The Challenging Heights

by Max Hennessy

  A choking sound escaped from Zoë’s throat that was just recognisable as another plea to Harmer to close the throttles, but as she covered her face, the sound changed to a thin wail, hoarse as a frightened animal’s cry. It was possible to see Harmer in the cockpit. He seemed to be fighting with the controls and Dicken could see his mouth open, yelling with fright and fury, but, because of panic or some mechanical fault, he still didn’t seem able to slam the throttles shut.

  A shock absorber went, a wingtip touched and crumpled and the Bantam swerved again, a rattling, swaying monster heading straight for the wooden shed which had seen its birth. As a wire fence vanished under the wheels and stakes pierced the wings and fuselage, the whole machine began to disintegrate into flying fragments of wood, steel and fabric. A long yellow wing whipped into the air like the last agonised throes of a wounded bird, before the machine hit the side of the hangar with a crash that could be heard clear across the field.

  They heard the thud as the huge petrol tank went up, and a vast mushroom of yellow flame, edged with black, billowed out, sprays of burning petrol leaping into the air like sparks from a roman candle. The ruined side of the hangar fell in, bringing down the roof, and slowly, as if in slow motion, the two ends followed in a shower of splintered planks, effectively covering the aeroplane. In seconds there was a furnace of burning wood and petrol, the roar of whose flames could be heard all the way across the field.

  ‘Casey!’ Zoë’s voice was broken and harsh with torment. ‘Casey!’

  Then inexplicably she turned on Dicken, her eyes blazing, her face pink with rage and despair, her hands flying in desperate swings at his head.

  ‘You killed him!’ she screamed. ‘It was you who made him do it this way! You killed him! You killed him! Damn you, you killed him!’

  Part Three

  One

  There was a remarkable take-it-or-leave-it attitude in London. Jealousy and ambition were still paralysing promotion and Diplock, back in England, was very much in evidence.

  Yet there was no doubt about it, after the hoopla in America, aviation had finally stepped from infancy to adulthood. Lindbergh had started the progress with his lonely flight across the Atlantic, a scientific project despite its amateur background, and despite the disasters that had followed, despite the rejection of aviation by nervous people who only the year before had been doing the cheering, the world had begun to think about aircraft. Up to 1927 two wings had seemed the safest thing to fly with but now everybody was thinking of monoplanes, and Fokker, Ford and Junkers were even building them of metal. In England civil flying had even overtaken military flying and the only view of the future seemed to be that of the Supermarine company and the Schneider Trophy machines, sleek-winged planes with which they had pushed up the air speed record to an incredible 300 miles an hour.

  For Dicken it was a period of frustration and anger, and London was a dreary place that seemed to be full of unemployed demanding the right to work. The country’s share of world trade had fallen since the war, when those nations not involved in the struggle had snatched up what Britain had been obliged to let fall, but according to Foote, effusive at having rediscovered Dicken and Hatto after so long, even in the States the upswing was coming to an end.

  The RAF had finally survived the attempts by the navy and the army to do away with it and, like flying itself, was beginning to flex its muscles. In Iraq it had shown it could control a country at half the cost the army demanded and there were now more dissenting voices, particularly in the States, claiming that aircraft had made battleships useless.

  Because of the financial crisis, however, the RAF was still doing what it could with aeroplanes which were not only out of date but actually looked out of date. The new Victorias were only an improvement on the Vernons, which were really only an improvement on the wartime Vickers Vimy with which Alcock and Brown had flown the Atlantic. New fighters were due but they were still biplanes, built for aerobatics and, compared with the Schneider Trophy machines, desperately slow. RAF officers, travelling in Germany, saw what was going on there and came back indignant that their country was being taken for a ride.

  Germany was in a far worse state financially than England and Dicken had heard that Udet had gone bust again but it was well known that, though the school in Russia had finally closed, its graduates were all over Europe in jobs that gave no clue to their qualifications. Some of them flew little planes advertising factory products, some were actually in mounted regiments, struggling with recalcitrant horses and cursed for their lack of horsemanship.

  Of his wife Dicken knew practically nothing and what he knew he learned from his mother. In a way that was almost vulgar in a country that was staggering from one crisis to another in the depths of a depression, she was making money hand over fist from her chain of garages and was still thinking of long-distance flying. The fact that he knew she was quite incapable of it reduced Dicken to fury.

  For a long time he wondered whether to ask for compassionate leave to go to America, but, when no explanatory letters came, he decided it wasn’t worth it. She’d got the bug in her blood and would never be satisfied until she had at least one record, however trivial, under her belt. It was like a climber looking at a mountain. She had to tackle it because it was there and nothing in the world would put her off until she had.

  Then suddenly a New York Times arrived from Foote with a ringed story on the front page. GLAMOR GIRL BREAKS RECORD, it said, and there was Zoë’s face beaming at him from a centre-page spread. She had flown from Charleston to San Antonio in Texas then back to New York. It had been a safe flight mostly over flat land with an experienced navigator, but she had broken a record. The newspaper seemed more impressed by her good looks than by her skill as an aviatrix, but there was no getting away from it: the bug which had bitten her had finally turned into something real and genuine.

