I Can't Stay Long

by Laurie Lee

  The great, Parisian, Place-Pigalle, pseudo centre of Beirut’s night-life is, of course, the Casino du Liban. It stands on a sharp cliff-edge about fourteen miles north of the city and is well understood to be an imperative for tourists. It is a mythical projection, tinged with Orient wealth and wickedness, offering the twin attractions of gambling and women. It is not as sinful as it sounds. Gambling is a State monopoly and to enter the gaming rooms one must show one’s passport. The main cabaret, held in the Salles des Ambassadeurs, struck me as being brave but derivative – scenes echoing Tannhäuser, Hollywood in the ’thirties, the Lido in Paris, and the Ziegfeld Follies; gorgeous girls whizzing up and down in golden cages, cascading waterfalls and dissolving stages …

  I found a place more to my liking in the somewhat shabby Fontana – sited incongruously opposite the American Embassy. This is considered by some to be a ‘working-class’ night-club: bare floorboards, plastic decorations, sagging balloons, and a wooden platform at the end of the room. It struck me as pleasantly sinister, down-at-heel and invigorating. You could sit at your table all night for the price of a bottle of beer. On the stage a small orchestra, dressed in European clothes, played excellent Arab music. There were two virtuoso violinists, lute, pipe, drum and cymbal, and a male singer dressed like a gas-meter reader. He was later followed by a full-figured beauty who poured passionately into the microphone husky throatfuls of desert desire and madness.

  These popular songs quickly heated up the audience, which was mostly noisily male. One or two glowing bubble-pipes were handed round to the customers. The night blew thick and scented from the sea. Nearby, two old tribesmen, inflamed by the beer and the music, were rapidly going off their heads, thumping the floor, whinnying and whistling, and flashing delighted teeth. A young hostess by the door sat with her dark head in her hands, waiting for something to happen to her. A giggling crone, in a shawl, slowly circled the room selling bunches of jaded flowers.

  Just before midnight, the orchestra built up to an orgasmic crescendo, and the belly dancer strode on to the stage. She had all that the audience could wish for – the cool face of a twelve-year-old, the broad beam of a tribal mother, a belly fruitfully rounded and erotically pitted, and a waist as loose and vibrant as a virgin’s.

  The girl wore a brief shiny garment of gold-tasselled blue, reminiscent of a Harrod’s lamp-shade. And young as she obviously was, I was fascinated by her expertise, her knowing air of carnal remoteness. Physically she was superb, her richly shaped body the result of generations of deliberate desert breeding. Technically her dance was as traditional as her body: the face blank and receptive, the shoulders steady and broad, and below them the loins presenting such a hypnotic offering of herself that the old tribesmen behind me were soon howling like dogs.

  Beirut is a good place to visit, and a sybaritic place to enjoy; but beneath its almost frantic vitality, its meeting ground between East and West, its neutrality and tolerance, the worm of intrigue grows fat.

  The day after I arrived in the city, a Sabena aircraft was held to ransom in Israel by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. By guile and gunplay, the Israelis wiped out the hijackers in the plane – the only way to deal with them, they said. ‘Manic,’ said Beirut journalists. ‘They gambled the lives of a hundred innocent passengers.’

  A week in Beirut was long enough to meet members of the PFLP, whose headquarters are in the Lebanon. Sympathizers drifted in and out from all parts of the world. Weird ‘training’ routines were being carried out in the mountains.

  It was the day after I flew back to London that three young Japanese gunmen massacred sixty-eight air-travellers in the customs hall at Lydda. A reprisal, it was announced, for the earlier killing of the Palestine guerillas. The surprising thing was that everyone was surprised.

  Concorde 002

  When I left home in my youth it took me two years of foot-slogging and scheming to get from Gloucestershire to the north of Spain. The other day I travelled practically the whole of that distance – and back – in one hour and forty-five minutes.

  I did this in the Concorde 002, flying from its Cotswold test-base near Fairford; and although it meant reaching heights and speeds to which my senses had never before been subjected, my most tangible memories are still more of the take-off and landing than the supersonic part, which remains little more than an airy nothing.

