by Nesta Tuomey
When they went on board Captain Higgins invited her up to the cockpit for take-off and landing. Standing behind the pilot’s seat Kay thought she would never forget that first magical time nosing upwards through the fluffy candy floss clouds. She could hardly bear to tear herself away and when at last she went back to join the other hostesses with his genial, ‘Come up again for landing my dear,’ in her ears, she found them busily setting up snack trays and call-bells popping up all over the cabin.
It was a long exhausting day but fun going into the airports to have coffee and look around. One of the perks of being supernumerary was that she got to go into the airports on every turnaround, while the other hostesses took it in turns to stay on board and keep an eye on things. Kay enjoyed browsing through the bookstalls in Heathrow and found quite few titles that weren’t available at home. Even the variety of chocolate and sweets gave her a thrill as she paid for a Mars bar and slipped it into her kitbag to enjoy later.
They were fairly friendly, Kay thought, but Elaine Rooney was a bit of a pain, All she ever said was, ‘Do get a move on, Kay, we’ll be landing soon.’ Catriona wasn’t too bad. At least she stopped to chat every now and then and whenever Kay forgot what she was supposed to do, reminded her pleasantly enough.
Renagh Walsh was the nicest of the three. She shared tourist with them to Shannon while Catriona did first class. Renagh worked cheerfully and competently, taking everything in her stride. Unlike the crabby Elaine nothing was too much trouble and she even found the time to bring the teapot down one more time to a lady who swore she could ‘drink Lough Erin dry.’
With just over an hour and a half to distribute snacks and drinks – and with passengers with a thirst on them like Kay had never seen - it seemed as if they would never get finished and would be landing at the airport with all the trays and glasses still around the cabin. But miraculously everything was put away, leaving her plenty of time to make it to the cockpit for landing. Kay wondered if it could possibly match the thrill of take-off when with the gentlest of thuds, the wheels of the Viscount were on the runway and racing smoothly forward. Captain Higgins winked at her as he reached for his cap.
‘Now for coffee and a bun,’ he said, amazing her by how simply he regarded the landing of an airplane. It might have been his car he was parking on a busy side street.
By the time they had landed in London for the second time, Kay wasn’t sure in which direction she was headed anymore and on the last leg home, her feet ached so much it was an effort to stand up straight. Going home in the crew car some of the lighter moments of the day struck her and she chuckled to herself when she thought of the old farmer who had mistaken the cloaks compartment for the toilet and absolutely ruined Catriona’s gaberdine. Kay was only sorry it wasn’t Elaine’s.
As she alighted in Carrick Road, every muscle in her body was aching and her face felt unnaturally stiff from smiling all day.
‘Where to this time, Kath-leen?’ Ginny Halpin accosted her at the gate. ‘Oh now, Mrs. Halpin, you’d never guess.’
‘Go on, try me.’ It was the kind of conversation Ginny loved. ‘Who do you think was on board?’
‘Charlie Haughey.’
‘Even better .... Garry Hannon.’
‘That dreamboat! You’re having me on.’ ‘Honest to God.’
It was true. The pop singer had got on in London and thrust a scruffy anorak at Kay with a lordly instruction to hang it carefully. She had shoved it in the overhead rack but otherwise had no dealings with him. He had slept all the way to Shannon and when she awakened him with his snack, he had used a rude word explosively and resumed the foetal position.
Ginny was charmed. ‘A real hunky-dory that fellah, what I wouldn’t give for your chances. Yer know, Kathleen...’
Kay made her escape and staggered stiffly into the house, feeling if she had to be civil to another soul she would scream. She headed straight for the bathroom. Never did she enjoy anything so much as that lovely, long hot soak.
After the London/Shannon all other flights seemed easy by comparison. Kay went to Glasgow and Birmingham and other UK cities. Then she had her first continental flight. On turnaround in Amsterdam she enjoyed a delicious cup of creamy coffee imbedded with chocolate flake and returned home that evening with her arms full of tulips for Molly.
‘Fancy, in January!’ her aunt sighed, delighted with the gift.
