The Lost Flying Boat

1

A listener from birth should not be surprised if his first occupation turns out to be that of wireless operator. So with me. I listened through earphones to messages which came invisibly from the sky, and was able to write, though not always understand, any language which used morse symbols.

I listened with the greatest intensity of which two ears are capable. Such willingness opened a way to the inner voice, and twenty-five years later all details of what happened to the flying boat Aldebaran and its crew of eight became clear, so it is perhaps as well that I waited before writing my account. By paying attention to the faithful voice I leave out nothing which insists on being told.

2

The trio of Partagas cigars carried in the breast pocket of Captain Bennett’s tunic were apt to crumble, so he coated each with cigarette paper as skilfully as if binding the broken limb of a pet monkey. He then puffed his whitened cigar into a simulation of alto-cumulus cloud above the blank spaces of the plotting chart, and gazed through the nebulosity in a way that showed he had his worries.

I had no qualms working for a man so preoccupied. It left me a great deal to myself while waiting for the rest of the crew to gather at the Driftwood Hotel, and that was what I liked. Going once a day to report my presence, I would find Bennett pencilling calculations concerning the range of the flying boat, the petrol its four engines would consume, and the distance to the Kerguelen Islands. At such times he would confide in me because he had no one else to talk to; though I think he wanted to listen to himself a shade more than he needed to hear what I had to say.

As he opened parallel rulers to draw the required track-line on the Admiralty Chart he expatiated on how essential maps and charts were for getting from place to place and for navigating over the water. ‘We must always be aware in which direction we are going. I once knew someone who set out across the world with no more than a few sheets torn from an atlas.’

He looked at me with an enquiring smile, as if to get some reaction as to whether or not I fully understood. I gave no sign one way or the other. He walked to the large window, looked out for a while, and puffed as if to give the inhabitants of this obscure South African port the benefit of his cigar smoke as well. He turned and went on: ‘Must have been an insensitive bod, to commit such desecration. I suppose he felt the need to bring a pretty diagram of his travels home for his children! They make people like that, these days.’

There was a bottle of whisky on the table, and he poured half a glass. ‘Booze confuses, but in my case it reduces the speed of thought. I can then grasp what’s in my mind. Otherwise my eyes slide across that vital small print of thought, and refuse to latch on.’

In the sitting room of his suite there were, besides the large rectangular table with a chair on each side, a sofa, a bureau, a separate wardrobe, and two huge armchairs. My cabin-like habitation on the floor above had a coathanger on the back of the door, a sink barely deep enough to get my hands in, and a cot. But it was all I needed.

‘Maps and charts fix our position, and inform us where we can and can’t go, Mr Adcock. We little men on earth are constrained by space and topography, God dammit! All we can do is sign on the dotted line, and stand by whatever it is we’ve half-wittingly agreed to.’

Why he said this I don’t know. I had never thought of doing other than carrying out what I was being paid for. The chart of the South Indian Ocean was scored with wriggling fathom-lines and cut by veins of isogonals. Between South Africa, where we were, and the Kerguelen Islands, where we hoped to go, were undersea canyons thousands of fathoms deep; and, mulling on such figures and profundities, I felt myself floating half-drowned through the blackest of killer-whale hideouts.

He showed me a smaller chart on which I was to inscribe the callsigns of radio stations. Wireless bearings obtained along our route would be useful to the navigator, he told me, especially if cloud reached so high that sights on heavenly bodies became impossible. ‘When we cannot see, we often hear.’

‘So I understand.’

He folded the callsign chart and gave it to me. ‘That’s why we’re taking you – to be our listener. And wireless navigator, if necessary. It’ll be a hard job finding what we want. In fact some might call it an expedition no sane person would approve of.’

I found his sense of humour reassuring, and said that, no matter what anyone thought, I was glad to be going. Much more was in my mind, but I felt this to be neither the time nor the place to say it.

‘Don’t think for a moment that there’s anything shady in our venture,’ he added. ‘There isn’t, believe you me, though while you’re here, Mr Adcock, I might tell you that this little job is more than a godsend to me.’

We had not reached that level of familiarity when he might have called me ‘Sparks’, the generic name for all wireless operators, but on my asking why he considered the job to be such a godsend, he resumed: ‘Because the time will never come again when it will be possible to do what we’re going to do. You may not have noticed, but let me tell you that the shutters are coming down on any individual with enterprising spirit. We fought the war in the cause of freedom, but as soon as it was over there was no freedom to inherit. Freedom was dying while we fought. The war turned us into slaves, by making the bureaucrat supreme. The only so-called virtues left are idleness and cheating. Show initiative, and you’re under suspicion. A spiderweb of red tape is woven around inventiveness. Fall into line, you get your reward – but not unless. A nation wins a war over the Nazis, but what does it signify if your own guts get kicked out in the process? All self-respect gone. Strangled by rules and regulations designed to keep bureaucrats at their posts and people in their place. I’ll have none of it, Adcock, not while I have this scheme up my sleeve.’

Because he spoke calmly, his ideas seemed reasonable. I knew they were not, and in my unease hoped for an end so that I could go. He walked again to the window, closed it, and came back. ‘The twentieth century has been poisoned by two bestial systems that have tainted everyone whether they embraced them or fought against them. For myself, I want to push this expedition through so that I can be independent of all systems. To become rich is the only defence against being without hope.’

Glancing over his shoulder at the blameless ocean of the chart, I did not know as much then as I do now. After a final puff he laid the whitened, still smouldering stub in the ashtray and began binding another, which I took as a sign that the conference was over. The last thing that occurred to me before going out was that the word PARTAGAS on the cigar box read SAGA TRAP backwards. I was going to mention this, but thought better of it.

3

On my way downstairs I passed Shottermill, a big coarse-featured man of about sixty, with thin white hair so wispy he was almost bald. On the middle finger of a huge hand which gripped the banister was a ring crested with the coat of arms of some regiment or ship. When his pale blue eyes saw my glance he withdrew the hand and continued upstairs as if he didn’t care to be seen by a younger man as needing the assistance of the banister. His stolid alertness was as if maintained by arrogance, and primed by scorn at any of the world’s weaknesses which threatened to infect him. In the Air Force his sort had been the mainstay of the lower ranks, a warrant officer without humour and always aloof.

At first I thought he was just another layabout at the Driftwood Hotel, perhaps an escapee from Attlee’s socialism who no longer cared to live with rationing and government controls, and to whom settling at a job in a cold climate seemed a lack of birthright after the war years, when any thought of tomorrow had been obliterated by the possibility that it might never come.

However I might dislike the expressions gathered into the orbit of his face, they were nevertheless of value to him and, his scowl implied, no bloody business of yours. What he had done before the war was impossible to say, but he was now a chandler contracted to provide stores for the flying boat. I suspect he also did smuggling and currency exchange, using his tourist agency as a cover. I sensed something of failure about him, but it was well held in, and perhaps came to me because there was sufficient failure in me at that time to make the connection. I had seen him only for a few seconds, but was young enough at twenty-six to indulge in snap judgements, and sufficiently dense to believe that each one must apply to other people. Now at the age of fifty I risk nothing and learn nothing. Youth only learns because only youth has to.

I was on my way out for a ten-minute walk before going to bed. Since arriving in Ansynk I’d had difficulty getting to sleep, and hoped the exercise and midnight air might lull me into oblivion. But coming back I succumbed to the idea of a last smoke in my room, and on the hotel stairs felt in my jacket for my cigarette case and lighter. On not finding them I thought that an efficient rob-job had been done. My pocket had been picked. But I had passed no one during the walk except a policeman, and he had been on the other side of the street.

I would always distrust others rather than blame myself, which was unreasonable, because though I had lost things I had never been robbed. I was wary of everyone, however, in a minor way, which perhaps explained my painstaking attitude to work, as in those long night watches in the Air Force when no planes risked getting themselves knocked about in monsoon clouds. I would contact other ground stations to test my signals, and sense their anger at being drawn out of slumber for a triviality. But if a kite had been in need of directional assistance, or had been forced to ditch, and air-sea rescue wanted its position, then my attention would have saved lives. Flying Control said no aircraft were about, but a civvy plane might have failed to notify them, which sometimes happened, so I would comb a few kilocycles either side of the frequency, with earphones dutifully clamped.

I remembered leaving the cigarette case and lighter in Bennett’s room and, thought and action being for once the same thing, went to the door and knocked. Shottermill opened it. ‘Who the hell’s that?’ the Skipper shouted.

‘The wireless operator. I left my cigarettes and lighter.’

Shottermill looked as if he wanted to knock me down. His eyes showed that he was terrifically angry about something, but he was also the sort of man who, once he hesitated, was lost. I pushed by when Bennett called that I should come in and find the bloody things.

During the day his hotel suite was noisy because main-street traffic rattled under the windows. But much of the time he was out making arrangements for the trip – though I imagined something more important than such affairs had brought Shottermill to see him now.

Shottermill grinned as I looked around the room. ‘Perhaps it’s under the table.’ He was trying to rile Bennett more than me, though I couldn’t fathom the reason. ‘I don’t see why you want a wireless operator.’

The chart on the table curled at one corner, and I saw my belongings half obscured, though did not go to them. Bennett gripped the bridge of his nose as if trying to think his way out of a puzzle. Pressing at that spot brought back the pain of the bone being broken at boxing, which minimized his irritation. ‘The supply ship will have a wireless operator, and I’ll have one as well. I’m not crossing so much water without all the aids I can lay my hands on. There’s no air-sea rescue if we get into trouble.’

‘I just wondered what use he’d be.’ Shottermill occupied an armchair, and pulled the whisky towards him but didn’t pour. I amused myself by thinking that if I weren’t too tired I would go outside and let down the tyres of his car. Bennett controlled his irritation: ‘When I think of what you’ll get out of the deal, he’s cheap at the price. We all are, in fact.’

I was glad to hear it, and wondered how high Shottermill was in the scheme of the expedition, rightly supposing it was he who had sold Bennett the box of ancient and worm-eaten cigars.

‘Fair enough, Captain,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to know.’

‘We’re here to talk about supplies.’ Bennett nodded towards my lighter and told me to get it. ‘All other arrangements were settled in London.’

Judging by Shottermill’s frown and broad uplifted hand I was to hear nothing of any importance, though my suspicions began from that moment, the worst being that Bennett did not have any. Whoever supposed that a wireless operator on such a trip was superfluous could not in his heart wish the expedition success. There were certain things he did not want me to hear, or messages to send, or vital contacts to make. Because as yet I knew almost nothing, these reflections fell into a vacuum, but I was to remember them.

I scooped up my stuff and went, hearing them arguing even from as far away as the stairs which led to the third floor – at which I gathered that someone had helped himself to Bennett’s whisky without permission.

4

Of all the things dead and living, only God has no name, but the newly discovered is immediately delineated on becoming known. A name, a number, or a callsign identifies. A boat, plane or even a motor car is given a name because until then it doesn’t properly belong. When possession is nine tenths of the law, a name puts a stamp of ownership on it. Possessions come by easily are named so that they are not blithely lost.

Everything has a name. From the door of my radio hut in Malaya I watched a C-47 Dakota come in to land. I had given bearings on the long haul from Burma, so took an interest in its safe arrival. Through Barr and Stroud binoculars I saw, as it turned into the dispersal point by the ramshackle control tower, stencilled letters on its fuselage which said Sheffield Star.

The aircraft had a name, and also a call sign, the letters of which rarely made word-sense – though there were exceptions. To while away the time at the Driftwood Hotel I thumbed through the book of radio navigation aids and picked out three- and four-letter callsigns which made a word in themselves, hoping that a wireless operator sending morse from the coast station at Nordeich DAN did not sit in a lion’s den. Neither could it be supposed that the operator at Cape Lookout NAN was a woman, or that some stray Scotsman was employed at Nagoya JOCK, or that the radio officer on the Estonian icebreaker ESAU despised his birthright. At Skagerrak SAM was not necessarily established as a prophet, though still sending morse when Oulu signed OFF. Maybe signals transmitted VIA Adelaide were relayed with VIM by Melbourne and picked up by a VIP at Perth. In France one could have FUN at Lorient, but find it cold enough to wear FUR at Rochefort, though it might be better to go to Madagascar and keep FIT at Tulear.

Perhaps a long association with the letters and rhythms of morse created a tandem proclivity to verbal dexterity. Perhaps not. But I remembered that anyone sending morse on our Malayan network whom we could not identify was called OOJERKERPIV, a nonsense word signifying (to us) ‘unknown’. Some operator might be clacking two bits of wire together above the jungles of Indo-China, or doing the same from a mangrove swamp by the mouth of a Borneo river. Most attempts to make an OOJERKERPIV admit his identity failed because he had no business being on an official frequency. Occasionally the squelch of dots and dashes came from an aircraft too far away to make contact, so that on getting close he was no longer an OOJERKERPIV but had a callsign and a right to be there.

No contact could be confirmed unless the formality of identification had taken place. Duty as well as courtesy meant that you obeyed the rules. An exchange of identity and signals strengths, of where coming and where going, and of latitude and longitude should the aircraft, for reasons known only unto God, suddenly plunge into the sea, were given with as much alacrity as those messages flashed between ships that pass in the middle of the ocean.

An OOJERKERPIV was not therefore regarded in friendly fashion. One wanted him to transfer his interfering pip-squeak morse elsewhere. But sitting in my hut beyond the runway, earphones on so that the rest of the world was shut out, I was one day called by an aircraft which identified itself by the actual name OOJERKERPIV. I could hardly believe it, but made contact nevertheless. On mentioning this to a fellow operator he said I should stop being a bloody liar, but when he saw details timed to the minute and neatly written in the logbook, each bearing sent to the plane underlined by the usual steel straightedge, he admitted I was right.

The full OOJERKERPIV came out as a kind of Hansardian shorthand by giving only the five letters OJKPV, which belonged to a Belgian aircraft taking people to Australia, and was indeed conceded to be a manifestation of at least one OOJERKERPIV that had plagued us for so long.

Through the same Barr and Stroud field glasses I saw the word ALDEBARAN painted on the side of the flying boat which was to take us to the Kerguelen Islands, its huge bulk with high wings set on flickering wavelets in the harbour. The word matched the boat, Aldebaran being a prime star of the navigators, meaning The Follower, which fitted because every member of the crew, even Bennett, would be one when the time came.

The name was everything, though we were not to know at the time just how totally this was so. The Aldebaran slurped at her moorings as we waited for the pinnace to take us aboard, not yet to begin our journey but to overlook the equipment and stow provisions in their places. The stilled propellers of her four engines faced us across the water, the stately prow rising in the wind-flayed bay. In a slow motion nodding to the rhythm of its sea-dance it seemed she assented to whatever we needed of her. According to the name, Aldebaran would go wherever coaxed, powered by any reasonable force.

The last three letters of the callsign PZX were most relevant to our navigator, for they denoted the points of the spherical triangle in the navigation training manuals, whose solution was necessary if the stars were to give our geographical position.

Thus in cabbalistic fashion I picked the letters of our callsign over and over, eager to find significance, until the meaning I imparted had more symbolic truth than I supposed.

5

As I lay on my charpoy after meeting Shottermill I heard the long-and-short blast of a middle-distance motor horn inadvertently signal the letter N, which told me the driver’s name was Noah. Alphabetical dots and dashes had been pressed into my brain like voracious ticks never to be removed, and ever since that time I have picked stray messages from every noise. Three long retorts by the vehicle presumably avoided indicated O for Obadiah, while erratic bumps in the plumbing behind my bed suggested nothing more than the presence of an elusive OOJERKERPIV.

Sounds had no secrets from me. I was keen to the faintest sign while tuned to a wireless, but deaf to the rest of the world. Living indifferently, I listened in daylight to signals from half the earth that was dark, and then in the dark heard messages from the other half where it was light. My faculties functioned because the heavenly envelope stayed constant, the same constellations fixed in their places when the clouds lifted, brought back by the revolutions of the earth.

In Malaya my direction-finding radio hut was far from the control tower, and several miles north of the camp. I would sit at my illuminated table with the doors wide open, one hand on the morse key and the other at the dials. If no aircraft were flying I might be reading a magazine, or sitting at ease with a mug of tea which caused sweat to saturate the waistband of my khaki drill trousers.

Or I would tilt the chair, earphones around my neck, and stare at the wall. Within moments I was beyond noise and seeing into space, at a point without coordinates of either sense or geography, so that I was out of myself and floating through vivid archipelagos of green, tucked into an elbow of the Heaviside Layer, feelings gone and never to return. Then, at the faintest initial squeak of my callsign’s first letter, earphones were on and fingers at the key while the other hand did a square search for a pencil and smoothed the page of the logbook. In switching so quickly from one state to the other I felt controlled by forces other than those which were a fundamental part of me. The transfer from stark duty to transcendental wool-gathering and back again could happen several times in a night. The mechanism of coming and going was not deliberate, and not always desired, but seemed to take place as the spirit required, perhaps as an escape from the weight of listening and a craving to see how far into the other world I could go without being unable to come back.

