The Lonely Sea and the Sky (25 page)

  The first wing was not a complete success. One panel, especially, was so baggy that I tried to take a tuck in the slack of it, doping another piece of fabric over the scar. The wing had a gaunt look, like a half-starved mongrel with its ribs showing. Something had gone wrong.

  A wireless message from Sydney solved the puzzle; the dope­resisting paint had been omitted. The fabric had stuck to every rib, instead of drawing tight over the whole wing like a drum skin. It was a relief to know that the mistake was not more serious, and as the fabric could not be taken off once it had been doped, we went ahead and finished it, making the best job we could. What arguments we had about doping that wing! Everybody helped – Frank, whose idea was to slap it on good and hearty, with the biggest brush he could find; Charlie Retmock who made me think of 'Gert' Jan Ridd in
Lorna
Doone
, and who painted steadily and ponderously, as if the wing were a barn door; young Stan, the postmaster and Minnie's brother, who dashed it on with furious abandon and energy; young Tom, the island buck, who used small strokes with a flourish and who did not exceed the speed limit, even when no island damsel was framed in the doorway (it was queer how often one happened to pop in just when Tom was there). They had different views on how to dope, but they were all agreed on one point, that I was a poor hand at it.

  'Here!' cried Frank, pointing to a rib I had taped the day before, 'you can't do that sort of work here, you know!'

  'No, I say, Chicko,' Roley added, 'you can't go to Sydney and have them think that that is the sort of work we do at Lord Howe Island.'

  'We wouldn't mind,' said Frank, 'if they knew that it was your work; but of course, after one look at you, they are bound to realise we have done all the important work on the plane.'

  Frank had offered to do all the doping for me. He didn't want any pay, he said, but would like my old altimeter. I told him that it had never worked when I needed it, even before its bathe in the sea; but that seemed to make him keener to have it; perhaps he thought it would be a suitable alarm clock for him.

  The doping was not the short job we had expected. We seldom had two hours in the morning or afternoon warm enough for it, and as we had to give each coat several hours to dry, we were lucky if we could give a wing one coat in a day. One morning a retired Australian architect called Giles visited our 'factory'. He was about seventy, tall and handsome with a short white beard. 'I should like to know why a young man like you wants to grow a beard,' he said.

  I said, 'Growing a beard is like undertaking a flight. First you have the idea which you dare not reveal to a soul. You feel that there will be wide open spaces you cannot cover. If it fails, have you the courage to face the condescending pity which people have for failures? If it succeeds, have you the endurance to be pleasant to everyone who asks why you did it?' 'Well, anyway,' grunted Mr Giles, 'I don't agree with half the funny things people say about it.'

  The
Makambo
was due to call again a few days later on her way to Sydney, so I thought that I had better put the motor together before she arrived. I went down to Kirby's to ask about the cylinder heads. 'Oh,' he said, 'the valves must first be thoroughly ground and the cylinders thoroughly cleaned. When I do a thing I like to do it properly.'

  'Don't you think I ought to put the engine together again before the boat returns?' I said. 'It's not much good cleaning the cylinder heads until they shine only to discover after the
Makambo
has left that a new one is required. How about just a little grinding of the valves? After all they were perfect when I left Norfolk Island.'

  He washed his hands of a job unless it was done properly, so I set to work grinding them myself at his bench. It was a job I disliked intensely.

  Putting the engine together again was simple enough in one way. All the tinfuls of nuts, bolts, washers, screws and parts must be used up. If anything was left over, I nosed round the engine until a place was found for it. In the end, the engine seemed perfectly all right, except that it would not go. There was no spark in either magneto, so I packed them off to Australia on the
Makambo
.

  We could not cover any more wings until the
Makambo
returned with the dope-resisting paint. Roley and I carried on rebuilding the wing and aileron frames. We finished the second wing in three days, the third and fourth in two days each. The steamer was soon back, and life became still more arduous. Repairing, covering and doping all went on at the same time. We were always jostling for room, though the islanders had lent me the only other shed large enough to hold a spread wing, the seed-packing shed. There was only room there to work on one wing, and room in the cargo shed for the wing being covered.

  I had been going about barefoot, but I gave it up because the sand had grown cold. It was the edge of winter, with the days shortening and rain squalls more frequent. As the warmth went out of the sunlight, the glow of my island life cooled. I had to think day and night. It was not a question of making as few mistakes as possible; I mustn't make any mistakes. All the time I felt the urgency of hurry; the stormy westerlies were setting in, and they lessened the chance of obtaining a run of fine days necessary for assembling and launching the seaplane. Once the wings were attached to the fuselage they must stay out at the mercy of the weather, for there was no room to take them back under cover. Once the seaplane was on the lagoon, it must stay there until it left the island.

The magnetos had returned with the dope-resisting paint, and one morning I set about fixing and timing them. I had not had much to do with motors, and this was another chore that scared me beforehand. However, after I had locked the doors, and, sitting on a petrol-case, had mastered the principles of the operation, it turned out to be easy. It was only a matter of marrying a cog wheel on the magneto to a cog wheel on the engine, so that a spark was produced when the piston was in a certain position. Then came the fun – we had to test the motor. I went off to find Ted Austic, the island's star cricketer. I had no trouble in coaxing him away from his task of building himself a house, and he sauntered along with a peaked cap on the back of his head and a vast curl in front overhanging his forehead. Hammering long spikes into lengths of wood he made a horse, a frame for the engine as used for sawing wood. I climbed up with a gallon tin of petrol, and balanced it on a rafter of the cargo shed. This represented the petrol tank in the top wing of the seaplane. A long rubber tube led the petrol from the tin on the rafter down to the carburettor. The engine horse stood on the edge of the pit inside the cargo shed, so that the revolving propeller should not strike the floor. I laid an earth-wire from each magneto to the metal of a screwdriver, and gave Roley the screwdriver to hold, and told him to earth the current if the pace grew too hot. 'Now listen, Chicko,' he said, 'are you sure this is all right? Everyone seems to have urgent business somewhere else suddenly.'

