‘How far is it?’
‘Two seventy nautical miles, about.’
‘You’ll be coming back in the dark.’ It was a statement, not a question. He unscrewed the cap of Kilo November and topped up the tanks.
‘Most of the way, yes.’
I did the routine checks all round the aircraft, fetched my padded jacket and my charts from the car, filed my flight plan, checked with the control tower for taxi clearance, and within a short while was up in the sky and away.
Air is curious stuff. One tends to think that because it is invisible it isn’t there. What you can’t see don’t exist, sort of thing. But air is tough, elastic and resistant; and the harder you dig into it the more solid it becomes. Air has currents stronger than tides and turbulences which would make Charybdis look like bath water running away.
When I first went flying I rationalised the invisibility thing by thinking of an aircraft being like a submarine: in both one went up and down and sideways in a medium one couldn’t see but which was very palpably around. Then I considered that if human eyes had been constructed differently it might have been possible to see the mixture of nitrogen and oxygen we breathe as clearly as the hydrogen and oxygen we wash in. After that I took the air’s positive plastic existence for granted, and thought no more about it.
The day I went to Islay was pure pleasure. I had flown so much by then that the handling of the little aircraft was as normal as driving a car, and with the perfect weather and my route carefully worked out and handy on the empty passenger seat behind me, there was nothing to do but enjoy myself. And that I did, because I liked being alone. Specifically I liked being alone in a tiny noisy efficient little capsule at 25,000 revs a minute, four thousand five hundred feet above sea level, speed over the ground one hundred and ten miles an hour, steady on a course 313 degrees, bound north-west towards the sea and a Scottish island.
I found Islay itself without trouble, and tuned my radio to the frequency — 118.5 — of Port Ellen airfield.
I said, ‘Port Ellen tower this is Golf Alpha Romeo Kilo November, do you read?’
A Scots accent crackled back, ‘Golf Kilo November, good afternoon, go ahead.’
‘Kilo November is approaching from the south-east, range fifteen miles, request joining instructions, over.’
‘Kilo November is cleared to join right base for runway zero four, QFE 998 millibars. Surface wind zero six zero, ten knots, call field in sight.’
Following his instructions I flew in and round the little airfield on the circuit, cut the engine, turned into wind, glided in at eighty, touched down, and taxied across to the control tower to report.
After eating in a snack bar I went for a walk by the sea, breathing the soft Atlantic air, and forgot to look for some heather to take back with me. The island lay dozing in the sun, shut up close because it was Sunday. It was peaceful and distant and slowed the pulse; soul’s balm if you stayed three hours, devitalising if you stayed for life.
The gold had already gone from the day when I started back, and I flew contentedly along in the dusk and the dark, navigating by compass and checking my direction by the radio beacons over which I passed. I dropped down briefly at Carlisle to refuel, and uneventfully returned to Lincolnshire, landing gently and regretfully on the well-known field.
As usual on Sundays the club room next to the main hall was bursting with amateur pilots like myself all talking at once about stalls and spins and ratings and slide slips and allowances for deviations. I edged round the crowd to the bar and acquired some whisky and water, which tasted dry and fine on my tongue and reminded me of where I had been.
Turning round I found myself directly beside the reception desk man and a red-haired boy he was talking to. Catching my eye he said to the boy, ‘Now here’s someone you ought to have a word with. Our Harry here, he’s dead quiet, but don’t let that fool you... He could fly the pants off most of that lot.’ He gestured round the room. ‘You ask Harry, now. He started just like you, knowing nothing at all, only three or four years ago.’
‘Four,’ I said.
‘There you are, then. Four years. Now he’s got a commercial licence and enough ratings to fill a book and he can strip an engine down like a mechanic.’
‘That’s enough,’ I interrupted mildly. The young man looked thoroughly unimpressed anyway, as he didn’t understand what he was being told. ‘I suppose the point is that once you start, you go on,’ I said. ‘One thing leads to another.’
‘I had my first lesson today,’ he said eagerly, and gave me a rev by rev account of it for the next fifteen minutes. I ate two thick ham sandwiches while he got it off his chest, and finished the whisky. You couldn’t really blame him, I thought, listening with half an ear: if you liked it, your first flight took you by the throat and you were hooked good and proper. It had happened to him. It had happened to me, one idle day when I passed the gates of the airfield and then turned back and went in, mildly interested in going up for a spin in a baby aircraft just to see what it was like.
I’d been to visit a dying great-aunt, and was depressed. Certainly Mr...? ‘Grey.’ I said. Certainly Mr Grey could go up with an instructor, the air people said: and the instructor, who hadn’t been told I only wanted a sight-seeing flip, began as a matter of course to teach me to fly. I stayed all day and spent a week’s salary in fees; and the next Sunday I went back. Most of my Sundays and most of my money had gone the same way since.
The red-head was brought to a full stop by a burly tweed-suited man who said ‘Excuse me,’ pleasantly but very firmly, and planted himself between us.
‘Harry, I’ve been waiting for you to come back.’
‘Have a drink?’
‘Yes... all right, in a minute.’
His name was Tom Wells. He owned and ran a small charter firm which was based on the airfield, and on Sundays, if they weren’t out on jobs, he allowed the flying club to hire his planes. It was one of his that I had flown to Islay.
‘Have I done something wrong?’ I asked.
‘Wrong? Why should you, for God’s sake? No, I’m in a spot and I thought you might be able to help me out.’
‘If I can, of course.’
‘I’ve overbooked next week-end and I’m going to be a pilot short. Will you do a flight for me next Sunday?’
‘Yes,’ I said: I’d done it before, several times.
He laughed. ‘You never waste words, Harry boy. Well, thanks. When can I ring you to give you a briefing?’
I hesitated. ‘I’d better ring you, as usual.’
‘Saturday morning, then.’
‘Right.’
We had a drink together, he talking discontentedly about the growing shortage of pilots and how it was now too expensive for a young man to take it up on his own account, it cost at least three thousand pounds to train a multi-engine pilot, and only the air lines could afford it. They trained their own men and kept them, naturally. When the generation who had learned flying in the R.A.F. during the war got too old, the smaller charter firms were going to find themselves in very sticky straits.
‘You now,’ he said, and it was obviously what he’d been working round to all along. ‘You’re an oddity. You’ve got a commercial licence and all the rest, and you hardly use it. Why not? Why don’t you give up that boring old desk job and come and work for me?’
I looked at him for a long, long moment. It was almost too tempting, but apart from everything else, it would mean giving up steeplechasing, and I wasn’t prepared to do that. I shook my head slowly, and said not for a few years yet.
Driving home I enjoyed the irony of the situation. Tom Wells didn’t know what my desk job was, only that I worked in an office. I hadn’t got around to telling him that I no longer did, and I wasn’t going to. He didn’t know where I came from or anything about my life away from the airfield. No one there did, and I liked it that way. I was just Harry who turned up on Sundays and flew if he had any money and worked on the engines in the hangars if he hadn’t.