The Lonely Sea and the Sky (32 page)

  I walked up to the Governor's house. The heat seemed to let me through reluctantly, and everything seemed dreamlike. The Governor ordered a meal to be produced while I had a bath in a room with the floor joists open to let the water fall through 20 feet to the ground below.

  I felt better after something to eat, and motored round the harbour with the Governor to find somewhere to beach the seaplane. When we returned to the wharf to fetch the plane, I had an impulse to open up one of the float compartments. The sea was dead smooth, and I opened up the front hatch without dropping a single screw in the water. The bilge was perfectly dry. I set to work on the second opening of the large middle compartment; when I saw what was inside I just stayed on one knee, staring into it, until the Governor called out, 'What is it?' This middle compartment, about 6-foot long, was half full of water; there must have been 50 gallons in it, equal to nearly half the weight of the whole seaplane. At last I knew what had been the cause of all my near disasters, the seaplane's nearly capsizing at Lord Howe Island, and trouble in taking off at Whitsunday Passage, Rockhampton, Merauke, Amboina, Ternate, Ormoc. To think of my pumping the bilge day after day and always finding it dry, while the main float compartment itself was flooded! I could see where the metal bilge pipe had been rammed by the keel and where it had kinked and cracked at the top, so that I always sucked air instead of water through the crack. In a sort of apathy I pumped until dark, and lowered the level considerably. When I left off for the night I kept on muttering, 'Well, I'm damned,' till the Governor began to look sideways at me. To think of all my disgust and despair and raging at the antics of the seaplane on the water, and the difficulty of getting it into the air: now that I had discovered it, it was too late – the propeller was ruined. I seemed likely to be stuck in Masbate for months, a horrible prospect.

  During the night I wondered if I could mend that propeller in some way. The difficulty was that I knew nothing about propeller construction, and I had been told that an unbalanced propeller would vibrate the engine clean out of the fuselage. Then I had an inspiration: why not try mending it with a piece of petrol tin? With that I went to sleep so soundly that I must have fed all the mosquitoes of Masbate. The net I had was too small to cover both my head and my feet. I had covered my head to keep the buzz away, and left my feet under the sheet. The mosquitoes must have bitten through this, because in the morning my flesh felt solid with bites.

  After pumping the float dry, simple enough when I knew where to pump, I started work on removing the propeller. To do this I had to stand on the tip of one float and lean away from the seaplane, holding on to the propeller-boss with one hand, to keep myself from falling while I unscrewed the bolts with the other. Each bolt was held by a lock washer, and there were about a dozen bolts. I soon lost one spanner, and when a Filipino dived for it, he could not find it. I tied a second one to my wrist, and I tied a handkerchief round my forehead to keep the sweat out of my eyes. There was no breeze, and with the sun striking up from the water as well as down from above, it was like working before an open furnace.

  When I had the propeller on shore I cut a piece out of a petrol tin and worked it into a sheath for the tip. I asked the Governor to buy some shoe tacks for me. He produced some drawing-pins, which I thought hardly the thing for an aeroplane propeller, so he went off again and returned with tacks. After I had finished the damaged blade I bound insulation tape round the other blade, partly because it had been damaged too, partly to balance the tin, and partly out of curiosity. It was more difficult to put on the propeller, because one blade must exactly track the other. I replaced the cover of the float hatch; the leak had been making a third of a gallon an hour. I swung the propeller, the engine started, and the propeller seemed all right. I was delighted, and opened the throttle wide. The
Gipsy Moth
took off like a bird. Suddenly there was a terrific din, flap! flap! flap! flap! I thought a blade had broken off, switched off instantly, and alighted on the spot. But it was only the tape that had started to unwind, and was whipping the float at each revolution. What I could not understand was that the tape, which had been thrashing round at 400 or 500 miles an hour, was quite undamaged. I took it off altogether. As soon as I opened up, the whole seaplane vibrated violently, and I could hardly hold the throttle. I expected the engine to be wrenched from its bed, and though I closed the throttle instantly, it seemed an age before the engine stopped.

  This time I took the propeller to the Governor's house, sheathed the other tip with tin, and then threaded the propeller on my walking stick between two chairs and drove in tacks until it balanced, exactly horizontal. When I tried it out again the seaplane flew perfectly. The Governor had been such a willing helper that I offered him a flight. I fitted him into the front cockpit among the gear. I knew that the seaplane would not rise from the glassy surface of the harbour with the extra weight, so I taxied out to the open sea. There I found a good breeze and just the right sea running. We were about to take off, and I could see the Governor laughing with exhilaration (there was no windshield to his cockpit, so the 100mph slipstream driving straight into his face produced a sensation of great speed), when I felt a jar; the port float had struck. Looking straight down I saw to my dismay that we were in the middle of a coral reef. I switched off at once, and alternately looked at the float to see if it was filling up and at the reef astern of us. The seaplane was drifting sternwards fast before the breeze. The coral was alive, and the many-branched shrubs of it had varying tints of red. Suddenly I noticed a broad clump of seaweed on the surface straight in our line of drift. I jumped out of the cockpit, landed on the float, slid into the water up to my waist, and held on waiting for my feet to touch. The seaplane was drifting fast, and at first its weight ran me off my feet. But I could feel the coral harsh and jagged through my rubber soles, and at last I secured a good footing, stopped the seaplane, and fended her off sideways. Then I went on, feeling for a foothold under water at each step, sometimes finding no bottom and falling in before pulling myself back on to the float, but every now and then getting a good push at what seemed a running pace under water until I had passed the seaplane round the outside of the clump. Then I jumped for the float and landed with my body across it. Next moment my feet touched again, and so I jumped from clump to clump with wild scrambles back on to the float until I had guided the seaplane back into the channel. From down in the water I could see the Governor still bubbling with glee, wrapped up in his own experience. He seemed to think it was all part of the game for me in my soft shoes to be pushing him round a coral reef in a seaplane. When we were safe, I told him about the float having struck the coral, and that I must get back as soon as possible to inspect it. He was quite satisfied, wanting no more thrill than that of taxiing at 40 or 50mph I was surprised and delighted to find the port float intact; it showed how sensitive I had become about anything touching the floats, because it must have been the lightest of scratches not to have ripped open the thin duralumin shell.

