‘There aren’t enough on board for us to throw them away every time,’ he explained, handing me ‘Henry’. ‘Sugar?’ He had a two-pound bag of granulated, and a red plastic spoon. ‘I know the way you lot drink coffee. The skipper, too.’
We drank the scalding brown liquid: it didn’t taste of coffee, but if you thought of it as a separate unnamed thirst quencher, it wasn’t too bad. In the galley the engine noise made it necessary to shout loudly to be heard, and the vibration shook concentric ripples in the coffee. The engineer sipped his gingerly over the scrawled word ‘Mike’.
‘You’ve got a right load there,’ he commented. ‘A ship full of expectant mums, aren’t they?’
Conker, Timmie and I nodded in unison.
‘Are they Italian?’
Together we shook our heads. Music hall stuff.
‘What are they going for, then?’
‘They are English mares going to be mated with Italian sires,’ explained Conker, who had once worked in a stud and would be positively happy if one of the mares foaled down prematurely on the flight.
‘Pull the other one, it’s got bells on,’ said the engineer.
‘No, it’s right,’ said Conker. ‘They have to have the foals they are carrying now in the stud where their next mate is.’
‘Why?’ The agile eyebrow worked overtime.
‘Ah,’ said Conker seriously. ‘The gestation period for horses is eleven months, right? And a brood mare has a foal every twelve months, right? So there’s only four weeks left between production and — er — reproduction, do you see? And in those four weeks the new foal isn’t fit for travelling hundreds of miles in the freezing cold, so the mares have to have the foals in the stud of their next mate. Get?’
‘I get,’ agreed the engineer. ‘I get indeed.’
‘That one,’ said Conker admiringly, pointing out in the foremost box an elegant brown silky head which owing to the general lack of space was almost in the galley, ‘that one’s going to Molvedo.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Timmie interestedly.
‘Horse box driver told me.’
The co-pilot came back from the cockpit and said the skipper wanted a refill.
‘Already? That man’s a tank.’ The engineer poured into the Patrick mug.
‘Here,’ said the co-pilot, handing it to me. ‘Take it to him, will you? I’m off to see a man about a dog.’ He brushed under Molvedo’s future wife’s inquisitive nose and bent down for the obstructed walk down to the john.
I took the steaming mug forward into the cockpit. The pilot, flying in whiter-than-white shirtsleeves despite the zero temperature outside, stretched out a languid hand and nodded his thanks. I stayed for a second looking round at the banked instruments, and he glanced up at me and gestured to me to put my ear down to his mouth. The noise there made even ordinary shouting impossible.
‘Are you the head chap with the horses?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like to sit there for a bit?’ He pointed to the empty co-pilot’s seat.
‘Yes, I would.’ He gestured permissively, and I edged sideways into the comfortable bucket seat beside him. The cockpit was tiny, considering how much had to be packed into it, and battered and dented with age. It was also, to me, very much my home.
I studied the instruments with interest. I had never flown a four engined craft, only one and two, for the excellent reason that there were no four engined planes at Fenland. As even small two engined jobs like the Aztec I had taken to Gleneagles the day before cost nearly thirty-five pounds per flying hour to hire from Tom, I thought it unlikely I would ever raise enough cash for a course on the really big stuff, even if I could use the qualification once I got it. You couldn’t just go up alone for an afternoon’s jolly in an airliner; they simply weren’t to be had. None of which stopped me for a moment being intent on learning everything I could.
The pilot, Patrick, indicated that I should put on the combined set of earphones and mouthpiece which was hanging over the semicircular wheel. I slid it on to my head, and through it he began to explain to me what all the switches and dials were for. He was the first pilot I’d flown with on Yardman’s trips who had taken such trouble, and I listened and nodded and felt grateful, and didn’t tell him I knew already most of what he was saying.
Patrick was a big striking looking man of about thirty, with straight dark auburn hair cut a bit theatrically in duck tails, and light amber eyes like a cat. His mouth turned naturally up at the corners so that even in repose he seemed to be smiling, as if everything in the world was delightful, with no evil to be found anywhere. Nor, I later proved, did the implication of that curve lie: he persisted in believing the best of everybody, even with villainy staring him in the face. He had the illogical faith in human goodness of a probation officer, though in that first half-hour all I learned about him was that he was a gentle, careful, self-assured and eminently safe pilot.
He tuned in to the frequency of the radio beacon at Dieppe, explaining it to me as he went, and took a weather report there before turning on to the course to Paris.
‘We’ll go down to the Med and fly along the coast,’ he said. ‘There’s too much cloud over the Alps to go straight across. Not being pressurised we ought not to go above ten thousand feet but fourteen thousand or so doesn’t hurt unless you’ve got a bad heart. Even that doesn’t give us enough in hand over the Alps in the present conditions, so I’m going the long way round.’
I nodded, thoroughly approving.
He checked the de-icing equipment for a second time in ten minutes and said, ‘This bird won’t fly with more than a quarter of a ton of ice on her, and the de-icers were U.S. last week.’ He grinned. ‘It’s O.K., I’ve checked them six times since they were repaired, they’re doing all right.’
He peeled and ate one of a large bunch of bananas lying on the ledge over the instrument panel, then calmly unhinged the window beside him a few inches and threw the skin out. I laughed to myself in appreciation and began to like Patrick a good deal.
The co-pilot returned to claim his place, and I went back to the horses for the rest of the journey. Uneventfully we went down across France to Dijon, turned south down the Rhone valley, east at Saint Tropez, and north again at Albenga, landing at Malpensa Airport, Milan, in exactly four hours from Gatwick.
Italy was cold. Shivering as the open doors let in air thirty degrees below the cabin temperature we watched about ten airport men in royal blue battle dress push the wide top-class ramp into position, and waited while three customs men made their way over from the building. They came up the ramp, and the eldest of them said something in his own language.
‘Non parlo italiano,’ I said apologetically, which useful sentence was all I knew.
‘Non importa,’ he said. He took from me the mares’ temporary import permits which had been made out in both English and Italian, and his two assistants began going from horse to horse calling out their descriptions.
All was in order. He gave me back the papers with a courteous nod of the head, and led his shadows away down the ramp. Again we went through the familiar routine of transferring the cargo from the plane to the waiting horse boxes, Conker making a great fuss of the mare going to Molvedo.
With an hour to spare before we set about loading another cargo of mares bound in the opposite direction for the same reason, Conker, Timmie and I walked across a quarter of a mile of tarmac to the airport building to have lunch. We were met at the door by Patrick, looking very official with gold-braided shoulder tabs on his navy uniform jacket, and wearing an expression of resignation.