by Nevil Shute
They sat staring at me. Then Ford said, “Are these natives?”
“That’s right,” I said. “The pilot’s a Sikh. The boy’s an Arab.”
“Oh. Would you propose that this native pilot should fly the Airtruck?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“We’d have to think about that one, if you’re going to want credit terms on the sale. We should have an interest in the machine.”
“Think all you like,” I said, “so long as you do it quick. This Sikh I’ve got is an ex-officer of the Royal Indian Air Force, and he’s done over three hundred hours on Hurricanes without an accident, much of it operational flying. If your Airtruck’s so bloody difficult to fly that he’s not safe on it, I don’t know that we can go any further.”
Ford laughed. “You know I don’t mean that. Anybody could fly an Airtruck. The proposal to employ a native pilot is a bit of a novelty, you know.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “You’ve got to go on the record. If he’s got a record of safe flying and if he’s got a ‘B’ licence, that’s good enough for me.”
“I suppose so. If the business grows, would you propose to employ more than one?”
“I’ll answer that in six months’ time,” I said. “If Gujar Singh is the success I think he will be, he’ll be the chief pilot, under me. In that case, any other pilots I take on may very well be Sikhs. I don’t see that there’d be any place in a set-up like that for British pilots at a thousand a year.”
Taverner asked, “What about the ground staff? Would you use Asiatic ground engineers for your maintenance?”
“I don’t know,” I said frankly. “That’s much more difficult than the pilots. I’m fully licensed as a ground engineer myself, ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D’. I can use Asiatic labour for a time, under my supervision. Then we’ll have to see. But I think by the time I need them Asiatics will turn up. I had some working under me in Egypt during the war. They were all right.”
Harry Ford laughed. “You’re planning an air service staffed entirely by Wogs!”
I was a bit angry at that. “I call them Asiatics,” I replied. “If you want to sell an Airtruck you can quit calling my staff Wogs.”
“No offence meant, Mr. Cutter,” he said. “One uses these slang phrases ... I take it that the point you’re making is that by the use of native staff you can reduce your overheads to the point when you can bear the hire-purchase cost of eighty per cent of an Airtruck spread over a year.”
I nodded. “That’s right. I can pay off the aircraft in a year, and still make money.” I thought for a moment. “I don’t want you to think that a native staff is solely a question of money,” I said slowly. “If I extend my operations, it will be in the direction of India, not towards Europe. Europe’s crowded out with charter operators already, all going broke together. There’s more scope for charter work as you go east. If I develop eastwards, then by using Asiatic pilots and ground engineers exclusively, I shall be using the people of the countries that I want to do business with. That’s bound to make things easier.”
Taverner chipped in then, and we went over my prospective overheads in the light of the payments I would have to make for Asiatic staff, and the sum naturally came out a good bit better. They left me then to go off and have a talk about it by themselves, and when they came back they said, fifteen hundred down and the machine was mine. I stuck my heels in and refused to pay a penny more than twelve hundred, and when I left the works that evening the machine was mine for delivery in about ten days, subject to the completion of all the formalities.
I went to Southampton that night, and got home at about nine o’clock. There was no telephone at home, of course; I’d sent a telegram from the works to say that I was coming, but it was nearly six o’clock when I telephoned it and after delivery hours, so Ma hadn’t got it. I walked in at the street door and put my bag down. Ma was in the scullery, and when she heard the door go she called out, “That you, Alf?” She thought it was Dad.
I said, “It’s me, Ma — Tom!” She came rushing out and put her arms round me and kissed me, and ticked me off for not letting them know which day I was coming. And then she said, “My, Tom, you do look brown. How long have you got at home?”
“Only a week or two,” I said. “I’m getting a bigger aeroplane, and flying out again as soon as it’s ready.”
“Not bust yet?” she asked.
“Not quite,” I said. “Where’s Dad?”
“He stepped out to the ‘Lion’ for his game of darts,” she said. “He should be back now, any minute.”
