Part 7 (1/2)

But nothing about the talks was auspicious. Two months before a Vice-Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party had publicly announced that his country intended to make Macao, Taiwan-and Hong Kong-into 'special administrative regions' of the People's Republic, and that the various residents ought to prepare themselves for life under Chinese sovereignty. When the talks began the 'malignant influence' of Saturn was in the air, and in fact had just moved into the transit of Venus, creating what Mr Gormick said was a 'sour' atmosphere, and a time when 'some chickens came home to roost'. And then, when the talks had finished, Mrs Thatcher tripped over on the steps leading down from the Great Hall of the People, and fell on to her hands and knees (prompting the irreverent observation by some of the colony's Cantonese papers that she had decided to perform the kowtow before the image of Chairman Mao). To Britons, the accident seemed of no consequence-President Ford had appeared to fall over almost every week, and President Reagan was not totally steady either. But to the Chinese, and to the stargazers, it was more than simple chance.

There was less than total surprise, then-though there was great dismay-when Mrs Thatcher proceeded to make a diplomatic blunder. She arrived in Hong Kong to tell the citizenry something of the talks she had had in the Chinese capital. She was in a tough mood-possibly she was still flushed by the great military victory in another colony, the Falkland Islands-when she made two declarations: the treaties that had given Britain dominion over these few square miles of China were in her view 'valid in international law', and China's honour would be impugned if it thought otherwise since 'if a country will not stand by one treaty, it will not stand by another'. Britain, she said, 'keeps her treaties'. Moreover, Britain had a responsibility to the people of Hong Kong; and she was proud of what had been achieved by Hong Kong under British administration.

Peking was outraged. As David Bonavia, The Times The Times man in China, was to write: 'Seldom in British colonial history was so much damage done to the interests of so many people in such a short s.p.a.ce of time by a single person.' The Hong Kong dollar slumped, and the stock market-and its index, the regionally notorious Hang Seng-went berserk. People began to wonder if the People's Liberation Army would march in there and then, and end what Hsinhua, the New China News Agency, was to call 'British Imperialism's plunder of Chinese territory'. man in China, was to write: 'Seldom in British colonial history was so much damage done to the interests of so many people in such a short s.p.a.ce of time by a single person.' The Hong Kong dollar slumped, and the stock market-and its index, the regionally notorious Hang Seng-went berserk. People began to wonder if the People's Liberation Army would march in there and then, and end what Hsinhua, the New China News Agency, was to call 'British Imperialism's plunder of Chinese territory'.

In the event it was the professional, often maligned diplomats who saved the Prime Minister's reputation. For the next two years a team of Foreign Office men, all speakers of putonghua putonghua (Mandarin) including a romantic scholar-athlete figure of the old Lawrence school, a man named David Wilson who had climbed in some of China's highest mountains, shuttled back and forth between Whitehall, Upper Albert Road, and the Fis.h.i.+ng Platform Guest House in the centre of Peking. Their mission was formidable: they had to accept China's firm belief that the three treaties ceding Hong Kong and the New Territories were 'unequal'-signed when the Chinese were in a position of temporary weakness, and were not balanced by the offer of a (Mandarin) including a romantic scholar-athlete figure of the old Lawrence school, a man named David Wilson who had climbed in some of China's highest mountains, shuttled back and forth between Whitehall, Upper Albert Road, and the Fis.h.i.+ng Platform Guest House in the centre of Peking. Their mission was formidable: they had to accept China's firm belief that the three treaties ceding Hong Kong and the New Territories were 'unequal'-signed when the Chinese were in a position of temporary weakness, and were not balanced by the offer of a quid pro quo quid pro quo from Britain; they had to accept that the end of the lease on the New Territories meant, essentially, an end to British rule in all Hong Kong (notwithstanding the terms of the Treaty of Nanking, which gave Hong Kong Island to Britain 'in perpetuity'); and they had to construct a system for Hong Kong that would discharge Britain's responsibilities to the five million people who lived there. Most, after all, had fled from Communist China; they had to be given a firm a.s.surance, internationally respected and underwritten, that their freedoms and their remarkable ways of life would be preserved, at least for some generations. from Britain; they had to accept that the end of the lease on the New Territories meant, essentially, an end to British rule in all Hong Kong (notwithstanding the terms of the Treaty of Nanking, which gave Hong Kong Island to Britain 'in perpetuity'); and they had to construct a system for Hong Kong that would discharge Britain's responsibilities to the five million people who lived there. Most, after all, had fled from Communist China; they had to be given a firm a.s.surance, internationally respected and underwritten, that their freedoms and their remarkable ways of life would be preserved, at least for some generations.

