”’Good evening, my name is Emilie Hinchliffe.’ More applause. ‘I’ve come here tonight to tell you my story,’ she gestured to the relevant subject of a”’Good evening, my name is Emilie Hinchliffe.’ More applause. ‘I’ve come here tonight to tell you my story,’ she gestured to the relevant subject of artwork as she spoke. ‘It’s about an heiress, an aeroplane, a ghost and the mightiest airship the world has ever seen. I know you’ve read the story of what happened to me, and to my husband and to many of his friends just recently. Tonight, I’m going to tell you the whole story.”
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The Endeavor. The Stinson Detroiter plane used by Captain Hinchliffe and Elise Mackay. Picture provided by David Dennington
On May 20th, 1927, Charles Lindbergh left Roosevelt Field in New York in his custom made, soon to be famous plane The Spirit of St. Louis. He made the crossing in 33.5 hours and became the first man to complete a solo, nonstop flight from New York to a European landmass. He became the most famous man in the world. He also earned $25,000 in prize money.
The race was on to see who could make the trip from East to West.
Captain Raymond Hinchliffe might have been an unlikely candidate to make the trip, but he was one of the most celebrated pilots of his era. During the Great War, he was shot down. He lost an eye in the resulting crash, and one leg would never be right again, but he was undaunted in his abilities to fly as well as any man. After the war, it wasn’t easy for him to find work as a commercial pilot, and frankly, that type of work was unfulfilling. He felt that he had one more great endeavor in him, and no one had beat him to it yet. He wanted to make that flight from East to West across the Atlantic, and the 10,000 pounds in prize money would give him and his wife Millie some security for the future.
Elsie Mackay was a rich girl, not content to just be a socialite. She was an actress, which would be more than enough attention for most other young ladies, but for her, she too wanted to define herself by a bold action. There were few pilots in the 1920s, but there were really only a handful of female pilots. Some might say she was recklessly trying to impress her father, Lord Inchcape. Being the first woman to cross the Atlantic was a prize well worth trying for, despite the danger. For a woman as progressive as Elsie, keeping pace with the boys was not only fun and exciting, but also essential.
Millie Hinchliffe was the wife of Captain Hinchliffe, a concert level pianist, and an accomplished painter. She had a knack for portrait painting; sometimes she expressed so well the inner life of her subject that it could be an uncomfortable revelation for the portrait sitter. Winston Churchill noticed her particular ability to capture the auras of her subjects. As this novel progressed, her otherworldly abilities became more acute, and she began to see visions that scared her into action to attempt to warn people of impending disaster. Her most terrifying vision of all regarded the mightiest airship ever built, the Cardington R101.
To know something horrifying that no one else knows is frustrating and lonely.
Meanwhile, the race was on for Hinchliffe and Mackay to get their Stinson Detroiter plane modified for the trip across the Atlantic. They knew a German team was nearly ready to attempt the crossing. There were no second place medals. There could only be one first. The tension was revving up with each new chapter.
One of the things I most enjoy about Dennington’s books is his development of female characters. They are not merely furniture or cardboard cutouts. They are women who are multi-talented and not at all compelled to be confined to a traditional role. They want to experience life on the same scale that any man would want. We certainly should not to forget these women of the air who dared to challenge this new frontier. Lauren Notaro, author of Crossing the Horizon, released this short, but poignant, video commemorating those women. Please do give it a quick look. 1:38 video of Crossing the Horizon
This book intersects with Dennington’s other book The Airshipmen, which I have also read and reviewed. Some characters in one book show up in the other. In his first book, he tells the tale of the airship Cardington R101. A special pleasure for me is that he brings the writer and engineer Nevil Shute to life and reminds me how much I enjoy his writing. I now have planes plans to read several of Shute’s books over the coming months.
Let’s return briefly to Millie so you can have some idea of the visions this poor woman was experiencing. The trick was to even interpret what she was seeing with any level of certainty.
”The train jerked forward. It traveled slowly away, she from him, he from her. He became drowned in black smoke. It was then, in the blackness, she saw his aura--usually vibrant multicolors--now predominantly purple and mauve. As she moved away, the black smoke, too, turned into swirling clouds of purple. She didn’t take her eyes from him until he was gone. She had an unbearable sinking feeling as he disappeared. What did it mean? She sank into her seat. As she’d watched him, she’d felt his spirit slipping away, as though this iron monster was pulling them apart, clacking wheels measuring the distance yard by yard. She felt terribly afraid.”