When terrorists began murdering planters and anyone in British uniform, I closed the doors and used one light over the set so that any bandit in the trees four hundred yards away would have nothing on which to beam his gun. Sometimes I would turn all lights off, load my rifle, and set out against orders to patrol between the hut and the trees. When a man moved across my track I was unwilling to award him time or warning in a game of him and me. Without calling out I saw him edge towards the wall of trees. He was full in my sights, and for a second, which was a long time, I wondered whether or not to fire. I tightened the sling against my shoulder to steady the aim, and squeezed the trigger. There was no question of not doing so. On hearing the noise, which must have carried for miles, a jeep load of soldiers came racing across the runway.

Earphones on, I said I’d heard nothing because of atmospherics. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘can you hear anything through that?’ When daylight came there was no sign of a body, but there was blood on the grass.

The rifle was taken away so that the terrorists could not capture it after killing me. An army patrol would call every couple of hours to see that I was safe, but the possibility of being shot without a gun in my hands was a nightmare. A sergeant at the armoury liked his booze, and on passing him a bottle of Scotch he promised to see what could be done.

‘Anything that will fire,’ I said. ‘Even a blunderbuss.’

‘That’s not very neat.’ His gnarled fingers stroked the bottle. ‘You want something neat, on your job, something very neat, Tosh.’

I still wasn’t happy, but there was a chance that with a loaded revolver I would be in a better mood to recognize happiness if it came my way. The Smith and Wesson lay by the graduated scale of the goniometer. Both doors opened showed east and west. If Chang the Hatchet Man came from north or south I wouldn’t hear. You can’t have everything. Daylight made me safe. Visibility is thine, said the Lord. But night was on their side, and I itched at the dials, out of contact by earphones that locked my senses into the stratosphere. The signals officer said we could operate from the camp, safe within its perimeter. No, I said, I liked being on my own, and would let no one rob me of being afraid.

I shut a flap of each door so that it would be difficult to tell whether I was in or out, then plugged in the loudspeaker so that from a distance I would hear any morse calling me. A scarf of sweat criss-crossed my back. Sharp patterns of equatorial stars decorated the outer envelope of the earth, but I needed only a hundred yards to be in elephant grass and beyond the glow I was assumed to inhabit.

The ground was my ally, and time on my side. The realization that they also can be deceived who have been in the country all their lives gave me confidence. I would not be picked off like a pig in a kampong, or cut to bits one night after I had nodded into an impossibly expensive dream.

With a bayonet in one hand and a revolver in the other, I crouched and waited. The cough of water buffalo, bullfrog noises scraping the sky, and the comforting thump of surf half a mile away were pushed into the background. But my crude ambush would deceive nobody. I went into a potent daydream of the night, under a half moon threatening to light up fronds of grass that rendered my body ambiguous in the scrubby landscape. Part of every hour I waited to kill whoever might be creeping up to kill me, my senses synchronized to the extent that they pushed out anxiety and brought happiness.

The centre of my solar system was the hut, and I shifted clockwise, taking bearings on its glimmer. I felt a tightness at my left leg after standing longer than the intended five minutes. Aches and pains were not my bane, but I had been as still as wood, and should have expected such a seizure. Jumping up and down to bring the limb back to life might have made me a target, so I resisted. The tightness increased as if a rope were applied above the ankle.

The pressure was uneven, and the few seconds while in the grip of the small and I hoped merely playful snake were longer by far than any spiritual trips I had taken in the empty watches of more peaceful nights. Stillness was life, and yet to breathe might mean death. I saw the shadow of the snake’s head but, waiting for the sting, looked at the line of trees. Thought was my worst enemy, but all I wondered, over and over, was: if I touch it, will it turn into a stick? I didn’t, nor counted the minutes, but as they passed I grew calm, until the snake unravelled and went on its way.

I was in no mind to linger anymore on midnight wanderings. Oil tins on a pile of stones acted as alarm bells. Between sticks dug in the ground I set a sharp wire to scrape any ankle. If I had read about such tricks, I had forgotten the books. My enjoyment was total, and I decided that to be mature one must be cunning and unafraid.

6

I was unable to make any decisions except the wrong ones, but since they seemed right I enjoyed making them. Life was good because it didn’t matter what I did. Carry on sending. Everything would be all right as long as you couldn’t care less. Fresh from the troopship, I put on my demob suit and after four years felt very much the jaunty ex-serviceman. I bought a large bunch of carnations and took the train to Mortlake. Anne was in her parlour and, though out of my element, I fell in love again. In three months we were married. I worked in a jeweller’s shop and instead of life speeding up as I had expected, it got slower and one day stopped. I fell down behind the counter, and the tray of engagement rings I was showing to a girl and her young man sprayed over the floor. When I was strong enough to stand I walked out.

I said to Anne that the job had been a stopgap. She asked what my long-term plans were. I had nothing to say. Such a question was unjust, and I could only hope that Fate would not let me down. Life did not seem real.

‘It’s more real than you think,’ she said.

My feet refused to touch ground. ‘I can’t make plans.’

‘Others do.’

Her information was superfluous. I knew they did. But where did that get me? And where were they? Whenever she was right she reduced me to silence. Mostly she was right, so mostly there was silence. For some reason this silence annoyed her more than if she had been wrong and we had gone on talking. Reality was when I twiddled the tuning knob of the radiogram and heard morse chirping from the speaker. Whatever was said spoke only to me: news agency reports, ships’ telegrams, amateur chat, weather messages. The cryptic spheres washed me clean.

‘You seem tense.’

I nodded, and switched off.

‘Put on some Mantovani?’ she asked.

The music soothed her as the morse had calmed me.

‘I’m tired of loving someone who just isn’t there,’ she said.

‘I am here.’

‘You think so, but you’re not. Not to me, anyway.’

I held my hand under her nose. ‘This is me, isn’t it?’

She laughed. ‘I do love you, I suppose.’

I curled my hand into a fist. ‘And I love your nice long ginger hair, and your beautiful neat cunt.’

‘I hate it when you talk like that.’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘You’re filthy.’

‘I can’t help it.’

‘You’re still not demobbed, to say such things.’

‘I won’t say it again.’ I was as contrite as could be.

She stood, and pushed my hand away. ‘Why don’t we go to the Feathers for a couple of hours?’

I belonged nowhere and to no one, so how could I claim to be in love? But I was. Being a girl of wit and perspicacity, she sensed my trouble and decided there was no cure. She was wrong, but I couldn’t blame her for not waiting.

She didn’t want to believe in a remedy because her own circuit was already shorting. One evening I found the flat stripped to the floorboards. The fireplace shelf in the living room held me up. Staring into a dusty cupboard I didn’t feel much of an ex-serviceman any more. I tried to dam the tears, but they found new routes down my cheeks. Four years in the mob, and I wasn’t even back where I started. I needed to get on and out and through and up and across and in any direction possible as long as I didn’t stay where I was. I had disappeared up my own arse and got lost.

I clung to the mantelshelf as if it were a plank of wood in the middle of the Atlantic, until I remembered the revolver in my attaché case. I spun a coin, saying heads me, tails her. Heads came three times, so I slammed in six and sucked the steel lollipop. I would have dipped it in jam, but she hadn’t left any food.

I had been drawn into the lobster pot of marriage, totally unprepared for such an investment. No need to apologize, Anne said. But there was, I insisted, wishing there hadn’t been. My face wore a twisted aspect as I looked in the mantelshelf mirror. After setting traps and perambulating the elephant grass to save my life, I had walked into one so obvious that I hadn’t even noticed. The same loaded gun was ready to stop me protesting about fate now that I was in a far less dangerous predicament.

I took the gun from my mouth, feeling older than when the barrel had gone in – though not much. In the mirror, I preferred not to recognize myself. Love won hands down over war when it came to making people miserable. There was much to learn, but I wanted to hide so far inside myself that no one would find me and I would be safe for ever.

I walked out with a suitcase and went to a radio school on the south coast, paying tuition fees from my savings so as to get my service qualifications converted to a certificate which would allow me to work on a ship or in aviation. Instead of being a shop assistant, I preferred listening to the traffic of the spheres. Marriage was for those whose emotional seesaw was properly centred. My spirit wanted to reach space where noises multiplied, in the hope that they would provide me with an answer as to why I was alive. I would stave off death by listening for the last message from ship or aircraft, or even while sending one of my own, and forget that I did not know what life was all about.

Anne, accurate in her knowledge, had seen no hope. I walked to one side of the pier and then the other, wearing two jerseys against the east wind. I would not try to make contact, even supposing I knew where she had gone, but hoped she considered me on the right side of forgiveness for whatever I might have done. For myself, I only forgive those I love, and she is still that person.

Separation gave me energy. I made acquaintances, but those at the wireless college who also came from the Air Force knew when to leave me alone. Perhaps a similar madness infected us all. If I went for long walks instead of passing an evening with them in a pub, no remark was made.

7

Some time during my marriage I bought a morse key and, when Anne complained of silence, would take it from the drawer and send insulting messages which she couldn’t read, or repeat the SOS signal over and over after she had gone to bed. Another little mannerism which my dear wife pointed out, because she said it drove her mad, was my habit of whistling. I knew that I did it, because on catching myself I would break off in the mid flow of rhythmical notes which came out between a small gap in my upper front teeth. The sound, piercing though not loud, might have been a bird in its death agony under the paws of a cat, or the tentative beginnings of a kettle about to boil before emitting its usual scream. The sound could be picked up in a crowd by anyone with a sensitive ear, even from some distance away.

The habit was harmless, but I tried to cure myself because any messages sent not only made me vulnerable to the world but enraged my wife. So I stopped in mid whistle, and the noise would cease until, forgetting my resolution (there was no pleasure in such mindless whistling, after all) I would catch myself once more, while at a dance or tea party with Anne or, even worse, standing behind the counter of the shop being overheard by the boss from behind.

The habit ended with Anne leaving, or so I thought, but on finishing radio school, and after a spell at sea, and when getting another job seemed impossible, it came back. I walked into a pub in Albemarle Street and ordered a pint and a sandwich. Impatient at having to wait, the five letters of an aircraft callsign formed slowly on my lips, so that though not a wireless operator, Bennett, a mere stranger who stood nearby, was able to interpret the five letters of morse which I sent again and again.

It was a near miracle, considering the noise, but he had ears that could detect the breath of a dying man across a hundred miles of Antarctic peaks. He also put together the co-sign of my moustache, as well as the forward jutting chin and glinting grey eyes that denoted a man who would pick up any signals that were going. There is also something unmistakable about ex-airmen until they lose their youth, and maybe I reminded him of an aircrew member he once knew, perhaps one of those poor-show bods who had his guts splashed across the TRII54/55 above Bremen and yet was brought back to burial on English soil. There was no knowing. We had been born to give no sign, show no emotion, admit to no foreknowledge. Pragmatical we were, and phlegmatic we would stay, no matter how much the inner cauldron boiled.

He looked at me. ‘RAF?’

‘How did you know?’

‘I’m asking.’

‘Yes.’

Lunch came. ‘I can’t get the bloody mob out of my head.’

‘Nor can a lot of us.’ He smiled. ‘What’s more, we don’t see why we should.’

‘Funny,’ I said.

‘It was a good mob.’

‘Still is.’ I offered him a drink.

‘No, you’ll have what I’m having.’ He called for double whiskies. Such stuff on top of a pint would clog my brain for the afternoon, but I was in no mind to refuse. ‘What sort of wireless were you in?’

I put the beer aside for a chaser, and lifted the whisky. ‘Mainly direction-finding.’

‘The old huff-duff, eh?’

‘The same.’

‘Do any ops?’

‘I was too late.’ Lots of aircrew ended in the cookhouse, pushing food out to the queues. I was lucky to get on the radio at all.

‘As long as you can handle the gear in a plane.’

‘What sort of plane?’

‘Flying boat. I need somebody for a couple of months. If you want a job.’

I looked interested. ‘I might.’

‘Did you do a gunnery course?’

‘Only the basics. They didn’t even want gunners. The war ended, remember?’

‘Don’t I know it?’ He kept silent, and left me wondering whether he really had a proposition to make. Then he said: ‘You’ll get five hundred a month, plus expenses. And come out with another thousand in your pocket.’

I needed a job like I’d soon need a suit to walk about in. ‘Sounds a fair screw.’

He slid down the other half of his whisky. ‘It’s more than eight-and-six a day!’

‘But is it legal?’

He nodded.

Hard to believe, but I was in no state to argue.

‘When can you start?’

I was off my food. ‘I don’t know. After you’ve told me what it’s all about.’

‘Now?’

‘If you like.’

‘I’m being set up in a charter business, and need a wireless operator to make up the crew. Do you have a civvy ticket?’

I did.

‘All right. But no questions about legality. I don’t like it.’

He was the skipper, so I soft-pedalled the interrogatives – and stopped whistling morse from that time on. He said that the original wireless operator, who had been a member of his old crew, had pulled out on hearing his wife was pregnant. He’d only got the phone call that morning, and was at his wits’ end for a replacement.

‘A Super Constellation leaves for Johannesburg in three days.’ We were in his South Kensington flat to settle my travel details and sign articles that, I thought, may not be worth the paper they’re written on.

8

On the quayside Bennett introduced me to Nash, his chief gunner. A squall hid the flying boat to which, day after day, a pinnace went out with supplies from Shottermill’s warehouse. I wondered how we could need a gunner, but kept silent. To ask questions was to have curiosity prematurely crushed, and the hope taken out of expectation. In any case I could wait, no matter what risk such a course might put me or others in.

No landing ground is necessary for a flying boat, and because water covers two-thirds of the earth it has more advantages than any other machine: a combination of Icarus successful and the dolphin tamed. As the huge and handsome boat lifts, its hull bids farewell to the fishes at the same moment that its wings say good day to the birds. The craft meets both and spans two elements, an aerodynamic ark speeding through cloud and clear sky in turn. I had no wish to know what was carried, wanted only to make the flight and collect my bounty.

A policeman skiddled his stick along the corrugated wall of the shed. Bennett peered intently, as if to bring the flying boat back into clarity. ‘Am I going to take that thing off again? I often wonder how much longer I can do it.’

Nash’s laugh was the kind that passes between people who have known each other a long time. It was meant only for Bennett. ‘They used to say you could do anything with the old flying boat, Skipper, except make it have a baby.’

‘On this trip I’ll need to make it have two – if we’re to get back.’

Nash knelt to tie his shoelaces, then said: ‘I remember a picture of the old Mayo-Composite before the war. I expect I saw it on a cigarette card. Maybe we should have dredged up one of those for the job.’

The Aldebaran, of pristine beauty and consummate power, shone almost silver under the sun which followed the squall. Bennett turned: ‘I’m on the wong side of forty, and can’t sweat like I used to. But I couldn’t resist this little job. There’ll be enough in the kitty for no more worries, so I shan’t have to fly again. I’ll be retired, and no one will ask questions. A bit of travel every year, a consultant for some firm or other to bring in a bit extra – that’ll be my life. And if I can’t stand it I’ll come out here, or buy a few thousand acres in Rhodesia.’

‘You might as well,’ Nash said. ‘There’s eff-all in Blighty, these days.’

9

Nash was a large man with dark hair swept back, thick lips and quick brown eyes. We smoked and talked in one of our narrow rooms after roaming the town at night for a place to eat. His father had been a market gardener in richest Lincolnshire, but Nash left school at fourteen and took any job he could find till volunteering for aircrew in 1940. ‘I wanted to get above it all!’ he said. ‘My feet had been too long on the ground, and I fancied a bit of flying, but I was sent to a station in Scotland to work in the stores. I lacked little, and thought I had a cushy billet for the duration, but two years later I was called to an aircrew selection board. There were so many changes of station to Birmingham I almost lost myself. Then I was sent to St John’s Wood for physical tests. I got through those and went to ITW, a conveyor belt for training aircrew, and I was happy to be on it. We marched at 120 paces to the minute to get speed of reaction, and the infantry weren’t fitter. There was classroom work on meteorology, navigation, engines – you name it, they taught it. I’d never worked so hard, going from one classroom to another, and then to do drill and PT in the hangar. Rain or shine, we never stopped.

‘I went on a twenty-four-week air gunner’s course, training on Bothas, Wimpies and Lancasters. I started ops in ’43 as a rear gunner. I got the last of the central heating, and often froze so much I couldn’t move anything but fingers and eyes. Which was all that was needed. I suppose I pissed up more Lanes than any other bod in the service. Apart from anything else I was physically too big for the job. I’m sure they picked big blokes on purpose to stick in those small turrets sometimes for eight hours at a stretch. I got a JU88 above Frankfurt, and damaged another over Holland – shoot first and die later, if you have to. Our luck was ladled out by the Big Dipper. We came home on a QDM from the wireless operator who had a piece of shrapnel in his eye. That was the trip we got the gongs for.

