Andrew Wareham
When Empires Collide
Innocents At
War Series
BOOK ONE
Digital edition published in 2016 by
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When Empires Collide
Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Wareham
All Rights Reserved
Contents:
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
By the Same Author
Introduction
When Empires Collide: As The Great War approaches, teenage pilot, Tommy Stark joins the embryonic Royal Flying Corps to train for the conflict. Never far from his mind is his ‘Monkey’ otherwise known as squire’s daughter, Grace. They had been friends since childhood, and as war looms their friendship blossoms into something deeper. With flying exams passed, Tommy is sent to France with the Corps as it haphazardly plans to do battle in the skies above Europe.
Best read in series order
Editor’s Note: Andrew’s book was written, produced and edited in the UK where some of the spellings, punctuation and word usage vary slightly from U.S. English.
When Empires Collide
Chapter One
“Happy Birthday, Tommy!”
Tommy Stark took the little parcel thrust abruptly, awkwardly into his hand. He opened it to find a palm-sized square of crimson silk, neatly hemmed and with ‘Birthday wishes, Eleventh November 1913’ embroidered in white and gold; hours of painstaking work.
“Thank you, Monkey! I shall keep this in my wallet, forever.”
Grace Moncur-Fisher-Hallows – Monkey since childhood - blushed as scarlet as the silk; at fifteen she was three years younger than Tommy, living in the Big House just a furlong up the lane from the Starks, who were second-greatest landowner of the parish. She was growing up, Tommy realised, would soon be a young lady, and a pretty one, too; for the first time he actually looked at her, rather than simply accepting her as his friend who he had ridden with and played with forever. She was growing taller and starting to get a shape – he would not even in his thoughts express that idea more clearly – and was somehow becoming slimmer as well, and showing a handsome face, the high cheekbones and grey eyes striking under that mass of jet-black hair. There was a lot to think about, suddenly, and he wanted time to get used to the fact that she was not a little girl, not any longer.
“I have to go, Monkey. Father will be waiting for me down at the field. He said he would be ready by midday!”
“Be careful, Tommy!”
Tommy made no reply, his face clouding over.
“It’s Father who needs to take care, Monkey, if only I can persuade him!”
He turned away, stepping into the car – a Sunbeam, his own, given him by his father two years before and looked after lovingly. There was an age limit for drivers, but Tommy had been born in America and had never received an English birth certificate and consequently his age was whatever he said it was; he had learned to drive in his father’s first Lanchester as soon as he had been tall enough to see over the steering wheel. Father maintained the car for him – he was a self-taught mechanic, a mining engineer in fact, with a natural, untrained aptitude for things mechanical that Tommy had not inherited. Tommy was far the better driver though, and a vastly more skilled pilot than the Old Chap – he had light hands and a feel for the air which his father simply lacked.
Tommy had been flying for nearly four years – again, there had been no practical limitation on the age at which he could become a pilot. He had held a licence since first they had been introduced. His father had been one of those fascinated by flying, and had made the money and the leisure to build for himself, had produced already three adequate biplanes that would take the air, potter about for half an hour and then land again, provided the wind was not too high; he was determined to do better, to make his name with the Stark 4, a machine that would be bought by the Royal Flying Corps and could be sold abroad as well. There would be a Stark factory, a flying empire, one day an airline to carry passengers – provided his new aircraft did the trick; he had talked at length to his son, who much feared that his enthusiasm had overtaken his caution.
Tommy waved as he pulled away, accelerating gently for the lane was surfaced with gravel and wheel spin would throw up a painful shower of stones. Monkey watched him go, heart in her face, had there been any to see; she waved as he rounded the bend, on his way to the airfield and, she much feared, to risk his life again. She turned and went inside to her room, sat down to the easel where she was trying, not for the first time, to make a portrait that would satisfy her, that would be good enough. A young man in a pilot’s ankle-length leather coat, looking up to the sky; quite tall, thin, for he had yet to fill out on chest and shoulders; fair-haired and blue-eyed with a strong hooked nose, like the pictures she had seen of the Duke of Wellington; wearing one glove and holding the other. It was accurate, she thought, and dead – she did not have the ability to make the portrait glow in the way that the man himself did, in her eyes at least.
She put the canvas away, turned to her books. She was educated at home, her parents having no wish to send her off to one of the boarding schools, and a local lady who had retired just a few years before from the teaching profession came every afternoon to work with her. Miss Armthwaite did not approve of Tommy; she was wise enough to know her charge’s feelings, and was quite certain that the young man would break her heart, probably by dying in one of his silly flying machines. Better for the girl if she fixed her attention on some other young chap, a sensible squire or gentleman farmer, but she much feared she would not do so.
