Mysterious Aviator (3 page)

They used to carry the much advertised Air Mails. That meant that the machines had to fly whether there were passengers to be carried or not. It was left to the discretion of the pilot whether or not the flight should be cancelled in bad weather; the pilots were dead keen and went on flying in the most impossible conditions.

“Sanderson got killed that way,” he said. “At Douinville. An’ all he had in the machine was a couple of picture postcards from trippers in Paris, sent to their families in England as a curiosity. That was the Air Mail. No passengers or anything—just the Mail.” He thought for a little. “Now that was a funny thing,” he said quietly. “Sanderson hit a tree on top of a little cliff, and he died about a week later. An’ all the time in the hospital he was explaining to the nurse how he’d put his machine in through the roof of the Coliseum and what a pity it was, because there was a damn good show going on at the time and he’d gone and spoilt it all. And presently he died.

“We got a bit more careful after that,” he said.

For Lenden that had been a good job. He told me that he had been making about nine hundred a year while it lasted. He took a little flat in Croydon and lived there with his wife for twelve months or so.

“That was a fine time,” he said. “The best I’ve ever had. We’d got plenty of money for the first time since we were
married. An’ Mollie liked the flat all right, and she made it simply great. We thought we was going on for ever, an’ we were beginning to make plans to get into a house with a bit of garden where we could have fruit trees and things. And we were going to have a pack o’ kids—two or three of them, as soon as we got settled.”

There was silence in the room for a minute. “You can’t run a show like that without a subsidy,” he said at last. “Or you couldn’t in those days, with the equipment we had. It lasted on into the winter of 1920. Then Aircraft Transport and Travel—it was a damn good name, that—they packed up. And that was the end of that.”

He was staring into the shadows at the far end of the room, and speaking in a very quiet voice. I had heard something of that early failure in the heroic period of aviation, but this was the first time that I had heard a personal account.

This time he was longer out of a job. The flat in Croydon was broken up and his wife went back again to her people, while Lenden went wandering around the south of England in his search for flying work. The time had gone by when motor-cars could be bought and sold at a profit by those outside the trade, and I gathered that by the end of four months his wife’s parents were financing him. In the end he found a job again in his own line of business, as pilot for an aerial survey to be made in Honduras.

“D’you ever meet Sam Robertson?” he inquired. “He was an observer in the war, and he got this contract for a survey for the Development Trust. Raked round in the city and got it all off his own bat. And he got me in on it to do the flying for him.

“In Honduras. They’d taken over a concession up the Patuca—there’s lashings of copper up there if only you could get it out. Lashings of it. This survey was one of the first shows of that sort to be done. It was a seaplane job. Sam bought a Fairey with a Rolls Eagle in her from the Disposals crowd, and we left for Belize in March, 1921.

“It meant leaving Mollie with her people,” he said. “I could
make her a pretty fair allowance, of course. I’d got the money then—for as long as the job lasted.”

I stirred in my chair. “Was this a photographic survey, then?” I asked.

He nodded. “In a way. The contract didn’t run to a proper mosaic of photographs. There wasn’t any need for it for what they wanted, and, anyway, we’d have had a job to line it up because there’s never been any sort of ground work done there to give you a grid. No. We picked up one of their people at Trujillo, a fellow called Wilson who was their resident out there, and he came on up the Patuca with us. We did most of the work with oblique photographs, and each evening he made up a rough map of the country we’d flown over.”

He paused. “It was the copper he was mostly interested in. You can tell it by the colour of the trees, you know. They look all dusty and dried up from the air, different to the rest of the jungle. You can see the copper areas quite clearly that way.”

He said it was the devil of a country. From Belize they had gone by a little coastal steamer, Brazilian-owned, to Trujillo. There they erected the machine, on the beach, in the sun. The inhabitants were a sort of Indian, very quiet and mostly diseased.

