Slide Rule (7 page)

The policy of the firm at that time was to make its living by designing and selling civil aeroplanes rather than military ones. The greater freedom from Air Ministry interference suited the genius of the directors for one thing, but to a great extent this policy arose from de Havilland’s strong antipathy to war and anything to do with it. In the two wars he put the whole of his genius to the design of military aircraft with outstanding success, but this quiet, highly strung man detested war and everything associated with it. I well remember an incident at my board in that early drawing office at Stag Lane. I had been investigating the weights of aeroplanes of increased size to the same overall characteristics at Walker’s command, to try to get an idea whether it would pay to build big. The discussion at my desk ranged beyond technicalities into policy, till Walker said thoughtfully, “Of course, if a machine can carry a thousand pound bomb, it doesn’t follow that a bigger one carrying a two thousand pound bomb will do twice the damage. It might pay to have two of the smaller ones.” De Havilland stood up, said, “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” and walked out of the office.

In this small, friendly company the office staff had plenty
of opportunities for flying with the pilots, and the company encouraged this for general experience, provided that it cost the company no money. I flew first as a passenger with Hatchett in a D.H.9 on a routine test flight. I was still writing bad poetry:

After that I flew whenever I could get into the air, and I flew with most of the firm’s pilots. De Havilland at that time had a D.H.6, a very slow, safe training biplane of the first war, that he kept for a short time for his personal use, and he took me up in that one day to show me what he meant when he talked at my desk about stability. There was something fresh to be learned every day, and in those days the master was still only a jump or two ahead of the pupil, so that the instruction was virile and stimulating.

Thinking back over those years, I think that Oxford was less important to me than my vacation work, which perhaps explains why I did no better than third class honours in my Finals. It was difficult to pump up any enthusiasm for the theory of concrete dams or electrical machinery when I was so deeply concerned in aviation. I must have felt, instinctively I think, that in my vacation
work I was in on something really big, something that would grow and be important to the world. All through my life I have been subject to these hunches, as I suppose many people are; I have felt inarticulately and for no special reason, ‘This really is something’, or ‘This can’t possibly be right. There must be something wrong with this one, some disaster coming’. Usually I have found that these instinctive feelings have been justified.

I went down from Oxford in the summer of 1922 and spent a month cruising in the Channel on a chartered sixtonner with two friends. De Havillands had offered me a job as a junior stress and performance calculator at a salary of five pounds a week, but when the autumn came the company was in difficulties and having to economise. They put me off till the New Year. My father retired on pension from the Post Office about that time and intended to spend most of the winter at Bordighera; I joined my parents there in the autumn and spent several months with them, exploring the countryside, learning a little Italian, and probably writing a little. I think I had given up writing poetry by that time, and I had not then started writing unpublishable novels. There is at least one unpublishable short story which dates from that autumn. I suppose most young authors go through the process of development that I went through. First I wrote poetry, probably because a poem is the shortest complete work that is possible, and being entirely emotional it requires little experience of life. Moreover, you don’t have to have a typewriter to write a poem. What I didn’t realise, of course, is that a piece of writing is like a camera; the smaller it is the more carefully it has to be made. In a novel a few awkward passages can get lost in the crowd, but in a short poem every word must play its part and be exactly right, and the temptation to use the wrong word for the sake of rhyme or rhythm is very great.

Probably the next stage is that the budding author acquires a typewriter. Those who are blessed with a flowing hand may be able to write a short story in longhand though it has to be typed in the end, for no editor will read a manuscript in these days. For myself, I have so cramped and stilted a handwriting that my hand is aching with fatigue after a hundred words, so I wrote nothing longer than that until I got a typewriter and learned to use it, when I found that I could go on as long as my brain would function. I had an old Blick to start with, which was a very elementary form of portable, not easy to use but better than handwriting. I think a good typewriter is as important to an author as brushes and palette to an artist, because when writing on a typewriter it is important to be able to forget the machine. It may not be quite a coincidence that my first publishable novel,
Marazan
, was the first that I wrote on a brand new typewriter bought out of my earnings as an engineer.

I started regular work with de Havillands in January 1923. The firm had already grown considerably, and they now had an order for eleven of a new type of transport for the London-Paris route. The D.H.34 was still a single engined biplane powered by one Napier Lion engine, but the trend of development towards the modern aircraft was beginning to appear. Two pilots were seated side by side in an open cockpit behind the engine and in front of the top wing; behind them the full gap fuselage accommodated a cabin for eight passengers and, I think, a toilet. This was a bigger aeroplane even than the D.H.18; I forget its fully loaded weight but it was probably about 8000 lbs. It stalled at the incredibly high speed of 61 m.p.h., so that its introduction caused something like a strike of the pilots of the operating companies, who held that an aeroplane with so high a landing speed could never be operated safely. Looking back thirty years, there may have been some
reason on their side, for the machine had no brakes, wireless of the most elementary nature operating by morse code with a tapping key, no flaps, no blind-flying instruments; in consequence forced landings in fields along the route had to be borne in mind if bad weather should make it impossible to complete a flight. However, the pilots got to like it in the end and the machine served the airlines well for several years, till larger, multi-engined aircraft took its place.

