Stephen Morris Read Free

lightly over the grass, perhaps two feet up, the pilot holding her off the ground till the last moment. Then he put her down; she touched, undulated gently in a vertical plane, ran along with her tail down, slowed, swayed, and turned towards thehangar. A small figure, the clerk who had been with him to take the money, jumped out and ran to a wing tip to help the machine on the turn; she taxied slowly to the hangar.
    ‘Lands her nicely, don’t he?’ said the mechanic.
    ‘Yes,’ said Morris, ‘he lands her well.’
    He taxied her up to the hangar. Morris watched for him to stop, but he went on. The great sliding doors were open, and he taxied the machine right inside, managing her cleverly with little bursts of engine at crucial moments. Not till the machine was well inside and berthed alongside the other one with the help of the clerk did he switch off and allow the engine to come to rest. Morris watched, interested, wondering if he could have done that so easily on a rotary-engined machine. Evidently it was a trick that had to be picked up on this work.
    ‘Very pretty,’ he said.
    ‘He always does that,’ said the man, ‘saves a terrible lot of handling. There’s none too many of us.’
    The pilot jumped down from the machine and came towards Morris; a small, broad-shouldered man with a big chin, in a dirty pair of tweed breeches and gaiters.
    ‘Mr Morris?’ he said. ‘My name’s Stenning.’ Morris made the usual greetings; the little man unbuckled his leather helmet. ‘Mr Riley told you how things are here?’
    Morris nodded.
    ‘Things aren’t going so badly as they were,’ said Stenning. ‘It’s no use denying we had a bad winter - worse than we counted on.’
    ‘Have a fag,’ suggested Morris.
    ‘Thanks.’ He took a long look at the sky. ‘It still holds,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think it was going to this morning. Of course,’ he added casually, ‘this extra machine will make a difference in the profits. Riley said there wasn’t enough work for three machines - nor there is. But what I saidto him - what I said to him was that we shan’t have three machines. One will usually be in dock for overhaul while the other two carry on. I told him, it means we can keep an efficient service with two machines. And not only that - not only that, I said - there are the incidental passengers, the people who come up here and want a ride and we’re both away. Those are the important people, too; the people who come and look you up are the people who want a ride, or who want a machine for an hour. That’s what I said to him; we want a third man so that one of us can be on the spot most days … ’
    ‘I see,’ said Morris. ‘Do you get much special charter work?’
    The other glanced at him shrewdly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Between you and me, we don’t. It’s been a great disappointment that - a great disappointment to both of us. We’ve only had one real charter since Easter; a man called Simpson whose wife started dying in Manchester one Sunday morning - I got him there in about three hours. But that’s the only one,’ he added impressively, ‘- the only one since Easter.’
    ‘I suppose you depend on that rather in the winter. Try and work it up when joy-riding’s slack?’
    ‘Try hard enough,’ said Stenning grimly, ‘the people just don’t come. Cut our prices for long distances to rock bottom - too low I say. The people don’t come and we don’t make any profit to speak of on the ones that do … ’
    He spat a little fragment of tobacco from his lip. ‘It’s been a great disappointment, that side of it,’ he repeated. ‘Riley says it needs more advertising and boom than we can afford. I don’t know about that - he does all that side of it. All I know is that we don’t get the business. Of course, the joy-riding pays all right in the warm weather.’
    He entered on a string of admonitions, mostly concernedwith the upkeep of the machines and the method of picking up passengers