It wasn’t just for me that work in Assembly was a nightmare—men were getting injured on a fairly regular basis. Nearly ever hour, someone would be off to the nurse with some part of their body wrapped in bloody towels, but those men soon returned to work, proudly showing off their bandages.  Others were less lucky and I feared I would soon be amongst them.
    It was not only the appalling conditions in Assembly that sent me home every evening with my clothes and hair thick with tiny flakes of rust and my skin the general colour of an Apache. It was also such an unhappy place. No one wanted to be friendly, neither to me nor each other, and who could have blamed them for the violence of their words when their environment was so dangerous and disgusting.
    Still the ceaseless torrents of abuse flowed over me.
“Not that way, you fucking fool!”
“Get a fucking grip on it, will yer? I’ll be better off trying to carry it by myself.”
“Is there anything you can’t fuck up, dickhead!”
“If you can’t do it, get out of the fucking way!”
Somehow, the abuse didn’t change. Doing it right was as bad as doing it wrong.
    At smoke-o the crew sat around a table in a filthy dark room, but there was no chair for me and I sat on a bench behind.  “So we’re puttin’ kids on these days, hey,” one of the welders chided at  me. “Reckon you musta just got off the tit last week, hey?”
“Leave the boy alone, Jack,” Bert Hanley said.

Ernest K. Gann’s first book, Island in the Sky told in strong detail of a plane crash in Arctic Canada and the battle of the freezing survivors to hang on while the complexities of the rescue mission are resolved. With only half a page to go, it looked like they weren’t going to make it and then...
    Gann mostly wrote adventure yarns, usually about aeroplanes, and I encountered his work several times before I knew who he was. In the mid fifties, there was The High and the Mighty—the quintessential airliner-in-trouble movie, done larger and more powerfully than ever before with a damaged John Wayne and an inexperienced Robert Stack at the controls and a cabin full of big name stars. Somehow it managed to make fascinating what many others could only lift to mildly boring—the feelings of the crew and passengers of a crippled airliner. And, interestingly, the best film of its type arose from the best book of the genre.  It worked mostly because the pilot is such a flawed but likeable character—he has a habit of whistling happy tunes in the face of adversity, and John Wayne played that character so well. The scene where he limps the aisle explaining the situation to the passengers personally, and the final shot as he strolls away down the long corridor, whistling the immortal theme, are amongst the most memorable stuff the big man ever did.
    A couple of years later, there was Soldier of Fortune, a pretty good adventure yarn set in modern Hong Kong with Clark Gable, Susan Haywood, Michael Rennie as the unflappable Inspector Merryweather, and Gene Barry in one of his few worthwhile roles. It was a classy, first rate adventure, despite its `Americanization’ of Hong Kong and some serious nonsense about the Red Chinese menace. I loved both of these films, but it took me some time to discover they were based on books by the same man. I read them and loved them all over again.
    Gann continued with a factual book about his old aviation buddies, tracing their lives before, during and after he knew them, if they survived, in Fate is the Hunter. By the end of the book, they are all dead except Gann, mostly in air crashes. A very sobering book by a very lonely man who had too many good friends that liked to fly aeroplanes.