51
than a cardboard cut-out of the
man we had known the night
before. He insisted that his
headache was only tolerable if we
brought the revs back to 1800.
He also claimed it would improve
with the intake of oxygen, so 500
feet was our ceiling for the f light.
As soon as he had the 235 set
up he handed me the controls and
told me not to wake him until I
had East London in sight, or some
desperate event took place.
As it turned out, both of
these occurrences happened
simultaneously. I spotted a large
aircraft climbing out from East
London, trailing an unbelievable
mass of black smoke.
I was appalled. “Skipper, wake
up – there’s an aircraft on fire.”
He was awake in an instant,
like a snoozing cat that has had a
glass of cold water chucked over
it. Zingi grabbed the mike and
shouted, “East London, Delta
Uniform Echo, you have an
aircraft on fire.”
There was a slight pause and
East London came back with, “No
sir, that is one of the new Boeing
Jet aircraft.”
Zingi dropped the mike
and stared at me, his eyebrows
twitching, “Davis, you bastard...”
Hendrik and
the Tiger
In order to explain Hendrik ’s
fate, it is necessary that I first
introduce Dronkie Lombard.
Dronkie had been bunged
out of the South African Air
Force because of his devotion to
the bottle. You had to be pretty
dedicated for this to happen –
drinking was a compulsory part of
service life, so to be heaved out for
over-compliance meant that you
were very serious indeed about
alcohol.
Dronkie had a round, sombre
face, and freckles to go with his
ginger moustache and centre-
parted ginger hair. He dressed
immaculately, always wore a tie,
and always smelled of mint. He
seldom smiled and had a habit
of glancing nervously over his
shoulder as if expecting to be
accosted by bandits.
I later discovered that it was, in
fact, the police who kept Dronkie
in a continual state of nervous
tension, but that’s another story,
which I will tell you later.
Perhaps desperadoes were also
after him because, after a few days’
unexplained absence from work,
he turned up at the airfield with
a split lip, the remains of a black-
eye, and his jaws wired together.
Fortunately the undisclosed
reason for his condition also
caused the dislodgement of two
front teeth. I say fortunately
because this permitted him to
drink soup through a straw. It
also enabled him to maintain his
intake of alcohol.
I don’t wish to steal the
limelight, but soon after Dronkie’s
tooth incident, I saved his life.Turning up at an Air Force
bash at Swartkop one night, I
was making my way through
the gardens towards the lights
and music, when I heard a sort
of gurgling whistle coming from
the bushes. I quickly located the
source of this extraordinary noise- it was Dronkie. He was hanging
on to a branch of a thorn-tree
while trying to empty the contents
of his stomach onto the grass,
through the gap in his teeth. Every
so often the outlet became blocked
by a lump of carrot or something,
and this put him on the brink of
drowning.
Realising that he needed a
means of unclogging the orifice I
plucked a thorn from the tree and
handed it to him, thus saving his
life, a service for which he never
thanked me.
But on with the story.
As the most junior member of
staff, I was always delegated to do
the crappiest f lights. So, when a
900-mile trip across the desert
to Windhoek, in a Tiger Moth,
came up, I knew it was mine. I
was therefore amazed to find
Dronkie circling the Tiger in the
back of the hangar, and casting a
suspicious eye over it.
The grapevine soon confirmed
that, as punishment for some
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