Old times

Today it is plain, flat and featureless, but grey skies often have character.

And if not for grey skies, we would appreciate those fine days less.

Slowly, the hills are turning green and already this morning I heard a familiar summer sound, one I am not fond of – leaf blowers. Three men were cleaning up beneath the hedges around the Walgreen’s parking lot. I would have thought one man could have done the job in an hour, with only a third of the racket, but what do I know?

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Thinking of that dream yesterday reminded me of the days when I travelled space-available.

AKA: Subload – Subject to load.

The benefit of discounted travel was the main reason I took a job with an airline. My family were spread over three continents and I enjoyed seeing different places.

My aunt Kay had once worked for BOAC and I remembered that she had come home once to England when I was a little girl, using a staff ticket. Otherwise, I’m not sure I would have realised it was a possibility.

As a child, I’d travelled with BOAC and my impression of them was that they were inclined to be snooty. Unlike my brother who twice managed to get upgraded to first class when travelling as an unaccompanied minor, I always ended up in a middle seat with unappealing seat-mates. In retrospect, I can see that the check-in staff were not paying attention, since unaccompanied minors should not be seated next to men as I inevitably was, but perhaps that had not yet become policy. I don’t remember the crew ever being terriby concerned with my welfare! Not that I would have welcomed being led by the hand or supervised.

However, by the time I was old enough to seek employment, I had apparently got beyond my prejudice and submitted an application to my national carrier. With no indication that a job might be forthcoming, I also applied to Pan American. There I was deemed too heavy for uniform, but was offered an office job in one of the hangars.

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Really, I was not fat or even chubby, but I was very weight conscious and this made me quite despondent, however, desperate for work, I accepted. For the next two weeks I ran teletype tapes through a machine which processed the information off which Pan Am crew got paid. It was not exciting. But then I got a call from BOAC, was interviewed and offered a job in uniform, so I was rescued, though there were times later when I would have been happy to be back in that hangar away from the public!

You had to work a year before your travel benefits were awarded. Then you could travel as much as you liked at a discount of 90%. Most of the other airlines offered free tickets, but being from another carrier meant you had the lowest priority. The American domestic carriers usually offered first class if it was available. So you had to decide what to go for. We always knew how heavily booked our own flights were, but the other carriers didn’t offer such information.

It had been my intention, when I got my travel benefits, to fly to Barbados as I had not seen my parents for 6 years, but father had rejoined UNESCO and they’d gone off to Madagascar. So instead I took a trip with a colleague and having not travelled for such a long time, I wanted to go as far away as possible.

We got free tickets from United Airlines who took us in first class to San Francisco and there caught a BOAC flight that routed to Hong Kong via Honolulu where they scheduled a night stop. Next morning we carried on, stopping for fuel at Wake Island, arriving in Hong Kong in darkness. I was thrilled to be back in Asia, yet speeding along in the back of a taxi, watching masses of multi-coloured neon lights flash past, it felt different and rather overwhelming. Perhaps it was the effect of severe jet-lag.

In daylight everything settled into place and we enjoyed a few days sightseeing and shopping. My companion was a dedicated shopper and Hong Kong was the place!

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Then we flew on to Bangkok where I’d booked us into the lovely hotel my mother and I had always stayed in, only to discover that it was no longer lovely. In fact it was anything but. It was sadly run down and seedy, so we made up a hasty excuse and departed forthwith to a more respectable abode.

After a couple more days of shopping, we caught a Pan Am flight to Sydney where we had time to visit the Taronga Zoo and not much else before we getting the BOAC flight to Fiji, which was where I think we really wanted to go. From Bangkok there were no direct flights, so we’d had to go all the way to Australia.

A better plan would have been to take the BOAC flight from JFK to Fiji and visit Hong Kong and Bangkok another time, especially since we only had two weeks leave, but we were young and I was very keen to go back to Asia.

Before the internet, finding out about an unknown destination was no so easy. Somehow we managed to book a hotel near Nadi which is where the airport was. Suva, the capital, is a drive of nearly 4 hours around the island.

What we had in mind was a tropical beach. We found our way to one, but we did not stay long as it was chilly. If not quite awful, the hotel was also not a place you wanted to extend your stay. But it was fine, we took ourselves poolside to get a drink. A “Bula cocktai”l”, I believe.

We sat down and a waiter came over to ask what we would like, so we gave him our order and soon he returned. To sit down between us. He was not a waiter at all and before long his hand was on my knee. Oops.

Suddenly, we remembered that we had a very early start the next day and we must be off…

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It was a harebrained, poorly thought out and badly planned holiday, but I’d satisfied the need to travel as far as I could in the amount of time available. We were lucky that none of the flights were fully booked, so there were no worries about getting stranded. That initiation would come later.

Arriving back at JFK, early in the morning, we taxied into the new terminal that we had only recently moved into and perceived that something was amiss. Indeed.

The move into the new dedicated BOAC terminal had been delayed by construction problems and when the time eventually came, much of the work was still incomplete, so we were using only 3 of the 6 gates. (Air Canada shared the building and had 3 gates at the opposite end.)

One morning, a day or two before we returned from our ill-conceived journey, the gate BOAC had mostly been using burst into flame. Luckily, no-one was injured, though they very easily could have been. The fire, which had started in two locations simultaneously, was deemed suspicious, but no-one was ever charged. The rumour was that it had something to do with either the construction company or the construction workers union, but that was conjecture.

Having our working gate and all its furniture destroyed offered a challenge, but before the move we’d been in the International Arrivals Building, itself under re-construction and existing there had also been problematic. On any given day, you could be leading a ‘plane load of passengers into the terminal, only to find the access had been sealed. Often you picked your way through debris. Bad weather made it all an exceptional special treat.

We were supposed to offer the passengers disposable raincoats as they disembarked, but by the time they’d got the thing undone, they were already soaked and the flimsy garment got caught in the wind and blew into someone else’s face, so they were not a great success.

Winters were seriously cold in those days, so if you were meeting arrivals, you dressed warmly. The problem was that when you got indoors, there was nowhere to put your coat, so you patrolled the immigration and customs halls coming quickly to a boil.

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What I remember most about those early days is sore feet. We had to wear court shoes with a two inch heel, but finding such a thing in plain navy blue that were also comfortable was seemingly impossible . We were on our feet and running around all day. My heels and toes blistered and I had bunions even then.

My chief concern, however, was what to do with my hair. It had to be off the collar, which meant I had to pin it up into a bun of some sort. Easy enough with the right kind of hair, but for me a daily struggle. When we changed into the Clive Evans uniform in 1970, I was much relieved as I could pile my unruly hair up into the little round hat which I kept on all day.

We moved into the new terminal at the end of June 1970. A few days later, our cabin crew went on strike. There is nothing like having all your flights cancelled when you have just moved into new offices where half the equipment is not hooked up and you can’t find anything. It was utter Bedlam.

Eventually the remaining gates got completed but then something else had to be adjusted, other things needed fixing or painting and in no time modifications were called for. Over the 30 years I worked in that building, a part of it was always under construction.

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British Airways moved out of that terminal at the end of 2022 and now operates out of the American Airlines terminal. I thought terminal 7 was to be destroyed but it is still there and reportedly quite busy. My old travel buddy Tim, who also worked in that building, took a flight from there recently and said how strange it felt.

Like going to visit someone in a house that long ago was home.

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