One of the perks of air hostessing was undoubtedly the shopping. On a long turnaround in London, Kay and another hostess hopped on a bus to Hounslow where they indulged themselves buying frothy, sinfully expensive underwear in Etam’s.
Coming back through Customs Kay suffered a bad moment when Pat Macken lowered his big hands into her kitbag and, in the manner of one searching for diamonds among newlaid eggs, pawed his way carefully around the top and sides. But there was no real need for worry. Of all the Customs men, big, burly Pat was the most easygoing and half the time hardly bothered to get off his stool to search them.
‘I suppose you will be telling me next you have the crown jewels in there,’ he said with a grin.
With Pat, chances were even if you had nicked the jewels along with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ring, he would have let you off. All he wanted was a quiet life. Not so some of the other men with their sneaky habit of knocking off the hostesses’ berets in the hopes of catching them smuggling in cigarettes. To defeat them, Kay had got in the habit of hiding her contraband around her waist beneath her blouse swearing every time she would not risk it again. But of course, she always did.
Once or twice she went over to the canteen after flights to treat herself to steak and chips. The meals there were remarkably cheap and extremely tasty. But mostly she went home and took pot luck. Her aunt’s cuisine was a movable feast at the best of times and of late, it had become even leaner. The older Molly got the less interested she was in homemaking
When Kay got her third roster she was thrilled to see she had a night stopover in London. The flight captain turned out to be Simon Cooney, the Chief Hostess’s boyfriend, they had all heard so much about in training. He and the First Officer took Kay and the other hostess, Emer, to a meal in Soho.
Afterwards the four of them strolled around Trafalgar Square and eventually wound up in Downing Street to look at the wreath hanging on the door of Number Ten. Only that day the news of the Prime Minister’s death had been announced on the radio and as they stood in the lightly falling snow, Kay was reminded of an earlier remark of Molly’s ‘That old Winston Churchill was no friend to Ireland but you have to hand it to him – he’s a great politician.’
Standing in Downing Street , Captain Cooney struck a pose
‘‘We will fight on the beaches, we shall fight in the fields and on the streets,’ he intoned fiercely.
‘We shall never surrender,’ the First Officer took it up.
They were both not drunk exactly but nicely, Kay thought.
‘We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end,’ Simon raised his hand in a two- finger salute, speaking as if he had a plum in his mouth.
Standing on Westminster Bridge, they shivered and looked out over the water. Excited by the famous spot Simon put a hand on his chest and launched into, ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair,’ but soon ran out of steam.
Kay was amused. Obviously, he knew a lot of first lines and not a lot else. Earlier, he had made a thing of sitting beside her on the journey from Heathrow. Now in the taxi going back to the crew hotel in Richmond, he transferred his attentions to the giggling Emer. Kay didn’t mind. She supposed Captain Cooney was handsome in a florid, heavyset way but he didn’t appeal to her. And who did, she asked herself, trying to ignore the slap and tickle going on beside her. The dark, mature pilot in the Alfa Romeo? From the little she had seen so far pilots were either lecherous or fatherly. Which category the dark good-looking one fell into remained to be seen. Somehow Kay didn’t think it would be the latter.
When they reached the hotel, after a s
wim in the pool, they all went up to Emer’s room for drinks. Then Kay and the First Officer went to their respective rooms, while Captain Cooney stayed on with Emer. Flying home next day, Kay wondered if the pair of them had spent the night together and whether much of that kind of thing went on between crews in Celtic Airways. If it did, she couldn’t see herself taking any part in it. Kay was not prudish but she didn’t believe in sleeping around. At twenty-two, she was still a virgin and liked the idea of remaining one until her wedding night. She had of course, indulged in a certain amount of kissing and petting with the boys she dated - sometimes surprising herself by the strength of her sexual response - but she had stopped short on the safe side of passion.
During their first weeks flying, Kay met Sally a few times and they went dancing in the Olympic Ballroom, enjoying their nights out but meeting nobody they wanted to date. Sally was full of talk about a man she had met on a recent flight to Amsterdam. He had promised to ring her when over again on business and she seemed smitten by him. Kay had gone out a few times with Harry. She thought him nice and liked being seen in his Jaguar, but had no deep feelings for him.
