Propellerhead
Antony Woodward
Described by Pilot magazine in 2011 as ‘Inspirational … one of the best books ever written about flying’. Join the real Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines as they compete in the Round Britain race. Woodward’s warm, wry account of learning to fly will lift hearts everywhere. BBC2 documentary based on the book – 23 January 2012.Antony Woodward hated flying. It was, quite simply, not his thing. But when his flatmate Richard returned from Africa with a pilot's licence – and instant sex appeal – there was only one option …Eccentric characters, recalcitrant lawnmower engines, lousy weather, unhappy landings – can these really be the things to get a relationship off the ground? As Woodward's passage from man to airman hits ever-increasing turbulence, he finds himself embarked on a jaunt of self-discovery that will strike a chord with many a disaffected urbanite.
PROPELLERHEAD
Antony Woodward
To my mother and my father
‘Flying without feathers is not easy.’
Plautus, 254-184 BC
‘Remember, gentlemen, you cannot fuck and fly.’
Lord Trenchard, 1873-1956, First Marshal of the RAF
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u6ab289d6-1a98-5490-b36d-bd108b33ccb9)
Title Page (#ucfb0f13a-3373-5440-a8dd-931ee5ff177d)
Epigraph (#u0e5471cf-a364-524c-a9fa-310434e24e3d)
Author’s Note (#ud9140dce-d5b3-558c-95ba-fac7c5493668)
Out of Africa (#u68fff49f-efe9-58be-8808-aa7b1f9e94e6)
Normal for Norwich (#uc492cdde-bd26-5350-83de-072f0dc5a413)
Full Flying Member (#u386ddc50-fd71-59d8-a894-4e2ee90f58f6)
The Cows Just Got Smaller (#u32500d07-bedd-56c5-bf1a-b1d141fdf6e4)
How to Land a Plane (#litres_trial_promo)
Never Eat Shredded Wheat (#litres_trial_promo)
Natural Born Tinkerers (#litres_trial_promo)
Pilot-in-Command (#litres_trial_promo)
A Ride for a Ride (#litres_trial_promo)
Epaulette Country (#litres_trial_promo)
The Round Britain (#litres_trial_promo)
Ye Luckye Bastardes Club (#litres_trial_promo)
Sabres of Paradise ‘Smoke Belch II’ (Beatless Mix) (#litres_trial_promo)
Intentionally Blank (#litres_trial_promo)
Glossary and Definitions. (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo)
Thanks (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise for Propellerhead (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_9ee57616-bb4f-572e-85ce-3e3e589464e0)
Although this is a true story and the characters described are real, most names have been changed to protect privacy and—chiefly—pilots’ licences. All the events took place but details of chronology, in the interests of narrative continuity, have been shifted. Likewise, all dialogue was spoken, though not always at exactly the moments indicated. Anyone determined enough to work out where Barsham Green or Marston Mallet are will find circumstances at both places so altered as to be unrecognisable.
Out of Africa (#ulink_97ec4e92-464d-5a7f-b014-b5053cf5e2ab)
Pointing at the joystick, Miles, my instructor (known as ‘Air’ Miles), said: ‘That’s the houses lever. Push it forward and the houses get bigger; pull it back and they get smaller.’
Letter to The Times, week ending 14th March 1998
‘Done any flying before?’
‘A few hours in a little plane—a Cessna.’
‘Heh-heh-heh. No, then.’
‘You think this is better?’
‘This is flying.’
‘What’s wrong with Cessnas?’
‘What’s wrong with Ford Sierras?’
I looked round the breezy cockpit, where we were wedged tightly alongside each other, Geoff in the right-hand seat, I in the left. There was a singular lack of dials or instrumentation compared to the cockpit of any other plane I had ever seen; just four gauges, in fact. I realised that I could identify all of them: compass, altimeter, airspeed indicator and engine rev counter. Between (and slightly in front of) us was a stick.
Our seating position must have been no more than six or eight inches off the ground. We were protected from the drizzle by the wing above and an enclosing fibreglass pod; our forward view was framed through a curved, scratched, murky cowling and windshield. At our sides, where the doors would have been—had there been doors—was nothing. Above and in front of us was a tiny engine, about the size of two shoe boxes placed on top of each other. The intercom in my helmet crackled.
‘Keep clear of this…’ Geoff wagged the stick from side to side to indicate its range of travel.
‘And the throttle.’ He indicated a lever down on my left which moved in tandem with a lever his side.
