Travels with Myself and Another Page 3

  “The dinner was for about fifty people in a vast torch-lit patio with a fountain playing, the most spectacular house outside a movie set I have ever seen, and to me not beautiful, but rich, rich, rich. There is a strike of streetcar workers going on and they all said with vicious hard voices: let them strike till they starve but don’t give in, it will spoil these beautiful islands . . . The stockholders are now getting 80 percent on their investment; they cannot possibly compromise and only get 6 percent. Let them starve, the guests kept saying, over the creamy food and the champagne; let them starve. So that was very delightful and instructive.”

  Finding this letter was a lucky surprise, authentic hot news of the day, especially as I remembered nothing about Honolulu except being there, disliking it and touring Pearl Harbor with Bill. The planes stood wing tip to wing tip, the warships nudged each other (“like the Sargasso Sea”, from notes), the Japanese fishing boats were anchored alongside, ideal for Japanese Intelligence. Bill, a soldier, was appalled by the set-up but not a five-star general, thus unable to scare sense into anyone. U.C. said it was the system so popular in the First World War: get everything and everyone packed in one place and get the whole lot wiped out. When Pearl Harbor was indeed wiped out ten months later, with 3,300 American officers and men killed, my countrymen were whipped into fury against “the stab in the back”, but my fury was directed against the U.S. General Staff who provided the world’s richest target for the Japanese.

  We retreated to Hawaii, undiscovered by tourists, peaceful and simple. My notes are bright with descriptions of beauty, cane fields and cattle range country, tea gardens, fishing villages, enchanting Japanese children, but all I remember is climbing and scrabbling over volcanic lava in a vain search for the Hawaiian chamois or some such animal. U.C. enjoyed Hawaii more than I did; he was by no means on fire with impatience for the Orient. Then I hear the unchanging voice of my soul (in another letter to my mother): “In half an hour we go to the Clipper. I am very, very excited and pleased and glad to be off. To think that all the names of all the places are real; and I will be there . . . I don’t care where we go; it is all new, I want to see it all.”

  Air travel was not always disgusting. Those big PanAm flying boats were marvellous. We flew all day in roomy comfort, eating and drinking like pigs, visiting the Captain, listening to our fellow travellers, dozing, reading, and in the late afternoon the plane landed on the water at an island. The passengers had time for a swim, a shower, dinner, and slept in beds. Since that was air travel at its best, it has naturally disappeared.

  On the way to Hongkong, at Guam, we were introduced to spear-fishing by a passenger whom I described to my mother as “a character like Lawrence of Arabia, a marine aviator en route to Egypt”, and that’s all I now know about him, sinful bad memory. I never speared any fish nor tried to. I thought it unwise and improper to dive into depths where I didn’t belong and interfere with activity I didn’t understand. Keeping a respectful distance on the surface, I have watched underwater scenery and fish with joy all these years. Fish must perceive me as a rowboat. It is not that easy in life to find an unfailing source of joy.

  U.C. took to Hongkong at once. Hongkong bore no resemblance to the present city as seen on TV, a forest of skyscrapers, a mini New York set against the great triangular mountain. Travellers of the next century, always supposing there are any, will scarcely know whether they are in Buenos Aires or Chicago, skyscrapers all the way, skyscrapers to break the heart. When we saw it, the working city of Hongkong at the base of the Peak looked as if nailed together hurriedly from odd lots of old wood and sounded like a chronic Chinese New Year. It was brilliant with colour in signs and pennants; the narrow streets were jammed by rickshaws, bicycles, people, but not cars; the highest building was an imposing square bank and it wasn’t very high. The gentry lived in gracious homes up the sides of the Peak, social position established by height.

  We stayed in an old hotel downtown, perhaps the only hotel there was: big rooms with paddle fans on the ceilings, antique bathrooms, a large public lounge with large beat-up leather chairs; very Maugham to me. U.C., in the twinkling of an eye, collected a mixed jovial entourage, ranging from local cops with whom he went pheasant-shooting to fat wealthy crook-type Chinese businessmen who invited him to Chinese feasts. A bald middle-aged Caucasian of obscure nationality and occupation, self-styled “General,” was a special favourite, and a huge polite thug from Chicago named Cohen whom U.C. believed to be a hit man for some Chinese warlord.

