Maiden Flight

[from inside dj flap] To most women, the career of air stewardess must seem the most interesting and romantic of all. Pamela Hughes thought so too. She was the youngest and most eager of the embryo stewardesses on Skywide Airlines' Air Hostess Course, enjoying every moment of her training, the excitement of her trips to colourful far-away places, and the crowning dignity of her first transatlantic flight. But even the most glamorous job has its problems, and Pamela was to have her share -- in the form of Roger Carson, the attractive Technical Instructor, who disapproved of women on the airline in general, and, it seemed, of Pamela in particular.

What I love most about the stewardess/air hostess/flight attendant novels of the late 50s-mid-60s is that — stern, handsome technical instructors aside — what they’re really about is the romance of flight. Like the automobile frolics from the turn of the 20th century, they celebrate, and they marvel at, what we as humans are suddenly able to do. And that sense of wonder reaches forward through the long, cold, cynic-making years, until you can’t help feel a glimmer of it, too. Pamela’s first work flight — as supernumerary to the sophisticated, experienced, future-rival Miss Wentworth — sees her approaching G-AKUB -- “ahh, Uncle Baker! Good aircraft. Faster than the others.” -- with “almost a feeling of solemnity” (25). Aboard, with passengers seated, she watches the chocks, trolleys, and steps being pulled away, “the aeroplane was casting off its chrysalis”. Astroliner Uncle Baker of Skywide Airways moves “majestically towards the runway" and, finally, there’s the go-ahead for departure:

The engines’ roar swelled louder. The aircraft seemed to stand there and howl defiance at the whole universe. Then suddenly it moved forward on the crest of the engines’ loudest swell, faster and faster, so heavy and noisy and clumsy that it seemed as though it could never fly. The runway lights flashed by the window, so many of them, and so close together, that Pamela looked way, sure they would soon reach the end of them.

Then there was a lift under her feet. A little up and down movement as though a boat gently heaved on a summer swell. The engine note became sweeter. The great monster had become a bird. (33)

Look at us. Look what we can do.

And, also, what we did. These romances are equally fun for the vicarious experience of air travel in the 1950s. You enter a world where the flight attendants mix bottles for babies (and whip up omelettes) in the galley, pass around baskets of “cotton wool balls” for ears, “barley sugar treats to crunch” (39) during the ascent, (and of course, the cigarettes, “Turkish, Egyptian, and English” with “complimentary box of matches”.) The “ladies’ powder room” has a “stool with dressing table” and various jars and bottles for the complexion, there are 17 people on your international flight, “white clumps of round-topped cumulus” hang below you “like protective barrage balloons”, and the airline presents signed certificates for crossing the Atlantic, a “formidable route” for passengers and crew alike. It's almost unrecognizable from the movin' meat (to borrow a term expression from the MDs) atmosphere of today's economy class. The nostalgia factor is real.

The narrative of Maiden Flight is standard mid-century M&B fare. Pamela, the female MC, is very young and somewhat childlike, requiring admonition and the occasional rescue (wandering around the “native quarters” of Cairo by herself at night). Roger, the male MC, is stern and sexist and secretly quite kind, there’s the glamorous rival and the narrowly-averted in-flight disaster. It’s not bad — it’s just the light, “pleasant” (as advertised), unchallenging escapist read M&B selected for. If you prefer a story really worthy of its atmosphere, choose her fictionalized account of the WWII WAAF experience, Colours of the Night.