  'If I yell "earth!" bang those screwdrivers down as if your life depended on it,' I said.

  I pulled over the propeller with a distinct respect. At each fresh swing without the least sign of life, the less I liked it. It might catch on fire, or it might fly to pieces, it might explode. Suddenly, with a crackling roar, it started at full throttle. 'Earth!' I yelled, and jumped for the back of the stand. Whatever Roley did, it had no effect. The engine roared with enough pull to fly a plane at 90mph. The wooden stand jumped and danced madly on the edge of the pit.

  'Hang on, Roley!' I shouted, 'Hang on!', and one of us on each side of the engine, feet jammed against a niche in the concrete at the edge of the pit, leaning right back, we began a tug o' war with it. The roar reverberated from the roof, the blast tore at the roots of our hair, and the shed was full of whirling papers. The stand teetered and stuttered on the edge of the pit until I snatched the pipe off the carburettor, the petrol ran out of it, and the engine died.

  After the engine had had its run, the compression was good, greatly to my relief. There had been none beforehand, and I was afraid that Kirby had been right saying that I had not ground the valves thoroughly. When I imparted the glad tidings to him, he turned up next morning and offered to help me again. I gratefully accepted. All the morning he worked away in the cargo shed, while Roley and I were in the other one. When we returned we found he had discovered the one thing on the fuselage that I had not dismantled. This was a down pipe, to lead away waste oil from the engine. It had no mechanical value. Kirby had spotted a dent in it, and had taken it off to straighten out the dent. He pointed out to me that a job should be done properly. When the dent was straightened out the part could not be replaced, because of the trestle supporting the fuselage. It had to be left till later, when the engine was lifted by block and tackle to a rafter for dropping back into position in the fuselage, which was then moved out of the shed and fixed on to the float chassis. Now both the fuselage and the float struts were in the way of that pipe. I lost more knuckle skin over it than over the rest of the seaplane, and it was only by replacing the dent as before that I finally got the pipe back at all.

  Kirby also spotted the old lock-washers still on the propeller shaft's collar-bolts. 'Look here, Chick,' he said. 'You ought not to use those old washers! Surely you ordered new ones?' I had made up my mind to secure those collar-bolts myself, with the idea that if a wrongly done job meant a watery entrance to the next world, I should have the consolation that it was my own fault. But not wanting to hurt Kirby's feelings I said I had no other washers. I reckoned without his new determination to help me. He proceeded to screw home every nut on to an old washer, and I had to watch the whole operation, conscious of Roley's laughing with his back turned, and of the new washers weighing down my pocket like lead. Roley and I decided that it was not fair to associate Kirby with our slipshod work, and asked him to undertake the sign-writing, of painting the registration letters ZK-AKK in 3-foot letters on the top and bottom of the wings. He could do the job in his own way, and be as efficient as he wished. He said, 'Certainly,' and took away our dope trestles and used the whole packing-shed to begin setting out the letters on the first wing. Roley and I were forced to abandon our doping, and went off to look for a job in the cargo shed until Kirby had finished. He made a thorough job of it, and afterwards Roley and I nearly succeeded in taking out the dents made by his elbows in the wing surface.

  Often it seemed that we should never finish but at last the time came when we had rebuilt four wings and two ailerons, painted them first with oil, and then with dope-resisting paint, taped and covered them, doped serrated tape along the line of the ribs, applied seven coats of dope to the surfaces, fitted the automatic slots and replaced the fixtures and fittings, struts, rigging wires and aileron controls. At last the overhauled motor was back in place, the fuselage beautifully enamelled inside and out, the floats carefully painted, ninety-six new screw threads through the manhole rims, the wings loosely assembled in pairs ready to fix to the fuselage, the bent float boom repaired, and the bruised longerons strengthened with steel fish plates.

  The
Gipsy Moth
was ready at last for rigging again, and the ground outside the cargo shed had become an island meeting-place. Some volunteers carried the float undercarriage out, others carried out the fuselage with the engine attached, tediously secured by thirty-six bolts and twelve bracing wires to the float undercarriage. I sighed with relief when after an hour and a half we had the fuselage level and ready for rigging. The trouble we had had to get the seaplane level was explained when I happened to turn the spirit-level end for end. The bubble rushed to one end of it; the instrument itself was not level and I could not find an accurate level on the island. Now I was face to face with rigging. I had watched in awed silence a rigger performing this mystic ritual and I studied the book. The wings must be dihedrally rigged, three and a half degrees upwards, and this angle must be correct to one sixth of a degree, measured with a variable inclinometer. In other words the wings must be cocked up.

  'Roley,' I said. 'You will have to make an inclinometer.' 'All right,' he said, 'if you can draw one, I can make one.'

  I marked an angle of three and a half degrees on a piece of wood 3-foot long, which Roley took home and planed until it was a long thin wedge. It was so accurately made that I could not find it the slightest degree out of true anywhere. We laid this along the wing spar with the rather dubious level on top of it, and cocked up the wing by adjusting the rigging screws until the bubble was at least in the centre of the level.