‘Me and Bennett had done so many ops we could choose our time for a night off, and on one pass to London the rest of the crew went bang over Cologne, including the CO who’d given us the pass, because that night he was captain. We’d done our turn. Let somebody else sit on the flying bomb racks and flog Sodom and Gomorrah night after night just to get back home and have a fried egg for breakfast. Bennett wangled a conversion course to flying boats and took me as his tail gunner. I was game for a change. Over the Atlantic the stars were where they should be (when they were) and not burning to death on the ground.

‘The Sunderlands carried a galley and a steward so that sausages as well as fried eggs could be had en route. A couple of JU88s once nosed too close, but after our gunners played the Browning version the skipper lost them in a cloud.’

Nash told the story of his life more than once, but I had the feeling that when the rest of our crew got here he would talk less. There seemed to be a gap in his story when he came to his time with Coastal Command. They ‘killed’ one U-boat, oil and dirty water telling of its demise. I knew from his wavering eyes, and disparagement about the mouth, that there was something of this incident that he wanted to tell but couldn’t. I was fitted for the job of listening, and never poked my nose where it wasn’t wanted. The trade selection tests hadn’t been far out in deciding that Bennett be a pilot, Nash a gunner, and me a wireless operator.

‘Though the Lord was a man of war, I was man enough to like peace when it came.’ He poured out more of that vile and sickly Van der Hum wine. ‘The first summer after demob was real life at last. A group of us would hire a boat in Boston and go out on the Wash trawling shrimps. We’d cook and eat them, and brew tea on a primus, and spend all day on the water, and come back with mussels by the pound, and I’d tip my share in the bath and throw them a handful of breadcrumbs. The good old days were here again, when you could expect to be alive a week, a month, even a year ahead.’

He couldn’t sit more than half an hour without needing to piss. His restless eyes settled into a stare, and he stood up with an apology he never made until this malady struck. He had taken pills, powders and potions, but nothing stopped this clockwork aggravation of the bladder: ‘A disease that no quack can cure, and which doesn’t kill, is no disease at all. You’ve got no business having it. The symptoms may be imaginary, but the effect is uncomfortable. If you suffer, it’s your own fault, so it’s no use blaming the doctors, or getting God on the blower, like Job.’

By the samphire borders of the Wash, he stood on the edge of the boat and sent streams of amber piss into the water while his mates’ backs were turned. A god to Nash would have been one who concocted a pill which allowed him a full night without getting up.

He would put money made out of the present trip into resurrecting the building firm he had run with his brother. From jobbing work they had, despite chronic shortages (since everything went for council houses and repairing bomb damage), increased their range to bungalows, finding a way through labyrinthine red tape to obtain materials and acquire sites. Difficulties overcome not only brought higher profits, but laid down procedures along which one could afterwards run with the ease of a trolley on rails. A nod, a wink, a gift, a fiver (or more) at a tricky obstacle cleared the hairpin bends like magic.

For what the judge called ‘a scandalous case of bribery and corruption’ he was sent to jail for eighteen months. Given time to brood, he saw no sense in being penalized merely for using his enterprise in days of such gratuitously imposed austerity. He found ways around the rules. Show intelligence, and you get kicked in the guts. ‘If it hadn’t been for this flying boat job, I’d have gone down and never come up again. The skipper doesn’t mind that I’ve been in prison. He stands by his old crew. And most of ’em do, which is something to be said for a doomed generation.’

This remark was the closest he got to self-pity, and I wheeled him out of it by saying I had never believed in such talk. ‘Ours was doomed, though,’ he said. ‘You missed it by a couple of years. Only ten per cent survived a tour of ops. Hundreds of bods fell out of the sky every night.’

I had often regretted not having been born earlier. When someone told me that a funny bomb had ended the war I called him a bloody liar. Adolescence was War, and suddenly both war and youth ended. Nash had come out with honour but an incontinent bladder.

He wiped tears from his left eye. ‘Germany’s pin-up boy sealed our doom. They killed whole fucking generations!’

‘Each generation is made up of any number of individuals,’ I said, ‘and as one of them I didn’t have, don’t have and never shall have any intention of dooming myself.’

Then he said, and I was too drunk to ask why: ‘When this flying boat takes off, you’ll come as close to being doomed as you’ll ever want to be. If you team up with Bennett, you ask for all you get.’

I was always conscious, even at my most obtuse, of being wholesomely attached to life. At the same time I thought that the possibility of being doomed was not something over which I had any control. But we had talked so long that I had to give in and say I was ready for the straw.

‘Sleep’ll be the death of you,’ he scoffed. ‘Be the death of me, as well. Trouble with sleep is you might not wake up. Maybe that’s why I get out of bed to piss six times a night. Shit-scared of going so far under I’ll never get back. People spend a third of their lives asleep. Twenty odd years off three-score-and-ten. It’s daylight robbery! You’ll get all the sleep you like when you’re dead, so why rush? If we could go through life without bed we’d live longer, and enjoy the final sleep better when it came. We’d kip so long there’d be no Heaven or Hell, or we’d be too tired to notice it. You only think such places exist if you have too much sleep when you’re alive.’

We drank the last bottle. ‘You’ve given it much thought.’

‘That’s because you think of rum things in that rear turret trying to stay awake and make sure the next second won’t be your last. The navigator and pilot keep us on course, and your Sergeant Backtune wireless operator’s tapping his feet to dance music from all over Europe, but your gunner has to keep himself warm and everybody else safe. Me and the skipper were one mind when it came to surviving. One whisper and the Lanc was in a corkscrew and I was belting the guns at a shadow that tried to follow us down. But sleep is public enemy number one, so you go off for your lethal dose of shut-eye, while I slope away for a leak!’

10

I had not expected so much delay in getting the flying boat ready. Waiting released gloomy premonitions, and the problem was whether I should leave to avoid disaster, which I felt was sure to come, or stay to see whether I was right or wrong about my premonitions. If I left I would never know, and feel a fool. If I stayed, I wouldn’t live to tell myself I had made a mistake. Pride on the one hand, and curiosity on the other, had me locked.

The flying boat had been chosen from thousands of war-surplus planes, and I couldn’t help wondering about its air-worthiness. I questioned the wisdom of placing myself at its disposal, an attachment which began after my inability to bed down into the married state. I had signed a contract as wireless officer for the Southern Ocean Survey Company on board the Aldebaran, and Nash told me during an interminable series of card games that we were to assess anchorage facilities in the Cape Town-Tasmania-Antarctic triangle, for a steamship company that would acquire and recondition a couple of redundant Liberty ships. They would go into the cruise market for naturalists, amateur geographers and middle-aged wayfarers with money, who had not travelled during the war and now wanted to take advantage of the reopening of facilities.

Nash saw that it would mean almost no change of name for the company when it became known as the Southern Ocean Steamship Company. There would be work for us all in such an enterprise, ‘especially for you,’ he said, ‘as radio officer.’ He reached across the table and nudged my chest, between one game of gin rummy and the next, though my own laugh was due to the unhappy coincidence of both acronyms.

I believed nothing of what he told me. A lifetime of listening had made me suspicious. A man couldn’t survive seventy-six operations over Germany, as well as a stint with Coastal Command, and not have more cunning than was good for him. Nash knew something about the trip that I didn’t know, and under his phlegmatic aspect was a caution hard to fathom. I had no evidence as to what it was, and my curiosity was so intense that I couldn’t see a way to find out. To ask questions, however circumspectly, would lose me all standing among the crew. I had been left with nothing when Anne went out of my life except that kind of honour which, providing an all-round defence, led me to distrust everything but my own competence – such as it was.

I asked Nash when the flying boat would be leaving.

‘In about a week.’ He licked his finger before picking up a card. ‘There’ll be briefings first, though, and a few circuits around the harbour. Meanwhile, you won’t be needing this.’ He drew one of the gaudy banknotes to his side of the table, then handed me the pack because it was my turn to shuffle.

I walked to the window. The air in the room was thick with our smoking. Outside there was grit in the wind. Yesterday the houses along the street had been intact, now they were being brought down. How are the mighty fallen! Between gaps the deep blue sea had white tails curling on top. When waves hit the breakwater a geyser of smoke banged into the air and, even at this distance, looking between demolished houses, I could hear that searing rush as the liquid mass came down. Close to midday, half the block was gone. That’s how they move in this country. A date-time is set for doing a job, and then it’s done, without argument or delay.

I went back to the table. ‘A poor lookout if it’s dead calm on the day we’re supposed to get airborne, with such a load to carry.’

‘That’s not your problem. Just deal the cards and pray for luck. You might win if you aren’t careful.’

According to graphs on Bennett’s table, the wind that prevailed on most days of the year, to any number of the Beaufort scale, when otherwise it was a calm of equal deadliness, was westerly. He’d fly the Aldebaran into the wind for lift, and we would have to rise before colliding with the escarpment on the other side of the harbour.

‘They aren’t used to such big flying boats out here,’ Nash said. ‘Only seaplanes. The skipper landed it almost empty, and a double run’ll be needed to get off. If we have to taxi out to the open sea he’ll have to wait for a calm day, and on such a day there’ll be little wind for lift-off. He has his problems. You’ve just got to trust him – like I do.’

Now that the war was over, I didn’t like to make anyone responsible for my life; yet Nash was right. On the other hand, neither he nor Bennett thought it necessary that I should be told the truth about the Aldebaran’s voyage. I wondered whether the navigator or flight engineer would reveal anything when they arrived, because they too had been part of the old crew. I was the only newcomer, and became more and more conscious of the fact. I had been chosen at random, or Fate had pinned a number on me which was impossible to pluck off.

If I took a train along the coast to Lessom Bay, and found work as an operator on some tramp steamer sailing to another part of the world, my last notion of honour would go. I would fall through the safety net of self-respect to the lowest state of all, that of breaking my word – the final dereliction of duty. I had been brought up to believe that once you lost that kind of honour you couldn’t atone. I didn’t think much of this precept, for there is such a thing as loyalty to life, which means taking reasonable precautions for survival.

‘You should stop thinking thoughts,’ said Nash, when I lost again. ‘It’s not good for you. It never did anybody any good.’

‘It’s worry,’ I said, ‘not thought, and it’ll go when I’m flying.’

‘That’ll be too late. You’ll have a rash by then. Get rid of it now. Take a tip from me. We can’t afford to have anyone in the crew who thinks.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘you win.’

‘See what I mean?’

‘I do. So deal.’

Whatever the reason, for the rest of that day I won every game.

11

A man was playing a slot machine by the coat racks. Each spinning drum lit up red and yellow. He put money in and, after pausing to let a bout of coughing rack its way through him (he simply stood upright and looked straight ahead, telling the animal inside to do its worst but for God’s sake to let rip and get it over with even if it intended killing him), pulled at the large handle as if knowing every move of the machinery inside. A juke-box in an adjoining alcove played the world favourite for that year: ‘I’ll Never Forget You …’ A glass of beer was set on the table, and he reached for a drink when his cosseting of the gamble-box brought no results.

I finished a straw bottle of red before my spaghetti and cutlets, with juicy tomato on the summit, came to the table. The Italian proprietor, Mario Salvatore, who was from Turin, told me he had been a prisoner in South Africa during the war. His young wife looked around the curtain every few minutes, then brought my dessert of meringue crème Chantilly and a cup of black coffee. I left the dinosaur-trail of cream, and read a newspaper, little interested in reports of the Berlin Blockade and the same old ding-dong in Korea. The snowy ridge across my plate was more intriguing, and led me to speculate on the topography of the island that Bennett was taking us to. The future, holding no more anxieties now that I had eaten, existed only insofar as my wondering about it prevented me from feeling conspicuous at supper.

On my way to the restaurant I had turned away from the seafront and passed several eating places, unable to make up my mind which to enter. They were too crowded, or too empty, or too dingy. I got back to the quay, then walked along the street of storage sheds, as if my body had yet to work up an appetite. I continued along the shore of the bay, and morse-read the licence plates of passing cars, calculating how many dots and dashes were in letters and numbers and whether there were more dots than dashes, so as to define a car as a dash or dot vehicle. If a dot, the car would go to heaven; if a dash, the thing would go to hell. And if the cypher came out in equal numbers, then its pagan status would keep it from either place.

When there were neither houses nor pavement along the potholed road (and no more cars), I looked at the sunset reflection on the battle-plate grey of the harbour, and a glow of coalfire on the wall of mountain behind. The town was quiet with the peace that presages war and frightens children more than grown men, though they do not know what it means. I remembered being frightened as a child by the continual talk of war, until that fear was replaced by excitement at real war beginning.

The satisfactory eating place of half an hour before now had people waiting, so I circled the tree-lined square twice and walked into the Plaza Restaurant which was nearly empty. I hung up my raincoat and sat down. A few solitary eaters had their backs to me. I hated having to sit with others. Even when I had a table to myself I fancied people looking at what was being knifed-and-forked into my mouth.

The man at the slot machine played on. His teeth spiked a cheroot, and the only evidence of his agitation, or enjoyment, was when smoke swept back from the crown of his head as if the machine itself was on fire. He was determined, as coin after coin dropped into its demoniac conveyor system, on an all-or-nothing decision, being a man who, I thought, wanted chance firmly in his grip, so as to be protected from something even bigger which might callously injure him.

After a long draw-down of the handle, bundles of coins cascaded out of the tin pocket level with his groin, and both hands, in no kind of hurry – he had been expecting to win and knew clearly what to do – moved to extract his reward. Money continued teeming out and was heaped on the table until his glass of glowing lager became a regal beacon on the high ground of an island set to keep ships away from its dangerous coast.

Thin in face and body, he grinned, yellow teeth showing as he carried his winnings in troughed hands to his own table. He put on his ridiculously small nicky hat, perched as if to hold down the thatch of fair hair reaching almost to his collar. He sat, eyes glowing with exhaustion and triumph. After a quick reckoning, he laid part of his bonus aside, perhaps to put back into the machine, for he seemed nothing if not systematic. Noticing my interest, and realizing who I was, he said: ‘Hello, Sparks. Let’s have a bottle of steam to celebrate.’

He was Wilcox, our newly-arrived flight engineer. When he came out of Bennett’s room that afternoon I knew who he was, and he knew who I was, but I did not feel like introducing myself, and neither did he seem eager, both of us perhaps preferring to let such a procedure occur in the normal course of events.

‘Be glad to.’ I got up to shake hands.

‘Looks like I’ve broken the bank, eh?’

I went to his table, thinking it as good a time as any to get acquainted. Having watched him at his favourite pastime, I already knew something. His finely boned face took on a light shade of purple when he coughed, hands clenched and opened, as he fought to clear his throat without causing me to think that he put much effort into it. I considered him ill enough for bed, but he rallied and looked almost robust. He relit his cheroot, which calmed the coughing, and sat down.

‘After I left the mob I couldn’t settle at anything,’ he said. ‘I tried a few office jobs, but was as bored as hell. Then I worked in a garage, bodging cars together – some of which were nicked, I’d say. But one night I met some friends in a pub and they got me taken on by a firm which did jobs all over the country putting up scaffolding. I was never afraid of heights, or working long hours in wet and freezing weather, so with good wages we had a fine old time. Hell-raising wasn’t the half of it – plenty of booze and women when we weren’t working all hours God sent. Then I got married, and last winter I caught this bloody cough and had to knock off work.’

He gave a vivid illustration of what he meant, during which I thought he would end by coming to pieces, so that I considered keeping my head to one side in case I should catch whatever he had. ‘I went down with a terrible dose of ’flu, and it hasn’t left me yet.’

He hoped to have a few days’ rest before we set out, to get rid of whatever it was. I agreed that he should. ‘The climate’s right, anyway.’ He too was parted from his wife, but it was he who had walked out on her: ‘We were passionately in love, but one morning she said that if I coughed once more she’d go mad. I knew then there was no hope for our marriage. She had lost confidence in me, and once that happens life gets intolerable. I couldn’t see an end to my coughing, and didn’t want to be responsible for getting her into an asylum. I have this thing about being sensible, and about confidence. If people don’t have confidence in each other they’ve no right tormenting one another. The letter from the skipper saying he wanted me for this trip came just at the right time. In any case I was on sick pay, so I was glad it did.’

12

Why I should be followed around the streets of this obscure port of southern Africa I did not know, but one evening on my way to search out a place with a different menu I sensed a shadow some way behind. Though I heard nothing, the knowledge of being stalked was positive, as if my own shadow had pulled away in the shine of a street lamp and wanted to observe my intentions in an unfriendly manner.

