Round the Bend (5 page)

It was there that she had stood waving me good-bye.

I turned away, and walked up the main road through the shopping part before turning off up Aerodrome Lane to the works. And now I was scared stiff that I’d meet her Dad or Mum out doing the shopping, or some of her family. I don’t know why it was, but I was afraid to meet them, and I knew as I walked up to the works that I could never work in that place again. I’d never have the courage to walk round those streets as we had walked together, or go to the picture house that we had used, or lunch in the works canteen where we had lunched.

The Managing Director, Mr. Norman Evans, he was very nice to me. I think he must have heard about my trouble, because
when I said that I’d been back two days and I’d had personal things to see to first, he said quickly, “I know, Cutter. Things get a bit tangled up when one’s away for a long time. I’m very sorry indeed.” And then he went on to talk about the work, so that I didn’t have to answer.

The business was all upset, of course, because it had been expanded greatly in the war years with war orders, and now those had come to an end and it was having to contract again. It’s easy enough to expand an aviation business, but it’s bloody difficult to get it back to what it was before. Mr. Evans couldn’t have been nicer. “I want to tell you how much I appreciate the job you did in Egypt,” he said. “We’ve got to make a lot of changes now. What I want you to do is to take over the whole of our repair and servicing side in the British Isles—here, and at Bristol and at Belfast.”

It was a first-class job, of course, as good as any I could hope to get. I was only thirty-one years old. “The main office would be here, sir, I suppose?” I asked. “I’d do most of the work from here, and travel to Bristol arid Belfast?”

“That’s right,” he said. “I thought you might take over Mr. Holden’s old office. I’ll have that room next to it divided into two, and you can have your secretary in there unless you want her in the room with you.” Then he went on to talk about the salary, which was good, and as we talked I knew that it would never work. Unless I came to work each day by helicopter I’d have to use the same streets and the same Underground and the same passages and roads about the works that I had walked with Beryl.

I said presently, “I’ve got a month’s leave due to me, sir. Can I take that now?”

“That’s right,” he said. He glanced at the calendar. “Oh, well, that takes us up to Christmas. Suppose we say you’ll start immediately after that.”

I thanked him, and agreed, and then he took me for a walk around the works and we talked about the layout of the place, and what parts we would shut down or use as stores, and how the rest of it should be reorganized. I had only half my mind on the job. At every corner there was some new place I had forgotten
about where I had walked and talked with Beryl in the lunch hour. When finally Mr. Evans asked me to stay and lunch in the canteen I couldn’t take it any longer, and I said that if he’d excuse me I’d get off down to my home in Southampton that afternoon.

As I walked down to the Underground, looking furtively around in case there were some of the Cousins family about, I knew it was impossible. I couldn’t go back there to work. I’d have been off my rocker in a fortnight.

I got my bag and paid my bill at the hotel, and went to Waterloo and caught a train down to Southampton. I got there in the late afternoon, and took a bus to the gasworks, and walked home from there. Our street, between the gasworks and the docks, hadn’t suffered much in the blitz; old Mrs. Tickle’s house had gone, and Mrs. Tickle with it, but that was the only damage actually in our street, and that had been done before I went to Egypt.

I was surprised at how small it all looked now. I knew it was dirty, because you can’t keep houses clean between the gasworks and the docks, but I had not realized till then how small the houses were, how small and mean the shops. As I got near our house I could see that an upstairs window was broken and shut up with windowlite tacked over the frame; they had written to tell me about that, done by a flying bomb that fell into Montgomery Street in July 1944. I thought that while I was home I’d build up the frame and get a bit of glass and do that for them, even if it was the landlord’s job.

I went in at the street door that opened straight into the living room and there was Ma laying the table for tea; it was getting on for five o’clock when Dad would be knocking off at the docks. I put my suitcase down. “I’m back, Ma,” I said quietly.

She said, “Oh, Tom! You’re looking so brown!” And when she’d kissed me she said, “We know about poor Beryl, Tom. We’re all ever so sorry.”

“How did you get to know?” I asked.