The result was a doc.u.ment signed in Peking shortly before Christmas 1984, by Mrs Thatcher. Hong Kong would, indeed, become a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic. There would be an elected legislature (something the colony had not enjoyed under British rule) and perhaps an elected Governor. The legal system would remain precisely as it is. All the freedoms commonly accepted by Hong Kongers-the rights to free speech, a free press, freedom of a.s.sociation and religion and choice of employment-would be guaranteed. Capitalism would remain the economic dogma of the region, provided that was what the local people wanted. The Hong Kong dollar would remain in circulation, and would be convertible. All land leases would be honoured. The citizenry would be able to carry British pa.s.sports (though of the less-than-entirely-worthwhile kind-they would not enable their holders to settle in Britain, and would to all intents and purposes be regarded by British immigration officers as alien travel doc.u.ments) and would enjoy some degree of British consular protection, long after Peking took control of the territory.

All these provisions would be preserved until at least 30th June 2047. A Joint Liaison Group, made up of officials from both London and Peking, would supervise the arrangements for the transition; the group would begin work in 1985, and would cease to exist in the year 2000, once Peking was firmly established as ruler once again.

The doc.u.ment was welcomed as a diplomatic triumph. Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary, a man with a reputation for weakness (being attacked by Sir Geoffrey in the House of Commons was like 'being savaged by a dead sheep', a member of the Labour Opposition Denis Healey once said), was the hero of the hour. At least, he was in London. The people of Hong Kong were told their objections would be noted, if they had any (and a team was set up to note them, and the Whitehall mandarin Sir Patrick Nairne, now an Oxford college princ.i.p.al and head of the Italic Handwriting Society, was sent to monitor the monitors), but that the agreement was not about to be changed. A few did object. Some, who had good cause to appreciate the mercurial nature of the Chinese leaders.h.i.+p, said they were deeply sceptical-how, they asked, could the British, in all good faith, negotiate with the heirs to the Cultural Revolution, the pract.i.tioners of dogmatic madness? How could anyone be trusted? Others were angry about their own status-why had the Falkland Islanders and the Gibraltarians been admitted to the cosy club of full British nationality, and the Cantonese of Hong Kong specifically excluded, and rendered into some national half-caste status, neither properly British, nor properly Chinese, nor even properly of an ent.i.ty called Hong Kong?

A few leader writers in the British newspapers agreed with them, and so did a clutch of Members of Parliament, and some in the Upper House, too. Sir Patrick Nairne, with the utmost courtesy and care, took note of all the objections, agreed that they had been considered most fairly by the monitoring team, and wrote a report for Parliament. A Bill was presented, a vote was taken, an Act was pa.s.sed, the Treaty of Nanking and the Convention of Peking 1860 were each effectively rescinded, and Hong Kong began its inexorable progress out of the British Empire, and into the fathomless mysteries of Special Communist Administration.

The rest of the Empire, and a gaggle of Commonwealth brother-nations, smelled fortune in the air. People would never stay in Hong Kong, they reasoned; companies would bail out, would place their funds in countries that had a guaranteed future (guaranteed non-Communist, that is), send their personnel to more stable outposts under Imperial control or influence. And so, like vultures (or like lifeboat crews, depending on the viewpoint) they flew in to Kai Tak-the Caymanian bankers, the tax-shelter aficionados from Grand Turk, officials offering pa.s.sports from Fiji or citizens.h.i.+p in Canada or resident status in Bermuda and the Bahamas. There were uncountable billions of dollars in Hong Kong that could well be looking for new homes: everyone seemed, reasonably enough, to want to help find them.

In December 1938, W. H. Auden wrote of Hong Kong: The leading characters are wise and wittySubstantial men of birth and educationWith wide experience of administrationThey know the manners of a modern cityOnly the servants enter unexpectedTheir silence has a fresh dramatic useHere in the East the bankers have erectedA worthy temple to the Comic Muse The servants, and the bankers. Always the servants triumph in the end. They are on the verge of doing so now, though the Europeans-the bankers, the dealers, the merchants, the taipans-seem to do so for the moment.

