CURLY:-
Talked the whole thing through with Suzie.
She went rather pale and quiet,
But she's a brick: she said she knew
I'd never be completely happy
Unless I was floating
Between earth and heaven,
And they're bound to want
Such a hot-stuff pilot,
And she'd always wanted
To live in Bedford...

I got the job;
Well, Certified Airship Officers
Weren't exactly thick on the ground,
And the new Imperial Airship Service
Never scared up more than eight of us
For the two ships.
Assigned to the R.101
As the Third Officer,
Based at Cardington,
The Royal Airship Factory,
Big as a small town
And everything on the grandest scale;
A thousand or so people
Living for airships,
Dwarfed by that monstrous
Construction Shed No. 1,
The biggest building in the British Empire.

This was the real thing.
This was the big time.
We'd show the birdmen
That Gas was the king.
We've got old Sky Hunt
As Senior Coxswain;
We're all spit and vinegar,
Raring to go.

Bigger than the greatest ship on the sea,
The largest man-made moving thing
The world had ever seen.
When Number Two
First took me into the shed,
The sheer naked size of her,
It took my breath away...

The gleaming ribs
Of the uncovered skeleton
Soared above us like the hectic arches
Of some vast and unearthly cathedral:
Fantastic silver tracery
Seen through a shimmering web
Of taut wiring,
And, a hundred and fifty feet
Above our heads,
Men crawled in the glare of arc-lights.
He turned to me as we stood
In the echoing immensity
And said...

SECOND OFFICER:-
"Well, what d'you think of her, Curly?"

CURLY:-
"Crikey, Jim," I said. "She's quite large..."

Her girders were mostly stainless steel
Instead of the usual Duralumin,
And her framework certainly looked
Enormously strong.
I climbed around her
In growing astonishment,
New gadgets and systems at every turn;
Her ingenious complexity
Made 'Tiny' look like a crude balloon.
She was finished like a watch,
With no expense spared,
Beautiful craftsmanship
From stem to stern,
With five gigantic Beardmore diesels
To comply with that weird 'no petrol' rule,
Everything new and everything different
From the old Zeppelin ideas.
She had forty-three men
And four other officers.
Our skipper was Lieutenant Irwin,
A quiet and rather nervy Irish chap.
And he'd been the Captain of my last ship;
Not easy to get close to,
But a decent fellow for all that,
And the finest airship pilot I ever knew.
And we called him 'Bird'.
I'd have flown with him anywhere,
And now I wish I hadn't...

Month by month, I helped her grow:
The delicate lungs, the silver skin,
The five-star hotel sunk in her belly
That she'd carry
To the other side of the world.