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The room was all windows. It was full of expectancy and bare of any decoration except a globe of the world. That had its place there, for the young man in the blue flying suit who leant against the table had in his time put a girdle round the earth. Outside, the gray afternoon pressed against the window. Outside, a row of Spitfires was lined up upon the secret airfield. Outside, in a few minutes, the young man with the fair hair and the blue overalls would climb into the cockpit of yet another new machine that had never left the ground before and proceed to put it through its paces, shirking nothing in the trial, even as he has tested thousands of aircraft since the war began. Already, before the war, Alex Henshaw was a kind of legend. Did he not fly the six thousand miles to the Cape in less than forty hours, and then take only four minutes longer on the return journey? Wasn’t he awarded the Britannia Trophy of the Royal Aero Club? Didn’t he win the Kings Cup Air Race in 1938? And now he is more than ever a legend for all the ants on the ground, who never cease to be astonished when suddenly, far above their heads, they see a tiny dot that is a Spitfire at fifteen thousand feet power-dive down to fifty feet above the airfield floor and proceed to go through the same gyrations again and again until the pilot is absolutely satisfied with what he himself calls “a hands-and-feet off test.” That means the first time each machine goes into the air, the pilot takes his hands and his feet off the controls when he goes into air dive to make sure that every Spitfire is perfect for the men who will fly after him in operations. I had heard many stories of the legend from those closely associated with Alex Henshaw before I met him the other day. I had heard how, to keep fit for his job, he neither smokes or drinks, how his one thought is to fly from dawn to dusk seven days a week, how he had been complaining that this had not been such a good year, because for two days out of the three hundred and sixty five he had been kept on the ground through fog. I had heard, too, how a few days before he had nicked two fingers of his right hand on the propeller of the baby Gull in which he flies home when his work is done. What did he do? Immediately he had the two fingers strapped up in plaster and went out and tested two more Spitfires that afternoon. He was still wearing his right hand in a mitt when I met him. And before he went out of the room that was all windows, to take his life once more into his hands, he said to me quietly: “I never take risks.” I said nothing to that, and he went on: “You see, I know exactly what my machine will do, and do it. That is all.” He then added something, which has stayed in my mind, too. “You know the Battle of Britain, the greatest pilots were the fellows who did not rush in indiscriminately, but first assessed the odds in cold blood and attacked when they knew they had a fighting chance, and other times laid off so they could fight another day.” Then he went out to the airfield and climbed into yet another cockpit of a machine that an hour before had still been in the factory shop. As I watched the mechanics put the finishing touches, I thought I was back on another airfield from which I had watched a Spitfire sweep-’the Circus’ they called it-take off to do a patrol over France. Altogether over 5,000 different parts go to assembling of a Spitfire. I know that, because for hours I walked between the benches on my tour of the largest Spitfire factory in the country. A model for all war factories-and the managing director, who was my guide, explained to me how everything in the Spitfire is planned in regard to ’stress.’ For example only four bolts are needed to fix the frame of the Rolls Royce engine owing to the exquisite balance of co-ordination in the make up of the machine. The first few minutes off the ground the test pilot goes warily. An uncomplicated circuit at not more than 2,000 feet, and then lands against the far end of the airfield. My companion explained: “That’s what we call the ’snag hut’ over there in the corner. Alex is telling them about a readjustment he wants done.” In a few minutes he was off again roaring past the hangers and then climbing swiftly above our heads till he was poised like a hawk against the gray ceiling. There was a moment of stillness and suspense, and then he was putting the machine down in a power-dive at over 400 miles an hour. At first, in the dive, the machine seems to be moving so slowly towards you that it is not moving at all. Then suddenly it is rushing at you like a thunderbolt, and you have to dig your heels into the grass so as not to duck or run in that second when it is flattening out just over your head. “How near was that?” I asked, as the roar went away from us again. “Fifty feet?” My companion chuckled. “Much more like twenty,” he said. Again and again he put the machine through the ‘hands-and-feet-off tests. And over and over again there drummed in my mind that one simple sentence: “I never take risks.” Until, clearly content that the machine could do everything that might be asked of it in the future, that lonely pioneer disappeared into the dusk to land at another airfield.