The Glass Ship

By Martin Simons

Peter Markham is a schoolteacher who has been abandoned by his female partner because she, rightly, considers him dull.

He tries to change himself, seeking adventure by joining a course at a gliding club. Disappointed, he leaves the airfield in anger when a wild teenage girl forces him to stop, begging for help in retrieving her older stepsister, Julia, who has landed her glider in a hayfield a hundred kilometres away.

He allows himself to be manipulated by Mitch, the younger girl, calling her a cunning little minx. Reluctantly, he does as she asks.

This is the beginning of a series of life-changing experiences for him. Instructed by the older sister, he learns to fly, finds himself in love with the sport and with young Mitch, while confronting serious problems with Julia.

Tragedy intervenes, but happier prospects emerge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Feb 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514444481

Martin Simons

Martin Simons was born in Derbyshire, England, in 1930. After national service in the RAF, he trained as a teacher at Borough Road and Goldsmiths Colleges. While teaching full time, in the evenings, he studied geography with ancillary geology at Birkbeck College, London University. He graduated with first class honours in 1959 and subsequently became a university lecturer in London and Adelaide. He completed masters degrees in education and in philosophy. He has had lifelong interests in education, philosophy, aeronautics, especially the sport of gliding, and has written extensively about these and other subjects. In 1954, he married Jean, and they had two daughters, Patricia and Margaret. The family moved to Adelaide in 1968. After fifty happy years, Jean died of pancreatic cancer in 2005. Since then, he has lived alone in suburban Melbourne but remains fully engaged with his writing and other activities. In recent years, while continuing to fly and write nonfiction, he has written three very unusual novels, Jenny Rat, Cities at Sea, and The Glass Ship.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

He handed in his overcoat and umbrella to the cloakroom attendant at the entrance to the courthouse. There was a security check. This surprised him at first but a momentary reflection convinced him of its necessity. He emptied his pockets for inspection. His mobile phone was switched off. In the hall with its enormously high ceiling, black and white mosaic tiled floor and ceremonial staircase people were standing and sitting around, some in anxious clusters conferring with gowned lawyers. There was a family group looking totally bewildered, some solitary and untidy individuals sprawling on benches, apparently bored and apathetic. Occasional gowned and wigged figures walked through or stopped to speak with someone.

The woman at the reception desk, smiling pleasantly, checked his name on her list; Peter Markham; and directed him to where he was required and expected. There was no escape. He walked along a tiled, echoing corridor, down a few steps at the end into a lobby where two bespectacled women at a desk checked his identity again and waved him through into the court. ‘Take a seat at this end,’ one of them said. ‘The coroner will be ready in a few minutes.’

The courtroom was not as large as he had expected. It was rectangular with a high ceiling, the layout not unlike a large school classroom or college lecture theatre, familiar to him as a teacher but more expensively and elaborately furnished. One wall, on the right as he entered, was all high windows. Under the windows were several tables and chairs facing inwards across the room, one occupied by a young woman with an Ipad apparently engaged with a puzzle or game on her screen. Peter guessed she was a news reporter waiting for the action to start. An enclosure on that side, with two tiers of six seats, must be the jury box. It was empty. He thought no jury would be needed for this case. Immediately inside the door he had come through were aligned three rows of eight large chairs with green leatherette padding, facing down the room to the other end where there was a broad, raised platform. Steps led up to this higher level where, centrally, there was a large table and a chair almost like a throne. On the oak panelling above and behind the throne was the royal coat of arms.

On the left wall there was a roll-down screen with a projector hanging from the ceiling. Were pictures to be shown? What use could they possibly be? There was also a white wallboard. A janitor in a brown smock coat was there busy checking felt tipped pens, making sure they had not dried out, and laying out a clean duster and a bottle of something. Who, if anyone, would be writing on that board? There would be nothing to write, how could there be? The man departed through a door at the far end of the room. In the well of the court were more tables and chairs, several of them occupied.

Above and behind him there was a public gallery.

On the left side of the raised platform, fenced by a waist-high partition, was the witness box. That’s where he would have to stand when he was called. His heart sank.