What does it mean?
David Dennington kindly agreed to answer a few questions.
Jeffrey D. Keeten: “The problem, of course, with the art of clairvoyance is that the demand for answers from so many people who lost someone in the Great War created opportunities for charlatans.”
David Dennington: “This was true after WW1 and the R101 disaster. I reckon probably only ten percent were genuine. Money was scarce, too, and it was a good way to pick up a few pounds/dollars.”
Jeffrey D. Keeten: “I've read before about the belief held by Arthur Conan Doyle which you explored in your novel, but I'm curious to know if you believe in clairvoyants?”
David Dennington: “Conan Doyle was a lovely guy. A bit naïve and was taken for a ride at times, I think. This is why I wanted to sit in circle and develop my own psychic ability. Then I could say, ‘I saw it myself’.”
JDK: “Can we speak with the dead? Have you attended a legitimate seance?”
DD: “Yes, sometimes, and yes, I have. I can only speak for myself. Growing up as a child, I always felt as though something was there. At 10, I distinctly remember being in my little schoolroom and looking round at all the girls. I liked girls. I thought what it might be like to be married. I was told that my wife’s name would begin with the letter ‘J.’ For many years, I went to school with a good friend who said his grandmother was a ‘medium’ and would I like to meet her. I always declined—not courageous enough. But when my father died at 48, when I was 20, he asked me again, and I said ‘yes.’ She was a kindly old soul with smiling eyes who chuckled all the time. Mrs. East is based on her and a composite of my own Nan who sat beside the picture on the wall of her own son ‘Lawrie,’ torpedoed by a Uboat in WW2. His death overshadowed the family all my life. So, the old lady took me to the Spiritualist church where I ‘sat in circle’ for a year or so; it is eerily similar to Mrs East in The Ghost. My own psychic development did occur. I do have some interesting tales to tell of my experiences and some over the years since. In circle, I did encounter mediums who were ‘powerful.’ You could actually feel it coming from their bodies, like electricity (ah, now I’m thinking of Madam Harandah!) There were others who I think were just ‘wannabees’ with no power at all. I attended ‘transfigurations,’ which was interesting, and was invited to ‘materializations,’ which I declined, feeling it was too open to fraud and the ‘darkside.’ But Millie Hinchliffe did go to all those things. I am thinking of writing a memoir of all my experiences in the psychic realm.”
“The thing about being given something, like a sign, is usually very small. But to you personally, when it happens, it’s huge. But when told to someone else, it might sound daft, or that you’ve got a screw loose. I’ll give you a couple of instances. The first one was when I’d returned from Bermuda with my family to London and was pretty depressed after being in such an exotic place, leading the life of Riley. I planned to take a job in Florida, which my friend Mike (we’d been friends from our Bahama days) had arranged for me. But I thought I would go up to London to Belgrave Square to the Spiritualist Alliance and get a reading (yes, the same place Millie went to with Mrs. East). I went there, and the medium, a man, was wary of me, thinking I was a journalist (I had a pencil and a notebook). He said I would go and live in Africa, to which I thought, ‘I will never set foot in Africa.’ As I was going out the door, he said, ‘You will write a book, a very big book, and it will be rather wonderful!’ Then he pointed at me and said, ‘You must pay your taxes!’ I’ve thought about that for years. If you look at the map, South Florida and Africa look similar. I was leaving for South Florida the following week. I wonder if he’d been shown a map and got it wrong. I wrote a ‘big book’ thirty years later. And I later got into massive trouble over my taxes, which hit me like a Mack truck—all unintentional on my part.”
“The second thing happened this year. And could be pure coincidence. My best friend Mike of fifty years (who found me the job in Florida) died of brain cancer in November last year. We are all like family. I was in Bermuda in May and during the night got up and came back to my room in the dark. I sat on the bed and fondly thought of my buddy Mike and imagined him saying to me, ‘I love you man; you are my brother, you know.’ Then I felt something weird in my left ear and put my hand to it. Something was stuck to my ear. I pulled it off and put the light on. I was a heart—a child’s sticky icon left on the bed by my grandchildren. There were others, I discovered, of the alphabet. What struck me was that it was over my ear, and it was the valentine symbol of love. It could have been a letter from the alphabet. Now, to you it probably all sounds silly, but I just wonder. I keep an open mind but am always skeptical. Mike, like Christopher Hitchens, was an atheist, and we had some fights about it. He was almost bitter about the subject. We had a set to about it in Spain, and on leaving, he hugged me goodbye. Somehow I knew that would be the last time I’d see him, though we tried three times to get to Florida to see him but were prevented by hurricanes, etc. In passing, I have to tell you that I love Hitchens and agree with most of what he says (and love to watch him on Youtube). I think to believe in God, the afterlife, and all that, you have to have imagination or, should I say, an imaginative type of mind. Hitchens was a Marxist, but he thought for himself; he did not move with the herd, and that made him fascinating to the media (and of course, he was light years ahead of all of them). Now like Mike, I wonder if he’s changed his views now he’s ‘over there’! Sorry, I digress.”