‘…and the rudders.’ He paddled two stirrups at my feet, which I hadn’t noticed. The engine screamed, we flicked round in a sharp U-turn and were off. As we surged across the grass, with surprising momentum, I gripped the stout tube of the A-frame on my side of the cockpit. I felt disconcertingly low: so low that I could almost, had I not been pinned into my seat by the safety harness, have run my fingers through the wet tussocks. Yet strangely, though I was ready to be nervous, I wasn’t. I didn’t even notice when we left the ground. Suddenly the ride seemed to have become smoother, the grass was falling away and we were climbing over the hedge and a clump of scrubby trees in the corner of the field.
The view was extraordinary. The open sides and huge windscreen meant unimpeded visibility to the front and sides. As we rose towards the low cloud, the ground began to become obscured by murky grey-white wisps of water vapour. Relief that I was still not feeling sick, or paralysed by vertigo, gave me a burst of confidence.
‘So why is this so much better? What can she do?’
‘Put your hand here.’ He placed my hand round the rubber grip on top of the stick. ‘Now put your feet on the rudder pedals. Now, basically…’ He pulled the stick sharply back. The seat beneath me suddenly hardened and pressed up against me. The g-force felt enormous and a charge ran through my loins as I found myself looking vertically into the murk.
‘Up.’
We hung there for a moment, then he pushed the stick hard forward. It was like going over Nemesis at Alton Towers. Except that rather than a childish 90° dive, we went through 180°. The nose pitched forward as if we were going to turn a complete somersault, until the view ahead through the windscreen was the ground directly beneath. A wood pigeon flapped languidly out of a large old oak tree. My stomach reversed up my oesophagus like a bubble in a spirit level, and I felt that not unpleasant shivering ache of going over a humpback bridge fast.
‘Down.’
He levelled us, and I began to take stock of my condition; I had no idea that sensational feelings like these—which I had presumed were the prerogative of Tornado or Space Shuttle pilots alone—would be available in a toy plane like this. Geoff, however, was not finished. He brought the stick sharply over to the right, its full range of travel, until it pressed up against his thigh. The horizon spun round to vertical and my helmet crashed against his with an undignified clunk as I was thrown against him. I found myself staring across his body at the ground again. This time I studied the furrows of the ploughed field.
‘Right.’
Now he brought the stick hard over in the opposite direction, against my right thigh. The horizon spun again as the little machine rolled crazily over the other way. There was a creak as the harness took my twelve-and-a-half stone, suspending me over the void beneath. There was nothing between me and the plough. I imagined myself dropping into it, face-first, with a muddy squelch.
‘And left. Got it? Your turn’.
As he rolled us back to level, the little craft bucking and swivelling like a settling gyro, I wondered if I detected, through the static, a slightly defiant note in his voice. As if to say ‘That’s what she can do, Cessna man.’ I also wondered, not for the first time that soggy Saturday afternoon, whether this was really an experience I needed.
It was March 1987, and my reason for booking the trial microlight flight had nothing to do with fulfilling any boyhood dream to fly. My first word wasn’t ‘plane’. If, when little, I ran round with my arms out making nneeeeeeeooooowww noises, I certainly didn’t do it any more than other children. I never made paper darts or Airfix models. When people at school got those little single-cylinder model plane engines and spent endless hours flicking the plastic propeller round with their forefinger to coax them into a few seconds of ear-splitting and fuel-spitting life, I thought—well, I didn’t think anything. I never looked up if planes went over. I was once taken to an air show, but I don’t remember particularly enjoying it. I didn’t cut the RAF ads out of Sunday magazines (the ones which always turned out to be for navigators). As an adult airline passenger, I always listened to the safety lectures a good deal more carefully than I pretended, noting the positions of the emergency exits (or, preferably, sitting next to one—alleging that this was for leg-room reasons) and I always heaved an inner sigh of relief the second we touched down. And that, no doubt, is how my relationship with flying and planes would have remained—had Richard not returned from Africa with his pilot’s licence.
