Authors: Nevil Shute
She smiled at him. “Don’t go bumping on a rock, or on
the Beaulieu spit,” she said. “And don’t let anybody get you into anything.”
“I won’t,” he said. “Good night, Rosemary.”
She said, “Good night, Nigger.”
D
AVID took delivery of the Australian Ceres for the Queen’s Flight in September, a fortnight after Dewar had taken over the Canadian one. Before delivery both crews had put in a month of intensive work upon the crew trainer, a full-scale representation of the flight deck of a Ceres set up by the manufacturers in a vacant hangar; when the time came to take over the aircraft and to fly it away from Hatfield the crew knew their job.
Besides familiarisation training with the aircraft, the crew had to be trained to work as a team in radar controlled landings carried out in fog or bad weather. They were all experienced individually; indeed their experience of bad weather flying had been one of the chief factors in their selection for the Queen’s Flight, but now they had to be exercised together on the Ceres till they could put it down upon the runway accurately and safely in the thickest fog, at night. They did this at the B.O.A.C. training aerodrome at Hurn, in Hampshire; twice a week they would fly down there to practise their blind landings all night long. Being members of the Royal Australian Air Force no civil certificates were issued to them, but Group Captain Cox kept them at it till he was assured that they were equal to the best B.O.A.C. pilots in this technique. Throughout
their time in the Queen’s Flight they went to Hurn for a refresher course once a month, whenever they were in England.
It was the Queen’s wish that year to spend the late fall in Canada, and it was proposed that she should leave England in the Canadian Ceres on the evening of the twelfth of November and fly direct to Edmonton to open the Clearwater hydro-electric scheme, a flight of about eight hours, go on to Vancouver for a few days’ holiday and then back to Ottawa. It seemed desirable to make a trial flight over this route before starting with the Queen, and the Canadian machine was quietly prepared to make this flight, carrying the Australian crew as passengers for general experience.
Before this trial flight took place, the crews of the Queen’s Flight were plagued with visitors, exalted personages who took the afternoon off from their offices to motor down to White Waltham in the fine autumn weather to see the new machines. The High Commissioners were fair enough, because they after all had paid for the aeroplanes as representatives of their countries. Air Chief Marshal Sir William Bradbury came frankly for the drive in the country, and said so. So did eight civil servants from various ministries on eight separate visits, but they did not say so. All these people had to be entertained. Finally Frank Cox received a telephone call from the Secretary of State for Air, Lord Coles of Northfield, to say that he was coming down that afternoon.
He broke the news to the Canadian and Australian captains. “Lord Coles is coming down this afternoon.”
“For the love of Pete,” said Wing Commander Dewar, “what’s it got to do with him? We aren’t in his parish.”
“I am,” said Cox. “So is the aerodrome.”
“Well, hell,” said the Canadian. “Let him inspect you
and the aerodrome and leave us be. I’ve got the radar schedule three to do this afternoon. I can’t have people in and out of the machine.”
“He’ll have to look at Nigger’s aircraft,” said Cox. “I’ll tell him yours is just the same.”
“Who is Lord Coles?” asked David. “Apart from being Secretary of State for Air?”
“Shop steward at an iron foundry,” said Dewar. “He’s been a good union man, and got to be head of the Royal Air Force.”
David’s lips tightened, but Frank Cox was there, and the Australians and Canadians were careful not to say what they might think about the British system of government. He turned to the Group Captain. “I can show them Tare,” he said. “The upholsterers are in the port cabin, and they’re checking the flap indicators, but that doesn’t matter.” They spoke of the Canadian and Australian machines as Sugar and Tare respectively, from the last letters of the registration call signs.
The Group Captain nodded. “I’ll keep him in my office for a few minutes when he arrives, and send a message over—you’ll be on the aircraft? Come over to the office, and we’ll show him the machine together. Better warn Ryder.” Flight Lieutenant Ryder was the Australian second pilot of Tare.
David was working with his crew on the machine when he saw the telephone girl crossing the floor of the hangar to him, in the middle of the afternoon. He went to meet her. “Want me?”
She said, “The Group Captain said I was to tell you that the Prime Minister is in his office, with Lord Coles.”