  To be ready and early for the trip, we put up the previous evening at a comfortably coal-fired Fairford hotel. The night was wild and howling with Shakespearian augurs, and next morning we found windows blown in and chimney-pots scattered – not from sonic booms but from a Force 8 gale.

  ‘Never ever known no wind ever blow like it never,’ said the chambermaid. ‘Not never in all my days.’

  In the distance, as from the sky, I could hear a thin ghostly wail. Perhaps the flight would be cancelled? My spirits rose.

  ‘Oh, no, he’ll fly,’ said the girl. ‘Or so I expect. They bin warmin’ ’im up since seven.’

  We drove out to the base, which is speculatively shared between the RAF and BAC. Typical airfield, typical cold slap of upper Cotswolds, typical petulant winter’s day – water-tanks on stilts, huts roofed with bent iron, wet concrete, birds flying backwards.

  A handful of security police filtered us through to the Press Centre building, where we found we’d arrived too soon. A girl asked us to sign something, probably a disclaimer. Then a young man called Peter bustled in and took charge.

  ‘I only just heard,’ he said. ‘So I popped over from Filton by Dakota.’ He shook the rain from his hair like a terrier.

  Would we fly? Yes, he thought so. There was low cloud, strong head-winds, but the Concorde was still warming up outside.

  Ever since breakfast we’d been aware of it; a presence, not an intrusion, a continuous sound in the air. A relaxed, high-pitched purring of steady power, the Concorde waiting, the breath of the dragon at rest.

  Peter from Filton suggested we went out for a look. They were towing the plane back from the end of the runway. It approached us side-on, gliding slowly past, and I remember writing pompously in my notebook: ‘The long silver line of aerospacial truth, stamped with its trade-name, like a plastic container.’ Sideways, in fact, it looks rather neuter, suburban – a classy, high-speed capsule dotted with tiny commuter windows and carried on wheels on long thin stalks. It is only when it turns towards you that you see its new beauty – the high questing head, the delicate neck, finally the wide-swept snowgoose wings.

  I went forward with Peter, saw the forty-foot-high tail, the four under-slung jet-vents as black as tar-barrels. The service trucks were plugging in wires and tubes, air-conditioning, battery charging. I noticed long strips of paint flaking off from beneath the wings. I asked: ‘Was that meteorites? Or did you hit some birds?’

  ‘No. When we first painted the job, we got the undercoat wrong. We’ll get it right next time.’

  I retreated out of the wind behind the Concorde’s hangar – a curve-roofed building half the size of Paddington Station. One vast wall was open on to a measureless interior peopled by distant tiny mechanics. As I stood there, an old bent man went past in the rain carrying a small yellow cranking handle. This he stuck into a hole and started to turn it and groan; and slowly, majestically, the gigantic doors – the height of three-storey buildings – began to close on each other.

  ‘If they’re closing the hangars, you’ll fly,’ said Peter. He took us back to the Press Room for our final briefing.

  ‘Nothing special about the Concorde,’ he told us, ‘except it’s the best in the world. It’s designed to be flown by idiots. After all, when we get world markets we’ll be selling to all and sundry, and we won’t be choosing the pilots. It’s got four Rolls-Royce/SNECMA Olympus 593 turbojet engines mounted in paired nacelles under the wing. It’s flown Mach 2 on two engines – no noticeable difference, very docile.’ ‘Will it fly on one engine?’ I asked. ‘Yes – presumably.’

 
We sat round waiting and twitching. There were still only eight of us. Where were all the others? ‘You eight are the lot.’ Only eight, rattling about in that great thing? ‘We shall be carrying twelve tons of special electronic testing equipment. There’ll just be room to pack you lot in the stern.’

  We were due to take off at 11.00. There was half-an-hour’s delay. Then they drove us out to the field. As I stepped down from the bus the wind ripped a ‘Scandinavian Shipping Line’ label off my briefcase and sent it spinning across the runway.

  The Concorde was standing ready for us, its giant beak pecking earthwards, the blue maintenance-trucks beginning reverently to withdraw. Along the 200-foot fuselage was written: ‘British Aircraft Corporation – Aerospatiale France’. The twin begetters, the double agents, the freak alliance that put the ‘e’ in ‘Concorde’.

