by Max Hennessy
In spite of its size and the over-gaudiness of everything, there was a strange naiveté about it all, too. America had a newly acquired world importance after generations of isolation, and Americans, finding that what they said and did was suddenly important in other parts of the globe, were enjoying their importance as much as they were enjoying their prosperity; and it was this as much as anything else that appealed to Ira as he stood sniffing the warm perfumed air of history-haunted Charleston, so different from the shiny spanking newness of New York, absorbing it all with the excitement of a child at a circus.
He was a squarely built young man sweating in the humid Southern heat in a tweed jacket and trousers, his clothes ill-cut and creased as he stood guard over the pile of threadbare luggage on the pavement. Considering how far it had travelled, there was remarkably little of it.
‘This is quite a country you’ve got,’ he remarked gravely to the man with the tourer. The American looked up. He wore belted trousers marked with oil-stains, scuffed shoes, a lopsided bow-tie and a voluminous flat cap resting over one ear.
‘Yeah,’ he said solemnly. ‘Quite a country.’
He studied Ira warily, as though he were still a little dubious of foreigners, as though, even, he weren’t sure that the job Ira had arrived in the States to do couldn’t be done much better by an American.
Ira was aware of his unspoken distrust. He was hardly used to the idea of why he was there yet himself. He had been approached in a bar in the Bubbling Well Road in Shanghai by an American businessman he knew, speaking on behalf of a mutual friend in the States; a contract had followed, and then he had been hurried aboard ship and set in motion towards the United States. He hardly seemed to have drawn breath between the preliminary bout of talks and his arrival in Charleston.
The tourer’s engine caught with a roar and the American hurried to the steering wheel to adjust the throttle, then he stared round him, frowning and bewildered.
‘Where’s your buddy gone?’ he demanded. ‘He’s wandered off again.’
His brows down, he set off towards the thin youngster in the breeches who was staring open-mouthed at a two-horse carriage with a fringed awning and a black coachman, waiting nearby. His thin neck protruded so that his Adam’s apple stuck out like a promontory, and his beaky nose seemed to jab at the sunlit sky.
‘OK, Mr Shapiro,’ the American said, touching his arm. ‘The auto’s going. You can get in now.’
The beak nose swung round quickly and a pair of fierce black eyes glared up at him. Ira grinned. No one – no one in the whole world – pushed Sammy Shapiro about. Even Ira had learned to tread warily in his dealings with the hotheaded, prickly personality inside the frail frame.
Sammy was not very old, but he had long since decided that Samuel Amos Shapiro was master of his own fate and captain of his own soul – now, in the future and for ever more, amen.
He stared up at the taller man holding his arm, his gaze direct and baleful.
‘That’s a dangerous thing to do, Mr Woolff,’ he said gently, his face expressionless. ‘I once shot a bloke dead for doing that very thing when I wasn’t expecting it. Four-five revolver. Blew his brains all over the wall. Name of George Cluff.’
Ira laughed outright. It was an unblinking and outrageous lie and George Cluff had been a partner in an airline he and Sammy had once tried to run in Africa, until he’d grown despondent at their lack of success and walked out on them. But it was symbolic of the cool cheek that had got Sammy where he was. He had walked into Ira’s life seven years before as a skinny youngster in shirt and shorts and had eventually almost taken over his business affairs. It had been Sammy’s curiosity that had led them to China, where they’d run into the contract and the offer of a job in the United States.
Woolff was looking dubiously at him now, finding it hard to associate the virulence of his threats with his small frame and smooth cheeks. He glanced at Ira uncertainly.
‘Say, how old is he?’ he demanded in a heavy aside.
Sammy heard him. ‘I’m seven,’ he snapped. ‘It’s just that I’m big for my age.’
He moved to the car alongside Woolff, his walk a confident strut. ‘I think I’m going to like this dump,’ he decided aloud.
Woolff almost choked. ‘Dump!’ he said. ‘I guess we’d better get you guys to your hotel before somebody hears you!’
