High Road to China

‘I regret the limited time allowed, but I am afraid there is no way of changing my master’s mind. If I do not have the statue back with him on the day appointed, I too shall be killed.’ Sun was abruptly grave, as if the thought of his own possible death was suddenly a surprise to him. Then he shrugged away the possibility: he was that acrobatic philosopher, an optimistic fatalist.

‘Why is there such an absolute deadline?’ Henty asked. ‘Can’t you ask your master for an extension?’

Sun shook his head. ‘The only wireless in Hunan is controlled by Chang Ching-yao. I should have told my master before this that I had missed you, had it been possible. I have been in a veritable state of frustration ever since I took ship at Hong Kong. What to do? I kept asking myself.’

‘How did you manage to arrive here today then, if you were always so far behind Miss Tozer?’

‘My ship went to Constantinople – I caught the Orient Express from there. A very funny name for a train, one that stops over 4000 miles from the real Orient. But very comfortable and full of very strange people. It saved me several days getting here.’

‘It hasn’t saved us enough to get us to Hunan in eighteen days.’

Eve looked at the watch in her hand. Somehow she knew, with a sickening feeling of certainty, that it was all the evidence she needed to know that her father had indeed been kidnapped. But with despairing hope she said, ‘What if I don’t believe your story, Mr Sun? You could have stolen this watch – ’

Sun Nan produced a piece of folded notepaper from the inside of his jacket and handed it to her. As soon as she unfolded it she recognized the handwriting, bold, assertive even while it asked for her help: Eve darling, These fellows, I’m afraid, mean business. Give them what they want. And don’t worry. Dad.

‘I don’t understand why the Shanghai office hasn’t cabled us your father is missing,’ said Henty.

‘Mr Henty, China hasn’t changed since you left. Up-country, two days out of Shanghai, and you could be on the other side of the moon as far as keeping in contact.’ She turned back to Sun Nan. ‘Will your master, whoever he is, really kill my father if he doesn’t get back that statue?’

‘I’m afraid so, Miss Tozer. He does not value lives highly, especially those of foreigners. He often jokes he would have made a very good imperialist.’ He smiled, but Eve and Henty did not share the joke.

‘What about you? Do you value foreigners’ lives?’

Sun spread his hands. ‘I value my own. I am a humble messenger. Does the telegraph boy carry the burden of every telegram he delivers?’

‘Good Christ, now he’s spouting bloody aphorisms!’ Then Henty hastily looked at Eve, wobbled on his stick. ‘I’m frightfully sorry. I usually don’t swear in front of ladies – ’

‘It’s all right, Mr Henty. Everything is bloody at the moment.’

Eve felt choked: with helplessness, fear, premature grief for her father who was about to die. She had felt grief before but that had been bearable; her mother, gone suddenly with cancer, had been spared what the doctors had said would otherwise have been a long lingering death. But Bradley Tozer, for all his adventurousness, had always seemed to her invulnerable. Though they had often been separated in the years during and since the war, she living in America with her grandmother and he coming home from China on his annual visits, she had never thought of life without him. The bond between them had never been severed or even frayed by distance. Distance …

‘How far is it from London to Hunan by air?’

‘By air?’ Henty’s eyebrows went up this time as if he had had a sudden spasm; then they came down again in a puzzled frown. ‘By aeroplane, you mean? But there’s no aeroplane service that far. The furthest it goes is to Paris.’

‘I can fly. Father and I have our own machine back home. We usually fly from Boston down to our winter place in Florida. We were planning to do so next month.’ She heard herself already speaking in the past tense; and tried to sound more resolute. ‘We can buy a machine here and fly to China. How far is it?’

‘I don’t know. Seven, perhaps eight thousand miles as the crow flies. But you wouldn’t be flying as the crow flies. It’s out of the question, Miss Tozer – ’

‘Nothing is out of the question, Mr Henty, if it will save my father’s life. Unless you can think of an alternative?’

Henty thumped his stick on the carpet in frustration. ‘No, I can’t. But such a flight – ’ He trailed off helplessly.

‘Some men – what was their name? Smith? – flew out to Australia only last year.’

‘Ross and Keith Smith. But there were four of them, they had an engineer and a mechanic and they flew a Vickers Vimy bomber. Even so they took longer than eighteen days. A month at least, I think. And another half a dozen chaps have tried to follow them and got less than half-way.’