  U.C. could not bear party chatter, or discussions of politics or the arts, but never tired of true life stories, the more unlikely the better. He was able to sit with a bunch of men for most of a day or most of a night, or most of both day and night though perhaps with different men, wherever he happened to have started sitting, all of them fortified by a continuous supply of drink, the while he roared with laughter at reminiscences and anecdotes. It was a valid system for him. Aside from being his form of amusement, he learned about a place and people through the eyes and experiences of those who lived there.

  Though a hearty talker in my own right and given to laughing loudly at my own jokes, I was a novice drinker and had a separate approach to learning. I wanted to see for myself, not hear. U.C. did not mind what I did as long as he didn’t have to do it too. Much as I like conversation, I like it only in bursts for a few hours, not marathons, and seldom in group formation. I slipped away from the large leather chairs. U.C. used to say, kindly, “M. is going off to take the pulse of the nation.”

  Four days after arrival, I left Hongkong alone to fly via Chungking and Kunming to Lashio, the Burma end of the Burma Road, and returned immediately the same way, material for a Collier’s article. The airline, called China National Aviation Company (CNAC), consisted of two DC3s and three DC2s, elderly machines and no nonsense about comfort. Compared to passenger planes now, these were flying beetles. The floor sloped steeply, the chairs were canvas on metal frames, the toilet, behind a green curtain, gave a small circular view of the ground below.

  DC3s could carry twenty-one passengers, DC2s fourteen passengers, but seats were removed to make space for the freight load. Five thousand kilos of mail and fifty-five million dollars in banknotes (very heavy) were average monthly freight; the same planes also hauled wolfram and tin out of China. Except for the Burma Road, CNAC was the only contact between the outside world and “Free” China, in effect the one third of China not occupied by the Japanese and ruled by the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek. Trucks took fourteen days to reach Chungking from Rangoon on the spectacular corkscrew of the Burma Road, and broke down and rolled off precipices in alarming numbers. The five small tatty planes of CNAC kept “Free” China in business.

  There were seven surviving American CNAC pilots, ten Chinese and Chinese-American copilots, same for twelve radio operators, and two stewardesses. The pilot on my round trip jaunt was Roy Leonard who looked and sounded like a nice ordinary Midwesterner. He became my hero within an hour of being airborne. He was thirty-three or four, medium height, brown hair, thin, matter-of-fact, invariably good tempered, and as much at home and at ease in China as if China were Indiana. I never learned why he came to China but he had been flying here for years, for a time as Chiang’s private pilot. I felt I was watching a genius at work, and I watched closely, settling at once into the pilot’s cabin.

  The Japanese encircled Hongkong and had shown themselves hostile by fatally attacking two CNAC planes. CNAC simply changed its methods. Now CNAC planes climbed high above Hongkong, at night, in bad weather, before crossing the Japanese lines. Flights were postponed or cancelled if the weather was too good. Passengers were informed of the departure time a few hours in advance. By daylight, the Hongkong airfield looked discouragingly short, with the sea at one end and the cliffside of the Peak at the other. It was less worrying at night when you couldn’t see what was happening.

  We left Hongkong at 4.30 a.m. in a high wind in a DC2; freight, seven Chinese passenger
s, me and Roy Leonard. I cannot remember a radio operator nor find mention of him in my muddled old pencil notes; there was certainly no copilot or stewardess. In principle every plane did carry a radio operator whose job was to pick up weather reports and, before landing, make sure the landing field was not being bombed or under water. The passengers were given a rough brown blanket and a brown paper bag for throwing up. The plane was not heated or pressurized.

