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Next day we set off for England again. To
begin with, so thick was New York traffic that we almost missed
the plane, which might have saved everyone a great deal of
trouble. Disaster avoided, we took off at eleven-thirty, and
shortly afterwards the pilot made his rounds. Wanting to
reassure Diana, I stopped him and suggested that the untoward
incidents of the day before hadn't been too serious. In that
wonderful calm bluff English way, he answered, 'Airplane engines,
you see, are made up of thousands of individual parts, and it is
quite impossible to tell when any one of them may cease to
function'; with which Job's comfort he passed on. A short while
later one of those many parts did indeed cease to function: oil
began blowing over the wings, and back we went to Idlewild
Airport, as it then was. At the third try, later that afternoon,
we succeeded in crossing the Atlantic, making one stop to refuel
in Newfoundland and another at Shannon in the Irish Republic,
for one flew from landfall to landfall in those days.
Here the English weather blocked further progress: fog had
closed London Airport. It was about 6:30 a.m. local time when we
arrived at Shannon, too early to despair of reaching our
destination. We telephoned my agent, Harold Holt, and I borrowed
an airport office to practise in. However, as the hours passed
and the London fog failed to lift, I grew anxious enough to try
to charter from Aer Lingus a plane small enough to land in
conditions which our big Stratocruiser could not cope with. For
some reason Aer Lingus was not allowed to rescue us, so after
more endless hours, we took off in the transatlantic plane,
first at three forty-five - when the radio was found to be out
of order and we had to turn back, then, finally, at four-fifteen.
All hopes of rehearsing had long been abandoned, but the concert
itself still seemed safe. The fog had yet a couple of tricks up
its sleeve, however. After circling over Heathrow a few times in
a vain attempt to find a break in the blanket below him, the
pilot landed at Manston on the east coast. Diana and I were
delivered to the earth through the luggage shaft in the plane's
belly, hustled through customs at a trot and thrust into a
waiting car, which roared off the airfield with most gratifying
drama. One mile farther on, the gentle fog of the countryside
rolled toward us in thick, soft, totally opaque clouds, and we
crawled the rest of the way at hardly more than walking speed,
Diana shivering in the unheated car.
We were of course late. |
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