‘China is not as far as Australia and the Smiths were not as hard pressed for time as I am.’

‘I wish there were some other way – ’

‘There isn’t,’ said Eve. ‘Where can I buy an aeroplane?’

2

Extract from the William Bede O’Malley manuscript:

George Weyman always said he could read my sky-writing better than he could the handwritten notes I used to leave for him in our office. Perhaps that was because he suffered from what we now call dyslexia; or perhaps it was because the only sky-writing contract we ever had was for Oxo, the meat extract. Or more correctly, nearly had. Because at the time I am writing of, we were no more than on trial. The first sky-writing had been attempted by an American way back in 1913, but nobody had yet come up with a formula for keeping the smoke coming consistently out of the exhaust pipes of our machines. Letters kept breaking off in mid-stroke; if the world at large had been able to read Mr Pitman’s shorthand we might have been successful. There were plenty of advertisers waiting to use our services once we proved, as it were, that we were not illiterate. That summer we had been approached by a sweets manufacturer who wanted his name, plus a gumdrop in green, sketched above half a dozen seaside resorts. The producers of the motion picture Why Change Tour Wife? had also been in touch with us; they wanted the name of their film in purple smoke and that of the delectable actress, Miss Gloria Swanson, in red, hung, as one of their publicity men described it, on God’s marquee. The thought of Miss Swanson in cirrocumulus across London’s sky had excited me, but reason had forced us to say no to them. There was no point in taking on a 35-letter contract when I still hadn’t succeeded in spelling out Oxo.

This weekend was our last chance and our luck was running its usual course. George and I had stood in our shed all morning watching the rain; as soon as it stopped I took off. The clouds were still too low for good sky-writing, but that couldn’t be helped. The writing, if I managed to get it out of the exhaust, was going to be just that much lower to the ground. The shortsighted citizens, if not the executives of Oxo, would be pleased.

I finished the first O, shut off the smoke and took the Sopwith Camel up to begin the first stroke of the X. But half-way down the stroke I knew our luck had finally run out; there was nothing but a dribble coming from the exhaust. I did a half-loop and climbed back up again, rolled over into another dive. But it was no use: Oxo was no more than a giant cypher in the sky, drifting west towards Berkshire, a county not noted for Oxo drinkers. I cursed the smoke mixture, the weather and God Himself and headed back towards earth and bankruptcy.

I took the Camel down over the Thames towards Waddon aerodrome near Croydon. I passed over the Oval. Surrey was playing Notts that day and play had started; spectators sat around the ground in their raincoats and watched the flannelled fools on the mud-heap out in the middle. I hoped Surrey was batting and I waggled the Camel’s wings as an encouragement to Hobbs and Sandham. Cricket is, or was then, a peaceful game; but none of the cricketers down there knew the peace I sometimes felt up here in the sky. Excitement, too; but mostly peace these days, as if the air was my one true element, the one to be trusted. Debts were never airborne with me, nor any other worries. That gave the sky a certain purity, if nothing else did.

Waddon aerodrome came up on my starboard wing and I banked to go in, making sure there were no other machines with the same idea at that particular moment. I could see four or five machines at various heights around the aerodrome; they would be the joy-riders, ten minutes for ten bob. There was a control tower at Waddon, but they had little control over you if you chose not to look in their direction. It was the days before the bureaucrats began cutting up the sky into little cubes with aeroplanes’ markings on them. Too many damned people flying these days. Egalitarianism should never have been allowed to get off the ground.

I came in over the long sheds of the Aircraft Disposal Company. I always wanted to weep when I thought of what stood there beneath those long roofs. Hundreds of aircraft, like birds that had died at the moment they had spread their wings for flight. Pups, Camels, SE5a’s, Bristols, DH4’s and 9’s, Handley Pages, even some Spads and Nieuports: the no-longer-wanted chariots of a war everyone was trying to forget. The Aircraft Disposal Company had brought them all here when the war had ended. It had been expected there would be a rush to buy them, everyone wanting to be airborne on the euphoria of peace and a cheap aeroplane. But it had turned out that the wartime pilots had other, more pressing things to do with their money. Such as getting married (what use was a Sopwith Pup to a couple intent on adding to the postwar baby boom?), buying a house if you could find one (the housing shortage wasn’t a recent invention), emigrating to Canada or Australia: money went no further in 1919-20 than it does now. There’s just more of it now, that’s all, like promiscuity. The satisfaction with what you get hasn’t been increased.