One night she had a date with him but was put on reserve duty that afternoon. As she sat in the restroom turning the page of the thriller she was reading, Orla O’Neill came noisily in the door. Just back from Paris, she was in high spirits, her kitbag full of smuggled brandy, one half-bottle around her waist, the other snugly concealed inside her manual. Kay couldn’t help being a little horrified at what Orla had done to the hostess bible. Butchered, was the only word to describe it.
‘Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?’ she asked curiously.
‘Who cares?’ Orla grinned, knowing she would get out of it like she got out of all her scrapes, by using her wit, or lying solidly.
‘Mary Delaney,’ rostering came through like the voice of doom. ‘You’re needed on the Edinburgh flight.’
‘Oh no, I can’t!’ blonde Mary protested weakly. ‘I’m going to the theatre this evening.’ ‘Not now you aren’t.’ Even the microphonic distortion couldn’t disguise the malice in the disembodied voice.
A crowd of hostesses came in the door off their flights. ‘Sally!’ Kay cried delightedly.
With her was Betty, toting a huge bag of wool. She sat down beside Kay and announced that their meal allowances were shortly for the chop. Betty had become an ardent union supporter and was fast becoming indispensable to Check Beattie Burgenhoffer, chairwoman of the hostess union committee.
‘We’ll fight it, I suppose,’ said Sally.
‘Come to the union meeting on Thursday night and you’ll see.’
‘I have a date that night,’ Kay lied. While admittedly there had been a certain fascination in witnessing Beattie’s histrionic handling of hostess concerns at the one meeting she attended, she didn’t think future attendance would be high on her priorities list.
‘I’m in London that night,’ Sally said without regret.
‘Well, you can’t help that, Sally.’ Betty stared coldly at Kay. There was an air of flushed fanaticism about her thin features. ‘And there’s the matter of our flight requests. Hardly anyone is making use of them,’ she persisted seeing Kay’s dubious look. ‘‘It’s no skin off rostering’s back.’
In Kay’s opinion, if rostering knew you wanted a special day off, they were bound to refuse out of sheer cussedness. Much better, she believed, to request a longish duty the previous day which allowed for a rest day after it. Kay changed seats on the pretext of wanting to be nearer the heater. Let Betty draw rostering’s wrath, she thought, she would exercise her right to keep a low profile.
A braying sound like a malevolent donkey came from the squawk box, followed by an abrupt enquiry, ‘Is Kay Martin there?’
Kay jumped off the couch. Oh well, no Jaguar tonight.
FIFTEEN
Graham Penders sat in the pilot’s lounge and leafed through Time magazine. Yawning, he glanced at his watch and saw that there was another fifteen minutes to go before emergency drill. He hated time spent in the lounge when he was forced to listen to the asinine conversations going on between the younger pilots around him Worst of all was that fool Dan Tully, boasting, as he was doing now, of some conquest or other. A frown creased Graham’s forehead as Tully’s brash voice continued to assault his eardrums.
‘There’s a certain kind of dollybird,’ Dan was instructing two grinning Second Officers, ‘as soon as she says, “I don’t usually do this kind of thing,” boy have you got it made!’
. There was an abrasiveness about the scene that intruded upon his longing for quiet, offended his sense of what was fitting. He sat in the furthest corner of the room where Tully’s boasting voice was reduced to an irritating burr, and determinedly closed his ears, willing time to pass.
In April Graham was transferring to the trans Atlantic route and shortly before that he was contracted to go on loan to Karachi to fly eastern routes for a while. The most he would have to suffer was another two weeks of this he calculated. He controlled his temper with an effort and got up to change his seat. In the farthest corner of the room, Tully’s boasting voice was reduced to an irritating burr. He closed his eyes, willing the time to pass.
