Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

The sky was a sullen orange-grey when we took off at eight the next morning from Gatwick, the as yet unshed snow hanging heavily as spawn in a frog’s belly. We were carrying eight brood mares in an old unpressurised D.C.4, flying away from the incoming storm, en route to Milan. Timmie and Conker were back, to my relief, but neither had had a scintillating holiday, by the sound of it[159]. I overheard Conker, a much harassed small father of seven large hooligans, complaining as he loaded the cargo that he’d done nothing but cook and wash up while his wife curled up in bed with what was, in his opinion, opportunist malingering influenza. Timmie showed his sympathy in his usual way: a hearty gear-changing sniff. A thick-set black-haired square little Welshman, he suffered from interminable catarrh and everyone around him suffered also. It had been his sinuses, he unrepentantly said after one particularly repulsive spitting session, which had stopped him going down the mines like his pa. The February holiday, Timmie agreed, was not much cop[160].

‘How many holidays do you have?’ I asked, fixing chains.

‘A week off every two months,’ Conker said. ‘Blimey mate, don’t tell me you took this job without asking that.’

‘I’m afraid I did.’

‘You’ll be exploited,’ Conker said seriously. ‘When you start a job, you want your terms cut and dried[161], wages, overtime, holidays with pay, bonuses, superannuation, the lot. If you don’t stand up for your rights, no one else will, there isn’t a union for us, you know, bar the agricultural workers, if you care for that which I don’t. And old Yardman, he don’t give nothing away you know. You want to make sure about your weeks off, mate, or you won’t get any. I’m telling you.[162]’

‘Well, thank you, I’ll ask him.’

‘Aw, look man,’ said Timmie in his soft Welsh voice, ‘We get other times off too. You don’t want to work yourself to death. Mr Yardman don’t hold you to more than two trips a week, I’ll say that for him. If you don’t want to go, that is.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘And if you don’t go, Billy and Alf do?’

‘That’s about it,’ agreed Conker. ‘I reckon.’ He fitted the last lynch pin on the last box and rubbed his hands down the sides of his trousers.

I remembered Simon saying that my predecessor Peters had been a belligerent stand-on-your-rights man, and I supposed that Conker had caught his antiexploitation attitude from him, because it seemed to me, from what they’d said, that Conker and Timmie both had free time positively lavished upon them. A day’s return trip certainly meant working a continuous stretch of twelve hours or more, but two of those in seven days wasn’t exactly penal servitude[163]. Out of interest I had added up my hours on duty some weeks, and even at the most they had never touched forty. They just don’t know when they are well off, I thought mildly, and signalled to the airport staff to take the ramp away.

The D.C.4 was noisy and very cramped. The gangways between and alongside the horses were too narrow for two people to pass, and in addition one had to go forward and backward along the length of the plane bent almost double[164]. It was, as usual, normally a passenger ship, and it had low-hung luggage shelves along its length on both sides. There were catches to hold the racks up out of the way, but they were apt to shake open in flight and it was more prudent to start with all the racks down than have them fall on one’s head. This, added to the angled guy chains cutting across at shin level, made walking about a tiresome process and provided the worst working conditions I had yet struck. But Conker, I was interested to notice, had no complaints. Peters, maybe, hadn’t been with him on a D.C.4.

After take-off, the horses all being quiet and well-behaved, we went forward into the galley for the first cup of coffee. The engineer, a tall thin man with a habit of raising his right eyebrow five or six times rather fast when he asked a question, was already dispensing it into disposable mugs. Two full ones had names pencilled on:

Patrick and Bob. The engineer picked them up and took them forward to the pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit.

Coming back, the engineer asked our names and wrote us each a mug.

‘There aren’t enough on board for us to throw them away every time,’ he explained, handing me ‘Henry’.

‘Sugar?’ He had a two-pound bag of granulated, and a red plastic spoon. ‘I know the way you lot drink coffee. The skipper, too.’

We drank the scalding brown liquid: it didn’t taste of coffee, but if you thought of it as a separate unnamed thirst quencher, it wasn’t too bad. In the galley the engine noise made it necessary to shout loudly to be heard, and the vibration shook concentric ripples in the coffee. The engineer sipped his gingerly over the scrawled word ‘Mike’.

‘You’ve got a right load there,’ he commented. ‘A ship full of expectant mums, aren’t they?’

Conker, Timmie and I nodded in unison.

‘Are they Italian?’