To follow one man and not lose sight of him takes three men. If the man to be kept in view is on the move sixteen hours a day, then six men are needed to work two shifts of eight hours. If it is necessary to keep him under observation during the night as well, nine men would be employed. I liked the situation no more than when sitting on watch in Malaya with hut doors open and lights glaring from the double pack of accumulators, and thinking that a terrorist had me in his sights from the cover of the trees. As I turned a corner at my usual pace I wondered, not how to outwit my pursuer, but how I could discover his identity. Common sense suggested I swing from the next bend and walk back into him; but cunning advised me not to show that I was aware of his intentions.

Being a prey to speculation led me to query whether I was in fact being followed. Perhaps two weeks of boredom had deranged me. Idleness had been pleasant. The lodging, provision and lack of responsibility were so agreeable that I wanted to pass my life in this state, because nothing could make a wireless operator more content than a long break from tapping and log-filling. But the idleness went on too long and, like the painful stage of a disease, was beginning to eat into my soul. I was losing the ability to open and close my eyes at will. The calves of my legs ached, and my scalp itched as if, should I scratch, my hair would fall out in clutches. Too long from the disciplined stitch of morse code, the pit of my stomach started to solidify. Looking at my hand, I would see three fingers instead of four. The only cure was to be tucked into my operator’s position with earphones and intercom-jacks pushed decisively into their respective sockets, and hands twitching at the coloured clickstops of the transmitter whose façade looks like a child’s construction kit.

Being away from England, and pitched into a situation whose outcome was from any point of view uncertain, I felt myself to be at least two different people, both of whom it was difficult to hold together in one physical spot. Could not that person, therefore, who followed me and never varied the distance, be a third entity that had split off from the two of me already in existence?

I increased my pace from a surge of buoyancy rather than to outdistance my pursuer. If instead of one person tracking me there were in fact the necessary three – out of a conscientiousness to do the job properly – then the three parts of me within my controllable orbit had a chance of outwitting them.

Before deciding on the best means of doing this I wondered why anyone should so obviously track me, and hoped the reason would be revealed. Having discovered the fact early could only be explained by my lack of surprise at such a thing happening at all. Since meeting Bennett and reaching our rendezvous in Southern Africa, there had seemed something unreal about the purpose – if not the legality – of what he proposed to do. The only evidence for this uneasiness was that it poisoned my idleness.

The clatter of footsteps was my own. I would walk instead of march, do 90 and not 120 paces to the minute, preferring to show concern rather than anxiety. It was chilling to be followed. Being tracked can turn into a pursuit, and become a chase. Physically aware of the follower, you may be manoeuvred into a trap.

The streets darkened. I clenched my fists, and turned corners. The route must have shaped so many letter Ls they’d become like stairs on paper. I marched again, and at the left foot passing the right, as if on parade, the loud voice in me shouted: ‘Halt!’

Both feet came noisily together. On a further command I did the ‘about turn’, drew back my left fist, and punched the body which came against me. He let out a cry, and fell into the road.

Having hit someone who as likely as not hadn’t been following me at all, I thought it wise to run as far as my guilt would allow, especially since he might have been a policeman wanting only to check my passport. If he wasn’t alone in his work, assistants would be coming up to help. Perhaps Shottermill, who would leave no trick unturned, still wanted the flying boat to set off without me. Or maybe he didn’t want it to depart at all.

Acting without consideration never did any good, and now reason must be elevated to a par with valour, whereby it seemed tactically right to flee. I turned to do so and – no great feat to vanish into the darkness – heard my name called as clearly as if a coil of rope had hissed around my neck:

‘Adcock!’ A burly figure came towards me, brushing gravel from jacket and trousers. ‘You bloody fool.’ He didn’t seem angry until: ‘You’re like a fucking wolf.’ My blow had been a mere push, and he had only gone over on losing his balance at the drop of the kerb. He spoke in a North of England accent which I didn’t trust an inch: ‘It is Adcock, isn’t it?’

‘You were following me.’

His arm came close, and I dodged, but the gesture was to guide himself in the dark. ‘How could I catch you up if I didn’t follow?’ His hand was for me to shake. ‘But you walked as quick as if you’d just come off square-bashing. My name’s Bull, flight-sergeant air-gunner, as I once was. Came in this evening to join the crew.’ I shook the warm and meaty hand, which held on too long for my liking. ‘Bennett gave me some of that lovely coloured money, more than a monthly wage packet back home. Then I met Wilcox coughing his guts up in the lobby of that Flotsam Hotel and asked where I could eat pork pies and black puddings. So he says I’d better follow Adcock the Sparks who is just going out, because he knows the best places to get scoff. I tried to, but you walked bloody fast.’

We went back towards the middle of town. I was unable to show instant comradeship for someone who had caused me to panic so ignominiously. ‘Sorry about the thump.’

He laughed, and became more likeable. ‘Wasn’t much, was it? Like a kitten with mittens playing dobbie! I might have done the same in your place, only the poor sod I did it to wouldn’t have got up in a hurry. Still, as long as you make up for your tap at me by finding some nice grub.’

‘You won’t get pork pies and pints.’

‘Ah well!’ He held my arm, as if he might lose me again.

‘Wine gets you drunk quicker.’

‘That’s what I’ll have, then, if you recommend it.’

I asked how many gunners we were taking on. There seemed no end to them.

‘Two, besides me and Nash. I came down with my old oppoes Armatage and Appleyard. You’ll be as safe as houses with us. We’ve shot coffins out of the sky many a time!’

All we needed was a navigator. As things stood, Bennett would fly the plane, Nash and the gunners guard it, Wilcox maintain it, and I would be all ears cocked against the world. But without a navigator on a long flight over the ocean we would not reach our destination. Though Bennett had a First Class Navigator’s Licence, he couldn’t fly the crate and do that job properly, because while the navigator took star-sights in the astro dome a good pilot had to keep the plane level and steady.

We faced each other, as well as chips and chops and chunks of bread and bottles of red plonk in between. It suited him fine. He poured a tumbler and drank it like cold tea. He was thirty years old but seemed middle-aged. Civvy life had been so dull he had joined the Merchant Navy, doing any work he was put to: ‘As well as being a gunner, I’m a rigger and a steward – a jack-knife of all trades, you might say. I happened to be at home to see my parents, because I’d just jumped ship. I thought I might settle down on shore for a while, but then Bennett’s telegram came and I knew I couldn’t let the skipper down. Well, could I? You know how it is. He’s got us all now, every manjack of the old crew except the wireless-op, and you’re standing in for him.’

He was open and friendly, and the more we drank the more I wondered whether he had in fact been following me. No matter what he said, mistrust came and went. At the third bottle he took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. I glanced at his decorated skin. ‘That’s how it is if you’re a sailor,’ he said. ‘You aren’t much of a man if you haven’t got a bit of this stuff over your arms and tits.’

From the bulge of white muscles down to the backs of his wrists were red and blue daggers, hearts, reptiles, union jacks, buxom women and, on his chest, he said, a portrait of King George. My sight was glazed from too much wine, but I was sure that, even though I hadn’t yet met Appleyard and Armatage, Bennett had gathered a very fine crew indeed – and, whatever I thought, I was certainly one of them.

‘Oh yes,’ Bull said, ‘and another thing I forgot to tell you. The navigator came in as well. You’re in for a treat when you see him.’

13

The water chopped itself about, objecting to the wind, but the flying boat was well-moored. When Bennett wasn’t on board overlooking stowage, or in his room cooking up hypothetical navigation schemes, he was pacing the quay in strides too big for his frame, cigar going like a haystack, hands behind his back and glancing up every few yards, as if to a time mechanism, at the lift and fall of the Aldebaran.

His skin was the colour of milk from the tension of waiting. The bottle of whisky on his table was always half full, and of a different brand. For the captain of a flying boat his hands shook too much, but we all had aches and twitches of some sort that would not go away till flesh and blood felt relief at the great flying boat with stores and men on board lifting into the air, the rate of climb indicator, the rev counter and the altimeter doing their jobs, as lessening bumps under the hull told us we were almost airborne.

All we could do was play cards, walk the town, fall asleep in the local picture house, and get drunk. Six months will pass before we depart, I thought when I woke up the morning after my encounter with Bull, so that we’ll have winter as one more enemy. None of the others seemed over-anxious, however, and Wilcox was positively glad of all the sleep he could get.

After a shower and breakfast I went out for my usual walk. I watched cranes at their demolition work with the fascination of the idle at the spectacle of the energetically employed. I did not know whether to go left and walk by the harbour, or stroll right and up the hill behind the town.

As I stood, work ceased for some kind of break. Blacks went to their dinner cans, and whites to a wooden hut, and I saw the wall that was left naked. Floors had been scraped away, and a purple mark remained as if it had been burned there. A groove was revealed, and with it a continuation that made a scar as if across a chin, and the blue wash of a wall crested an eye enclosed in tissues that gave the glazed, beacon-like stare of some prehistoric creature.

Illuminated by the sun, the composition was like an enlarged reproduction of the side of our navigator’s face, turned from us when I met him in the breakfast room before coming out. The wound had been caused by a Very signal-rocket pistol. The stubby cartridge of brutal calibre had gored his cheek and burned there, a stray or accidental shot from the control tower window when he happened to have been strolling by. Plastic surgery had bettered the grisly enhancement, but not much. He later told me that he left the hospital after eighteen months because kindness was turning him clockwise into a lunatic. He hiked the by-ways for a year to get back health, and the only item of value in his rucksack was a bubble sextant which he would not relinquish. He did not know why, but while children ran from him he relished the extra weight. Sisyphus, he said, had nothing on me. At which Bull confessed that he’d had a dose of that, as well. Rose got a job, and went to live again with his mother, and stayed until receiving Bennett’s telegram which called him, he said, back to duty.

As I stood across the road from the enormously enlarged picture of Rose’s hideous blemish high up the wall, I wondered how long it would be before we took our departure. The livid vision made me active where I had been apathetic. I walked away as quickly as I could, unable to look a moment more than I had to. When I passed in the evening the whole building was level with the ground.

14

The seven of us waited in the hotel lounge, which was closed off for our use. A chart of the ocean, and a large-scale map of the islands, were pinned to the wall. As if to accustom us gradually to the scarred side of his face, the navigator kept it turned whenever possible. Because his name was Rose, I thought of him as ‘Compass’, though when none of the others took the sobriquet as in any way witty I let the name go. Smoke from his pipe drifted over a fleshy landscape of red and purple, to screen the distortion from anyone tempted to gaze at it. The pipe angled jauntily out of the disfigured side of his mouth, so that a languid puff slid up the lunar scars. If anything this made the effect worse, which may have been his idea, though I think he no longer cared for anyone’s opinion. The glint in his eyes suggested that he was used to bearing the scar, and his nonchalant expression turned humorous when he considered what the world could do as far as he was concerned. But the lasting effect of the scar was to curb outright laughter from him. People in any case expected so little merriment because of his affliction that he eventually employed less than he had grown up with. The truth was that he had accustomed himself to his disfigurement, and it was up to us to get used to it.

He looked around. ‘What a bloody shower!’

The others laughed, having known him well, but only in the wartime pre-scar days, so that to some extent he was also new to them. Perhaps we did look a shower, with our open-necked shirts and various kinds of jackets. I had a tie in my luggage, and supposed the others had.

‘You may well turn out to be right,’ Nash said.

‘I sincerely hope not. You know how the skipper likes us to dress for dinner in mid-flight.’

I laughed with the others.

‘We don’t want any crisis during the trip.’ In spite of twitting us, he had a gentle voice. He’d grown up in a small farming town on the northern edge of Salisbury Plain, and the pleasant burr to his speech remained. His father, a solicitor, had sent him to the local grammar school to which he had gone as a boy, and a distinction in mathematics for his Higher School Certificate had naturally led Rose to become a navigator on volunteering for aircrew.

He sat with the knick-knacks of his trade: a Dalton Computer, plotting instruments, star-finder, and a Bubble Sextant Mark IX. Maps and charts were spilling from a black bag by his polished shoes. Even Bennett hadn’t such knife-edged creases in his trousers. He irons his laces at night, we used to say about such a type. Butter wouldn’t melt in his turnups. You could smell his haircream a mile off. How wrong we were.

When the skipper came in, Rose, Nash and the others stood as at a pukka briefing, so I joined them. He looked at us one by one, then nodded. We sat down, and he talked for some time about the allocation of duties. We were informed that Rose, being the navigator and also capable of piloting the plane, was second in command. The flight engineer would, in spite of his cough, be able to control the aircraft and keep it on course during level flight, if necessary. He also knew some navigation. So did the wireless operator. It wasn’t unusual for such a crew to learn something of each other’s jobs, so we had the equivalent of three possible pilots and two good navigators, which was an advantage, considering what margins of error might develop on our lengthy flight.

The fact that there was one wireless operator gave me some satisfaction, because it meant that the ears of the craft and the transmitter were my own. There would be no one to interfere with me working the dials and clickstops. If I went down with illness or injury Bennett and Rose could do a slow morse speed of six words a minute and tap out an SOS, but only providing the transmitter was on the right frequency.

Bennett pointed at the chart with a piece of stick. ‘The first leg of the trip will be to the Kerguelen Islands, over two thousand nautical miles away. We reconnoitre the straits’ – more indication with his baton – ‘between one island and another, to find a certain cove’ – a definite stab at that point – ‘for anchorage. Using it as our base, we spend a few days exploring the west and north-west coast – a bit of surveying, you might say – and then set course for Freemantle, 2320 nautical miles further on. On our way to Kerguelen we overfly – or as near as dammit we do, won’t we, Mr Rose? – two small inhabited islands, with no facilities, I’m afraid, of either petrol or beer. Also, there aren’t any shipping lanes where we’re going, which is why we have a navigator like Mr Rose to plot our way. Cruising speed will be something in the region of 120 knots, though the prevailing wind, if it prevails as it should, ought to give us a bit more ground speed, so we’ll take about eighteen hours to reach our objective. The end of the second leg will get us to Freemantle, but after refuelling there may be no time to go ashore.’

Such distances deadened my head, imagination unable to register the sight of endless sea. While Rose played with the knobs on his Dalton Computer – ‘You can do anything with it, except fry eggs’ – we others were supposed to think up questions. Wilcox, still wearing his hat, stopped coughing long enough to comment: ‘This place seems at the end of our range, Skipper, and the wind may not play ball with us. Is there a fill-up station on the way?’

Bennett smiled. ‘I’ve stared at the chart till I’m blue in the face and still haven’t conjured one up. Nevertheless, I shouldn’t worry if I were you. We do have auxiliary tanks to give a range of two thousand five hundred miles, so we shouldn’t be forced to ditch on the way. I wish you’d suck some Zubes for that cough, though. When the trip’s over we’ll send you to Switzerland.’

‘It’s only ‘flu, Skipper.’

Nash folded an old Daily Mail into his jacket pocket. ‘And where’s the juice coming from for the flight to Freemantle?’

‘A ship will meet us in a convenient stretch of calm water.’ He waved his stick so that no one could be certain where it was, and I couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t being sarcastic. ‘All hands will set to with gusto, and stock up the tanks.’

The notion that we would be a flying petrol tank for over two thousand miles gave me a strange feeling in the stomach. ‘Do we have a dummy run to see if we can get off with such a load?’

‘We’ve got the longest runway in the world, Adcock, a thousand miles, if the sea’s calm enough. Let me worry about that. I’ve worked things out, never you fear.’

‘It’s safer to chug along with an extra ton or two of petrol than carry the same in depth-charges,’ Rose said to me as he opened a stubby tin of Flowerdew’s Cut Golden Bar and refilled his pipe. He smoked contentedly, but to puff such twist in the same room as Wilcox seemed inconsiderate, though I don’t suppose he would have coughed much less without it. Bennett advised him to sit by the open window, but he didn’t bother, saying his cough was sure to go as soon as the old kite got above the clouds.

Appleyard, one of the gunners, wanted to know how much airborne time we’d need before reaching Freemantle. He had a cousin there. Rose nodded, the scarred side of his face towards the skipper: ‘Thirty-eight hours, give or take a day or two!’

Bennett came out of his reverie. ‘How long we stay at Kerguelen depends on all of you. Intelligent co-operation is what I want, like in the good old days. We’re a bit rusty, but we’ll shine up. As captain of this enterprise – and God help me with such a shower – even I may have to lend a hand when it comes to picking up the goods at Kerguelen.’

‘What goods?’

‘That’s between me and the company. Till we get on board, it’s classified gen.’

I asked if there was a W/T met. station on the island.

‘You’ll be briefed on that later. But the short answer is no.’

‘We’ll hope for calm weather,’ Rose said, ‘and a good anchorage.’

