Next week she told Derek the whole thing. He took it very well and said that he was sure that a divorce was the right course. He could not go himself to brief a solicitor and he asked her to see his solicitor in Leacaster and ask him to come and see him, and get the whole thing going with somebody to act for her. I had offered to go to see him if he wished but he didn’t want that; he told her very sensibly that matters of this sort were always easier if they were kept as impersonal as possible. She saw his doctor later and he congratulated her upon the way that she had handled it; he said his patient seemed much easier in his mind.
It was up to us then to provide the evidence. I scouted round and got the name of a hotel in Bloomsbury that seemed to do a good bit of that sort of thing, and telegraphed to book a double room. I got a couple of days’ leave from the club and went down to London, and met her at St Pancras Station, under the clock. ‘I don’t know if this is going to work,’ I said. ‘I’ve been and looked at the hotel from the outside, and it looks all right.’
‘I expect it’ll work,’ she said. ‘If it doesn’t, we’ll have to try again. I feel as if I was playing the leading part in a dramatised version of a rude story.’
I laughed. ‘That’s exactly what you are doing.’
She nodded, laughing. ‘I’ll try everything once. Let’s go and register at that hotel.’
We took a taxi to the hotel and registered as Mr and Mrs Pascoe. She had taken some pains over her luggage and had got herself a new suitcase with the initials B.P. on it, and she had marked some of her clothes, Brenda Pascoe. In the bleak, utilitarian bedroom with the double bed and the gas stove she showed me these with pride. ‘It’s getting ahead of the game a bit,’ she said. ‘But I can leave them lying about, and somebody might look.’ We went down and had lunch in the hotel dining room, and then we went out. She wanted to go and see some herbaceous plants in Kew Gardens, so we went there and walked round the borders all the afternoon while she made notes in a little book for her garden at Duffington. ‘Though I suppose it’s rather silly,’ she said once. ‘I mean, I shan’t be living there very much longer.’
I touched her arm. ‘We’ll have a garden of our own, somewhere. Not so big as the Manor garden, though.’
‘I don’t want another one like that,’ she said. ‘I’d like to have a little garden in a suburb, that we could do all ourselves. It’d be much more fun.’
We went back and had dinner at the hotel. I had booked a couple of stalls for Lilac Time; she had never seen it and she liked Schubert, and this was a sort of compromise to please us both. It did, and when we went back to the hotel for the serious business of our visit to London we were very happy together.
In the bedroom we settled down to dominoes. There was only one tub chair and one upright one; we pulled the suitcase stand out as a table and put a suitcase on it and played dominoes on that. By two in the morning we were both dropping asleep, and I didn’t care if I never saw another domino again in all my life. ‘Go to bed,’ I said. ‘The bed ought to be slept in, anyway. I’ll sleep in the chair.’
‘You wouldn’t mind if I did that? It’s a bit hard on you.’
I laughed. ‘Go on and go to bed. I won’t look.’
She did, and went to sleep at once. I sat on dozing intermittently in the chair till dawn came grey over the London roofs, and people started stirring in the corridors. I got up stiffly and turned out the fire, and opened the window to let fresh air into the room. She woke as I was doing that, and turned over sleepily, and sat up in bed. ‘Did you have an awful night?’ she asked.
‘Not too bad,’ I told her. ‘This is the last act, now.’
I undressed and put on my pyjamas and got into bed with her. She bubbled into laughter. ‘Johnnie,’ she said, ‘what marvellous pyjamas!’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I chose them very carefully. There was a pair with naked women all over them, and I nearly bought those.’
‘It wouldn’t have been in the part,’ she said. ‘We’re supposed to be a respectably married couple, aren’t we? I wasn’t quite sure if we were or not. I wondered if I ought to have a flannel nightie buttoned up to the neck, and then I thought that it would be a waste of money, because I’d never use it again.’
‘I’m not quite sure what we’re supposed to be,’ I said. ‘I ought to have asked the solicitor. Anyway, you’re all right as you are.’
