by Nesta Tuomey
‘In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it,’ sang the merry widow, straining upwards on her stool, while all about her the other elderly ladies obligingly swayed, the fragility of the moment as yet unbroken by the cacophonous booming of the dinner gong.
Party Piece
On the mahogany sideboard in the living room are displayed my black and white photographs taken long ago. When visitors pick them up and exclaim, ‘Your daughter? What a pretty girl,’ I shrug and smile, waiting until the moment when something dated about these pictures causes them to take a second look. Then their smiles fade and their glances become unsure as they look from the buxom smiling stewardess in uniform to the wizened woman in the wheelchair
‘But surely,’ they mumble and fall silent, their eyes dropping furtively to the plaid rug laid across my lap. And in their averted gaze I sense the struggle going on as they speculate on the wasted limbs beneath.
Within minutes they have recovered and are all bright conjecture again. ‘Now this must be your little boy.’ Examining the other family photos they seem not to notice the absence of a female figure as they admire the happily gurgling baby on the rug, the handsome airman with his cap set squarely on his head. ‘I suppose that was all before...’ respectfully awaiting their cues.
‘That’s right,’ I agree with a quick conspiratorial glance at my husband, both of us supporting this little piece of fiction to preserve the proprieties.
‘The accident...emergency...was later.’
‘If it upsets you don’t, please don’t talk about it,’ they beg while plainly dying to know all the gruesome details.
‘No, no really, it helps to talk about it,’ I assure them, telling them what they want to believe. Yet in a funny kind of way it does help, although all of it is sham and the baby on the rug is some other couple’s child. I am revived by their interest, afforded another chance to tell my story. It is my party piece after all, my only deceit these days.
I suppose there are two versions to every story but the one I like best to tell them is the following. It makes for good listening and in it, unlike the truth, all the participants were valiant.
At the time I was a mere six months flying. I was a fairly competent stew but young, barely out of my teens. You had to be twenty on application to the airline and I had just about made it. The average life of a flight attendant was comparatively brief in those years. Come thirty-five and you were out of a job. Not like today’s air girls, old enough to be grandmothers and still walking the aisles.
On the day in question I was the only hostess on that Fokker Friendship bound for Liverpool, in sole command of thirty-eight passengers (or paps as we wrote on the flight manifesto to save time). It was a lot of responsibility being the only girl on board but in any emergency from drunks to hijackers there is always the crew to fall back on. Mine were all I could ask. Bill and Jim. Cheerful, supportive, dependable.
Let me tell you I was staking my future on Jim’s dependability. For some time the First Officer and I had been...well, rather more than just good friends. Even before the flight took off that day we were joined by a tie more binding than mere friendship, though only one of us was aware of it at the time.
It was a trip that seemed jinxed from the start. After an undignified tussle with the rear door of the aircraft, which refused to close despite all my futile efforts in obedience to the muffled voice without, I finally admitted defeat and sought assistance from the cockpit.
From the beginning aircraft doors were my particular bugbear. No matter how conscientiously I applied myself I was beleaguered after take-off by grisly images of entire planeloads sucked out because of me. Small children wandering near the back gave me the jitters and in those first weeks I clocked up a lot of mileage, scurrying up and down the cabin, keeping my eye on them. I was in danger of becoming paranoid about the whole thing but then, phobias were not uncommon amongst my flying group.
My best friend confessed to a fear the plane would fail to lift on take-off and plow madly through someone’s back garden. Another hostess, a former nurse, never flew anywhere without her surgical scissors, convinced that once above cloud she would soon be cutting through an umbilical cord. One hostess even quit her job when her pet phobia became too powerful to contain it. Something terrible, she believed, would befall the aircraft while she dallied in the toilet and, all unknowing, she would be detached (like the backend of a space module) and sped off to kingdom come. ‘Loo-nar module,’ I had been unable to resist punning to Jim, and raised a chuckle. Believe me, there was much to laugh about then but, alas, not too much merriment today.
