Circling the Sun (2 page)

4 September
1936

Abingdon, England

T
he Vega Gull is peacock blue with silver wings, more splendid than any bird I’ve known, and somehow mine to fly. She’s called
The Messenger,
and has been designed and built with great care and skill to do what should be impossible—cross an ocean in one brave launch, thirty-six hundred miles of black chop and nothingness—and to take me with her.

It’s dusk when I board her. Storms have hunched over the aerodrome for days, and what light there is now is stingy and wrung out. Rain beats on the Gull’s wings in timpani, and the wind gusts sideways, and yet I’m told it’s the best weather I’m going to get all month. I’m less worried about weather than weight. The Gull’s been fashioned with a special undercarriage to bear the extra oil and petrol. Tanks have been fixed under the wings and to the cabin, where they form a close-fitting wall around my seat with petcocks I can reach with two fingers to switch over the tanks mid-flight. I’ve been instructed that I should let one run completely dry and close it off before opening the next, to avoid an airlock. The engine might freeze for a few moments, but will start up again. I will have to rely on that. I will have to rely on a good many other things, too.

All over the tarmac puddles stretch out the size of small lakes, their surfaces whipped white. There are fierce, unremitting headwinds, and low brooding clouds. Some journalists and friends have gathered for my take-off, but the mood is undeniably dark. Everyone who knows the real nature of what I’m about to do has tried to convince me not to. Not today. Not this year. The record will still be there when the weather turns more favourable—but I’ve come too far to turn back now. I stow my small basket of food, tuck the flask of brandy into the hip pocket of my flight suit, and wedge myself into the cockpit, snug as a skin. I have a watch on loan from Jim Mollison, the only pilot who’s ever attempted this particular feat and lived. I have a chart that traces my route across the Atlantic, Abingdon to New York, every inch of icy water I’ll pass over, but not the emptiness involved or the loneliness, or the fear. Those things are as real as anything else, though, and I’ll have to fly through them. Straight through the sickening dips and air pockets, because you can’t chart a course around anything you’re afraid of. You can’t run from any part of yourself, and it’s better that you can’t. Sometimes I’ve thought it’s only our challenges that sharpen us, and change us, too—a mile-long runway and nineteen hundred pounds of fuel. Black squadrons of clouds muscling in from every corner of the sky and the light fading, minute by minute. There is no way I could do any of this and remain the same.

I steady my position and lean into my stick, roaring past the onlookers with their cameras, and then the series of markers towards the single red flag that means the point of no return. I have a mile of runway and not an inch more. And she might not make it, of course. After all the planning and care and work and mustering of courage, there is the overwhelming possibility that the Gull will stay fixed to the earth, more elephant than butterfly, and that I’ll fail before I’ve even begun. But not before I give this moment everything I’ve got.

After five hundred feet of runway, her tail comes up, ponderously. I urge her faster, feeling the drag of gravity, the impossible weight of her, feeling more than seeing the red flag growing nearer. Then the rudder and elevator finally come to life, swinging her nose up, and she’s left the earth—arrow straight. A butterfly after all. We climb the dimming sky and the rain over green-and-grey-chequered Swindon. Ahead lies the Irish Sea, all that dark, dark water ready to grip and stop my heart. The smeary twinkling that is Cork. The hulking black of Labrador. The constant sobbing of the engine doing the work it was built for.

My nose bouncing, I drive hard through the wet spatter, thrusting into the climb and the shudder of pressing weather. The instincts for flying are in my hands, and the practical work of it, too, and then there is the more mysterious and essential thing, how I’m meant to do this and always have been, to stitch my name on the sky with this propeller, these lacquered linen wings, thirty-six hours in the dark.

It was two years ago when the challenge first came up, in the noisy, cedar-panelled bar of the White Rhino in Nyeri. There were tournedos of pepper-flecked beef on my plate, blanched asparagus spears, each as narrow as my smallest finger, and deep-stained claret in all our glasses. Then a dare thrown out like a last course from JC Carberry.
No one has managed the Atlantic solo from this side, England to America, not man or woman. What do you say, Beryl?

