Round the Bend (14 page)

We had a meal at midday, and got off for Bangkok after lunch. It was affecting in a way, because the people of the village were so deeply grieved to see Connie go. He had his service at the Buddha in the morning before starting work and most of the village turned up for it, women as well as men; there must
have been over two hundred people there on the strip. It only lasted about ten minutes. The people hung about the strip all day. They paid no attention to the rest of us, but their eyes followed Connie everywhere. A curious thing was that three monks turned up in yellow robes, with shaven heads and bare feet. They made the same obeisance to him that the villagers made, touching their fingers to the forehead and bowing low. This seemed odd to me, but I was sorting out the maps with Gujar at the time and didn’t take much notice of what they were doing. The trouble was that we had only one set of maps for the two aircraft, which made things a bit tricky. We couldn’t fly in company, because the Airtruck cruised at a hundred miles an hour and the Carrier at a hundred and fifty. At the cruising speed of the Airtruck the Carrier would have been just about falling out of the air.

There was quite a good assortment of spares for the Carrier in Dwight Schafter’s house, and several valuable bits of ground equipment—towing bars, hydraulic jacks, and all that sort of thing. In all there was over a ton of stuff. We put this in the Airtruck for the flight to Bangkok as the Carrier was loaded to the limit, meaning to transfer it at Don Muang when the Carrier had used up some of her fuel load. In this way we managed to take with us everything of importance that Dwight Schafter had at Damrey Phong except about four tons of petrol; that we had to leave in the store for the benefit of whoever came along.

We taxied down to the end of the strip together and took off in turn, Gujar Singh first in the Airtruck with the two engineers; I followed in the Carrier with Connie by my side. I turned after taking off and followed Gujar round upon a left-hand circuit before getting upon course, and having raised the flaps and throttled back the boost and set the revs I glanced out of the window at the strip on my left side. The whole village seemed to be standing by the Buddha looking up at us; they were not waving. They were just standing there motionless and sad, watching us as we flew away.

We flew past Gujar Singh and waved at him, and went on on a compass course that would bring us to the Menam River between Bangkok and the sea. I had given our one map to Gujar
having made a few extracts from it on a sheet of paper. The Carrier had an automatic pilot, and at our sector height and on our course I put this in and sat for ten minutes watching that it was working all right. Then Connie and I left our seats and went to the wireless, and found Bangkok broadcasting station, and took a series of bearings on it to check our course. In the course of an hour the bearings gradually crept round from 310° to 357° magnetic, which should have brought us to the river, and when we got to that point and stood up to look out of the windscreen, there was the river. It was as easy as that. We landed at Don Muang about an hour ahead of Gujar Singh. The Siamese control officers knew the Carrier well; they were most tactful, and asked no questions.

We transferred the loads next morning and took off about midday for Rangoon, flying by the Three Pagodas Pass and the line of the Burma-Siam railway made in the war with the labour of Asiatics and prisoners of war at a vast cost in human life. Again we got to Rangoon an hour or so before Gujar, plodding along behind us at a hundred miles an hour. I was able to raise some more maps at Mingladoon airport; we stayed the night in the hostel there and said good-bye to U Myin and went on at dawn next day. That day we landed to refuel the Airtruck at Chittagong after flying up the coast of Arakan, and took off in the early afternoon for Calcutta.

At Calcutta I left Gujar to follow on behind at the best speed he could make, and went ahead with Connie in the Carrier. We made one long hop to Karachi in the day, flying right over India at about ten thousand feet, stayed there the night, and left next morning for Bahrein direct. We got there in the early afternoon and circled the familiar airport in our new large aircraft. There was the other Airtruck parked outside, and Arjan Singh with the ground staff standing looking up at this strange freight aircraft that was coming in to land. They didn’t know it was a new addition to the fleet.

