Round the Bend (6 page)

I finished off the Fox-Moth a few days after that, and she really didn’t look so bad, with a new aluminium spray all over her and green registration letters, and a broad green line running backwards down the fuselage from the prop. I had had the cabin seats re-upholstered, too, and replaced the scratched perspex in the windows, so that by the time I’d done with her she looked almost new.

Dad and Mum came out to see her when she was finished, one Sunday, and I took them up for a joyride over Southampton. Then I was ready to start.

It was a bad time of year to fly from England, and the Fox-Moth was a very little aeroplane, with no blind flying instruments, or radio, or anything like that. On the day I wanted to start, Monday the 21st, there was a dense fog and it would have been crazy to leave the ground even if the airport officers had let me, which they wouldn’t. Next day was better. Ma came out with me to Eastleigh to see me off. I got the aircraft out and ran the engine to warm her up, and got my stuff through customs, and went and made my flight plan at the Control. Then I was ready to get in and go.

“This is it, Mum,” I said. “I’ll be back in a year or so.”

She kissed me. “Good-bye, Tom,” she said. “Look after yourself, and don’t go killing yourself or anything of that.”

“I won’t do that, Mum,” I said, smiling. One always thinks, of course, “Those things can’t happen to me.”

“Don’t forget what I was telling you, about finding a nice girl.”

“I won’t. Good-bye, Mum.”

“Good-bye, son.”

I swung the little propeller, and the engine fired, and I went round and got into the cockpit, clumsy in my leather coat. Then I waved to Mum and taxied forward, and the Control gave me a green light and I moved to the end of the runway and took off from England.

I’m not going to say much about that trip out to Bahrein; there was nothing to make it interesting but my own inexperience and the inadequacy of the aircraft for so long a journey. I could fly the thing all right, but my total flying experience was only about five hundred hours and I didn’t know a lot about navigation, when I started. I knew a bit more by the time I reached the Persian Gulf.

I had to land a good many times for fuel on the way. The extreme range of the Fox-Moth was only about three hundred and fifty miles; later on I fitted an extra tank. I went by way of Dinard, and across France to Cannes, landing at Tours and Lyon. From there I went to Pisa and Rome and Brindisi and Araxos and Athens, and from there to Rhodes and Cyprus. I rested a day there and did a quick run round the engine, and went on by way of Damascus to a place called H.3. in the middle of the desert; then to Baghdad, Basra, Kuwait, and so to Bahrein. It took me eight days of trundling along at ninety miles an hour, and I was tired when I got there.

I landed one evening on the big R.A.F. and civil aerodrome on Muharraq Island. There was a hangar there and the place is an R.A.F. station, but there were no service aircraft stationed there at that time. Several used to come through every week, and at that time the B.O.A.C. flying boats called there, as well as several foreign lines.

It was a lovely, summery evening as I taxied to the hangar after landing, just like a warm day in June in England. It had been very cold over most of the route, until I got south of Baghdad, and
then it had begun to warm up. A couple of R.A.F. flying officers strolled out to the machine as I switched off in front of the hangar, and I got out of the cockpit to talk to them.

“Come far?” one asked.

“Eastleigh,” I said.

They raised eyebrows and grinned. “How long did it take you?”

“I left England last Tuesday,” I said. “Eight days.”

“Going on to India?”

“No,” I said. “I was thinking of staying here a bit, and see if I can pick up a bit of charter work.”

We talked about it for a time, and then I left them and went up to the Control Tower to report. When I got back to the machine the officers had got some airmen and we pushed the Fox-Moth into the hangar and got my stuff out of the cabin. As we did so one of the young officers that I later came to know as Mr. Allen, said, “Pity you weren’t here yesterday.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Party of three engineers going down to Muscat. They’re consulting on a new water supply or something. They came in by B.O.A.C. from England. If you’d been here you might have got a job.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“Went on down to Sharjah in a chartered dhow. They left this morning.”

“How far is it to Sharjah?”

“About four hundred miles. I wouldn’t like to do that in a dhow. It’ll take them three or four days.”