  We climbed, as if climbing a spiral staircase, in tight jolting circles over Hongkong until we reached fourteen thousand feet. All lights went off except the dim light in the pilot’s cabin and we crossed the Japanese lines, brightly lit far below. In half an hour, the storm hit us. I had been watching the flickering exhaust flame on a wing, but the wing vanished into cloud that looked grainy and hard as granite. Hail sounded like a threshing machine. Everything froze including the air speed indicator. Roy explained that if the speed dropped below sixty-three miles per hour the plane stalled and went into a spin, but there was no cause for anxiety; he opened his window a crack and judged air speed that way; he’d done it often. The wind-screen was a sheet of frost. Inside this cloud mass, elevator draughts lifted and dropped the plane, one’s stomach making the same vertical movements. I had untroubled confidence in Roy so the behaviour of the plane didn’t disturb me but I was perishing of cold. Behind in the cabin, the passengers vomited or hid beneath their blankets from the sound and the fury. This lasted for an hour and a half, after which Roy remarked that the rest of the trip would be easy. We were still flying blind in cloud but I thought it would be bad manners to mention that.

  We landed at 10 a.m. at Chungking. The airstrip was a narrow island in the Yangtze, beneath the cliffs. For two months a year, this island lay under sixty feet of water and was subject to weird nightly rises in the river level. When we circled to land, I saw Chungking on the cliff top, looking like a greyish brown expanse of rubble. The passengers departed gratefully. While the plane was refuelled, Roy and I sat on the damp ground and ate a sumptuous breakfast of one bowl of dry rice and tea. That was the only nourishment until we got the same repast in the late afternoon at Kunming. I said there was no nonsense about comfort.

  More passengers arrived and we took off for Kunming. The country was visible all afternoon, mountains, changing in colour and marked with a jigsaw pattern of small cultivated fields. A few grey villages, a few isolated farmhouses appeared in this vastness, and paths like animal tracks. Roy flew the plane as if riding a horse, meandering along valleys, “I go where I’m looking,” he said. He was trying out a new route, the idea being to baffle the Japanese.

  At one point I observed that this was a remarkable plane as it seemed able to stand still in the air. We were low in a valley between massive mountains. Roy said we weren’t exactly standing still but headwinds were sixty miles per hour so it kind of slowed us. Then he started to play an odd game of peek-a-boo, flying up to peer over mountains, dropping back; he was trying to see how things were at Kunming. “Yep,” he said, and we flew straight in to land. The sky above Kunming was smoky and yellow with dust but clear of Japanese planes; the day’s bombing had finished. Every day, ground crews scurried around shifting the runway markers, white-painted oil drums, and filling in new bomb craters to get ready for the arrival of the CNAC plane.

  Again passengers left with relief and another lot arrived and we were off, flying at thirteen thousand feet above the gorges of the Burma Road. The high altitude was necessary because here the appalling down-draughts plunged the plane thousands of feet in seconds towards the valley floor. We were always cold to frozen but I began to feel ashamed (soft, nothing worse than being soft) because I was also flushed and my legs and arms twitched and my mind seemed peevishly dislocated and I thought with horror that I might burst into tears for no reason. Confessing some of these symptoms to Roy, with a forced laugh, he said it was only lack of oxygen and I’d be all right when we got to Lashio after ten that night. Flare pots lit the runway at Lashio; it was much easier on the nerves to land in the dark when you couldn’t see what a mess you were landing on. Sixteen hours and 1,494 miles, if flying like a crow, seemed to me a fairly mammoth trip, but this was a regular weekly run for Roy and the other pilots.

  The CNAC rest house, near the Lashio field, was a wooden shack with iron cots and a shower, heaven itself, a chance to wash and sleep in spite of suffocating heat. Roy went off in the early morning with a .22 rifle to bag game; I wandered in the village bazaar, Burma rubies and eggs in banana-leaf baskets and pretty little Burmese women bathing under a tap. The Japanese usually bombed Kunming between 10 and 11 a.m. but it was unsafe to count on their schedule. Today they were late. We hung about sweating, which made a nice change, until the radio reported that twenty-seven Jap planes had bombed Kunming at 1 p.m. for half an hour but were now gone, so we could take off. Back as we’d come, over the Burma Road by daylight, beautiful, hopeless country, jagged mountain after mountain and a brown ribbon of road. Those hot green mountains were breeding grounds for the malarial mosquito; malignant malaria, which is fatal, was another hazard of the road journey. We landed at Kunming at five-thirty in the afternoon dark, a city shrouded in smoke and lit by fires.

