The Challenging Heights (18 page)

As he stuck up his hand and waved, Father O’Buhilly’s face turned towards him. ‘Ready?’

‘Yes. For God’s sake, Father, get on with it!’

‘Right, me boy. Switch off. Petrol on. Suck in.’

Dicken repeated the phrases after him and Father O’Buhilly turned the propeller as he’d been told. Then he wiped his hands on his trousers, scraped his boots to make sure of his foothold and leaned forward with his hands resting on the blade.

‘Contact,’ he said.

The magneto switches clicked.

‘Contact! Heave, Father!’

As Father O’Buhilly pulled out and down, the engine coughed to life, seemed in some doubt, then caught and began to roar. The sound was the most exciting thing Dicken had ever heard. Inside the cockpit, his head down, he watched the revolution indicator and the pressure gauge. As he looked up he saw the priest climbing on to the wing.

‘Chocks, Father! For God’s sake, the chocks!’

‘Sorry, me boy! I forgot!’

Scrambling down, the priest reached under the wing for the chocks. In the half-light, Dicken was quite certain he’d be hit by the propeller but he remembered to back away instead of moving forward and a second later he was scrambling on to the fuselage. As the machine began to swing into the wind, a screech came from the cockpit. ‘The sandbags! Where are the sandbags, boy?’

‘There aren’t any! This one came with a passenger.’

By this time, they could hear men shouting and shots being fired. The first figures emerged from the darkness as Dicken opened the throttle. Slowly, maddeningly slowly, the DH9 began to move forward, rolling across the uneven turf. As it began to pick up speed a man ran out and tried to grab the wing but he was knocked flat on his back as the aeroplane passed over him. A rifle exploded and Dicken heard the whine of the bullet. As he lifted the tail, a few more figures appeared dead ahead, waving their arms, and there were flashes as rifles were fired. Praying none of them would run into the whirling propeller, Dicken lifted the tail and glanced at the air speed indicator, but it was too dark to see it and he had to make a guess. Yanking at the control column, he felt the nose rise and all the figures in front fell away beneath and behind, then they were in the air and, holding the machine close to the ground until he had built up sufficient speed, he hauled on the stick and swept into the air in a steep climbing turn.

Joyce Mahaffy welcomed Dicken back with open arms.

‘I thought I’d lost you for ever,’ she said. ‘And I was going to Wei Hai Wei to mope. How about coming with me and making it a holiday? We can celebrate. Can you get away?’

It was easy enough to get leave after being a prisoner and the island was wooded and beautiful with no traffic beyond rickshaws. The hotel was a long wooden bungalow divided into what looked like horse boxes set on a green rise over the harbour, where lights shone from warships anchored on the swaying water. Pomegranates glowed among their spiky leaves and white acacias dripped petals like snowflakes in the fading evening light.

It was an idyllic place to be but Dicken was curiously unsettled. He knew his affair with Joyce Mahaffy was going to produce nothing and he wasn’t sorry when the time came to return to Shanghai. As he walked into Orr’s office, Orr rose and tossed down a file.

‘You’re for England,’ he announced at once. ‘Staff College. The way to the top. A few years from now I’ll be saluting you instead of t’other way round. And that’s how it should be, because you’re young and I’m not.’

Joyce bade him a tearful goodbye, though he suspected the tears were laid on for his special benefit and didn’t have a great deal of meaning. She promised she’d follow him home but he doubted if she ever would, and he said a maudlin goodbye to Father O’Buhilly in his stark little room over a bottle of Irish whiskey.

‘I don’t suppose we shall ever see each other again,’ Dicken said.

‘Ach, it is most unlikely that we will not,’ the priest retorted. ‘Two people who met and defeated General Lee, as we did, me boy, are bound to cross each other’s paths again before long.’

It was strange to be back in England where the girls had taken to applying a lot of make-up and wearing their skirts higher above their knees. In addition the motor car had been discovered and horse traffic was beginning to show signs of disappearing.

Halfway through the course Dicken received an un-expected letter from Zoë’s sister Annys, Diplock’s wife, who, it seemed, had followed him home on the next ship. She was concerned about Zoë’s business interests. The single small business she’d received under her father’s will was now a chain of garages operating along the south coast and was making money hand over fist. The recession that had hit industrial England had barely touched the south and according to Annys, the manager Zoë had appointed was suspected of fiddling the books.