It was not so long ago that the taipans, the great men of the Oriental Empire, really did rule Hong Kong. Their names-Jardine, Swire, Hutchison, Gilman, Dodwell, Marden, Kadoorie-really did cause the colony to tremble and obey. Power did once rest with the Jockey Club, Jardine's, the HongKong and Shanghai Bank, and the Governor-in that order. Hong Kong Land, China Light and Power, the Hong Kong Club, the South China Morning Post South China Morning Post-these were the pillars of established order, and woe betide any who dared forget.

But behind all these grand panjandrums of the Western Empire there was always-though not always heard, or recognised-the dull, thunderous murmur of the Eastern, mightier Empire of the Chinese. This may have been a British enclave, run by Sherwood Foresters and Grenadiers, flown over by the Royal Air Force, sailed around by the Royal Navy (though only in twenty-five-year-old Ton cla.s.s minesweepers today), and policed by officers from Glasgow and Bristol and West Hartlepool; this may have long been run under the stern authority of the Union flag, all blanco, bra.s.s and tropical whites, goose-feathers and the Anthem and the Queen's birthday party; this may have been the base for a hundred thousand temporary merchants with their gin-and-tonics, their cricket matches, their yachts and their bored wives; but this was also, irrevocably, unmistakably and magnificently, no other place than China.

Hong Kong was never separate from China. It succeeded because the vision and investment of the immigrant round-eyes was able to marry with the energies, the ac.u.men and ambition of the refugee Chinese. It was not another Gibraltar, able to hold itself aloof from its population; nor was it a St Helena or a Caribbean island, where a small elite kept the native peoples in subjection, and wondered why there was no progress, and little hope. In Hong Kong the British were past-masters at ordering and directing the irrepressible energies of the mighty crush of Chinese humanity, until the point was reached where the stream became too strong, burst over its banks, and carried the British along in its exuberant fury.

And so today the rulers of Hong Kong-the new rulers-are the Chinese. The drivers of the 600 Rolls-Royces registered in the colony are, invariably, wealthy men from Canton or Shanghai. (There are only fourteen registered rickshaws, also driven by Chinese, but for tourists coming off the Star Ferry.) The big names, the new taipans, are the Run Run Shaws and the Y. K. Paos and the Woo Hon Fais-hard-working, shrewd, ruthless, merchant venturers. And in the background, the Triads-the Chinese version of the Mafia, controlling and manipulating and directing the seamier side of the colony, with all its curious needs and desires. It was a supreme irony, a policeman said to me one evening over a drink in a Wanchai bar, that the British gained Hong Kong as the result of a war that stemmed from British attempts to force opium on the Chinese market; the Triads were now the princ.i.p.al target of the Royal Hong Kong police for trafficking in derivatives of the very same substance, and trying to s.h.i.+p it, and sell it, back to the British.

A few days after the excitements of the signing ceremonies, and once the colony appeared to have accustomed herself to the harsh fact that the British were no longer going to rule and the Han Chinese would be taking over in the Year of the Rat, 5,000 days hence-once all was settled, and the arguments were stilled, I took a morning ferry ride to Lantau Island, on the western perimeter of the colony.

I went with a friend, a beautiful young Chinese girl. We sat together on the prow of the ferry, the early sun warming our backs, and watched the wall of great skysc.r.a.pers slip past, and the junks dip through the waves, and the great ocean freighters flying their flags from Panama and Liberia, Greece and India. This was indeed the engine of Eastern commerce, a key to the lock of the world! Sir John Fisher had been right; Lord Curzon was correct in a.s.suming that all foreigners would bow in mute respect at the sight of Hong Kong, this perpetual exhibition of British might and main.

But then the skysc.r.a.pers were behind us, and the green hills of Lantau rose ahead, and my friend was chatting to a neighbour in the shrill singsong of her old Canton, and the waters were busy with small fis.h.i.+ng boats, and a sort of peace had settled all around. We took a car to the very western tip of the island, and up among the hills and the tea plantations to the Po Lin monastery, where the Buddhists pray and teach and find their sanctuary. I had come because an English friend had a son there. He was learning to be a priest, and I had come to give him his mother's love.