“How far on is it to Muscat?”

“About two hundred and fifty miles. They were going to charter a truck to take them from Sharjah to Muscat.”

I said, “Is there any fuel at Muscat?”

Allen nodded. “We keep a small party there. There’s a strip there, and there’s hundred octane fuel.”

This was too rich and rare a fuel for my common little engine, but I could mix it with motor-car petrol. I said, “Can I get a telegram to Sharjah offering this Fox for charter to them?”

“I should think so. They’ll probably send it from the Control Tower if you ask them nicely, over the R/T. They’re always talking
to Sharjah. It’s more reliable than the land telegraph line. That’s always falling down.”

I got the name of the leader of the party from him, and the rest house where they would stay in Sharjah, and went back to the Control Tower. The Control officer knew all about this party, and advised me to wire them care of the Political Agent. I sent off a message detailing the accommodation and range of my Fox-Moth and offering it for charter for eight pounds an hour from Bahrein.

I had a bit of luck then, because one of the wireless operators, Dick Reed, spoke up and asked me where I was going to stay. He lived in a house in Muharraq town just outside the aerodrome with all the other operators; they ran it as a chummery, and they had a spare room, normally occupied by a chap who was on leave. They offered this to me and I moved in there that night and messed with the radio crowd.

At the aerodrome, they made me a member of the sergeants’ mess, which meant that I could go in there at any time for lunch, or for tea if I was working late. That was a great help, in those early months.

I spent next day working on the aircraft to get it overhauled and fit for work after the flight out from England, and in typing out circular letters, five copies at a time, to send out to the eighteen or twenty possible employers of a charter aircraft in the Persian Gulf. I got a job next day, to take two engineers from Awali up to Kuwait for a conference, leaving early in the morning and coming back at night. They paid my eight pounds an hour without blinking and the job went off all right, so by the end of the day I was fifty-six pounds in pocket and everyone seemed satisfied, specially me. My eight pounds an hour worked out at about two bob a mile, but we had travelled six hundred miles in seven hours’ flying time.

Next, a reply to my Sharjah wire came in, ordering me down to Sharjah at once. Three days in an Arab dhow had made my eight pounds an hour seem cheap to the water engineers, even though I couldn’t carry the party in one load but had to ferry them everywhere in two trips. I took them down to Muscat and stayed with them for a week. In all I was away from Bahrein for
ten days, and I got back at the end of the job with thirty-eight hours of flying done for them, and a cheque for three hundred and four pounds in my pocket.

That’s the way it went on all the time. The Persian Gulf is full of industry—new oil fields being laid out, wells being sunk, pipelines being laid, new docks and harbours being built all over the place. There are no roads outside the towns and no railways, and no coasting steamers and few motor boats. The country is full of engineers to whom time is money, and there are always people wanting to get about in a hurry. The country is mostly sand desert, good for landing a small aeroplane when you have learned the different look of hard and soft sand from the air, and I was right up to the neck in work from the day I got there. Most of the oil companies had their own aircraft, but there was plenty of work left over for me.

I have been asked sometimes what led me to the Persian Gulf, what instinct told me that I could build up a business there. It’s really perfectly simple. If you go to the hottest and most uncomfortable place on the map you’ll find there’s not a lot of competition; in my experience most British pilots would rather go bankrupt than get prickly heat. If you can find, as I did, a place where there’s a lot of business for a modest charter operator, that’s also hot and uncomfortable—well, it’s money for jam. Only, of course, you can’t afford to pay the wages of a European staff.

To start with, I had no staff at all. For the first two months I did everything myself, serviced the aircraft, washed it down, did the correspondence on my typewriter in the evening, kept the accounts, sent out the bills, and—easiest of all—flew the thing. Presently it got a bit too much, and I got in help for the washing down. I got an Arab boy about fifteen years old called Tarik and paid him twenty rupees a month, about thirty bob, at which he was highly delighted. I taught him to wash and clean the aircraft while I worked upon the engine, and when he wasn’t doing that he was running errands for me to the souk—the market. He wasn’t fully employed in those early days, of course, but it was useful to have somebody to help with the refuelling.