At that moment, Kay and Sally were crossing the tarmac on their way to emergency drill. Inside the huge hangar doors the Vickers Viscount was parked, metal steps pushed against the rear door. The girls climbed in quickly and moved down the cabin.. Behind them the aircraft was filling up as more crew arrived and took their places. A group of hostesses in slacks and sweaters sat in front of them, prepared for the task of sliding down escape-chutes. Neither Kay nor Sally had thought of that.
‘Oh well, they’ll just get an eyeful of underwear,’ said Sally blithely.
Kay grinned, glad she had a good lacy slip on. If they did have to go down the chute she hoped her nylons wouldn’t snag. Although hostesses were allowed two complimentary packs a week, she was always having to buy more
‘Hey, get a load of that,’ Sally nudged her as Captain Dan Tully shot down the aisle brandishing the emergency axe, in hot pursuit of a squealing hostess.
Kay turned to watch. Slim, dark and known as Desperate Dan, Tully was married, in his late forties and, according to the grapevine, so randy that for want of anything better, he would happily court the leg of a chair.
Seeing him in the water at ditching drill in the Marian baths the previous week, playfully tussling with a very tanned hostess, Kay’s heart had done a somersault. She had been convinced he was her pilot with the white Alfa Romeo, but soon realised while both were tall, dark and handsome her pilot was miles better looking.
Now watching Dan Tully stuff a corkscrew down another shrieking hostess’s back, Kay murmured to Sally. ‘He and Orla would make a good pair.’
‘Or Sandy,’ Sally chuckled.
A moment later, Captain Higgins appeared looking spruce and authoritative in uniform. With a smiling greeting, he took up position at the top of the cabin, one hand thrown casually up to grasp the overhead rack, the other dug comfortably in his pants pocked as he addressed them,.
Listening to his attractive voice explaining the mechanics of escape-chutes, Kay was painfully reminded of her own near brush with death on a recent Liverpool flight.
Funny how she hadn’t really been afraid at the time, she mused. It was only afterwards when she began thinking about it and realized how bad it might have been that she had begun to shake. She had attributed her calmness to the fact she wasn’t the only hostess on the flight. Normally on a Fokker Friendship she would have been, but on that particular day she was being checked out by Eva Hendricks.
Remembering, Kay frowned. The Check had arrived on board wearing a huge emerald engagement ring and stood aloofly by as Kay tussled helplessly with the rear door. From the beginning the Friendship door had been Kay’s bete noir. Unlike the Viscount, which had a simple locking device, it had to be hoisted up and positioned in a groove. Where exactly to set it down was the
problem. By the time the First Officer had closed it for her, the flight had been delayed for ten minutes – a fact which Eva had lost no time jotting down in her report.
When disaster struck Kay had headed to the cockpit to be told that the port engine was a gonner and they were going to try and put down at the RAF base at Valley Airport. At the time none of it had seemed real to her and she had had the weird feeling that it was some kind of test cooked up between the Captain and Eva to see how she would make out.
A sudden burst of laughter brought Kay back to her surroundings. Guiltily, she fixed her eyes on Captain Higgins, aware that she hadn’t heard a single word he’d said.
‘So, girls, it’s up to you,’ Ben was insisting. ‘Never forget that the passenger is always right and never more so than at thirty thousand feet.’
A roar of protest came from Beattie Burgenhoffer and her supporters at the rear of the cabin.
Ben grinned and held up his well-manicured hands, ‘I know... I know.’ This was the moment he loved, allying himself sympathetically with the lot of the hostesses while, at the same time, in a big brotherly fashion, laying it firmly on the line.
‘You don’t have it easy. Believe me, no one appreciates that more than we do. But look at it this way, if you can keep ‘em sweet - as only you charming girls know how (he threw the sop) - the whole thing can be sorted out later on the ground. Perhaps you don’t know this but flying produces peculiar behaviour patterns in humans. It can trigger epilepsy and migraine and don’t be too surprised that it can also make ‘em run amok.’
‘Just as we thought!’ Sally whispered, referring to their shared opinion that once off the ground, passengers suffered an air change into something, if not rich and strange, at least rare and parched.
