Читать книгу Round the Bend онлайн

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If I didn't nip in and get myself established, someone else would come along and do it over my head.

On Bahrein aerodrome the local R.A.F. and civil air staff began to get quite interested in me. It was obvious at the end of the three months that, licence or not, I was on to a good thing and I was doing pretty well. British N.C.O.s with the R.A.F. used to come along and watch me working with young Tarik, and suggest that they were due to be demobilised in a few months and what about a job? I never engaged one of them. I knew from my own experience the wages that you have to pay British engineers in the East, and I knew that if once I started on that sort of wage bill I'd be bust in no time. Moreover, I didn't need them. I had all the ground engineer's licences myself. Young Tarik, brown though he might be, was keen and quite intelligent, and I reckoned that with two or three more like him I could service several aircraft myself.

It was about that time that Gujar Singh turned up.

Gujar Singh was a young Sikh, who worked as a cashier in the Bank of Asia. He might have been twenty-six or twenty-eight years old at that time, and he was the fiercest thing I had ever seen. Being a good Sikh he never cut his hair, and he had a great black beard that stuck out forward from his chin in a manner that would have frightened any gunman trying to hold up the bank into a fit. When I got to know him better, and travelled with him, I found that he slept every night with a bandage round his head to make this beard grow fiercely outwards from his face. He wore European clothes and was usually dressed in a neat, light grey tropical suit, but he always wore a turban. Beneath this turban there was long black hair that reached down to his waist, coiled round his head out of sight and fastened with a comb. He wore a plain iron bangle on his wrist, and beneath his jacket he wore a ceremonial dagger belted round his waist. He didn't smoke or drink, because of his religion.