After university, where we met, Richard and I had moved to London together. From a shared basement flat in Fulham that seemed to serve as a sink for all the trampled cardboard, fruit peel and McDonald’s wrappers from the North End Road, Richard trained to become a bank manager while I tried to break into advertising as a copywriter. After our carefree student years, it was a penurious, confidence-sapping existence, a phase of our lives (later known as ‘The Depression Years’) that seemed grimly indefinite—until Richard finally broke the deadlock by accepting a year’s posting in Swaziland, Africa. It was when I joined him to go travelling, at the end of this period, that I discovered he had learnt to fly. Frankly, I was surprised by how much this news threw me. It made me look at him differently. Most red-blooded males want to be able to drive things—generally the more complicated, powerful or impressive-looking the thing, the better. (My own daydreams tended to centre round bulldozers, fire trucks and Formula One cars.) A plane, by any standards, rated as The Ultimate Driving Machine. So when Richard’s job delayed him for a few days, I promptly booked some lessons with his instructor myself.
The joys of being closeted in the suffocating cockpit of a little Cessna plane, hour by arduous hour, with Lindsay bawling ‘R-r-right R-r-r-rudder’ (she had a particular way of rolling her ‘r’s) repeatedly into my right ear, eluded me entirely. This feeling was compounded when, after fourteen lessons, she took me aside. In twenty-two years of instructing, she said, she had never come across a student with so little natural aptitude for flying. Here my brief career in aviation would have ended, had we not returned together to the cloud-knitted skies of Fulham—to discover the jaw-dropping effect that Richard’s new qualification had on women.
Here I should explain that my flatmate was not an obvious catch for womankind. Never less than thirteen stone, when he put on weight—as he frequently did—he inflated rapidly and evenly, as if by foot pump. From his broad, rounded physique shirts naturally untucked themselves and trousers sagged (the material collecting in little folds over his shoes)—making him resemble, my mother always said, an unmade bed. He had a loud voice, un-moderated by any kind of volume control. And his bluff, impatiently forthright manner had occasioned his employers—Barclays Bank—to mark his personal career file ‘task – rather than people – orientated’.
There was no single incident or moment; no gorgeous blonde Suzi or dark-eyed Tamsin on whom I had pinned my hopes, and whom I lost to Richard. It was just that when the subject of flying came up—and Richard ensured, unremittingly, that it did—the attention migrated to him. Suddenly he was no longer another nondescript, pimply 25-year-old on the pull. He had moved up several links in the food chain. The impression was that here was a man with something about him; who had proved his capabilities in a grown-up activity involving epic, worldly understanding of things like navigation and weather—something, moreover, with an exotic tinge of wealth and daring. In this impression he was helped by the timely network television premiere of Out of Africa: a film that a majority of young women seemed to regard as the ne plus ultra of romantic fantasy. For a time, the mere juxtaposition of the words ‘flying’ and ‘Africa’ was enough to induce a swooning, goggle-eyed state in twentysomething women, unthinkable today without MDMA-based dietary supplements. And as these women clamoured to be ‘taken up’, the inference was clear: here was a potentially workable system of sexual procurement.
Ultimately, it was this thought, as much as pure jealousy, which convinced me to give flying another try. As Richard needed to keep up his flying hours to retain his new status, he welcomed a flying companion. And while we could neither afford to fly proper planes, we had high hopes of the new craze of microlighting, whose more lurid and comical accidents were increasingly making the newspapers. Might not one of these make a more affordable sex aid? When the first machine that I enquired about turned out to be called a Thruster, fate seemed to have taken a hand. I booked a trial flight for the following Saturday.
Aware of Geoff’s sharp eyes on me, I gingerly dabbed the stick this way, then that. Not much seemed to happen. When it did it felt very imprecise: as if we were perpetually skidding or slipping. Also, without any reference points for speed and direction, it was hard to tell how fast (or slowly) we were going.
‘You’re climbing. Watch the nose.’
The nose seemed to me to be where it had been the whole flight, but to pacify Geoff I eased the stick slightly forward.
‘Now, you’re descending. Pull the stick back. No, not that much. Just keep her straight and level.’
‘Does the engine ever fail?’
‘Oh yes.’ I waited for further information, but none was forthcoming. In the interval I became more aware of the engine roaring and vibrating away up in front of us, and how far away the ground looked.
‘Often?’
‘Not often enough.’
I was beginning to get a fix on Geoff.
‘What happens then?’ As the question came out, I realised how foolish it was. Before I had a chance to rephrase it, he had cut the engine.
‘Like this, you mean? Let’s see, shall we?’
In fact he didn’t stop it completely. But he reduced it to such a lazy idling tick-over that it felt as if he had. Compared to the racket of a second before, it seemed like silence.