There were a few of us who felt no immediate need of a wife, a house or a new country. I had no nostalgia for the war, none at all. But two years of tossing an aeroplane about the sky, uninhibited but for a natural desire to avoid German bullets, had worn threadbare any yearning for what the editorial writers were then calling the fruits of victory. Already they, the fruits not the editorialists, looked speckled. Though come to think of it, what those editorialists wrote had the sound of second-hand words in which they didn’t truly believe, the harangue of men caught at a corner where they weren’t sure from which direction came the echoes they could hear. In that year the Roaring Twenties was still just a distant whisper. In the meantime some of us flew aeroplanes, ignored our debts and called Waddon home.

There were two landing fields at Waddon in those days, separated from each other by a public road, Plough Lane. I put the Camel down on the grass of the field called Wallington, holding it against the cross-wind. Landing was usually no problem, if you watched the wind; but taking off, a cross-wind could sometimes flip you over on your back. You don’t get that sort of thrill these days in those damned great cattle trucks they call jumbos. I swung the machine round at the end of the field and taxied back towards the level crossing over Plough Lane, feeling as I always felt when I came back to earth, deflated. I’ve heard it likened to post-coital blues, though personally I never felt any such blues till I was too old to be coital.

I crossed the road, waving a royal hand to the envious and resentful motorists and cyclists waiting beyond the gates, and taxied towards our shed near the ADC’s hangars. George Weyman was waiting for me, ready to put the Camel away as he always did. George still flew, but he was the mechanic of the two of us and he looked after our single machine as if he, and not the Sopwith Company, had given birth to it. He loved it as an aeroplane, but he also loved it as our only asset.

‘Someone has just been on the telephone,’ he said when the Camel was safely stored away in the shed that was its hangar, our office and our home. We could not afford a telephone and I knew he must have been called over to the ADC’s office. ‘Chap named Henty. He said you would remember him, Arthur Henty.’

‘We were in the same battalion together, before I transferred to the RFC. What did he want? Not some bloody regimental reunion, I hope.’

‘He said something about wanting to buy an aeroplane. Or maybe two.’

‘We’re not going to sell him the Camel,’ I protested in anticipation. ‘We’ll pay off our debts some other way.’

‘What other way? I saw what just happened to Oxo.’ He nodded up towards the sky. The O I’d written was now just a flat dim vowel in the greyness. ‘You’re not thinking of taking up joy-riders, are you? They’ll expect a seat, not be standing out on the wing.’

George Weyman was a big man with a high voice and a low boiling point. He never went looking for a fight or an argument, but somehow he seemed to spend half his time swinging his fists to defend a point or holding someone down to force an argument down his throat. He was prickly with prejudices and one had to be careful one didn’t rub against them; which was not always easy to do, since they seemed to cover the whole spectrum of human bias. So why did I choose him as my friend and partner? Because he was loyal, honest, good company when he wasn’t arguing and the best damn aeroplane mechanic I’d ever come across.

‘Did Henty say why he wanted to see me? If he wants a machine, why doesn’t he just go over to the ADC?’

‘He said he’d like your advice as an old army mate.’

‘Henty would never use the word mate.’

‘Righto. Friend. He said he’d be down within the hour. What are you thinking about? You’ve got your swindler’s look again.’

I was staring across at the ADC’s sheds. ‘How many cheques do we have left in our cheque-book?’

‘Four. There’s just one snag. We don’t have any money in our account. They closed our overdraft on Friday.’

‘Today’s a bank holiday. If I write four cheques, who’s going to be able to call the bank to see if there’s any money in our account to meet them?’

‘What are you going to write four cheques for?’

‘Deposits on four machines. We’ll give Henty a choice – you said he wanted a machine, perhaps two. You said he also wanted my advice. My advice will be to buy from us, not the ADC. We’ll be more expensive than the ADC, but he won’t know that.’