Some of the nearby green seats were occupied. He chose one at the end in the rear rank, by himself. Several men in the front row turned briefly as he entered. He recognised the club president, who nodded to him. The Competition Director was there too. Peter knew him by sight but they had never met formally. An older man between these two might be a lawyer. There too was Paul Sharples, Chair of the Association’s Technical Committee, engineer, author of textbooks and official manuals; he had interviewed Peter weeks before. When they met then both were in shabby, well-worn overalls. After their talk Sharples had advised, ‘The inquest should be only a matter of form. You have nothing to gain by hiring your own lawyer. The Association and the club will be represented when the time comes. We know what happened, there’s nothing anyone needs to hide, or can hide. Our legal eagles will advise you if you ask. Say what you saw, what you said and did. Answer the questions. If they ask for your opinion, give it fairly but if you aren’t sure, say so. Leave any technical stuff to me if you can. My turn will come later.’

Today they were both dressed smartly and formally. Seeing now that he had arrived Sharples raised a hand, stood and made his way round to him.

‘Good morning, Peter.’ They shook hands. Sharples whispered.

‘This might take a bit longer than I thought. The family aren’t happy, they think they can sue someone. They will ask some rude questions. Don’t volunteer any guesses. Everything said here goes on the record and might be used afterwards.’ Peter nodded. ‘That youngster at the end there is Günther Kleinweg’, said Sharples.

‘Who? What’s he here for?’ asked Peter.

‘The designer. He’s here to defend his Akaflieg. Don’t you recognise him?’ Peter shook his head. Paul left him as several more people moved into the second row.

First of them was a tall, handsome middle-aged woman in legal costume who glanced at him as she entered, nodding slightly, seeming to recognise him although he had never seen her before. She sat immediately in front of him, extracting a folder or file of some kind from her briefcase. A lawyer, obviously, representing who?

A big man, florid-faced, obese, with abundant greying hair moved ponderously to sit on her right. The resemblance was inescapable. This must be the girls’ father. Half turning, the man looked over his shoulder directly at Peter, glared for a few seconds, then turned back to whisper to a slender woman who came to sit with him. She glanced briefly and indifferently at Peter. He had given no thought to the family till Dave mentioned them just now. To say there was a family was stretching the meaning of the word. He knew well, very well indeed, there was a sister. Half-sister. She was not in the courtroom yet; perhaps she would not come at all. Any evidence she might possibly have given would surely be inadmissible. Had someone advised her she need not attend? She had a lively and intelligent mind, would have made her own decision. She was sensitive, this formal hearing would be too much for her. It was probably going to be too much for him too but he had no option. He sank deeper into depression.

Another man, coming in on the right, could be another relative, a cousin, perhaps. He did not turn to stare. More strangers moved in to occupy chairs near him in the back row. One was in police uniform, a sergeant. He supposed they must all have come as witnesses. Yet they had not seen, could not have seen what he had seen. The memory still made him flinch internally. He wished himself far away.

A door opened behind the central throne and a gowned, bewigged male figure entered, descended the steps and placed the folder he was carrying on a central desk. He remained standing and said;

‘Please stand for Her Majesty’s Coroner.’ Everyone obediently did so.

The Coroner came quietly onto the platform, closing the door behind him, stood briefly in front of the throne to look round the court. He was not a specially imposing figure, middle aged, slightly overweight, balding with no wig or cloak, spectacles and a weary expression on a pale face. He wore a dark suit and a deep blue tie with white shirt. After a very brief pause and a minimal bow, he said,

‘Please be seated,’ and took his own place. All sat.

The clerk began to speak.

‘This court is now in…..’ but broke off immediately, looking up and back as a group of latecomers came noisily into the public gallery high in the rear wall. Everyone turned to see where the disturbance came from. Mostly they were teenaged girls but a few boys were among them, conversing and even giggling as they shuffled in. They quietened quickly, embarrassed and shushing as they realised they had interrupted the solemn proceedings. The coroner looked at them hard, frowning, and raised an eyebrow to the clerk who turned and whispered up to him. He nodded.

‘This court is now in session,’ said the clerk.

CHAPTER 1

His Easter holiday week at Castelfield had been a failure, a waste of money and time. This Sunday, the last day of the course, had been totally frustrating. He flung his bag angrily into the boot of the car where it had stood all week on the gravel patch that was the club’s excuse for a car park. He plumped into the driver’s seat, clipped the belt, slammed the door and was accelerating away when a figure appeared directly in front, running towards him like a mad thing, arms waving, yelling, forcing him to stamp on the brake. The car skidded alarmingly on the loose gravel. Whoever it was thumped the bonnet with both hands and fell back out of sight. He scrambled out in great alarm but the wild creature was already standing. He saw now it was a young girl with long, untidy hair, dressed in shapeless green overalls. Who was this? What was she playing at?