“Mrs. Cousins wrote and told us,” she replied. “There was a bit about it in the paper, too. It’s been a sad homecoming for you, boy.”

“That’s right,” I said heavily. “Nothing to be done about it
now, though, and the least said the better.” She took the hint and she must have dropped a word to Dad, because they never bothered me with questions.

We had plenty of other things to talk about, though, specially when Dad came home. I’d written to them regularly while I was away, and they’d got young Ted’s school atlas and marked on it all the places that I’d been to, and it made a sort of spider’s web all over the Near East. I had some photographs that I’d collected from time to time, and after we’d done the washing up I got these out and showed them and told them all about it. My sister Joyce came in with her husband Joe Morton who kept the greengrocer’s shop in Allenby Street just round the corner, and he brought a couple of bottles of beer in, and I sat talking and telling them about it all till nearly ten o’clock.

When they had gone and Dad and I were sitting with a final cigarette before the fire, and Ted and Ma had gone up to bed, Dad said to me, “What comes next, boy?”

“I don’t know.” I told him about the job I had been offered that morning, and I told him something about my great unwillingness to go back to Morden. He asked, “What’s the pay like?”

“Nine hundred a year,” I told him.

He opened his eyes. “That’s twice what I get. Three times what I ever got before the war. You’re getting on in the world, boy.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s a good job and I’d be a bloody fool to turn it down. But it’s no good working in a place that’s going to send you round the bend.”

“You’re looking tired,” he said. “You’ll feel different when you’ve had a bit of a rest. How long leave have you got?”

“They’re giving me a month,” I told him. “Till after Christmas. I haven’t had a day off since I went out to Egypt.”

He said in wonder, “I never had more’n a week’s holiday in all my life. Are they paying you?”

“My Cairo pay goes on till the end of December,” I said.

“Do you spend it all?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got a good bit saved up.” I hesitated. “I was saving up for furniture.”

Ted was the only one of the family still living at home; he was
just eighteen and due to go off for his military service pretty soon. He worked for a firm of contractors and Dad had had him taught to drive, so he was all set to be a truck driver. We had three bedrooms in that house; when I was a boy it had been Dad and Mum upstairs in one room and the girls in the other, and for us boys there was a room downstairs built out behind the scullery in the garden. It was a good big room, and it had need to be because four of us had slept together there when I was a boy, in two beds. Ted had got the girls’ room upstairs, and Dad and Mum had titivated up the big old room for me, colourwashed it and all when they heard I was coming home; they’d gone to a lot of trouble over it, working at it over the week-end. I slept there that night, comforted a bit by memories of childhood, and although I stayed awake some time, I did sleep.

I went out early next day and got a chisel and a brass-backed saw, and started on that window. I worked on it all that day and the next and got it finished and glazed for them, with a coat of white lead paint. I did a lot of odd jobs round the house in the next few days, and got an electric water heater and installed it over the sink in the scullery for Ma. While I worked at these things, I was making up my mind what I was going to do. By the end of the first day, I think I knew what it was to be.

I took a bus one day and went out to the airport at Eastleigh. There’s a firm there, Kennington’s, who do quite a big business in overhauling and servicing aircraft; I had thought once or twice of putting in for a job with them. Now I went to the sales side, to a young chap called Warren that I knew slightly, and asked if he knew where I could get a Fox-Moth.

The Fox-Moth is a de Havilland type, obsolete now; it was produced about 1933. It has a little cabin for the passengers and an open cockpit for the pilot, and an engine of a hundred and thirty horsepower. Mine cruised at about ninety miles an hour. It would carry the pilot and two passengers comfortably, or four passengers if they were very little ones and there was a good long runway to take off on with the overload. The type hasn’t been in production for a long time and there weren’t many of them left, but Warren said he thought he knew of one in Leicester, dismantled and unused for years, and wanting a lot of work done
on it. We got on the telephone from his office, and found that it was there all right, and about to be put out on the scrap heap.

I went to Leicester next day and bought it with a second-hand engine for a hundred and twenty pounds, and arranged for it to be sent down to Eastleigh on a truck. That’s how I started in the air transport business.