  After that, he saw her picture in the newspapers again and again. Because she’d lived in the States on and off for so long, the Americans liked to regard her as an American, but because she was British the London newspapers took her up, too, and her face, smiling and beautiful, was always appearing in reports of receptions for flying personalities. She was a wealthy woman now and clearly intended to use her wealth. She had always boasted that she intended to be a liberated woman and had finally become one. Her days of flying with the likes of Charley Wright, giving flips in soggy-winged Avros were finished. She was a personality and it was clear she considered she was getting more out of life than Dicken.

  Her rare letters all harped on the same theme. Why not leave the RAF and join her in business? There was never any question of leaving him. She seemed to think he gave her dignity and somehow, behind the requests there always also seemed to be an unspoken announcement of her need for him so that the question of a separation, despite the fact that they saw so little of each other, never arose. It was almost as if she suspected that civilian aviation hadn’t yet quite achieved respectability, that it was still too near to the barnstorming days, and that the men who hung around the civilian hangars, with their too-widely-cut breeches, silk scarves and beribboned flying caps, smacked more of fiction than fact.

  Since completing the staff course, nobody seemed to know what to do with Dicken. The old attitude that a man had to have the right background for high rank still prevailed, there was an overweight air staff, and more money seemed to be spent on building luxurious officers’ messes than was spent on aircraft, while, amazingly, committees of experts still haggled over such trivialities as whether RAF officers should wear spurs. In the scramble for promotion Dicken seemed to have been overlooked and, as the old bugaboo of his Merchant Navy wireless operator’s certificate rose again, he found himself in command of the Signals Section of the Flying Training School at Upavon where he had flown in 1917 before going to Italy.

  The pupils, full of the eleven-year-old effervescence of the Air Force,
wore an uncomfortable service dress of breeches and puttees and saluted everybody in sight who looked as though he might be an officer. During the morning, the field was always empty of aeroplanes until five minutes to midday, when it was filled with returning machines, each trying to get in first so that the pilots would be at the head of the queue for lunch. At one-thirty they all took off again and the aerodrome was quiet once more until on the stroke of four they all arrived back. It was a bit like ringing a school bell.

  Instructing was not popular. Pupils had a habit of flying their instructors into hills or into the ground, and tended to over-value their skills so that they lost control and crashed as they tried illicit aerobatics.

  It was part of Dicken’s job – a heritage of that almost forgotten ambition to be a radio operator at sea – to make sure that they were instructed in the mysteries of wireless. Most of them only wanted to fly and it was clear they regarded their instructors as outdated, outmoded and out of fashion. Because of his record and the number of medals he wore, they were more respectful with Dicken but still found it hard not to believe that they were the ones on whom the future depended.

  While at Upavon, Dicken met a man called Whittle who had entered the RAF as an apprentice at Cranwell and was now on an instructor’s course. He was at work on a new kind of power plant and when the weather was unfit for flying liked to discuss the principles he had in mind. Most people seemed to consider him mad because his idea was to produce an engine that provided its power not by propeller but by whirling fans inside a tube which would force hot air out behind. More than once his theory was laughed at but Dicken remembered Henry Ford’s ideas only too well.

  Because of his signals background, he found himself in command of an experiment with speech radio. The sets had to be adjusted by their operators to a high degree of sensitivity, so that conversations from air to ground or air to air always remained doubtful and resulted in lost aircraft wandering about the country and exercises being cancelled because of misunderstood messages. One pilot, receiving a message to patrol Halton at 15,000 feet from an airman who had a habit of dropping his aitches, spent the next hour patrolling Alton, a hundred and fifty miles away. It was decided very quickly that place names on a map were useless.

  But flying had changed. A pre-flight check was no longer a twang on the wires, a wiggle of the rudder and a kick at the tyres, but a scientific inspection following laid-down rules, checking the minutest details by the book. Pupils not only had to learn to fly but also had to understand navigation, rigging, controls, the engines that powered their aircraft, bomb sights, and the workings of machine guns and parachutes, and had to go solo after ten hours or be dismissed.

  It didn’t always work and occasionally there were funerals when the pupils, purple-faced in boots and puttees and well aware that the next time it could be one of them, went through the rigmarole of the slow march, their faces expressionless as the chaplain recited the service and the bugler blew the Last Post. Everyone had to attend to put on a show for the grieving parents and as Dicken retired to his office from one such event and hung up his cap, he turned to see Hatto sitting in his chair.

  ‘Willie! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Come to see you, old lad. They told me you were busy.’

  ‘Yes. Sealed and weighted coffin, because there wasn’t really enough to bury. Bit awkward when loving mothers insist on seeing their son for the last time. What are you up to?’

  ‘Got a job for you.’

  ‘Not another bloody signals posting, for God’s sake! I’d like to go back to flying.’

  ‘All in good time,’ Hatto said. ‘These days people like you and I have to accept that our job’s to leave the dangerous business of flying to youngsters. Youth’s gone, old lad. Long since. You try going up to 20,000 feet without oxygen. We did it regularly during the war – when we could get that high, that is – but I tried it recently with a crew of twenty-year-olds. They were fine but I had problems.’

