This blissful, almost infantile state of contentment continued for another ten minutes or so; until I began to notice, while looking at an oil tanker far away on the shining sea, that the aeroplane was beginning to yaw gently from side to side, then to pitch up and down in a long, soft undulation like that of a large ship riding the swell from a far-off storm. I looked out of the cabin window again. Air turbulence? Surely not: the weather had been very hot lately but we were far from land and there had been little wind that morning when we took off. After a couple more minutes of this meandering progress—so gentle as yet that none of the other passengers appeared to have noticed it—the air hostess put down her magazine and bustled forward to disappear behind the flight-deck curtain. And when she emerged once more, a minute or so later, I saw to my alarm that she was wearing that bright games-mistress smile which among the English is supposed to convey reassurance, but which I must say has on my morale rather the effect of smoke oozing from under a door, or water starting to drip from a bulge in the ceiling. Prochazka’s First Law, based upon more than half a century’s observation of the English, states that when a nurse sits down by the head of the examination couch and starts making light conversation with you, it usually means that you are about to be given a spinal tap without benefit of anaesthetic.
“Well,” she enquired brightly, “everyone enjoying their flight I hope?” She spoke—as did all air hostesses in those days—in the carefully cultivated tones of the J. Arthur Rank Charm Schooclass="underline" the sort of well-groomed debutante-cum-Esher diction which was so perfected by the late Jessie Matthews and which seems almost to have died out now, along with elocution classes and the Court Turn. We all agreed that we were enjoying the flight. I sensed that the man in front of me already seemed a trifle uneasy; but the other passengers appeared not to have noticed anything amiss so I nodded with the rest.
“Splendid, super.” Then there was an ominous pause, although the smile remained as fixed as ever. “I say, I wonder whether anyone has ever flown before?” By the murmur of assent I judged that about half the passengers had in fact flane befaw. A faint, barely discernible shadow stole across the radiance of the smile. “No, no. I meant, has anyone actually flown an aeroplane before. You know: flown an aeroplane, not flown in an aeroplane.” The significance of this question appeared not to have sunk in, so she persisted. “I mean, is any of you actually—er—a qualified pilot?”
This question produced a sudden chill in the cabin—accompanied as it was by a distinct and ominous lurch to starboard. I looked across at Edith, who was staring in a sort of trance with tiny drops of sweat already breaking through the face powder on her forehead. Quite clearly, something was badly amiss. I raised my hand—and saw the young woman’s smile freeze as she glanced at me.
“Excuse me young lady, but I am a qualified pilot.”
She looked at me, struggling valiantly to conceal her dismay. I was a well cared-for old gentleman I suppose, in my early seventies and still (I imagine) with some vestiges of the stiff-backed bearing of a one-time career naval officer of the House of Habsburg, without a walking-stick or even spectacles. No, I suppose that it must have been other factors that did it: the Central European accent and the bristly white moustache and the rather squarish, high-cheekboned Slavic cast of countenance. One of the least endearing traits of the English, I have often had cause to observe— now quite as much as in those early post-imperial days—is their total inability to take any nationality but themselves seriously; as if Englishness were some God-ordained ideal state of humanity of which all the other peoples of the earth fall short to a greater or lesser degree. And in my case of course, being an Austro-Czech by birth placed me immediately in a sort of third-class compartment of risibility some way below Belgians and only just above the Portuguese and the Greeks: remote, quaint and absurd, probably untrustworthy but basically harmless; bracketed for ever in the realms of operetta along with Rupert of Hentzau and the late Richard Tauber, complete with monocle and silly accent.
The hostess’s response to my intervention was at any rate the normal reaction of the English Lady when confronted with anything alarming or unwelcome: that is to say, she simply ignored it and went on as before, raising her voice this time and craning to look over our heads as though she suspected that Captain Lindbergh in full flying kit might be aboard, concealing himself behind the seats for a joke.
“I said, is anyone here a qualified pilot?”
Well, I can be stubborn too, and matters were clearly getting serious: the aircraft’s pitching was now so pronounced that she was having to hold on to a seat-top to steady herself.
“Excuse me, young lady, but I said that I am a qualified pilot.” She looked at me as if I had just made an indecent suggestion, but still with that glassy smile. Feeling that my credentials were being called into question I decided to elaborate. “In fact I have held a pilot’s licence since the year 1912, though it has not been renewed since before the last war . . .”
“Oh really? How very interesting, I said, is there anyone here who . . .” “. . . I was one of the first pilots of the Austro-Hungarian Naval Flying Corps, and I flew as an officer-observer with the Imperial and Royal Flying Service for five months on the Italian Front in 1916. It is true, I have not piloted an aeroplane since that year, and I think that twin- engined aircraft might give me some problems at first. But I am quite confident that I could still handle a small piston-engined aircraft like this with no difficulty whatever . . .”
If, until now, the full gravity of our plight had not fully dawned upon my fellow-passengers, it certainly did at that moment: the sudden, awful realisation that they were several thousand metres above the middle of the English Channel in a small aeroplane with no co-pilot and with some unspecified but dreadful emergency taking place on the flight deck. And as if that were not bad enough, that their only hope of survival should now rest in the hands of a decrepit old Mitteleuropean zany who claimed to have last flown with Prince Eugen of Savoy during the War of the Spanish Succession. As if to underline the point, the aeroplane suddenly leant over on to one wingtip for a second or two, causing the hostess to lose her balance and land in my lap with a squeal of alarm.
“I said, I am a qualified pilot . . .”
“Shut UP, you horrible old man!” she hissed as the aeroplane came level again and she got up, smoothing her uniform and trying to reassume her smile as near-hysteria broke out among the passengers (Edith, mercifully, had just fainted). In the end my qualifications were rejected and she scrambled through the curtain dragging after her the passenger who had been sitting in front of me: a large, mild-mannered commercial traveller in carborundum wheels who (it transpired) had been a flight engineer in a Halifax bomber during the war.