‘Are you hurt?’ Evidently not seriously; she was standing and dusting herself down. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he said, ‘Trying to get yourself killed? What do you want?

‘You’re Peter Markham.’

‘Yes. Who are you? How do you know my name?’

‘Of course I know your fucking name. I’ve written it down often enough, haven’t I? Not that you would bloody notice me.’

He had been dimly aware that some girl had been sitting every day in the old red and white bus used as an on-field office, recording times and making notes. He supposed she was a club employee. It hadn’t occurred to him during the week to ask who she was.

‘Oh, you are the log keeper.’ He hadn’t cared then and he didn’t want to know now. He was relieved that this wild creature had not been injured, though he supposed there might be some mild bruising.

‘I need help. The jockey wheel slipped and I can’t get the fucking tow bar on. I need a push and I’ve to lift it onto the bloody ball. You mustn’t drive off and leave me. You can’t.’

‘What the devil are you talking about?’

‘The trailer, the fucking trailer. The bugger’s too bloody heavy for me, it’s stuck in a rut and I need a push. Come on!’ She cursed like the rougher kids he spoke with every day of the week, yet she had a plummy accent. He supposed she was from some snooty, expensive private girls’ boarding school. Girls in gangs could be as rough as they liked in speech but their teachers would rarely hear them, or would pretend not to hear.

‘Trailer? What trailer?’

‘It’s over there. I can’t move it on my bloody own.’ She pointed at the huts behind the clubhouse. He almost got back into the car to drive off in anger. His immediate concern was to get home before dark; if he left now there might even be time to make a late phone call. At least he could try again, though he feared there would be no reply.

This crazy girl, a child, came close and grabbed his arm desperately, pulling him away. She was distressed, close to tears. He could not ignore her.

‘Come on. I can’t move the fucking thing. Come on, come on, I need you. It won’t take long. Help me.’

He allowed, grudgingly, that he could spare a few minutes and allowed himself to be dragged away.

Parked side by side in a row behind the huts were fifteen or so very narrow two-wheeled trailers of various shapes and lengths. They were lined up with their towbars resting on a long, horizontal steel rail about half a metre above the ground. As they approached he saw one of the trailers had its nose down in the dirt. He supposed this mischievous teenager had been playing about with it and it had slipped off the supporting rail. She shouldn’t have touched it.

The jockey wheel she had spoken off, he recognised, was a wheel free to swivel like a castor on a piece of furniture but much bigger. It was made of solid, hard rubber on a bracket at the end of a vertical steel tube mounted on the towbar. Seeing the other trailers, he understood that it was there to act as a third wheel but the tube had not been clamped properly and had allowed this trailer to slump, dropping its front end to the ground.

There was a steel ball welded to the rail. The towbar was obviously supposed to engage with this. He would only have to lift the front end, roll the trailer forward a little and put it back to where it should be, in line with the others. Then he would get away. There was a handle, which he grasped and lifted. The load was not tremendously heavy and he began to heave the trailer towards the rail.

‘No, no, stupid. What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ she ranted furiously. ‘I don’t want it on there again. I’ve only just got the bugger off, for fuck’s sake.’ He was already irritated and this was infuriating. He supposed she had all the contemptuous attitudes that he supposed went with the swanky voice, thinking herself superior to lower caste clods who spoke as he did.

As he used to speak.

He was inclined to swear in return and walk away, but recognised again that this girl was almost weeping. She was very young. He forced himself to calm down. A child could not choose the school she went to, nor the attitudes she learned there. The proud accent wasn’t her own fault, any more than his former ugly habits of speech had been his. She was alone, asking for help. He knew what that was like and suddenly felt sorry for her. She was like him, but not like him.

They were from different worlds.

His own voice had shocked him when he first heard himself on a tape recorder. He had sounded so like his despised father. The college authorities had made it clear that his north-country accent was not very important but a teacher must always, above all, speak clearly. He had struggled for a whole term of elocution classes to eliminate glottal stops, sound consonants clearly, tighten slurred syllables and shorten his elongated, drawled vowels. The classroom voice he had learned was habitual now. It tended to alienate him from his family and friends. Yet it wasn’t only voices and accents that made him feel like a foreigner, a furriner, in his own home. He had become alienated years ago.

‘What exactly do you want me to do?’ he asked, politely and gently.

She dragged him to the rear end of the trailer, which was ten or eleven metres long. Now he saw that a few yards away there stood a large four-wheel drive vehicle, a Range Rover. It went with the posh voice, except that as they came nearer he saw it looked old and scruffy, in need of a wash, and scratched. The young girl was scruffy too, in mud-stained overalls with that totally wild hair of nondescript colour.