‘I’ll pray fervently for both,’ said Nash.

It all sounded, Appleyard observed, that a few prayers might not be out of order.

‘Prayers never did an air gunner any harm,’ Bennett said. ‘As for myself, I muttered a quick one to the old God every time I had to get you lot off the ground. And gave special thanks when I got back.’

Armatage, another gunner, sat upright in the heavily upholstered chair. He had fair wavy hair and a handlebar moustache, as if he had always hoped to be taken from a distance for a pilot or navigator, which would at least have given a short burst of glory before whoever it was got close enough to see the badge on his battledress. He had worked in the office of an insurance company, but his spare time was given to running a youth club from which he led expeditions across Dartmoor at Easter ‘when conditions can be fair to Arctic’ and summer ‘when it wasn’t so good either.’ Nash told me he had lost his job after something he’d done had got into the newspapers.

‘Whoever thought up this stunt must have been round the bend,’ he shouted. ‘If I don’t do a bunk it’s only because I’m half way up the zig-zags already.’ Then he laughed, a bray without humour, and lay back with irritation that would not let him say more.

Maybe he had spoken for more than himself, but before anyone could say so Bennett put in that if he lacked moral fibre he had better go now, and that if he didn’t he had better shut up.

‘He was often like that,’ Rose said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

‘Too bloody well,’ said Nash.

‘He was all right at the first upshot of flak, though.’

Armatage didn’t answer.

‘In view of the circumstances,’ Bennett said, ‘you can say goodbye to any celebratory booze-up, or aircrew hanky-panky the night before we go on board for take-off. Have your party, if you must, but make it at least twenty-four hours prior to getting your clearance chits signed from this hotel. In which case I might join you. You’ll collect more than soldiers’ pay when this operation is over, and you can go to pieces then if you care to. But for the trip, you’ll be like teetotal parsons – if they ever existed – keeping an eye on each other to make sure there’s no flouting that one. I want no hymn singing, though, on your part, nor any need for the riot act to be read on mine. We’ve got a tricky job, I don’t mind telling you, and we want to come through successfully. Once we’re airborne we’ll fall into our allotted places, even Mr Adcock, who hasn’t flown with us before, so that after a few hours up top it’ll seem as if we’ve never had a break from the last time we were together. Twenty hours is a long run, and I won’t say that anybody caught slipping into the land of nod will be thrown overboard; but I will frown severely, and he might get his head knocked off. As for you gunners, you won’t be playing poker in the galley, either. Nash will see to that. You’ll keep your eyes peeled, and eat carrot-pudding in case any strange or otherwise unexplainable object comes into view. I want as sharp a lookout as for JU88s when flying up Happy Valley or across Biscay. Close to the Islands, the more you might have to do in the gunnery line, and when we land it’ll be sleeves rolled up for everyone.’

The sooner we eight luminaries were into the wide blue yonder the better; then at least I would have no further illusions about being followed. I wondered whether I was the only one, and though we were as friendly as a crew should be there seemed no sane opening for me to broach the matter. If my fears reached Bennett he might throw me off the job as unsuitable, especially if the work we were about to undertake was as legitimate as he made out.

15

In a ship without guns there was a superfluity of gunners. The pilot, the navigator, the flight-engineer and the wireless operator had well-defined tasks, but so many gunners worried me – though no one else seemed perturbed. Perhaps they assumed that having filled such a role during the war, ‘gunner’ was now an identification tag, no more than a badge stitched under the lapel of jacket or windcheater.

All of us belonged to a crew in which no member could claim more importance than the next, but gunners were in the majority, which was valid only if they were to be employed as look-outs, or loaders, or stewards, or riggers, or bowmen, or whatever work Bennett was to find necessary. In which case it was easy to explain their presence.

The existence of each crew member had to be individually acknowledged. Bennett talked to Rose about routes and possible wind vectors, cloud ceilings and departure times, such a parley between pilot and navigator being long and involved. With the flight-engineer he broached engine performances and miles per gallon: how long the flying boat could stay in the air on a given quantity of fuel. Nash, as supercargo in charge of supplies and their loading, had to go over details of tool-stowage and survival rations, in case an accident should keep us on sub-Antarctic terrain, or if the flying boat alighted far from land and we had to wait for rescue by a passing ship. Distances were vast, and emptiness complete. Precautions had to be taken.

Away from air or sea lanes, the trip was exploratory, which was why we would collect a year’s pay for a bare two months. The earth would turn sixty-one times on its axis and if, as the Bible says, life is seventy years long, what difference will it make whether the pole-axe falls at seventy years and four months or seventy years and two months? The contract was indeed generous, and whoever devised such terms put high value on sixty-one days, or 1,464 hours or 87,840 minutes. And which of the 5,270,400 seconds would justify the payment of what all of us took to be danger money? Sixty-one days sounded more sober as a period of employment, less perilous yet demanding a full sense of responsibility while living through the heaviest that were obviously yet to come.

And beyond the end of two full moons there was nothing. A medieval sailor thought he might fall off the world. So would I when our time ran out. Visibility had closed in regarding the future, allowing me to see no more than a day ahead in those two months which might contain the moment of my death. It was better to be blind and unfeeling than think too far in front, though after Bennett had said what he expected by way of duty I was able to see a picture of the flying boat lifting, and setting course towards Kerguelen.

‘I tried to get eleven in the crew,’ he said, ‘but I was over-ruled in the matter and told to manage with eight. A hendecker – that is to say, eleven – would have given us an extra pilot, navigator, and wireless operator. To keep awake for twenty hours is asking a lot.’

Having done fourteen-hour watches, I told him I could cope, at which he said that no doubt all of us would do our duty. He sat so that he could stretch his legs and rest both feet on a corner of his desk. His worn face showed the battered spirit of a man at the end of a journey from which he had barely escaped with life and sanity, rather than the commander of an expedition about to depart and whose purpose none of us could understand. Perhaps the burden weighed so heavily on him because he was not so clear about it himself.

The deeply fixed lines down his face hadn’t been so obvious ten days ago. I waited, thinking he would never talk again, wondering whether I ought not to go out of the room. On the table was a fold-out stand of photographs, with a woman in the middle panel and a child on either side. She was dark-haired, with delicately lidded eyes and a sad smile, and a hand at her face as if to stop her long hair obscuring it. The children were ten or twelve years old, a boy and a girl on whom Bennett also gazed, though I don’t think he saw them as clearly as he wanted to.

‘I suppose now the gunners have arrived we’ll be taking off, Skipper?’

He reached for a pencil, spoke after a while, turning the leaves of a springbound notebook. ‘They’re my old crew right enough, but I get to thinking they’re here to make sure we don’t go north instead of east. They had a stopover in London, which may have put a different picture into their minds.’

‘Why should we want to go north instead of east?’

He gripped the notebook to prevent his hands trembling. ‘We might. Then again, we might not. After Kerguelen, no radio stations en route. Nothing but empty sea. At Freemantle the owners’ representatives are waiting. We hand over the cargo we picked up. That’s the picture. All arranged and agreed to, and the gunners are on board from take-off to see that we follow the plan and that none of it goes according to my wayward geographical proclivities. Our orders must coincide, Adcock.’

I lit a cigarette, wondering what the hell he meant. ‘Don’t you want the trip to go right?’ – speaking not because I wanted to, or even out of any particular interest in his puzzling talk, but because my senses told me that it was expected. I was never one to recognize the crucial moment when it was obscured by a morass of deception. I should have demanded that he cut the crap and tell me what the stunt was all about.

But he floated back unchallenged into the great Bennett silence, leaving me to mull on the fact that he had only wished for a double crew on the flight deck so that we would then outnumber the gunners. With a single crew, working every minute and fighting to keep awake, the gunners would have no difficulty in keeping us under observation. ‘Perhaps they were sent to protect us from something else,’ I suggested.

He wanted to find out whether I was wholly on his side. If so, then it was five against three, supposing we could count on Nash; but if not, he would be lumbered with the problem of having only four of us to four of them.

‘Both,’ he answered. ‘How far can you reach with the 1154 transmitter, Adcock?’

No distance could be guaranteed. Depended on your luck. One night I worked a Lancastrian from fifteen hundred miles away. His signals were faint but audible. I brought him right across the Dutch East Indies.

‘And if we get up to eighteen thousand feet?’

Flukes were possible, sometimes prevalent, mostly out of the question. I didn’t like giving figures. He craved them, however. ‘Let’s say, five hundred during the day, and twelve hundred at night. I’ll do what I can.’

He wanted to buy something, and demanded that I sell, so I did in order to give him ease of mind. I could have been right, after all. But there seemed something lunatic about the conversation: he’d been familiar with my transmitter for ten years and knew exactly what it could and could not do. He threw the pad and pencil on the table and rubbed his hands. ‘That’s all I need. I don’t want you to be God and promise me the earth. You’ll have the usual three frequencies, unless I tell you otherwise.’ I took out my notebook, though knowing them well. ‘Listen on 500 as much as practicable, except when I put you on 6500 during the day and 3805 as soon as it gets dark. But as far as the gunners are concerned, you’ll be on 500. They’re very particular about safety. Some bloody clot said that the Sparks should always be listening out on 500. But there’ll be no sending, Adcock. Keep your claws away from that tapper, unless and until I say so; but listen all the time and take down anything interesting. Swivel the knob every few minutes and let me know of anything else. Get what bearings you can with the loop aerial to help with the navigation. Leave the half-convergency business to Rose. He’s used to that.’

I was uneasy about not being able to send. Every operator likes a bit of tap-chat with passing ships or planes, or with shore stations.

‘I’ll tell you when it’s necessary. If you send, and somebody gets a bearing on us, it could put us in peril. You understand, Adcock?’

‘Why is that?’

‘Take my word for it. There may be some rum types roaming around the area we’re going to. You never can tell. So no sending. We want to spend our hard earned money on Pleasure Island, not Devil’s Island, don’t we?’

I agreed that we did.

‘You’re our ears, our intelligence section. So listen, and keep your hands off that key. With you bloody operators it’s like playing with yourself, but resist it. Everything you hear is important. Whatever little squeak comes into your ken, I want to know about it.’

The assignment was peculiar, yet such orders had more excitement than orthodox instructions. I was about to ask for how long they would apply, when he said: ‘I assume that I have your absolute trust, Adcock?’

The question might have been tainted with insult to a certified and experienced wireless officer, young though I might be in comparison to the rest of the crew. If I had known myself to be untrustworthy, would I have given him an answer? Yet who could be certain until a crisis proved it one way or the other? I felt the same query going through him. He seemed burdened by such anxiety that, though it was automatic that he have my loyalty, it was far from guaranteed that he had my confidence. Yet anxiety seemed his normal condition, and because I did not want it to increase, I shook his hand when he stood up. The flesh was like that of a lizard, where it had previously been warm and moist. I supposed he had been through the same procedure with the others.

Shaking hands is often a competition to see who can crush most fingers. I’ve never liked the practice. There are those who assume that afterwards they won’t see you again, and maim your fingers to give you something to remember them by. Others, who have already been caught out, slide their hand immediately away. Or they dread touching either man or woman, fearing strangers as much as they distrust themselves. There’s no sincerity in it.

Hand-shaking is a language whose messages are peculiar to the moment, and Bennett indicated by his that he wanted to rely on me. Yet how could he expect such loyalty when he would not say why it was needed? If I knew what was in his mind I might have been sincere in my agreement to do more than the duty I was paid for. The text of my returned handshake must have been understood, however. He tapped the photo-triptych of his family, maybe by accident, so that I wondered if he had indicated it to the others on their separate briefings. I nodded, my hand on the doorknob.

‘I’m going to need your loyalty above that of everyone else, Adcock. I hope you understand.’

There’s a mock-solemn, patronizing quality about those who continually speak your name when talking to you. I don’t like it. They look upon you as a child, and have an unjustified feeling of their own significance. Yet Bennett seemed less of the type. Whether his hands trembled from too much drink (the bottle was again half empty) or from sleeplessness, or from fear of something he would rather die than tell, I couldn’t say. It seemed an act of mercy rather than friendship to affirm, before opening the door: ‘I’ll do all I can.’

Such candour, while helpful to him, got me nowhere. My curiosity was at its highest, but if I wanted to satisfy it I would have to wait till such time as I, and maybe the rest of us, became a victim to whatever was intent on destroying him – because when, in an aircraft flying at eighteen thousand feet above the ocean, the captain discovers himself beset by enemies from within or without, then surely those foes – whoever and whatever they might be – become equally dedicated to the destruction of everyone else who has the misfortune to be on board with him. Bennett wanted to be the master of his own destiny, but I questioned the validity of this desire to involve me in any way.

A dream-serial played while I slept off the food and drink. A flying boat was hundreds of miles out, with but two of its four engines working. Instead of a normal aircraft interior there were the domestic furnishings of an ordinary house. There was no fuel left, and the flying boat came down on a rough sea and began to disintegrate. Waves spun and splashed with malevolence over the windscreen. When the perspex panels fell away I woke from the horrors.

Nash banged from next door: ‘You all right, Sparks?’

16

Rose sat in the smoking room, reading a copy of Flight Magazine, legs straight out as if ‘don’t disturb’ was printed on the soles of both shoes. The high leather armchair in the shade of the aspidistra hid most of his body, and he was so engrossed in whatever piece of technical exposé had taken his fancy that I could hardly believe he was alive. He seemed in a state of repose that would be impossible to disturb, as if blessed with a power of automatic detachment that had been with him since childhood; and because the devastation of the scar was turned away from me, I saw him as if before his accident. Just as a person who has lost an arm eventually finds more strength than he originally had in the two together, so perhaps the livid corrugation of bone and flesh had in some compensatory way beautified the side I looked at and made it more perfect than if the other part had never been injured. Yet the boyishness that would stay even if he lived to be a hundred was only marred by a painful sensitivity which made his head too big for his body.

I had decided to tackle him about the real nature of our trip in the hope that his replies would at least indicate the direction in which any further questions ought to point. As chief mate, he was not exactly matey; but if he told me to vanish or get dive-bombed I would leave him alone.

A navigator, like others of the aerial fraternity, was jealous of his guild-secrets even when they were obsolescent, or sufficiently simplified that they could be passed on without revelation. I felt the same about my own trade. Questioned by an outsider, I would tell nothing because, unless to save life, my time would be wasted. Those who asked from friendliness might learn that I sat at a table sending and receiving messages in morse code; but that was all.

The roles of aircrew sometimes overlapped, but the fundamental part of each skill could not be passed on. If such details were handed over it was only to give the illusion that we were capable of sharing secrets, which built up our comradeship for the day when, as crew members, we would care for each other and the plane. If Rose was party to any secret with Bennett as to the true purpose of our expedition, would he be able to unshackle these principles sufficiently to tell me something?

There was no saying, but private communication between one crew member and the next would be impossible once we were airborne. To hugger-mugger in hole or corner would stink of conspiracy. Cool and intelligible words must go via the intercom, and any others must be kept healthily suppressed. Working as an eighth part of the common voice, a good crew has no use for secrecy.

I had very much wanted to believe in the neat package of a single task for one and all, as I looked at the flying boat the previous evening, seeing it as a refuge that I had spent a lifetime looking for, floating on the placid water like a white mansion under the moon, four engines in their sturdy cowlings, wings stretching as if they might grow to span the whole town, and the steeply sloping hull which, if it weren’t for the wings, would be a galleon waiting for its pirate crew.

The flying boat showed only its registration sign, and I wondered what true colours it would be under when on the move, what flash should decorate its tailplane. Probably a constellation of blue stars on a white background, Ursa Major, or the buckle of Orion’s Belt, or the seven visible stars of the Pleiades. Each crew member could no doubt stamp his individual badge on the Aldebaran according to how he defined the pattern of his own life.

The pennant would have been harmless, even humorous, because trust bound us together when we played cards and drank in the bar or lounge of the hotel, analysing endlessly some bombing operation over Europe during the war. In the space of a few days we had time to observe all mannerisms, assess each other’s virtues, weigh up generosities and catch flickers of deviousness or diffidence with which we would have to live come what may. Our bodies and mortal souls depended on each man’s inner emblem, and there was no way of knowing what they portended because all were buried under the common denominator of crew-like characteristics. We were to earn our money, and afterwards flee to the eight points of the compass. As long as we didn’t talk about the purpose of the journey, we were content.

But there was little else that I wanted to discuss, and on wondering how I could open the matter with Rose I felt strongly that the journey had little interest for him. When he and the others had been told to bomb Hamburg or Frankfurt or Essen, they asked no questions. So it was now. At take-off they would get their fingers out and do their stuff. Compared to the war it was a piece of cake. In view of which, it did not matter that, once airborne, there would be no possibility of private conversation. Being a prisoner of my own small private life, I was a perfect specimen for the job I had stumbled into by my senseless whistling of morse code in a London pub.

