Round the Bend by Nevil Shute Read Free Book Online

worked at these things, I was making up my mind what I was going to do. By the end of the first day, I think I knew what it was to be.
    I took a bus one day and went out to the airport at Eastleigh. There’s a firm there, Kennington’s, who do quite a big business in overhauling and servicing aircraft; I had thought once or twice of putting in for a job with them. Now I went to the sales side, to a young chap called Warren that I knew slightly, and asked if he knew where I could get a Fox-Moth.
    The Fox-Moth is a de Havilland type, obsolete now; it was produced about 1933. It has a little cabin for the passengers and an open cockpit for the pilot, and an engine of a hundred and thirty horsepower. Mine cruised at about ninety miles an hour. It would carry the pilot and two passengers comfortably, or four passengers if they were very little ones and there was a good long runway to take off on with the overload. The type hasn’t been in production for a long time and there weren’t many of them left, but Warren said he thought he knew of one in Leicester, dismantled and unused for years, and wanting a lot of work doneon it. We got on the telephone from his office, and found that it was there all right, and about to be put out on the scrap heap.
    I went to Leicester next day and bought it with a second-hand engine for a hundred and twenty pounds, and arranged for it to be sent down to Eastleigh on a truck. That’s how I started in the air transport business.
    I was headed for the Persian Gulf. I’d been to Abadan and Basra and Kuwait and as far down as Bahrein for a night, and I’d seen conditions there. I had an idea that a chap with a little aeroplane for charter, that could land on any decent bit of desert, might do all right for himself. There’s no way to get about that country except by plane or car, and travelling by car on those sand tracks is no fun at all. There was nobody doing charter work in that part that I knew of. I had a hunch that if I went there with a Fox-Moth I might make a living. Anyway, it would be something different; if I lost my money I’d always got my trade to fall back on.
    Kennington’s were very helpful. I made a deal with them to pay for overheads and for any labour that I used, and when the Fox-Moth came they put it in a corner of a hangar and let me get on with the work myself, with a boy to help me; they knew I hadn’t got much money. The plane wasn’t in too bad condition. I got it all stripped down and had the Air Registration Board inspector to agree what wanted doing, and by Christmas time I’d got the airframe finished all except the final spraying. I was working on it by half past seven every morning, and I never left till eight o’clock at night; I hadn’t got much time to spare, because with every day my money was running out.
    I wrote to Mr. Evans at Morden about the middle of December, turning in my job. I told him that it was for personal reasons, that I didn’t want to come back there, and that I was going to do something totally different for a change. He wrote me a very nice letter telling me to let them know if ever I wanted to come back into the repair business, and with that I felt I had something behind me to fall back on.
    I finished the engine and got it through a test run on the bench about the end of the first week in January, and got it installed in the aircraft a couple of days after that. I made a test flight onJanuary 12th, and there was nothing then to do but the final spray painting and lettering, and make the arrangements for my journey to the Gulf.
    Ma was good to me while I was working out at Eastleigh on the Fox-Moth. I used to go out there on a bicycle to save money, six miles each way, and sometimes I wouldn’t be home till nearly ten o’clock at night. Whatever time I came home there would be something hot for me in the oven, and a kettle boiling ready for my tea, and a bit of cheese or cake to eat after. Once while I was eating my supper, Ma