The 12.30 from Croydon (2 page)

They were duly weighed in. Rose wanted to know their weights, but as set forth in the Company’s advertisement, a veil is drawn over this intimate matter and the figures repose in the brain of the clerk alone. They were, however, handed a map and booklet of information about the flight. Presently there came the cry: ‘All for Paris, please!’ and with varying degrees of eagerness or indifference everyone began to drift towards the door. Outside the Croydon bus was waiting, they all got in, and it moved slowly off.

The morning had been fine when they left York, but the sky had soon become overcast and now a dismal rain was falling. Though Rose remained immensely excited, her enthusiasm became somewhat damped by the miles of wet streets through which they passed and the drab and dingy buildings which edged them. An uninspiring drive, though as they got nearer Croydon things improved. Here it was not raining, though it was cloudy and threatening to commence at any moment.

At last the aerodrome! Behind the buildings fronting the road Rose could see sheds, a tall square tower, a green field and a glimpse of planes. They swung in through a narrow gate and pulled up at the porch of a large building. Everyone got out. The passengers sorted themselves into groups and passed in through the porch to a large hall. There the passports were returned and they were shepherded by officials to a second door leading out on to the drome.

Now the great moment had come! Here in front of them was the aeroplane. Rose had eyes for nothing else as in a thin stream the passengers emerged on to the concrete on which the great machine was standing, some thirty or forty yards from the building. How huge it looked! Unwieldy too, thought Rose, gazing at the criss-cross struts connecting its wings and its long, slightly curved body. Not in the least like a bird, but still like something she had seen. What was it? She remembered: it was a dragonfly. It was just a huge dragonfly with a specially long head, which projected far forward before the wings like an enormous snout. And those four lumps were its motors, two on each wing, set into the front edge of the wing and each with its great propeller twirling in front of it. And there was its name, painted on its head:
H, E, N, G, I, S, T; HENGIST
. Hengist and Horsa; she had heard of them, though she wasn’t quite certain who they were.

But there was really no time to look at the strange machine. Halfway between the wings and the tail a door was open in its side, with a flight of steps leading up to it, and before Rose knew where she was, she was climbing up after her father. A step through the doorway and she was in the cabin.

It was just like the bus in which she had so often gone to school, with four seats across it and a narrow corridor down the centre. Her seat was next to the side immediately in front of the door, with her father next to her. Beside her was a window, but she couldn’t see out because the door opened back across it. She therefore looked round the cabin instead.

Her grandfather was just taking his place right in front of her with Weatherup in the seat next to him. There were eighteen seats in the compartment, and in a few seconds every one of them was filled. And Rose knew that a lot more people had got in through another door to the forward cabin in front of the wings. It was to it, she supposed, that that door in the front partition led.

Everyone was settling down, putting handbags on the racks above the windows and getting out papers and magazines. No one seemed to think it at all strange that they were going to fly. How
could
they, she wondered? However, she supposed they had all done it before.

The door was now shut behind her and she suddenly found that the obstruction was gone from the window and that she could see out. The principal object in the landscape was the lower wing. It seemed simply huge from so close. From it the great criss-crosses went up to the upper wing, which she could see only by bending down and gazing up. Others of these criss-crosses went down to the landing-wheel which had a pneumatic tyre a good deal bigger than her whole body.

At each side of the wheel were large wooden wedges, and now a man came forward and pulled these away. Then an officer in a smart blue uniform made a signal to someone on board. At once the motors began to hum more loudly, and the propeller, which had been flickering, now became a round blur. Suddenly she saw that the ground was moving. They were off!

There was a stain of mud on the great landing-wheel, and fascinated, Rose watched it going round and round. The plane turned to the right, and the air buildings and the small crowd of onlookers swung round backwards and slipped out of sight. Soon they were off the concrete and on to the grass of the field. The machine ran very easily: Rose could feel the motion like that of a car, but there were no bumps. Out in the middle of the drome they slowed down and the plane was turned, to meet the wind, her father explained. Then suddenly the motors roared out loudly. There was a feeling as if an enormous hand had grasped the machine and was pulling it forward. The speed increased so quickly that Rose felt pressed immovably back into her seat. More fascinated than ever she watched the mud stain on the great wheel, going round faster and faster and always faster.