“Mind if I go down there and fetch him, Ma?”
She nodded. “He’ll like you to meet his friends, Bert Topp and Harry Burke, and Chandler. Don’t be more’n a quarter of an hour, Tom. I’ll start getting supper now.”
I went down to the pub, and there was Dad playing darts with Harry Burke. I said, “How do, Dad,” and he said, “How do, Tom,” and I told him I’d been home, and he told the barman to give me a pint, and went on with his game. The barman said, “Been out in the sun?” and I said, “Persian Gulf,” and he said, “Uh-huh,” and I sat and watched Dad going for the double at the finish of the game. It was just as if I’d never been away at all, as if Bahrein and Gujar Singh, and Sharjah, and Yas Island were places and people I’d read about in a book.
I walked home with Dad when he’d finished the game, and told him something about what I’d been doing on the way. Back home when we sat down to the light supper that they had before going to bed, Ma asked me, “What’s it like out where you’re working, Tom? What does it all look like?” She paused. “Is it all palm trees and dates and that?”
“Not in the country,” I said. “Nothing grows outside the towns, because of the water. There’s no water at all. The land is desert — great flat stretches of sandy sort of earth, with maybe rocky hills or mountains here and there. All yellow and dried up under the sun. You get groves of date palms and greenery outside Bahrein and outside most towns, where they irrigate with water from wells.”
Dad said, “Sounds a bad sort of country.”
“I rather like it, Dad,” I said. “It gets hold of you, after a bit. It’s good for people — you don’t get any of the pansy boys out there. It can be lovely when you’re flying, too. Some places and in some lights, the desert goes a sort of rosy pink, all over, and then if you’re flying up a coast the sea can be a brilliant emerald green, or else a brilliant blue, with a strip of white surf all along the edge like a girl’s slip showing.”
“Ever had a forced landing in it and got stranded?” Dad asked.
I shook my head. “Not yet, and I don’t want one. I had to put down once because of a sand storm, and sit it out in the cabin for five or six hours; then it got better and I took off and went on. I always take a petrol can of water in the aircraft.”
Ma said, “My ...”
They wanted to know if I’d got anyone to help me, and I told them about Gujar Singh and Tarik. It was difficult, of course, to make them understand, however hard I was trying, however much they wanted to. Dad said,
“Like niggers, I suppose they’d be?”
I shook my head. “No, not like niggers. Gujar Singh’s an Indian.”
“Lascars are Indians, I think,” Dad said. He only knew the types he’d seen about the docks, of course.
“That’s right,” I said. “But this is a different sort of Indian. A better sort than lascars, more of an Army officer type.” I went on to describe what Gujar looked like, but I don’t know that a description of him really helped me in describing what I had come to feel: that our minds ran on similar tracks.
Ma said, “They’d be heathens, I suppose?”
The question worried me a bit, because I wanted her to like them. I wanted her to understand. “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “Both of them believe in God — just one God, not a lot of Gods. I suppose you’d call them heathens. They don’t believe in Jesus Christ as God — the Moslems think He was
a prophet, just like Moses. But I must say, they seem to say their prayers very regular, which is more’n we do.”
Ma was trying her best. “They don’t go to church, I suppose?” she asked. “Just have heathen temples, like?”
“They’ve got their own places where they go to pray,” I said. “Friday is the big day, like our Sunday, when they all go to the mosque. Most businesses shut up shop on Friday, and the offices and the banks shut on Friday, too. We don’t work on Fridays, but we work on Sundays. They’re very particular about Fridays, and then, of course, they’re always at their prayers. I told young Tarik after the first day, I said, You do your praying in the lunch hour and after we knock off, lad — not in the time I pay you for. A chap in the radio set-up put me wise to that one. They’ll swing it on you if you let them. But then, on your side, you’ve got to be reasonable and fix the hours of work so they can get their praying in.”
“Do you mean they go off to the mosque on a working day?” Dad asked.
