Round the Bend by Nevil Shute
“No,” I said. “I was thinking of staying here a bit, and see if I can pick up a bit of charter work.”
We talked about it for a time, and then I left them and went up to the Control Tower to report. When I got back to the machine the officers had got some airmen and we pushed the Fox-Moth into the hangar and got my stuff out of the cabin. As we did so one of the young officers that I later came to know as Mr. Allen, said, “Pity you weren’t here yesterday.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Party of three engineers going down to Muscat. They’re consulting on a new water supply or something. They came in by B.O.A.C. from England. If you’d been here you might have got a job.”
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“Went on down to Sharjah in a chartered dhow. They left this morning.”
“How far is it to Sharjah?”
“About four hundred miles. I wouldn’t like to do that in a dhow. It’ll take them three or four days.”
“How far on is it to Muscat?”
“About two hundred and fifty miles. They were going to charter a truck to take them from Sharjah to Muscat.”
I said, “Is there any fuel at Muscat?”
Allen nodded. “We keep a small party there. There’s a strip there, and there’s hundred octane fuel.”
This was too rich and rare a fuel for my common little engine, but I could mix it with motor-car petrol. I said, “Can I get a telegram to Sharjah offering this Fox for charter to them?”
“I should think so. They’ll probably send it from the Control Tower if you ask them nicely, over the R/T. They’re always talking to Sharjah. It’s more reliable than the land telegraph line. That’s always falling down.”
I got the name of the leader of the party from him, and the rest house where they would stay in Sharjah, and went back to the Control Tower. The Control officer knew all about this party, and advised me to wire them care of the Political Agent. I sent off a message detailing the accommodation and range of my Fox-Moth and offering it for charter for eight pounds an hour from Bahrein.
I had a bit of luck then, because one of the wireless operators, Dick Reed, spoke up and asked me where I was going to stay. He lived in a house in Muharraq town just outside the aerodrome with all the other operators; they ran it as a chummery, and they had a spare room, normally occupied by a chap who was on leave. They offered this to me and I moved in there that night and messed with the radio crowd.
At the aerodrome, they made me a member of the sergeants’ mess, which meant that I could go in there at any time for lunch, or for tea if I was working late. That was a great help, in those early months.
I spent next day working on the aircraft to get it overhauled and fit for work after the flight out from England, and in typing out circular letters, five copies at a time, to send out to the eighteen or twenty possible employers of a charter aircraft in the Persian Gulf. I got a job next day, to take two engineers from Awali up to Kuwait for a conference, leaving early in the morning and coming back at night. They paid my eight pounds an hour without blinking and the job went off all right, so by the end of the day I was fifty-six pounds in pocket and everyone seemed satisfied, specially me. My eight pounds an hour worked out at about two bob a mile, but we had travelled six hundred miles in seven hours’ flying time.
Next, a reply to my Sharjah wire came in, ordering me down to Sharjah at once. Three days in an Arab dhow had made my eight pounds an hour seem cheap to the water engineers, even though I couldn’t carry the party in one load but had to ferry them everywhere in two trips. I took them down to Muscat and stayed with them for a week. In all I was away from Bahrein for ten days, and I got back at the end of the job with thirty-eight hours of flying done for them, and a cheque for three hundred and four pounds in my pocket.
That’s the way it went on all the time. The Persian Gulf is full of industry—new oil fields being laid out, wells being sunk, pipelines being laid, new docks and harbours being built all over the place. There are no roads outside the towns and no railways, and no coasting steamers and few motor boats. The country is full of engineers to whom time is money, and there are always people wanting to get about in a hurry. The country is mostly sand desert, good for landing a small aeroplane when you have learned the different look of hard and soft sand from the air, and I was right up to the neck in work from the day I got there. Most of the oil companies had their own aircraft, but there was plenty of work left over for me.
I have been asked sometimes what led me to the Persian Gulf, what instinct told me that I could build up a business there. It’s really perfectly simple. If you go to the hottest and most uncomfortable place on the map you’ll find there’s not a lot of competition; in my experience most British pilots would rather go bankrupt than get prickly heat. If you can find, as I did, a place where there’s a lot of business for a modest charter operator, that’s also hot and uncomfortable—well, it’s money for jam. Only, of course, you can’t afford to pay the wages of a European staff.
To start with, I had no staff at all. For the first two months I did everything myself, serviced the aircraft, washed it down, did the correspondence on my typewriter in the evening, kept the accounts, sent out the bills, and—easiest of all—flew the thing. Presently it got a bit too much, and I got in help for the washing down. I got an Arab boy about fifteen years old called Tarik and paid him twenty rupees a month, about thirty bob, at which he was highly delighted. I taught him to wash and clean the aircraft while I worked upon the engine, and when he wasn’t doing that he was running errands for me to the souk—the market. He wasn’t fully employed in those early days, of course, but it was useful to have somebody to help with the refuelling.
It was three months before anyone woke up to the fact that I wasn’t licensed to carry passengers for hire or reward. I only had a private pilot’s licence. An A.R.B. inspector turned up from Egypt one day, travelling around to see what was going on in civil aviation in the Persian Gulf, and told me that I was breaking the law every time I went up. I knew that, of course, but I hoped that nobody else did.