  I had been in Finnish cities during bombing attacks, and Madrid was swept almost daily by artillery fire; but Kunming was in a class by itself. It was a big walled city, entered by a great carved painted gate. The houses were made of timber or mud brick, with curving eaves. The Japanese claimed to have destroyed it but, as they destroyed, the Chinese residents repaired. Endurance was the Chinese secret weapon. The Japanese should have understood that, and everybody else had better remember it.

  First, we smelled smoke and the stink of burst drains. Electric light lines were down like snakes over heaps of rubble. On the sides of a fresh crater, twenty-five feet wide, a little house half tottered, half held, and the family was eating inside by candle light. There was no sound except hammering. Enormous crowds of silent people were putting their houses together as best they could, by the light of candles and kerosene lamps. Something had gone wrong with the fire hose, water could not be pumped from the river. Two tall fires blazed while a mile-long chain of Chinese passed buckets of water from hand to hand. No one was wailing or crying; everyone, even small children, worked in silence.

  Part of the city was still lit by electric light. Noisy eaters were bowed over rice bowls in an eating house. A long queue stood outside a movie theatre waiting to see a film called “Kentucky.” We took rickshaws to the hotel since we couldn’t find our way on foot over the rubble and around the new craters. The hotel was a small dirty café downstairs and a few dirty little rooms upstairs. The Greek owner welcomed Roy as a friend, and was in splendid form. Every day that his hotel escaped intact was like a special favour from God. He said, “L’alerte est très correcte ici.” The people had two to three hours warning so they could run from the city. Pre-alarm was one balloon, floating over the town; then two balloons were floated and the siren wailed, really time to get moving. For the final urgent alert the balloons were hauled down and the siren wailed steadily. The only casualties were people who got sick and tired of running off into the fields every day, and stayed and took their chances.

  The penalty for looting was death. “They shot about 400 and since then there has been no problem.” Today had been unusual, only forty minutes’ warning and the Japanese, whom the Greek called “ces bandits,” were late. Kunming was defenceless and the Burma Road traffic did not pile up there. Roy thought the Japanese used Kunming as safe practice in bombing and cross-country navigation for their trainee pilots. We dined on fried eggs and warm beer, very jolly, and went early to bed as we had to be off before dawn and well lost, flying low between the mountains, before the Japanese came back on their usual morning raid.

  Landing at Hongkong the third night was as impressive as the rest of the trip. We had been flying in what looked like bechamel sauce for hours; Hongkong was invisible but the Peak is always there as a threat for
straying planes. Roy wheeled and turned, wheeled and turned, saw the field for an instant through a rift in the clouds, dropped lower, still on that circular flight pattern, saw more, and finally we skimmed the house-tops, ceiling two hundred metres, and landed neatly. The Chinese passengers had a tendency to clap, with tears in their eyes, at every safe arrival.

  There can have been nothing else like CNAC in the history of civil aviation. I doubt if there were ever any other pilots like those. They flew by compass, eyesight and experience; help from the ground was limited to contact when nearing cities, the all-clear signal for take-off, and whatever weather reports they could pick from the air. I remember one weather report: “The moon is beaming,” not really much help. The pilots earned one thousand dollars a month for eighty-five flying hours and ten dollars for each extra hour. Men do not risk their lives every week for such money. They were immensely proud of their fantastic little airline. And I think they were in love with their kind of flying, the man and the machine off on their own against the Japanese and the weather and the mountains and the landing fields.

  That was not a horror journey, never a dull moment. Glowing with adrenalin and high spirits, I would gladly have started again on the next flight.

  U.C. had finished a long piece of work before we left the U.S. and if I hadn’t coaxed him to China, he would have been loafing somewhere probably with a fishing rod. Since he was done out of that, he loafed around Hongkong with an ever-growing band of buddies. He had learned to speak coolie English, a language related to West African pidgin and Caribbean English, and was seen laughing with waiters and rickshaw coolies and street vendors, all parties evidently enjoying each other. He loved Chinese food and would return from feasts with his Chinese crook-type friends swearing they’d been served by geisha girls, and describe the menu until I begged him to stop, due to queasiness. He was ready to try anything, including snake wine, the snakes presumably coiled and pickled in the bottom of the jug.