Love, Death, Chariot of Fire Read online

  Dudley studies the map that Mitchell unfolds onto the Moth’s lower wing. ‘Well, how about we head up north towards Winchester, but turn east-south-east just before it at Compton End, making for Bignor here, where we’ll swing round again and strike out west for home? Does that sound all right, RJ?’

  ‘That sounds fine. As you say, I haven’t flown that route before.’

  ‘Staunton, fetch the kneeboard from the rear cockpit there, would you?’

  The mechanic hands the board to Mitchell, who folds his map to expose all the reference points along the chosen route, then clips it down on the board. He attaches a blank sheet of paper and his circular slide rule to it as well, and checks that his mechanical pencil is poking out, securely fastened, from his breast pocket. He doesn’t want to be seen cutting corners, even though he can do the navigational arithmetic in his head.

  ‘If we’re back in time we might be able to fit in a couple of touch-and-go landings, too,’ Dudley adds. ‘You seem to have a talent for landing these little coots, which otherwise have a bad reputation in that department. Who knows? One day you might end up winning the local spot-landing competition, Reg!’

  Mitchell’s lower abdomen is still sore, so he appreciates Dudley’s tactful help in stepping up onto the left wing root. But he has to climb through the entry hatch into the cramped rear cockpit by himself, stand on the seat, flex his knees, and ease himself down, until his rump lands on the cushion and his feet on the rudder pedals.

  His colostomy makes this an uncomfortable action, and he sighs with relief when it’s over. Every time he performs it he’s reminded of the tiny cockpits he’s forced the pilots of the High Speed Flight into during the Schneider years. His own ordeal is poetic justice! But at least their innards were still intact.

  Mitchell straps himself in, buckles on his helmet, then touches the plane’s very basic controls to remind himself where they are. Rudder pedals under his feet, throttle lever against the inside skin of the fuselage on the left, stick between his knees, ‘gospel tube’ for communicating with the instructor near his right hand, compass right under his nose. What more do you need? Brakes? Utterly superfluous! There’s a skid instead of a wheel under the tail.

  Dudley hands him the kneeboard, which he straps on so no errant gust can snatch it away during the flight.

  The view immediately in front of him is a veritable clutter of wires, struts and the anachronistic upper wing that offended him when he first started his flying lessons. There’s even a thin fuel line off to the left, running down to the engine from the tank wedged between the upper wings. It looks like the work of a suburban plumber. Precisely the draggy elements he banished from his racers!

  But this little biplane is no racer, of course. And what a relief that is. Top speed of a hundred miles an hour, preferably with a tailwind! For once he’s not here to prove anything. He’s just discovered a strong taste for actually flying, and this machine leaves you in no doubt that you’re doing precisely that. Just as small sailing dinghies intensify the sense of really sailing.

  He wishes that the field of vision in front of him also included the view ahead, beyond the plane. But as with all tail-draggers – including the Type 224 and its likely successor – the upturned nose blocks that prospect until well into the take-off run. Only then can he push the stick forward to bring the tail up and the nose down, so revealing what lies ahead.

  Dudley clambers past him along the wing root and settles himself into the front cockpit. Mitchell watches the back of his helmet wobble from side to side as he squirms around to retrieve his harness and buckle up. Staunton approaches the wooden propeller from the left-hand side and glances expectantly at Mitchell, who picks up the cue, reaches out and forward along the fuselage to check that the ignition switch is off, and nods. Staunton swings the propeller four times to prime the carburettor, making the plane shiver. He jumps clear each time, just in case – against all logic – the engine fires. Then he cues Mitchell again.

  Mitchell yells ‘Contact!’ and flicks the ignition switch into the on-position. The little machine rocks again as Staunton swings the prop in earnest this time. It trembles as the engine fires. He stands back and waits while Mitchell lets the engine idle and the propeller beat the air for the prescribed four minutes to reach its operating temperature. Mitchell himself uses the time to study the map once more.

