Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

On Saturday I had a fall and a winner[33] at Sandown Races, Sunday I spent in my usual way, and Monday I flew with some circus ponies to Germany. After a fortnight of it I was dying from exhaustion; after a month I was acclimatised. My body got used to long hours, irregular food, nonstop coffee, and sleeping sitting upright on bales of hay ten thousand feet up in the sky. The two grooms, Timmie and Conker, gradually got over the worst of their anger, and we developed into a quick, efficient, laconic team.

My family were predictably horrified by my change of occupation and did their best to pry me away from it. My sister anxiously retracted the words I knew I’d earned, my father foresaw the earldom going to the cousin after all, aeroplanes being entirely against nature and usually fatal[34], and my mother had hysterics over what her friends would say.

‘It’s a labourer’s job,’ she wailed.

‘A job is what you make it.’

‘What will the Filyhoughs think?’

‘Who the hell cares what they think?’

‘It isn’t a suitable job for you.’ She wrung her hands.

‘It’s a job I like. It suits me, therefore it is suitable.’

‘You know that isn’t what I mean.’

‘I know exactly what you mean, Mother, and I profoundly disagree with you. People should do work they like doing; that’s all that should decide them. Whether it is socially O.K. or not shouldn’t come into it.’

‘But it does,’ she cried, exasperated.

‘It has for me for nearly six years,’ I admitted, ‘but not any more. And ideas change. What I am doing now may be the top thing next year[35]. If I don’t look out half the men I know will be muscling in on the act. Anyway, it’s right for me, and I’m going on with it.’

All the same she couldn’t be won over, and could only face her own elderly convention-bound circle by pretending my job was ‘for the experience, you know,’ and by treating it as a joke.

It was a joke to Simon Searle too, at first.

‘You won’t stick it[36], Henry’, he said confidently. ‘Not you and all that dirt. You with your spotless dark suits and your snowy white shirts and not a hair out of place. One trip will be enough.’

After a month, looking exactly the same, I turned up for my pay packet late on Friday afternoon, and we sauntered along to his favourite pub, a tatty place with stained glass doors and a chronic smell of fug. He oozed on to a bar stool, his bulk drooping around him. A pint for him, he said. I bought it, and a half for me, and he drank most of his off with one much practised swallow.

‘How’s the globe-trotting, then?’ He ran his tongue over his upper lip for the froth.

‘I like it.’

‘I’ll grant you,’ he said, smiling amicably, ‘that you haven’t made a mess of it yet.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Though of course since I do all the spade work[37] for you at both ends, you bloody well shouldn’t.’

‘No,’ I agreed. He was, in truth, an excellent organiser, which was mainly why Anglia often dealt with Yardman Transport instead of Clarkson Carriers, a much bigger and better known firm. Simon’s arrangements were clear, simple, and always twice confirmed: agencies, owners and air-lines alike knew exactly where they stood and at what hours they were expected to be where. No one else in the business, that I had come across at any rate, was as consistently reliable. Being so precise myself, I admired his work almost as a work of art.

He looked me over, privately amused. ‘You don’t go on trips dressed like that?’

‘I do, yes, more or less.’

‘What does more or less mean?’

‘I wear a sweater instead of my jacket, in and around the aircraft.’

‘And hang up your jacket on a hanger for when you land?’

‘Yes, I do.’

He laughed, but without mockery. ‘You’re a rum sort of chap[38], Henry’. He ordered more beer, shrugged when I refused, and drank deep again. ‘Why are you so methodical?’

‘It’s safer.’

‘Safer.’ He choked on his beer, coughing and laughing. ‘I suppose it doesn’t strike you that to many people steeplechasing and air transport might not seem especially safe?’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

‘What, then?’

But I shook my head, and didn’t explain. ‘Tell me about Yardman,’ I said.

‘What about him?’

‘Well, where he came from… anything.’

Simon hunched his great shoulders protectively around his pint, and pursed his lips.

‘He joined the firm after the war, when he left the Army. He was a sergeant in an infantry regiment, I think. Don’t know any details: never asked. Anyway he worked his way up through the business. It wasn’t called Yardman Transport then, of course. Belonged to a family, the Mayhews, but they were dying out… nephews weren’t interested, that sort of thing. Yardman had taken it over by the time I got there; don’t know how really, come to think of it, but he’s a bright lad, there’s no doubt of that. Take switching to air, for instance. That was him. He was pressing the advantages of air travel for horses whilst all the other transport agencies were going entirely by sea.’

