Marazan (26 page)

I turned and faced her. ‘You mustn’t think about those things,’ I said evenly. ‘That was in the war—nearly ten years ago. But this is peace-time, and those things don’t count for anything now. Or they oughtn’t to. You mustn’t let them.’

‘It may have been years ago,’ she said. ‘But they haven’t forgotten about them at the Yard.’

‘It’s their business to remember things,’ I said.

She came very close to me. It was bright sunlight on the down. I remember noticing a rabbit that came out from behind a patch of furze about fifty yards away and looked at us.

‘Philip,’ she said quietly, ‘you mustn’t talk like that. You know Sir David Carter thinks a frightful lot of you.’

I took her by the shoulders. ‘I don’t care a damn about Sir David,’ I said. ‘But you—what do you think of me?’

She looked up at me gravely. ‘Philip dear,’ she said, ‘I think that you’re the best and truest man I’ve ever met.’

I
WAS
pretty busy in the next few days that remained before the 16th. They sent out a chap from the Yard to watch things in Italy, but by the time he got out there the steamer had already left—we presumed for England. I spent most of my time running backwards and forwards between the Yard and the aerodrome.

We had a little trouble with Morris at first, who refused point-blank to charter us a machine for the job. Civil aviation, he said, was a sober and a serious business, and stunts of the sort that we proposed would only serve to hinder progress by frightening away the man in the street, who very naturally regarded flying as the special province of warriors, criminals, and the like.

I made him see reason at last. Then he wanted to make a little money out of us, arguing that the machine was to be utilised against the King’s enemies and so the insurance policy was void. We argued him off this, and finally won his grudging consent. He stipulated:

I remember this amused Sir David. We could have got a machine from Croydon without all this fuss, but I wanted to have my own mechanic on the job. And I
knew perfectly well that if Morris once took it on he’d do his utmost to make a success of it.

I chose one of our light touring machines. She had a turn of speed of about a hundred and twenty miles an hour, and she handled like a fighting scout. She had a cabin to seat four; I decided to fill up a part of the cabin space with extra fuel tanks, and in this way I provided sufficient fuel for seven hours in the air. For a long time I hesitated over the question of taking a passenger as an observer, and finally decided against it. The view from the cabin was very much restricted, and communication with him wouldn’t have been easy. The extra weight would have taken a little off the performance of the machine. It meant letting someone else into the secret, and we didn’t want to do that till the last moment, when, of course, the signallers would have to be instructed in their part of the business.

I had the machine fitted with the standard wireless telephone set. I knew all about that and had used it regularly when I was flying from Croydon on the cross-Channel service. The fitting up of the machine in this way raised very little comment in the works. Morris gave out that I was taking the machine abroad on a journalistic stunt, to rush back the photographs and cinema films of the wedding of an archduke. We often had those jobs to do.

So the days passed in preparing the machine. If what I had heard in Florence was correct, the cargo was to be landed in the Scillies on the night of Saturday-Sunday. On the Thursday afternoon I went to the Yard for a final conference. They had kept me rather in the dark till then, but now they produced all their plans and arrangements and showed me everything.

Norman’s part of the business put the wind up me properly—I wouldn’t have taken on a job like that for
quids. He was to be the observer at Marazan. He had had a telephone line run unostentatiously from St. Mary’s to White Island, the rocky and uninhabited island to the north of Marazan Sound. He proposed to take up his position there under cover of darkness on the previous night, and to lie out there for the whole of Saturday to avoid the possibility of being seen on the way to his observation post.

Under the cover of darkness a destroyer and a sloop were to close the islands from the direction of the south-east. During the early part of the night these were to work round and lie off to the north of the islands, showing no lights. Norman, in telephonic communication with Hugh Town and so with the mainland, would watch events in the Sound. Immediately after the departure of the amphibian he was to send up a rocket. On that the sloop and the destroyer were to open up their searchlights and arrest every vessel in the vicinity.

It seemed to me a pretty little plan, and quite likely to go through all right. I must say I didn’t care much for Norman’s job. It struck me that he’d stand precious little chance if the Dagoes happened to find out that he was there.

My part of the business was not so difficult; for one thing, I had plenty of help. My job was to stand by with the machine at a point not very far from Taunton. I had chosen a large pasture there that the machine could operate from, and in one corner of it the Sappers had set up a field wireless station. This was in telephonic communication with half a dozen observation stations up the north and south coasts of Devon and Cornwall. I should wait on the ground till we had some news of the amphibian travelling up the coast; then I should get into the air and trust to luck to be able to pick her
up in the dim light of the dawn, keeping in touch with the Sappers by wireless telephony.

At Fowey and at Padstow the Anti-Aircraft lads were setting up sound-ranging stations.

I had only one modification to suggest to these arrangements, but that was one that saved our bacon later. I suggested that a line of posts should be strung out along the Exeter-Barnstaple road that runs straight across Devon from north to south. The Sappers laid a field cable along the whole length of this road on the Saturday morning, and dropped a man every three miles with a telephone that he could tap into the wire. All through they did their part of the business extraordinarily well.

I flew down to Taunton on the Saturday afternoon, taking my mechanic with me. The field that we had picked to fly from was a couple of miles to the west of the town, not very far from the village of Grant Haddon. It was a fine, sunny afternoon. We got down there at about six o’clock after an uneventful flight. I found the field without difficulty, circled round once for a look-see, and put her down gently on the grass.

There was a bell tent in one corner of the field with one or two soldiers beside it, watching the machine. I taxied over to the tent, swung the machine round into the wind, and stopped the engine. As I was slowly unfastening my helmet one of the men came up to the machine.

‘Captain Stenning?’ he said.

I heaved myself up out of the cockpit and dropped down on to the grass beside him. ‘Right you are,’ I said. ‘That’s me.’