‘I don’t know how you got your commission as an officer and a gentleman. I was only a bloody sergeant and I’m twice the gentleman you are.’

‘You’re wrong, chum. Honesty has nothing to do with being a gentleman – that’s a myth put out by gentlemen. Simmer down, George. I’m not about to do something they can send me to Wormwood Scrubs for. All I’m going to do is put our name – ’

‘Your name. Not mine.’

‘Righto, my name. I’ll sign the cheques and leave them with the ADC. If Henty buys a machine, or two, I’ll cancel the deposits on those he doesn’t want. I’ll get him to give us his cheque today and we’ll be down at the bank in the morning when it opens to deposit it to meet the cheques we’ve paid out. Now what’s dishonest about that?’

‘It’s not what I’d expect of a gentleman, that’s all.’

‘That’s because you’re not a gentleman. You socialists always expect more of us than we claim for ourselves. You secretly wish you had our honest hypocrisy.’

Half an hour later we saw the Rolls-Royce pull up outside our shed. It came down the perimeter of the field as if the chauffeur wasn’t quite sure that he wasn’t going to be attacked by the aeroplanes coming in and taking off. Arthur Henty got out, steadying himself with a walking-stick. He turned and helped out a girl. Even through the dirty windows of our office one could see she was a stunner, an absolute beauty. I know I’m looking back through a rose-coloured telescope and the girls of an old man’s youth always have an aura about them. But Eve Tozer was not only beautiful, she had what was later known as It or, still later, sex appeal; and she also had what is now known as class. Even through the grime of that office window and the rheum of an old man’s eyes, I can still see her that afternoon fifty years ago and still remember the feeling that, up till then, I had only experienced when looping the loop. And not in bed.

‘Holy Moses, did you ever see such a girl!’

‘They’ve got a bloody Chink with them,’ was all George said. He was only slightly prejudiced against women, but he had a consuming aversion to all the world’s populace who weren’t white, especially those outside the Empire. ‘We’re not going to sell any machine to him! Those buggers want to conquer the world.’

‘Let me do the talking, George. Just don’t declare war on China till we hear what Henty has to say.’

We went out to meet them. A Chinese had come round from the passenger’s side of the front seat and stood by the rear door behind Henty and the girl. As we walked towards them I whispered to George, ‘The Chinaman looks like a butler. Stop worrying about the Yellow Peril.’

Henty introduced himself and Miss Tozer, ignoring the Chinese, and came straight to his point. ‘Miss Tozer needs an aeroplane for a long-distance flight, O’Malley.’

The O’Malley was a measure of the sort of friends we had been. We had been fellow officers sharing a mess and several trenches together, but he had been wounded and demobbed before we had been through enough to get down to first-name terms. ‘How did you know where to find me?’

‘I saw that piece in the Illustrated London News on your attempts at sky-writing. I cut it out and kept it. One likes to keep track of chaps one knew in the army, y’know.’

It wasn’t a liking of mine, but I was glad it was one of his, if it meant he brought Miss Tozer to meet chaps he’d known in the army. ‘How long is the flight you’re planning, Miss Tozer?’

‘To China.’ I felt George start beside me. ‘I’d like to leave tomorrow at the latest.’

‘Are you serious?’ said George, starting to boil. ‘We don’t like having our leg pulled.’

‘I’ve never been more serious in my life, Mr Weyman. I am an experienced pilot, I know what I’m attempting should have more preparation than a day’s notice allows. But I just don’t have the time. I am flying to China because it is urgent, terribly urgent, that I get there by a certain date.’

‘How soon?’

She looked at Henty, then back at us. ‘21 August. I’ll need an aeroplane with maximum range and a good cruising speed. One that will carry myself as pilot and a passenger.’

I glanced at Henty and he shook his head. ‘Not me. Mr Sun Nan.’

The Chinese behind them stared at George and me. I almost said inscrutably, but there was a certain nervousness about him, tiny cracks in his mask. ‘Does Mr Sun Nan fly?’

‘No,’ said Henty. I became aware that he and Miss Tozer did not want to take me and George into their confidence. This flight they were talking about was no eccentricity, no madcap adventure by a bored rich girl; they were far too serious for that, too strained-looking. But I was certain that Miss Tozer, for all her claims to being an experienced pilot, really had no idea of what lay ahead of her. Henty must have seen the sceptical look on my face, because he went on, ‘On our way down here I’ve been talking to Miss Tozer about taking a second machine and pilot with her.’