‘See? She glides just fine. All you do is pick yourself a field and down you go.’ We were losing height rapidly. ‘People with Cessnas…’—he had a way of saying the word which made it sound like having lice—‘People with Cessnas can fly their whole life without ever having an engine failure.’ It sounded like an indictment against the Board and Directors of the Cessna company. ‘Trouble is, when they do…’
He opened up the throttle and we began to climb again.
‘These days aircraft engines run forever,’ he went on. ‘Makes you take them for granted. Makes you lazy. Makes you assume it’ll never happen. But this—’ Here a tone of warm affection re-entered his voice. ‘This doesn’t have an aircraft engine. This has a two-stroke designed for a Snowmobile, not made to strain away at high revs all the time. You’re bound to get a failure now and again. Part of the fun. That’s what makes you a real pilot. Engine failures keep you on your toes. Never get them and you never expect them.’
‘What about the other kind of microlight? The flexwing kind?’
While waiting for our trial flight in the clubhouse, it had been explained to us that there were two different types of microlight. There was the more primitive weight-shift kind, known as ‘flexwings’, which were controlled by a rudimentary bar, and were basically hang-gliders with an engine. And there were the more sophisticated ‘three-axis’ or ‘fixed-wing’ machines, like the one I was in now, which had a fixed wing that made it look more or less like a normal aeroplane—albeit one that appeared in the pretty early pages of any history of flight. These fixed-wing, three-axis machines were controlled ‘in three axes’ by the conventional aviation controls of a stick and rudder.
‘A trike?’ (How many names did these machines have, I wondered.) ‘All right. If you like that kind of thing. Easy to fly. Bit boring. Most people prefer it.’
‘You think this is better?’
‘This needs something you don’t need to fly a trike. Or a Cessna.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Skill.’
‘Ah. Ha-ha-ha.’
‘It’s true. The Thruster is a tail-wheel aeroplane, like the Spitfire and the Lancaster and all the great planes. That means it’s much more difficult to land. Lot of people find it impossible. Don’t get it just right, and she’ll bounce. Anyone can pancake a plane with a trike undercarriage onto the ground, but only a few can learn to land a tail-dragger. If in doubt, I’d go for a trike.’
We were descending again. The A303 re-appeared beneath us and there, alongside it, was the airfield. With a hiss, a film of drizzle covered the windshield. As we came in to land, I grasped the A-frame with my left hand; we appeared to be about to fly straight into the ground. As the moment of impact approached, I braced myself, but the bump never came. By the time I realised we had landed, we were bowling along the grass towards the clubhouse where Richard was waiting for his turn.
As I sat in the clubhouse, sipping a cup of coffee, my cheeks were burning. I could only have been up for fifteen minutes, but my hangover had disappeared. There had been more flying sensations in fifteen minutes with him than in all my lessons in a Cessna in Africa. I looked around the room. There were several tables. At one, two men pored over an air chart surrounded by books, rulers, protractors and marker pens, periodically pushing buttons on a calculator and filling in boxes on a printed form. At others, people drank cups of tea or coffee, chatted or read magazines. Under a glass counter were text books, manuals, cassettes, log books, woven cap badges, rulers and objects which looked like circular slide rules for sale. Notices on pinboards covered every wall. ‘Think Noise Abatement’, said one. ‘Think Hedgerow, not Heathrow’, said another. ‘Beware Spinnning Propellers’ (here a Ralph Steadman drawing of someone having their head sawn off by a propeller). There were abstruse-looking meteorological charts, weather reports and maps of the local area with shadings and markings all over them, and similar-looking charts for the whole of the south of England. There were line-drawn maps on architects’ paper with shading all over them marked ‘Airspace Classifications’ and identical maps with different shading marked ‘Areas of Intense Aerial Activity’. There were pictures of microlights with headlines saying ‘The Safest Way to Make the Earth Move’. And, more exotically, a poster: ‘Imported by Plane? Drugs Kill’ and ‘Coast Watch: Have You Seen Anything Suspicious?’ There was an advertisement board with photographs of planes for sale, and other notices: ‘Alençon Trip’, ‘le Touquet Trip’, ‘Sherborne Farm Fly-in and BBQ’.
On one side, a man sat behind a counter next to a radio set. Periodically this burst into life with a blast of static and a stream of incomprehensible pilot-speak: ‘Sierra zulu downwind zero eight.’ Mainly this was ignored, but sometimes the man would pick up the mouthpiece, press a button, and say crisply something like: ‘Sierra zulu wind one two zero fifteen repeat one two zero fifteen QFE one zero one two report finals.’ I faintly wished that I understood what he meant.
