Читать книгу Round the Bend онлайн

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I had a bit of luck then, because one of the wireless operators, Dick Reed, spoke up and asked me where I was going to stay. He lived in a house in Muharraq town just outside the aerodrome with all the other operators; they ran it as a chummery, and they had a spare room, normally occupied by a chap who was on leave. They offered this to me and I moved in there that night and messed with the radio crowd.

At the aerodrome, they made me a member of the sergeants' mess, which meant that I could go in there at any time for lunch, or for tea if I was working late. That was a great help, in those early months.

I spent next day working on the aircraft to get it overhauled and fit for work after the flight out from England, and in typing out circular letters, five copies at a time, to send out to the eighteen or twenty possible employers of a charter aircraft in the Persian Gulf. I got a job next day, to take two engineers from Awali up to Kuweit for a conference, leaving early in the morning and coming back at night. They paid my eight pounds an hour without blinking, and the job went off all right, so by the end of the day I was fifty-six pounds in pocket and everyone seemed satisfied, specially me. My eight pounds an hour worked out at about two bob a mile, but we had travelled six hundred miles in seven hours flying time.