by Nevil Shute
“I took Mollie out of pawn again,” he said, a little bitterly, “and we got furnished rooms between Eltham and Lewisham, not very far from her people. And that year it went all right.”
He stared into the fire. “I was the proper city gent. Mr. Everyman. I wore a bowler hat and a morning coat like all the other stiffs, and carried a pair of gloves, and read the Daily Mail going up and the Evening News coming down.”
It seemed to have been a poor sort of job. From the first there was little chance that he could make a success of it; the clerks with whom he worked had forgotten more about business than he had ever known. He was unsuited for it temperamentally, and he was getting fifteen shillings a week more than the others, which didn’t make things any easier for him. And he was desperately hard up. He couldn’t live on his pay; his wife’s parents had to come forward again and make him a substantial allowance, and that got him on the raw. He told me all this that night.
He stuck it out for two years.
“I chucked it in the early summer of 1924,” he said, and shot the ash from his cigarette into the fire. “It’s the spring that gets you, in a job like that; when the days begin to get a bit warm and sunny, an’ you know you could make better money out in the clean country on an aerodrome.”
He was quiet for a little after that, and then he said: “We were right on the rocks by then, and not a chance of things getting any better. I was still on four pounds ten a week. The way I put it to the old man—I said I simply had to go where I stood a chance of earning a bit more money. It wasn’t good enough to stick on like that. He cut up pretty rough about it, but I was through with the City. Mollie went home again for a bit, and I went back to the old game.”
It was joy-riding again this time, as a paid pilot to a concern called the Atalanta Flying Services. The Atalanta Flying Services was a three-seater Avro, painted a bright scarlet all over. The pilot who had been flying her before had just cut off with all the loose cash in the kitty, and while they tracked him down Lenden got the job to carry on. This time, however, the directors put a secretary into the concern to keep him company.
“We picked up the machine at Gloucester,” he said, “where the other fellow left her when he vanished. There were four of us in the game. There was the secretary—a chap called Carpenter—and a ground engineer, and an odd-job man, and myself. We had the Avro, and a Ford lorry that was all covered-in with tarpaulins and fitted up for sleeping and living in, and a Cowley two-seater. Carpenter used to drive the Cowley on in front and get to the next town a day or so ahead of us, and fix up the landing-ground with the farmer, and get out the posters.”
He thought for a minute. “I dare say you’ve seen the posters,” he said. “We came all round this part of the country. We had ’em printed in red, very big and staring. Like this:
WATCH
FOR THE RED AEROPLANE!
You’ve seen people walking on the wings at the cinema, but have you ever seen it with your own eyes? Have you ever flown in an aeroplane at a dizzy height above the ground while a man walked coolly to the extreme tips of the wings?
NO!
BUT YOU CAN NEXT WEEK!
The Atalanta Flying Services are coming, with Captain Lenden, M.C., who shot down fourteen enemy machines in the war and is one of Britain’s most experienced airmen. The Air Ministry have certified that Captain Lenden is
ABSOLUTELY SAFE!
Flying daily from Shotover Farm, by kind permission of Mr. Joshua Phillips.
“And a lot more of the same sort of thing,” he said. “You know.”
Two very happy years followed. The job was one that suited Lenden; it was a country life with few business worries. The pay worked out at about four hundred and fifty, and that enabled him to make a respectable allowance to his wife, though he seldom had an opportunity of seeing her. With the Avro, the Ford lorry, and the Morris-Cowley, the Atalanta Flying Services went wandering, and for the first eighteen months wherever they wandered they made money. They were entirely self-contained.
“We did it this way,” he said. “We’d pick our field, and put up a fence of sackcloth round as much of it as we could. We charged sixpence for admission to see the flying. Just by the entrance we had the lorry, and we used it as a sort of office in the day. At night we used to picket the machine as close to the van as we could get her, and then turn in, all snug for the night.”
They went all over the country in the next two years, staying ten days at each little town. From Gloucester they worked down through Devon into Cornwall; then back along the whole length of the south coast, till in the winter of 1924 they found themselves in Kent. At Croydon they overhauled the machine and went north into Essex, and up the coast to Sheringham and Cromer. In 1925 they went right up the east coast as far as Edinburgh, and back through the Midlands; till in the spring of 1926 they found themselves again in Gloucester.
He glanced at me. “I don’t know that I’ve ever enjoyed a job so much as that, taking it all round. It was damn hard work. But it suited me—the life did.”
He stopped talking, and remained staring moodily into the fire. I realised that the next episode had proved less prosperous and left him to himself for a bit. The fire was dying down; I got up and threw a few more lumps on, and raked the ashes from the hearth. I settled down into my chair again and lit a pipe. It was about four o’clock in the morning.
“What happened next?” I asked. I wanted to hear the end of this story if it meant sitting up all night.
He roused himself, and smiled a little. “What happened next,” he said quietly, “was that Mollie left me.”
I wasn’t prepared for that, though on his own showing nothing was more probable. I said something or other, but he went on again without listening.