He turned out to be an ex-captain of the RASC, called George Peasegood, smooth-tongued, sleek haired, and given to wearing yellow spats, and as he talked to Dicken it was obvious he was being very careful what he had to say. It didn’t take Dicken long to decide he was indeed helping himself to the profits and he wrote his views at length to be forwarded to Zoë when he managed to find her.

Towards the end of the staff course it was announced that it was routine for students to spend a few weeks with the air force of a foreign country. Hatto, on the same course, suggested they plump for America.

‘Most people go for Europe,’ he said. ‘Because it’s nearer and cheaper, but the States shows more imagination and initiative. Nobody’s ever asked for it before.’

Their request was turned down, but the Under-Secretary of State for Air happened to appear the following day and in a speech commented that he couldn’t understand why no one ever asked to go to America. Since a wink was as good as a nod, they promptly reapplied, quoting him, and Hatto persuaded his father in the House of Lords to put on a little pressure in the right places, and the Air Ministry changed its mind. A few weeks later they found themselves on the deck of a transatlantic liner staring at the incredible skyline of Manhattan, and the manoeuvres of a small red and white biplane which had met the ship far out of reach of land and had swooped and dived just above the mast and done delirious loops and half-rolls in the bright sky to the surprised delight of the passengers. Its appearance seemed to imply that in America it had long since been decided that there was a future in the air.

It wasn’t long since the Atlantic had been flown direct from New York to Paris and everybody was now trying to get in on the act. As long ago as 1919, even before Alcock and Brown had flown the Atlantic, a French-born New York hotelier called Orteig had offered a prize of 25,000 dollars for the first man to achieve the feat, but at that time there were neither the aeroplanes nor the engines fit for ocean flying and experienced airmen had preferred to wait. When Orteig had renewed his offer in 1925, however, aeroplanes had changed. The lines were sleeker, their engines more reliable, and finally a young American airmail pilot called Lindbergh had managed it.

The achievement had not been made without loss of life, however, and six men had died, though it had caused no slackening of enthusiasm and since Lindbergh’s feat two other aeroplanes had also made it and flying had burst out in the States like an exotic new flower.

The tall buildings of New York shouldered the stars, while girders, stark against the sky, indicated where new ones were still going up. Somehow the place made Dicken feel he had never been so much alive. The streets were crammed with motor cars – Chevrolets, Franklins, Fords and a dozen other makes he’d never heard of, sedans, limousines, roadsters, coupés, all long and cumbersome and swallowing petrol, all fitted with vast headlights like enormous basins with glowing insides, all thundering and rattling and backfiring so that the area between the towering brick and concrete skyscrapers was hazy with smoke and breath-catching with the smell of burnt fuel. In England, motoring had still barely caught the public imagination and there were still as many horse-drawn carts as petrol-driven lorries, but here in America the craze had swept across the country like a forest fire, filling the streets, changing the whole face of the land, and, with the hurrying pedestrians who crowded the sidewalks, giving an impression of immense wealth, power and urgency. As an American on the ship crossing the Atlantic had said, there was a lot wrong with his country – girls with bobbed hair, painted faces and skirts halfway up their thighs, prohibition with its attendant gangsters, bootleggers and hijackers, and corrupt politicians with a finger in a hundred and one pies anxious to make a fast buck – but there was one thing that wasn’t wrong and that was business. America was booming.

The tabloids brought the same breathless excitement to the news that was obvious in every pulsing movement of the streets, screaming at the top of their voices the latest vice exposure, the latest disgraced name, the latest disaster – and disasters, exposures and scandals all seemed bigger in America than in Europe. FILM STAR’S LOVE NEST RAIDED. RACER CRASHES INTO CROWD. BOOTLEGGER SHOT DEAD IN BAR. It was a land of tremendous vitality whose leisure seemed as urgent as its business, yet from the middle of all the violence that was implicit in the foot-deep headlines, middle-class honesty and labour shone like a beacon from the cramped Vermont features of President Coolidge. From shops, offices and hotels, his photograph directed its disdainful stare on the people he represented, his expression implying a total disagreement with all their habits, their enthusiasms and their excitements, everything they enjoyed, but judging by the undiminished vitality everywhere, apparently unable to do a thing to curb a single one of them.