He was quite nice about it. I told him that next day I had to take Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Hogaarts of the Arabia-Sumatran Petroleum Company from Abu Ali to Kuwait, and if I didn’t turn up they’d be stuck at Abu Ali, and after some hesitation he agreed that I should make this one trip. While we were talking the telephone went and it was Johnson of the Bahrein Petroleum Company wanting to book me for the following Thursday to take a couple of his chaps down to Dubai. I knew Johnson well, and I never believe in hiding things up, so I told him I was with a bloke who said I couldn’t carry passengers for hire because I’d only got an A licence.
“For Christ’s sake,” he said. “Let me have a talk to him.” I handed over the receiver, and he talked to the inspector, saying that they couldn’t do without me and all that sort of thing. The upshot of it was that it was agreed that I should do that one trip also, and by next morning the inspector had thought it over and said that he would recommend that I should be granted a provisional B licence.
The point of this argument was that I could get a B licence without much difficulty on the basis of the experience I had, but I could only go through the examinations for it in England, and I was in the Persian Gulf. I couldn’t have got it when I left England; I wasn’t good enough. I knew that I could keep them talking for some months and in the meantime I could go on operating, and after that I might well find myself in England.
By that time, it was dawning on me that I should have to make a quick trip back to England before long to buy another aeroplane. There was far more work than I could cope with. I was flying four or five hours practically every day, and maintaining the aircraft and doing the correspondence for the rest of the time. At that I was only tackling the fringe of the job. It wasn’t only taking engineers about the country, though I could have used a six-passenger machine on that to supplement the Fox-Moth. There was machinery to be taken out to places
If I didn’t nip in and get myself established, someone else would come along and do it over my head.
On Bahrein aerodrome the local R.A.F. and civil air staff began to get quite interested in me. It was obvious at the end of the three months that, licence or not, I was on to a good thing and I was doing pretty well. British N.C.O.’s with the R.A.F. used to come along and watch me working with young Tarik, and suggest that they were due to be demobilized in a few months and what about a job? I never engaged one of them. I knew from my own experience the wages that you have to pay British engineers in the East, and I knew that if once I started on that sort of wage bill I’d be bust in no time. Moreover, I didn’t need them. I had all the ground engineer’s licences myself. Young Tarik, brown though he might be, was keen and quite intelligent, and I reckoned that with two or three more like him I could service several aircraft myself.
It was about that time that Gujar Singh turned up.
Gujar Singh was a young Sikh, who worked as a cashier in the Bank of Asia. He might have been twenty-six or twenty-eight years old at that time, and he was the fiercest thing I had ever seen. Being a good Sikh he never cut his hair, and he had a great black beard that stuck out forward from his chin in a manner that would have frightened any gunman trying to hold up the bank into a fit. When I got to know him better, and travelled with him, I found that he slept every night with a bandage round his head to make this beard grow fiercely outwards from his face. He wore European clothes and was usually dressed in a neat, light grey tropical suit, but he always wore a turban. Beneath this turban there was long black hair that reached down to his waist, coiled round his head out of sight and fastened with a comb. He wore a plain iron bangle on his wrist, and beneath his jacket he wore a ceremonial dagger belted round his waist. He didn’t smoke or drink, because of his religion.
Gujar Singh was always pleasant when I met him in the bank; he was a smiling, soft-spoken, friendly young man in spite of his fierce appearance. He was reserved and discreet; he was evidently interested in me and in my business, but he never asked questions. Once he did ask me what the weather had been like the day before, when I had been down to Yas Island or somewhere, and afterwards the remark stuck in my mind, because it had been a thundery sort of day and something in the words he used were well informed for a bank clerk. He seemed to speak my language.
My whole life at that time centred round my work. If I had had more time I think I should have been very lonely. I lived with the four radio operators but I wasn’t one of them, and I was never one for lying on the charpoy reading or sleeping, as they did in their spare time. The memory of Beryl was never very far from my mind; whenever I had leisure I was moody and depressed, so that it’s a good thing in a way that I had little leisure. I must have been bad company in the chummery. Perhaps it was this moodiness and loneliness that made me interested in the Sikh cashier at the bank, and when next I went there I asked him where he learned to speak such very good English.
He smiled. “I was educated in Lahore,” he said. “I went to Lahore College. But apart from that, my father was a captain in the Army. We often spoke English at home.”
“I wish I could speak Arabic as well as you speak English,” I said. “It’ld make things a lot easier. Were you in the Indian Army in the war?”
He smiled again. “I was in the Royal Indian Air Force. I did about three hundred hours on Hurricanes.”
I struck up quite a friendship with Gujar after that. He told me all about his squadron and what they had done in the Burmese war against Japan; he showed me his pilot’s log book one day and I found that he’d done about four hundred and fifty hours in all, with only one minor crash upon a Tiger Moth in the early days of his training. He was deeply interested in my venture, not only because it had to do with flying but because it was apparent from the bank account that it was very profitable.