“It was my fault, of course. We’d never been able to have a proper home, or the kids we wanted. And one way or another I’d given her a rotten time of it. We hadn’t lived together for two years when that happened. There was a cousin of hers, a chap in the Navy … She was still a girl, you know—a good bit younger than me. I went down to see her at her people’s place.”
He was quiet for a minute, and then he laughed. “I came away out of it as soon as I could. There was a girl at Gloucester who got me out of that mess. Worked in an office there. She was a damn good sort, an’ her name was Mollie, too. I took her to the Regent at Cheltenham, and we spent a night there, and I sent my wife the bill. And presently I got a notice that she was suing for divorce….”
He sat brooding in his chair for a bit then, staring into the fire, immersed in memories. But presently he roused himself again.
“That killed my luck,” he said. “After that happened everything went wrong. We started off again from Gloucester to do the south coast, and at every place we went we showed a loss. At every ruddy place. Places like Taunton and Honiton, where we’d been really busy a couple of years before—if we got a dozen of them into the air it was all we did. People seemed to have got tired of it. We carried on that way for a couple of months, and then the directors got tired of it too. I brought the machine up to Croydon to be sold, and that was the end of that.”
He lit another cigarette. “I hadn’t got a home to go to then,” he said.
He said no more than that, but something in the way he said it revealed to me something of what that meant to him. I know now that he was a man of little stamina. In all his roving and uncertain life since the war he had always had a base, somewhere to retire to, to be alone with his wife and to regain his self-respect. I think his wife must have been a great backbone to him. He wasn’t the sort of man ever to make a name for himself alone, and in the loss of his wife he had suffered a grave injury.
“I had about fifty pounds in hand, and while that lasted I hung about Croydon touting for a job. But there wasn’t much doing there. Stavanger gave me a few odd taxi trips to do for him, but nothing regular. And then I went and did my Reserve training, and that carried me on for a few weeks.
“By
the end of the summer I was on the street,” he said. “It was either earn something or starve then. I got a job in a garage, as a fitter. In Acton. Two pounds ten a week.”
He grinned unpleasantly at me. “Temporary, of course. Just till something else turned up. I suppose that’s how everyone looks at it when they go down the drain.”
He told me about his life in the garage in little short, cynical sentences. From something that he said I gained a very clear impression that he had been drinking heavily ever since his wife left him, a circumstance which probably accounted for his failure to get a flying job. Unlike the other failures to which he likened himself, however, he hated the garage enough to rouse himself to get out of it. Possibly he gave up drinking—I don’t know about that. At all events, he told me that he began to look about for a chance to get out of the country. He thought that if he could get out to Australia he might be able to pick up a job in aviation again. He said he wanted to get out of England.
He could have got a free passage to Australia, but he didn’t know that.
And then a queer thing happened to him. He used to take a packet of lunch to work with him from his fifth-rate lodgings in Harlesden, and every other day he bought a copy of the Daily Mail to read in the lunch hour. And there, one day, he read an article about the Red Menace.
He lit another cigarette. “Bit of luck I got the paper that day,” he said. “I might have missed it. God knows what would have happened then—I was about through with fitter’s work. It said in the article that the Russians were building up the hell of an air service that was getting to be a menace to the whole of the rest of Europe. I’d heard somewhere or other that they were enlarging their service, but I’d no idea till I read that bit in the paper that it was anything like that. And then it went on to say how they were getting hold of British ex-officers and sending them out to Russia to train the Red Army in the latest tricks of aerial warfare, and what a sin and a shame it was that Englishmen should go and do that, and how the Government ought to stop it. It went on like that for a couple of columns. It said that they were paying as much as a thousand a year to these chaps.”
He lifted his eyes from the fire and stared across at me. In the firelight and the shadows of the room there was a momentary pause. “Well,” he said at last, “so they were.”
I stirred in my chair, a little uneasily. “You went after it, then?”
“Like a knife. So would you have done.”
He read that at lunch time, and he abandoned the garage and went straight off to the Public Baths in the High Street and had a sixpenny hot bath. Then he went back to his room and got out the most respectable of his old suits, and found he had a visiting card left, and he went straight off to the Soviet Embassy in Chesham Place.
He sat there in my armchair, staring into the fire for a minute and fingering the matchbox on his knee. “And it was all quite true,” he said. “I’d got away from all that muck, just when I was beginning to think I never would.”
The tone of relief in which he said that silenced me abruptly. It silenced me then, and it has done so ever since. For him, service with the Soviet meant a deliverance from hell, and a chance to get away and make a fresh start. That was a great injury that his wife did him when she went.
It was a sort of Polish Jew who interviewed him. He took Lenden through it pretty thoroughly, asking him the most searching questions about his war service. He was particularly anxious to know whether he had had any experience on postwar single-seater fighting machines. Lenden had done half an hour on one of the earlier Siskins, and made some capital out of that; for the rest he judged it better to speak the truth.
