He clicked over the intercom, and said, ‘Sorry about all the racket, squire. The nice little Bombardier engine she was born with didn’t like the heat and dust out here, so we swapped it for a power pack robbed out of an old Chipmunk – much more reliable.’
I didn’t care what was under the bonnet as long as it got me up in the air, and down again – but I didn’t want to disappoint him.
‘OK. Let me know when you’re about to go.’
I had stood outside the aircraft to watch them fire it up. They thought I was showing a professional interest in the starting procedures: actually I was delaying getting into the dusty glass-and-metal box as long as I could.
A glaikit-looking mechanic swung the propeller slowly four times through the priming sequence and Pickles, grinning from the cockpit, gave it three full strokes on the priming pump, and a thumbs-up. Then the mechanic gave the prop one more decent pull, through the compression stroke, and stepped smartly back. The nasty little bugger – the Auster, not the fitter; it wasn’t his fault – coughed, and sprang to life. The arc of the spinning prop shimmered in the hard light, and grey-blue smoke from the exhaust quickly became invisible. That said it was time for me to mount up, through the back door on the starboard side. As I strapped in I reflected that the army was still using a start-up sequence that the RAF had ditched not long after the First World War. What had happened to cartridge starters, or mobile electrical sources, while I had been away?
Sitting in the Auster was like sitting inside a closely tailored greenhouse which vibrated at the rate a modern electric toothbrush would work up to today. I hated it, and so would you. You have to trust me in this, although I can’t say that Pickles hadn’t warned me.
He did his checks, and ran the engine at various rev settings. Then he ran it up against the chocks for a couple of minutes. I could feel the beast straining to fly. Pickles clicked, and said, ‘Luna One. Taxiing.’
The guy in flying control was having a fit of the giggles when he came back with, ‘Permission to taxi, Luna One,’ and then, ‘Permission to take off.’ I looked at the rudder in front of me as he checked its travel, and privately doubted that this little kite would be able to get us over the top of Box Hill.
Pickles taxied the beast fast. It was light on its feet when it was on the ground. That was good, because it was as slow as a pregnant pachyderm in the air. In 1943 the clapped-out Wellington bombers I did my primary training in were quicker than this thing. I know that some people love them, but the Auster is actually the technological equivalent of a grasshopper.
A nippy little cross wind told us to use the cross runway. Against the Auster’s small main wheels it felt a bit lumpy, but Pickles gave it the gun, and it seemed to me that we were flying almost immediately. Maybe grasshopper wasn’t too bad a description of it. It didn’t need much room; either on the ground or to get airborne. On the other hand one of the bad points was that the rear-facing observer – yours truly – was left looking almost vertically down at an airfield receding slowly beneath him: a steep rate of climb but not a good one.
A few years ago another old army pilot told me I should have picked up on the fact that we were going to climb steeply when I heard Pickles’s voice crackle, ‘Fifty knots,’ in my ear. Apparently there was a tree not all that far away that took a bit of hurdling, and fifty knots gave you the best engine setting for a steep rate of climb. I looked down at the tents getting smaller, and felt sick.
He climbed us in lazy circles, calling out high points from time to time, and other prominent features below. After twenty minutes he got us to eight thousand feet. That’s a mile and a half in your language: far enough for anyone to fall in mine. Every time he turned up sun the cabin warmed noticeably.
‘High enough for you, Radios?’ I think he momentarily forgot my name. Not bad, actually: it reminded me what I was there to do, and to stop feeling sorry for myself.
‘Fine, Wilf. Where’s the aerial spool?’
‘In the roof. Look over your left shoulder, and up.’
It looked a proper Heath Robinson lash-up to me, but it worked. Wilf slowed our IAS so much before we deployed the aerial, that it was almost as if we hung motionless in the air: aircraft aren’t supposed to do that. Ten minutes later, when we were out over Famagusta Bay, I fired up the radio, and the signals came in from everywhere, like a pack of hungry foxhounds disappearing underneath your bed.
My first thought was to tear off my phones to prevent my eardrums bursting. Then I settled down to it, cranked it back to comfortable, and swept and wrote whilst Pickles flew us slowly eastwards in reciprocal parallels – like a farmer ploughing his best field. He was probably bored, but we gave it a good hour.
There was no doubt about it. The 108 enjoyed its trip to the roof of the world: a bit of height, and a hundred and fifty feet of trailing aerial, made a ridiculous difference. The only signals I could identify for certain, of course, were the Saudis and their damned train . . . because I knew their call signs. But I had the