We walked through a different world. The monks, silent and shuffling in their deep brown robes, went about their holy business in a rich silence. The air was heavy with incense, and thin blue eddies of smoke rose from the incense sticks before an effigy of the Lord Buddha. Offerings of oranges and figs, bananas and papayas and freshly gathered tea lay on the altars. Old women would approach the statue, bow, kneel, make wordless prayers and offer silent supplication.

I found my Englishman, shaven-headed and serene, learning to fold a robe made of red silk. He was on a three-day vow of silence; but my friend asked the abbot if he might speak to me for a few moments, and permission was given, with a smile. 'Come to see the real Hong Kong?' was his first question. He said he loved the island, its feeling of one-ness with China, its timelessness, its immemorial qualities. He did not know where the abbot would send him, and he was naturally content to do as he was bidden; but he would love to stay here, among the clouds and the fragrance of the tea bushes, and on the edge of China. And my friend nodded happily, and she was silent on the ferry boat back to Hong Kong Island, and when we said goodbye-for I had to fly on to another country, and another island, even more remote-she said she hoped the Hong Kong that arose after the British left was more like Lantau, less like Wanchai, Central, and the streaming shops of Tsim Sha Tsui.

This is the only British colony of whose const.i.tutional future we can now be sure. It is the only colony that, on being freed from British rule, becomes subsumed into a neighbour nation (Northern Ireland is the single remaining possession that awaits a similar fate). At one second after midnight on 1st July 1997 the Crown colony of Hong Kong will be ret.i.tled the Special Administrative Region of Xianggang-Hong Kong, China.

A few moments before there will have been a sorry little ceremony. A small detachment of British troops, all in Number One dress and gleaming bra.s.s, will have wheeled, clattered and saluted, and a blare of trumpets will have sounded the familiar anthem. The Governor, all in white, with the plumes of his hat fluttering white and scarlet in the night-time breeze, will have stepped forward to the dais. Drums will have rolled; the distant chimes from the cathedral church of St John will sound the midnight hour; a marine will have lowered, with infinite slowness, the Union flag from the white jackstaff.

And then, jauntily, up will go the red and gold flag of the People's Republic and, perhaps, a new banner for Xianggang. A small man in a modest brown suit will step forward from the shadows and shake the Governor's hand; the Governor will slip into those same shadows, and be borne off to a waiting wars.h.i.+p on which the troops have already started to embark. Someone in the watching crowd will start to sob quietly; another will mutter the line about the captain and the kings departing, the tumult and the shouting dying...

And British rule will all be over, just as it is predestined and preordained. That small but precious jewel in the Imperial crown will have pa.s.sed back to its rightful owners to the north; Hong Kong, China, will stand ready to do business with the world in the name of the ma.s.sed proletariat of the People's Republic, rather than the House of Windsor and the taipans of Great Britain. Whether or not it will continue to be a success cannot be known; Britons a.s.sume that without the wisdom of their direction, the Chinese cannot hope to succeed as they have been allowed to do since Captain Elliot did his deal in 1841. The condition of Hong Kong? remarked a wit-a British, Imperially minded wit-in the Foreign Correspondents' Club one evening. Past imperfect, present tense, future conditional.

8.

Bermuda

The telephone rang shortly before six, startling me from what I had supposed the night before would be a long, deserved and comfortable Sunday lie-in. It was March 1973 and I was in Chevy Chase, a pleasant suburb of Was.h.i.+ngton; the caller was in London, and seemed, through my sleep-fogged mind, to have but a single question: 'Do you think you ought to go?'

He said it again. 'Do you think you ought to go?' I had no idea what the Foreign Editor was talking about, and for a few further seconds I was too fuddled with sleep to care. But then, in a flash of sudden realisation, it occurred to me that my editor in London knew more about something-moreover something that had evidently happened in my parish-than I did. Considering that I was the man on the spot, and had only recently arrived there, such an imbalance of knowledge could prove embarra.s.sing. I muttered something about holding on, shot out of bed, raced to the front door and found outside, on the doorstep, the rolled copy of that Sunday morning's Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post.

I scanned it with a frantic urgency. Nothing at the top of the page. Nothing below-no, wait a minute, here was a small paragraph, inserted late in the night. 'Governor Shot Dead' read the headline. And underneath, a one-word dateline. 'Bermuda'. This, surely, must be the story-something that had happened while I was asleep, and must have already been broadcast back home, on the BBC.