‘Look, it has to go on there!’ she pointed forcefully at the rear of the van. He stared, recognising now that he had been rather obtuse. The vehicle had a ball at the back like the one on the rail. The trailer was to be towed by the Rover. Never having had a car big enough to tow anything he had not given such matters any attention till now.

‘Are you going to take the trailer somewhere?’

This provoked another outburst.

‘Of course I bloody am. What do you think? I’ve got to go and get Julia. Didn’t you see her set off? She went and now she’s down not even half way along the second leg. She was trying for a diamond. She thought she was going to get all the bloody way round a three hundred triangle. I knew it wasn’t on. I have to go and get her and the K6. It’s about a hundred K. I should have left an hour ago but I couldn’t find anyone to help.’

He didn’t understand much of this.

‘Second leg? Diamond? Three hundred triangle? A hundred K 6?’

‘Our sailplane,’ she said, as if he were an imbecile. ‘The Ka-6E. Julia’s down a hundred kilometres away, about sixty miles, in a fucking hayfield. She’s hopping mad. I have to retrieve her with the trailer. She’ll eat me alive if I don’t get moving.’

She pulled him back to the front end of the thing.

‘Help me, please,’ she said, changing her manner abruptly, appealing. ‘What I have to do is push it out, turn it to line up with the van, drop it onto that ball, plug in the lights and get moving.’

‘Can’t you get someone else? I want to get home and I doubt if the two of us could manage it anyway. It needs more.’

‘There isn’t anyone else. They’ve all gone. It’s Sunday evening. Two of us can shift it. We must. I have to go.’

He hesitated.

‘Oh please, please, do help me,’ she said, desperately. ‘Just to get it onto the van. Please. I’m sorry I was rude.’

‘Well, all right, if it doesn’t take too long.’

He lifted the tow bar while she restored the jockey wheel to its proper position and clamped it. She said it needed to be tighter, so he screwed the clamp hard. They then managed to push the trailer on its three wheels out of the line and swung it round. Pulling and lifting together they got the towbar up into place on the van. Under instruction he released the clamp, wriggled the jockey wheel up out of the way and clamped it firmly.

‘Thanks. It’s an old-fashioned wooden trailer but it still works,’ she said. She needed no help to make the rest of the connections. He watched as she latched the trailer nose onto the ball, attached safety chains and inserted a multi-pin plug into a socket on the car.

‘Help me check the lights,’ she commanded, forcefully. ‘I’ll switch on. You stay there at the back and shout to tell me what you see. I’ll switch on the running lights first, then the brake light, and the turn indicators, left and right in order.’

‘Please?’ she added, gently, as an afterthought, looking at him sorrowfully. He did what she asked.

All the lights were working.

‘Thanks. I’ll get going, then,’ she said, making to get into the van’s driving seat.

‘Hold on. You aren’t trying to drive this monster, are you?’

‘The seat slides forward. I can reach everything. I’ve driven it before, lots of times.’

‘On the airfield, I suppose. Not on public roads.’

‘Of course on the roads.’

‘Don’t you have to have a special licence to tow a trailer?’

‘You don’t need a licence for glider trailers. They go by weight and they aren’t very heavy.’

‘Well, I take your word for that but you need a driving licence and you aren’t old enough.’ No response.

‘Do you have a driving licence?’

‘Fuck that. You don’t need to know.’

‘You must not take this on the road. It’ll be dark soon. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow when there’s someone experienced to go with you.’

‘There won’t be anyone here tomorrow. The club isn’t open mid-week, now your bloody course is finished. I’ll have to go by myself. I can’t leave Julia where she is. She’ll have a fit. I mean it. She’ll make my life hell.’

‘That’s crazy. You mustn’t even try. You will be in serious trouble if the police stop you, much worse if there’s an accident.’

‘I’ll be in worse trouble if I don’t go and get Julia. She’s stuck in the middle of nowhere and she’s livid. She said I must find a club member to help. They’ve all gone home except you. I can drive it,’ she said.

‘I can’t stand here and watch you break the law. That would get me into trouble too.’

‘Look the other way.’ She moved again towards the driving seat.

‘No.’ He made a quick grab and took the keys out of the ignition. She stared at him, at the keys in his hand, at the big vehicle. There was a long silence.

‘You’re a club member,’ she said. ‘You