I finished my coffee and wandered up the field, booting clouds of moisture from the sodden clumps of grass. I wondered how difficult ‘difficult to land’ could be. (If we ever got a microlight, I had already decided that there was no way it was going to be a ‘flexwing’.) I wondered how Richard was getting on—given his fractious, hung-over condition of earlier in the day—in particular how he had received the information that flying a Cessna was like driving a Sierra. I could rely on the fact that he would have told Geoff he had his pilot’s licence.
‘Did you find that man as irritating as I did?’ said Richard cheerfully as we made our way back to the car. He still had flattened hair, red ears and white pressure marks from the crash helmet; his face was pink, his eyes were bright and his nose was running. As we headed into London, the weather began to clear—a routine development, I would learn, at the end of a flying day.
‘…Yes, not bad, not bad. Very different to a Cessna, of course. But not bad at all’, said Richard. ‘What’s it called again?’
‘A Thruster.’
‘Yes, at least it’s like a proper aircraft. Stick and rudder. Did you see those other things? They looked like kites.’
‘What about the landing? How difficult do you think that can be?’
‘Landing?’ said Richard. ‘Why should there be any problem with landing? Look at the people who do it.’ Richard’s spirits were completely restored and I noticed that I was in a better mood than I had been in for months.
It did not strike us until much later that Geoff was an excellent salesman.
Normal for Norwich (#ulink_466c8449-9570-56f3-a0f4-2d6589c6e3a8)
95% of the people who own light planes today can’t afford to own them.
A Gift of Wings, Richard Bach
A new Thruster cost £12,000. A private pilot’s licence to fly it required a minimum of twenty-five hours flying time (though we had been warned to allow a great deal more on account of the British weather) of which a large proportion might be ‘dual’ or with an instructor, charged at around £75 per hour. My bank balance stood at £542.62 overdrawn.
Microlighting, it transpired, fell into that select category of sports—alongside base-jumping, wing-walking, sky-diving, motorcycle racing, hang-gliding, free-climbing, sky-boarding—where insurance companies were not tempted by your business, even at a 99 per cent premium. If you had life policies, health insurance or endowment mortgages, all were invalid the moment you set foot in a microlight, or at least until you emerged unscathed. A consequence of this was that, because microlights could not be insured, they could not be hired. You could not, therefore, have a few lessons, acquire a licence, then rent a machine when you felt like flying (as with a Cessna). If you wished to maintain a licence, there was no alternative but to buy a machine. There was the option of buying second-hand, but as Richard said, with an activity of this kind it seemed to make sense to buy new. Thereafter, from the moment it arrived, it was racking up expense in running, maintenance and monthly hangarage charges at whichever airfield we ended up keeping it.
Richard—the bank manager—did the sums. Although we differed in the extent of instruction we required (Richard, having a PPL, only had to apply to the Civil Aviation Authority to adapt his licence), the dismal conclusion was the same. We needed£6,000 each now, plus, for me, another £2,000 for instruction and other expenses, spread over however long it took.
Despite what I might intimate to people unfamiliar with the advertising industry, I was still a junior copywriter. I worked for a tiny advertising ‘boutique’—one of the rash of 1980s start-ups—located above a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. Richard earned slightly more but was only in the black himself because it was a condition of his employment. We were in no position to buy an aircraft. ‘Saying you haven’t got the money, is not a reason,’ said Richard. ‘It’s an excuse. It comes as no surprise to hear you’re trying to back out.’
Richard examined my bank statements and declared that, if I followed his instructions, I should be able to raise a £4,000 loan. He could raise about the same. It was not enough.
We asked one or two friends if they would care to come in on our project, but they had read about microlights in the same newspaper reports that I had and, with gracious thanks, the offer was declined. For a time it looked as if the whole scheme would have to be shelved but then it occurred to me that there must be some central organising body for microlighters, and it must have a newsletter. Why not place an ad there? I rang the BMAA—the British Microlight Aircraft Association—and they told me that their quarterly newsletter, Flightline, could indeed carry an ad if I joined (£12 per year adult member, £18 family), but they were going to press next day. I dictated: Thruster Syndicate. Third or quarter share to buy new plane. 01-381-8533.’
