I threw my gown into the laundry basket, emptied my locker, and set out to find Miriam. If I needed to woo her from Richard Sutherland I would buy an American car, take up flying, cast myself as her Lindbergh, ready to fly the Atlantic with nothing but a packet of sandwiches and my own will.

The NATO Boys

5

THE NATO BOYS

As always, the sound of engines in the morning sent the slipstream racing through my mind long before I steered the Harvard from the parking apron. Snow lay across Moose Jaw airfield, draped like overnight laundry on the windsocks and the grilles of the landing lights. But the sky was a crystal summer blue, lit by needles of high-altitude ice, the flying weather of which we trainee pilots had dreamed as we waited among the dog-eared magazines in the flight room.

For four days the Saskatchewan fogs had put an end to all flying, and now every serviceable Harvard at the NATO training base was on the apron. The ground crews moved along the line of aircraft with their battery carts. The signal lamps flashed in a green fever from the control tower, and the first planes taxied towards the runway. As each engine choked and stuttered into life another layer of sound stiffened the air, the bull-throated roar of exhausts and intakes. The windows of the Canadian officers’ mess and the cadet barracks trembled with the noise of propeller steel setting its edge against the wind.

A ground crew moved their battery cart under my starboard wing. Muffled like Arctic explorers in oilskins, goggles, and earmuffs, they plugged their cable into the starter motor. I completed the take-off check, signalled to them through the canopy, and pressed the worn brass ring of the ignition button.

The heavy engine snuffled and kicked, the cylinders trying to clear their throats, and the propeller threw a slice of wet ice across the windshield. The blades lurched in unwieldy staggers against the air. I cracked the throttle, increasing the fuel supply to the carburettors, and felt the harness pulling at my shoulders as the cylinders fired together. The slipstream whirled the ice from the windshield and buffeted the yellow wings and tailplane, jarring the control column against my knees. An organ loft of noise filled the aircraft and reached out to the frozen deserts of Saskatchewan, driving everything from my mind. As I waited for the battery cart I had been thinking of my overdue letters from Miriam, the drunken brawl earlier that week at the Iroquois Hotel in Moose Jaw and the penalty hours cleaning aircraft in the hangar, and the fifty dollars I owed David Hunter for stripping the second gear from his Oldsmobile. But all this was forgotten when the engine came to life and the Harvard thrust itself against the brake pedals.