Sammy eyed him equably, quite unperturbed. Nothing ever intimidated Sammy. The only person he deferred to, the only person his independent temperament would accept as his acknowledged superior, was Ira, whose judgement he accepted in everything except the care of the aeroplanes which were his pride and joy. In his knowledge of these – largely self-taught though it was – he would defer to no one.
‘Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,’ he advised Woolff. ‘It’s a compliment. Where we come from, they rolled the pavements up at ten p.m. If they had pavements.’
Their belongings were strapped to the back of the quivering car now and they climbed eagerly aboard. As they moved from the shadow into the bright white sunshine, Woolff tried to start a conversation, speaking hesitantly as though he were a little shy and diffident of his own capabilities.
‘You guys are English, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘Yep,’ Sammy nodded.
‘This is a great country to work in.’ Woolff’s manner was cautious, as though he were proud of his own land but unwilling to force it down anyone else’s throat. ‘Courtney told me to meet you with the automobile. He’s in Philadelphia fixing some business.’
Sammy turned from watching a girl leading a couple of children across the road, her dress a vivid flame-purple colour.
‘Is he really a millionaire?’ he asked.
Woolff grinned, an unexpected spontaneous friendly grin that broke down the barriers of his shyness. ‘Not so’s I’ve noticed,’ he said. ‘I guess he did all right with those autos of his, but Chevrolet decided he’s dangerous and they’re paying for the sort of ads he can’t afford. He’ll be back tomorrow, full of ideas same as always, straining like a dog after a bone. He’s OK,’ he ended in mild tones, as though he regarded Felton Courtney with a great deal of affection and amusement.
He moved the gears of the big throbbing tourer and released the brake, and they headed through the town between a strange mixture of mechanical and horse-drawn transport. The sun was already hot and the shadows between the buildings were dark slashes like huge hatchet strokes across the glaring brightness.
Heading down King Street towards the harbour between antique houses with lacy iron balconies, Woolff stopped the car near the Battery in the shade of old oaks hung with Spanish Moss. Among them they could see the silhouetted shapes of ancient guns pointing out to sea. Beside one of the guns a squirrel squatted on its haunches, its forepaws to its mouth.
‘Thought you’d like to take a look,’ Woolff said shyly. ‘Civil War started here.’
From a nearby house they could hear the wail of a dance-band saxophone on someone’s radio and the hiss of wire brushes on a snare drum coming through the palmetto flags that hung still and dusty in the sunshine.
‘Kinda like this place,’ Woolff pointed out. ‘Nice and slow and easy. ’Course, it has its troubles. Workers ain’t so expert as they are in the North where I come from, but you get ’em cheaper, I guess. Come on. I’ll get you to your hotel.’
He started the car again and they headed along the shore and crossed the Ashley River to turn west into an area of swampland.
Woolff gave his vast cap a push so that it skidded to a point over his right ear. ‘One thing,’ he observed, ‘it’s flat around here. OK for flying.’
The sun on the open car made them perspire and Ira jerked off the heavy tweed jacket he wore and tossed it on to the seat beside him.
Woolff noticed that his shoulders were broader than he’d thought.
‘What’s he like, this Courtney?’ Sammy asked.
Woolff shrugged. ‘He’s OK,’ he said again. ‘He likes avia
tors. He was in France with the Lafayette Squadron.’
‘I met him,’ Ira said. ‘How is he? He was shot in the chest. Did he get over it?’
Woolff nodded. ‘I guess so. Left him with a tricky heart, I suppose, but he’s OK. He told me about you. He thinks you’re the best flier he ever met. He’s a great guy for aeroplanes. He started on autos after the war but he’s decided now he’d like to try his hand at selling to the airmail companies. That’s why he moved down here from Boston. Labour’s easier. Land’s cheaper. We’ve got an airfield out at Medway. Part of an old plantation. Had to take up the house ’n’ everythin’ else with it. Slave quarters. Everything.’ He looked up from his driving as they moved through a patch of sun-splashed shadow. ‘I’m factory manager and chief mechanic. Not that that means much. We’ve hardly got goin’ yet.’
Ira looked at him quickly. ‘Do you build many aeroplanes?’ he asked.