A week or two later, the magazine arrived. It was an engagingly homespun publication full of pictures of offbeat flying machines and advertisements for engines and propellers. I could understand hardly a word. I flicked through to the small ads. On the last page, in the Miscellaneous section, amid advertisements for windsocks (‘8 ft dayglo orange ripstop nylon, ideal for field and private airstrip use’), microlight holidays in the Lake District (‘100 hours minimum flying experience’), Mercury flying suits (‘smart gear at a smart price’), Skymaster recovery parachute (‘full instructions included’), there it was.
There were no responses.
Towards the end of April, letting myself into the flat, I just caught the phone. ‘Hullo. Hullo. The name’s Watson. Lester Watson.’ It was an educated male voice, my parents’ age, disengaged but authoritative. Assuming it was a wrong number, I did not pay much attention. ‘I’m calling about the advertisement. Yers.’ He had a most characteristic way of speaking, as if he were talking mainly to himself. ‘Yers, we were wondering about a Thruster, too. Have you got one yet? How do you find it?’ He spoke in distinct phrases, like a toy operated by pulling the string. By the time I had realised what he was talking about and mumbled that, as it happened, we had not yet done anything about it, he had moved on. ‘Come and stay and we can discuss it. We live in Norfolk. There’s an instructor nearby. We can talk to him. Dan, my son, is also interested. Salsingham is the address; Salsingham Hall. We’ll see you Friday evening then.’ I was too confused to think of a reason why I could not manage the weekend, and by the time I had thought of something, I found I was speaking to a dialling tone.
So on Friday evening, Richard and I found ourselves back in Richard’s bottle-green company Rover, in a traffic jam in the Forest Road in north-east London. To my surprise, Richard had been enthusiastic about the trip when I told him about Mr Watson. The truth was that as the novelty of returning from Africa had begun to wane and, as neither of us had girlfriends, any potential new distraction was welcome.
After forty minutes, during which we moved no more than a hundred yards, he swung suddenly into a side street, accelerated down it, turned left at the end, accelerated down the next street, decisively turned left at the end of that, accelerated again, until he was forced to brake sharply at a row of concrete bollards which separated us from the road we required. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Which way?’
The only navigational aid was an ancient black-and-white paperback London A-Z. The corners were so turned back on each other and overlapping the pages either side that it was a job to open it. When I did, the pages covering Central London, fell out—not that this mattered, as we were far outside this zone, adrift in a no-man’s labyrinth of minute print and unrecognisable roads. I had found where we were, cross-referenced it with where we needed to go, and was about to give him instructions when Richard set off again. Moments later we were at another dead end. ‘Urgh,’ he sighed, clicking his tongue. ‘I forgot you can’t read maps.’
Richard and I were used to each other’s company despite being friends by accident. In the early 1980s we had occupied rooms across a corridor in a faceless brick and concrete block of student accommodation, allowing us to observe minutely—and listen to—each other’s habits and lifestyles sufficiently to nurse a mutual but confident dislike for each other. He read maths and The Daily Telegraph, played rugby and liked student politics; he was someone I knew could not be my friend. Our natural instinct was to disagree on all things. However, as I had a refrigerator and he had a toasted sandwich-maker; and he had a car, and I had a girlfriend he fancied greatly, we ended up seeing more of each other than we would have chosen. She moved on. We were left as friends.
I had never been to Norfolk. All I knew was that it was flat, intensively farmed, on the way to nowhere and that doctors marked the medical records of patients who had survived accidents but been left slightly subnormal ‘NFN’—Normal for Norwich. It was also, at the end of the 1980s, the county that transport policy forgot. It was getting dark as the All carried us through the Thetford Forest to wide, open fields with huge metal irrigation booms. And it was after 11pm by the time we turned in through a pair of brick lodge gates and up a long drive to what was evidently a vast country house. All was in darkness except for a single downstairs window. When we switched the engine off, the sound of organ music wafted out into the cool spring night air.
We pushed on the bell of the grand main portico. There was no sound from within to indicate that it was working. After a few moments of alternate ringing and knocking, we tried the door. It had appeared to be locked, but when Richard gave it a harder shove it opened, and we found ourselves standing in a huge entrance hall, enveloped by resounding organ music. There was a yellow glow from behind an organ case at the top of the big double staircase. ‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Hello!’ The organ music continued.
‘Hello! HELLO!’ shouted Richard.
The music stopped. A male voice echoed back.
‘Hello? Is someone there?’ It was the voice on the phone.
