The Warlord of the Air (10 page)

O
ver the next six months I must admit that I led a life of ease. I continued to feign amnesia and, naturally enough, nothing the doctors could do would bring back my “memory”. Sometimes it even seemed to me that the world of 1902 had been nothing more than an extremely detailed dream. At first this worried me, but eventually it no longer came to matter to me in which period of time I ‘belonged’.

I was regarded as something of a phenomenon and, for a short time, was a celebrity. Newspaper articles were written about my mysterious appearance in the Himalayan mountains and the speculation, particularly in the farthing press, grew wilder and wilder. Some of those articles were so fanciful that they even touched on the truth! I was interviewed for the kinematograph (whose coloured pictures could now talk as well as move), for the Marconiphone—now a version of the telephone which, from central stations, broadcast news reports, plays and popular music to almost every home where receiving equipment was installed. These receivers were amplified so that they no longer had to be lifted to the ear, but could be heard from another room if desired. I attended a reception at which the Liberal Prime Minister, Sir George Brown, was present (the Liberals had been in office for over thirty years and the Conservatives were very much a party in decline) and learned that socialist agitation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had actually had a good effect on saner political parties, like the Liberals, and had, in fact, given a certain amount of impetus to many of the social improvements I had witnessed. Only recently had the serpent of socialism— almost incredibly—begun to rear its head again in political life. Not that the creed had any support from the British people. As usual a few fanatics and neurotic intellectuals used it as a means of rationalizing their own insane dreams.

During this first six months I was taken by monorail, or airship, or steamer or electrical carriage to all parts of Britain and, of course, little was recognizable. All major cities were modeled on similar lines to London and there was constant and rapid movement between these great “conurbations” as they were called. Where Trade had encouraged improvements in travel and communications, these benefits had now been extended to everyone for their convenience and their pleasure.

The population had risen considerably, but the working man was as well-to-do as many middle-class people of 1902 and he had only to work a thirty-hour week to keep himself in virtual luxury. And there was no problem of finding a well-appointed house to live in or a job of work to do, for the excess population of the nation was more than willing to expand beyond the British Isles. Every year thousands left to go out to all corners of the Empire: to Africa, to India, to the protectorates in China or the dominions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. All over the world the British were settling and administering—and so civilizing—even the most inaccessible areas, thanks to the invention of the airship.

At home, rural England was unspoiled and as lovely as it had ever been. No steam locomotives cast palls of smoke over trees and plants, and advertisement hoardings had long since been abolished, as had all the uglier features of English life at the beginnings of the twentieth century. Electrically driven bicycles were available to those of the most modest income and it meant that town people could enjoy the pleasures of the countryside whenever they desired. Prices were low and wages were high (some skilled workmen getting as much as £5 per week) and if one had a few extra sovereigns to spare, then an air trip to France or Germany was often in order. By a little diligent saving, the man in the street could even afford passage by airship to visit relatives in the more distant lands of the Empire. And as for the seamier side of life, well, there was hardly any at all, for the social and moral evils which had created them had been abolished. The Suffragettes of my own day would have been happy to hear that women over thirty now had the vote and there was talk of extending the franchise to women of twenty-one. The length of girls’ frocks, incidentally, was if anything shorter in London than the first I had seen in Katmandu. After some months I managed to work up courage to invite one or two pretty girls to the theatre or to a concert. Usually these were the daughters of the doctors or army officers with whom I spent my leisure time and, by our standards, the girls were rather ‘forward’, accepting very much an equal position in society and as outspoken as any man. After my initial surprise I found this most refreshing—as I found the plays I saw, which had many rather daring Shavian qualities (though politics, thankfully, was missing from them).

Eventually my notoriety faded and I began to feel uneasy about my long “holiday” in the future. I refused offers from publishers to write my memoirs (rather difficult if I really were suffering from amnesia!) and began to consider the various forms of honest employment open to me. Since my career had originally been in the army, I decided that I would prefer to continue, if possible, to serve my country in this way. However, I also entertained the notion that I should like to fly in airships and after making a few enquiries discovered that, without a great deal of training in the various functions of airship flying and navigation, I could obtain a position in the recently formed Special Air Police. There would be various exams and I should have to train for a minimum of six months, but I was confident that I could get through all that without too much trouble. It would not take me long to learn service discipline, for instance!

The new branch of the service, the Special Air Police, had been drawn from the army, primarily, but there were also volunteers from the navy and the air service. It had been formed to protect civil aircraft against acts of piracy in the air, against potential saboteurs (there had been threats from fanatics but so far no serious damage done) and to protect passengers who might be bothered either by thieves aboard or criminals, for instance, on the run.

