Round the Bend Read Online Free Page A

If a Rapide ran off the runway and bent its undercarriage at Luxor or at Lydda, the responsibility for getting it into the air again was mine. If it was a simple and straightforward repair I would send one of my ground engineers to it by air or truck, but if it was a difficult or complicated job I would go myself and see the work put in hand the way I wanted it. We had an old Hornet two-seater that I used to go in if the journey was anything less than five hundredmiles, but there was always a difficulty about finding a pilot who could spare the time, and after a while the firm agreed that I should fly myself about in this thing. It wasn’t worth much if I crashed it, and I didn’t want any flying pay or insurance.
    On these repair jobs, flying myself or being flown by a pilot, I travelled very widely in the last two years of the war. I went to Beirut and Baghdad and Aleppo and Nicosia, and down south as far as Khartoum and Addis Ababa. I got to know about Syrian and Iraqui and Egyptian aircraft hands, what they could do and what they couldn’t, what days they had to take off for their religion or their festivals, and why. I tried to learn about all that. It’s no good going round and saying that those boys are just a lot of monkeys, that they aren’t reliable and you can’t use them. You can use them all right if you take the trouble to learn about them, and if you do that you’ll find the work is liable to come out a good deal cheaper, because their wages are much less.
    I got some experience in negotiating with officials, too. That was a type of job I’d never done before. Whenever parts for a repair had to be taken into Syria or Lebanon or Iraq there were customs duties to be paid or talked out of; in the usual way I’d get to Aleppo or some place like that and find that the repair parts I’d sent up had got stuck in a bonded warehouse, the Government were asking for a hundred and fifty pounds before they would release them, and the ground engineer had got angry and had insulted the Minister for Air. There was nobody to straighten all that out but me, and I got into the way of taking it easy, going to drink a cup of coffee with the Minister, saying what a happy little town it was and how my wife would like it if we came to live there, and sending over a big bouquet of flowers for the Minister’s wife. I’d usually get the parts next day without any trouble at all, and nothing to pay. The most I ever had to do was to fix up a joyride for the Minister’s children when the aircraft was flying again.
    I used to write to Beryl regularly once a week wherever I was, telling her as much about what I’d been doing as I thought would pass the censor. She used to write to me, but not so often. It wasonce a week at first, but then it got a bit irregular and sometimes I wouldn’t hear anything for three weeks, and then two letters would come together, written within a couple of days of each other. She never seemed to have much to say, but that was natural because life in England was all just the same. Often most of a letter was about some film she’d seen.
    There was one of those long gaps in her letters, nearly a month, about October 1944, when I’d been out in Egypt just a year. Air mail was coming through all right. I got a bit angry, because I’d written regularly myself and I didn’t see why she couldn’t find time to write to me, so I sent her a sharp one. Nothing happened for a bit, and then about ten days later I got a letter from her Dad.
    It read:
    Dear Tom,
    We’ve been having trouble here, I’m sorry to say, and Beryl wants me to write and tell you before she writes herself, and her Ma and I think that’s best too. It’s been very dull for her since you went away, and she went up to the West End some time ago and got in with some Polish officers, very nice and well behaved, she says. She took to going about with one of them, a Captain Wysock, and the long and the short of it is, Tom, she’s going to