In the next few weeks I had a lot of work. I reorganized the ground staff and put Connie in charge of all maintenance. I wanted to get Gujar Singh on to flying the Carrier as soon as possible, but I was resolved that he should do a hundred hours
on it with me as co-pilot before taking it on alone. With two of us off nearly every day in the Carrier, because there was a lot of business for it from the start, it was urgently necessary for us to get another pilot. By that time I was getting letters in almost every mail from British pilots wanting a job, but I was getting on all right with Asiatics at a quarter the salary and probably harder working. I got an Iraqui called Hosein who had been an officer in the Iraqui Air Force; he could fly twin-engined stuff and so Gujar put him on the Airtruck right away. I now had four aircraft all going hard, and so I found I had to get another boy clerk and more labourers. It was getting to be quite a business.

There was work for the Carrier, more work than we could handle, from the first day. For the first time we had an aircraft in the Persian Gulf that was really designed to carry heavy commercial loads; we could take a motor pump out four hundred miles into the desert, or a concrete mixer, or a truck. We could fetch a crashed aircraft from Sharjah or Kuwait and take it to Egypt in a few hours for repair, and we did that more than once, returning with loads of cases of machinery or engineering stores. There was all manner of work for a big freight aircraft, we discovered, in the Persian Gulf, and it showed no signs whatsoever of getting any less.

In Batavia, Dwight Schafter came up for trial by the Dutch, and got three years’ imprisonment; his co-pilot Seriot got twelve months. I wrote to Schafter about that time saying that the Carrier was safe and earning its keep, and I should be willing to negotiate with his attorney to buy it at my own price by instalments over a period. So far as I could see the thing would have paid its cost in about two years; if I could spread the instalment payments over that time I should get it without having to put down any capital at all. Dwight Schafter, I felt, wouldn’t need the money till he’d done his sentence; it might well be that he would agree to such a scheme.

In the hangar, Connie got the organization into order in a very short time. I had increased the staff by the Chinese, Chai Tai Foong, that we had brought from Damrey Phong and by another Iraqui, so that I now had Connie, four licensed engineers, and five engineering labourers, the latter all Arabs from Bahrein. I had
suggested to Connie that I should get him into the radio operators’ chummery with me, but he wouldn’t have it. “I am an Asiatic,” he said. “It would lead to difficulties.”

“I don’t see why it should. You’re only technically an Asiatic, after all.”

He smiled. “Perhaps. But I should prefer to live in the souk. I must learn Arabic now, and anyway, I shall feel freer there.”

He had a great ability to learn languages, I was to discover; three months seemed to be quite enough for him to become fluent in any Eastern language. “All right,” I said. “I don’t want to press you to live on the station. Where are you staying now?”

“Gujar Singh has found me a room near his place,” he said. “A room in the house of an Arab merchant who sells silks. I shall be all right there.”

“It’s a good long way from the hangar,” I said. “What will you do—walk it?”

He grinned. “Do what Gujar Singh does—get a bicycle.” My chief pilot came to work each day on an old rusty lady’s bicycle, his black beard flowing fiercely in the breeze.

All this expansion made a considerable stir on Bahrein aerodrome. Practically every month I had to go to the R.A.F. and ask if I could lease another building. Although in theory I was making money hand over fist, there was never any of it in evidence; it all went back into aeroplanes and tools and spares—into various capital accounts. I should have been hard put to it to find the money to erect the simplest wooden hut, but fortunately there were plenty of empty buildings belonging to the R.A.F. that had been put up in the war and had been empty ever since. The accountant officer was very helpful; whenever I wanted a new store or office he could usually produce something, although on a very short term lease. I was lucky in the officers I had to deal with, perhaps; certainly without the help and encouragement of the R.A.F. I’d never have been able to build up the business in those early years.

I had no time, of course, for any social intercourse, nor could I have kept my end up in such matters. I got my education at the fitter’s bench, not at a university. The Persian Gulf states are advised by a British Resident, Sir William Faulkner, who lives at the
Residency in Bahrein with secretaries and whatnot from the Foreign Office; I saw these people sometimes as they came and went in aircraft at the aerodrome, but I never spoke to any of them for years. I never did any work for them because my business was freight alone. I’ve never put a passenger seat into an aeroplane unless its weight was charged for, or employed a stewardess, and I hope I never shall. I went into that business to make money, not to lose it, and my sort of aircraft weren’t the sort to carry diplomats about the place.

