Tues 7 May
I have been trying to identify, from Frater’s book, the hotel where we stayed in Karachi. KLM used the Midway (so-called because it was half way between Amsterdam and Batavia) for their cannon-ball service in land planes. For most of the ‘30s Imperial used land planes on the Indian sectors and they evidently used the Killarney Hotel (or “rest house” <img src="wink.gif" border="0"> and it was probably the Killarney about which Mum was so scathing. Frater says that most people thought that Karachi, the “Gateway” to India before partition, was a pretty dull place. Agreed. Imperial’s next stop Eastbound for land planes was Jodhpur in Rajasthan; in Caledonia we refueled at Lake Jisaman, which I have not been able to locate in my Atlases, and then at another lake near Gwalior, both of which were hot and “uninteresting”. I have to tread carefully because there are still plenty of old Sunderland hands around, but the landing technique in the boats seemed rather different from large jets. It was not a good idea, evidently, to commit oneself by chopping the power before touchdown. Over calm and translucent water (such as Mirabella Bay) judgement of height could be tricky, and to stall the boat on was disastrous. There was usually masses of “runway ahead” so some power would be maintained until touch–down “on the step”, and then the throttles would be eased to idle. The drag, when the boat settled down “off the step”, slowed her quickly. Of course, we had no reversing props. The next stop was Allahabad, where we flew over the fort and the Maharajah’s palace before landing on “a sandy river just outside the town” – presumably the Ganges. We alighted on the Hooghly River , Calcutta at 1700 – nearly 12 hours out of Karachi. The river was filthy and turbulent and the bus ride down town , an eye-opener for an English school boy, was through narrow streets which seemed to double as open sewers, teeming with people living in abject poverty. Diseased and misshapen beggars clamoured for attention. The Great Eastern Hotel, in its heyday, was magnificent and worthy of the “second city of the Empire”. Mum records “a nice room and a lovely dinner”, but I remember an awe-inspiring room and “en-suite” with bearers chasing around after me, and then a fabulous curry dinner, which turned me into an addict for life. It was in the Great Eastern, during the “Indian Mutiny” that the British Community mustered a force of armed vigilantes to defend themselves against the “blood-crazed sepoys”. Mum took us for a short stroll to see the site of the infamous “Black Hole”.
Wed 8 May
We left Calcutta at 0615 and headed out across the Ganges delta to pick up the coast of Arakan. In May the Monsoon begins to build up in the Bay of Bengal and there can be some very nasty cunim around the Arakan Yoma. The turbulence was quite severe, but most of the passengers seem to have become inured. Caledonia was twisting and turning to avoid the worst of the storms. Akyab sometimes had to be missed due to the weather, but we touched down in the harbour by the island at 0930. Mum records that she was able to see her old house from the air, and that she knew the Imperial agent well. Dad had been District Judge at Akyab for several years in the ‘30s, when the airstrip had been a staging post for many of the pioneer flyers. He had helped dig some of them out of the mud and was none too complimentary about some of their planning and preparation. One young lady was navigating from a school atlas and Dad managed to find her some decent maps from somewhere. The final stage into Rangoon was marked by some even more exciting cunim-dodging. I believe we approached Rangoon from the West, across the Irrawaddy delta and then made a circuit of the city to show the passengers the famous golden Shwe Dagon pagoda, before touching down on the brown Rangoon River at midday. The few of us leaving the flight bade our farewells to the remaining passengers (my sister and the Aussie girl had become firm friends) and the steward, who had been unfailingly polite and helpful, and were ferried ashore to the Customs jetty. Dad (whom I had not seen since his home leave in ’37) had been waiting for us for some time, with an anxious eye on the weather. Rangoon was stinking hot and oppressive and remained so for a few days until the rains broke. Before we left the customs house I saw Caledonia take off on her next stage to Bangkok, and I felt a pang as daylight appeared between her keel and the river. She was indeed a graceful craft. <img src="smile.gif" border="0">