JDK: “Your two novels intersect. Have you any plans to build on this world with your next novel? There are so many interesting characters associated with this period of history. I could really see you being able to do four or five novels without leaving the confines of your original research too far.”
DD:”I love this idea and often think of doing it. Some people have said they would have liked to know more about the airship crewmen and that I didn’t tell enough about their lives—as if it wasn’t long enough already! Then there’s Martha and Ramsay MacDonald, of course.”
JDK:”You have an affinity for bringing strong female characters, real or imaginary, to life.”
DD: “Thank you.”
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Elsie Mackay.
JDK: “Most memorably for me was Countess Marthe Bibesco from The Airshipmen. In this novel, Millie Hinchliffe and Elsie Mackay are so vividly portrayed one might say they still haunt me.”
DD: “Thank you. No author could ask for more than that.”
JDK “For that reason I would highly recommend your books to men and women without reservations. Male readers and female readers will find people they can identify with and, in some cases, maybe someone from the opposite sex. Was this a conscious part of your writing to achieve this balance?”
DD: “Actually, I don’t consciously do that. I listen. And I write down what they say. It’s like taking dictation. I think I can feel and think what a woman feels and thinks. Maybe it was from being around my mother as an only child with my Dad at work at nights, printing the Daily Mirror. Or, maybe, and this is just a big maybe, it’s from past lives, if you believe in any of that!”
JDK: “You must have a few female beta readers who must say from time to time, ‘Oh David, she wouldn't say that or do that?”
DD: “That has not happened yet. I have had a few Nevil Shute fans say I write like him. Sometimes I think he’s been looking over my shoulder. I kick myself now that I didn’t bring him into The Ghost. He could have been in the pub and met Hinch and Millie. He could have come down and had his portrait painted, and he could have advised her on writing her own book.”
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A posed photo of Elsie Mackay. I love the shoes!
JDK: “What I really like about your female characters is the fact that they are multi-talented women. They aren't just good at one thing. That is certainly why I find them so fascinating.”
DD: “Thank you. I love women. All the women in my life have been wonderful: My Nan, my mother Lena, Aunt Vi (Lawrie’s sister--still alive and more like my sister), my cousin Dawn, my daughter (who is a super intelligent Tufts graduate, my editor, and the best read person I know), and Jennifer, my wife with a 'J.'”
“Thank you again, Jeffrey. As a writer, I must say you are someone who really 'gets it.'”
JDK: My special thanks to David Dennington for graciously agreeing to answer my questions and for providing me with several photos that I used in this review.
”The crowd wailed as the two ends of the airship sagged downwards, the whole thing splitting open like a massive dinosaur egg. Suddenly a huge explosi”The crowd wailed as the two ends of the airship sagged downwards, the whole thing splitting open like a massive dinosaur egg. Suddenly a huge explosion knocked the crowd to the ground. Flames and black smoke burst from the opening, and equipment, gas tanks, ballast tanks and men on fire tumbled from the envelope into the sky.
I could say this story starts on August 23rd, 1921, when the British airship R38 exploded, but really there are far reaching histories for the people populating this novel. Most are still dealing with some horrific events from WW1. Part of the solace of the sacrifice is that it is the war to end all wars. Unfortunately, that does not prove to be the case. For the American Lou Remington, surviving the war is only the beginning of the battle. During the war he was blown up along with many other men and buried under tons of dirt. It was a miracle that he was found and pulled from the ground. It leaves him with a serious case of claustrophobia and a healthy dose of survivor’s guilt.
Why is he spared?
His surviving against the odds earns him medals and acclaim, but for others, like Charlotte Hamilton, the war produces similar horrors that are locked away in the dark recesses of their minds and kept private. They do not get, nor want, accolades. Lou is given the opportunity to be a member of the American contingent of airshipmen to help pilot the R38 airship. It is the British answer to the German Zeppelin program.