I went on living at the radio operators’ chummery and in the sergeants’ mess.

I got to know some of the young officers quite well, however. When they went on leave I could often give them a free ride to India or to Egypt if they didn’t mind sitting on their luggage with the load in an unheated and unsoundproofed cabin, and I was always glad to help them in this way, as they helped me. A lot of them had nothing much to do, and they were keen on aeroplanes. I did far more flying at Bahrein in those postwar years than ever the R.A.F. did, and these boys used to come down to the hangar sometimes and just sit around and watch. Some of them got to know as much of what was going on in my crowd as I did myself, or a bit more.

Flight Lieutenant Allen came into my office once for something or other—I forget what it was. As he turned to go he grinned and said, “How’s old Harpic getting on?”

“Who do you call Harpic?” I enquired. It was a new one to me.

“Sorry,” he said. “Mr. Shaklin. Your chief engineer.”

“Doing all right,” I replied. “Why do you call him that?”

“He’s clean round the bend.”

“He’s a bloody good engineer,” I said. “He’s brisking up the other boys. I’m getting the maintenance properly done now that I’ve given up trying to run everything myself.”

“He talks religion to them all the time.”

“Well, what of it?” I said. “Do some of you young muggers good if you thought about your immortal souls a bit.”

“You can’t maintain aircraft with the Koran in one hand and a spanner in the other. Or can you?”

“Course you can,” I said. “He’s doing it. Who told you anyway?”
Because I knew that anything of that sort that was going on in my hangar went on in Arabic. I was starting to understand a bit of Arabic myself by that time, but I was pretty sure that Flight Lieutenant Allen didn’t know a word.

“The barman in the mess was telling us. It’s getting talked about all over the town. They say that if you want religion you can go and listen to the Imam in the mosque or you can go and listen to old Harpic in the hangar.”

I grinned. “Do you a bit of good to go to either.” He went away, and I sat on at the bare table that I used as a desk, listening to the typewriter in the next room, slightly uneasy. Connie was getting talked about, it seemed. I should know more of what was going on.

I knew it happened mostly in the afternoon, in the last hour of work before they knocked off for the afternoon prayer. I went down to the hangar that afternoon and got into the cockpit of the Fox-Moth with a pencil and a notebook; I had intended for some time to fit a blind-flying panel in the instrument board and I wanted to scheme it out. But that wasn’t really the reason that I went.

Standing beside the Fox was the first Airtruck, and Connie was doing a top overhaul on the port engine. He had a working platform rigged up by the engine of a couple of planks on trestles, and he was up on this thing with a ground engineer and one of the Arab boys. Most of the rest of the staff seemed to have arranged their work to get within earshot; they were all doing something, but they were listening at the same time. Up on his platform working on the engine Connie was talking to them.

He was speaking partly in English and partly in Arabic, which he could already speak much better than I could. “We are a peculiar people,” he was saying, “we who care for aeroplanes. For common men it is enough to pray five times in each day, as the Imam dictates and as is ordained in the Koran. But we are different, we engineers. We are called to a higher task than common men, and Allah will require much more from us than that.” He paused, and said to the man working with him, “Got a five-sixteenth box there? Thanks. Now hold it, just like that.”

They worked on for a time in silence. “You have heard from
the Imam of the journey that the Prophet of God made, when he was roused from sleep by the angel Gabriel who mounted him upon the horse with eagle’s wings, Al Borak. You know how he passed by the Three Temptations and traversed the Seven Heavens till he came to the House of Adoration and the Presence of God. God then gave to the Prophet the main doctrines of the Faith, and ordained that prayers should be said by the faithful each day.” He paused, and slipped the nuts collected in his hand into an old cigarette tin. “Now, draw her off gently. Wait a minute—the gasket’s sticking on this side.” They disengaged the cylinder head, and passed it down carefully from hand to hand to the ground.

Connie straightened up. “How many times were prayers to be said each day?”

There was a momentary silence. Then two or three said at once, “Fifty times.” And someone added, “—Teacher.” I noted that for thinking over later on. This thing was going deeper than I knew about.