They were now racing across the field with the speed of an express train, the wheel turning so quickly that Rose could scarcely see the mud stain. She watched it breathlessly, her hands clasped with excitement. Then suddenly the wonder happened.

Without feeling anything unusual she saw there was a little space, a few inches, below the great wheel! The space increased. It became a foot, a yard, several yards. They were flying!

‘Oh!’ gasped Rose, delighted and yet just the least little bit afraid.

‘Now we’re off,’ said Peter somewhat unnecessarily, but she scarcely heard him. She was too busy looking down on Croydon. As far as she could see, they were not rising: the ground instead was sinking quickly down from them in some quite inexplicable way. Two or three hundred yards below them Croydon seemed a far prettier place than it had looked on the way from Town. There were hills and hollows and the roads wound about in curves, and there was any amount of green between the houses. From the bus she had only seen streets and shops.

Suddenly her heart shot into her mouth and she gripped the back of the seat in front of her in momentary terror. ‘Hengist’ gave a horrid drop, as the stern of a great ship will slip off a receding wave. It was like a lift of which the rope had broken. Immediately he brought up, as if landing at the bottom of the shaft. Then for a while he was unsteady, swooping up and down quicker than the quickest lift Rose had ever been in. He didn’t pitch or roll, but rose and fell on an even keel. Rose hated it. However, it didn’t last long, and soon he settled down steadily again.

Now a fluffy strip of vapour floated past the window, and almost at once they were in fog. Rose could still see the great wing and its wheel, but the ground was gone. Except for the wing and wheel there was nothing anywhere but pearly grey mist.

‘Fog, daddy,’ she said, disappointed that she could no longer see below.

‘It’s cloud, darling,’ Peter Morley answered. ‘We’ve gone right up into the clouds! What do you think of that?’ He leaned forward. ‘How are you getting on, Mr Crowther? The motion’s not unpleasant?’

‘I’m enjoying it,’ the old man returned. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever travelled by air and I’m enjoying it. We might as well be in the car.’

‘Yes, it’s pretty steady now and not too noisy. A wonderful improvement on the early machines, when you had to get cotton-wool in your ears, and even then were half deafened.’

‘They said it would be no noisier than a train, and neither is it.’

Rose guessed from her grandfather’s manner that in his quiet way he was just as much excited by the experience as she was. It was not really noisy, she thought; still, there was that tremendous drone of the motors going on so steadily all the time. But after a while she supposed one would get so used to that as scarcely to hear it.

‘See those little dials?’ her father pointed.

There were three, side by side, like three clocks, set into the wall in front, beside the door leading to the other cabin. One indeed was a clock; the others she couldn’t read.

‘Those tell us our height and our speed,’ Peter went on. ‘You see, we are three thousand two hundred feet high and going at one hundred and twenty miles an hour: twice as quick as an express train. You see that, Mr Crowther?’ and he went on to repeat his information.

Rose thought it all very thrilling, but she wished they were out of the cloud. She had wanted to see the sea, and it didn’t look as if she were going to. However, long before she began to feel bored, a new diversion occurred. The attendant came round to know if they were taking lunch.

They all took it. Tiny flaps on the backs of the chairs in front were let down to make tables, and little rings, which came out like the chalk dishes of a billiard table, held their glasses. They had a four-course lunch followed by coffee, all very nice and comfortably served. Rose enjoyed every minute of it, particularly as she could still see nothing from the window but the wing with its attendant hanging wheel and the pearly grey fog.

