Per Ardua
By STRIX aro sir,' said Nanny when I came in, 'there's Wan aeroplane been flying round the house ever so low. Why, I could see the man's arm.' In a modern flying machine it is not nor- mally possible to 'see the man's arm,' and I wondered vaguely why my home had been made the venue of these silent-film, Clubfoot-Strikes- Again aerobatics. Later, down by the stable, I found one of those coloured streamers with a small weighted pouch attached which are the RAF's version of the cleft stick. The pouch con- tained an insolent message from Bernard Fer- gusson, the notorious brigadier. I might have In a modern flying machine it is not nor- mally possible to 'see the man's arm,' and I wondered vaguely why my home had been made the venue of these silent-film, Clubfoot-Strikes- Again aerobatics. Later, down by the stable, I found one of those coloured streamers with a small weighted pouch attached which are the RAF's version of the cleft stick. The pouch con- tained an insolent message from Bernard Fer- gusson, the notorious brigadier. I might have known The episode set me thinking about how imper- sonal—except for an occasional aberration of this kind—flying has become. When I was a child, before the First War, aeroplanes were rarely seen in the sky; if one did appear every- body stood still and watched it till i,t was out of sight, as if it had been a golden.eagle. I seem to remember (though here I may be slightly over- doing the period atmosphere) that it was quite common form for people to wave their handker- chiefs to the intrepid aeronaut who, it was generally felt, needed all the encouragement he could get as he pursued his unnatural and hazardous avocation. For my part, I watched his machine closely, for I more than half ex- pected it to fall like a stone suddenly to the ground.
I shall tell my grandchildren that I saw a Zeppelin, and what is more I am almost certain that I did. What I am quite certain about is that I heard my first iull-blown grown-up joke during an air raid. We were sitting torpidly in the wine- cellar and the joke was made by an old friend of the family, an Archdeacon of St. Paul's, who was staying with us. 'We really ought to feel ashamed of ourselves,' he said. 'Here we are surrounded by champagne, while outside• people are undergoing real pain.' I thought this in the worst possible taste.
I first took passage in an aeroplane in 1930, on a flight from Guatemala City to Mexico City. Even in the Americas, flying was in those days still regarded as an unusual method of travel, and a very large number of people assembled to bid us godspeed. In this valedictory throng the Latin Americans crossed themselves re- peatedly as we prepared to take off; many were in tears.
At that period aeroplanes flew quite close to the ground, which on our course was diversified by a long range of volcanic mountains. We skirted the flanks of this range, so that for much of the time there was plenty to see by looking out of the window horizontally, as one does from a train, or even in an upward direction, instead of having to crane one's neck and peer down- wards through the clouds. It was far more in- teresting and enjoyable than a modern passenger- flight. I wrote blasé letters home; in 1930 a letter written in an aeroplane had—at any rate in the circles in which I moved—a freakish and exotic cachet. I cannot remember what sort of aeroplane it was, or whether it had more than one engine.
A year or so later I boarded a tremendously up-to-date aircraft at Basra. It had a bar; one felt that the conquest of space would never go further than this, that the sky's challenge had at last been met in :full. The CG's under the bar,' explained the pilot. I looked in vain for the protruding feet of some inebriated senior official but was told later that the pilot was talking about the centre of gravity. I have flown in dozens of different aeroplanes since then but have never heard the centre of gravity mentioned. Perhaps it is not as important as it was.
Flying—I mean as a passenger—has become steadily more highly organised and duller. As the launch took us away from the Imperial Airways Sunderland in Alexandria harbour in 1937, 'Oh dear!' exclaimed a nice lady who had come out to visit her son in the Coldstream Guards. 'How dreadful of me ! I quite forgot to thank the driver.' You don't, I fancy, find much of that sort of thing among the great flocks of travellers who are dragooned in and out of the huge bellies of today's flying machines.
Although this is neither here nor there, the driver's name was Bennett; as an Air Vice- Marshal he led the Pathfinder squadrons in the Second War.
This conflict stimulated everybody's interest in aircraft. During it, although a simple foot- soldier, I was airborne in the following types : Walrus, Sunderland, Swordfish, Blenheim, Dakota, Mosquito, D.H. Rapide, Anson, Mitchell, Liberator, Moth, Hudson, Glenn Martin, Wellington, L.1., L.5. and two or three others whose names, if I ever knew them, I have forgotten.
Implicit in this list is my chief complaint against aeroplanes from the outsider's point of view. There are so many different sorts and they all become obsolete so quickly that it is im- possible for a non-specialist to take, or even to pretend that he takes, an intelligent interest in them.
This would not matter a great deal were it not that it adversely affects one's prestige in the eyes of the very young. There is no getting away from it, a citizen of today ought to be able to distinguish between the various enormous and expensive machines which hurtle with increasing frequency through the skies above him. Inability to tell a Viscount from a Britannia is in hard fact as great a solecism as was, under Elizabeth I, inability to tell a hawk from a heron. The young are all too well aware of this; one finds oneself acquiring, slightly before one's time, an odour of moth balls, the status of an assegai-minded fogey.
The velocipede, to my unmechanical mind an almost equally ingenious invention, burst upon the world only a few years _before the flying machine, and for a time aroused a comparable wonder among those who saw it in motion. I hope I shall not offend bicycle-lovers by sug- gesting that their darling has evolved at a reasonable, placid tempo. The number, nay the very shape of the wheels have remained constant for more than half a century. The strength of the crew has not varied. One has none of those here-today-gone-tomorrow qualms about' the pedals. The noise emitted is still a gentle whirr.
Whether the world " would be a worse or a better place if the evolution of the aeroplane had been equally gradual it is not for me to say. But I doubt if it would be a less interesting place; it would certainly be much quieter; and a good many people would find it easier to keep up with Jones minor.
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