‘Even though the office itself is on a wharf,’ I remarked.

‘Yes. Very handy once. It isn’t used much at all now since they clamped down on exporting horses to the Continent for meat.’

‘Yardman was in that?’

‘Shipping agent,’ he nodded. ‘There’s a big warehouse down the other end of the wharf where we used to collect them. They’d start being brought in three days before the ship came. Once a fortnight, on average. I can’t say I’m sorry it’s finished. It was a lot of work and a lot of mess and noise, and not much profit, Yardman said.’

‘It didn’t worry you, though, that they were going to be slaughtered?’

‘No more than cattle or pigs.’ He finished his beer. ‘Why should it? Everything dies sometime.’ He smiled cheerfully and gestured to the glasses. ‘Another?’ He had one, I didn’t.

‘Has anyone heard any more of Peters?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Not a murmur.[39]’

‘How about his cards?’

‘Still in the office, as far as I know.’

‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’

Simon shrugged. ‘You never know, he might have wanted to duck someone[40], and did it thoroughly’.

‘But did anyone ever come looking for him?’

‘Nope. No police, no unpaid bookies, no rampaging females, no one.’

‘He just went to Italy and didn’t come back?’

‘That’s the size of it[41]’, Simon agreed. ‘He went with some brood mares to Milan and he should have come back the same day. But there was some trouble over an engine or something, and the pilot ran out of time and said he’d be in dead trouble if he worked too many hours. So they stayed there overnight and in the morning Peters didn’t turn up. They waited nearly all day, then they came back without him.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘That’s the lot,’ he agreed. ‘Just one of life’s little mysteries. What’s the matter, are you afraid Peters will reappear and take back his job?’

‘Something like that.’

‘He was an awkward bastard,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Stood on his rights. Always arguing; that sort of chap. Belligerent. Never stood any nonsense from foreign customs officers.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll bet they’re quite glad to see you instead.’

‘I dare say I’ll be just as cussed in a year or two.’

‘A year or two?’ He looked surprised. ‘Henry, it’s all very well you taking Peters’s job for a bit of a giggle[42] but you surely can’t mean to go on with it permanently?’

‘You think it would be more suitable if I was sitting behind a nice solid desk at Anglia?’ I asked ironically.

‘Yes,’ he said seriously. ‘Of course it would.’

I sighed. ‘Not you too. I thought you at least might understand.’ I stopped wryly.

‘Understand what?’

‘Well… that who one’s father is has nothing to do with the sort of work one is best suited for. And I am not fitted for sitting behind a desk. I came to that conclusion my first week at Anglia, but I stayed there because I’d kicked up a fuss and insisted on getting an ordinary job, and I wasn’t going to admit I’d made a mistake with it. I tried to like it. At any rate I got used to it, but now… now. I don’t think I could face that nine-to-five routine ever again[43].’

‘Your father’s in his eighties, isn’t he?’ Simon said thoughtfully.

I nodded.

‘And do you think that when he dies you will be allowed to go on carting horses round the world? And for how long could you do it without becoming an eccentric nut? Like it or not, Henry, it’s easy enough to go up the social scale, but damn difficult to go down. And still be respected, that is.’

‘And I could be respected sitting behind a desk at Anglia, transferring horses from owner to owner on paper, but not if I move about and do it on aeroplanes?’

He laughed. ‘Exactly.’

‘The world is mad,’ I said.

‘You’re a romantic. But time will cure that.’ He looked at me in a large tolerant friendship, finished his beer, and flowed down from the stool like a green corduroy amoeba.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s time for another along the road at the Saracen’s Head.’

At Newbury Races the following afternoon I watched five races from the stands and rode in one.

This inactivity was not mine by choice, but thrust upon me by the Stewards[44]. They had, by the time I was twenty, presented me with their usual ultimatum to regular amateur riders: either turn professional, or ride in only fifty open races each season. In other words, don’t undercut the trade: stop taking the bread and butter out of the professional’s mouths. (As if jockeys ate much bread and butter, to start with.)