The field at Brooklands was no more than fifteen miles distant, little more than thirty minutes through the lanes. Tommy had been going there almost every day since the first planes had flown from the grass strip and had watched, and been part of, the unplanned growth in the centre of the motor-racing circuit that had turned it into the home of English aviation. Designers and engineers had come together there simply because they wished to talk to each other, to discuss their ideas, to share knowledge, occasionally to borrow each other’s technical skills to turn a drawing into reality. Sopwith and de Havilland were there, and several dozens of lesser known, and wholly unknown, innovators of the new aviation industry.
Joseph Stark had built a workshop and a small hangar there as well, and had equipped his premises with machine tools and a pair of skilled tradesmen as employees, which had attracted attention as the majority of the enthusiasts were permanently short of
cash. He had become well-liked for his willingness to help, to allow other aeronauts into his shop and onto his lathes and grinders and drills and machine-saw. Tommy had accompanied his father, had become part of the background, as it were, and had absorbed flying as he grew up. At fourteen he had sat in the second cockpit of one of Sopwith’s machines, acting in effect as ballast on a testing flight; a month later he had been shown the controls. By the end of that summer he was flying whenever he could, testing out the machines produced by his father and others, sought out to assist because he was lightweight but also had a delicacy of feeling for the controls that most envied; he became known as perhaps the best pilot among them. Mostly they thought he was good because he had grown up with the aeroplane; flight was natural to him in a way that it could not be to an older man learning new tricks.
Joseph Stark knew that he was in no way to be compared to his son as a pilot; he was proud of the boy, and frightened for him. Planes were not mechanically reliable: engines failed; control wires snapped unpredictably; most commonly, innovations that should work did not. Add to that the unpredictable English weather that could turn a calm summer’s day into half a gale in the space of a very few minutes; a plane could take off in bright sunlight and be engulfed in a storm before the pilot had time to bring it down again. The death rate from accidents was not negligible.
Tommy knew he was a better pilot than his father; he knew as well that he would never be an engineer or designer – he lacked the talents. To him, just eighteen, it seemed entirely logical that the Old Chap should make the planes and that he should fly them. To the argument that the first flight of any aircraft was when the unforeseen problems occurred he replied that the need for a good pilot was so much the greater – he might bring the plane down where a lesser man would crash.
The Stark 4 was ready to go, had been wheeled out for its first flight; as always there was an audience, every other man on the field dropping what they were doing and coming to watch. It was wholly the province of men, although Tommy had not noticed the fact, for it was only very recently that he had discovered the existence of women. He did notice that the audience was not uncritical; for every admiring glance at the new plane there were two or three shaking heads.
Tommy was uncertain of the design himself, but he had no basis on which he could rationally condemn his father’s brainchild.
It was a monoplane, as Bleriot’s Channel-crossing machine had been and many others were; no immediate grounds for objection merely because it had only one wing; in England Bristol and Handley-Page built monoplanes while the French had their Morane-Saulnier, which was said to be very fast, and the Germans their Taube types, which were rumoured to be a model of reliability. The machine was configured as a parasol, the wing high above the fuselage, offering maximum visibility to pilot and observer. The engine was one of the new Sunbeams, which did not perhaps have the best name in the trade; very good at building cars but they had not yet quite mastered the aero engine and its demands for continuous high revs. The lines were clean and the plane looked speedy; good looks and good performance quite often went together in the worlds of fast cars and yachting, for example. The problem was that the construction seemed just the least bit frail, the wings depending on a single main spar that was not perhaps especially strong. The rudder was small as well. A set of wires ran from a central point to work the ailerons, to shift them to the correct position for take-off and landing and for banking to make a turn; the wires were very thin and their mountings were small, no doubt to save weight.
Tommy had pressed his father to allow him to take her up first; he weighed little more than eight stone, less than one hundred and twenty pounds in his leather flying coat, while his father, who was more than fifty, had spread from his youthful figure. His father had insisted that he would take up his own plane: it was his piece de resistance, the machine that must make his name, and both their fortunes, and Tommy would not start the argument again in front of a crowd.
He watched the mechanic from the workshop topping up the petrol tank, standing on a step ladder to reach so high.
“Full fuel tank, Father?”
“Eight gallons, my boy. I shall give her a run for ten minutes, that’s all, but it allows enough to get across to one of the racecourses if needs be.”
There were three big courses within thirty miles of Brooklands, each of them with flat grass that could take an aeroplane in an emergency.
“So be it, sir. The wind is light and no sign of cloud, which is rare in November. A cold, dry day – better far than the warmth of summer. More lift in this air and less chance of the engine overheating.”