She leaned towards me. ‘You’re looking much too tidy. Let me rumple your hair.’
‘Not much,’ I said. ‘I’ll rumple it myself. One thing leads to another.’
She laughed. ‘Would you like me to get out and get the dominoes?’
We sat in bed together for half an hour, laughing and talking happily till we heard the rattle of teacups in the passage. I pressed the bell. ‘Now for a cup of tea.’
She laughed. ‘I’d love a cup of tea.’
A maid about forty years old came in, a horse-faced woman with a slightly humorous expression. I ordered tea, and then I winked at her, as I had been told to do. She smiled, and crossed the room to close the window, taking a good look round the room as she did so. When she brought the tea she took a good look at us both in bed.
As the door shut behind her, Brenda asked, ‘Is that all, Johnnie?’
‘That’s all,’ I said. ‘I’ll go out in a minute and get her name.’
‘It seems too easy.’
In the corridor on my way to the bath I found the chambermaid hanging around. ‘Thank you for looking after us so well,’ I said. ‘In case I don’t see you again, here’s something to remember us by.’ I put two five pound notes into her hand.
She smiled, and said, ‘Thank you, sir. My name’s Doris Swanson. If you should want to get in touch with me at any time, I live at 56 Kitchener Street, North Harrow.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
‘I’m sure I hope that you and the lady will be very happy.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and went on to my bath.
When I got back to the bedroom she was dressed and packing her suitcase. I dressed and we went down to breakfast together. We had decided we had better not go back to Leacaster by the same train; we left the hotel in a taxi and put her suitcase in the cloakroom at St Pancras Station. She would do some shopping and go home in the afternoon.
In the bustle of the station she turned to me. ‘Thank you for everything,’ she said. ‘I was rather dreading this, but it’s been lovely, all the time.’
I grinned at her. ‘Like to do it again, one day?’
She laughed. ‘Not just like this. But I should never be afraid again.’
April came to an end, with Brenda coming out to fly her Moth practically every day. We started on a mass of legal work. There were three solicitors engaged in our divorce proceedings, one for Derek in The Haven, one for Brenda, and one for me; mine was also working on my own divorce. All three had their offices in Leacaster and all lunched together at the Conservative Club; I suppose each of them suspected that the divorce was a put-up affair, but we all went through the motions. Whenever I wasn’t flying at that time I seemed to be in a solicitor’s office.
The Pageant at Sherburn-in-Elmet, the aerodrome for Leeds at that time, came early in May. We took up two club machines, and Brenda took her Moth, and a young man called Peter Dawson flew up in his private Comper Swift. He won the Sherburn Stakes that year. I didn’t want Brenda to fly in a race just yet but she went in for the landing competition and won it by a most colossal fluke, finishing up her landing run with one wheel slap in the middle of the two-yard bullseye marked out at the centre of the circle. She also won the Concours d’Elegance, but I suspect that the white boiler suit and the short, curly hair had more to do with that than Airwork’s careful work on the machine. She flew back to Leacaster in the evening with two silver cups in the luggage locker of her Moth, bursting with pride of achievement. At Cramlington a fortnight later she won another one for coming in on the sealed time in the arrival competition, and had it presented to her by th
e Lady Mayoress of Newcastle who made a little speech about Women in the Modern World.
Derek’s solicitor got in touch with Doris Swanson and she came to Leacaster one Sunday to identify Brenda. Derek signed the papers petitioning for his divorce, and the case went down for hearing in the autumn. At a committee meeting of the Leacaster Aero Club I told them that more members than we had seats for in the machines wanted to go to the Rally with the Aero Club de Paris at their own expense, and suggested that we should close down the club for that week and take all three machines; Mrs Marshall also wanted to go. The Chairman said that he thought it was a good thing to show the flag in this way once a year, but questioned whether Mrs Marshall had enough experience to fly abroad. I said we couldn’t stop her flying anywhere she wanted to in her own aircraft, but suggested that I should fly with her in the front seat of her machine and lead the club Flight from that. In that way we could look after her and see she didn’t get into trouble. They thought that was a very good idea, and told me to lay it all on.