He came down to the aerodrome several times in the evenings after that, and I found that he was quite willing to take his coat off and give me a hand with the maintenance. Once a man has had to do with aeroplanes it gets into the blood, whether he is Western or Asiatic, and Gujar Singh used to potter about with me from time to time cleaning the filters and draining the sumps and checking the tyre pressures of the Fox-Moth. Presently, one evening in the hangar, he asked me to remember him if ever I wanted another pilot.
The thought had been in my own mind for a week or two. I had been at Bahrein about four months when that happened, and clearly if I got another aeroplane I’d have to have another pilot. This gentle, ferocious-looking Sikh was certainly a possibility. I said,
“What about the bank, Gujar? You want to think a bit before giving up a steady job like that. I may go bust at any time.”
He smiled. “It may be a breach of confidence, but of necessity I know the balance of your account, what it was when you came here and what it is now. I am prepared to take the chance.”
I liked Gujar. He was modest and careful. It did not seem to me that he was likely to crash an aircraft. I knew nothing of him as a navigator, or how steady he would be in an emergency. But in these things one has to trust one’s judgment, and my whole instinct now was to give this a trial.
“Tell me,” I said. “Are you married? I don’t want to pry into your affairs, but I’d like to know that.”
“I am married,” he said. “My wife is a Sikh also. I have three children. I live at the northwest side of the souk.”
I knew that part. It was in a part of the town where only Asiatics live, a part where there are no made roads, just alleys between the houses. Probably he lived in one room, or at the most in two.
“How much money would you want?” I asked.
“I will tell you,” he said. “At the bank I am paid two hundred and fifty rupees a month, and I can increase that by ten rupees a month for every year of service.” He smiled. “Our needs are less than yours, and we are quite comfortable on that. I would come to fly for you for the same money as I am getting at the bank, but if you should take on another pilot under me I should expect promotion.”
That was fair enough, of course. I always have to translate rupees into English money in my mind, because most of the aircraft costs and contracts are in terms of sterling. Two hundred and fifty rupees a month, which he was getting in the bank, was about two hundred and twenty pounds a year, less than the wage of a farm labourer in England. On that he was quite happy with a wife and three children. If I were to get an English pilot out from England to fill this job I should have to pay at least a thousand a year, more than four times the wage that Gujar Singh wanted. The balance would pay for a good many minor crashes if my judgment proved to be wrong. But I didn’t think it was.
“Look, Gujar,” I said. “We’d both better think this over for a bit. Until I’ve got another aeroplane I don’t want another pilot. It’ll be three months or so before the thing becomes acute. But I’ll certainly bear it in mind.”
“That is all I want,” he said. “Just keep it in your mind. I would rather work for you than continue to work in the bank. What sort of aeroplane do you think that you will buy?”
“There’s a new thing just out called a Basing Airtruck,” I said. “That’s what we want out here. High wing, two of these engines, and a great big cabin for a ton of freight. I’ve got the specification in my room, if you’d like to come in and see it.”
I had a good many talks with Gujar after that, and I confirmed the good opinion I had formed of him. His knowledge of aircraft wasn’t very deep, but then it didn’t have to be. He hadn’t got a licence of any sort, of course, but I had little doubt that
That spring the Air Ministry sent an R.A.F. Tiger Moth to Bahrein, an old instructional type that was used for ab initio training in the war. They were evidently getting worried that morale would suffer if flying officers were stationed there indefinitely with nothing to fly, and a large R.A.F. aerodrome with no aeroplanes at all looks rather odd to foreigners. The Tiger Moth is a small open two-seater with dual control, and for a time this thing was in the air all day, mostly inverted. When the rush for it subsided a bit, I asked the C.O. if one of the officers might give Gujar a run round in it and check up on his flying for me. It wasn’t strictly according to King’s Regulations, of course, but I have always found the R.A.F. to be quite helpful, and Allen and Gujar went off and did circuits and bumps in this thing for an hour one evening while I watched the landings from the shade of the hangar. When they came in, Allen told me he was all right. Gujar was as pleased as a dog with two tails.
That evening I told him he could give his notice in to the bank and start as soon as he liked.
I had his licence to negotiate then. I had been given a provisional B licence for myself which had to be renewed each month, and was only given on the understanding that I went to England very soon to take it properly. I started in to battle then for another provisional licence for Gujar Singh so that he could carry on in the Fox-Moth while I was in England. Officialdom came back at once and asked who was going to maintain the Fox-Moth and sign it out while I was in England, and I threw back the ball that Flight Sergeant Harrison had A and C ground engineer’s licences and would do it in the evenings. Officialdom replied that Flight Sergeant Harrison was licensed for Dakotas, it was true, but not for a Fox-Moth, and I replied that, surely to God if he could sign for a Dakota he could sign for a pipsqueak thing like a Fox-Moth. So it went on.
Presently it came out that Gujar Singh was an Indian subject, and we found that he could get a B licence with the greatest of ease in Karachi. There was a York of R.A.F. Transport Command going through to Mauripur the week that he joined me, and the C.O. very kindly gave him a passage in that. He was back three days later in a Dakota of Orient Airways that was going through to Baghdad, and he had a brand new B licence, valid for six months. I wished I was an Indian.