I sat opposite Rose. ‘There’s something I want to ask.’

He didn’t look up. His arm squeaked along the leather from the pressure of turning the page. ‘What about?’

‘A simple question.’

He flipped another page, and cigarette ash fell onto the worn carpet. ‘One of the cheapest planes you can buy today is an Auster. I flew one once. A strong wind almost pushed me backwards.’

I fetched an ashtray from the table laden with old magazines. ‘What’s that star called at the top left-hand corner of the Square of Pegasus?’

‘Alpheratz. Why?’

‘The word came to me in a dream. I knew it was the name of a star, but couldn’t place it till I looked it up.’

He put the magazine on his knee. ‘Why Alpheratz?’

‘Because that’s what all eight of us are: Alpha Rats – stuck in the front line, and numbered for this stunt of Bennett’s that none of us knows anything about. What are we going to pick up at the Kerguelen Islands? I think you know.’

He hadn’t navigated for two years but, after giving up his tramp around the country, had a desk job with Little Island Air Lines, until bankruptcy was fended off by amalgamation – and his own redundancy. A navigator has to work every day, otherwise he might lose his way through sight-reduction tables and relinquish that sixth sense by which, on long flights over the sea, he looks at the waves and knows his drift almost by instinct. Bennett must have pondered the issue, but he was God in his flying boat, and all was right in Heaven, so who could tell what he thought?

‘There are nearly five thousand stars in the heavens,’ Rose said, ‘which are visible to the naked eye, so why choose Alpheratz?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘Alpheratz chose me – and the rest of us.’

‘Not a very bright star,’ he observed. ‘You’re not a particularly bright Sparks, either, if you ask me.’

‘Nash thought it bright enough. We laughed about it last night over a couple of bottles of Alphen Red. He said this trip was a matter of life and death eight times over, and that even if we did find the island, and I suppose we actually might, with a shit-hot navigator like you, the sea’s likely to be so jumped-up there’ll be no hope of landing without getting the whole rig smashed. And if we do land, we might never find whatever it is. And even if we do, who knows whether we’ll be able to refuel, especially if, in the time it’s taken to find what we’re looking for, the weather worsens as it’s likely to do in those latitudes. Because you know as well as I do, Rose, that forecasting is non-existent, as are navigational facilities, and the scarcity of radio stations is positively bloody horrifying. Now I don’t mind all this. It’s insane, I know, but I signed up for a taste of adventure so I’m prepared to have a go and do my bit at the wireless. But I would like to know what I’m risking my neck for.’

I tried to sound amiable, but he went nonchalantly back to his reading as if I were a rat that had eaten its way out of his Dalton computer with a bit of topographical map in its mouth. I stood so as to see the devastated side of his face, and made sure he knew it. If I had stayed immobile there would have been no bust up. Silence and stillness were good for both, the way things were going. But the contemptuous way he ignored me, and allowed his fingers to search blindly for the top right corner of the magazine before turning the page, enraged me. He was a better actor than a navigator, unless he really had forgotten my existence.

I snatched the magazine and threw it towards the door: ‘Listen, Scarface, I asked a question. Either answer, or give a fair reason why you can’t.’

The good part of his face turned white. I had gone too far, but because of his contempt he couldn’t say so. He stood, and picked up the magazine: ‘Last night I dreamed I was pissing blood, but it was sheer happiness compared to dealing with a bod like you. What we’re going to Kerguelen for is no concern of yours. We’re looking for harbours that future cruise ships will be able to anchor in with a fair degree of safety. That’s all I know, and all I want to know. What do you imagine we’re looking for, for Pete’s sake? If we hadn’t had to wait so long you wouldn’t suspect anything. Look up your callsigns, get familiar with the frequencies, or calculate a few skip distances – or whatever you do these days. I suppose this South African wine’s too potent for a head like yours. Can’t take the stuff myself. As for my scar, I don’t suppose I can object to you using it as an identifying mark, but be careful you don’t attach a moral stigma to it. That would be unjust, and injustice is something that might make me lose my temper.’

I regretted letting go of mine. He lifted the magazine, then lowered it: ‘You know how I got this scar? It was no accident. Somebody tried to kill me because he thought I’d betrayed him. I used to think more of the world than I do now.’

He held out his hand, and I was glad to accept that he knew nothing I didn’t know. Too cowardly to tackle the pilot, I had gone for the navigator, and discovered he was better than I thought.

‘I’m sorry, Rose.’

He was back behind his magazine.

But as I walked down the stairs I still wasn’t satisfied. I never was, and never would be. Only the final death-shave, that I wouldn’t wake up to know about, would cure me. Rose had brought up the concept of morality with regard to his disfigurement, and I wished he hadn’t because from then on the word gripped me and wouldn’t let go.

17

With a dozen of beer on the table, and two of Voortrekker’s Gin from which the corks were lost as soon as extracted, Nash opted for the Lancaster because of its range and bomb load. Except for the absence of a belly-gun, there wasn’t much to gripe about by way of armament. A. V. Roe did a good job when they turned up with the Lanc, a kite that generally got through, and often came back. You had to say that for it.

Wilcox, in spite of his coughing, shouted him to a standstill. Too many had exploded in mid-air, or piled up on the runway after seven or eight poor buggers had slogged six hundred miles to get back. Inside the plane you sweated blood crawling over the bomb bays from one part to another. He filled his glass, foaming the table. His cough was no trouble while he drank a pint.

Discussing the best plane of the war was like talking about the merits of Milltown United as against those of Weathersfield Wednesday, but I placed my bet on the Spitfire. Without the Spit there’d have been no Lancaster. We would have been beaten into the ground. To see a Spit doing aerobatics was something never forgotten. The sight was like recalling a good dream.

‘Good dreams are few and far between,’ Appleyard said.

‘Especially wet ones,’ said Bull.

‘The sky was its background,’ I went on. ‘Man and machine were wedded to each other, the highest achievement of technique and art! What more could you want?’

‘Bloody hellfire!’ Rose exclaimed.

‘Schoolboy crap.’ Nash went on to say that I should get some in. He was in Baghdad before I was in my Dad’s bag. All the old laughter clattered out.

‘Butcher Harris should be living at this hour,’ Rose said.

Bennett looked from around the corner of the L-shaped room: ‘He is, and not far from here, either.’

‘Let’s drink to him, then.’ Nash held up his mug of gin: ‘Here’s to the best bloody leader anybody ever had.’ There were grumbles from his gunners, who were too drunk to say anything sensible. Wilcox came out in favour of the Sunderland, which beat the U-boats. ‘Britain would have starved to death without it.’

Bull called that he should tell that to the navy.

‘Apart from which’ – Wilcox’s coughing sounded as if his chest was full of inmates trying to get out of a jail that had caught fire – ‘the Sunderland was the most beautiful flying boat that ever was, and a treat to work on, as everybody knows. There was space, and two of each for the crew.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Nash.

‘The lovely old bag was big enough to live in.’ Wilcox said he would make a house out of one, fly to another place when he got browned-off, which would be pretty often, you can bet.

Appleyard staggered out to be sick, and by the time he came back the laughs had turned to jeers at Wilcox’s idea. The black waiter brought a dozen more bottles. Armatage denied the supremacy of the Lancaster, and gave his vote to the Spitfire. There were tears on his cheeks – or was it because his spilt beer had ricocheted from the table? The good old Spitfire saved the best country in the world from the iron heel of Germany. It bloody had – say what you like. If they hadn’t kicked the living shit out of the Messerschmitts at the Battle of Britain, where would we have been today, mate, eh?

Maybe the Spitfire wasn’t the most renowned plane of the war, I said, and that if given time to consider the matter at leisure – as I had while staring at the beer label and sending its words out in morse – I would decide that the Sunderland qualified for that honour. This led us to compare the performance data of the Sunderland with the vital statistics of the Lancaster, and from that point, all things being equal, we went on to correlate the relative sizes of the three planes and, knowing that the Spitfire was the smallest, and the Sunderland the biggest, embarked on a passionate discussion as to how many Spitfires could be parked on the wings of a Sunderland.

Out came pencils and bits of paper. The number increased as more gin was swilled and beer put back. In our cooked brains even the exact wingspan of the Sunderland wasn’t known, never mind the distance from leading edge to aileron. Yet it did not matter, because the Sunderland seemed to grow into the size of the earth itself, and what had peeled off from the original discussion as a technical dispute now became metaphysical. If you folded the wings of Spitfires and packed them close, they would make a platform for other folded Spitfires to be parked on top, and so on, and so on, thus building a tower of aircraft until you reached heaven or the structure capsized and sank without trace.

The sombre picture brought on silence, until in the extended right-turning part of the L-shaped room where Bennett and Rose were having their own pre-flight drink or two, I heard the Skipper say: ‘How do we go, Navigator?’

‘In a straight line, Captain’ – walking between two carpets.

‘There’s no such thing. It’s either a fixed Mercator course, or the shortest distance on a Lambert Conformal. A rhumb line isn’t the shortest distance. A Great Circle is, but can’t be a straight course, now can it, Mr Rose?’

‘Don’t mix me up, Skipper.’

Bennett opened his box of imperfect Partagas cigars and slowly covered a specimen with white cigarette paper. ‘A straight line is the longest distance. A curved line means less miles, but who steers a curved line? And who goes the shortest way? The earth is a funny place when you want to get from point to point. Does your life from cradle to coffin go on a rhumb line or a great circle? Both have advantages. A rhumb line uses more fuel, but a great circle gets you there sooner. A rhumb line is less trouble: you set course and arrive at a certain time, providing there’s no wind, which there always is. On the other hand, a great circle needs more planning, as well as work to make sure you stick to it. It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, I’m afraid, because on either system you’re at the mercy of malign tides and tricky winds, and the homely pull of the earth.’

‘I’ll make your course straight enough to do a great circle,’ Rose slurred, ‘which is the best of both systems. Or the best of this one, and that’s a fact – if facts are needed.’

‘They are,’ Bennett said. ‘Believe you me.’

‘I’ll work out the convergency angle, and calculate the different distances.’

‘You’ve been to the right school. The only bogey will be the weather.’ Leaning over the table to unroll his chart, Bennett splashed whisky across the southern half of Madagascar. ‘Whether it’s summertime or not in that land of glaciers and fjords, the weather is the thing. And the compass needle swings fifty degrees out of true.’

Rose turned his face away. ‘The left hand as usual won’t know what the right hand is doing.’

‘Does it ever? It’s immaterial.’ Bennett poured whisky for his navigator, and more for himself. ‘Only the planispherical stars will give anything like true direction, if they can be seen. And only the configurated scratchmarks of land the actual position, providing it can be found.’

‘If only the earth wasn’t round,’ said Rose. ‘How simple life would be! I’d never think about the end, if there was a danger of falling off the edge.’

‘You’re alive as long as you don’t fear dying,’ Bennett told him. ‘Life is full when you aren’t aware of spending your strength freely and yet are doing so. You get the best out of life when you act knowingly, and still don’t know. Being close to revelation is never close enough, though all of us were near it when candle flames burned bright over a city in the process of devastation. In the total trips more than six hundred tons of bombs were unloaded, making nearly a hundred tons for each crew member. The Rubble Churners. The Fire Raisers. The Second Fronters. God’s appointed Wrath.’

‘There is no guilt where I come from,’ said Rose. ‘The Knights of the Apocalypse rode in squadrons of Lancasters to excoriate evildoers. I’ve seen too many perfect knights go down to feel pity for those on the ground.’

‘A thousand Lincolns were being prepared,’ Bennett said, ‘to create a desert from a former empire and call it quits.’

‘What the world’s come to’s no business of mine,’ said Rose. ‘The world made me what I am.’

‘I rather think it was your parents,’ said Bennett. ‘When you begin to scratch, you itch. I’m drunk, Rose, and don’t like it. The life force under the skin crawls and irritates. In the gap between moments you mindlessly scratch, and unwanted words are born. You resent the disturbance that has no name. Where it comes from you neither know nor care, but because you stare and don’t shout doesn’t mean its hooks aren’t there. All in all, I’d like to stick a label on that door that opens onto the maelstrom. I hope the lock’s secure.’

‘So do I,’ said Rose.

Wilcox built up the empties till his tower was a foot from the ceiling. His hand shook on lifting a full glass to drink, but when he set a bottle one stage higher his grip was steady and eye accurate, a liverish tongue pressed into acquiescence by his teeth to stop the coughs breaking.

The structure collapsed, and we each caught an armful without any bottle cracking, though it seemed strange that our laughter didn’t shatter one or two. A clergyman and his wife, a red-faced farmer, and an old English colonel had already evacuated themselves from such aircrew behaviour. Nash remarked that it felt like the pre-ops mood in the worst days at the end of 1943, when kites were dropping out of the sky like coffins. You didn’t even have the heart to go into the bog for a last wank before take-off, superstitious that it might be the last. This over-loud recollection drove the final spectator into the lobby.

Beyond the point of no return, the waiter came with a bucket to empty the ashtrays. He put six more bottles on the table. Bull said it was his turn to pay, and fell down unconscious, clutching the money. Nash thought we had better make our final choices, and I told him I now plonked for the Lancaster, but how final is final?

‘More final than you think.’ Wilcox looked as if he ought to know. ‘The die is cast. I’ll take the Sunny Sunderland.’

Which left Nash with the Spitfire. ‘I’m the tallest, so get the smallest. Always the bloody same.’

We sat on the stairs singing: ‘One step forward, two steps back’, a bitter kind of boozy refrain, which set us grabbing ankles to stop further progress up or down. But we got to our doors and said goodnight. There’s a purpose in hilarity. We were in it together, bespoke tragedians stitching our lives like figures dangling in a paperchain. But in that split second before oblivion I wondered what it was that we were in.

18

Because the oil supply to the port inner engine was giving trouble, it was not until two mornings later that we sat on either side of the motorboat to go on board for departure. Even so, we wouldn’t be airborne for twenty-four hours, till a favourable weather front moved in to see us off.

I felt as pasty as the others looked, a mush-breakfast of coffee and buns like mortar in my stomach. Nash was so stricken by a fit of belching that at one splintering emission Appleyard commented that if he carried on like that he’d come apart at the seams.

Choppy water was like the shifting tiles of a grey roof. I had never been seasick, but felt there was no point in worrying about what might not come. I suppose we all thought the same. ‘If it gets rough, hard-tack will be on the cards,’ said Wilcox.

Bennett wore an overcoat, an airforce type cap and leather gloves. ‘You’ll organize the mess and serve proper meals, even if you’ve as many sealegs to get used to as a centipede.’ Noticing that Bull shivered in the wind, he told him that without a jacket he was improperly dressed, a phrase we found quaint, under the circumstances. ‘You didn’t think you’d need one? On this trip you’re not only paid to do as I tell you, but to think for yourself as well, when necessary. Anyone who can’t work that kind of balancing trick won’t be much good to himself or others.’

Bull did not need a sermon to point out his mistake. He winced at the stricture, and spat into the water. A red band beyond the harbour showed the sun, up but not apparent. An area of cloud fused into pink, then merged with a seam of muddy grey. We turned an arm of the inner mole, and were covered with spray as the boat winged from side to side. The horizon was cut from view by the white port-holed flank of the flying boat rising above the lap of water, and Wilcox interrupted his early morning cough to say that you couldn’t go on board without feeling a lift at the bottom of the stomach. ‘Every time, it’s as if you’ve never been on before.’

Appleyard likened the experience to a woman he hadn’t seen for a while. ‘I might not be expecting to go to bed with her, but I’m happy to be close, all the same.’

Sun broke up the rolls of cloud, and Bull smiled at its warmth, out of the hump into which the skipper had put him. ‘Dropped a clanger, didn’t you?’ Nash said in a low voice.

‘I often do,’ Bull answered. ‘Law and Admin’s a bit strong on this trip, though, ain’t it?’

The boat went under the chill of the starboard wing. ‘It’s going to be a hard one,’ Nash said, ‘that’s why.’

A gull swung by the float and looked in at the hatchway, as if knowing that our twenty-five tonner, on coming to life, would lift to heights it could never attain. Or was it scouting for choice leftovers? ‘He’s more like the bloody adjutant than the old skipper,’ Bull grumbled. ‘I only came for a good time.’

‘You’ll end up with a good dose, the way you’ve been going on.’

When he borrowed money from each of us we couldn’t understand how he had spent up so quickly, till he said he’d been and found a nice black woman to pass the time with. We accused him of shooting a line, because you couldn’t do such a thing in this country. But Nash, who knew better, called in disgust: ‘He’d even shag an oak tree felled by lightning.’