I followed him into the tent. He had a vast amount of electrical gear there that he said was a wireless station; I took his word for it. He showed me the land
telephone line that connected him up with all the other stations, and then he showed me the petrol that had been provided for filling up my machine. I left the mechanic to deal with this, and went with an orderly to meet the officer in charge.

I dined alone that night, in a little hotel that I found in the village. It was half full of summer residents, a couple of elderly maiden ladies, an old man who looked as if he’d been missing his Kruschens, and a honeymoon couple. I had nothing to do that evening till ten o’clock or so, and was too restless to spend it in the tent gossiping with the subaltern in charge. I wandered off to the village and found this little place, and ordered a dinner that brought the proprietor hurrying to me in respect.

It was a warm summer evening. I lingered for a long time over my dinner, grateful for the quiet of the moment. I knew that I had a pretty tough night before me; I think that even then I had a dim idea that when the cold dawn came up over the fields I should be fighting for my life. Certainly I made the most of that dinner. They served me well. They had put me at a small table by an open window that looked over a croquet lawn to a little wood; I sat there musing between the courses, my chin upon my hands, staring out of the window, thinking about my engagement, thinking about my golf handicap, thinking what a perfectly corking country England was.

I shall always remember that evening that I spent alone in that little pub, the night before I met Mattani. I had a straightforward job ahead of me, a job that I knew I could do well. I had no worries. I remember that I was most frightfully happy, in a quiet sort of way.

It came to an end, of course. I had my coffee out on the mossy lawn, and then it was time for me to go. I paid my shot in the dusk of the little hall, and strode
out of the hotel. I passed the window of the drawing-room as I went by outside; the lights were on and the window open; I paused for a minute in the darkness and looked in. There they all were. The two maiden ladies were sitting together in a corner, one of them knitting, the other writing a letter on her knee. The old gentleman was reading an old book, his spectacles insecurely mounted on the extreme end of his nose. The honeymoon couple were sitting very close together on a settee, reading the same book. It was like a bit of Jane Austen.

I laughed, and swung away to my own life, the life that I knew, and as I went I thought of that same old line of Kipling:

I laughed again, and swung down the drive towards my work. I was still smiling over this when I arrived at the field and saw the machine looming darkly behind the bell tent.

I had a curious experience then. I found the officer in charge talking into the telephone; he was a subaltern, and rather a good sort. He turned as I entered the tent and nodded to me.

‘Half a minute,’ he said into the telephone. ‘Here is Captain Stenning.’

He was talking to Norman in his look-out station on White Island. I took the instrument and spoke to Norman, and told him the detail of the arrangements I had made. There was very little to discuss. I remember it made a deep impression on me to be talking to Norman as he lay stretched in a crevice of the rocks overlooking Marazan Sound. It made me feel that things were
beginning to happen. Norman had little to say. It appeared that he had been very bored all day, and had attempted to pass the time by a telephonic game of draughts with the coastguard at St. Mary’s, sketching the position of the pieces on the back of an envelope. He remarked that he had suffered much from gulls and guano.

After that I went and sat with the subaltern at the mouth of the tent, gossiping in a desultory manner. The night seemed interminable. Every half-hour or so we rang up Norman, always with the same result; there was nothing yet in sight. Always after that we rang up the round of the patrols to make sure that everyone was awake. There were over twenty of those calls; we left them to the corporal, so that by the time he had finished with them it was time for us to speak to Norman again.

At about two in the morning one of the patrols a mile or so south of Barnstaple rang up and said he heard an aeroplane.

When the subaltern heard this he gave a terse, monosyllabic comment that expressed my opinion of the observer very well. He took the telephone from the corporal and was about to speak to the man to tell him not to imagine things, but I caught him by the arm.

‘Steady a moment,’ I said. ‘That’ll be the seaplane going down.’

It hadn’t struck me before—so far as I know, it hadn’t occurred to anyone—that we should hear the machine on its way to the Scillies. It’s the sort of detail that one is apt to forget. But there it was; the man was quite sure it was an aeroplane. He thought from the sound that it was a mile or two to the north of him, and travelling westwards. We rang up Norman to let him know about this, and then we rang up the rest of the patrols to tell them to keep an eye open.

It was really quite interesting. The man at Hartland seems to have missed it, and the next we heard was from the sound-ranging station on the headland above Padstow. They put the machine about a mile out to sea; they waited for five minutes and gave us a second observation, showing by the comparison of the bearings that the machine was travelling down the coast. They gave it as their opinion that the engine was a Rolls Eagle or Falcon, probably an Eagle.

That was the last we heard of her. We never got a report from Land’s End; we rang up half an hour later, but nothing had been heard there. We came to the conclusion that the machine had left the coast for the Scillies somewhere between Land’s End and Padstow.

Then we sat and waited to hear from Norman. I went to the door of the tent and had a look at the night. It was pretty clear by that time that I should have a job of work to do before many hours were out. It was a fine night with a bright moon, a little obscured by cloud. I remember thinking how quiet it was. I strolled over to the machine and mooned about it for a little, drumming with my fingers on the taut fabric of the lower plane. The lamplight in the tent streamed from the open flap and threw a broad belt of colour on the grass; over the tent the aerial loomed mysteriously against a deep blue sky.

I ran over in my mind the various civilian aircraft that I knew were fitted with a single Rolls engine. The information about the engine narrowed the field considerably, but I was still quite unable to identify the machine. I knew of seven machines fitted with one or other of those engines that might conceivably be used for the job, but none of them was a seaplane or amphibian.

Then Norman rang through. They called me from the tent; I went back and spoke to him on the telephone
in his lonely crevice on White Island. He spoke as quietly as if he were in the room with me. I remember wondering at his nerve.