That spring my parents returned from Italy and took a small country house fifty miles south-west of London, at Liss off the Portsmouth Road. In those days nobody knew much about the depreciation of money or realised that a reduced standard of living had come to stay, and my parents started off with two maids in the house and a gardener three days a week. Money worries pursued them though I was virtually off their hands; they kept the situation under control because my mother all her life had kept accounts religiously, so that they knew exactly where they were. Their retirement, however, was not the carefree time it should have been and after some years they gave up the attempt to live in England in the only manner that appealed to them, and took to wandering, spending their winters abroad and their summers in a variety of hotels at home.

The motor bicycle had given place to a two-seater car, a Morgan three-wheeler, while I was at Oxford. I got rooms in Stag Lane just outside the de Havilland aerodrome and settled down to work, going down every weekend by road to stay with my parents. In Petersfield I soon discovered No. 1 The Square, an old half-timbered house run as a secondhand bookshop, art gallery, and custom jewellery shop by a crowd of artists led by Harry Roberts, an East End doctor who had a large, rambling estate of woodland in the hills outside the town, near Steep. I made
no other friends in the neighbourhood but they were enough.

In the spring of 1923 I learned to fly. The company by that time had started a flying school as another branch of its activities, and they were training reserve pilots for the Royal Air Force on Renault Avros, a somewhat unusual version of the well known Avro 504 trainer which was probably dictated by the fact that rotary engines were going out of use and henceforward training had to be upon machines with stationary engines. My flying had to be conducted with the strictest economy, for my parents were selling capital to provide this opportunity for me and flying on the Renault Avro cost five pounds ten an hour, a sum which even in these days of lessened money values would be regarded as prohibitive. Mr. Nixon was adamant in refusing to reduce this figure even for an employee, and I had seen sufficient of the economies forced on the company to feel no great resentment at this very economic charge. Indeed, even at the time when I was arguing for a reduction I felt a sneaking admiration for him in his uncompromising stand; the first objective of the company at that time was to stay in business. They had no elbow room for generosity, though individually they went to untold trouble over employees who were sick. It was a pleasant, friendly company, though tough in business, of necessity.

I see from my pilot’s log book, kept in the same paper-covered R.A.F. book of the first war for twenty-eight years, that I had nine hours’ dual instruction before going solo, about an average time for those days. That first solo flight was an anxiety and a delight; already I had seen a good many minor crashes and some quite serious ones, and the jocular phrase that one was going out to flirt with death was not entirely jocular in 1923. Humour was grim on Stag Lane Aerodrome at times. There was a crash
wagon with fire extinguishers on it ready at all times when flying was in progress, as is usual, and this crash wagon was provided with a steel rod about eighteen feet long with a large, sharpened hook at one end; this was for the purpose of hooking the body of the pilot out of the burning wreckage when the flames were too fierce to permit any gentler method of rescue. It was the custom at Stag Lane when any pupil was to do a first solo to get out this hook, to show him that his friends had it ready to assist him in any difficulty that might arise.

The private pilot’s licence had not then been introduced, and a pilot was recognised as such when he had passed the tests for the Royal Aero Club certificate, which entailed an ascent to six thousand feet, flying several figure-of-eights at about a thousand feet, and a landing without damage. For some reason that I cannot understand I did not take this test till February 1924, perhaps because of shortage of money. My early flying was certainly very much restricted for this reason; ten minutes was a normal flight for me in 1924, in which time one could get in about two practice landings. After I qualified, however, I handled the controls of a number of large aircraft in the course of test flights for the company, because by 1924 I was flying fairly frequently as test observer when the regular observer was on leave or occupied in other ways.

So the pleasant, busy months passed. I worked on the calculations for a great variety of those early aircraft and flew in most of them as a test observer or just plain ballast. Perhaps the most interesting of all was the tiny D.H.53 single seater designed for the Lympne light aeroplane competition of 1924. This was one of the earliest attempts to build an economical small aircraft for the private owner; it was a little monoplane with a Douglas motor-cycle engine that delivered about twenty-five horsepower. It proved to be too small for the market, but it flew beautifully,
especially when the rather more powerful 750 cc Blackburne engine was fitted. I still have the propeller that I designed for it, a little wooden thing only four feet from tip to tip.

While I was working at Stag Lane I was well placed for writing in the evenings, for my digs were only a few yards from the aerodrome, so that none of my spare time was wasted in travelling to work. I had my desk with me, and I had few distractions except weekends at home; I should say that I probably spent two or three evenings of each week in writing. I think I probably turned fairly quickly to writing novels. There are one or two short stories which were written in that period, but none of them were published and none of them went out to more than one editor. When they came back I was content to put them away and forget about them, realising their immaturity.

I don’t think there is a great deal in the theory that writing ability is dictated by heredity, but I think there is a great deal in environment. My father and my grandmother both wrote a number of books, so that the business was familiar to me before I started. I knew before putting my first finger to the typewriter that what I was about to write would probably be useless and unpublishable through inexperience, because everybody has to learn his trade and the trade of a writer can only be learned by writing. Apart from writing I was getting on well in a good job as an engineer; there was no economic compulsion on me to hawk my stuff around and try to sell it in order to live. In all my early work the correspondence shows that I was quite content to accept a refusal, put the thing on the shelf, and start on something else. At that time, of course, I had no literary agent.

I finished my first novel in 1923, sent it to three publishers, and put it on the shelf, where it will remain because it is a very poor book. I read it the other day
after brushing off the dust of nearly thirty years, or rather skimmed it through; I don’t think anyone would have the patience to read the whole thing. I doubt whether much, if any, of it was written twice; the evidence of the type is against that, and the timing. I wrote another one in 1924 which was equally bad, and again I was content to put it on the shelf and do something else.