Two or three days before, I had been invited
to lunch at an R.N.A.S. station, and was made to feel very much at home
by the nicest lot of quietly interesting young men it had ever been my
good fortune to meet. Then I was taken into the sheds. I walked
respectfully round and round a lot of machines of all kinds, and the more
I looked at them the more I felt somehow that for all the effect they
produced on me they might have been so many land-vehicles of an eccentric
design. So I said to Commander O., who very kindly was conducting me:
"This is all very fine, but to realise what one is looking at, one must
have been up."
He said at once: "I'll give you a flight to-morrow if you like."
I postulated that it should be none of those "ten minutes in the air"
affairs. I wanted a real business flight. Commander O. assured me that
I would get "awfully bored," but I declared that I was willing to take
that risk. "Very well," he said. "Eleven o'clock to-morrow. Don't be
late."
I am sorry to say I was about two minutes late, which was enough,
however, for Commander O. to greet me with a shout from a great distance:
"Oh! You are coming, then!"
"Of course I am coming," I yelled indignantly.
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