David started. “Iorwerth Jones?”
“Yes, sir. The Prime Minister.”
“Tell him I’ll be there in just a minute. I’d better wash
my hands.” As he did so, he speculated glumly on the afternoon before him. The Prime Minister of England had never been out of England but for one short holiday at Dinard, and he thought little of the Commonwealth; in return the Commonwealth thought little of him. Born in a Welsh mining valley, he had worked as a miner for some years and as a youth had been a member of the Party; Communism was no longer politically expedient in England since the Russian war and he had long abandoned it, but the class hatred of his youth still hung around him and influenced all that he did. In energy and in intellectual capacity he was a giant, a head and shoulders above the remainder of his Cabinet. He had sat in Parliament representing South Cardiff for twenty years, and he would sit there till he died.
David went into the Group Captain’s office and was introduced. He had not met either of the two visitors before, though he had seen pictures and movies of the Prime Minister many times and was familiar with the broad, white face, the iron grey shock of hair, and the glowering eyes. He did not know Lord Coles at all, and found him to be a tubby, rubicund little man who liked his beer and carpet slippers, and who knew absolutely nothing about aircraft or the Royal Air Force.
After the introductions, David said, “Tare is all ready, sir. There are men working in her; shall I get them out of the machine?”
Lord Coles said quickly, “Working bonus or piece work?”
David glanced at him uncertainly. Frank Cox said, “No, sir—they work time rate on the maintenance.”
The Secretary of State for Air was pleased. “Eh, then, give them a stand easy,” he said. They went out into the hangar.
The hangar doors were open, and Tare stood just inside, a great smooth gleaming mass of bright duralumin, white painted on the upper surfaces. Outside on a concrete circle off the runway Sugar stood lined up upon the radar target on a mast a mile away upon the far side of the field. It was easier to see the shape and lines of the machine upon the distant aircraft, the delta wing, the long protruding nose, the buried engines indicated by the air inlets. The two officers stood for five minutes describing the form of the machines and their general characteristics to their guests, as they had so often had to describe them before, and as they talked they knew that what they said meant very little to these politicians. Once, when they said that the range of the machine was about eight thousand nautical miles, the Secretary of State for Air asked if that was far enough to take the machine to Aden without landing. They told him that it could safely fly as far as Colombo without landing and still have a forty per cent reserve of fuel, and he asked if Colombo was further than Aden.
This was all normal to the officers, and they turned to the aircraft in the hangar. Before going up the gangway into it, the two politicians withdrew a little from the officers and stood looking at it together, talking in low tones. Then Mr. Jones summoned the Group Captain, and said, “What did this bloody nonsense cost?”
The Group Captain said, “The aircraft, sir? I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you that exactly. The High Commissioners handle the accounts. I think the machines cost about four hundred thousand pounds each, but I’m afraid that’s only rumour.”
The Prime Minister turned quickly to David. “Do you know what this cost?”
“No, sir,” said the Australian. “I don’t know anything about that side of it. It’s not my business.”
Mr. Iorwerth Jones stared at David. “What’s your position in this thing? Who pays you?”
“I’m an officer of the Royal Australian Air Force, sir,” the pilot said equably. “I’m paid by the Federal Government.”
“How many of you are there here, paid by Australia?”
“Eight, sir—counting myself. That’s the aircrew.”
“How many people are there here paid by the British Government?”
Group Captain Cox said, “Myself and the telephone girl, sir. The High Commissioners for Canada and for Australia are meeting the whole of the expenses of the Flight, except those which pertain expressly to the Royal Household.”
“It seems to me a bloody waste of money,” said the Prime Minister. “If the Queen wants to go to Australia she can book a seat on the air line like everybody else, or go by sea.”
There was an awkward silence. Lord Coles broke it by saying, “Well, let’s ’ave a look at it, now we’re here. It won’t take long.”
“The gangway is just here, sir,” said David, frigidly polite. Inwardly he was furious, but he did not quite know why. He had the good sense not to show his anger, but commenced upon his description of the aircraft, now so often repeated to officials that it had degenerated into a sort of patter. He showed them everything inside the fuselage from the luggage compartment in the tail to the radar compartment in the nose. The Prime Minister found nothing to his taste.