And so I applied and was accepted. I was taken to the Air Service Training School at Cardington and taught some of the mysteries of the wireless telephone used to communicate within the ship and also with the ground, when necessary. I learned how an airship was flown and what the various technical terms meant. I was given a little practical experience in flying—this was really the only exciting part of my training—and taught the mysteries of meteorology and so forth. Although an air policeman was an army officer rather than a flyer, therefore not expected to fly a vessel, it was considered necessary to know what to do, in case of emergencies. Thus, by the end of my first year in the future (a strange sort of contradiction that, in a way) I was commissioned as a Lieutenant in His Majesty’s Special Air Police and assigned to the A.S.
Loch Ness.

For all she invited the name, the
Loch Ness
was no monster, but a trim little airship of not much more eighty tons, with a useful lift of about sixty tons, and she handled beautifully. I was lucky to be assigned to her, though the captain pooh-poohed the necessity of having me aboard and at first was a bit cool towards me. The bigger an airship, the more docile she normally is, but the little
Loch Ness
was quick-witted, good-natured and reliable. She was never a long hauler. I think the longest run we ever went on was to Gibraltar and the
Loch Ness
was not really equipped for that, being what was called a “soft-covered” ship (her hull was fabric not “plastic”), and she didn’t have an automatic temperature control, so it was the very devil keeping her gas from expanding in the sort of heat you got in the Med. She taught me a lot about airships. It was a bit of a wrench to leave her, for you become attached to an airship rather as a navy man becomes attached to an ordinary ship. But I had only been assigned to her in order to gain some practical experience and I gather I did pretty well because the Macaphee house (who owned the
Loch Ness)
asked for my C.O. to put me on board the pride of their line, the recently built
Loch Etive.

T
he
Loch Etive
was similar to the first commercial ship on which I’d flown, the
Light of Dresden.
But now that I was familiar with the details of airships, I could fully appreciate her marvels. She was a thousand feet long, with eight diesel engines mounted four a side, with reversible propellers. Her helium capacity was twelve million cubic feet, contained in twenty-four separate bags inside the hull. Her frame was “duralloy” and she could carry a maximum of four hundred passengers and fifty tons of cargo. She could cruise easily at one hundred miles an hour and her top speed was one hundred and fifty miles an hour in good weather. All her works were housed inside the hull, with the exception of the engine casings and propellers. The inspection catwalks on the top and sides of the hull were covered in and for emergencies we had parachutes, inflatable boats, life-jackets and a couple of non-rigid balloons. For the entertainment of the passengers there were kinemas, ballrooms, phonographs, deck sports and party games, restaurants—all anyone might desire concentrated in a space of a quarter of a mile floating two or three thousand feet above the surface of the Earth!

We were doing the round-the-world cruise on what was called the All Red Route (i.e. the colour on the map of the countries in question) but with a trip over the U.S.A. thrown in for good measure. We went from Britain via Canada and the U.S.A. down to British Ecuador and across to Australia, Hong Kong, Calcutta, Aden, Cairo and back to London. My job was to keep a look-out for suspicious customers, check for weapons, bombs, that sort of thing, and—the least pleasant bit—deal with passenger complaints ranging from petty thefts and card-sharping to suspected sabotage attempts. It was a job which, on the whole, left me plenty of time to enjoy the flights and there were rarely any serious emergencies. We had an interesting selection of passengers from all nations and of all colours and creeds—Indian princes, African tribal leaders, British diplomats, American congressmen, high-ranking soldiers, and once we carried the aging president of the Chinese Republic (which was scarcely more, I’m sorry to say, than a collection of provinces under the control of various warlords). I was particularly impressed by the education and sophistication of the native leaders, particularly the Africans, many of whom might have been mistaken for English gentlemen, save for the colour of their skins.

The man who had overall responsibility for every detail of the running of the
Loch Etive
and for every soul aboard her was old Captain Quelch, who had been flying airships almost from the start, when it had been altogether a much more perilous business. He had, I learned, been one of the last to command a “flying bomb”, as they called the ships which had been filled with explosive gases, like hydrogen, before the
Elephant
disaster of 1936, when all hydrogen-filled ships had, by international agreement, been grounded and broken up. I gathered that he was not altogether happy about commanding a passenger liner, particularly one as modern as the
Loch Etive
, but on the other hand he hated the idea of retiring. The air, he said, was his natural environment and he was damned if he was going to spend more of his life than he had to in some blasted birdcage in Balham. I got the impression that he would die if he was forced to give up flying. He was one of the most decent men I had ever met and I developed an enormous affection for him, spending much time in his company during the long periods aboard when there was nothing much to do. “They don’t need a blasted captain on that gadget-run bridge,” he would say, a trifle bitterly. “They could command it by telephone from London if they wanted to.”

I
suppose it was my strong affection for Captain Quelch which led to the first disaster of my new life. A disaster which was to lead to others, of increasing consequence, until the final one... But again I’m running ahead of my story.