I shook my head. “They can do it on any quiet little bit of ground, it seems. A Moslem has to say his prayers five times a day. What young Tarik does, he goes out on a little bit of flat ground just beside the hangar and he faces west, about in the direction of Mecca. That’s their holy city, where they go for pilgrimages. He takes off his shoes and stands up straight, and puts both hands up to his ears, and prays. Then he stands with his arms folded in front of him and prays. Then he bends forwards with both hands on his knees, and prays. Then he goes down on hands on knees and puts his head on the ground, and prays. Then he sits down for a bit and thinks about it all, and then he starts in and goes through it all again. He goes on like that for about ten minutes, like doing physical jerks. Only you can’t laugh about it, Dad, when you see them at it. They take it all so serious, just like us in church. It means a lot to them.”
“Five times a day they go through all that?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Young Tarik’s hours are sort of fluid, ‘cause there’s only just him there at present. He’s supposed to start at seven in the morning, and I must say he’s usually there on time. He works till nine, and then gets a break for a cup of tea or a bit to eat, and prayers. Starts again at nine-thirty and works till twelve, and gets an hour then for his dinner and prayers. Works from one to four-thirty, and knocks off for prayers. That makes an eight-hour day. If he works over, then I give him a bit more at the end of the month.”
Ma said, “Seems like they’re not heathens at all, if they say their prayers that much.”
“They’re not Christians, Ma,” I said. “But honestly, I don’t think you could call them heathens, either. They believe in God all right.”
Dad asked about the aeroplanes, and I told him about the Airtruck, and got out a picture of it from my case to show him. He asked how much it cost, and I told him, and then I told him about the money that I’d made, and that was all going back into the business. Dad and Ma were so pleased, it was just fine; they thought far more of my little success, and took more pleasure in it, than ever I did. It was worth that six months of heat and work and sweat and fright, to see the pleasure they got out of it.
They asked what I was going to do and how long I could stay, and I told them that I’d have to go for a week to Air Service Training Ltd. at Hamble and get a radio operator’s licence; that was only six miles out of Southampton, so I could live at home and go out on the bus each day.
Young Ted had gone off to do his military service so Dad and Ma were all alone at home. Ma asked where I’d like to sleep, upstairs or down, and I said down in the big room where we’d all slept together as kids. I lay there for a while that night thinking of all sorts of things, of the Airtruck, of my radio licence, of Bahrein and the Persian Gulf country, of the last time I came to sleep there in the misery of Beryl’s death. If Beryl had lived, my life would have been a very different one, I knew. She wouldn’t have fitted in at Bahrein, and she’d have hated it. But then, I’d never have got out there if she’d lived.
I got up with Dad and Ma next morning and had breakfast at seven with Dad before he went off to the docks. I hung around then and helped Ma with the washing up, because there was no point in getting out to Hamble before ten. As we were drying the dishes Ma said, “Ted brought ever such a nice girl home last week-end, Tom. Lily Clarke, her name is. Her folks live at Fareham. Father’s a petty officer in the Navy.”
“Starting young,” I said.
“Mm. Met her at a dance. I don’t know if there’s anything in it.”
“Better wait till he gets through his service and in a proper job,” I said. “Besides, he’s only just nineteen.”
“Your pa was only twenty when we got married, Tom. I had Elsie when I was nineteen.”
I grinned at her. “Ought to be ashamed of yourself, Ma, and Dad too.”
“Well, I don’t know. It worked out all right with us. I often wish you’d married young, Tom, but you were always so stuck into your books.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “I got around to it too late.”
“There’s always another chance. You didn’t meet anybody out there?”
I shook my head, smiling a little. “It’s not that sort of a place, Ma. You get more snowstorms in the Persian Gulf than unmarried white girls.”
She sighed. “I wish you didn’t have to work in a place like that. Will you ever come back and work in England, Tom?”