  On a gesture from Mitchell, Staunton hauls the chocks away. Mitchell pushes the throttle lever forward, the engine responds, and they’re in motion. He no longer needs to be told how to taxi out onto the airfield, search the ground and air for other aircraft movements. And to make one final check of the windsock to make sure he’s facing into the wind. He adjusts his goggles and earpieces, and begins the take-off sequence. The wheels softly lift off the turf, and the plane labours up and away from the ground.

  It claws its way up to an altitude of 1,500 feet before Mitchell levels out, comfortably below the cloud base, and establishes an air speed of 85 miles an hour – the speed at which the controls are most effective and the engine most efficient. Anything slower, and the controls become spongy. Anything faster, and the plane tends to judder with the effort, while the controls become oversensitive.

  The gospel tube maintains its silence – so far everything’s gone according to Hoyle. During his first lessons with Dudley, instructions came down the tube in a steady stream to guide his every move. Since then they’ve thinned out to a trickle. He’ll soon be ready for his first solo flight. Perhaps Dudley is maintaining silence today to prepare him for that challenging experience.

  Like a good student he sets a heading to Compton End with map and compass, and jots down the time and course on his blank sheet of paper. He knows Hampshire so well now that he could just as well follow the narrow winding roads, hamlets, farmhouses, woods, and the undulating hills and fields. Or he could simply follow the River Itchen, which connects Eastleigh to Winchester. At this modest altitude all these reference points are clearly visible beneath him off to the sides, framed by the plane’s rigging. But he’s the son and husband of former school principals, a native of the realm of standard procedures!

  Spring is signalling an early arrival this year, with vivid light-green patches swathing the rounded chalk hills of the South Downs. Clusters of sheep punctuate the open country.

  He settles back to enjoy the ride. Such a luxury, this flying without a thought to maximising speed. The little craft hops and skitters in the variable air currents and wind gusts. Its motion massages his whole body. In the intervals between them the Gipsy seems to hang in the air, swinging a little like a pendulum, as the landscape below slides slowly aft.

  What’s left of his aeronautical mind recognises the pendulum effect produced by the nicely calculated dihedral angle of the lower wings that keeps the plane stable. But he’s not going into all that theoretical stuff now! He chooses to immerse himself in the bodily sensations of being airborne. They never disappoint him. When he moves his head to the side, out from behind the tiny windscreen, he receives a blast of icy air on his cheeks. It feels almost snug when he draws back again, into the lee of the screen, and he smiles at the contrast.

  The cloud cover renders the light so soft, yet so clear. Wherever he turns his gaze, objects stand out so vividly that they appear to shimmer. He’s surprised to find his senses responding in the same euphoric way they did when he was receiving morphia injections. The injections have ceased, but the sensibility they invoked is still available to him.

  Of course he has to keep actively flying the plane, responding to each air current with the stick and rudder, balancing his craft, holding his course. But that’s part of the pleasure, like controlling a sailing dinghy with constant small adjustments of tiller and sheets. Adroitly dancing with the natural elements. Soaring like an eagle.

  It’s no wonder this humble little aeroplane attracts famous devotees. The Prince of Wales flies himself around in one – it must provide him with blessed relief from the vexations of
his station and the chivvying of his querulous father. Then there’s Amy Johnson. Even after her three-month odyssey to Australia in her Gipsy Moth four years ago, she could still declare her undying love for the machine.

  Dudley still has nothing to say; the back of his helmet barely moves, as if it’s a fixture of the plane. Maybe he’s fallen asleep. Mitchell might just as well be all alone up here, just like that eagle.

  He sees the brown smudge of coaldust over Winchester up ahead and looks down to locate Compton. He uses the stick to bank the Moth into a right-hand turn and sets a new course – the longer leg, heading for Bignor.

  A few minutes later he feels a shock of recognition. Petersfield is coming up on his left, but more importantly he recognises the village of Buriton on his right, clustered around the blockish thirteenth-century Church of St Mary, with its higgledy-piggledy old gravestones scattered around it and overshadowed by a huge, centuries-old yew tree. Wittingly or not, Dudley has sent him on a course, the longest leg of which follows the South Downs Way.