The Rally at La Baule was held on the first week-end in June that year, the machines being timed to arrive between two and three in the afternoon. This was all right for the Aero Club de Paris who had about a hundred and fifty miles to fly and could do it comfortably in the morning, but not so good for us with over five hundred miles to fly at an average ground speed of about seventy, with two refuelling stops. I decided that we would leave Leacaster at ten o’clock on Friday morning and fly in loose formation to Lympne on the south coast of England at the Straits of Dover, and have lunch there, and refuel. Then we would take off again and cross the Channel by the shortest route with everybody wearing life jackets, and fly along the coast of Normandy to Dinard, landing there to enter the French Customs and spend the night. It would then be only a short flight on to La Baule next day.
With the long hours of daylight at midsummer this was a good flight plan, because it gave us plenty of daylight on the ground. The Moth of those days wasn’t as reliable as it became later, and the engines in our club machines had all done a good many hours. I wasn’t worried about the Bluebird or about Brenda’s Moth, but the other two machines had a habit of shedding their exhaust valve seatings from the cylinder head, which wasn’t quite so good. I made sure that the pilots of those two machines were good, experienced chaps who were accustomed to forced landings, and I took a selection of cylinder heads, engine parts, and tools distributed between the machines, in case of trouble.
Brenda was thrilled at the prospect of this small excursion into France. She had never been abroad before. When it became definite that we were going to La Baule she got herself a set of gramophone records teaching French, and set herself to learn the language. She collected all the maps and drew thick blue pencil lines on them with distance and magnetic course carefully pencilled against each, and she got a Baedeker and read it. She came out to the aerodrome one day with four suitcases of different sizes on approval from the shop and made me sit in the front cockpit of her Moth while she chose the biggest that would go between my knees. One evening at the Manor she displayed a new evening dress that she had got for the occasion, for my approval.
We started off from Duffington on the Friday morning, all four machines fairly heavily loaded. The weather was good when we started, but the forecast was a bit doubtful, with a low coming up from the Atlantic and a chance of rain later in the day. The quicker we got across the Channel the better. I briefed my four pilots with the course, and with the hand signals I would make, and appointed Knox-Turner, who had been on Bristol Fighters in the war, as deputy Flight commander to me. Then we took off one by one and got on course for Lympne, flying in loose formation with Brenda and myself leading in the white Moth.
Everything went fine as far as Lympne, where we landed and refuelled the machines, and had a quick sandwich lunch in the club. Then we took off over the sea for Cape Gris Nez, as I had taken off with the Camel Squadron twelve years before, and passed over the spot where Calvert went down in the sea. I sat for a few minutes with sad memories of those days revived in me. Then I turned and glanced back at the rear cockpit at Brenda, bright-eyed and excited pointing at the coast of France ahead, and came back to the present.
We turned when we were over land and flew on down the coast at about fifteen hundred feet, passing Boulogne, Abbeville, and Dieppe. When we had passed Le Havre and I was starting to think about Dinard and our landing, Knox-Turner in one of the club Moths suddenly started to lose height. His engine was vibrating like a jelly and shooting tongues of flame out of the exhaust, and I knew just what had happened. He throttled back and started in on the approach for a forced landing.
I signalled to the other two machines to keep on circling around, and spoke to Brenda down the voice pipe. She throttled back and went down after Knox-Turner, keeping well out of his way. He picked a good big field and put down into it and made what seemed to be quite a smooth landing. We circled round at about two hundred feet and saw them get out; Knox-Turner pointing at the motor. We waved to them and started to climb back towards the other two machines; as we went I pin-pointed the position on my map. It was near a place called Unverre, a small village about ten miles from Bayeux.