Lunch was still in progress when she noticed a difference in the appearance of the fog. She couldn’t understand it, but her father explained. They had come out of the cloud and were flying through clear air. Still they could see neither earth nor sun. Layers of cloud stretched both above and below them. Gradually they rose above the lower layer and as they did so its appearance became more and more impressive. It looked solid, like a rolling, hillocky plain, but the hillocks had soft edges like frayed cotton-wool. It stretched away as far as they could see into the distance, its valleys showing dark between its lighter crests. Above them, however, the cloud looked flat and unbroken, like the sky of a wet day on the earth.

Presently it grew lighter ahead and they saw that they were approaching the edge of the upper cloud. From a definite line on the lower cloud the sun was shining. They flew out into the sun. Above, the sky was now blue; below, the hillocks of the vast plain were more intensely white and the valleys between them correspondingly darker.

‘Where are we now?’ Peter Morley asked the attendant, who came to change the plates.

‘Over the Channel, sir.’

Rose was a little disappointed. She had missed that aerial view of England to which she had been looking forward ever since she had heard they were to fly. However, she had seen the clouds from above, and that was something.

Presently she noticed that a large area of the cloud below had darkened in colour. For a moment she gazed at it with a rather listless attention. Then, realizing what it was, she was suddenly thrilled.

‘Daddy, look, look!’ she cried excitedly. ‘Look at the land!’

She was right. There, three thousand two hundred feet below them, was the surface of France. Peter leant forward to see, old Mr Crowther was evidently fascinated, and even the sombre Weatherup showed a grudging interest.

It was indeed a fascinating map upon which they gazed. The land was divided up into little irregular squares like tiny crooked postage stamps in various shades of greens and browns and reds. Feathery green areas obviously represented woods. In all directions ran traces, a perfect network of lines, representing roads and lanes and water-courses. A few were straight or evenly curved, evidently main roads or railways. A darkish worm headed by a tiny white streamer made certain of the nature of one dark line. The houses showed as tiny rectangles and the villages reminded them of the relievo models so often made to illustrate dead cities. Tiny yellow circles, looking about as big as the heads of matches, at first puzzled Rose. Then she saw that they must be haystacks. Some fields had a still more mysterious appearance. They were covered with a pattern of little dots, arranged in lines as if for ornament, like tiny beads sewn on an old-fashioned mitten.

‘What are they, daddy?’ she asked, pointing them out.

Peter Morley was not sure, but suggested cartloads of fertilizer, laid down in the fields but not yet spread.

The most striking thing in the landscape was, however, the shadows. Every object had its shadow stretching away north. The shadow alone showed that objects had height. Every building, every hedge, every embankment had its shadow. Thin clumps of trees, feathery and indeterminate, stood out clearly because of their shadows.

Looking backwards from the other side of the car they were able to get a glimpse of the sea, showing up as a flat plain of dark, slaty blue.

‘That,’ said Peter Morley, who had been studying his map, ‘is the estuary of the Somme. And that,’ he returned to Rose’s window and pointed, ‘that straight dark line is the Nord Railway from Calais and Boulogne to Paris. The town over there is Abbeville.’

Rose gazed down. It was all very thrilling and wonderful. So that queer-looking country was France! To think that all those funny little spaces between the houses were really streets, and that people were in them, too small to be seen! It was like looking on an ant heap from the top of a high building.

‘What’s that white ring, daddy?’ she asked presently, as a circle containing letters showed in the middle of a field far below.

‘Poix,’ Peter answered, again studying his map. ‘It’s an aerodrome, and you could see its name in the circle if we were lower. That’s how the pilots know where to come down.’

Rose was still meditating over this when she noticed that little wisps of cloud were forming far below. Small and widely separated at first, they quickly grew larger and closer together, allowing mere glimpses of the land. Soon even these gaps disappeared and once again they were looking down on a world of rolling cloud. What a pity, she thought, when the view of the country had been so wonderful.

She was interested to notice that her grandfather had gone to sleep. He was leaning back in the corner of his seat with his head against the wall of the car. Asleep! she thought amazedly. Fancy anyone going to sleep in the middle of all this excitement! But old people were like that. They got tired easily. Her father noticed it at the same time.