  Our world, the airfield, one might say the whole of Fairford, was now dominated by the fact of this plane. I noticed that scarcely anyone in sight could take their eyes off it for a moment. Intention, power, a leap in the dimensions of gadgetry, inexorable possibility for good or ill, millions in expended treasure, and the labours of 80,000 people – all these lay sealed in the skin of this fine-spun tube, were expressed in the unearthly throb of its waiting forces.

  The gangway seemed high as a fireman’s ladder. I was glided towards it and climbed it without thinking. I looked back once and saw in the faces of the ground crew that they considered me inexplicably overprivileged.

  From the outside, the Concorde is familiar for its dramatic clarity of line; inside, it’s like a whiz-kid’s attic – ‘Careful how you go, don’t trip on the wires, mind the switches, don’t touch the explosives.’

  In the rear, there were eight quite ordinary little passenger-seats, and an ordinary luggage rack, on which I bumped my head. We were settled down, strapped in, and shown where our oxygen was (if required). Then we were each given a pair of earphones. Through these we could listen in to captain and crew – though it was explained, gently, that we couldn’t talk back.

  So I began to eavesdrop on a mysterious litany of voices going through the long routine check before take-off. Scots’ accents, Yorkshire, broad Gloucestershire, Bristolian, swapped information, asked questions, gave orders. Behind all this, God knows why, I swear I could also hear bells and bagpipes. And of course that continuous power-house whine.

  The voices were relaxed and easy, especially those between captain and co-pilot, who sounded reassuringly amateurish and dotty. They might have been warming up at a friendly game of tennis, with lots of ‘Oops, sorry’s’, and ‘Let’s try it again’.

  Of course, my memory of the Concorde’s flight-deck jargon is only of what I thought I heard; there were times when it could have been that of Indian canooists on the Upper Amazon.

  Things were now hotting up anyway. Engines checked, one to four. Names and numbers reported in sequence. Occasionally there’d come a short blast of sound, deep-throated, tremendous, like Niagara being switched on and off.

  ‘OK for steps, chief.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Electric truck away.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Another short gust of thunder.

  ‘Pressure gauge seems stuck.’

  ‘It’s possible. Yes.’

  ‘Oh, well, Johnny – just give it a thump.’

  More bells and bagpipes.

  ‘Auto-pilot on … Chocks away.’

  ‘Right.’ (Somebody whistled aimlessly.)

  For a while we’d been poised trembling at the end of the 10,000-foot runway. Low clouds were sweeping over the ragged fields. Suddenly we came deafeningly alive, sprang forward as though kicked, gathered speed, hurled past the main buildings. I saw through my window a blurr of white figures watching, raindrops washing horizontally across the glass. I was committed now into the white palms of a power far stronger than I’d ever known.

  ‘No transit, skipper. Bucket’s in locked position.’

  ‘Try it once more … Oh, never mind, forget it.’

  We tilted, rose. The wet fields leant violently backwards. In five seconds they were lost in cloud. Looking along the length of the fuselage, it seemed to sway and buckle like the vertebrae of a skeletal snake.

  ‘No use sitting around in this stuff, Johnny. Let’s get out of it quick. Hundred per cent dreadful. Reckon ceiling’s 10,000. Between you and me and the Flight-Engineer …’ I thought it better to slip off my earphones.

  In five minutes from take-off we broke the top of the cloud-bank. There were still some veils of dirty stuff above. According to the map-brief we should be somewhere over Radstock, Somerset, and heading for the North Devon coast, and climbing.

  They now said we could unstrap and move about if we wished. I stayed in my seat a while longer. I was in the Concorde. I felt nothing; but then I was not supposed to feel anything. I could see little; but such a plane’s not for sightseeing. Presently I unbuckled and started to walk up the cabin. It was like walking up a chapel roof.

  Three members of the crew, in shirt-sleeves, were sitting side by side at a bench, monitoring conditions and details of the plane’s performance. Before them were computers, dials, clocks, thermometers, automatic writing needles. The more intelligible of the dials told me that we were already at 29,000 feet, and climbing at what looked like 100 feet a second; that our speed was Mach 0.94; that we were over a point of land some 150 miles from Fairford; and that we had been in the air for fifteen minutes.