‘Mr Henty vouched for you as a pilot and a gentleman,’ said Miss Tozer.

George coughed and ran his hand like a crab over his mouth. I wasn’t sure that Henty knew anything about my value as either a pilot or a gentleman; but he was one of those, now almost all gone, who believed that if a man came from a certain class he was taken as a gentleman until proven otherwise. He had told me so one night in our mess at Salisbury, before we had gone to France and found the Germans made no class distinctions as they shot at us. He knew nothing about my cynicism: that had developed after we had parted company.

‘What would the pay be?’ I said, ungentlemanly.

‘We could come to terms,’ said Miss Tozer. ‘There would be no quibbling on my part. My only concern is to get to China as soon as possible. And I think we are wasting time even now. May we look at the aeroplane you suggest I buy?’

‘It’s over there in the ADC sheds,’ I lied. ‘They let us store our machines there. We have four.’

‘Five,’ said George, determined to get a grain of truth in somewhere. ‘We have a Sopwith Camel, but that would be no good for your purpose.’

Mr Sun Nan stayed with the chauffeur and we led Miss Tozer and Henty across to the Company’s sheds. Being a holiday there was only a skeleton staff on duty; no salesman followed us as we made our way down past the long lines of parked aircraft. The first machine I showed Miss Tozer was a Vickers Vimy. It could carry four people and extra fuel tanks could be fitted; it had been a good bomber in the last days of the war. George had not come across with me to look at it when I had paid one of our rubber cheques as a deposit on it; but ten minutes’ inspection now told him it would need at least a week’s work before being ready for any long-range flying. It was the same with the De Havilland 9 and 4 on which I had also paid deposits; I could see our quick profits disappearing even quicker than that O in Oxo. We were left with only the Bristol Fighter at the end of the line.

‘There’s another DH4 at the other end of the shed.’ George suddenly sounded as if he had been a used aeroplane dealer all his life. ‘But I’d take the Bristol over it. The range is about the same, but the Bristol is about five miles an hour faster and it can climb about five thousand feet higher. You’ll be crossing a lot of mountains, I suppose.’

‘What’s the range?’ Miss Tozer asked.

‘The Bristol will stay up for three hours,’ I said. ‘I flew one for a while during the war. Say about three hundred miles or a little over.’

‘We could stretch that by fitting extra tanks,’ said George. ‘Assuming you cruise around ninety to one hundred miles an hour, with the extra tanks you’d probably get another hundred, possibly more, to your range. Let’s say four hundred and fifty miles maximum.’

Miss Tozer stared at the Bristol Fighter. It had been a great warplane, a two-seater almost as manoeuvrable as any single-seater and twice as effective because it had carried two guns, one fired straight ahead by the pilot and the other able to be fired in a complete circle by the observer. George and I had flown as a team in one of them and in three months we had brought down nine Huns. Miss Tozer walked round the machine, then came back to us.

‘Mr O’Malley, could you get us some maps? I think we need to sit down and have a talk. Perhaps we could go back to your office?’

Two people in our office crowded it; a four-person conference would have split it at the seams. ‘We’ll go back to our shed – we can find a spot there where we can have a talk. George will have to scout around for some maps – all we have are some of England and some old war maps of France and Belgium. But before he goes scrounging – ’

‘Yes?’

‘This machine won’t do for what you have in mind. For one thing, it can carry only you and Mr Sun Nan. There won’t be room for a second pilot. You mentioned the possibility of a second machine, but all we have is our Camel. It wouldn’t have sufficient range.’

She was quiet for a moment. She had a habit, that I was to come to recognize later, of holding her chin in one hand, almost as if she had a toothache; but it was her pensive attitude, as if she were holding her head steady while she deliberated. Then: ‘How many other Bristol Fighters are there here?’

‘At least half a dozen,’ said George. ‘Two of them are in as good condition as this one.’

‘They happen to be two on which we have an option,’ I said.

‘I thought you might have,’ said Miss Tozer, and suddenly I knew she had already begun to doubt Henty’s recommendation of me as a gentleman. ‘How much would they cost?’