Two years earlier, Mollison had fallen short in a similar waterjump, and no one had done much more than imagine the aeroplane that could accomplish the distance, but JC had more money than he could ever spend and the spark of a Magellan or a Peary. And there it was: the boundless ocean, thousands of miles of icy virgin air, a clear frontier, and no plane.
Want to chance it?

JC’s eyes were like agates. I watched them glitter and thought of how his beautiful wife, Maia, should be there in white silk with perfectly marcelled hair, but she had died years ago in a simple flying lesson near Nairobi, on a day with no wind or weather. She was the first air tragedy that hit close to us, but not the last. Many other dear ghosts were glinting from the past, winks of light playing along the rims of our wineglasses, reminding us of how reckless they’d been and how magnificent. I didn’t really need reminding. I hadn’t forgotten those ghosts for a moment—and somehow, when I met JC’s gaze, I felt ready to pull them even closer.
Yes,
I said, and then said it again.

It’s not long at all before the last bits of light rinse from the ragged edge of the sky, and then there’s only the rain and the smell of petrol. I’m flying at two thousand feet above sea level and will be for nearly two days. Dense clouds have swallowed the moon and stars—the dark so complete I have no choice but to fly on instruments, blinking away fatigue to peer at the dimly lit dials. I have no wireless, so the sound and force of my engine and the wind blowing back against my nose at forty knots are soothing. The gurgle and sway of petrol in the tanks are soothing, too, until four hours into my flight, when the engine begins to falter abruptly. It sputters and whistles, then gives out. Silence. The needle of my altimeter begins to spiral downwards with shocking speed. It puts me into a kind of trance, but my hands know what to do even as my mind remains muffled and still. I only have to reach for the petcock and switch over the tank. The engine will start again. It will. I steady my hand and make my fingers find the silver toggle. When I do, it clicks reassuringly, but the engine doesn’t budge. The Gull keeps losing altitude, eleven hundred feet, then eight hundred. Lower. The clouds around me part briefly, and I can see terrifying glints of water and foam. The waves reach up and the fathomless sky pushes down. I flip the toggle again, trying not to shake or panic. I’ve prepared for everything as well as I can, but is anyone truly ready for death? Was Maia when she saw the ground flying up to meet her? Was Denys, that awful day over Voi?

A bolt of lightning crackles near my left wing, bright as Christmas trimmings, electrifying the air—and suddenly I have the feeling that all of this has happened before, perhaps many times over. Perhaps I’ve always been here, diving headlong towards myself. Below me, heartless water lashes, ready for me, but it’s Kenya I’m thinking of. My Rift Valley—Longonot and the jagged rim of Menengai. Lake Nakuru with its shimmering pink flesh of flamingos, the high and low escarpments, Kekopey and Molo, Njoro and the Muthaiga Club’s glittering lawn. It’s there I seem to be going, though I know that’s impossible—as if the propeller is slicing through years, turning me backwards and also endlessly forward, setting me free.

Oh,
I think, hurtling down through the dark, blind to everything else.
I’ve somehow turned for home.

B
efore Kenya was Kenya, when it was millions of years old and yet still somehow new, the name belonged only to our most magnificent mountain. You could see it from our farm in Njoro, in the British East African Protectorate—hard edged at the far end of a stretching golden plain, its crown glazed with ice that never completely melted. Behind us, the Mau Forest was blue with strings of mist. Before us, the Rongai Valley sloped down and away, bordered on one side by the strange, high Menengai Crater, which the natives called the Mountain of God, and on the other by the distant Aberdare Range, rounded blue-grey hills that went smoky and purple at dusk before dissolving into the night sky.

When we first arrived, in 1904, the farm wasn’t anything but fifteen hundred acres of untouched bush and three weather-beaten huts.

“This?” my mother said, the air around her humming and shimmering as if it were alive. “You sold everything for this?”

“Other farmers are making a go of it in tougher places, Clara,” my father said.

“You’re not a farmer, Charles!” she spat before bursting into tears.