To return to my particular bête noire, I can honestly say that to me the door on the Fokker Friendship was anything but friendly. Not happily designed like the Vickers Viscount with a simple locking device, it had first to be lifted and then positioned firmly in a groove. Finding the groove was the problem.
When appealed to, Jim, of course, responded manfully. He donned his pilot’s cap and accompanied me to the rear of the cabin. To tell you the truth at that stage he was glad of any excuse to be alone with me, if you can call it being alone in an aircraft cabin with almost forty forward-facing passengers. I don’t know whether you are familiar with the Friendship. If you are, you will know that there is a tiny area of privacy to the rear of the toilet bulkhead. That day, as on many another, we made the most of it uncaring that we were further delaying our flight. But that’s lovers for you. They have no conscience, feel no obligation to anyone but themselves. In most cases this obsession resolves itself without harm to anyone. But not this time.
In those days Jim and I were constantly seeking and finding each other. Our glances sizzled across cockpits, our fingers spoke volumes in the passing of a coffee cup. He could not move along the cabin without making contact with me; a thrust of his hip, a sly pinch. We became adept at snatching such moments, gloried in our carelessness. That’s how it was. Oh but how different it is now. To what lengths does he go to avoid what was once a source of all delight.
But I digress. Engines roaring we became airborne at last. A slight technical hitch, announced Bill on the pubic address, loyally explaining away the delay. No doubt you are familiar with this layman’s sop which clarifies nothing and covers a multitude, from the non-showing of the captain to the late arrival of catering or the loss of an engine. As far as the airline was concerned the less passengers knew the better and as flight crew we were content to keep it that way. Beyond a slight murmuring and resigned shaking of heads the passengers settled down, hoping no doubt time lost would be regained in flight.
For the first twenty minutes I served up drinks and smiles – with no catering there wasn’t a lot to do – lingering to flirt with the more attractive of the male passengers, just to keep my hand in. Out over the Irish Sea the vista was clear and calm. The sun sparkled on the windows, all was serene. Until three warning bells broke into that tranquil sky and sent me speeding to the cockpit.
There are two golden rules of emergency – one is never to run, the other never to show alarm. With an effort I forced myself to give observance to both, though a smile was quite beyond me. Other hostess never had any difficulty conjuring up smiles at will, but not me; not without the assistance of an erotic fantasy or comic memory. On entering the flight deck I stood for a moment unnoticed by either pilot, so busy were they coping.
‘Anita,’ says Bill, turning to me at last. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to prepare the passengers for an emergency landing,’ his tone mildly regretful as though asking me to engage in some sociably not quite nice practice. And then, in case the seriousness of our situation had not registered, he added, ‘Port engine’s a gonner. Going to try and make it the R.A.F base at Valley.’
Beside him, Jim frowned in concentration, giving all his attention to tuning the high frequency radio. As I turned to go he spared me a brief encouraging glance. Or maybe it was merely lascivious.
‘Think you can manage?’ asked the captain.
&
nbsp; I nodded. ‘Yes, captain.’ Somehow none of it seemed real. Try though I might I couldn’t altogether believe in that emergency. It wouldn’t have been unlike Bill and Jim to have cooked the whole thing up between them, a special kind of honours test to see how I would make out.
‘Good! I’ll make an announcement in a minute.’
I returned to the cabin wondering what he would tell the passengers. This time he could hardly hope to get away with ‘a slight technical hitch.’ Gazing out portside I judged there to be nothing startlingly different about the metal mass of wing and engine. I supposed the propellers were no longer whirring but without comparing it with its two companions on the starboard side it was difficult to say. Then like a hammer blow realisation struck. We were not on the Viscount!
Two engines bad, four engines good, my mind gibbered in Orwellian hysteria as I trotted to the back. If one goes there’s only one to keep you up, and if that goes..... One green bottle hanging on the wall, my mind swung into defensive action. But if one green bottle should accidentally fall...
