The Atlantic Sky by Betty Beaty Read Free Book Online

She served a reasonable quick meal to two typists, three traffic girls, a man who worked in the pay section and an elderly radar operator.
    And all her customers were quite extraordinarily helpful. ‘No,’ one of the traffic girls said to Patsy’s red and flurried face as she tried to pop the roast pork in front of her for the second time, ‘not for me, I’m at the sweet—but Ted ...’ she craned her pretty head down the table towards the man in the pay section. ‘You said pork, didn’t you? I’m sure I heard you ... well,’ with gentle chiding, as though he was keeping it waiting, ‘here it is.’
    The staff canteen appeared by now to have got used to these untrained waitresses, and were thankful to escape with only lesser misfortunes. Even as Patsy hurried from table to serving hatch, she could see other more unlucky colleagues furtively mopping up soup and gravy with the folded napkin if they’d got one, but usually rather pitifully with a handkerchief, or even the edge of an overall. Inevitably they looked around to see if Mr. Crosbie or his particular S.S. man of the day was watching. Inevitably he was.
    Even the afternoon lectures began to be less of a respite than they had been, for instead of sitting in their safe little desks and drowsily listening to the various instructors, the embryo stewardesses began to have to do the things they were taught.
    It was no use, in answer to the long-suffering doctor’s question, to say that you’d bandaged a passenger’s knee in a criss-cross circular manner, you had to come to the front of the class and do it. Then, too, there were those catering forms the bar accounts that were designed, it seemed, not to balance. The changing of escudos into pounds and pounds into dollars.
    But the days went by. They began to understand more. Soon the subjects caught their attention. They listened with genuine interest to the physical laws whereby fifty-ton monsters could be supported in thin air: the network of customs barriers and international regulations which still covered the shrinking world: first aid ... how to bandage ... how to recognize the signs of serious illness ... what to do if the aircraft was forced down in the desert or in the sea ... what to do if it crashed ... even how to deliver a passenger’s baby: and the more everyday and therefore perhaps more important occurrences ... food and how to prepare it in the mock-up galley next to the main kitchens ... and then, just as essential, how to serve it. They looked at diagrams of the covers to lay for five-, six- and seven-course meals. They were given pro-formas of the bar accounts, and had to fill in imaginary items. They were told of the weather and what caused its violence and fluctuations ... and then, as the course sped by, the conditions they would find on the routes they would be flying.
    That routine went on day after day, week after week—work in the kitchen or the galley mock-up in the morning, waiting at table during lunch, lectures in the afternoon, sometimes further waitressing at tea or in the evenings. All day, they heard aeroplanes—taxiing, running up, taking off, or flying overhead. But the only view they had of them was through the windows of the classroom, or when, their day’s work beginning or ending, the girls passed the apron on their way in and out of the airport. And when the kitchen practicals started to get more frequent, exasperated frustration among the embryo stewardesses increased in exactly the same proportion, until Cynthia observed cynically, ‘It’s a hoax ... that’s what it is! They can’t get domestic help, so they invent a gigantic blind called No. 8 Air Stewardess Course.’
    And then unexpectedly, one Monday in mid-September, Mr. Crosbie started off the afternoon’s lectures with the magic words: ‘The aeroplane you will soon be flying on ‘When, Mr. Crosbie?’ cried half a dozen eager female voices. ‘Today?’
    The Catering Officer looked up from his notes on