Extracts from a Diary
by Amelia Bourne-Phipps
-edited by Simon Barber-
26 April, 1937 to 27 April,
1937
Monday 26th April, 1937 Fine weather still, and as usual our Tutors made the best of it. We were straight out after breakfast to the airfield, and every machine Songmark possesses (or can lay claim to) was in the air by nine. It makes quite a little squadron, with the four original Tiger Moths now joined by the Sea Osprey, the Junkers 86 and even my little Flying Flea. As before, it was tricky flying in formation when the top speed of the Flea was so close to the stalling speed of the Junkers, even with its flaps half down. Still I think we managed a creditable enough show. Li Han flew my flea – she is the lightest of us and every pound saved helps the performance. Although the professionally built kit flies much better than any of my home-built Fleas back in Barsetshire, it is hardly a point-defence interceptor unless the threat is runaway balloons drifting in the wind. Not that the Flea could afford to carry the weight of any weapons to deal with them, even so. An excellent day’s flying, with some challenging experiences and not just padding our logbooks. By lunchtime we had each logged another hour and a half solo, and more as crew in the Sea Osprey or the Junkers. Rather than have us spend the time trotting to Songmark and back for luncheon, our Tutors let us lunch at Mahanish’s – there was no need to forbid us ordering any alcohol or Nootnops Blue. The new chef there certainly keeps up the traditions, and the chilli can really make a fur walk out panting on a frosty day! Some of the first-years have worried about such dishes damaging one’s snout, but we have talked to Spontoon Guides who use their scenting skill a lot (and would know if it was ever blunted) and they eat some very fiery local dishes without any ill effects. At least, not to that end – though last term we heard various alarmed cries from the first-year dorms early one morning and saw Mrs. Oelabe summoned urgently. If they lost points for a false alarm I hardly know, but at least they have gained experience of a sort. It was a fine break – until Irma Bundt happened to look on the back pages of the Spontoon Mirror, where they have classified advertisements and announcements. In the centre of the page is about twenty shell’s worth of space, with just one line of bold text – “DEVINSKI – THY DAMNATION SLUMBERETH NOT.” There was no hint what it means or who it was from. Rather disturbing, I thought. Not surprisingly, when we showed it to our Tutor she already knew. Maria and Beryl were tasked with enquiring at the Mirror offices – not that they expected to find much. Indeed, an hour later they came back with news that it had been phoned in from Hawaii – not, Beryl thinks, even by the person who wanted it placed themselves but what she calls a “cut-out”, which seems to be the same thing as Molly calls a stooge. The Mirror likes to court controversy as well as revenue, and there are some very strange things in the personal columns sometimes including blocks of code that furs like Susan de Ruiz seize on with delight as other folk would try the crossword. Beryl has mused that it would be a good joke and not too dear to phone in completely meaningless blocks of random letters, just knowing various highly paid professionals are scratching their head-fur out trying to decrypt them. Then, her idea of robust practical jokes includes land mines. I should think this is connected with Father Dominicus. My dorm has not been much involved with the rivalry with the Ave Argentum, but Jasbir’s and Missy K’s have been tasked with some rather odd jobs this year, vanishing away for odd days and nights. Naturally they do not talk about them, any more than I tell folk just what Mr. Sapohatan asks of us. Anyway, it could mean things are hotting up – I know Father Dominicus had wanted to “save” one of our first-years from Alpha Rote’s dorm and take on her education himself. Presumably he thought converting Alpha herself would need too much of a miracle to hope for – I have seen those ancient books Alpha brought with her in the first term, and they could hardly be more toxic in one respect as if they were dripping with mustard gas in a more mundane one. Back into the air after lunch, for something rather different. First there was a trip to Pangai, one of the nearer Kanim Islands, where we landed the Tiger Moths and I put the Sea Osprey down in the lagoon. There were crew standing by with what looked like cut-down telegraph poles, which they fitted to that release gear on the undercarriage we were told was for carrying drop fuel tanks when available. So in half an hour, all our Tiger Moths were basically carrying dummy torpedoes. Not something that is listed in the Songmark Prospectus – and out in Pangai, there were no non-Spontoonie eyes to see. Interestingly, not everyone came on this outing though there would have been room in the Sea Osprey. Madeleine X and Beryl were given a separate long-distance navigation exercise in the Junkers 86, along with the other 2 in Madeleine’s dorm * as crew. They went off in quite the opposite direction. There was time and fuel for us to get four “drops” each into the Lagoon, with the Sea Osprey taxiing around to retrieve the floating logs and pull them back to shore. A seaplane without a proper water rudder makes a rather clumsy boat, and it is a fine test of throttle control to steer it around collecting logs bobbing in the waves while staying clear of the reefs and shallows. Running into a ten-foot log at any sort of speed would be a bad move too, and anyone doing so would lose marks as well as get a lot more unwanted practice pulling dents out of the dural hull when we got back to Eastern Island. Quite a day of mysteries! Naturally Maria noticed who was not invited to this part of our “education”, and was not too surprised. As for mysteries, the more poetically inclined Songmark students sometimes think of a career involving finding fame and fortune travelling the world