  Long before Gordon’s birth, when Mitchell and Flo first got married and settled in Southampton, they came to Buriton, where the South Downs escarpment rises and the Way begins. They were embarking on a summer walking holiday along the ancient Way east towards Beachy Head and Eastbourne seventy miles away in east Sussex. They wanted to put down roots in their shared new home in southern England, and this struck them as a romantic way to go about it. The Way long predates its Roman wayfarers, according to the experts, and the visible remnants of pre-Roman human occupation along its length spur the imagination.

  At night they stayed at inns along the ancient footpath, and each evening Flo read aloud to him from her notebook. In it she’d copied excerpts from Hilaire Belloc’s The Old Road and The Four Men, about walking old roads like the Way, ones saturated with millennia of history. How he savoured those evening, and didn’t mind a bit Flo’s ulterior motive of turning him into a man of culture.

  As Buriton slips behind the plane, he can look left and identify two distant summits – War Down, with Butser Hill just beyond it, illuminated in a burst of sunshine. Tightly packed tree canopies clothe their slopes and form the southern edge of the Weald, the forest that separates the South from the North Downs. On his right he recognises another similarly-clad summit, Oakham Hill. The three of them dominated the horizon during his and Flo’s first days of walking. Now they sharpen his physical memory of the Way, together with the strong sense of place that walking it evoked.

  While he looks down on the undulating grassland he remembers marvelling at how one could walk across sparsely populated landscapes and chalk-nourished springy green turf all that way, across two counties, to the English Channel. Even he felt the frisson of the supernatural at the sight of the burial mounds – the barrows – whose origins remain mysterious. Some fellow hikers assured them they were the work of the fairy folk. Down there, walking the Way, you could almost believe it. Old England slumbered just beneath the surface, teeming with mysteries.

  The thought awakens once more the recurring presentiment of his own likely death in the foreseeable future – in such contrast to the Downs, where ‘death hath no dominion’ as the Bible puts it. Yet he – the most mortal of its sons – feels such a personal responsibility to protect this deathless land from invading fascist death-worshippers. The South Downs lie so perilously close to the Channel and the Continent – the source of that threat. In what remains of his life he must work to ensure that jackboots never get to tramp the Way. They shall not pass! That monosyllabic French slogan from the Great War – On ne passe pas! – starts up a rhythmic chant in his brain.

  The familiar country, so charged with memory and feeling, has diverted him from his map-reading. But no harm done. The deep Arun valley is coming into view up ahead, and Amberley beyond it. Before them he sees the little village of Bignor, near the Sussex border. Like Buriton, Bignor is recognisable by the medieval church at its centre. In this case the more elegant Church of the Holy Cross. He remembers the village for its proximity to the crossroads where the ancient north-south Roman road between London and the south coast (now prosaically called Stane Street) intersects the Way.

  He dips the right-hand wings of the Moth to execute a 130-degree turn.

  ‘Well spotted, Reg!’ Dudley’s voice suddenly erupts in his earpieces. ‘Bignor isn’t exactly the most outstanding landmark around here.’

  Mitchell reaches for the gospel tube. ‘Thanks, Wes,’ he shouts into it. His instructor doesn’t need to know he’s been here before.

  As he straightens the plane up on its new westerly heading, the Channel dominates the view to his left; the coastal towns of Chichester, and then Portsmouth, appear and slide past. Within a few minutes it’s time for him to concentrate on his landing back at Eastleigh.

  When he spots the airfield he throttles back, shedding altitude and speed to fly the preliminary circuit, during which he can take careful note of the sock once again so as to land into the wind. And to check for other planes using the airfield. Then he commences his approach at what he hopes is just the right speed and angle to be able to glide in – the mark of good airmanship. He’ll disappoint his instructor if he misjudges and has to rely on the engine to stay aloft. A couple of times in the past he’s done just that, disconcerted by the way the ground seems to rush up at you in the final stage of the approach.

  He grins as he remembers Bev Shenstone – who learned to fly in Canada on Gipsy Moths as an airforce cadet – cursing their landing characteristics. ‘Little devils’ he called them! Their stiff landing gear makes them prone to bouncing up embarrassingly from the turf unless the touchdown is well judged.