“They used to come and sit round staring at us, without saying anything at all,” he said. “And then when we’d sweated a bucket we’d go in to the pub and drink with the Dagoes. It was a rotten place, that. Rotten.”

When the machine was ready they sent a launch full of stores round by sea to the mouth of the Patuca; he told me that the concession was about a hundred miles up the river. Wilson went with the launch; Lenden and Robertson gave them three days’ start and went after them in the seaplane. In a couple of hours’ flight they had passed the launch, and then they carried on up the river to the agreed meeting place—Jutigalpa.

He told me that that was a glorified mud village, with a Spanish-speaking half-caste to collect a few taxes from the Indians. They lived in a native hut, picketing the machine in
the shade of the trees on the beach. That was to be their home for the next six months.

They started flying operations as soon as the launch arrived. They had a very fat mechanic, Meyer by name; within the first three days he was down with fever and some form of heat apoplexy, and had to be sent back to Trujillo in the launch. That delayed them for a week. Then they carried on with the flying, and had surveyed about a third of the area when they crashed a float. Lenden, in taxi-ing the machine on the water, ran her over a submerged snag which ripped their port float from bow to stern; he was fortunate in being able to run the machine ashore before she sank.

“And there we were,” he said, “for the next three months, till we got a new float out from England. Wilson went back with Robertson to Trujillo to send the order, and then Robertson came back to Jutigalpa, and we built a sort of palm-leaf hut over the machine with the Indians. And then we just sat on our backsides in that rotten little hole and waited for the float.”

When the float came they repaired the machine and carried on, finishing the survey in about six weeks. From the point of view of the Development Trust it was a success; they had found out what they wanted to know about their land cheaply and accurately.

“We finished the job, and came back to Trujillo,” said Lenden.

The coals fell together with a little crash. It was about half-past three in the morning. I had lost all desire to go to bed; now that Lenden was talking freely I wanted to hear the end of his story. I knew what was coming. Gradually, and in his own way, he was working up to the point of telling me what he had been doing with that Breguet on the down. I wanted to know about that.

I swung round, pitched one or two more lumps of coal into the grate, and poked them up. Lenden got up absently from the table and came and threw himself down into a chair before the fire.

“No,” he said at last. “You wouldn’t have heard about it here. But there was a tornado out there that year. Sam Robertson and I settled down at Trujillo for a few weeks while he got in touch with some of the mines in Nicaragua. We thought that while we were there we might get one or two more jobs of the same sort in that district, and Wilson gave us a whole lot of help in getting them. We’d just about fixed to go down to the Santa Vanua—it was a sort of forestry survey that they wanted there—when the storm came.”

He was staring into the fire, and speaking very quietly. “It came one evening, quite suddenly. We had the Fairey pegged down upon the beach in the lee of a cliff—it was the only place we had to put her. But no pickets could have stood against that wind. We got the whole town out to hold her down. I dare say there were fifty of us hanging on to her in the dusk, and she blew clean out of our hands and away up the beach.”

He glanced at me. “She was all we had, you know—the whole capital. Sam and I hung on to her after she took charge—and she chucked us off like a horse. Robertson fell soft, but I broke an arm as I went down.” He passed his hand absently up his left forearm. “Yes—she was all we had, and she went flying up the beach till she cartwheeled into a little corrugated-iron hut and knocked it flat, and then on—what was left of her—till she fetched up against the forest. We lay on the beach all that night because we could hear the houses crashing in the town, and Robertson made splints for my arm. And when the morning came and it blew itself out, half the houses in the place were down and Sam was as rich as me.”

“That’s rotten luck,” I muttered.

He nodded. “Yes, it was bad luck, because there was all the makings of a survey business out there. But that finished us, and we came home Third Class.”