I signalled to the other two machines when we got up to them to fly on, and I led them on to Dinard. We landed there and taxied in to clear the Customs, and I told the Douane officers about the machine that had forced-landed near Unverre, which would make a complication. They were very nice about it, but refused a lift back there in one of the machines with me; they didn’t seem to care for flying. So I hired a car to take one of them to Unverre, and saw him start off.
Brenda offered to fly me back in her machine, so we told the other four club members to fix themselves up in the hotel for the night and we would rejoin forces either late that night if we could get Knox-Turner’s Moth repaired in time to fly that evening, or else early in the morning. I collected all the engine parts and tools from their machines and put them into Brenda’s, and we took off to fly back to Unverre. As it was to be a forced landing in a field she suggested I should fly it from the back cockpit, and so we went like that.
When we got back to the other machine I found that they had picked quite a good field, and I had no difficulty in landing beside them. They had got the cowling off the engine and had diagnosed the trouble, a valve seating, as I had suspected. The weather was fine and we had everything we needed for the job, and so I got to work. We borrowed a couple of chairs from a cottage about half a mile away to stand on, and with an increasing audience of French countrymen and children I started in upon the engine, while Brenda practised her French upon them down below. Presently the officer of the Douane from Dinard arrived, and we had to take time off for him.
The engine was a simple one, but we had to change the head and the gasket and remove the cylinder to make a very close inspection of the piston. It was about four hours before we got it all together again, and the sun was setting. We did a ground run then, using the branch of a tree for chocks, and the engine seemed all right, but it was getting too dark by then to do the test flight that I ought to do before club members flew it. We should all have to spend the night at Unverre, and fly on to Dinard in the morning.
We were very tired by that time, and we had had nothing to eat since lunch. Knox-Turner had gone into the village and had ordered a meal for us at the one inn, which Michelin didn’t seem to think much of but which turned on a good meal for us. He had discovered that it had only one bedroom, with two double beds in it. That seemed a bit matey for us all, so he had got the landlord to ring up the next village, a place called Coudray three miles away, which had a much bigger hotel with three bedrooms. He had booked two of these rooms for Brenda and myself. We picketed the two Moths down and went into Unverre in the local taxi to wash and eat. The whole thing was a delight to Brenda, who had never before seen a French village or a French meal. She had changed into a skirt in the taxi while we were dealing with the aeroplane and she was enjoying eve
ry minute, and so was I.
We had a very good meal of thick, country soup, and roast duck, salad, and cheese, washing it down with a couple of bottles of burgundy. Then the landlord suggested that they went to bed early at Coudray, indicating that they did so also at Unverre, and so Brenda and I took our bags and got into the taxi and drove off to La Belle Moisson hotel at Coudray.
When we got there, it became apparent that there had been some confusion, probably due to Knox-Turner’s knowledge of the French language. There was only one bedroom vacant, though it had two double beds in it.
I said, ‘We can go into Bayeux.’
She said, ‘It’s so late, Johnnie. We might not get in there. Don’t you think we’d better take this?’ She smiled. ‘After all, it’s not as if we’d never done it before.’
‘It’s as you think,’ I said.
She turned to Madame at the door. ‘C’est bien,’ she said.
The old lady smiled at us. ‘Bonne nuit, monsieur et madame, et bon repos.’ She closed the door on us.
‘If we keep on doing this,’ I remarked, ‘something’s going to happen, one of these days.’
She came into my arms. ‘We’ll be free people before long, and, after all, we’re getting our divorce for this. Does it really matter if it does?’
5
The trouble when you take a Nembutal, or any of the barbiturates, is that you must go on sleeping for the allotted time. However great the distress that dreams impose upon you, you cannot jerk yourself awake, fully awake, that is, till the effect of the drug has eased. I think I may have been partially successful in my struggle to awake because I can remember the whistle of the wind around the exposed little house, and the rain beating on the window. Or perhaps it was some noise that Dr Turnbull made that roused me partially, when he brought in the nurse. Whatever it was, I had to go on sleeping with a dream that turned to nightmare.