  As for Mitchell, he’s an ambitious student and avid sportsman. Just as Dudley guessed, he already has the Eastleigh spot-landing competition in his sights for when he gets his pilot’s licence and can hone his skill at precision landing – avoiding kangaroo hops and using only a fraction of the available landing area.

  The tube comes to life again. ‘Do you still want to take on a couple of touch-and-goes, Reg?’

  ‘Yes please, Wes.’

  ‘All right. You know what you have to do.’

  Yes. He knows what he has to do.

  Chapter 10

  A meeting of minds

  Supermarine works, Woolston. Wednesday 14 March 1934, 9 am. Reginald Mitchell and Vera Cross are standing in his office finishing a conversation when the tall, gaunt figure of Beverley Shenstone appears at his door. Mitchell waves him in. The three colleagues greet each other and exchange remarks about the delayed spring weather.

  ‘If you tried the weather back home in Toronto right now, you’d really have something to complain about,’ Shenstone chides his English colleagues.

  Mitchell, conscious of the risk of his fouling the air, has defied the chill outside and left the sash window slightly open.

  Vera makes for the door. ‘Should I close it, RJ?’ She asks over shoulder.

  ‘No, leave it ajar thanks, Vera. But be sure to repel all boarders until Bev and I are finished, if you please.’

  ‘Aye, aye, captain,’ she grins with a mock salute, and returns to her own office.

  ‘Take a seat, Bev,’ Mitchell says, gesturing towards the chair across the desk from his own as he sits down himself. He notes that the younger man’s hair is receding in a straight line, making his high forehead bulge even more. Grey strands are appearing in the younger man’s annoying pencil moustache.

  Mitchell wonders if Shenstone is unwell, or unhappy. But the two men with their wives meet socially from time to time, and Bev and Helen have struck him as a fond married couple. Shenstone’s intense concentration on his research and design work offers the only available explanation for his premature ageing.

  The younger man summons up a smile. ‘I take it from your instruction to Vera that you have something on your mind, RJ.’

  ‘You could say that. This firm – myself in particular – has to make amends for the Type 224
debacle. We have to start again from scratch to get the fighter we want, though a little discreetly at first. Of course the board has approved the project and given it a proper designation – Type 300. I’ve had some ideas, made a few sketches. The more I think about it, the more the wings stand out as the nub of the matter. Or – if you like – our biggest challenge.

  Shenstone remains silent but attentive. Mitchell takes the next step.

  ‘So I want to get you involved. Fully involved, Bev. I want you to be my wingman, as the RAF braves put it – if you’ll pardon the wordplay. How would you feel about that? It would interrupt your work on the flying boats, but I do see this project as a higher priority for the firm. And – given what’s going on in Germany – the highest priority for the country.’

  ‘I’d love to be involved in something as pioneering as this, RJ. But can you convince the board to throw so many resources into this project?’

  ‘Why not? I sit on the bloody board! And I’m the chief designer of this company. Don’t worry, the top echelons know the score. They won’t get in the way. You and I will lead the initial design effort. Others will get involved down the track. Starting with Joe Smith and the draughtsmen, and Alf Faddy and the rest of the engineering section.

  ‘You see, I don’t want to just build an aeroplane – I want to build a team of people who work well together and who understand that aeroplane intimately as they take it through its later developmental stages in the years to come. Life is, well, uncertain. Neither the firm nor the country can afford for any of us to be indispensable.’

  A frown creases Shenstone’s oversized forehead. Mitchell wonders if speculation about his health is doing the rounds of the drawing office.

  ‘You mentioned the need for discretion, RJ. Why is that?’

  ‘Well, there’s a bit of double accounting going on. We’re still being funded by the ministry under the F.7/30 specification and the contract to work on the Type 224 prototype. We’re making good its shortcomings, that’s the official story. Unofficially we’re working on Type 300, which will make good the Type 224’s shortcomings by replacing it with something else entirely. Dowding at the Air Council knows and approves of what we’re up to, but has to bide his time before introducing our new endeavour as a separate project.’