  ‘Acceleration’ was to begin after we’d crossed Hartland Point, that was, in two minutes time. I stood and braced myself. We were still climbing steeply. The needle moved from 0.94 to Mach 1. I was standing facing the dials. It felt as though someone had lightly brushed against me. We had passed the speed of sound.

  ‘Mach One-plus,’ someone said. The big needle stood steady, but some of the other dials seemed suddenly to go crazy: pointers see-sawed, swung; numbers raced and clicked; indicators jerked and hiccoughed.

  Nothing else appeared to happen. The crew went on with their figures. So that was that. I decided to take a look at the flight-deck. It was the closest thing I could imagine that might resemble an astronaut’s command-module – instrument-packed to the point of delirium. The four crew were sitting more or less back-to-back, as though in an Irish jaunting car: pilot and co-pilot, naturally enough, up front, Flight-Engineer behind them, Navigator in a corner facing backwards. There was scarcely room in the cockpit for a visiting cat, but chairs were tilted to let me through. I spoke to the captain and his first officer (who was wearing a red-peaked cap). All was calm – we were on auto-pilot. Through the sloping windows upper-air sunlight streamed through, whitish-yellow like a narcissus.

  I returned to the Navigator’s corner. He was looking down into a 6-inch radar, which glowed with a sort of submarine light. The top of the screen was filled with what appeared to be a torn green leaf. ‘South coast of Ireland – seventy miles off.’ The Navigator indicated Cork with his pencil, then went on with his calculations. I turned unsteadily to leave him, and only then did he show the mildest alarm. ‘Don’t bump into any buttons,’ he said.

  Back at the monitoring benches I noticed we had reached 50,000 feet. That’s what it said, and my ears hadn’t popped. Our speed was now flickering around Mach 2. ‘How fast is that?’ I asked. ‘Gobbledy knots,’ said the crewman. ‘What’s that in miles?’ ‘Wait a sec, I’ll find out.’ He spoke into the intercom, then turned and scribbled in my notebook: ‘1,340 mph.’

  We’d left the turning area off the south of Ireland and were heading down over the Bay of Biscay. Outside, the air temperature was −70 C. But the outer skin of the plane was 120 C. ‘Friction,’ said a pundit. ‘You could fry an egg on that wing.’ I’d been wondering when someone would say that.

  Well over one-and-a-half times the height of Everest, and still climbing. ‘Reheat’s coming off at 51,600.’ ‘What’s “reheat”?’ ‘Saves mucking about. We use it to get to Mach 2 quicker.’

>   The artificial horizon showed me we were standing on our ears, going into a starboard turn. I went back to my seat and saw the wing pointing downwards at an immense crumpled floor of cloud. A curious ghost-sun followed us, skimming across the vapour below. The windows across the cabin were filled with the opaque blue of space.

  For the next half hour, at twice the speed of sound, we manoeuvred over the sea, somewhere west of the rich plains of Bordeaux, somewhere north of the rough coast of Spain. We were above a cloud-trapped world, in a thin blue air, occasionally turning and recrossing our contrails. Visibility was so clear it took in the quilted curve of the earth. I imagine there were few other civilians up there that day.

  Then we were on the homeward leg, and I went for another look at the dials: 54,000 feet, steady (presumably our ceiling) and Mach 2.07 (low whistles from a fellow passenger). Oxygen, OK. No warning lights visible. About an hour in the air, and soon due to come down. We must be back off the south of Ireland. Then I noticed that we were dropping at nearly 200 feet a second – which is a deal faster than you can fall off a house. We made another steep turn and the sun changed windows. I hurried back to my seat.

  Maybe I should have stayed where I was. The earphones were buzzing with problems. It seemed the weather at Fairford had closed in tight. There was talk from the captain about diverting to Manston, Kent. The question was the balance of fuel.

  ‘I reckon I could hit Manston all right with 10,000 kilos. What else have we got? Forget about France. How’s Prestwick? Gusting 40? Well, Prestwick’s out, Johnny. We’ll keep that for Hogmanay. How about Heathrow? Aye, there’s better runways there. What’s Heathrow’s weather? Better ask Gatwick.’