It was three months before anyone woke up to the fact that I
wasn’t licensed to carry passengers for hire or reward. I only had a private pilot’s licence. An A.R.B. inspector turned up from Egypt one day, travelling around to see what was going on in civil aviation in the Persian Gulf, and told me that I was breaking the law every time I went up. I knew that, of course, but I hoped that nobody else did.

He was quite nice about it. I told him that next day I had to take Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Hogaarts of the Arabia-Sumatran Petroleum Company from Abu Ali to Kuwait, and if I didn’t turn up they’d be stuck at Abu Ali, and after some hesitation he agreed that I should make this one trip. While we were talking the telephone went and it was Johnson of the Bahrein Petroleum Company wanting to book me for the following Thursday to take a couple of his chaps down to Dubai. I knew Johnson well, and I never believe in hiding things up, so I told him I was with a bloke who said I couldn’t carry passengers for hire because I’d only got an A licence.

“For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Let me have a talk to him.” I handed over the receiver, and he talked to the inspector, saying that they couldn’t do without me and all that sort of thing. The upshot of it was that it was agreed that I should do that one trip also, and by next morning the inspector had thought it over and said that he would recommend that I should be granted a provisional B licence.

The point of this argument was that I could get a B licence without much difficulty on the basis of the experience I had, but I could only go through the examinations for it in England, and I was in the Persian Gulf. I couldn’t have got it when I left England; I wasn’t good enough. I knew that I could keep them talking for some months and in the meantime I could go on operating, and after that I might well find myself in England.

By that time, it was dawning on me that I should have to make a quick trip back to England before long to buy another aeroplane. There was far more work than I could cope with. I was flying four or five hours practically every day, and maintaining the aircraft and doing the correspondence for the rest of the time. At that I was only tackling the fringe of the job. It wasn’t only taking engineers about the country, though I could have used
a six-passenger machine on that to supplement the Fox-Moth. There was machinery to be taken out to places in the desert, drilling machinery to be fetched in for reconditioning, spare parts for trucks and bulldozers—all sorts of things, some of them requiring really large aircraft. Nobody was doing more than scratch the surface of the work that was offering, and over and above the lot of it there were things like the transport of pilgrims to Jidda and transport of food to relieve the perennial famines in the Hadramaut.

If I didn’t nip in and get myself established, someone else would come along and do it over my head.

On Bahrein aerodrome the local R.A.F. and civil air staff began to get quite interested in me. It was obvious at the end of the three months that, licence or not, I was on to a good thing and I was doing pretty well. British N.C.O.’s with the R.A.F. used to come along and watch me working with young Tarik, and suggest that they were due to be demobilized in a few months and what about a job? I never engaged one of them. I knew from my own experience the wages that you have to pay British engineers in the East, and I knew that if once I started on that sort of wage bill I’d be bust in no time. Moreover, I didn’t need them. I had all the ground engineer’s licences myself. Young Tarik, brown though he might be, was keen and quite intelligent, and I reckoned that with two or three more like him I could service several aircraft myself.

It was about that time that Gujar Singh turned up.

Gujar Singh was a young Sikh, who worked as a cashier in the Bank of Asia. He might have been twenty-six or twenty-eight years old at that time, and he was the fiercest thing I had ever seen. Being a good Sikh he never cut his hair, and he had a great black beard that stuck out forward from his chin in a manner that would have frightened any gunman trying to hold up the bank into a fit. When I got to know him better, and travelled with him, I found that he slept every night with a bandage round his head to make this beard grow fiercely outwards from his face. He wore European clothes and was usually dressed in a neat, light grey tropical suit, but he always wore a turban. Beneath this turban there was long black hair that reached down to his waist, coiled
round his head out of sight and fastened with a comb. He wore a plain iron bangle on his wrist, and beneath his jacket he wore a ceremonial dagger belted round his waist. He didn’t smoke or drink, because of his religion.