I hadn’t turned professional when I was twenty because I had been both too conventional and not really good enough. I was still not good enough to be a top rank professional, but I had long been a fully employed amateur. A big fish in a small pond. In the new-found freedom of my Yardman’s job I regretted that I hadn’t been bolder at twenty. I liked steeplechasing enormously, and with fulltime professional application I might just have made a decent success. Earth-bound on the stands at Newbury I painfully accepted that my sister had brought me to my senses a lot too late.

The one horse I did ride was in the ‘amateurs only’ race. As there were no restrictions on the number of amateur events I could ride in, few were run without me. I rode regularly for many owners who grudged paying professional jockey’s fees, for some who reckoned their horses stood more chance in amateur races, and for a few who genuinely liked my work.

All of them knew very well that if I won either amateur or open races I expected ten per cent of the prize. The word had got around. Henry Grey rode for money, not love[45]. Henry Grey was the shamateur to end all shamateurs. Because I was silent and discreet and they could trust my tongue, I had even been given cash presents by stewards: and solely because my father was the Earl of Creggan, my amateur permit survived.

In the changing room that afternoon I found that however different I might feel, I could not alter my long set pattern. The easy bantering chat flowed round me and as usual it was impossible to join in. No one expected me to. They were used to me. Half of them took my aloofness to be arrogant snobbery, and the rest shrugged it off as ‘just Henry’s way.’ No one was actively hostile, and it was I, I, who had failed to belong. I changed slowly into my racing clothes and listened to the jokes and the warm earthy language, and I could think of nothing, not one single thing, to say.

I won the race. The well pleased owner gave me a public clap on the shoulder and a drink in the members’ bar, and surreptitiously, round a private corner[46], forty pounds. On the following day, Sunday, I spent the lot.

I started my little Herald in the garage in the pre-dawn dark, and as quietly as possible opened the doors and drifted away down the drive. Mother had invited yet another well-heeled presumptive virgin for the week-end, together with her slightly forbidding parents, and having dutifully escorted them all to Newbury Races the day before and tipped them a winner – my own – I felt I had done quite enough. They would be gone, I thought coolly, before I got back late that evening, and with a bit of luck[47] my bad manners in disappearing would have discouraged them for ever.

A steady two and a half hours driving northwards found me at shortly before ten o’clock turning in through some inconspicuously signposted gates in Lincolnshire. I parked the car at the end of the row of others, climbed out, stretched, and looked up into the sky. It was a cold clear morning with maximum visibility. Not a cloud in sight. Smiling contentedly I strolled over to the row of white painted buildings and pushed open the glass door into the main hall of the Fenland Flying Club.

The hall was a big room with several passages leading off it and a double door on the far side opening to the airfield itself. Round the walls hung framed charts, Air Ministry regulations, a large map of the surrounding area, do’s and don’ts[48] for visiting pilots, a thumb-tacked weather report and a list of people wanting to enter for a ping-pong tournament. There were several small wooden tables and hard chairs at one end, half occupied, and across the whole width of the other end stretched the reception-cum-operations-cum-everything else desk[49]. Yawning behind it and scratching between his shoulder blades stood a plump sleepy man of about my own age, sporting a thick sloppy sweater and a fair sized hangover. He held a cup of strong coffee and a cigarette in his free hand, and he was talking lethargically to a gay young spark who had turned up with a girl-friend he wanted to impress.

‘I’ve told you, old chap, you should have given us a ring. All the planes are booked today. I’m sorry, no can do. You can hang about if you like, in case someone doesn’t turn up…’

He turned towards me, casually.

‘Morning, Harry,’ he said. ‘How’s things?’

‘Very O.K.,’ I said. ‘And you?’

‘Ouch,’ he grinned, ‘don’t cut me. The gin would run out.’ He turned round and consulted the vast timetable charts covering most of the wall behind him. ‘You’ve got Kilo November today, it’s out by the petrol pumps, I think. Cross country again; is that right?’

‘Uh-huh,’ I nodded.

‘Nice day for it.’ He put a tick on his chart where it said H. Grey, solo cross.

‘Couldn’t be better.’

The girl said moodily, ‘How about this afternoon, then?’

‘No dice.[50] All booked. And it gets dark so early… there’ll be plenty of planes tomorrow.’

I strolled away, out of the door to the airfield and round to the petrol pumps.

There were six single-engined aircraft lined up there in two rows of three, with a tall man in white overalls filling one up through the opening on the upper surface of the port wing[51]. He waved when he saw me coming, and grinned.