Our pinnace nosed under the wing towards the tail, high out of the water. We were going a circle, as if Bennett wanted the man at the tiller to give us a last view until disembarking at Kerguelen. The bird caught the wind and came round again, button-eyes staring side-on at floats, hull, stern, wings and engines as if reconnoitring every plate and rivet on the mindless assumption that sooner or later an explanation would appear as to what connection the Aldebaran had to earth and sky, thus releasing the gull to fly away with curiosity satisfied. When the bird alighted on the cowling of the inner port engine, Bennett said: ‘Get it, Nash. But don’t sink the bloody ship!’

As we swung for the door Nash held a pistol at arm’s length for a steady aim. The crack disturbed a feather of the gull’s head, causing it to lift, roll along the wing then, apparently, recover and fly away. ‘Just as well you missed.’

‘Scared it, at least.’

‘Can’t have it shitting all over the paintwork,’ Armatage said. ‘Shit from a white gull peels it off. Why is the shit of a white gull black?’

The boat bounced against the rubber tyres and Wilcox, with a final landbound fit of coughing, leapt in through the hatch. ‘Because they eat black puddings,’ Bull said.

‘They don’t have ’em in these parts,’ said Appleyard.

‘They do,’ Bull grinned, ‘and they’re lovely.’

Bennett counted us in, the pinnace held firm by Appleyard’s knots. Conscious that the holiday was at an end, I went over. We were on watch from now on. Duty was the word, and work our pastime. He called for all hands to get in the kit and last remaining stores. We were sweating. Armatage threw each piece into my arms, and I passed it to Bull. We were allowed one holdall or case, which Nash promised would go over the side if we developed a weight problem. Wilcox smiled when everything was stowed. During the work he hadn’t coughed. Bennett climbed the ladder to the flight deck as if going up a monkey-climber in the back garden. There was a smell of petrol and stale food, of diesel oil and seaweed, which gave the kite a maritime personality – dead though it yet was.

Fore and aft, from floor to ceiling, the cavern of the boat’s body caused me to wonder why I had waited so long to make its acquaintance. No aeroplane I had been in was so spacious. The cubic footage daunted me as far as getting to know each cranny, yet the size promised comfort and security. The unmistakable smell of a service aircraft, together with the rise and fall of the boat, brought a whiff of sickness as I went up the aluminium ladder. To the right, behind the cockpit, Rose lifted the lid of his navigator’s table to discover a loose screw in one of the hinges, and asked Wilcox, at his knobs and levers panel, to lend a screwdriver.

In my section was the graduated receiver scale and homely façade of the robust Marconi TR-1154/55. I drew my fingers over the multi-coloured transmitter clickstops and pressed the encased bakelite morse key. There was space to stand up and swing my arms, and with little movement get a view of Appleyard going back to shore on the pinnace to fetch last minute necessities from Shottermill on the quay. The sun already warmed the flying boat, and a gentle rocking under foot made the craft less formidable.

The sickness passed. The outside was a picture to be looked at from this convenient vehicle making its way over the water surface of the earth. ‘Plenty of room to work in, eh?’ Nash spoke as if he had been responsible for the design. ‘What do you think of the old cloud-lorry?’

‘People must have felt good producing a plane like this.’ I mentioned loyalty and co-operation, not to say patriotism, and even a kind of love necessary to get such a huge aerodynamic construction assembled from scratch. Almost like building a cathedral. The workers must have felt pride when they saw it newly finished.

He was laughing. ‘Pride? Loyalty? Most of them wanted to earn as much as they could in the shortest possible time while doing as little work as possible as slowly as they could get away with – though I suppose it wasn’t that slow if they got a bonus on top of their pay-packets.’

A flying boat is built by people who guide each strut, float, stringer, tailplane, aileron and leading edge into place, I said. The anatomical diagram is adhered to as a blueprint for every component from a tiny screw to the whole engine. After launching, the flying boat retains the touch of human hands. Even if few felt that they were creating a work of beauty, it justified what I was trying to say – which Nash admitted might be true enough.

Salt water cradled the hull, reflecting an underwing float beyond each outer engine. Extended wings mirrored a shimmering charmed image below, both entities joined by the umbilical surface where one ended and the other began. Though anything utilitarian need not be beautiful, beauty must have its use, and of all man-made artefacts I grew in the next few days to feel that the flying boat was one of his most graceful endeavours, a spiritual extension with a practical purpose.

The sea is its resting place, and when the hull pushes against water during take-off, driven by the engines’ powerful thrust, or first glances the surface of the sea when coming down, designed to alight at a landing speed of less than a hundred miles an hour, it will gracefully meet its natural plain, but in an agitated sea the thin hull can be broken, and take the flying boat to disaster.

Where we were going, no marked area or man-designed breakwater would protect us. A cape might give shelter from prevailing winds and undue current, but guarantees of a safe anchorage were few. Our chart delineated the coastline but told little of the interior except that mountains and glaciers almost filled it. A flying boat was the only aircraft which could visit that tortuous terrain. To put a landplane down, Bennett explained, would be like trying to do so in upper Norway; but for a flying boat to alight in a fjord with two or three sharp bends was, for the sort of flying he knew about, a piece of cake.

I sat at my radio desk and took the List of Radio Signals out of my briefcase. There were no fixed stations where we were going, nothing but a few ships perhaps on the great circle route between South Africa and Australia. I stacked the Wireless Operator’s Handbook, a copy of the Weather Message Decode Book, the standard Wireless Equipment on Aircraft, and a folded tracing of the Admiralty Chart.

Rose’s larger collection of printed matter – Sight Reduction Tables, Sight Log Book, Star Almanac, Star Atlas, and the Antarctic Pilot which contained a description of the Kerguelen Islands – found a place in his desk, on top of which he spread the Mercator chart which he had patiently constructed at the Driftwood Hotel. Then came his Dalton computer, a bubble sextant, a marine sextant, a stop watch, a chronometer, and an astro compass for finding true north no matter what the magnetic variation, providing the sun was visible. The reliance placed on the heavenly bodies to guide us to our destination was almost total, and I could only hope that cloud cover would not fox us for the whole trip.

Wilcox in his office, facing the panel of knobs and levers, was simulating a pre-flight check – we would not take off till the morning – while Nash and his gunners were getting in the drogues and upping anchor before closing the hatch for our trip around the roadstead. Bennett started the port inner, and I fixed on my headset, hearing him over the intercom: ‘Taxi-ing. Stand by.’

‘OK this side,’ Nash said.

‘Try your wireless, Sparks, but disconnect the antennae.’

I listened out on 500 kc/s and, hearing nothing, tapped Ks for ten seconds. The morse thumped loudly through the phones, its rhythm tingling both eardrums while my feet kept time. The gear functioned, all knobs set, dials and needles back in action. I reconnected the aerial and listened to ships calling the local coast station.

The boat was turning, four engines going. Once we were in the air and hundreds of miles out over the ocean, who would we contact in an emergency? The wireless was, after engines and airframe, our lifeline. On medium wave, where there was reasonable hope that a ship would hear, the range by morse might be something like three hundred miles, assuming whoever was listening had a good receiver, and that the ether was free from interference. Short wave was a different matter. Provided the correct wavelength was chosen, my patter could be audible for up to several thousand miles, but might not be picked up if the operator wasn’t specifically tuned in. No station, either near or distant, had been advised to listen for my signals, and without prearranged schedules worked on short wave anything was possible and little was feasible.

But I would listen, and beam my direction-finding loop on any ship’s message in case it contained his latitude and longitude, which would help our navigation should sun or stars not shine. Such a bearing might be useful in assessing our most probable position, but few ships would be in the area, and radio functioned best when close to shipping routes and coastal stations. I would also intercept met. information from any source concerning the South Indian Ocean. Even if for areas hundreds of miles away, they could be evaluated, providing we deduced the direction of the weather, though by heading towards a climatically unpredictable part of the world the results would be dubious.

As the flying boat turned, I left my radio to look out of a porthole. The water was calm. Then I saw that the gull Nash had shot at must have fallen wounded, and then died, for it floated like a scrap of grey cloth under the wingtip. I regretted that the bird had been so wantonly used for target practice.

19

Bennett’s humour was always based on the scent of danger. The smile was youthful, even boyish, and his grey eyes lightened. His face, before he spoke, indicated a pleasant person, and the only time he seemed halfway human was when he was at one with his crew. But so far there was little of that informal wartime ‘Hi-di-hi!’ answered by a ‘Ho-di-ho!’ instead of a salute. Perhaps the crew hadn’t been long enough reunited, nor yet faced danger. An easygoing relationship had to be earned.

He stood by the flight deck ladder and addressed us as if we were a bomber crew about to set off for Germany. The wall maps were lacking, but these our memories supplied. ‘Some of you know more than others about this operation. A few may have put two and two together already – to make sixes and sevens. Well, you can forget all that, and listen to the pukka gen.

‘We take off in the morning, and that’s official. There’ll be no last night ashore. I don’t want to lose you, especially after what you’re going to hear. Our reason for going to the Kerguelen Islands is to recover a ton of gold coins deposited by a German submarine at the end of the war. They thought it a good hiding place, until such time as they could recover it. A supply ship or raider must have refuelled the sub which, having concealed its load on the island, never got back to base, but was sunk by a flying boat. The captain of the submarine was the only survivor, and I took the map and notes concerning the gold after we picked him up from the sea. He died, and went overboard. You all know this except Adcock, though none of you realized what I took from the dying captain.

‘Some of you have been worried about whether we can ship enough fuel to reach the islands. We can, so forget it. And as for getting back, a steamer called the Difda, of some six hundred tons, will supply us with enough fuel to fly out. You may ask: why doesn’t the same steamer recover the gold instead of us? Speed, is the answer. And secrecy. We can be away quickly, and take the goods to market before any other interested party will even know it’s gone. In a week’s time your valuable services should no longer be required – and we are carrying supplies to last a fortnight.

‘The Kerguelen Islands lie on the Antarctic Convergence, where the northward moving cold water sinks below the warmer, which means uncertainty of weather. But we’re going at the best time of the year, and there are sheltered places where we can get down without trouble. The nearest fjord to the gold is sufficiently sheltered to hide the Aldebaran like a fly in a jar of blackcurrant jam. The snowline lies at about 1500 feet. In January there’s fog on one or two days, and the air temperature is between forty and fifty – bloody cold at night, but we have plenty of equipment for that.’

He rolled white paper around one of his fragile cigars more, I thought, to help put on the expression of boredom he by no means felt, and also in order to discourage questions. ‘Getting there is the most difficult part, but Rose is familiar with the navigational problems, and Adcock will do his stuff with thermionic valves and bits of wire when it comes to making contact with the refuelling ship. The islands are uninhabited, though the French have talked of setting up a scientific station – a fair way from where we’ll be dropping anchor. We’ve got to get the gold out now because it may be more difficult later.’

He went into his stateroom, and there was a lowered atmosphere among us. What had started as a job had become an adventure with too many imponderables. We were going to a place of which there were no adequate maps, and no radio aids, nor even, as far as we knew, any other human beings. The only ships would be whaling vessels, said Nash, which were as rare in any case as spots on a film star’s face. If we alighted in that desolation of glaciers and could not get off again, food supplies would be of prime importance. I felt wary, and daunted. ‘I’m getting cold feet,’ said Armatage, as we moved back to the galley.

‘You’ll be lucky if that’s all you get,’ Appleyard said in his quiet manner.

‘A touch of the old L of M F?’ Nash said. ‘It’ll pass. It always did. And if it doesn’t, what’s death? Just another blackout after a party.’ The primus stoves were lit, and Nash rolled up his sleeves to produce mugs of soup, followed by bacon, omelettes and potatoes that Appleyard had peeled. There was plenty of bread, and during the meal a pot of water was boiled for tea. Armatage scraped his leftovers into a bucket: ‘I wonder what we’ve let ourselves in for?’

‘Stop binding,’ said Nash. ‘You’re getting on people’s nerves.’

I felt that one or two of us would like to back out, though we succeeded in hiding our misgivings. Slip through the hatch and swim. Drown if you must, rather than go on. Don’t, I told myself. We are committed, cocooned in lassitude. I fought paralysis by disputing its effect, point by point as if I were a lawyer rather than a radio operator. But the pall would not go away. I chatted with Nash, however, in as cheerful a mood as I was ever in.

20

When going to see his mother, Bennett would nurse his cigar for twenty-five miles of the road. She was turning senile, and called him by his father’s name. He stepped on that one: a monolithic skipper of the skies who believes in the future can’t afford such memories when boning up for a long stint over the ocean. A two-and-a-half-thousand mile track from all shipping routes could, by an error of one degree on either side, miss the island entirely, in spite of its size, and cause the flying boat to crash through lack of fuel, or loom around the Antarctic for eternity like a ghostly ship of old.

‘Unless we get good astro fixes,’ he told Nash, who saw no reason not to pass on such details which gratuitously came his way, ‘we’re heading for a watery grave. A cold one. If we can’t get angles on the stars, we’ll have to fly low to calculate drift readings for dead reckoning. We’ll get a little help from the radio. But nothing is as certain as the stars.’

He sweated, at the risk, shaking more at such slender chances than he ever had flying through Trojan walls of flak towards Essen or Berlin. They’d ship enough fuel, but too much circling to find the bay and they might run out. Impossible to row those last few miles. He erased the figures and worked them through again. When did not success depend on navigation? Rose was the best, a shining asset to this shower of a crew. If God looks kindly down, we’ll be rich. If he doesn’t, it’s Job’s boils for the lot of us, and cold water for our coffin.

He felt the shock of the optimist who realizes that he has so far survived only by luck. But he did not then become pessimistic. The efficacy of calculations may not always reassure, but they held back mortal damage. Faith in mechanical reliability kept hope in an airtight capsule, like the vacuum of a barometer which enables the needle to show height above the earth when air acts on it. Years of operational flying shifted pessimism sufficiently for him to watch the smoke from his cigar roll over his coloured map of the southern hemisphere.

A Mercator sheet of the South West Approaches would have been overprinted with the purple and green and blue mesh of the Loran grid, which made pinpointing a piece of cake, so that the spot in the north Atlantic where the sub had gone down was fixed for ever to within a mile or two. We would be safer if we had at least Consol to help, Nash my boy, but only the busy parts of the world are covered. Down here you have to pray to the heavenly bodies.

We saw them struggling in the oil, Nash said, as we were about to set course for home: ‘No hope, poor bastards.’ If their gunners had been better we’d have been the ones to drink oily water. ‘I feel like raking ’em, Skipper. They do it to our chaps.’ Between thought and word was no space to Nash, but the route from word to deed followed zig-zags.

Bennett knew his chief gunner’s malady: ‘Have a piss, and forget it.’ The turret full to starboard, Nash machined it back so that he could let Appleyard in. A steep bank to port rolled him over as Bennett, circling for another look, remembered his brother who died in India when his stringbag crashed. Too unorthodox for words: ‘We zap the gollies up the Khyber Pass, and when you press the gunbutton your old orange-box goes backwards!’ So he carried out the Prunish lark of picking up prisoners when you weren’t even supposed to go down for your own pals. The skipper’s intentions, said Nash, became your own.

They were on the skids, like landing in a channel of rocks, halfway into the wind, bumping before able to turn. One survivor was the captain, wounded and full of oil. The copilot flew while Bennett looked them over, and Nash stood guard. The captain’s green face was only alive at the eyes. ‘We should make him eat that Iron Cross, and see if he can shit it out.’

‘I don’t think he’s in much of a state to do either.’ Bennett pulled at a string around the man’s neck. He cut off the celluloid packet and put it into his jacket, while Nash took a revolver and a bundle of wet cigars from the second survivor.

A pattern emerges after a number of considered decisions. Having carried out an action which is divorced from all sensible rules, a split appeared in Bennett’s life, and he knew that it began while reading the U-boat commander’s papers standing by the toilet of the flying boat. They gave details for latitude and longitude, bearings and distances. There were sketches of bays and hills. The positions were precise to a fraction of a second, and must have been worked out by theodolite. He had heard of the islands, a complication of bays, rocky peninsulas, fjords and glaciers.

The U-boat captain may have been on the active service side of middle age, but he died an old man. Without benefit of the Book, Nash delivered him and his companion to the deep. Back to the Waterland, said Rose. And Bennett’s log did not record either the taking or the demise of their prisoners.

An inner voice insisted that he get as many of his old crew as possible to come on the expedition. The muster roll, more complete than expected, lacked only a wireless operator, and even he had been easy to find: ‘I heard this chap whistling morse in a pub, and knew I’d got my man,’ he said to Nash.