That was always the trouble with me. I am inclined to burlesque the saddest, most serious things. As my thoughts went careering about in this irresponsible fashion, I tried to switch off and was struck afresh by the thought that I was in an emergency!
There I was again thinking in italics. But why couldn’t I feel more afraid, I wondered. Perhaps it was the extra adrenaline reported to pump through your veins at such a time. Certainly something was giving me a tremendous surge of energy and excitement. Moments later our captain’s voice came soothingly over the public address telling us the facts – or as many as he deemed wise, namely that we were about to make a forced landing and assuring us there was nothing at all to be concerned about.
The former was arresting, the latter stretched credulity. And was about as convincing as urging a terminally ill patient to keep on hoping. He ended this contradictory message in Gaelic ‘De cunam De’ - his fervent prayer that with the help of God we might all be alive to tell our story over dinner that night.
Hardly reassuring in any language.
‘Why doesn’t he speak English?’ a man asked suspiciously. And a woman began to cry. Heads turned seeking information and failing to get it, bells began clamouring for the flight attendant.
‘Nothing to be alarmed about,’ I repeated the captain’s calumny as I moved smoothly along the cabin, showing them how to brace themselves for landing. Somehow the lying smile with which I accompanied this reassurance came easier to my lips than the social one. .
‘What’s the captain about?’ A thin man who had spurned my conversational overtures earlier demanded aggressively. His spectacles, contrary to the captain’s orders, were still settled on the end of his raw-looking nose, his briefcase agape on his knee. ‘Do you know that I have a very important luncheon appointment in Liverpool?’ He said it as though he thought I should.
‘I’m sorry,’ I kept saying as if it was my fault, as if it was just a whim of the captain’s to divert the plane. ‘It is an emergency,’ I protested mildly, and wondered too late if I should have used that word. Some expressions are best avoided, I know, lest they inspire panic. But, in this instance, it appeared to convince the man because he conceded grudgingly, ‘Well, I suppose in that case,’ as if anything less he would not have accepted.
‘There’s no danger?’ a woman queried anxiously, ‘I mean we’ll be all right, won’t we?’
I summoned up my most convincing smile but before I could speak, help came unexpectedly from her neighbour, a grizzled sixty-year old. ‘Of course we will,’ he soothed. ‘It’s only a precaution like the skipper told us.’
I wondered if he knew that there was only one engine between himself and the deep blue sea, would he be quite so trusting? But his words had good effect and there were even a few weak jokes exchanged between the men, trying not to show the white flag before the women. We were all of us beginning to look a bit more cheerful when with a sudden convulsive shudder – will I ever forget it - the aircraft plunged earthwards.
At this point in the narration my audience always react with horrified looks and dread cries, ‘Was it then? Was that when it happened?’ they ask with meaningful looks at my wasted legs just visible now, free of the rug, their earlier repugnance forgotten in the agony of sharing. This is the moment they have been awaiting all along, the climax of this brave tale. They are hungry to hear how I sacrificed myself to help my stricken passengers, courageously keeping up their spirits as I assisted that frightened crowd of humanity from the burning wreckage. All thirty-eight souls saved from the pyre and at what terrible cost.
What would you have me do? Shatter their trust? Tell them I never did get to save anyone for by a strange fluke of fate I was thrown clear of the aircraft. No, I thought not. And Jim, my husband? He listens without contradiction, never tiring of the story, reinforcing with quiet approval the impression that we are truly a devoted and courageous couple, me a heroine and he a hero. Now it’s his turn to answer modestly about his shining career, his distinguished service culminating in the position of the airline’s chief pilot. I listen with just the correct degree of smiling fondness and keep my counsel - as I did at the enquiry following the crash – and I have kept it ever since. I did not say then, or now, that it was Jim made negligent by lust, who failed to properly secure the Friendship door that day (ultimately my salvation), nor do I reveal what he later admitted to me in private that it was his ill-judged action in opening the power levels to the stops that put the aircraft into its terminal dive. Only for the captain’s speedy intervention we might have all been killed. But then dead pilots tell no tales and Bill was the real hero of the hour. So be it!