Dicken and Hatto were received with enthusiasm by the American airmen who immediately made up a party to show them the town. Starting at a restaurant, they produced flasks even as they sat down and calmly poured large tots of bootleg whisky into the glasses on the table. Nobody turned a hair because it was clear everybody else was doing the same.

‘You have to learn to live with prohibition,’ one of the Americans pointed out.

Later they were taken to a teetotal bar which appeared to be almost empty but, after a quiet word with the barman, they were directed to a blank door where a conspiratorial knock opened it into a smoky room packed with respectable-looking men of all ages rapidly knocking back whisky and gin.

‘If you want a bottle of scotch,’ one of the Americans said, ‘ask the bellhop. He knows where to get it. You can also buy kits in the drug stores to distil gin in the bath but I shouldn’t try it. You can use it as dope on your airplane.’

They were not needed over the weekend so they decided to try to find Walt Foote, who had served with them in France and Italy. Foote was from Boston and the telephone operator looked up a variety of Footes before finally coming up with a Walter C Foote, in Chestnut Street, off Bunker Hill.

‘Best part of town,’ the operator said. ‘You want I should call him?’

Dicken’s voice was greeted with a yell of delight.

‘Jesus, Mae! It’s Dick Quinney and Willie Hatto! They’re here in America!’

The following day a roadster as long as an ocean liner drew up outside the hotel and Foote, Dicken and Hatto started doing a gloat dance on the steps to the amazement of Foote’s wife and two children.

‘Meet the Feete,’ Foote grinned, waving at them. ‘How’s Parasol Percy? Anybody strangled him yet?’ His face clouded. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget that guy,’ he said slowly. ‘I swear he killed my brother with his goddam orders. It’s a long time ago now but he still sticks in my craw.’

He was working in the law department of one of the big American firms doing business in China and was interested to hear that Dicken had just come from there.

‘What’s it like? They’re talking of sending me to Hong Kong. Me and Mae and the whole family. It’d sure make a change from here. What are you doing in the States, anyway?’

‘Staff course,’ Dicken pointed out. ‘It seemed a good opportunity to come to America and dig out my wife. She’s over here.’

‘Bring her round and meet the folks.’

Dicken frowned. ‘I have to find her first,’ he said.

‘America’s a goddam big country.’ Foote shrugged. ‘But we can try. I’ve got a little Waco I fly so I’ll ask around the airfield. Somebody’s bound to know something.’

Their duties with the United States Air Force started the following day when they took a train to the army airfield from where they set out in two Curtiss two-seaters for Washington. Dicken’s pilot commented that he’d heard of his exploits during the war and, clearly intending to show him that the United States could produce pilots too, took, off in a steep climbing turn that was so near a stall it took Dicken’s breath away. Flying along Long Island, he dived boldly over the Bronx and into the centre of Manhattan, skimming along Central Park at a height well below the towering hotels and apartment blocks on either side, then zoomed up to roar over more high blocks of offices to look down on the grid pattern of the city, before descending over the Battery and flying at fifty feet above the waters of Upper Bay towards the Statue of Liberty, circling it so closely it was possible to see the faces of sightseers on the observation platform in the hollow head staring out through the open eyes. Holding his breath, Dicken wondered what would have happened to an RAF officer who had done such a thing over London.

In Washington, they were received by the Chief of the Air Staff who offered transport anywhere they wished to go and the following day they flew to an airfield where an experimental station had been set up with an incredible thing called a wind tunnel, which enabled the engineers to watch the behaviour of air as it passed over the wings of aircraft in flight. From there they flew on to the Naval Air Station at Hampton Roads, then over the Shenandoah Valley to Dayton. Dicken’s pilot was more than pleased to allow him to handle the controls.

They were given night flights over Dayton in a Curtiss piloted by an Army Air Corps lieutenant called Doolittle, who held one of the low-numbers in the licences which American pilots now needed to pilot a plane. Short in stature but with the build of an athlete and a ready smile, Doolittle already had a reputation as a daredevil and had been the first man to perform an outside loop. He was an expert instrument flier, however, and, despite his smile, was a serious aeronautical scientist, contemptuous of the old-fashioned seat-of-the-pants fliers who relied on their senses to tell them the altitudes of their machines. He had won the Schneider Trophy races in 1925 and no air race meeting in the States was complete without him.