  Next day, I took off for Manila and was met by three United States Army fighters, 50 miles south of the city. They flew above me in formation and I was excited; I had reached Manila and it was thrilling to look up in the hot sunlight to see those fighter pilots above my head in formation, and sometimes waving at me. When I alighted at Cavite outside Manila, they swooped like three roaring hawks before zooming off.

  At Manila I ran into terrific hospitality. After satisfying the US quarantine officer, I was driven to the Manila Hotel by Bagtas, the President of the Governor's Aviation Committee and led to a man in a large wicker chair close to the entrance archway. This was Nicol Williamson, to whom I had a letter of introduction from someone in Sydney. He invited me to stay with him; it would have been hard to come across a more efficiently hospitable man.

  Manila's society gave me a good time: lunch with the Governor-General's Aviation Committee, out to dinner, to a boxing match, to the English Club, to the swimming pool where I watched the attractive women and girls bathing. The more functions and parties I went to, the more lonely I felt. I realised that I was little more than an abstract idea; I was the character responsible for a seaplane's having flown up from New Zealand to Manila. The more people I met, and the more friendliness, the more I longed for intimacy, the sharing of thoughts and feelings with one sympathetic person. Sometimes I daydreamed bastion of good behaviour. If I was madly attracted by someone, it was better to avoid her, because I would have to leave in a day or two. I became profoundly depressed. A company owning a seaplane had lent me shelter in their hangar for my
Gipsy Moth
, which had been wheeled in on an axle. The floats were in a bad way; I could see daylight through the keel of the starboard one, and the port float had a bad bump. Long scores could be seen inside, caused by the coral reef. The first thing to do was to detach the floats. This company had two pilots, and the one on duty that morning was a bony-faced German with a sloping forehead and thin hair brushed back from it, who talked abrupt sentences of run-together words. I thought the obvious way to remove the floats was to sling the seaplane from the principal beam of the triangulated framework supporting the roof. The German came out of his office and refused to let me do it. I suggested something else, but he would not have that, either. I decided that he just plainly loathed the sight of me, and I could understand his viewpoint; why should an amateur be the spoilt pet of Manila when there were far more deserving veterans of aviation? I went into his office to talk to him and was astounded at his flying experience; he had flown nearly every type of machine, had flown right through the First World War. 'What squadron was he with?' I asked. 'Was it the American Lafayette?'

  'I wasn't fighting for you, I was fighting against you,' he said. I was full of interest and wonder at his experiences. What he did not know about aeroplanes was not worth knowing. I asked what he thought would be the best way to lift my seaplane: he suggested tilting it up on to one wing tip. I observed that perhaps the
Gipsy Moth
was flimsy compared with the important types he was used to handling, but he retorted briskly that he had handled dozens of them in China. We talked on without actually doing anything, and it was a depressed and baffled amateur pilot whom Williamson's boy fetched for lunch. After lunch the company's other pilot, MacIlroy, an American, was on duty. We had the seaplane suspended from the roof in about thirty minutes, and both the floats and the propeller off soon afterwards.

  The floats were in a bad way; in places only Roley Wilson's paint was keeping the water out. I decided that my only hope was the US Air Corps. But had their offer of assistance been merely a conventional politeness? I rang up Nichol's Field, and it was at once clear that the US Air Corps meant what it said. Major Duty, the officer in charge of Ordnance, came round at once. He was extremely efficient, and next morning at 7 a.m. an army lorry took the floats away. I set to work on the engine, wearing overalls only (I found them cooler than shorts) and a handkerchief round my eyebrows. An English engineer lent me an excellent mechanic to grind the valves, a job I detested. The exhaust valve in No. 3 cylinder was so pitted that we threw it out.

  Major Duty invited me out to Nichol's Field. They had made a splendid job of the propeller by splicing in a piece of wood, and then sheathing the tips in copper. This made the propeller heavier, but by now it was obvious that only metal would stand up to the constant slashing through spray and wave crests. The propeller was on a spindle, and it was so well balanced that when I breathed on one tip it began to revolve. I was delighted. The floats would take some days; on their turning a hose into one, the water had gone straight through. The riveter wanted to cut a hatch in the top of the float in order to drive home the last rivets, but to avoid this it was finally agreed that he should screw the last plates home to a block inside the float, instead of riveting it. If only I could have foreseen the consequences of this petty detail!

It was five and a half months since I left Wellington, if I included the time spent at Auckland. I wrote, 'Five and a half months alone on a ship would be less lonely than this flying game. On a ship one would at least become used to the craft and all the parts of it, the sails, the ropes, the cabin, the decks, but with flying one is no sooner acquainted with any place or person than one must leave them and fly on again.' These were ground thoughts; life in the plane, in the air, was a life apart, strange, secret and thrilling, not to be thought of in the midst of materialism. I was a third of the way to England, with another 12,800 miles to fly.