I was headed for the Persian Gulf. I’d been to Abadan and Basra and Kuwait and as far down as Bahrein for a night, and I’d seen conditions there. I had an idea that a chap with a little aeroplane for charter, that could land on any decent bit of desert, might do all right for himself. There’s no way to get about that country except by plane or car, and travelling by car on those sand tracks is no fun at all. There was nobody doing charter work in that part that I knew of. I had a hunch that if I went there with a Fox-Moth I might make a living. Anyway, it would be something different; if I lost my money I’d always got my trade to fall back on.

Kennington’s were very helpful. I made a deal with them to pay for overheads and for any labour that I used, and when the Fox-Moth came they put it in a corner of a hangar and let me get on with the work myself, with a boy to help me; they knew I hadn’t got much money. The plane wasn’t in too bad condition. I got it all stripped down and had the Air Registration Board inspector to agree what wanted doing, and by Christmas time I’d got the airframe finished all except the final spraying. I was working on it by half past seven every morning, and I never left till eight o’clock at night; I hadn’t got much time to spare, because with every day my money was running out.

I wrote to Mr. Evans at Morden about the middle of December, turning in my job. I told him that it was for personal reasons, that I didn’t want to come back there, and that I was going to do something totally different for a change. He wrote me a very nice letter telling me to let them know if ever I wanted to come back into the repair business, and with that I felt I had something behind me to fall back on.

I finished the engine and got it through a test run on the bench about the end of the first week in January, and got it installed in the aircraft a couple of days after that. I made a test flight on
January 12th, and there was nothing then to do but the final spray painting and lettering, and make the arrangements for my journey to the Gulf.

Ma was good to me while I was working out at Eastleigh on the Fox-Moth. I used to go out there on a bicycle to save money, six miles each way, and sometimes I wouldn’t be home till nearly ten o’clock at night. Whatever time I came home there would be something hot for me in the oven, and a kettle boiling ready for my tea, and a bit of cheese or cake to eat after. Once while I was eating my supper, Ma said,

“How long will you be away for this time, Tom?”

I grinned at her. “Three months,” I said. “I’ll be broke by that time, and home looking for a job.”

She was knitting, and she went on for a minute. “I don’t think so,” she said quietly. “I don’t think you’ll go broke.”

“Lots of people do go broke,” I said, “and doing less daft things than this I’m playing at.”

“I don’t think you will,” she repeated.

I grinned at her again. “Well, I’ve never starved in the winter yet.”

“No, and I don’t think you will.”

She knitted on in silence for a time. “This place Bahrein where you’re going to,” she said. “What sort of place is it? How will you be living?”

“It’s a fair-sized town,” I said. “An Arab town, of course. There are some white people living there—the R.A.F., and the chaps in the Government. And then, inland there are sort of special towns like Awali run by the Bahrein Petroleum Company, where a lot of British and Canadian engineers live with their families.”

“Will you live there?”

I shook my head. “I think there’s an Arab hotel in the town. I’ll probably be there, at first at any rate.”

“Will there be any white girls there?” she asked.

I knew what she was getting at, of course. “Not one,” I said. “There might be some W.A.A.F.’s with the Air Force, but I wouldn’t get a look in there.”

“Try and find someone, Tom,” she said quietly. “I know you don’t feel like it now, and maybe that’s right. But I would
like to see you settled comfortable in a nice home, with a nice girl and some children. Don’t give all of your life to your work.”

“Blowed if I know where I’ll find the nice home, but it won’t be in Bahrein,” I said. “Nor the nice girl, either. But I’ll bear it in mind, Ma.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Just keep it in your mind. I do want to see you settled and comfortable, like your Dad and I have been.”

Ma never wanted anything better than she’d got. She knew it was a lousy little house, of course, but it was home and near Dad’s work, and there she had lived all her married life, and had her children, and watched them grow up and get out into the world. She never wanted anything better; she had a happiness quite independent of the quality of her house. It’s convenient for Dad’s work and she’s accustomed to it. She’ll never move.