The list of airship disasters stretches from 1897 to the present day. There is a large push, starting in the 1920s, by many of the leading governments to master the air with these beautiful gas filled marvels that are proving so delicate.
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The Hindenburg explosion on May 6th, 1937 is probably the most well known of the airship disasters. This event happened after the scope of this story, but the visual is too stunning not to share.
I guess you could say that Lou is either the luckiest man on the planet or one of the most unlucky. If this were a Greek tale from Homer, we would have to assume that some god is manipulating events to keep him alive for his/her own amusement. When the R38 collapses in flames, he is one of a handful of survivors. As he convaleses, he falls in love with his nurse, the aforementioned Charlotte, who has one of those beautiful faces that can launch a thousand ships.
Lou certainly benefits from the Florence Nightingale Effect. It is as if the universe is balancing the sheets between disaster and a chance at epic happiness. Even if he were a cat he’d be running short of lives.
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A gorgeous 1911 portrait of Princess Marthe Bibesco painted by Giovanni Boldini.
As the plot develops, David Dennington weaves real life personalities into the plot. One of the most interesting for me is the Romanian Socialite Princess Marthe Bibesco, who becomes central to the politics surrounding the airship program by being friendly with the Secretary of Air Kit Thomson and Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. She is universally admired for her beauty, as well as her intelligence. Every day that her schedule allows, she writes from morning till noon and left behind a vast hoard of journals and novels for future writers to investigate. Her glamour is certainly tinged with tragedy. Nevil Shute Norway is likewise one of my favorite people to show up in this novel. He is working as an airship engineer by day and a writer by night. Shute wrote one of my favorite apocalyptic books called On the Beach, which was also made into an excellent movie starring Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire. Dennington brings Shute to life, stutter and all.
Lou tries to pump gas, service cars, and lead a normal life, but he has led anything but a normal life, and going from living a rather large life to a mundane life is a difficult transition. When the Air Service approaches him, hoping he will join back up for airship duty, he can’t resist.
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An example of the wonderful sketches that are throughout the book.
One of the successful airship flights that Lou is part of the flight crew takes him to Canada, which allows him the chance to hop a train and go see his family in Virginia. He is returning to a different America. The Bonus Army Conflict is in full swing in Washington. Hooverville is becoming a barnacle on the neck of D.C. The tension is high as people from all walks of life in America are experiencing unemployment and poverty after the devastating 1929 crash. Lou’s own family has been deeply affected by the crash. Just as disturbing is the fact that the KKK has grown more powerful. Unfortunately, when times are bad is when the vulnerable are made more defenseless, and people start to look for reasons to place blame on people for the wrong reasons.
”The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Lou has picked up some skills over the years on how to defend himself, and no racist morons dressed in bedsheets are going to scare him into becoming a spectator to other people’s misery.
This is all, of course, leading up to the famous flight of airship Cardington R101. Will politics play too large a role? Will Charlotte be able to handle the very real stress of being married to an airman? Will the stalker Jessup triumph? Will Princess Bibesco say yes to Thomson’s proposal of marriage? The whole future of the airship program in Great Britain rests on the flight of the Cardington R101. Dennington brings it all to life with his meticulous research. The beautiful sketches scattered throughout the book add to the enjoyment of the story. He deftly handles a blend of fascinating real people with the characters he has created to allow us to experience likely authentic conversations that could have happened at the critical stages of airship history. This is a story written on an epic scale and a fine tribute to those who risked everything to try and make airship flying safe.
”Being alone in an aeroplane for even a short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your ow”Being alone in an aeroplane for even a short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind---such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.”
Beryl Markham was the first person to fly solo over the Atlantic from England to North America. She was also the first woman to fly solo East to West. She made it to the coast of Nova Scotia by the skin of her teeth. Ice had clogged the air intake to her last fuel tank, greatly reducing the amount of fuel getting to the carburetor. The Vega Gull’s engine kept dying. She kept nursing it back to life until finally the coast appears. She crash landed without killing herself and put herself in the record books.
She grew up in Kenya and always wanted to do what the boys were doing. She had a native boy who was a close friend. This association allowed her to learn the ways of the tribe. She has to be one of the few white girls from that period of time or any period of time who was allowed to go on hunts with the men.
”So there are many Africas. There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa--and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else’s, but likely to be haughtily disagreed with by all those who believe in some other Africa.”
