Hammond Innes - Air Bridge

‘Who owns the patent?’ I asked.

‘I do,’ he snapped. ‘The prototype was never completed. For a man in your position, you’ve a devilish sensitive conscience.’ He sat down abruptly. ‘For God’s sake let’s get on. We’ve wasted enough time already.’

I had barely got back to my lathe when there was a knock at the door of the hangar. ‘See who it is, Fraser,’ Saeton said. ‘If it’s Randall I won’t talk to him.’

But it wasn’t Randall. It was Diana, and with her was a girl in a faded brown smock. I knew her at once. She was the girl who had been talking with Saeton in the hangar that first night I had come to Membury. She had recognised me, too, for she caught her breath and stared at me as though I were something unexpected, and her broad forehead contracted in a frown that gave her pleasant, quiet features a brooding look.

‘She wants to see Bill,’ Diana said.

I pulled open the door and they came in, the girl hesitating over the sill as though she feared a trap. Then she was walking down the hangar, her head erect, her shoulders squared.

? Saeton looked up, saw her and jumped to his feet. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ His thick eyebrows were dragged down, his body tense.

The girl didn’t flinch. Her eyes roved quickly along the bench. They were wide, intelligent eyes, and they seemed to miss nothing. Finally they came to rest on the completed engine and their expression seemed to change, to soften.

‘Did you bring her here, Diana?’ Saeton’s voice was harsh.

‘Yes. She wanted to see you.’

‘I don’t care who she wanted to see,’ he stormed. ‘Get her out of here.’ He got control of himself and turned to me. ‘Take her outside and find out what she wants. I won’t have people walking in and out of this place as though it were a railway station.’ But almost immediately he changed his mind. ‘All right. I’ll talk to her.’ He strode down the hangar. The girl hesitated, her eyes lingering a moment on the litter of the work bench, then she turned and followed him.

‘That’s a queer girl,’ Diana said to her husband. ‘When Randall was here she hung around the quarters like a cat on hot bricks. After a time she went out on to the airfield, and the next I saw of her she came flying through the woods, her face white and her eyes wet with tears. Had she been in a concentration camp or something?’

‘Her father died in one,’ Carter answered. ‘That’s all I know.’

Saeton came back then, his face angry, the muscles at the side of his jaw swollen with the clenching of his teeth.

‘What did she want?’ Diana asked.

He didn’t appear to hear her question. He strode straight past her and seated himself at the bench again. ‘Will you bring lunch for the three of us up here at one-thirty,’ he said.

Diana hesitated. But his manner didn’t encourage questions. ‘All right,’ she said and left the hangar. I turned back to my lathe, but all the time I was trying to remember the scrap of conversation I’d overheard that night in the hangar.

Twice I glanced at Saeton, but each time his expression stopped me from putting the question that was on the tip of my tongue. At length I said, ‘Who is that girl?’

His head jerked up. ‘That was Else,’ he said.

‘What was her father’s work?’

His fist crashed down on the bench. ‘You ask too many damned questions,’ he shouted.

I felt the shock of his violence as though it was a physical blow and went quickly over to the lathe. But a moment later he was at my side. ‘I’m sorry, Neil,’ he said quietly. ‘Don’t worry if I lose my temper now and then.’ His hand reached out and gripped my arm and he waved his free hand to the litter of parts on the bench. ‘I feel sometimes as though these were my organs and I was being slowly manufactured and pieced together. If anything happened to prevent the completion of the whole thing-’ He didn’t finish and the grip on my arm slowly relaxed. ‘I’m a bit tired, that’s all. It’ll be like this until we’re in the air.’

Time stood still for me on Membury aerodrome in the weeks that followed. November slid into December and I scarcely noticed it. We rose at six and started work at seven. There was coffee around eleven and we had our lunch and our tea at the work bench. Breakfast and dinner were the only meals we had back at the quarters, dinner anywhere between seven-thirty and nine according to how the work ran. Tempers were short and the working hours long, and though Diana Carter talked about Prince Charles and the fighting in Palestine and the opening of Tegel airport, it meant nothing to me, for I didn’t read the papers. My life was the cold, grey cavern of the hangar; I lived and dreamed engineering and the world outside Membury ceased to exist.

And yet through it all ran a thread of pure excitement. Saeton never gave me a briefing on the engines. He left me to find out for myself and as the Satan Mark II, which was what he called it, took shape under our hands, my sense of excitement mounted.

The difference lay mainly in the system of ignition and the method of fuel injection. High-pressure injectors delivered filtered fuel to the combustion chambers. Injector timing replaced ignition timing and there was a complicated system for metering the fuel, the flow having to be adjusted constantly in relation to altitude. It was essentially a compression ignition motor and though it was a long way removed from the diesel design, it was soon clear to me that the man who had made the original design must have been a diesel expert.

It took us just over five weeks to build that second engine and all the time it was a race — our skill against my bank balance, with the airlift date looming ever nearer.

It was a queer life, the four of us alone up on that derelict airfield, held there by Saeton’s tenacity and the gradual emergence of that second engine. I got to know Tubby Carter and his wife well, and they were as different as two people could be. Maybe that was why they had got married. I don’t know. They were an oddly assorted pair.

Tubby was a stolid, unimaginative man, round of face and round of figure with rolls of fat across his stomach and sides that gave him the appearance of a man-sized cupid when stripped. His nature was happy and friendly. He was one of the nicest men I have ever met, and one of the most uninteresting. Outside of flying and engineering, he knew nothing of the world, accepting it and ignoring it so long as it let him get on with his job. What had caused this unenterprising son of a Lancashire poultry farmer to take to flying I never discovered. He had started in a blacksmith’s shop and when that closed down he had got a job in a foundry producing farm equipment. He was one of those men who shift along on the tide of life and the tide had drifted him into a motor factory and so into the engineering side of the aircraft industry. That he had started to fly because he wanted to would have been quite out of character. I imagine it just happened that way and his stolidity would have made him an ideal flight engineer in any bomber crew.

When I think of Tubby, it is of a happy child, whistling gently between his teeth. He was like a fat, cheerful mongrel, something of a cross between airedale and pug. His eyes were brown and affectionate and if he’d had a tail it would have wagged every time anybody spoke to him. But when I think of him as a man, then it is only his hands I remember. His hands were long and slender, and quite hairless like the rest of him — very different from Saeton’s hands. Give those hands a piece of metal and ask them to produce something out of it and he grew to man’s stature in an instant, all his being concentrated in his fingers, his face wreathed in a smile that crinkled his eyes, and his short, fat lips pursed as he whistled endlessly at the work. He was a born engineer, and though he was a child in other respects, he had a streak of obstinacy that took the place of initiative. Once he had been persuaded on a course of action, nothing would deflect him. It was this tenacity that made one respect as well as like him.