HOME BY LIGHT AIRCRAFT
By BERNARD FERGUSSON
COMING home from the Middle East by light aircraft rates pretty low in terms of speed ; it is analogous to a slow breast- stroke. But I wanted to visit the battlefields of my regiment on the way, and battlefields were not sited primarily with the purpose of facilitating post-war pilgrimage. I had in favour three assets : the aeroplane, the leave and a modicum of currency. I still have the aeroplane, some of the leave and unhappily 320,000 drachmae of the currency. With this sum, brought out of Greece inadvertently and against the regulations, I am now saddled ; nobody would change it in Italy or France, and everybody laughs when I mention it here.
The aeroplane was, indeed is, a three-seater, high-winged mono- plane, cruising at eighty miles an hour and consuming in that time four and a half gallons of petrol. Its range worked out at some- thing over five hours, but np human body could endure its con- fined space for so long. A disease which my companion and I knew as " taxi-driver's cramp " invariably set in, and in point of fact our longest hop, from Marble Arch to Castel Benito, the airport of Tripoli, was just under four hours. Our route was from Jerusalem to Tunis to Sicily to Brindisi to Athens to Brindisi to Rome to Cannes to Croydon. We landed twenty-nine times apart from false starts and incidental joy-rides. From Jerusalem to Tunis they thought we were crazy, and I was reminded of an Essex boat- builder who once prepared me for a long voyage in a small boat with the words : " I'm zorry to zee zuch a nice young gentleman a-zooiciding of hisself." From Tunis to Athens they thought we were lucky, and suggested that we should seek employment there for the rest of the winter. From Athens to Croydon we met with ever-increasing respect. But in point of fact we had few anxious moments throughout the trip, and most of those were due to our own fault, such as impatience with meteorological pessimism or forgetting that at a stated hour night must fall.
We took forty-one days over the journey, but flew on only nineteen of them ; on some of these we flew two hours or less. We lost six full days and as many half days of projected flying through bad weather ; we were held up for four days at Athens waiting for good weather in the Gulf of Corinth. We were treated superbly every- where, on big airfields as well as on small, just as, in my experience, small yachts on long cruises are well received in the hugest har- bours. Thus Liberators and Vikings were kept purring with their four engines, waiting on taxi-tracks, while our tiny Auster was in leisurely circuit preparing to land. To this rule of helpfulness there were only two exceptions. One was at Rouen, where the head douanier lost us a day through a mixture of dilatoriness, pomposity and obstructionism. The other, I regret to say, was on a Royal Air Force station, where they produced written orders from their Air Officer Commanding that no facilities whatever—not even blankets— were to be afforded to civilian aircraft. As there is no alternative night-stop for several hundred miles in either direction, and no alternative route on that part of the journey, this (new) rule, until rescinded, will make it impossible for any light aircraft to perform the trip to the Middle East without a night in the blue, unless it is prepared to tackle the long sea-crossing from Rhodes to Cyprus ; the Turks will not grant facilities across their territory except from north to south. In this case, however, the good nature of the officers prevailed, and they got round these inhospitable regulations by sailing near the wind and accepting us as their personal guests. All other R.A.F. stations did us proud.
The officials of B.O.A.C. and B.E.A., and all foreign authorities, treated us as honoured, if eccentric, guests. From Jerusalem to Croydon, Shell wafted us efficiently and gracefully along. Their
local representatives varied from an elegant Italian with a large coronet on his visiting card, whom we met at Naples, to an Arab who refuelled us at Marble Arch. The first spoke perfect English ; the second had only one word of it, and that was the legend Shell blazoned in red letters across his blue-sweatered bosom. We tipped him lavishly in cigarettes and cheese.
When ordering the aircraft last April I omitted to specify that it should have radio. I had a vague intention in my ignorance of installing it later ; I did not realise that some delicate operation on ignition or something or other was necessary beforehand. We there- fore had to rely chiefly on telepathy for our communications, and by this means we sent out on occasion some fairly anguished signals. But we were most punctilious, especially on our sea-crossings, to forecast our route and our estimated time of arrival, and to ask our last port of call to signal these to our next. Whether this was in fact done by the authorities of the more frivolous countries I rather doubt ; but it did something, in conjunction with the Mae Wests lent us by the French at Tunis, to put our minds at rest. Of the various bits of sea we crossed, I thought the Adriatic looked the coldest ; the English Channel looked rather cosy, with all the steamers puffing past Dungeness. Sicily was Disney-like, with monasteries perched precariously on hill-tops, and toy railways emerging and disappearing like rabbits among the myriad tunnels. The downs and dales of Auvergne, where we first felt the chill of the northern winter, were homely to the eye. But beyond doubt the best span of the trip was the stretch from Corfu down the Greek coast to the Gulf of Corinth. Corfu itself looked from the air like the vast park of an English country house ; and the clouds which dissolved in rain over the steep mountains of the mainland were mere fluff above the string of islands, the midmost of which is Ithaca. One can land at Corfu, but I was deterred from doing so by the evil reputation of its small landing-ground after rain. The descendants of Odysseus still expect one to arrive by ship.
The possession of a private aircraft automatically doubles one's hotel bill, like being called Guinness or having an astrakhan collar. Spare parts and overhauls are expensive ; landing fees reasonable (and sometimes forgotten); petrol negligible. I only used four gallons of oil on the whole trip, and of that half was due to a precautionary change of oil in the sump half-way home. We worked out that from Jerusalem to Athens our petrol had cost us £25 4s. From thereon our calculations were upset. We filled up one night in preparation for take-off next morning, but our tanks were empty by first light ; petrol is worth a lot in the Greek black market. Our only other adventure of this kind was at Marble Arch, where some white wine, contained in a brandy bottle marked " Martell," proved to have been turned overnight into water. Benina airfield, where we had spent the aforesaid night, appears to be the antithesis of Cana in Galilee. Next time I go there I shall leave a decoy bottle in the back of the plane.
Apart from such minor setbacks, I am convinced that touring in a light aircraft has a great future, and that it will compare favourably with other means of travel when currency restrictions allow. For a payment of twenty-five pounds to a company such as Shell or Intava, one receives a carnet which enables one to draw petrol on " tick." I only once had to pay out cash ; once I had a free fill from a foreign air force, which declined payment ; twice (I hope not improperly) I was allowed to draw non-Shell petrol on my Shell carnet. Most of my currency allowance, which was granted before the latest restric- tions and augmented because I was gathering material for a book, went on the hire of taxis to and from the battlefields. For these the fares were outrageous, presumably because of the high cost of petrol on the black market.
I have long been a devotee of small-boat cruising, and I am by no means weaned from that early love. But the joy of being able to skip lightly over frontiers and bad roads and stormy seas has much to commend it. To Garleffan ' (4 tons Thames measurement Ber- mudan sloop) I am still wedded ; but G-AJAF, my tea-tray in the sky (known in Palestine as my flying carpet), is very dear to me. Perhaps I should use of her the phrase which Lady Burton coined in her bowdlerised version for children of Sir Richard's translation of the Arabian Nights, and call her "a kind of assistant wife."
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