‘Are we expecting opposition?’
He sat down and nursed his face at another wicked twinge. ‘Who can tell?’
I felt sorry for him. ‘It can’t last forever.’
‘Maybe. But we’ve got to be prepared.’ We were part of a machine, each at his job to keep the props moving. I sat in my wireless section and spun the needle over coloured markings. In an emergency, one man with ordinary toothache would put us off schedule. He would be as bad as a stretcher case. But I felt as if I’d had a few whiskies, and couldn’t care less.
An Italian opera from Cape Town or Johannesburg had a hard ride with such bounce and crackle waiting in ambush along the route. I adjusted the wavelength, and poured music for enjoyment through the intercom, vibrating what phones were plugged in.
‘We’ll make you the ENSA wallah,’ Bennett said, ‘if you aren’t careful.’
Nash wanted the Warsaw Concerto. ‘It always gives me a lump in my throat. One of my best oppoes was a Polish gunner, alas no longer with us.’
I put up the volume.
‘A piece of Beethoven,’ Rose said. ‘Much better than your bent bearings. What about Fidelio?’
‘Fidelio’s a dog,’ said Appleyard. ‘In quarantine.’
‘You mean Fido,’ Bull barked convincingly. ‘That’s a fucking dog, not Fidelio. Get back into your kennel.’
Wilcox asked for Mantovani.
‘You can’t have him,’ Appleyard called.
‘It might stop him coughing,’ said Nash.
‘Or play Victor Sylvester,’ said Armatage.
‘No dancing,’ said Nash, ‘or you’ll be on a fizzer.’
‘You’ll bugger up Mr Rose’s sunsights,’ said Bull.
‘Cut the language,’ said Appleyard, ‘or you’ll get no tea.’
One of the gunners booed, Armatage I think. There was rediffusion of flying boat favourites till the music crumpled against a mountain range of static and disappeared.
‘Back to business, Mr Adcock.’
I switched to ships and coast stations. My fingers itched to tap a greeting, but I roamed up and down the wavelength, never long enough on any to get a whole message. What did I expect? No weather report could come from where we were going. If a rolling stone gathered no moss, whose loss is that? It was the pattern of my life, and after so long I thought that nothing could break it.
We were the filling in a cloud sandwich, two thousand feet of sky through which we droned, a movable feast activated by so many currents of air that the plane had to be ridden rather than driven. A topography of ridges and cauliflower hillocks passed us by. Rose jerked his elbows back and forth. ‘A cold front’s coming from the southeast.’
‘How do you know?’
‘If I knew, I wouldn’t know. Take it from me. There’ll be a bit of turbulence before we hit the drink.’
He paced irascibly against the bumps and lurches. ‘Calm down.’ I made myself heard as he came close. A hand covered the scar-side of his face, while the exposed half was pale and leaden. He shivered with cold. I wondered how we would manage if our navigator passed out.
‘Maybe something I ate,’ he said. ‘It’s not unusual for me to feel air sick. Every other trip, and I spend half my time staring the bog out.’
I found a canister of water and filled a mug, spilling some before getting it back to him. Bennett was dodging the black three-dimensional coastline of cumulus, trying to rise to where the kite might be steady enough for Rose to obtain his sunsight. We went onto oxygen at twelve thousand feet, though I delayed as long as I could, hating that rubbery medicated tang that crept into the throat. ‘It’s like the whiff that comes out of a Selection Box of french letters,’ said Bull. A disembodied croak over the intercom agreed, adding that his popsy had given him such a gift at Christmas.
‘Shut up,’ Bennett said.
I hung on, oxygen tacking and veering through my veins. My ears were buzzing, and a bodily nervousness – while at my wireless table – presaged a heavenward lift where all might be well. The impression lasted a few minutes, time for the system to get used to alien air taking hold. For whoever had work, reality reasserted its grip. A ship sent a routine message, faint but readable, which I logged, returning to the illusion that my work and I were inseparable. On this trip we had to be.
Another ship’s operator, having difficulty reaching a coast station, was sending so slowly that I’d have had time to part my hair between each letter.
5
Height was the best aerial, but there was a limit to how far it could be extended. Infinity was not enough, though the higher we climbed the more I could hear. To bring in Madagascar and Mozambique gave a sense of power. I heard Tasmania and Nairobi with pleasure. Rhodesia and the Seychelles were registered with childish pride – yet the world was no bigger than the space between my enphoned ears since, in spite of what I wanted to believe, each place came in of its own accord.
I heard them all, dots-and-dashes denoting each locality, showing picture-book scenes where I would rather be than in the bucking slum-galleon of a flying boat going to a place that lacked the morse symbols which my imagination could embellish with reality. Without those electrical impulses (affected, as the handbook might say, by keying across a resistance in the high-tension negative supply), a place had no identity. Robbed of a name, it was erased from latitude and longitude, and so was denied existence.
And yet where we were going was on all maps and charts, and perhaps even shown on those small globes used as pencil sharpeners. Its natural harbours had been known for two hundred years by whalers and seal hunters. Explorers had laid up in them to fair-copy their surveys, piratical merchants had hidden to count the score of their plunder, and the Germans had used the area as a base from which to prey on shipping. But without a wireless station the region lacked a soul. No sound meant no life. No aerial system on high ground conveyed intelligence to other places. We were heading for white space because my earphones could not bring in the necessary signals to convince me it was solid property.
Rose’s table took most of the sun as we ascended from the gloom, but a narrow shaft illuminated my log book. Cloud below was flat like the sea, fixed ribs crossing our track. The plane was steady, and Rose got into the ’dome with an Astro-Compass to check the course, while I stood below with his watch and wondered whether, should it become necessary, I could navigate our boat on its trans-ocean flight. Apart from radio bearings, it was not beyond my competence to lay out a course if provided with the wind vector. There was no mystery in sextant and timepiece as long as sun or stars were visible, and a book of Sight Reduction Tables available to work out a position line. You always learned something of the next man’s job, occasionally without him knowing, and hardly aware of it yourself.
But the proper exercise of navigation demands arcane knowledge during a long flight over water, as well as subtle judgement when putting together the factors of dead-reckoning, astro navigation and wireless bearings. Therefore I couldn’t do it, no more than anyone on board could do my work, though they tended to regard the wireless operator as having the easiest task on the flight deck. His technical knowledge was thought to go little beyond rectifying a few obvious faults, and using Morse Code could not be compared to the arduous work of flying or navigation – both of which are as much an art as a craft.
With senses of a more primitive order, the wireless operator needs experience and patience when pulling in any data for the well-being of the aircraft. He interprets symbols coming into the earphones, and uses the international ‘Q’ code as an operator’s Esperanto. To take morse at speed calls for the sense of rhythm possessed by a poet – or an African in the bush manipulating his tom-toms, as Rose scathingly said. The wireless operator’s brain receives a series of beats which galvanize him into writing words originating from someone else. Others will in turn take down words or initials tapped out by him, both senders and receivers being mediums to transcribe electrical patterns from the sky.