I hurtled back to the phone. 'Sorry to keep you waiting,' I said, and then tried to a.s.sume a tone of sage and languid authority, as though I had known about the shooting all along. 'Yes-I suppose I should wander over. Could make a decent piece.' 'Fine,' returned the voice on the other end. 'There's a plane from Baltimore in an hour. I've booked you on it already. Should get in to Hamilton by lunchtime. Talk to you later.' And he hung up.

Sir Richard Sharples had been Colonial Governor for six months. He had arrived, in the proper style for an island that makes its living from holidaymakers, aboard a cruise liner. He had made himself reasonably popular-he had the Imperial bearing that Bermudians like their Governors to have, and he gave pleasant parties, and he mixed well. But now, astonis.h.i.+ngly, he was dead. He, his ADC, and his dog had all been shot as they walked between the rose bushes after dinner. A state of emergency had been declared. A frigate had been dispatched. The well-oiled machinery for dealing with native insurrections was swung into place, on the off-chance it might be needed, as in Malaya, or British Guiana, or Cyprus, or those dozen other sites of old Imperial trouble.

I remember less than I should. The visit was too hurried, the images too compressed, the story too confusing. No one knew who might have fired the shots, or why. There was a great pall of bewildered sadness over the island, and yet I remember the sun s.h.i.+ning and the blue sea looking particularly exquisite, and the tiny pink houses in their neat gardens, and the fields of Easter lilies being picked for delivery to the New York flower markets. I had to hire a scooter to get me around the island-visitors were not allowed to drive cars-and this only added to the strange feeling I had about the place. It should have been grey and stormy, or perhaps steamily hot and crawling with snakes and leeches, and I should have had to make my calls in a black car, being talked to by a gloomily pessimistic taxi driver. Instead I was zipping along narrow lanes between bushes of oleander and bougainvillaea, humming above white coral beaches, feeling fit and well and getting a handsome tan in one of the prettiest places in creation. I was glad to get away, and back to the real world.

Bermuda then gave me the feeling that it was a sort of Disneyland, and that the shootings were the local equivalent of a tourist having a heart-attack inside the plastic Matterhorn-smiling young men with shrouds would clear everything up within seconds and hustle the cadaver away through a back door, and then the whirligigs would start up again and the crowds would re-form, like waters briefly parted, and the music would start, and the smiling young men would resume their cries of 'Have a nice day!' and all would seem well once more. It had all been just a brief interruption to the placid rhythms of paradise.

It was more than a decade before I went back. I seemed to be on opposite sides of the world whenever Bermuda crept into the headlines. The police did, eventually, find the murderers-two young hoodlums-and a jury convicted them. They were hanged, after the Foreign Secretary in London reported that he was 'unable to advise the Queen to intervene'. The hangings triggered riots, and, in true Imperial style, soldiers of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers were sent in to restore order, and a Royal Commission had to be set up to find out how it had happened. But before long the tranquil blue waters closed over these events, too. The 'still-vex'd Bermoothes' may have inspired Shakespeare to write The Tempest The Tempest-but so far as the public relations firm who acted for the Bermudian Government were concerned the murders and the mayhem, the rioting and the Royal Regiments were as nothing. The islands were delightfully and permanently unvex'd, the atmosphere anything but Tempestuous, and for everyone's sake, long may the cruise s.h.i.+ps call, the lilies bloom and the invading armies of suburban Americans come each year from honeymoon to retirement, to enjoy the peace and beauty of it all.

When I next went back to Bermuda it was to see the first girl I ever kissed. Gillian was the daughter of my boarding house-master at school. I was fourteen and she thirteen when, as I think I recall, we exchanged a tentative brus.h.i.+ng of lips outside the fourth form bathroom. Thus committed to one another we had gone for a few walks together in the Dorset countryside, had pledged all kinds of lifetime troths and trysts, but had then parted and, eventually and inevitably, lost touch. I heard that she had moved to Paris, and then to Amsterdam. Rumour said she was in Boston in the early 1980s, and finally a chance letter from her father mentioned that she now lived in Bermuda, married to a man who had made a fortune in computer programs. She was, her father said enviously, 'more or less retired'.