solving crimes and clearing up mysteries – in Beryl’s case her idea is to see the world and acquire much of its portable wealth doing quite the opposite. * Editor’s note – this is the nearest Amelia comes to mentioning the “missing” two members of her year. Adding up the numbers in each dorm always comes up two short. Unless a second account of her class comes to light, we are definitely still left guessing. Beryl is certainly said to be the only new arrival since day one, so they have been with her all the time. Very strange. Tuesday 27th April, 1937 Pouring with rain, alas. We all stoked up with breakfast grimly aware there would probably be something strenuous to do outdoors, and indeed our Tutors did not disappoint us. For the first time this term we jogged out to the cliff edge North of LONO hill, our paws sinking deep into the mud on the way there. We have certainly explored every square foot of these rocks up, down and sideways, in rain and shine, day and night, and in everything from bathing costumes to full packs loaded with water bags. Today we were climbing without the protection of ropes. It concentrates the mind wonderfully. The rock was absolutely flowing with water and slick with green moss and algae; not what a girl wants as fur conditioner. This time last year it would have been Adele Beasley in whose paw a supposedly solid chunk of cliff face snapped off after surviving hundreds of years of weathering – today it was Helen. Fortunately she was only ten feet up, and managed to jump clear of the rock face and make a decent rolling landing on the steep grass below without injury. It is getting challenging to find obviously new routes on this cliff, but we keep trying. Sophie D’Artagnan managed to string together some of our older routes into a sixty foot traverse that varies from two to twenty feet up the main wall, and she has named it “Last Waltz” in the notebooks*. Quite possibly we will be leaving this little cliff to the junior years now, making it our last waltz indeed with these stones. It was just our bad luck that we were not using ropes today, as now three dorms of us (mine, Jasbir’s and Prudence’s) are wearing the modified shorts we built with an inconspicuous sewn-in harness of two inch cargo strapping. While taking a fall of a few feet in such a harness is hardly fun, it is far less painful than the traditional three turns of rope around one’s waist. Possibly that was a reason Miss Wildford had us leave the rope behind today. She spotted that trick with the badly vulcanised “sticky” plimsolls a couple of terms ago, and forbad us to wear them on Songmark climbs. Everyone who has a pair kept theirs though, and in the next year they might be worn in some interesting situations around the world. Back to Songmark for some more classes indoors, which made a nice change – it was an interesting exercise in what Maria called “ruthless geography”. That is, looking at the profitable resources of the world and who owns them – similarly, who is short of them and has the ability and/or ambition to grab rather than buy. We knew that Vostok is turning out about a quarter of the world’s magnesium and a tenth of its aluminium (I keep having to correct Molly’s and Helen’s attempts at spelling the metal) but we had not realised just how hard-up Japan is for metals. No wonder all the scrap metal merchants we see here are Japanese. Similarly, unusual metals such as tungsten are going to be increasingly important as engineering wants more exotic alloys – and nations that get refused commercial trade in them will find other ways to lay their paws on them. Maria has interesting news from her homeland – her Uncle is actually putting some of her ideas into practice. In Cyrenacia, Eritrea and the rest of Italian East Africa (he has declared the word “Ethiopia” to be as extinct as the nation of Carthage and not to be used any more) there are now wide-ranging teams of young geologists based on four airships surveying twenty times as much ground per diem as they ever could on their paws and managing to live to tell the tale. When they see a promising outcrop they spin up the autogiros carried on docking booms under the airship, land for half an hour’s geology then back into the clouds with their samples to analyse before the un-pacified locals turn up with spears and skinning knives. Having the airship in unfriendly terrain is very handy; one can hover over a likely site out of range of Native musket-fire and survey it at leisure before heading back to all the comforts of a secure base camp every night as well as supplying covering fire and spotting ambushes. She says they have already found chromium deposits in the West of Italian Eastern Africa – that is, just East of the Sudanese frontier. While the Natives already know about ordinary metals such as gold, lead and copper, chromium is the sort of “modern” resource they would not have recognised – or be able to do much with if they did. Back to work on our textbooks – much to Helen’s despair. She says that after she finishes Songmark, the monthly edition of “Extra-Spicy Pacific Tails” is the only book she intends to read. * These notebooks seem to have survived somewhere to resurface decades later as part of the official “Guide to rock, Spontoons and Nimitz Sea edition”. Last Waltz is recognisably labelled a classic, or more exactly: “Last Waltz: Grade ES (Extremely Scary). Start from same greasy runnel as “Crack of Doom”, break left in layback along questionable scoops to outcrop below main mantle of “Head Case” and find sparse claw-holds along almost featureless slabs. A tentative head-jamming hold might be possible to the left by a heroic dyno move, otherwise friction holds on greasy scoops are the only protection. Crux is a succession of dyno moves across the loose flute to the overhang on Dragon Rock next to “Eton Wall Game”, which only furs with extreme flexibility will be able to complete – involving 3 tricky double paw changes and a back twist that has drummed up much trade for local osteopaths.” next |