And so he gave up aviation. He had been bitten three times, and he’d enough of it. He wanted to settle down, he said, and live with his wife. He told me that he had come to the conclusion out in Trujillo that flying was no good for a married man, and that he must look for more stable employment in the
future. He realised that he would have to start at the bottom. Wilson stepped in there and gave him an introduction to a cousin who ran a firm of wholesale clothiers in St. Paul’s Churchyard, and Lenden came home to England to start work in the city on four pounds ten a week. With Robertson he had been getting seven hundred a year.

“I took Mollie out of pawn again,” he said, a little bitterly, “and we got furnished rooms between Eltham and Lewisham, not very far from her people. And that year it went all right.”

He stared into the fire. “I was the proper city gent. Mr. Everyman. I wore a bowler hat and a morning coat like all the other stiffs, and carried a pair of gloves, and read the
Daily Mail
going up and the
Evening News
coming down.”

It seemed to have been a poor sort of job. From the first there was little chance that he could make a success of it; the clerks with whom he worked had forgotten more about business than he had ever known. He was unsuited for it temperamentally, and he was getting fifteen shillings a week more than the others, which didn’t make things any easier for him. And he was desperately hard up. He couldn’t live on his pay; his wife’s parents had to come forward again and make him a substantial allowance, and that got him on the raw. He told me all this that night.

He stuck it out for two years.

“I chucked it in the early summer of 1924,” he said, and shot the ash from his cigarette into the fire. “It’s the spring that gets you, in a job like that; when the days begin to get a bit warm and sunny, an’ you know you could make better money out in the clean country on an aerodrome.”

He was quiet for a little after that, and then he said: “We were right on the rocks by then, and not a chance of things getting any better. I was still on four pounds ten a week. The way I put it to the old man—I said I simply had to go where I stood a chance of earning a bit more money. It wasn’t good enough to stick on like that. He cut up pretty rough about it, but I was through with the City. Mollie went home again for a bit, and I went back to the old game.”

It was joy-riding again this time, as a paid pilot to a concern called the Atalanta Flying Services. The Atalanta Flying Services was a three-seater Avro, painted a bright scarlet all over. The pilot who had been flying her before had just cut off with all the loose cash in the kitty, and while they tracked him down Lenden got the job to carry on. This time, however, the directors put a secretary into the concern to keep him company.

“We picked up the machine at Gloucester,” he said, “where the other fellow left her when he vanished. There were four of us in the game. There was the secretary—a chap called Carpenter—and a ground engineer, and an odd-job man, and myself. We had the Avro, and a Ford lorry that was all covered-in with tarpaulins and fitted up for sleeping and living in, and a Cowley two-seater. Carpenter used to drive the Cowley on in front and get to the next town a day or so ahead of us, and fix up the landing-ground with the farmer, and get out the posters.”

He thought for a minute. “I dare say you’ve seen the posters,” he said. “We came all round this part of the country. We had ’em printed in red, very big and staring. Like this:

“And a lot more of the same sort of thing,” he said. “You know.”

Two very happy years followed. The job was one that suited Lenden; it was a country life with few business worries. The pay worked out at about four hundred and fifty, and that enabled him to make a respectable allowance to his wife, though he seldom had an opportunity of seeing her. With the Avro, the Ford lorry, and the Morris-Cowley, the Atalanta Flying Services went wandering, and for the first eighteen months wherever they wandered they made money. They were entirely self-contained.

“We did it this way,” he said. “We’d pick our field, and put up a fence of sackcloth round as much of it as we could. We charged sixpence for admission to see the flying. Just by the entrance we had the lorry, and we used it as a sort of office in the day. At night we used to picket the machine as close to the van as we could get her, and then turn in, all snug for the night.”

They went all over the country in the next two years, staying ten days at each little town. From Gloucester they worked down through Devon into Cornwall; then back along the whole length of the south coast, till in the winter of 1924 they found themselves in Kent. At Croydon they overhauled the machine and went north into Essex, and up the coast to Sheringham and Cromer. In 1925 they went right up the east coast as far as Edinburgh, and back through the Midlands; till in the spring of 1926 they found themselves again in Gloucester.