‘Just doing yours next, Harry. The boys have tuned her up special[52]. They say you couldn’t have done it better yourself.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ I said smiling.

He screwed on the cap and jumped down.

‘Lovely day,’ he said, looking up. There were already two little planes in the air, and four more stood ready in front of the control tower. ‘Going far?’ he asked.

‘Scotland,’ I said.

‘That’s cheating.[53]’ He swung the hose away and began to drag it along to the next aircraft. ‘The navigation’s too easy. You only have to go west till you hit the A-1 and then fly up it.’

‘I’m going to Islay,’ I smiled. ‘No roads, I promise.’

‘Islay. That’s different.’

‘I’ll land there for lunch and bring you back a bit of heather.’

‘How far is it?’

‘Two seventy nautical miles, about.’

‘You’ll be coming back in the dark.’ It was a statement, not a question. He unscrewed the cap of Kilo November and topped up the tanks.

‘Most of the way, yes.’

I did the routine checks all round the aircraft, fetched my padded jacket and my charts from the car, filed my flight plan, checked with the control tower for taxy clearance, and within a short while was up in the sky and away.

Air is curious stuff. One tends to think that because it is in visible it isn’t there. What you can’t see don’t exist, sort of thing. But air is tough, elastic and resistant; and the harder you dig into it the more solid it becomes. Air has currents stronger than tides and turbulences which would make Charybdis look like bath water running away.

When I first went flying I rationalised the invisibility thing by thinking of an aircraft being like a submarine: in both one went up and down and sideways in a medium one couldn’t see but which was very palpably around. Then I considered that if human eyes had been constructed differently it might have been possible to see the mixture of nitrogen and oxygen we breathe as clearly as the hydrogen and oxygen we wash in. After that I took the air’s positive plastic existence for granted, and thought no more about it.

The day I went to Islay was pure pleasure. I had flown so much by then that the handling of the little aircraft was as normal as driving a car, and with the perfect weather and my route carefully worked out and handy on the empty passenger seat behind me, there was nothing to do but enjoy myself. And that I did, because I liked being alone. Specifically I liked being alone in a tiny noisy efficient little capsule at 25,000 revs[54] a minute, four thousand five hundred feet above sea level, speed over the ground one hundred and ten miles an hour, steady on a course 313 degrees, bound northwest towards the sea and a Scottish island.

I found Islay itself without trouble, and tuned my radio to the frequency – 118.5 – of Port Ellen airfield.

I said, ‘Port Ellen tower this is Golf Alpha Romeo[55] Kilo November, do you read[56]?’

A Scots accent crackled back, ‘Golf Kilo November, good-afternoon, go ahead.’

‘Kilo November is approaching from the south-east, range fifteen miles, request joining instructions, over[57].’

‘Kilo November is cleared to join right base for runway zero four, QFE 998 millibars. Surface wind zero six zero, ten knots, call field in sight.’

Following his instructions I flew in and round the little airfield on the circuit, cut the engine, turned into wind, glided in at eighty, touched down, and taxied across to the control tower to report.

After eating in a snack bar I went for a walk by the sea, breathing the soft Atlantic air, and forgot to look for some heather to take back with me. The island lay dozing in the sun, shut up close because it was Sunday. It was peaceful and distant and slowed the pulse; soul’s balm if you stayed three hours, devitalising if you stayed for life[58].

The gold had already gone from the day when I started back, and I flew contentedly along in the dusk and the dark, navigating by compass and checking my direction by the radio beacons over which I passed. I dropped down briefly at Carlisle to refuel, and uneventfully returned to Lincolnshire, landing gently and regretfully on the well-known field.

As usual on Sundays the club room next to the main hall was bursting with amateur pilots like myself all talking at once about stalls and spins and ratings and slide slips and allowances for deviations[59]. I edged round the crowd to the bar and acquired some whisky and water, which tasted dry and fine on my tongue and reminded me of where I had been.

Turning round I found myself directly beside the reception desk man and a red-haired boy he was talking to. Catching my eye he said to the boy, ‘Now here’s someone you ought to have a word with. Our Harry here, he’s dead quiet, but don’t let that fool you… He could fly the pants off most of that lot[60]’. He gestured round the room. ‘You ask Harry, now. He started just like you, knowing nothing at all, only three or four years ago.’

‘Four,’ I said.

