The Lost Valley

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Tom filed into the paymaster’s office behind the other men, excited to receive his first pay packet. He’d begun the new year working at the Hobart Aero Club as a trainee civil aviation mechanic, living at Cambridge Aerodrome, sleeping in a humble dorm with five other apprentices. Lumpy bunks, thin blankets and stodgy, tasteless food, but Tom didn’t mind. It had been like his birthday every day, investigating the innermost workings of a dizzying array of aircraft, learning the secrets of flight in a satisfying nuts-and-bolts way.

The problem was that Tom didn’t only want to know how planes worked. He wanted to fly them himself, guide them through the heavens, leave his earthbound existence behind. It would be next year at least before he could transfer to a pilot training course, and even then, entry wasn’t guaranteed.

So he’d applied for a Royal Australian Air Force flying cadetship. Technically he was a year too young, but he’d talked to Harry and, hey presto, he had a shiny new birth certificate proclaiming him to be eighteen years old. Applying for the RAAF was the first thing Tom had ever done that seemed to impress his brother.

‘An air force pilot?’ Harry whistled through his teeth. ‘Papa would have been proud.’

Tom bit his tongue at the mention of their father. There was so much that Harry didn’t know about their heritage, about the past. A privilege to think Nana had chosen him as secret keeper, but also a burden.

The panel interview had been exhaustive but maddeningly vague. We mark candidates on general promise and fitness for service, they’d said. How could you quantify general promise? He had no idea how he’d done. The entrance exam on physics, physical science and mathematics was more to his liking, and he’d achieved a high score.

‘A letter for you, Tom,’ said the paymaster as he distributed the wages. The man toyed with it, taking an agonising amount of time to hand it over, piquing the interest of the others. ‘Not planning on leaving us so soon, are you, son?’

Tom snatched the letter, taking a deep breath as he spotted the Air Board insignia in the corner. Unwilling to open it in front of an audience, he retreated to his empty dorm room, extracted the note from the envelope with shaky fingers, then whooped aloud with joy. He’d been selected for the RAAF’s No. 1 Flying Training School at Point Cook in Melbourne, and was to report there on the 20th of January, barely a week away.

A bolt of excitement coursed down Tom’s spine as he looked out the dingy window to the sky of flawless blue. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t longed to fly. When he hadn’t been jealous of each bird, as it vanished into the sun; of each moth as it spiralled towards the moon. Not any more. He read the letter again and laughed aloud. This time it was his turn to defy gravity and soar to the stars.

Tom wished he could share the news with Emma, but without an address or phone number … He’d tried everything to find out, even sneaking into the student record’s office at Campbell College to look at the files. But he’d been sprung. ‘That’s confidential information, I’m afraid.’ Thereafter the door had remained firmly locked whenever the bursar or Principal’s secretary were away. The awful truth was that he might never see Emma again.

Tom closed his eyes, imagining her serious smile and sweet face. She’d be thrilled for him, he knew she would be. Wherever Emma was, he hoped she was happy.

Tom spent a few days at Binburra before his ship sailed for Melbourne. His excitement was somewhat tempered when he saw his grandmother. She looked thinner than he remembered, and her cough had worsened. But she insisted she was fine, and her eyes shone with pride and joy as he told her his news.

On the day he left she gave him a thylacine pendant on a silver chain. ‘Your grandfather gave this to me on our first wedding anniversary. He wore one too.’

Tom closed his hand over the small, shining figure. ‘I’ll call her Karma.’

‘What an excellent name. She’ll watch over you now, as she has always watched over me.’ Tears filled his eyes and he hugged her tight. ‘You’ve dreamed of this all your life,’ said Nana, ‘and it will be a glorious adventure. I just pray the world has learned its lesson, and there will not be another war.’

One fine morning a few days later, Tom lined up on the Point Cook parade ground with an assortment of other new cadets. Strangers, yes, but each knowing they shared something in common – a love of flight. There was already a certain camaraderie in the air.

That day passed in a whirl. Tom was shown his quarters and allocated a place in the mess hall. He was introduced to his instructors and, best of all, assigned a flight schedule. He couldn’t wait to take off.

However, it didn’t take long for the heady excitement of that first day to evaporate. The new cadets were initiated by the seniors that very night, while the officers turned a blind eye. Stripped, daubed with paint and tossed in the dam. Afterwards they were made to stand naked on a table and sing a song. A humiliating procedure apparently designed to ‘knock any airs and graces out of you sorry little sods’.

In the coming days Tom struggled to adapt to a life of strict discipline; no easy thing for a boy from the bush. Endless backbreaking drills. A thousand rules. Two hours of compulsory sport daily. Fourteen-hour days, six days a week.