She met me at the airport, and it was both curious and enchanting how little had changed. It had been twenty-six years since we had last smiled conspiratorially at each other across the dining hall-for even the thought of romance was forbidden-and yet we recognised each other in an instant, and by the end of the first day were talking just as we had done on those walks to Beaminster and Upwey all those summers ago. Her husband must have felt a little left out, for the first day of reminiscence; but after a while the pleasantness of the memories became subsumed in the idyllic realities of daily life in Bermuda and that, I confess, began to weary me, and I began to feel left out, a stranger in a place that was in some unfathomable way most peculiar and, as I had felt a decade before, still oddly unreal.

They lived in a quiet apartment two miles away from the capital, beside a small cove where they kept the yacht they were only just learning how to sail. One room was reserved for their computer and its telephone links with the outside world-Boston, particularly, where the wealth from the magic invention cascaded into their bank account in a steady stream, and could be monitored at the touch of a b.u.t.ton. There was a collection of other electronic wizardry, and there were soft carpets and soft sofas and cus.h.i.+ons, all in pastel colours, easy on the eye, deliberately unexciting, inducing a permanent feeling of relaxation. Once in a while a telephone would purr its summons, and arrangements would be made for a tennis game, or a squash tournament, or a dinner in a nearby restaurant. But otherwise, nothing ever seemed to happen.

Days slipped into nights with measured ease. The weather was sunny, the skies and the seas were blue, the beaches were pink and white, the sunsets were soft and salmon-coloured, people wore cotton clothes that were white or vaguely tinted with lemon or cerise or eggsh.e.l.l. It was like living in an ashram, amid an atmosphere of studied perfection, as though everything that had been created, from the sky to the carpets, and whether natural or made by man, had been designed to promote a feeling of inner well-being among everyone who lived on the island, or had come there for a holiday. It was Disneyland, I was certain-or perhaps it should have been called England-land, a caricature of an always-sunny part of Cornwall, fas.h.i.+oned in polychrome and vinyl, and served up daily for the affluent East Coasters.

And then I began to have a nightmare-that Bermuda was like the village in an old television series called The Prisoner The Prisoner, and while everything was perfect and lovely to look at, it was impossible to get away, and you were stuck in its sticky sweetness, walled into a pastel cell and hummed at by the Muzak machine, smiled at and bowed to eternally by humanoids who wished you would have a nice day and wasn't the weather grand and wasn't the sea warm and the beaches pretty and the flowers nice? Sartre had written a play about being trapped in a room in a luxury hotel for all eternity. I had this feeling about Bermuda, and began, after only a very few days, to look around for the way out. And it was only then that I began to discover some of the reality of the island, and found it a good deal more curious than I had ever imagined.

One afternoon I was at the airport. A friend had told me that there were interesting things to see-it was an American military base, for one thing, and probably held some secrets-and so I begged permission for a tour. The control tower, while not exactly an Imperial monument, proved most interesting.

The air traffic controllers who talk down the jumbo jets bound for Kindley Field, as the base is called, are all members of the United States Navy. The ones I met were all attractive young women; for hours at a time each one sits, hunched over the green glow of her radar screen, a half-cold Pepsi-Cola beside her, a half-smoked Kent between her lips, the rasp of fatigue and concentration heavy in her voice, bringing some order to the apparent chaos of the mid-Atlantic flight paths.

Once in a while, if the inbound pilot is a cheery sort, she'll purr up at him, suggesting he may like to take his pa.s.sengers along what she'll call 'the tourist route' down to her island. 'Okay, Delta six-five heavy,' she'll say, talking to a Tri-Star droning in from Atlanta, 800 miles west, 'make a heading of one-five-zero and come down to flight level five-zero and show your folks where they're coming for their vacation.'

And down the plane will swoop, a long and lazy right-hand turn, a slow and gentle dive through the creamy lather of clouds. The controller, taking another sip of Pepsi, sucking once again on her crumpled tube of tobacco and murmuring some item of arcana to a crossbound long-haul plane which has strayed into her control zone while en route en route for somewhere else, forgets the Delta Airline pa.s.sengers, turns her attention to another blip on her screen, sees that it is an Eastern charter inbound from Newark, New Jersey, and prepares to say good day to the pilot, although she well knows that Eastern pilots are a lot less friendly than the good men from Delta and the Deep South. for somewhere else, forgets the Delta Airline pa.s.sengers, turns her attention to another blip on her screen, sees that it is an Eastern charter inbound from Newark, New Jersey, and prepares to say good day to the pilot, although she well knows that Eastern pilots are a lot less friendly than the good men from Delta and the Deep South.