“I expect I will some day,” I replied. “The trouble is, I rather like it in the East. I’d like to go further if I get a chance, into India and Burma, and on past those.”
“Well anyway,” she said, “it’s not as if you had to be out there for ever. Being in the air business, you do seem to be able to get home now and then.”
She kept on trying, Ma did. I went out that day and fixed up my course at Air Service Training, and got them to start me off next day on account of the urgency. Two nights later I came back to tea about six, and there was a girl in to tea with Ma, Doris Waters, daughter of old Waters the plumber. She was a pretty kid and quite intelligent, about twenty-two or twenty-three years old; she taught in a school. If I’d been different to what I was, things might have been different, too. But I wasn’t, and they weren’t. I was sorry for Ma.
With all the examinations for the radio operator’s licence and the “B” licence, and the renewal of my ground engineer’s licences, I was busy in a maze of paper work for the next three weeks. I had to go three times to London, and then in the middle of it all the August Bank Holiday came and everything stopped dead for about four days. I finally got away from England in the Airtruck on August the 22nd having been in England nearly a month. Dad and Mum came out to see the machine, as they had done before with the Fox-Moth. But this was a bigger and a better aircraft altogether. I had about three hundredweight of spares and tools with me, and quite a bit of luggage, and it made a little heap in one corner of the big cabin that you’d hardly notice.
The Airtruck was faster than the Fox-Moth, and better equipped, and so much easier to fly. Having two engines I took the sea crossing from Cannes to Rome direct, and then over the top of the Appenines through cloud to Brindisi instead of going round the coast. Short cuts like that made a lot of difference to the time, and with the greater range of the Airtruck I didn’t have to land so often for fuel. I got to Bahrein in five days from England, and as I turned down-wind on the circuit I saw the Fox-Moth standing in front of the hangar, and Gujar Singh and Tarik standing by it looking up at the Airtruck and waving to me. They hadn’t broken the Fox, which took a load off my mind. As I came in to the runway on the final and put her down, I felt like it was coming home again. The wide, bare, sandy field under the blazing sun, the blue sea beside, the shimmer from the tarmac, the white houses with their wind-towers — these were the things that pleased me; this was where I wanted to be.
Gujar and Tarik came up to the machine as I switched off in front of the hangar, and they opened the door, and came in to greet me as I sat quiet
in the cockpit for a few minutes, tired after a long day of flying from Damascus via Baghdad and Basra, writing up the journey log book on my knee. They were very much impressed with the Airtruck. “There will be a great deal of work to be done with this,” said Gujar, “once the oil companies get to know that it is here.”
I found that evening that he had done quite well in my absence with the Fox-Moth. He had had a job to do most days, and the bank account, which was two hundred pounds when I went away, was now over seven hundred. There were a good few bills outstanding because I hadn’t left him power to draw cheques, but so far as I could see he had made a profit of over three hundred pounds in the month or so that I had been away. I was very pleased with that, and I told him so. It meant that I could go away on jobs myself without the feeling that everything was going to collapse.
I got Evans of the Arabia-Sumatran Petroleum Company to come down and have a look at the new machine next day, with one or two from the other companies. The response was good, and by the end of a week the Airtruck was going hard every day. Spare parts for motor transport was one of our big, constant loads. The oil companies have a great number of trucks in various parts of the Arabian deserts in connection with the oil wells and pipe lines and docks. These trucks give continuous trouble; however ruggedly they may be built a country that has no roads and a lot of sand is hard on things mechanical. We could fly in spare back axles, wheels complete with tyres, drums of oil, or engine parts to stranded trucks, and it’s extraordinary how many stranded trucks there are. Apart from that, we took surveying parties and all their gear about the place continuously, and cases of tinned foods — all sorts of stuff. From time to time we took quite big loads of people, employees going in and out of some inaccessible place; I had no seats for the Airtruck and took them sitting or squatting on the floor. Presently, of course, the inevitable official popped up and told me that was illegal because they all ought to have a safety belt.