The voice talked against the power of rain, louder when his lips didn’t move and the words turned inwards, and he heard the water no more. He was only really alone when he sensed his inner voice clearly. Even footsteps on the creaking floor as he walked from the chart-covered table to the door and back again did not break the sentences that came against him like files of soldiers storming a building. He had called the nucleus of his crew together because a scratch-gang of all-comers taken from any quarter would not have been reliable. He could not have created a team in the time available. On the other hand, the chances of success being about even, it would have been kinder to let any but members of his old crew take part. If without them there was no hope of success, to have them was halfway to murder. He was using them for his own ends, though by employing them he was putting more money in their way than they could earn anywhere in the same length of time. Those who invested the money would also benefit, and though Bennett knew he was not worthy of his crew’s devotion, such people deserved it even less. He felt tainted by the issue.

Black market money floating about after the war was ready for investment in such projects. He had his proof, and they believed him. He went around clubs and hotels where food was served that he had not seen in a decade. Banquets with good wine and big cigars. He broached his scheme, promised evidence, and they listened. His eloquence turned into sharp business talk. Though he accepted their food and wine he wanted to wipe them from the face of the earth. His hesitation was their safety. Those who would have felt no such uncertainty were dead. Either that, or they would have been glad to see that the good life goes on, and take part in it.

When Harker-Rowe gave him the nod, he knew that his worries were about to begin. The gesture marked another stage in life. There were periods when he couldn’t sleep. During the war sleep had been available the moment he returned from a raid. He almost fell into oblivion during tedious debriefings. Four hours of rest performed a miracle. Dreams, like the cities he had flown to, were wiped out and ploughed with salt. The day before was scorched from memory. Tomorrow never came. It was always today. Sleep was so close to the surface that he could stand up in his subconscious and not drown. But below that, the space was without limit. He called it sleep, which seemed, on waking, to be something you went into and came out of at the flick of a switch.

When there was a memory which sleep could not erase, the ease of sleep abandoned you. No way of winning it back. The innocent person slept like a baby – so it was said. Others did so who were unable to admit that they were anything but innocent. Lacking the moral sophistication to understand that they were not innocents made them more depraved than those who knew very well why they were guilty. The crime that had initiated the expedition was such that it could not be condoned. The action had come out of a centre whose evil he had never suspected. Erupting flames had been impossible to beat back, short of burning both hands to ash.

His hair had changed colour, but such iron-grey, when he visited business offices to arrange finance for his venture, had shown him as someone in whom they could have confidence. What he told them went across as honest and feasible. Once the gold was secure in the hold of the flying boat they knew it would not disappear into the bank vaults of Panama or Zurich. His half share would make him a rich man. Trust in him was firm, but even if it were not, his wife and children would guarantee a safe return. If the flying boat’s engines failed on the way back, and Bennett’s crew found the grave they dreaded, would Harker-Rowe and his consortium think he had followed some preconceived dead-reckoning plan and made a break with the known world? If he did not allow for the equally complete vanishing of his wife and children, might they not see his disappearance as merely an effective way of getting the final divorce from family life that every married man dreams about? It would be no more cruel than the way in which he had first come by his knowledge of the treasure, or than the steps he had taken to ensure that only he should know of it.

A conscience was not the worst problem. The crime might not have been as final and efficient as he had assumed. A supply ship must have refuelled the submarine close to the island before the trip back to Germany could be attempted. Though not knowing exactly what the submarine had carried, perhaps the ship’s captain took the tale to the known world, so that the secret of the golden hoard was in someone’s brain and yet to be acted on.

‘What reasons do you have,’ Harker-Rowe asked, ‘for thinking the stuffs still there?’

Two men with bowler hats, rolled umbrellas, pink faces and impeccable accents were also at the meeting, go-betweens whose sense of humour was limited to the fact that they only laughed with Harker-Rowe. Because neither smoked, Bennett did not trust them. He said there had been one submarine. Not only had the captain of the U-boat and the other survivor separately informed him, but it was also written into the documents he produced. There could be no doubt. How do you know the gold was ever put there? Even Bennett laughed.

But he hated their guts. ‘How do you know,’ he smiled, ‘that I’m not a confidence trickster of the most blue-eyed cunning? Not playing a hoax for money, you understand, because money would mean nothing to the kind of super con-trick which I’m trying to swing, which is to get my hands on the controls of a flying boat and hear the voices of my old crew over the intercom for the last time, because the doctor said I had cancer of the liver and only six months to live, and that before I die I want to go on the longest trip, from Cape Town to Singapore via the Kerguelen Islands and Freemantle, all at your expense, one last adventure before the disease gets such a grip that I can do nothing except drag myself into bed and die. I want to hear those four engines and see the endless sea from the flight deck at eighteen thousand feet. That’s the reason I cooked up this cock-and-bull yarn, so that you would charitably – although unknowingly – supply the finance.’

He almost wished it were true. He would then have felt better when they stopped laughing. Humour had to be on their terms or not at all. Their pink skins gave an ugly tinge to such regular yet chinless features. ‘Perhaps you’ll now be good enough to sit down and tell me what you’ve heard,’ Bennett said from his armchair. ‘I want all the information, otherwise the expedition will be called off.’

‘I don’t sit,’ Harker-Rowe smiled. ‘Do too much of it in my life.’ Neither did his bowler-hatted guards. One stood at the door and the other concealed himself by the window, observing the street so as not to be seen – as if, Bennett thought, he had been an instructor in street-fighting during the war.

‘If you don’t,’ Bennett said, ‘I’ll pull out. The crew will understand.’

The pattern was too late to dismember. Harker-Rowe leaned by the shelf and, looking at himself in the mirror, ceased to smile. ‘We’ve done our investigations. A minesweeper was bought from the Argentine navy three weeks ago, but you’ve a head start because it’ll take at least a month to get seaworthy. Their first stop is Madagascar. We know about them, but they don’t know about us. You can’t help but get there first, with your flying boat.’

‘Are you certain they aren’t aware of us?’

‘They knew there was a submarine, but assume it was destroyed with no survivors. They may wonder. I credit them with that. But they’re quite happy to believe the best. Like everyone else. Though not us.’

‘Madagascar’s a good jumping-off place,’ Bennett said. ‘So why didn’t we think of that?’

‘We did,’ Harker-Rowe said. ‘But your story about an exploration company looks good, and it’ll be easier for us to make arrangements for you in South Africa. You do your work, and we’ll do ours.’

They showed an iron grip in protecting their investment, watching too closely for him to feel secure. Once the gold was on board, the danger would be mortal. Only in flying over the sea would he and his crew be safe. He would land where they would not be waiting for him. If he could get safely to the huge Pacific, the flying boat could land anywhere.

‘One more thing,’ Harker-Rowe said.

He reminded Bennett of a group captain who had come from the Air Ministry to go over the details of a spectacular raid, which would have been written up in the official history if it hadn’t gone wrong.

‘For a crew you’ll need a navigator, an engineer, a wireless operator and your old gunner, Nash. That’s five. But take the extra gunners. If there’s trouble, you’ll be glad of them.’

‘It’s flying that counts in this job. Nothing else.’

‘We think you may want more safeguards,’ the man by the window said.

Bennett hadn’t come to be lectured by such a pinhead. ‘I know what I need,’ he said sharply. ‘I’m the captain of this flying boat.’

‘But I’m chartering, with a half share in the gold,’ Harker-Rowe said. ‘If it’ll make you any happier, choose the gunners from your old crew. Appleyard, Bull and Armatage were in that list you showed.’

There was no way out. Bennett assumed they had already been approached, and suborned. They would watch our flight crew – and the gold once it was on board. He would take them. A certain amount of digging and carrying would be necessary when they reached the island.

‘We knew you’d see reason,’ Harker-Rowe said.

But did it make sense? He sweated too much to sleep, but losing such weight made him look fitter and more efficient. Having surrounded himself with so many uncertainties in order to find a way out of a labyrinth, he had reached the stage of wisdom which, such as it was, indicated that they only ceased to matter when you stopped thinking and started to act.

21

We talked in the galley about being able to swim, and Rose with his scar in shadow said he’d never had the ability. At thirty, he was too old to learn.

‘Too lazy to want to,’ Wilcox put in.

Nash had done too much messing about in boats to think of swimming. ‘I don’t even like to walk more than I’ve got to. Walking makes my feet sore, and swimming would make my arms ache.’

‘I tried it once,’ Wilcox said, ‘and started to sink before I could find out whether my arms ached or not. My father yanked me from a premature death by drowning. He was too scared to teach me again.’

Bull grinned at the memory of a few strokes with an inner-tube around his chest, but the valve opened and he saved his life by a panic-stricken dog-paddle to the bar of the swimming bath, a near-miss he had no wish to repeat. In spite of the dim light I saw his face turn pale. Appleyard confessed that his ambition was to be able to swim. He loved seeing people do the breast stroke, especially champions at the cinema.

‘Like Esther Williams?’ said Bull. ‘I’d like to swim up her.’

‘It looks so effortless.’ Because Appleyard knew it wasn’t, he got excited at the memory: ‘To make your way through the water must give you a real sensation.’ He was sure it did. Anyone who said otherwise should creep back into his hole and die like a liar. He had in fact been able to swim. ‘You won’t believe it.’ He sounded as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘Perhaps it was only a few yards, so that with practice I’d get better at distance. And I would have. Once you swim you can go on for ever, providing the sea isn’t rough or cold.’

‘Belt up,’ said Nash. ‘You give me the horrors.’

He ignored the slur that he lacked taste. ‘One day when I was sixteen I got cramp, and that put a stop to it. I’d heard about cramp, but never had it, and I wondered what the hell this wrenching pain was in my left leg.’

‘It would have to be the left, wouldn’t it?’ Bull sneered.

‘I was tied up in a knot. From being happy and lively I was in agony. Luckily a chap knew what was happening, and got me out. So I thought: swimming’s not for me. If you turn to stone when you’re walking, all you have to do is stop. You can’t sink under the pavement. But if you get cramp swimming, you drown.’

‘Fucked by the fickle finger of fate,’ said Bull.

‘Alliteration will do for you yet,’ said Rose.

‘Well, you can sink under the pavement if you get cramp while walking,’ Wilcox said. ‘If some idiot digs a hole and doesn’t rail it off, you’ve had it.’

Nash looked at me. ‘Can you swim, Sparks?’

There was an understandable need for us to be united by a common lack, but I did not want to erode our fellow feeling by saying that I could not swim when I could. Like coaxing a half-buried signal from monsoon atmospherics, I sensed that the common purpose among us was still frail. Each was here in the hope that the expedition would mend a broken dream, make it stronger in fact than it had originally been. To expect something better than before was, however, unrealistic. To pursue a dream is to go backwards. To go forward brings more reward than recapturing old dreams. But whatever state they were in, we were going forward nonetheless.

The life and death realization came too late. Having signed the contract, there was no backing out. But I wasn’t staying on from a sense of honour. Nothing like that. Honour is only a cover for what can’t be rationalized. Even if I hadn’t signed a contract I would have gone if I had really wanted to. We no longer had any minds to make up, could only go to wherever we must, not because our souls or our honour said so, but because we had got into this situation with the single mindedness of a retreat into the Darwinian slime when life on land looked too bleak for comfort.

I told them that I had been able to swim for as long as I could remember. Rose said: ‘I wouldn’t bank on it saving you.’

‘Them as dies will be the lucky ones!’ Nash gloated.

To claim the skill of swimming in such a company of water-haters would be unfriendly. Perhaps the virtue of a flying boat crew consisted in choosing to scorn such life-saving abilities. A foolhardy courage would always be available when the tumultuous sea threatened to break up the boat. The blue of the glassy millpond would be no kinder. Salt liquid would swallow sooner or later. Only four Pegasus engines horsing through the sky held us from the eternal element of water. In any case, we could all swim.

When Rose parted the stem and bowl of his pipe, juice came out like a stream of cold tea. ‘Swim or not, it’s the machines that we rely on, plus the skipper’s handling, my navigation, and your tip-tapping on the morse key.’

They laughed, satisfied that though I could swim I was no threat. All we had to do was keep our feet dry. I joined the hilarity. Apart from the millions of square miles that would churn beneath us, and five thousand horse power in the engines, together with the aerodynamic wings and seaworthy hull, there was a force without a name which had a say in our safety. Perhaps Nash had similar thoughts: ‘As long as the Gremlins leave us alone. Can’t have them little buggers icing us up, or unsticking our ailerons, or unscrewing bits and pieces from the engines.’

‘On one of our anti-sub patrols,’ Wilcox said, ‘I saw a Gremlin as large as life run onto the navigator’s table, pick up his Dalton computer – Rose was asleep at the time – get out onto the wing, and drop it in the drink. Then he did the same with his sextant – bit of a struggle, that. I’ll never forget the grin on its wicked little face. Stood by the starboard outer, doing a dance on his flippers before he let go. You should have seen Rose when he woke up and found his toys gone.’

The close night air was permeated with tobacco smoke and smells from the galley. ‘I remember,’ said Rose. ‘You lot hid them. What a bunch of jokers!’

When more tea was made there was silence rather than talk. Armatage asked me to take a cup to the skipper. The boat rocked as I went up the steps. Bennett was looking at the flight engineer’s panel. The shadowy light showed haggard features as he turned: ‘There’s no end to the homework.’

He had changed and shaved since the briefing. A dog-tag identity disc hung out from his shirt and clicked against the panel when he moved. That bit of brown bakelite with his name and service number looked ominous. Mine had gone missing – or I had handed it in. I saw a corpse in water, bloated by the power of the sun. The vision went. ‘What if other people are trying to get at this gold, Skipper?’

The grey, granite-like structure of Bennett’s cheeks and forehead tilted into surprise. Aircrew informality did not go as far as questioning operational orders, but I was curious about the danger that might be in store. It would have been unhelpful to ask at the briefing. No one could dispute that he was our captain. Each man to his work, to which all loyalty goes, but to be involved in a shady enterprise, and have even the geographical factors against you, did not make a good basis for employment. As individuals, we needed either the profit or the adventure – the more lucrative in the first case, and the more dangerous in the second, the better. Nor would a combination of both come amiss. Those in for profit would not baulk at excitement, and whoever wanted adventure might well accept money to cushion their return to the humdrum. But it seemed to me that danger could only be exhilarating when right was on your side.

He put his tea down. ‘As far as anybody can tell, no one else knows about the hoard.’

I was determined to say no more.

Do you want the job, or don’t you?

I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything.

It’s not too late to have you taken ashore.

I had spoken once too often.

We’ll manage without you. Plenty of others to put in your place.

‘Maybe it’s already gone,’ I said.

‘Leave the thinking to me, Adcock. If there was a chance that the gold had gone do you think we’d go and look for the bloody stuff? Just sit at your box of tricks and tap out “Best Bent Wire” to the birds on your little toy morse key.’

I should have acted, but it was too late. One can’t walk from a flying boat moored before take-off. The only way out was at the end of the trip, wherever and whenever that would be.

In the galley Nash and Appleyard were checking stores. Bull clutched a pack of playing cards to his chest and slept. The flying boat felt leaden, an ordinary squalid habitation that could not possibly fly; but Bennett and Rose were talking fuel figures with Wilcox, and our piratical galleon of the air was being primed for its task.

Armatage finished cleaning, and was reorganizing the containers of food. ‘Skipper was right when he said we had plenty. Neither a ship nor a pub should run out of grub, as I’ve heard say. And that means a flying boat. Let me tell you, Sparks, there’s nothing we ain’t got on board.’

Instead of asking what he meant, I stacked each piece of washing-up for putting away, noting the different marks and decorative monograms of railway companies, hotels, officers’ messes and restaurants – all crockery in prime condition. The same with the cutlery. ‘It’s a wonder there was any left when the railways were nationalized.’

‘Listen, Tosh, the government’s a big firm.’ He stowed things in the locker. ‘And we know how to make ourselves comfortable. Nothing but the best, that’s what I say.’ He wiped the table and fastened it down, then laid towels across the stoves. ‘If we’re shipwrecked let’s hope we get all this onto dry land. We might have to survive six months, never mind six days.’

Over the two bunks was a row of paperbacks and copies of London Opinion, and hardcovered library books with the coats of arms of various cities half torn away. I put one called The Knapsack into my pocket, in case sleep was hard to come by.

At my receiver I pressed the switch and stared at the glass through which the magic eye filled to the brim with green. How many times had that hypnotic light given me pleasure to watch? Operators were saying goodnight. A Lockheed Lodestar was calling Port Elizabeth. One half of the world in my left ear, and the other in my right, were joined by the brain; and this reading of rhythmical symbols oscillating into words at writing speed never ceased to strike me as magical.

I listened to messages from ship to shore, or from aircraft to earth, none of which concerned us. The transmitter of one ship, asking for a harbour pilot, sounded as if it had been recovered from the sea after accidentally falling overboard, its note farting across fifty kilocycles of frequency. Stations were going off the air as if a slow-moving tidal wave was sweeping the slate clean for take-off in the morning.