Testing in the hangar had shown that the engine could run hot on the ground, in the few minutes between starting-up and take-off. They expected that the rush of air in flight would solve the problem, provided it did not seize up first.
“I’ve had an idea for improving the placing of the radiator, Tommy. I’ll talk about it when I come down.”
The Old Chap buttoned up his coat and climbed into the rear cockpit, putting on his goggles as he sat and then tightened his lap belt. He gave a thumbs up to the mechanic stood ready to swing the propeller, almost as tall as him, caught the engine as it fired and opened the throttle slowly. Tommy grabbed the rope to the chocks, pulled them away from the wheels as he waved his hand.
The plane was facing into the wind and the Old Chap gave the engine full throttle and taxied away, sat level on the very modern tricycle undercarriage.
Sopwith was there; he had been one of the head-shakers.
“She’s slow unsticking, Tommy!”
“I think my father wants to have speed in hand before he takes her up, sir.”
The plane must have passed forty miles an hour before the Old Chap slowly pulled back on the stick, lifting her off in a slow climb over the concrete banking of the race track.
“She’s wobbling, Tommy! The rudder’s flexing, look. She’s hunting, wavering side to side.”
Tommy watched, able to do nothing, trying to put a good face on it.
“She’s out of balance, sir. The wingtips are shaking, I think. It might be just the speed she’s doing, setting up the wrong vibrations, what do you call ‘em, harmonics, is it?”
“Could be…”
It was the boy’s father up at three hundred feet now; it would be cruel to deny him hope, even for a few seconds.
The engine coughed and stuttered as the Old Chap throttled back as he levelled off.
“Don’t open up, Father…”
Tommy would have reduced power even more and put the machine, hopefully, into a glide while the engine burned off the fuel in the cylinders. The elder Stark pushed the throttle full forward and tried to increase speed; the engine flooded and stopped.
“The fields are ploughed, but if he can line up with the furrows he can still get down, Tommy.”
“He’s trying to bank, sir. He’s trying to turn back!”
Flying was too new to have many rules; one of the very few, and the most inflexible, was ‘never turn back’. If the engine failed on take-off – which was one of the most likely times for failure, as power was first applied – then keep flying straight, whatever was on the ground in front.
Almost invariably, a turn with a dead engine resulted in a crash, for lack of speed to create an airflow over the wings. They watched for less than five seconds as the machine started to bank to the right and then flipped onto its side and swung nearly to the vertical and down, nose first. They started to run, knowing there was nothing to be done. The thump of the crash was followed by the explosion of the almost full petrol tank, an immediate cloud of smoke.
The remains were less than half of a mile away, in farmland, ten minutes through the mud and over two fences. There was little point to hurrying and they slowed down as they came in sight of the pyre. Perhaps fortunately, the Old Chap’s body had not been thrown clear by the impact and there was very little of him to be seen.
“Full tank, Tommy
?”
“Eight gallons, sir. All-wood construction, poplar and ash, and doped fabric. He was using shale oil as a lubricant as well.”
The older man took charge; the boy had enough on his plate, simply coping with watching his father die. Tommy was white-lipped, forcing himself forward, to do all that a man should; he was Mr Stark now, Master Tommy no longer. Sopwith respected the boy’s – the young man’s – guts, but there was no need to push himself too far.
“Don’t go any nearer, Tommy. There’s nothing there you want, or need, to see. Back to the yard, and I shall telephone the police station and then call on our undertaker. We should bring a doctor to the scene, so that there can be a death certificate for the coroner. Do you know the name of your father’s lawyers? They will need to read the Will and organise probate and arrange for everything to be put into your name. There’s quite an amount of land, is there not?”
Tommy looked blank for a moment – this was no time for agriculture. Then he realised that Mr Sopwith knew nothing of the family; few outsiders would.
“Three large farms, sir, and two small – and none of them coming to me!”
“But…”
“My father was married twice, sir. I have a brother, perhaps twelve years older than me. I have never met him, know his name only, Joseph Stark, after my father. I will inherit an income, so my father explained to me last year, but the house and land goes by entail. I do not know all of the details – my father seemed to think there was no hurry to inform me of them. I am within reason certain that I will not be welcome in the Lodge when my brother is given the keys.”
“There will be a room for you at my place while you settle yourself, Tommy.”
“Thank you, sir. I may well accept that offer for a few days. All must wait until I know just what state my affairs will be in. Perhaps some of the neighbourhood will wish to accommodate me for a day or two and courtesy may demand acceptance – I do not know, I am afraid.”
Andrew Wareham Page 1