  ‘And the job?’

  ‘I’m at the Ministry at the moment and my chief’s learned that the German Air Service, which is supposed to be defunct, is anything but. They’ve created a secret air section of the Reichswehrministerium and a hundred and eighty-six ex-air force officers have been judiciously planted throughout the ranks of the army, and they’ve been training men south-east of Moscow at Lipezk.’

  ‘I could have told you that ages ago.’

  Hatto looked startled. ‘Then why didn’t you?’

  ‘I put in a paper. It never saw daylight.’

  Hatto frowned. ‘You speak German?’ he asked.

  ‘I learned it when I was flying for Lord Ruffsedge. It was useful for picking up girls.’

  ‘And where did you get this information of yours?’

  ‘Erni Udet. When he was in his cups.’

  ‘Know him well?’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘That’s what we heard. How about going and having another chat with him? We’re thinking of sending you as temporary air attaché to the embassy in Berlin.’

  Berlin hadn’t changed much. It still had a lunatic atmosphere of indifference but now there was also an underlying element of bitterness, frustration and despair.

  The one thing the Germans found hard to accept was the weight of the reparations which had been loaded on them by the French, who, forgetting Napoleon’s depredations, had insisted that never again should the Germans be allowed to rampage through Europe. The Berliners were able to accept the loss of their colonies, even the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, but they couldn’t accept that the reparations they were expected to pay were to continue until 1988.

  ‘It means,’ the elderly German who stoked the boilers at the embassy told Dicken, ‘that not only will I pay them, but also my children and grandchildren when they grow to adulthood.’

  The one word on everybody’s lips was ‘Zeitgeist’, the quality of life, but the German capital’s idea of what constituted quality was strange.

  ‘Wie schön ist es hier zu leben,’ Dicken was told more than once. ‘How good it is to live here.’ But happiness seemed to consist of pushing morals to their very limit. At night, places like the Café Josty, the Café Luitpold, the Café Stefanie and the Romanische Café on the corner of the Tauentzienstrasse and the Budapestherstrasse were full of avant garde writers, critics and thinkers who, in their attempts to be ahead of their time, favoured all the things that had been frowned on for generations – sexual promiscuity, drugs, marital infidelity, pacifism, pornography, even incest and pederasty. Out to shock, they seemed fascinated by ugliness and lack of harmony.

  ‘Kunst ist Scheisse,’ Dicken heard. ‘Art is shit.’

  Udet hated the lot of them for their views. ‘This isn’t Germany,’ he growled. ‘Any more than the view that vas put over in the last century of plump, contented husbands mit their hausfraus, children and bocks of beer. Ve exist somewhere in between, like all other nations, mit the good and the bad among us. Here in Berlin at the moment, the bad has come to the top like froth on beer. Fortunately, they won’t last long when the National Socialists get power.’

  ‘Will they get power?’

  Udet shrugged. ‘The Nazis believe in a way the English never do in Rassenstolz – pride of race – and they’ve sworn to rebuild the Fatherland. And when they do, I shall be behind them – in spirit if not politically – because I’m a German.’

  ‘They’re not strong enough to gain power for years.’

  ‘Don’t you be too sure, my friend. They’re in favour of Nazionalgeist – regeneration of the Fatherland and the rekindling of German patriotism. And Germany is tired of the theoreticians and the November criminals who signed the Armistice in 1918. The Nazis are well aware that the people who’re running the country now are intellectuals and Social Democrats, and they know that Germany wants things to happen, not just
to talk about them happening. They’re tired of Leftism and the unemployment that’s dragging us down. I’ve made and lost half a dozen fortunes because of the state of the economy. Everybody’s suffering from an inferiority complex and they intend to change all that when they get power.’

  ‘Will they get power?’ Dicken asked again.

  Udet shrugged. ‘I give them a fifty-fifty chance,’ he said. ‘If only because they’re the only party which knows what it wants. This Hitler – they’ll shove him out of the way when they get power, of course, but they’ve got some muscle behind them. Ludendorff favours them. The Ruhr industrialists favour them. The army favours them. Several of our lot are vith them. Bodenschatz, who vas adjutant to the Rittmeister, Goering, who took over after the Rittmeister vas killed, von Greim, von Schoeneberg, Richthofen’s cousin, Wolfram, Jeschonnek, Loerzer, Milch, Osterkamp. All fliers, my friend, who want their place in the sun. If the Rittmeister – the Rote Kampfflieger – had been alive he’d have probably joined them, too, and for the same reason.’

  Dicken listened quietly. Udet had had too much to drink and was in a talkative mood. ‘They’re backed by the aircraft manufacturers,’ he pointed out. ‘Heinkel, Junkers, Messerschmitt – who see money in it for themselves, and, believe me, my old friend, they’re not thinking of biplanes. Their minds are on monoplanes – all-metal monoplanes with retractable undercarriages, like darts with wings. You and the Americans are still wallowing in memories of the last war. When I was last in the States they even produced some guy I’d shot down in 1918. Pure sentiment. Germany is not sentimental.’

  ‘Will you join them, Erni?’