“Waste of the working man’s money,” he said once.
He paused once at the entrance to the Royal cabin, quietly furnished in dove grey fabrics and silky oak veneers. “I know who put them up to this,” he said. “That bloody old fool Bob Menzies. He’s the nigger in the wood pile.
He’ll have to learn to keep his nose out ot what doesn’t concern him.”
David said quietly, “I don’t know anything about it, but I’m sure you’re wrong. Sir Robert Menzies retired from politics when I was a boy. He’s a very old man, about eighty five. He couldn’t have had anything to do with the decision to provide this aircraft.”
“Don’t you give me that,” said the Prime Minister. “I know his stink.”
The wonders of design meant nothing to these men. In the pilot’s cockpit the Secretary of State for Air said, “Where d’you keep the Very pistol?”
Vague memories of the equipment of early Army Cooperation aircraft came to the pilot’s mind. “Very pistol? We don’t carry one of those.”
“How do you signal to the folks on the ground, if you want to come down, like?”
“I don’t think you’d do that, sir. We’ve got plenty of radio.” It was difficult to commence from the beginning, to explain that travelling at fifty thousand feet no pyrotechnic would be seen, that an aircraft of that nature could not land in any field.
“You should ’ave a Very pistol,” said the Secretary of State. “See he gets a Very pistol, Cox.”
“Very good, sir.”
Lord Coles turned to Mr. Jones. “You got to look after things yourself,” he said. “If I’d not come this afternoon they might ’ave gone without a Very pistol.”
At last the visitors departed to drive back to London in their official car, and David was left in the office with his Group Captain. For a minute each found it difficult to make the first remark. At last Frank Cox said dully, “I’ll see if I can get a Very pistol for you, Nigger. They might have one in the Army.”
David smiled. “Cheer up,” he said. “We’ve people like that in Australia.”
“Maybe,” said the Group Captain. “But not as Secretary of State for Air.”
There did not seem to be anything useful to be said between the Australian and the Englishman, and David found it equally difficult to discuss the events of the afternoon with Dewar when he came in from the radar check on Sugar. He went back to his office and sat in troubled thought for half an hour. Then he lifted the telephone and asked the girl to get Miss Long in the Assistant Secretary’s office at the Palace.
She came on the line presently. “Miss Long,” he said. “This is Nigger Anderson.”
“Hullo, Nigger,” she said. “Where are you speaking from?”
“White Waltham,” he said. “We’ve just had Lord Coles down with the Prime Minister to have a look at the machines.”
“Oh …” she said. “I don’t think Major Macmahon knew that.”
He said, “Will you have dinner with me, Rosemary? I want to talk to you.”
“About your little friends, Nigger?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know that you’d better.”
“I don’t want to talk very much. Just one or two questions that I think I ought to know the answers to. We might have dinner at the R.A.C. and go out to a picture afterwards.”
She said, “I’d love to do that, but I don’t know that I’m going to answer any questions. We don’t gossip in this servants’ hall, you know. When do you want to meet me?”
“Tomorrow night?”
“I’m free tomorrow night.” They fixed the time, and rang off.
They met next night in the ladies’ annexe of the club. He went forward to meet her. “It was good of you to come,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ve really got much to worry you about.” He helped her out of her coat, and ordered a dry sherry and a tomato juice cocktail. “I’ve been looking at the movies,” he said. “Have you seen
Red Coral
—Judy March?”
She shook her head. “They say it’s awfully good.”
He went to organise the seats, and when he came back to her they talked of unimportant things till it was time for them to go to dinner. The dining room was fairly full, the tables close together; the girl glanced round her thoughtfully as she sat down. Over the oysters she said, “What’s the first question, Commander?”
He smiled. “Can I start off by telling you what happened?”
“If you like,” she said. “I probably know most of it. Frank Cox was talking to Major Macmahon this morning, and after that there were some memorandums. Anyway, go ahead and tell me.”
He gave her a short account of the events of the afternoon, making his story as dispassionate as he was able. As he talked the girl glanced round the room once or twice. In the end he said, “Well, that’s what happened. I didn’t like it much.”