He was a horseman, in fact. What he knew was steeplechasing and foxhunting and the tame lanes and hedgerows of Rutland. But he’d seen paper flyers hawking cheap imperial land, and an idea had latched on to him that wouldn’t let go. We left Westfield House, where I was born, and travelled seven thousand miles, past Tunis and Tripoli and Suez, the waves like great grey mountains swallowing the sky. Then through Kilindini Harbour, in the port of Mombasa, which smelled of sharp spices and drying fish, and onto the snaking train bound for Nairobi, the windows boiling over with red dust. I stared at everything, completely thrilled in a way I hadn’t remembered feeling before. Whatever this place was, it was like nothing and nowhere else.

We settled in and worked to make our situation liveable, pushing against the wildness while the wildness pushed back with everything it had. Our land had no visible borders or fences, and our huts lacked proper doors. Silky, banded colobus monkeys climbed through the burlap sacking covering our windows. Plumbing was unheard of. When nature called, you walked out into the night with all the things that wanted to have at you and hung your derrière over a long-drop, whistling to keep your fear away.

Lady and Lord Delamere were our nearest white neighbours, a seven-mile hack through the bush. Their titles didn’t save them from sleeping in the typical mud-and-thatch rondavels. Lady D kept a loaded revolver under her pillow and advised my mother to do the same—but she wouldn’t. She didn’t want to shoot snakes or her dinner. She didn’t want to drag water for miles to have anything like a decent bath, or to live without company for months at a time. There was no society. There was no way to keep her hands clean. Life was simply too hard.

After two years, my mother booked a passage back to England. My older brother, Dickie, would go too, since he had always been frail and wouldn’t weather Africa for very much longer. I had yet to turn five when they climbed aboard the twice-weekly train to Nairobi with steamer trunks and handkerchiefs and travelling shoes. The white feather in my mother’s helmet trembled as she kissed me, telling me I should keep my chin up. She knew I’d be fine, since I was such a big strong girl. As a treat, she would send a box of liquorice allsorts and pear drops from a shop in Piccadilly that I wouldn’t have to share with a soul.

I watched the train recede along the still black line of the track, not quite believing she would actually go. Even when the last shuddering car was swallowed up by distant yellow hills, and my father turned to me, ready to go back to the farm and his work; even then I thought the whole thing was a mistake, some terrible misunderstanding that would all get sorted at any moment. Mother and Dickie would disembark at the next station, or turn around at Nairobi and be back the next day. When that didn’t happen, I kept waiting all the same, listening for the far-off rumble of the train, one eye on the horizon, my heart on tiptoe.

For months there was no word from my mother, not even a dashed-off cable, and then the sweets arrived. The box was heavy and bore only my name—
Beryl Clutterbuck
—in my mother’s curlicued script. Even the shape of her handwriting, those familiar dips and loops, instantly had me in tears. I knew what the gift meant and couldn’t fool myself any more. Scooping the box into my arms, I made off to a hidden corner where, trembling, I ate up as many of the sugar-dusted things as I could stand before retching into a stable bucket.

Later, unable to drink the tea my father had made, I finally dared to say what I feared most. “Mother and Dickie aren’t coming back, are they?”

He gave me a pained look. “I don’t know.”

“Perhaps she’s waiting for us to come to her.”

There was a long silence, and then he allowed that she might be. “This is our home now,” he said. “And I’m not ready to give up on it just yet. Are you?”

My father was offering a choice, but it wasn’t a simple one. His question wasn’t
Will you stay here with me?
That decision had been made months before. What he wanted to know was if I could love this life as he did. If I could give my heart to this place, even if she never returned and I had no mother going forward, perhaps not ever.

How could I begin to answer? All around us, half-empty cupboards reminded me of the things that used to be there but weren’t any longer—four china teacups with gold-painted rims, a card game, amber beads clicking together on a necklace my mother had loved. Her absence was still so loud and so heavy, I ached with it, feeling hollow and lost. I didn’t know how to forget my mother any more than my father knew how he might comfort me. He pulled me—long limbed and a little dirty, as I always seemed to be—onto his lap, and we sat like that quietly for a while. From the edge of the forest, a group of hyraxes echoed shrieks of alarm. One of our greyhounds cocked a sleek ear and then settled back into his comfortable sleep by the fire. Finally my father sighed. He scooped me under my arms, grazed my drying tears with a quick kiss, and set me on my own two feet.