country. They whittle away our liberties one by one. When I was a girl you could travel anywhere on the continent except Russia without a passport and you took what you liked in the way of money. Until recently they only asked what money you had, or at the very worst[82] they wanted to see your wallet. If there’s one thing I hate in any human being it is mistrust.”
“The way you speak,” I said jokingly, “I suspect we are lucky that it is not your bags which are being searched.”
I could well imagine my aunt stuffing a dozen five-pound notes into the toe of her bedroom slippers. Having been a bank manager, I am perhaps overscrupulous, though I must confess that I had brought an extra five-pound note folded up in my ticket pocket, but that was something I might genuinely have overlooked.
“Luck doesn’t enter into my calculations,” my aunt said. “Only a fool would trust to luck[83], and there is probably a fool now on the Nice flight who is regretting his folly. Whenever new restrictions are made, I make a very careful study of the arrangements for carrying them out.” She gave a little sigh. “In the case of Heathrow I owe a great deal to Wordsworth. For a time he acted as a loader here. He left when there was some trouble about a gold consignment. Nothing was ever proved against him, but the whole affair had been too impromptu and disgusted him. He told me the story. A very large ingot was abstracted by a loader, and the loss was discovered too soon, before the men went off duty. They knew as a result that they would be searched by the police on leaving, all taxis too, and they had no idea what to do with the thing until Wordsworth suggested rolling it in tar and using it as a doorstop in the customs shed. So there it stayed for months. Every time they brought crates along to the shed, they could see their ingot propping open the door. Wordsworth said he got so maddened by the sight of it that he threw up the job. That was when he became a doorman at the Grenada Palace.”
“What happened to the ingot?”
“I suppose the authorities lost interest when the diamond robberies started. Diamonds are money for jam, Henry. You see, they have special sealed sacks for valuable freight and these sacks are put into ordinary sacks, the idea being that the loaders can’t spot them. The official mind is remarkably innocent. By the time you’ve been loading sacks a week or two, you can feel which sack contains another inside it. Then all you’ve got to do is to slit both coverings open and take pot luck[84]. Like a children’s bran tub at Christmas. Nobody is going to discover the slit until the plane arrives at the other end. Wordsworth knew a man who struck lucky the first time and pulled out a box with fifty gem stones.”
“Surely somebody’s watching?”
“Only the other loaders and they take a share. Of course, occasionally a man has bad luck. Once a friend of Wordsworth’s fished out a fat packet of notes, but they proved to be Pakistani. Worth about a thousand pounds if you happened to live in Karachi, but who was going to change them for him here? The poor fellow used to haunt the tarmac whenever a plane was taking off to Karachi, but he never found a safe customer. Wordsworth said he got quite embittered.”
“I had no idea such things went on at Heathrow.”
“My dear Henry,” Aunt Augusta said, “if you had been a young man I would have advised you to become a loader. A loader’s life is one of adventure with far more chance of a fortune than you ever have in a branch bank. I can imagine nothing better for a young man with ambition except perhaps illicit diamond digging. That is best practised in Sierra Leone, where Wordsworth comes from. The security guards are less sophisticated and less ruthless than in South Africa.”
“Sometimes you shock me, Aunt Augusta,” I said, but the statement had already almost ceased to be true. “I have never had anything stolen from my suitcase and I don’t even lock it.”
“That is probably your safeguard. No one is going to bother about an unlocked suitcase. Wordsworth knew a loader who had keys to every kind of suitcase. There are not many varieties, though he was baffled once by a Russian one.”
The loud-speaker announced our flight and we were told to proceed at once to Gate 14 for immediate embarkation.
“For someone who doesn’t like airports,” I said, “you seem to know a great deal about Heathrow.”
“I’ve always been interested in human nature,” Aunt Augusta said. “Especially the more imaginative sides of it.”
She ordered another two gins and tonics immediately we arrived on the plane. “There goes ten shillings towards the first-class fare,” she said. “A friend of mine calculated once that on a long flight to Tahiti – it took in those days more than sixty-four hours – he recuperated nearly twenty pounds, but of course he was a hard drinker.”
Again I had the impression that I was turning the pages in an American magazine in search of a contribution which I had temporarily lost. “I still don’t understand,” I said, “about the luggage-trailer and the suitcase. Why were you so anxious that the trailer should disappear?”
“I have an impression,” my aunt said, “that you are really a little shocked by trivial illegalities. When you reach my age you will be more tolerant. Years ago Paris was regarded as the vice centre of the world, as Buenos Aires was before that, but Madame de Gaulle[85] altered things there. Rome, Milan, Venice and Naples survived a decade longer, but then the only cities left were Macao and Havana. Macao has been cleaned up by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Havana by Fidel Castro. For the moment Heathrow is the Havana of the West. It won’t last very long, of course, but one must admit that at the present time London Airport has a glamour which certainly puts Britain first. Have you got a little vodka for the caviar?” she asked the hostess who brought our trays. “I prefer it to champagne.”
“But, Aunt Augusta, you have still not told me about the trailer.”
“It’s very simple,” my aunt said. “If the luggage is to be loaded direct on to the aircraft, the trailer is detached outside the Queen Elizabeth building – there are always traffic hold-ups at this point and nothing is noticed by the passengers. If when the bus arrives at the BEA or Air France entrance you find the trailer is still attached, this means that the luggage is going to be sent to the customs. Personally I have a rooted objection to unknown hands, which have fiddled about in all kinds of strange luggage, some not overclean, fiddling about in mine.”
“What do you do then?”
“I reclaim my bags, saying that after all I don’t require them on the voyage and wish to leave them in the cloakroom. Or I cancel my flight and try again another day.” She finished her smoked salmon and went on to the caviar. “There is no such convenient system as that at Dover, or I would prefer to go by boat.”
“Aunt Augusta,” I said, “what are you carrying in your suit-cases?”
“Only one is a little dangerous,” she said, “the red. I always use the red for that purpose. Red for danger,” she added with a smile.
“But what have you got in the red one?”
“A trifle,” Aunt Augusta said, “something to help us in our travels. I can’t really endure any longer these absurd travel allowances. Allowances! For grown people! When I was a child I received a shilling a week pocket money. If you consider the value of the pound today, that is rather more than what we are allowed to travel with annually. You haven’t eaten your portion of foie gras[86].”
“It doesn’t
at the very worst – (
Only a fool would trust to luck – (
take pot luck – (
Madame de Gaulle – мадам де Голль, жена Шарля Андре Жозефа де Голля, французского генерала, государственного деятеля, президента Франции (1959–1970) много занималась благотворительностью
