James Philip - Empire Day

“I’d shake your hand but you want to put that smoke out first,” he explained hurriedly, “or we’ll both go up in flames.”

The woman gave him a thoughtful look, then, smelling the petrol vapour in the air, she worked it out for herself.

She took a step back and ground out the cigarette beneath her heel.

“Forgive me. I don’t usually fly in such small aeroplanes,” she informed the pilot.

“Sorry about the way I look. I’ve been up a couple of times already this morning and had to do some work on the engine just now,” he blurted, still a little intimidated by Leonora Coolidge.

She was blond – from what he could see of the hair sticking out of her brown leather flying skull-cap – and willowy, late twenties maybe and her eyes were very nearly cornflower blue.

“Oh,” Alex added, “and you always get gasoline on you when you refuel these kites on your own.”

The woman contemplated the whiplash fit tousled haired man in the oil-stained flying suit, sizing him up. She guessed he was a little older than her, and his face was weathered, had about it a prize-fighter’s propensity to take hard knocks if that was what it took to get the job done.

That said she remained unimpressed by his aeroplane.

It looked like it was made of coarse canvas and held together by cane and cat gut.

The man was reading her thoughts.

“Don’t get carried away by the way she looks,” he chuckled. “This old bird’s a lot tougher than you or me!”

Leonora Coolidge’s driver was standing by his vehicle, ready to open the door so that his ride could get back in.

“Your guy got a name?” Alex inquired, nodding at the man.

“Joe.”

“Once you’re in the front seat I’ll need him to give me a hand pointing the aircraft into the wind.”

“You’re ready to go?”

“Sure. When you are.”

That made up her mind.

Her fiancé had offered to fly her over the review in his De Havilland twin-engined racer – a gilded carriage in comparison with the heap of scrap in front of her now – but they had had a tiff and she had decided that she was going to fly over the Fleet with or without the assistance of that no-good piece of…

Leonora climbed into the machine with no little trepidation.

A single slip and she strongly suspected that she would put her foot through the fuselage and probably fall to the ground!

She was a little irked to be treated like a child.

“Make sure you are strapped in at all times”

“Don’t touch any of the controls in the front cockpit.”

And: “Don’t be sick until we’re back on the ground again!”

Then Alex was running up the engine and waving at Leonora’s driver, Joe, to pick up the tail and walk it around to the north.

Leonora heard and felt the engine quieten.

Nothing happened.

“What are we waiting for?” She shouted.

Alex had been watching Rufus McIntyre’s Bristol VI waddle across the turf like a baby elephant trying to get airborne by flapping its ears. It eventually got off the ground just short of the sandy marshland bordering the eastern side of the field.

He pointed sidelong at Paul Hopkins’s aircraft repeating McIntyre’s slow-motion, horribly laboured take-off run.

The two idiots had been sitting around all morning while everybody else had been flying their socks off and now both men were taking off slightly across the wind.

“I’m waiting to see if that fellow crashes or not!”

The second Bristol VI took an even longer run up before staggering into the air at the very last moment.

What on earth do those comedians think they are doing taking-off in aircraft so obviously over-loaded?

Sooner or later the authorities were going to have to do something to stop every Tom, Dick or Harry – or Rufus or Paul – going flying. Those two would not be the only complete beginners, regardless of what their pilot’s logs said they were, in Alex’s humble opinion, rank amateurs, taking to the sky as they pleased today.

Not my problem, thank goodness!

He gunned the motor and the trainer lurched forward.

Soon she was bumping, running across the grass.

Opening up the throttle the engine bellowed and the old biplane lifted effortlessly, as light as a feather off the turf and began to climb over Rockaway Point, the long sandy isthmus that sheltered Gravesend and Jamaica bays from the winter storms.

The aircraft soared high above a destroyer slowly quartering the entrance to the Lower Bay between Rockaway Point in the north and Sandy Hook to the south.

The whole Lower Bay in the west seemed full of column after column of grey warships streaming a thousand flags and pennants in the brilliant morning sunshine.

Leonora had only ever flown in the relative luxury of a passenger cabin of a big two or four propeller air-liner or Imperial Airways flying boat – aerial gin palaces by any other name – or in one or other of her beau’s, there had been three or four in the last couple of years, shiny, super-fast racers or airborne playthings. The men she became ‘involved with’ all had aeroplanes or noisy, over-power motor launches, souped-up over-powered speedboats by any other name, like the ones ripping up the waves far down below.

She twisted in her seat.

“CAN WE GO LOWER?”

The man grinned and nodded, gave her a thumb’s up signal and the old aircraft dove towards the ships in the mile-wide narrows between Long Island and Staten Island.

They flew over the top of a huge battleship, so low that Leonora imagined she could smell the fumes coming out of the ship’s after smoke stack.

Then they were climbing, soaring over the next leviathan.

There was an orange-red flicker of light below her.

Suddenly the aircraft was on its side.

Leonora felt the hot blast of air on her face and the machine tip over and start to fall out of the air.

Somebody screamed in feral, animal terror.

It was a second or two before she realised that she was the one who was screaming.

HMS Lion, Upper Bay, New York

Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Pakenham eyed the aircraft circling over the fleet and the chaotic proliferation of motor boats and yachts of practically every conceivable size and rig milling in between the big ships with a very jaundiced eye. Fleet Reviews were staid, disciplined affairs in home waters but out in the colonies they were always circuses. Given what had happened yesterday afternoon he had quietly, very strongly advised the King that either there should be a general prohibition on small craft or the whole thing should be called off. His old friend had politely and very firmly rebuffed his advice.

It was Empire Day and ‘a lot of people will have been looking forward to this day for a long time’.

Including, the commander of the 5th Battle Squadron reflected, a lot of people with malice aforethought!

Problematically, as the Review was to be held in the waters of the Crown Colonies of New York-Long Island and New Jersey the whole thing had had to be organised by the combine ‘Fleet Review Committees’ of both colonies; the members of which spent the rest of their lives in cut-throat competition, and basically, really did not like each other. Wisely, the Governor of New England had tried to keep above the fray, acting as an impartial referee employing his most diplomatic staffers as peace-making go-betweens as the arrangements had finally been agreed, line by painful line over the course of the last six months.

Allegedly, the Fleet Review Committee had disintegrated into open warfare – albeit nothing more unpleasant than ineffectual fisticuffs – several times over the last few weeks and only the intercession of the Governor’s daughter, Henrietta, shuttling between the alienated factions had avoided her father having to opt for the so-called ‘Flanders Option’, so named after a particularly bloody Allied victory in France in 1864, removing the whole thing from the hands of the ‘local’ colonies. No Governor in living memory had wanted to do that about anything, let alone an event designed to be an Imperial celebration of everybody’s loyalty to the Crown!