There are a lot of factors in how people experience a place. As travellers, it might rain the whole time you are somewhere, or you might have one rude experience with a waiter (Paris and I should have knocked the bastard on his doughy fat ass), or you might be experiencing the final days of a doomed love affair. On the other hand, the weather might be sunny and breezy, or you might have an amazing hour with a knowledgeable art curator, or you might find new love. All of those factors can certainly color our perceptions of a place. When you live anywhere for an extended period of time, like Beryl did in Kenya, you have a better chance of experiencing a true Kenya.
But then there is a difference growing up an English privileged rose who has horses and all that her heart desires compared to say a young black Kenyan woman who might have a completely different experience growing up in Africa. Beryl made one generalization about a local tribe that smacked of the imperial colonial view of a local population.
"But physically the Kikuyu are the least impressive of all. It may be because they are primarily agriculturists and generations of looking to the earth for the livelihood have dulled what fire there might once have been in their eyes and what will to excel might have been in their hearts. They have lost inspiration for beauty. They are a hardworking people from the viewpoint of Empire, a docile and therefore a useful people. Their character is constant, even strong, but it is lustreless. "
I have a friend who happens to be a Kenyan from the Kikuyu tribe. I shared this quote with her, and she had a few opinions about the description
”The wench!! (that was my favorite) yet another ignorant white-privileged bourgeois colonial story which paints a pretty picture of the land but knows next to jack shit about the locals. Only what they saw in passing. I would gladly tell the dead colonial to stick to horses and planes. But really? We lost our spark because of the earth? We killed for that land. We shed blood and tears for it. Most of it white... And we continue to struggle for it. To buy our own to raise our children on. And what did she mean lost our spark? We don't have diamond eyes. Or wear contacts. Or have eyes that shine like the ocean blue eyes of a Victorian damsel who wouldn’t know dust if it drowned them... See? And my thoughts are a lot less polite.”Mwanamali Mari
Yes, I know I’m a pot stirrer. I probably missed my calling as a journalist. Of course, all of us know that, when we make a generalized statement about a culture or a people, we leave ourselves susceptible to criticism. The point is during this period of time, in the pre-world war two era especially, books are rife with irritatingly simplistic, condescending statements about native population. This was the only one I caught. Mwanamali, reading this book, might catch even more than the one that I did, but in her defense, Beryl did love many native Kenyans that she met and worked with over the decades of her life.
Her father experienced some financial difficulties due to a lack of rain...something, being the son of a farmer, that I’m very familiar with. Beryl, as a teenager, became a horse trainer and did well. It was a boy’s club, of course, so it took longer than it should for her to get the business she deserved, but then Beryl was not unfamiliar with being at a disadvantage from the moment she came out of the womb...a girl. There was this great moment in the book where a filly called Wise Child, that Beryl had resurrected from the dead, races against the top stallion in the racing world at the time. She did such a great job setting the scene and then describing the race that I felt like I was as invested in the outcome of that race as Beryl. I had tears in my eyes.
Markham is a lyrical writer whether she is describing horses, planes, landscape or even the process of writing. ”Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it. I sit in a labyrinth of solitude jabbing at its bulwarks with the point of a pen--jabbing, jabbing.”
I did have a moment of real doubt when Beryl took a job flying big game hunters into the wilds of Kenya to shoot elephants. The money was really good, but there is something soulless about shooting elephants. She even said, ”It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of the preposterous things that men do.” You may not pull the trigger, but if you are helping these hunters find their prey via an airplane, you are as responsible for the death of the elephant as the men who fire the bullet. She had some wonderful, inspiring descriptions of how smart the elephants were and how many times they would fool the hunters. Those stories confirmed me in my belief that elephants are intelligent sacred animals and should be left in peace. So why do some people feel so driven to hunt these beautiful animals or put themselves in other death defying situations? One of the Kenyan guides remarked to Markham: ”White men pay for danger--we poor cannot afford it.”
It kind of makes it all sound fake. Men trying to prove themselves in manufactured situations.
I did have some issues with Beryl, but I also found her to be a groundbreaker and certainly a woman whom other women can look up to. She took on men toe to toe and proved she could compete with them whether it be on the horse track, in the air, or in the bedroom. She was friends with Karen Blixen, better known by her pen name of Isak Dinesen. She was such good friends with her that she even shared a man with her by the name of Denys Finch Hatton, an adventurer and hunter. The interesting thing about this book is that her love life has been carefully kept off screen. Markham was notorious for her marriages and her affairs. She was attractive to men, and she was attracted to men. Her love life fits with the way she lived her whole life as free as any man and more so than most.
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