Woolff gave him a shy grin. ‘Some,’ he said. ‘Takes some doin’, though, gettin’ started. Everybody’s building planes these days. But I guess we’ll be OK when things start movin’. Especially now you’ve arrived.’
‘Yes,’ Sammy said. ‘Now that we’ve arrived.’
‘You’ll have a lot to do,’ Woolff went on.
‘Sure.’ Sammy’s interest was still on the palmetto leaves that pierced the shadows and the slow-moving group along the fringe of the sun-hot road. ‘You can’t get ready for a thing like this in five minutes.’
Woolff glanced at him. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Not a thing like this.’
They were both skirting the subject in their minds. Woolff was anxious to talk and so was Sammy, but they were both wary. Woolff looked at Ira and went on in a sudden burst of confidence. ‘We’ll do all we can,’ he said quickly. ‘All we can to help.’
His willingness, his sheer friendliness, struck a chord in Sammy and he grinned warmly in return. ‘We’ll need it,’ he said. ‘Everything you’ve got. Even angels if you can fix ’em. You don’t fly the Atlantic without help of that sort.’
Woolff’s plump face grew abruptly sober as Sammy spoke. Though he wasn’t a pilot himself, he’d worked on airfields long enough to know something about the risks of flying. He was aware of its mystique, that knowledge of bright sky and dazzling cloud and solitariness of spirit – and a certainty of danger! – that people who never left the ground would never fully understand. He knew enough about aeroplanes to feel proudly that the men who handled them, smelling as they did of dope and the other unfamiliar scents of their profession, were a race apart, men not quite of the earth. It seemed to Woolff – a humble, honest, sincere young man who knew his trade and entertained no delusions about it – that they took their lives in their hands every time they lifted their wheels from the grass of the cow-pastures from which they flew, that they possessed a special knowledge denied to all other men. They knew exactly what their fragile, weather-dominated machines of wood and fabric could do and how far they could be pressed in an emergency. Yet in 1927, because nothing was certain about flying, they were still sometimes terribly wrong enough to die.
He even knew about aviators’ deaths – a jolting ride, as often as not, under a stained tarpaulin to the back door of a village store somewhere out in the sticks, and a screwed-down coffin hastily made by a local carpenter. Aviators’ coffins were always hastily made and always screwed down and the relatives were never allowed to see inside.
Woolff’s round good-humoured face was grave as he took his eyes from the road ahead and glanced obliquely at his passengers with an expression of bleak honesty and unreserved admiration. They seemed surprisingly untouched by the implications of what Sammy had said, apparently accepting the dangers as part of the way they earned their living. As they gazed unconcernedly around them, Sammy’s eyes were dark, Ira’s blue with the deep tints of Cornish sea, and Woolff nodded slowly.
‘I guess it isn’t every day a guy gets picked for that,’ he agreed. ‘France is a long way away and you’d need twice Orteig’s twenty-five thousand dollars to get me to try it.’
Chapter 2
When Raymond Orteig, the French manager of a group of New York hotels, had made his original offer of 25,000 dollars to the first man to fly non-stop between Paris and New York there had been no takers. With the world still drawing its first relieved breaths after a devastating war, this was hardly surprising since no one had yet managed to build an aeroplane of sufficient range and power for such a journey. The distance was too great and, with the machines that then existed, there was no margin for error. Under the best of circumstances the odds were overwhelmingly against success.
Machines had been lifted across the Atlantic, of course – in easy stages just after the war – two American round-the-world Douglases and a Navy Curtiss flying boat. But there had originally been three Douglases. And the NC boat had been the sole survivor of four. Despite the biggest headlines since the war and the battleships stationed at intervals all the way across, one of the flying boats had been battered beyond repair at her moorings by a gale before starting, and two had had to give up before they had even reached the Azores.
And this wasn’t the end of the story. Locatelli, the Italian, had been forced down by fog between Iceland and Greenland; Raynham and Morgan had crashed on take-off; and Hawker and Mackenzie-Grieve, despite a flight of over a thousand miles, had still had to ditch in the sea. Only Alcock and Brown had successfully made it non-stop between the two continents, and even their flight – only across the narrow northern neck of the ocean between Newfoundland and Ireland – had been through fog and storms so violent the sleet had chewed pieces out of their faces and at times they had hardly known which way up they were flying.
