My family were predictably horrified by my change of occupation and did their best to pry me away from it. My sister anxiously retracted the words I knew I’d earned, my father foresaw the earldom going to the cousin after all, aeroplanes being entirely against nature and usually fatal, and my mother had hysterics over what her friends would say.
‘It’s a labourer’s job,’ she wailed.
‘A job is what you make it.’
‘What will the Filyhoughs think?’
‘Who the hell cares what they think?’
‘It isn’t a suitable job for you.’ She wrung her hands.
‘It’s a job I like. It suits me, therefore it is suitable.’
‘You know that isn’t what I mean.’
‘I know exactly what you mean, Mother, and I profoundly disagree with you. People should do work they like doing; that’s all that should decide them. Whether it is socially O.K. or not shouldn’t come into it.’
‘But it does,’ she cried, exasperated.
‘It has for me for nearly six years,’ I admitted, ‘but not any more. And ideas change. What I am doing now may be the top thing next year. If I don’t look out half the men I know will be muscling in on the act. Anyway, it’s right for me, and I’m going on with it.’
All the same she couldn’t be won over, and could only face her own elderly convention-bound circle by pretending my job was ‘for the experience, you know,’ and by treating it as a joke.
It was a joke to Simon Searle too, at first.
‘You won’t stick it, Henry,’ he said confidently. ‘Not you and all that dirt. You with your spotless dark suits and your snowy white shirts and not a hair out of place. One trip will be enough.’
After a month, looking exactly the same, I turned up for my pay packet late on Friday afternoon, and we sauntered along to his favourite pub, a tatty place with stained glass doors and a chronic smell of fug. He oozed on to a bar stool, his bulk drooping around him. A pint for him, he said. I bought it, and a half for me, and he drank most of his off with one much practised swallow.
‘How’s the globe-trotting, then?’ He ran his tongue over his upper lip for the froth.
‘I like it.’
‘I’ll grant you,’ he said, smiling amicably, ‘that you haven’t made a mess of it yet.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Though of course since I do all the spade work for you at both ends, you bloody well shouldn’t.”
‘No,’ I agreed. He was, in truth, an excellent organiser, which was mainly why Anglia often dealt with Yardman Transport instead of Clarkson Carriers, a much bigger and better known firm. Simon’s arrangements were clear, simple, and always twice confirmed: agencies, owners and air-lines alike knew exactly where they stood and at what hours they were expected to be where. No one else in the business, that I had come across at any rate, was as consistently reliable. Being so precise myself, I admired his work almost as a work of art.
He looked me over, privately amused. ‘You don’t go on trips dressed like that?’
‘I do, yes, more or less.’
‘What does more or less mean?’
‘I wear a sweater instead of my jacket, in and around the aircraft.’
‘And hang up your jacket on a hanger for when you land?’
‘Yes, I do.’
He laughed, but without mockery. ‘You’re a rum sort of chap, Henry.’ He ordered more beer, shrugged when I refused, and drank deep again. ‘Why are you so methodical?’
‘It’s safer.’
‘Safer.’ He choked on his beer, coughing and laughing. ‘I suppose it doesn’t strike you that to many people steeplechasing and air transport might not seem especially safe?’
‘That wasn’t what I meant.’
‘What, then?’
But I shook my head, and didn’t explain.
‘Tell me about Yardman,’ I said.
‘What about him?’
‘Well, where he came from... anything.’
Simon hunched his great shoulders protectively around his pint, and pursed his lips.
‘He joined the firm after the war, when he left the Army. He was a sergeant in an infantry regiment, I think. Don’t know any details: never asked. Anyway he worked his way up through the business. It wasn’t called Yardman Transport then, of course. Belonged to a family, the Mayhews, but they were dying out... nephews weren’t interested, that sort of thing. Yardman had taken it over by the time I got there; don’t know how really, come to think of it, but he’s a bright lad, there’s no doubt of that. Take switching to air, for instance. That was him. He was pressing the advantages of air travel for horses whilst all the other transport agencies were going entirely by sea.’
‘Even though the office itself is on a wharf,’ I remarked.
‘Yes. Very handy once. It isn’t used much at all now since they clamped down on exporting horses to the Continent for meat.’
‘Yardman was in that?’
‘Shipping agent,’ he nodded. ‘There’s a big warehouse down the other end of the wharf where we used to collect them. They’d start being brought in three days before the ship came. Once a fortnight, on average. I can’t say I’m sorry it’s finished. It was a lot of work and a lot of mess and noise, and not much profit, Yardman said.’
‘It didn’t worry you, though, that they were going to be slaughtered?’
‘No more than cattle or pigs.’ He finished his beer. ‘Why should it? Everything dies sometime.’ He smiled cheerfully and gestured to the glasses. ‘Another?’
He had one, I didn’t.
‘Has anyone heard any more of Peters?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Not a murmur.’
‘How about his cards?’
‘Still in the office, as far as I know.’
‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’
Simon shrugged. ‘You never know, he might have wanted to duck someone, and did it thoroughly.’
‘But did anyone ever come looking for him?’
‘Nope. No police, no unpaid bookies, no rampaging females, no one.’
‘He just went to Italy and didn’t come back?’
‘That’s the size of it,’ Simon agreed. ‘He went with some brood mares to Milan and he should have come back the same day. But there was some trouble over an engine or something, and the pilot ran out of time and said he’d be in dead trouble if he worked too many hours. So they stayed there overnight and in the morning Peters didn’t turn up. They waited nearly all day, then they came back without him.’
‘And that’s all?’
‘That’s the lot,’ he agreed. ‘Just one of life’s little mysteries. What’s the matter, are you afraid Peters will reappear and take back his job?’
‘Something like that.’
‘He was an awkward bastard,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Stood on his rights. Always arguing; that sort of chap. Belligerent. Never stood any nonsense from foreign customs officers.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll bet they’re quite glad to see you instead.’
‘I dare say I’ll be just as cussed in a year or two.’
‘A year or two?’ He looked surprised. ‘Henry, it’s all very well you taking Peters’s job for a bit of a giggle but you surely can’t mean to go on with it permanently?’
‘You think it would be more suitable if I was sitting behind a nice solid desk at Anglia?’ I asked ironically.
‘Yes,’ he said seriously. ‘Of course it would.’
I sighed. ‘Not you too. I thought you at least might understand...’ I stopped wryly.
‘Understand what?’
‘Well... that who one’s father is has nothing to do with the sort of work one is best suited for. And I am not fitted for sitting behind a desk. I came to that conclusion my first week at Anglia, but I stayed there because I’d kicked up a fuss and insisted on getting an ordinary job, and I wasn’t going to admit I’d made a mistake with it. I tried to like it. At any rate I got used to it, but now... now... I don’t think I could face that nine-to-five routine ever again.’