No, in this instance fiction serves us far better than the truth. I do not care to tell them how some months after the crash an accident on an icy road in the company of my drunken lover cost me my child and made an invalid of me. For my loyalty and my silence Jim has given houseroom to a cripple, keeps faithful to her... in his fashion. By that self-same silence I exact my revenge. And so we continue to live, if you can call it living, and I to gain whatever consolation that I can from my party piece.
No Bad Women
It came as a shock to Nan Reilly to learn that after thirteen years with her – even longer than Miss Quinn on the first floor back – Mr. Carney was leaving to go and live with his sister on the North Circular Road.
‘Abandoning me,’ Nan said accusingly. ‘And all the years I looked after him! Fat thanks I get!’
‘I’d like to move out the end of the week,’ Mr. Carney had said when he gave notice. And with reproof: ‘You’ve got my cheque for the full month.’
Nan remembered how she had always kept his room for him the summers he went walking abroad. She pulled her old tawny tomcat on her lap, roughly flattened his fur. And October almost done. The full month indeed!
‘I’da expected better of you Mr. Carney,’ she had scolded. ‘After all these years. If I’da known in September I coulda got a student. They’ve all of them found places be now.’
His injured expression strengthened Nan’s grievance. Suiting himself and trying to make her feel bad. The nerve! ‘Well no use going back on it now,’ she said, ‘I only hope you’ll find yourself as comfortable as you were here.’ By which she meant the opposite. Very shabbily he’d treated her. Standing empty his room was a reproach to her.
Nan lived on the city northside: a row of red brick houses with fanlights over the front doors and stone urns in the gardens. They were family dwellings but over the years most of them had sprouted B & B signs. With her husband retired – he was a purser on the Irish Shipping line – she prettified the rooms and equipped them with washbasins. She put a notice in the front window offering room and board, hot baths extra. She did not charge high rates. Nan craved company, not wealth. The purser had been too long on deck to satisfy her, his head always stuck in a book. Nan got help from the Sacred Heart Orphanage in the shape of Annie who at forty-five had
long despaired of adoption and was glad of a home. She was a willing, if erratic worker, with a short span of concentration. Her strengths lay in her small appetite and her ignorance of inflation. Nan rewarded her loyalty with cast-off cardigans and skirts. Annie was not particular and more than repaid these favours. The lavatory was her special vocation. Permanently at high tide, faecal matter bobbing like Halloween apples in the brimming bowl, no one else would go near it, least of all Nan. Annie had other uses. Come evening she cleared the table and stowed the milk and bread in some secret cache till morning. She was Nan’s legitimate excuse for meanness. She couldn’t have run her boarding-house without her. When Nan turned sixty she modified the legend in the window, added gas rings to the rooms and kept on only such full-boarders that remained; Mr. Carney was one, Miss Quinn the other. The only relic of former beneficence was the lavish High tea welcoming newcomers. With Annie’s declining energy, this too was dropped.
The schoolteacher had been a permanent fixture. So Nan thought. Gave no trouble and spent every Sunday with his sister. Now he was filched from her. She hardly closed an eye all night.
‘So Iggy’s moving back to the bosom of his family,’ the purser said, chopping an apple into his cereal. ‘Dearie me, what’ll we do in the evenings for laughs.’ He had a dry sense of humour.
‘When I think of all the soda bread I threw away on that man,’ said Nan regretfully, like it was a bad investment.
‘I hear the sister’s a dab hand at the baking,’ said the purser with a wink at Sadie, Nan’s niece. She and her friend May shared a room on the second floor back.
‘Ha! Much he’ll get from that one,’ said Nan scornfully. ‘She couldn’t make bread to save her life. All shop-bought! You can tell by the pasty look of her.’