‘At Point Cook we aim in one year to turn out officer pilots to the same standard as the RAF does in two,’ said Flight Lieutenant Jock Allen, Tom’s instructor. Working at the aerodrome had been easy compared to this, and a week passed with no sign of getting into a plane. There was plenty of theory though: twenty-three textbooks on subjects as wide-ranging as armaments, navigation, meteorology, navigation and the theory of flight.

In the hierarchy of the base, cadets were the lowest of the low, at everybody’s beck and call. Expected to run messages for their superiors, clean their rooms, even shine their shoes. It didn’t take long for Tom and the rest of the cadets to get their backs up.

‘I swear, if that mangy corporal barks at me one more time, I’ll deck him,’ growled Stu Kennedy one day, after four hours of drill in the blazing sun. ‘When in God’s name will we get in the air?’

Stu was another country boy, from Cooma in the Snowy Mountains; a bit of a larrikin who in some ways reminded Tom of his brother. He and Tom were the two youngest cadets, and both shared a love of their mountain homes, swapping stories about the big skies and jutting peaks. The grand isolation. Talking to Stu helped ease Tom’s impatience and homesickness.

The boys weren’t long disappointed. Flying instruction began the following week. Tom was to train in a Tiger Moth. Hard to believe he’d be taking to the air in a plane made by de Havilland, the most innovative aviation manufacturer in the world.

His Moth was a single-engine, two seater biplane; yellow and black like its namesake. Jock jumped into the open cockpit. ‘Hop in.’

Tom didn’t need to be told twice, but to his great disappointment, they didn’t leave the ground. He spent the next two hours taxiing around the runway, practising the controls.

‘That’s all for today, Abbott,’ said Jock at last. ‘Bring her back in.’

Tom gloomily headed for the hangar. At this rate he’d never take off, and he needed a certain number of dual flying hours before being allowed to go solo.

‘Cheer up.’ Jock smiled at his pupil’s long face. ‘You’ll take her up tomorrow.’

Tomorrow seemed to take forever coming, but when it did, flying was everything Tom had dreamed of. Taxiing down the runway, gaining speed, the thrill of lift-off. The buzz of adrenaline and sense of total freedom. The view of earth from sky. The magical, supporting power of thin air beneath him. It was indeed a miracle.

However, it wasn’t easy. Tom had blithely assumed he’d be a natural, and was surprised when he wasn’t. In those first few weeks he found his pretty Moth had a mind of her own. ‘I can’t fly straight and level let alone bring her in properly,’ he said to Stu one night over lamb shanks and mashed potato. ‘Today I overshot the landing point twice and almost hit a fence. I swung like mad when taking off, jerked at the controls and Old Jock called me rough and ham-fisted.’

‘You’ll be right,’ said Stu, who was flying an Avro Cadet, recently arrived from England; considered a superior training aircraft to the Tiger Moth and easier to fly. The pressure was on to go solo by ten hours of training, and it irked Tom that Stu had managed it after only seven.

But Tom wasn’t far behind, soloing right on the course average of nine hours and forty minutes. The euphoria of that first flight without Jock knocked him sideways. He could barely bring himself to land, and returned to earth whistling and singing and jumping for joy.

After that his confidence surged, and he made swift progress. Six weeks later he could loop the loop, scream through the sky at one hundred miles an hour, and perform daredevil dives. This was living.

However, not for everybody. Point Cook had its fair share of mishaps and tragedies. Four months into their course, the first fatal training accident happened. On a windy day in April, nineteen-year-old Norman Chaplin, with twenty-five hours’ flying time under his belt, was practising aerobatics when one wing crumpled coming out of a loop. The Gipsy Moth nosedived from a thousand feet. Norman had the courage and presence of mind to undo his belt, climb from the cockpit and jump. But his parachute became tangled in the plane.

Tom had liked Norman – a quiet, gentlemanly boy with whom he shared a bunkhouse – and the death hit him hard. Two days later Norman was buried with full ceremonial honours, and life at the base went on as before.

‘Better than crippled for life,’ said Stu. ‘Have you seen the burned flyboys that came down in the war? Faces melted away. Hands burned off. You’d be better off dead, I reckon.’

Tom shuddered. For the first time it hit home what he was doing. Playing at being a fighter pilot, shooting imaginary enemies from the sky. Pretending to drop bombs - making the noise as he flew low over buildings and imagined them exploding into flames beneath him. All the cadets did it. Flying was a thrilling game, but where would it lead them? Nana’s words rang in his ears. I pray the world has learned its lesson, and there will not be another war.