A green flash from the roof of the harbour master’s office was a dragon wink to warn us away. Engines roared a harmonious answer, and we moved forward. Bennett worked the control column: floats clear of water, stick back, a shade wing-down into wind to stay straight. A rock-bump denied we were up, and I wondered how long the run would be, as we dashed towards the town and high ground.
Ease stick back. The elements were taking over. Another feeling as if airborne. The skipper would worry, not us. But bump again as, in my own darkness, I held my breath, and at the roar of labouring motors prayed we’d get unstuck from the water and heave our tonnage into the air. Wilcox said that no flying boat had ever been so laden. Each power unit had to lift three tons of its own fuel, and race us to flying speed along the empty boulevard of water, a runway as hard as concrete should we come back down with too much of a bang. Seconds of time stretched as if made of all the rubber in Malaya.
I didn’t know whether I heard or felt. The sensation, as of peril at the beginning of any enterprise, was indeterminate. I knew enough about flight to make me uneasy, but only the skipper had sufficient to engage the worry clutch, and the flight engineer to experience proper anxiety, and the navigator – later – the mathematical expertise to feel embarrassment. Perhaps only Nash accepted completely the fiduciary characteristics of the flying boat.
There was a gravelly scraping under the hull, as if a studiously fashioned fully fingered hand was feeling for the weak spot before punching a hole into which more water would flow than air. If I had kept a diary, the entry of January 1st 1950 would have told how a large war-surplus flying boat (the cheapest that ever was bought, said Rose) took off with eight crew and set course for Kerguelen, 2415 nautical miles to the southeast.
Instead of sea, the sky flooded in. A glimpse of brown and green land, then a few buildings. We banked before getting closer, and while I hoped God would keep that four-stroke cycle igniting, I tapped a message of departure to the coast station.
On an even keel the climb began, saying so-long to land and good day to the birds. Rose confirmed our course to steer of 145 degrees, which made us henceforth playthings of drift and track, vectors that boxed us in and styled us airborne. Morse warbled among the atmospherics. One operator pounded his key as if using a transmitter from the stone age. Another sounded like Donald Duck trying to tell us the long and the short of it.
Bennett’s reactions were needle-quick: sight keen, hearing sharp and muscles in trim. Such flying called for the same skill and co-ordination as steering a large sailing boat single handed. Any deterioration of well-being, even with the best pilot in the game, was dangerous. One false move and the trip would be over.
Set against the immensity of the sea, the flying boat was frail indeed, but we had settled into our large and wieldy home by the time it gained that peerless sky waiting for us two miles up, the endlessly wrinkled sea scored at one corner by a coal-burning ship. I knew where we were heading, but what about that old steamer? He saw us, and we him but, caught in our own sounds, neither could hear the noise of different engines. Such detachment drove me to the rear turret where I took a back bearing for Rose with the hand compass which confirmed our track.
Land melted into the haze and, fly as long as we could on the fuel we had, I wondered if after twenty hours we’d find a place by which to put down. Perhaps soil or trees were gone for ever. On my first troopship-crossing of the Arabian Sea I had feared that land would not be found even with the most refined navigation. The world would end as at the beginning, leaving us no choice but to alight on water.
I glanced at Rose as he laid his ruler straight, turned the Douglas protractor, twiddled the knob of his computer, and worked a pencil deftly over the chart. He sat as cut off at his table as if a door were closed on him. He reckoned his tracks and course in deadly earnest, assembling the many factors by which to decide our most probable position, and the prudent limit of the flying boat’s endurance.
2
The plane entered cloud but hardly ever stayed there. Yet it always seemed so. Beads of moisture hung on the perspex. The engines took on a harsher and more vulnerable tone than in clear sky, though this, like a tinnier vibration detected in the airframe, was an illusion. Bennett nursed the kite on its gradual ascent, and my unexplained fear was emphasized by the effect of being in cloud and climbing at the same time.
Ripples of indistinguishable morse came from God knew where, as if even at this late stage someone was making, though without much hope, an attempt to call us back. The plane shuddered, but ploughed beyond the speed of stalling or hesitation, and we sat at our duties as if we had never left the earth.
The more we stayed in cloud the more null my senses became, till I seemed to be alive after death, not able to see or be seen. The cloud cotton-woolled us out of existence. Solitude and lack of visibility caused the engines to go silent as I turned the frequency needle of the Marconi more for something to do than in the hope of receiving any vital data, which made it seem as if the world had abandoned us rather than that we had waywardly departed from it.
After six miles without visibility my bones ached for the emptiness of blue. Nash called from the mid-upper that we would go blind unless somebody turned the sky back on. In such latitudes there was no chance of a collision at least.
Daylight dazzled the fuselage. Bennett whistled to himself, glad to have made a start. Cloud tops were the surface of another earth whose white soil we had sprung from fully formed, a landscape of spun glass, knobbly obelisks, mushroom columns, wispy stalagmites and, further away, caves suggesting mysterious hide-outs on some polar shore. We gained height till the milky landscape below was like a world in the process of being formed, lit by the sun’s flood but now tinged with grey. There was nothing between us and the universe as, after a hundred miles of gradual climbing to go easy on the fuel, Bennett levelled off and kept us on course for Kerguelen.
Anyone able to stand on an anvil of cloud would see our flying boat going gracefully through the blue at two miles a minute, with its turrets and aerials, tailplane and vast four-engined wingspan. I would have wanted to wave, much as I had lifted my arms as a boy to trains that went by, craving to be one of its passengers.
Cloud tops we flew between were like plumes of the Prince of Wales’ feathers. Earphone wire trailing, I tried to rid myself of a feeling of isolation, almost afraid to look out at the wings in case I witnessed them being rent from the fuselage. I wanted to live for ever, whereas on the ground I had not much cared whether I lived at all. Every moment that I was not at my wireless filled me with anxiety, unless I consciously marvelled at how four great engines propelled us along as easily as a bus on a country road. I was only alive when listening to morse while being carried through the sky, ten thousand feet above the sea.
Bennett stood behind me. The bounce of wireless signals was our lifeline. Whoever heard could write the call sign in their log, and if we vanished into the water of the South Indian Ocean, at least there would be the record of a last message, even if only a call tapped out to reassure the crew that we still had some connection with the earth.
Sweat fell from my cheeks. We were an hour on our way, with nineteen to go. A coast station tried to get me with a QRZ, so I asked Rose for our position and established contact by the return compliments of a QTH. Bennett smiled at seeing me busy. He had amended the position report, and what I sent, while the correct distance, put us on course for Madagascar.