‘There you are, then. Four years. Now he’s got a commercial licence and enough ratings to fill a book and he can strip an engine down[61] like a mechanic’.

‘That’s enough,’ I interrupted mildly. The young man looked thoroughly unimpressed anyway, as he didn’t understand what he was being told. ‘I suppose the point is that once you start, you go on,’ I said. ‘One thing leads to another.’

‘I had my first lesson today,’ he said eagerly, and gave me a rev by rev account of it[62] for the next fifteen minutes. I ate two thick ham sandwiches while he got it off his chest[63], and finished the whisky. You couldn’t really blame him, I thought, listening with half an ear: if you liked it, your first flight took you by the throat and you were hooked good and proper[64]. It had happened to him. It had happened to me, one idle day when I passed the gates of the airfield and then turned back and went in, mildly interested in going up for a spin in a baby aircraft just to see what it was like.

I’d been to visit a dying great-aunt, and was depressed.

Certainly Mr…? ‘Grey,’ I said. Certainly Mr Grey could go up with an instructor, the air people said: and the instructor, who hadn’t been told I only wanted a sight-seeing flip, began as a matter of course to teach me to fly. I stayed all day and spent a week’s salary in fees; and the next Sunday I went back. Most of my Sundays and most of my money had gone the same way since.

The red-head was brought to a full stop by a burly tweed-suited man who said ‘Excuse me,’ pleasantly but very firmly, and planted himself between us.

‘Harry, I’ve been waiting for you to come back.’

‘Have a drink?’

‘Yes, all right, in a minute.’

His name was Tom Wells. He owned and ran a small charter firm which was based on the airfield, and on Sundays, if they weren’t out on jobs, he allowed the flying club to hire his planes. It was one of his that I had flown to Islay.

‘Have I done something wrong?’ I asked.

‘Wrong? Why should you, for God’s sake? No, I’m in a spot[65] and I thought you might be able to help me out’.

‘If I can, of course.’

‘I’ve overbooked next week-end and I’m going to be a pilot short[66]. Will you do a flight for me next Sunday?’

‘Yes,’ I said: I’d done it before, several times.

He laughed. ‘You never waste words, Harry boy. Well, thanks. When can I ring you to give you a briefing?’

I hesitated. ‘I’d better ring you, as usual.’

‘Saturday morning, then.’

‘Right.’

We had a drink together, he talking discontentedly about the growing shortage of pilots and how it was now too expensive for a young man to take it up on his own account, it cost at least three thousand pounds to train a multi-engine pilot, and only the air lines could afford it. They trained their own men and kept them, naturally. When the generation who had learned flying in the R.A.F.[67] during the war got too old, the smaller charter firms were going to find themselves in very sticky straits[68].

‘You now,’ he said, and it was obviously what he’d been working round to all along[69]. ‘You’re an oddity. You’ve got a commercial licence and all the rest, and you hardly use it. Why not? Why don’t you give up that boring old desk job and come and work for me?’

I looked at him for a long, long moment. It was almost too tempting, but apart from everything else, it would mean giving up steeplechasing, and I wasn’t prepared to do that. I shook my head slowly, and said not for a few years yet.

Driving home I enjoyed the irony of the situation. Tom Wells didn’t know what my desk job was, only that I worked in an office. I hadn’t got around to telling him that I no longer did, and I wasn’t going to. He didn’t know where I came from or anything about my life away from the airfield. No one there did, and I liked it that way[70]. I was just Harry who turned up on Sundays and flew if he had any money and worked on the engines in the hangars if he hadn’t.

Tom Wells had offered me a job on my own account, not, like Yardman, because of my father, and that pleased me very much. It was rare for me to be sure of the motive behind things which were offered to me. But if I took the job my anonymity on the airfield would vanish pretty soon, and all the old problems would crowd in, and Tom Wells might very well retract, and I would be left with nowhere to escape to on one day a week to be myself.

My family did not know I was a pilot. I hadn’t told them I had been flying that first day because by the time I got home my great-aunt had died and I was ashamed of having enjoyed myself while she did it. I hadn’t told them afterwards because I was afraid that they would make a fuss and stop me[71]. Soon after that I realised what a release it was to lead two lives and I deliberately kept them separate. It was quite easy, as I had always been untalkative: I just didn’t answer when asked where I went on Sundays, and I kept my books and charts, slide rules and computers, securely locked up in my bedroom. And that was that.