Chapter 4 Switzerland
From Dusseldorf I flew to Zurich. At this stage all airlines were new to me and I eagerly read their magazines, full of chatty features such as "Meet your Captain", in which the writer had tried (too hard) to make the aircrews sound safe, solid, experienced, happily-married, well-adjusted and reliable. A parody would read something like this:
One of our most, senior Captains is the ever-popular, Australian born 'Baldy' Walters - a familiar figure to regular travellers on our jet-lines. 'Baldy’ is laughingly reticent regarding his age but gives a clue by revealing that he flew for the R.F.C. in 1915 and for the R.A.A.F. afterwards, where he was known as ‘Wheels up’ Walters through a habit of landing before lowering the undercarriage.
After a crash had put him out of the Air Force, he came to England to get in on civil aviation. Asked about the difference between planes then and now, 'Baldy' gave us his flying philosophy in a few words: 'There's no real difference', he claims. 'The jets are faster and you've got to show the cow who’s in charge!'
Baldy confesses to a liking for his ‘grog’ and has some amusing stories of 'beat-ups' in airport bars all over the world When he lived in Australia, his main sport was kangaroo shooting before he took to glasses. 'Now’, he says in his blunt way, 'I'd have to club the 'roo and it would have to big bastard before I saw it!'
Captain Walters has eight children, all in the custody of their mothers, he hopes to be going on the jet conversion course soon, but because of the great popularity of our ‘Golden Wonder' Jet Service, he is already flying them on a temporary basis."
And always there is a piece about a hostess; so sweet, so winsome, so wholesome, so safe.
Babs Meredith - 'Butterfingers' to her friends (Once, I dropped a baby'!!') - is an attractive, vivacious brunette. She says, she has Spanish blood in her family tree, and thinks this accounts for her flashing dark eyes and hot temper. She is sure she will enjoy the life once she has got her 'air-legs'. 'So embarrassing,' she says, "Why, the other day, I was sick all over a first-class passenger.'"
Fortunately, I was in Switzerland only a couple of days. Even in this short period I had acquired a reputation as a sort of mixture of Norman Wisdom and Jacques Tati. It started walked into, and very nearly through, a glass door in my company’s offices in Zug. The crash of my face against the glass attracted the attention of all the typists in the general office. My glasses slipped askew down my nose, giving me a drunken, rakish appearance. Though half stunned, I managed to continue into the office and sit down at my desk a truly British performance.
Perhaps this had jarred my wits. At any rate, within an hour I had walked into the ladies toilet, which was luckily vacant at that moment under the impression that it was the door leading to the Vice-President's suite. Laughter from the outside and the fact that I was obviously not in the Vice-President's suite, made me aware of my error and I shot the bolt on the door and sat down for a few seconds to summon up the necessary courage to emerge. This I did, walking unhurriedly to my desk and even smiling vaguely at one of the girls who made a noise like an empty soda siphon and buried face in her hands.
Later that afternoon, I had unaccountably managed to smear ballpoint ink over my face and did not discover it until washing prior to leaving for the day. I had mistakenly assumed that the hilarity and difficulty in keeping straight faces, which afflicted the girls when they saw me, related to my earlier exploits.
Zug is a charming little town in the smallest of the Cantons. Many corporations maintain financial offices there, giving it a prosperity and international flavour independent of the tourist trade. My hotel room overlooked the ancient square and three nearby chiming clocks mark the passing of the quarter hours, day and night - but particularly at night, according to my impression. There was also a disagreement between them regarding the exact moment of the quarters, so that the sleepless visitor is assured of plenty of cheerful noise throughout the night.
As I was packing for departure, a fellow guest, an American, interrupted me for a moment with one of the problems created for us by modern technology. The plug on his electric shaver was a moulded-on type, new to me. The flex had frayed and broken away, just where it entered the plug and he was confronted with a service problem but no means of shaving. If the old-fashioned type of plug, made in halves held together by screws, had been fitted he could have carried out the repair in two minutes. He borrowed my battery-electric shaver and over breakfast later, we agreed that progress takes such strange forms that often, but for the advertising, we would not know it for progress at all.