They sent him away with instructions to come back next day. In the interval they must have looked up his record at the Air Ministry in some occult manner, for they told him quite a lot about himself that he hadn’t mentioned before. Then they gave him a pretty stiff medical examination, and then they photographed him. And finally they presented him with a contract, drawn up and ready for him to sign; eight hundred a year for a two years’ engagement, with repatriation at the end of it. He signed it on the spot, and they gave him thirty pounds salary in advance.
“You could have knocked me down with a feather,” he said. “But they’ve treated me damn well all through. I know they’re dirty dogs in other ways, of course. I’ve seen it—a damn sight too much of it, out there. But they’ve always given me a square deal, and I don’t mind saying so. Jews mostly—all that I’ve had anything to do with. And you mostly get a square deal in business from the Jews.”
In three days’ time they sent him his passport and some tickets. He went out to Russia indirectly, travelling under an assumed name. There was a place up on the hills behind Ventimiglia, he said, the villa of an Italian profiteer, that seemed to serve as a centre for their activities in that part of Europe, and it was to this place that he was told to go. He reported there in due course, and the next day he was sent on through Austria and Poland into Russia. He had a fair command of languages that he had picked up through flying about the continent, and the travelling didn’t present many difficulties. From San Remo he travelled on a forged American passport.
They sent him first to Moscow. He did a little flying there, and in about ten days’ time he was sent on down to Kieff, where they were forming a squadron for instruction in advanced fighting.
“We’re a pretty mixed crowd,” he said. “Most of the instructors out there are Germans, but there were a couple of English there before me, and one or two French and Italians.” He shifted in his chair. “Never hit it off very well with the other two English out there—not my sort. The Germans aren’t a bad crowd, though. There’s one chap there that I got to know pretty well—a fellow called Keumer, who comes from Noremburg. Married, with two or three children. Like the rest of us—couldn’t get anything to do in his own place. Used to fly a Halberstadt in the war—in our part of the line, to. He’s a damn stout lad. We live in pairs out there, in little three-roomed huts, and after a bit I went and shared his place.”
He stared reflectively into the fire. “Kieff’s a good town,” he said. “It must have been better before the Revolution, but it’s a good spot still. They put us out beyond Pechersk, with the aerodrome about a mile from the river. Not much to do away from the aerodrome. You can go into the town—they lend us a car whenever we want it—and eat a heavy meal with the Germans. Or you can go toying with Amaryllis—there’s any amount of that to be had for the asking. Or you can go to the cinema and see Douglas Fairbanks and Norma Talmadge and Mack Sennett pretty well as soon as you can see ’em in London, with Russian sub-titles. And eat crystallised fruits. I tell you, there’s a glut of crystallised fruits in that town. You can’t get a proper cigarette for love or money, but you can get those damn things pretty well chucked at you. It’s a local industry, or something.”
He went on to talk for a long time about the type of machine that they had out there, and the ability of the Russian pilots. He was of the opinion that the best pilots were the Cossacks, and he said that the Russians were concentrating on trying to turn the best of their cavalry into fighting pilots. He thought that that was sound, and he had a very high opinion of their ability. The trouble was that they were so illiterate. Everyone coming to that course was supposed to be able to read and write; in actual fact their best pilots could do neither with any accuracy. Many of them had their horses with them; there were horse-lines along one side of the aerodrome.
“They fly into a fight … like riding a horse. No theory about it; but they’re good. They’ve got a feel for the machine from the very first. It’s a natural genius for the game. And they’ve got any amount of guts.”
There was a very long silence then. He sat there in that chair before the fire, staring at the coals, his hands outstretched upon the bolstered arms, his long black hair falling down over his forehead in the half-light. I thought that he was shivering a little as I watched him.
“That went on till about six we
eks ago,” he said at last. “I had a pretty good time of it out there, taking it all round. My pay comes regularly, and I send a good bit of it back to England. I arranged that before I signed the contract, and they stuck to their side of it. The money gets through all right. And I like the work. I’d have been there still, but for this job.”
I leaned forward and knocked my pipe out slowly against the palm of my hand over the grate. I knew that we were coming to the root of it now.
“This is for them?” I asked.
He didn’t answer that at once. “They’ve grown to trust me pretty well out there,” he said. “More than the others. They came along one day about the middle of last month, and made me an offer. They wanted a long night flight, or rather a series of night flights, done outside Russia. They offered me a thousand pounds sterling, with all expenses, as a fee for doing it.”
He paused, irresolute.
“Where’d you got to fly to?” I asked.
“Portsmouth,” he said laconically.
I had guessed something of the sort, I suppose. At all events, it didn’t come as much of a surprise.
He went on without looking at me. “I’m getting to the end of my time out there. I’ve saved a bit, of course—about a couple of hundred pounds. But that’s not capital. It wouldn’t go any way if I was out of a job. I tell you, half a dozen times in the last three years I’d have been on my feet if I could have raked up a thousand or so. Dawson wanted me to go in with him in that show of his in Penang, you know.” I didn’t know, but I was silent. “And I couldn’t, and he sold out to the Dutch as a going concern at three hundred per cent. And then Sam Robertson gave me a chance of going in with him on the Argentine Survey, and he’s doing damn well, I hear. And I’d have liked to have been with Sam again….”