By the time the offer was renewed for a further five years, however, things had changed considerably and there had been an immediate rush to take part by men with reputations made in the war against Germany. The first to register had been Paul Tarascon, a crippled Frenchman, whose chosen partner was François Coli, a one-eyed expert on Atlantic navigation and meteorology. Close behind had come two more Frenchmen, Drouhin and Landry, with a Farman Goliath in which they had already set up an endurance record of more than forty-five hours’ non-stop flying.
During a trial flight, however, Tarascon’s big Potez had crashed in a storm and Tarascon had barely escaped with his life. As an economic crisis in France had drained away the backing for a second try, René Fonck, perhaps the greatest name of all in French aviation, had decided, following a visit to the United States, that only there was money likely to be available for an attempt on the Atlantic. What was more, he had realised that, since the prevailing winds blew from west to east, New York, not Paris, was the obvious place to start.
He was not alone in his conclusions and a group of investors in America had already persuaded an emigré from Russia, Igor Sikorsky, to build a big two-engined machine which was at once offered to Fonck. A former stunt pilot, Clarence Chamberlain, had also indicated that he was looking for a machine for the attempt, and the commander of the Massachusetts Naval Reserve Station at Boston, Noel Davis, had said he would enter the competition with a tri-motored machine built by Anthony Fokker, the chubby Dutchman who had constructed warplanes for the Germans and had managed to smuggle not only his fortune but all his leftover machines, engines and spares into Holland just in time to prevent them being seized by the victorious Allies as reparations. Though neither of these last two ventures had come to fruition, Fonck had actually reached the point of take-off when his attempt had ended in tragedy and death.
Thus, the year 1927 had begun with the broad Atlantic still unconquered, while the competition had a new and evil reputation that seemed ready-made for those newspapers that preferred scandal to fact and bloody crashes to solid achievements. The dangers had become better known than the aims, and the failures more publicised than the solid advances in technology and skill.
Nevertheless, the new year had brought a fresh batch of contenders, all of them undeterred by the
horrifying end to Fonck’s attempt and Alcock’s stories of ice, frozen sleet and fog.
In France, the one-eyed Coli now had a new partner in Charles Nungesser, a wartime contemporary of Fonck’s, a man with seventeen wound scars and thirty-nine decorations and a reputation as a pilot second to none. In America the competitors ranged from Clarence Chamberlain, Lieutenant-Commander Davis and an unknown airmail pilot, to Richard Byrd, whose experience included the almost incredible feat of flying over the North Pole. Despite the crashes and the casualties, the Orteig competition was still very much in the news and very much the centre of controversy.
* * *
For some time nobody spoke, as though they were all avoiding the subject. They all knew that, despite the enthusiasm and the new contenders, the prospect of success was still a bleak one. A sea obscured for long periods by fog and storm and the business of getting off the ground the vast load of petrol that would be needed for such a tremendous flight were problems that had not diminished with the passage of time.
As the big car left Charleston behind them, Woolff was silent and seemed to be concentrating on his driving, as though it were essential that he prove to Ira and Sammy that in this at least he had a skill equal to theirs.
He handled the heavy car easily, holding it tightly to the inside of every corner and changing gear skilfully, threading in and out of the traffic without losing speed.
‘She’s an English Sunbeam,’ He broke the silence almost reluctantly, but as though he felt it was his duty to make his passengers feel at home. ‘Or she was until I redesigned her. She’s OK but she’s sometimes hard to start. I’ve even had to drip ether into the cocks of the cylinders. Sometimes I guess it would be cheaper to take a cab. I used to do some racing once. Indianapolis.’
He became silent again, squinting into the sunshine. ‘Never was any good,’ he went on shyly. ‘Always thought too much of what I was doin’ to the engine. Then I got the flyin’ bug and went in for designing aeroplanes instead.’