‘Hello!’ we shouted back.
A short, wiry figure came down the stairs. He looked at us a little doubtfully, as if unsure what we wanted.
Then he spotted our cases. His face cleared.
‘Just off?’ He extended a cordial hand. ‘Excellent. Very nice to see you again. You’ve signed the book? Good, good.’ He gently ushered us back out through the door. ‘Do come again. Bye.’ The door shut with a click.
There didn’t seem any alternative but to go back in. The room was now in darkness, but we were in time to see our man disappear down an unlit passage which led into a square, high-ceilinged kitchen. When we got there he had disappeared. Or rather, he had metamorphosed into a tall, good-looking and rather formidable woman, standing by an ancient Aga. She had a pen on a string round her neck which, as she looked up, she clicked menacingly.
‘Who are you?’ she said sharply. I smiled, apologised if we were late, and explained that we had come about the microlight. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’ At that moment her husband re-emerged by another door. ‘Lester, some people are here. Something to do with lights or lighting or something. Is this something you’ve arranged?’ She looked mildly irritated.
‘Lights?’
I attempted to explain again. Lester showed polite interest but no recognition. ‘Are you friends of Dan?’ he suggested helpfully. This seemed to crystallise something in the woman.
‘What sort of time do you call this? We might easily have gone to bed. If you want to stay in this house in future, perhaps you’d care to make your arrangements with the manager, not the lift boy.’ Mr Watson had left the room again. I was beginning to feel slightly seasick, and almost wondered if I had imagined my telephone conversation with him. But Mrs Watson had moved on. ‘I suppose you want feeding. Do you think these raspberries are defrosted?’
There were no further enquiries about the microlight. In fact no one seemed to mind in the least why we were there. I made one more attempt on Mr Watson when he wandered into the library where I had been sent with instructions to get a drink. ‘A Thruster? Yes, from what I can gather they’re very good machines. Very good. We’ve been thinking about getting one ourselves,’ he said. ‘There’s an instructor near here. We could go over tomorrow, if you liked.’
Later Mrs Watson led us up a bare wooden back staircase to the third floor and along a wide passageway. It was lined with bookcases, old magazines, stacked mattresses, ancient convector heaters, old telephones, broken toys and three-legged stools with birdcages perched on top of them. The linoleum had worn through in patches, revealing undulating floorboards beneath which squawked and groaned as we crossed them. Opening doors more or less at random, she settled on a room containing two beds and a mountain of furniture stacked under dust sheets. There was a musty smell, which turned into a heavy scent of musk and vanilla near the window. As she pulled the curtains on their noisy metal runners I glimpsed a branch of wisteria, laden with flowers, which had grown through the open top sash of one of the windows. The branch was at least three inches thick.
‘I don’t think anyone’s slept in here recently,’ she said. Her tone implied that this was to our advantage. Tugging on the frayed, plaited cord of an ancient electric fire, she retrieved a brown Bakelite round-pinned plug, which she plugged in and flicked the toggle. Sparks fizzed from the middle section, where one of the ceramic bars had at some stage been knocked, though the wire remained intact. ‘Make sure you switch it off,’ she said sternly. ‘The last person left it on for three months.’
As she removed the bed covers, the bars set up a whining, moaning resonance and the tarnished reflection plate began to tick as it heated up. In the bathroom across the corridor she twisted the newest (and only chrome-coloured) tap of some four different sets of plumbing which converged upon the bathtub, crossing and weaving round each other as they led off via a maze of pipes. It emitted a groan of air. ‘You’ll have to wait until the morning for hot water,’ she said, adding, with a momentary return to her earlier asperity, ‘if we’d known you were coming, we could have switched it on.’ With that she said good night.
We had finished breakfast before Dan Watson appeared in the kitchen. Lean and high-cheekboned, radiating unhurried calm, he swept his brown hair away from his eyes but didn’t remove his sunglasses as he held out a friendly hand. He had been at a party, he explained, until five. His movements were apparently choreographed always to finish in an elegant position. He sniffed the coffee in the cafetière doubtfully, inspected the sausages and bacon that Mrs Watson had told us in a note were in a roasting tin in the oven, then set about assembling his own breakfast. He ignored most of the fare on offer, set a battered espresso machine to brew on the Aga, scrambled some eggs and added some chopped parsley. He set some butter to melt in a pan, added a big field mushroom which he said he had found the day before. Only when he had assembled everything to his liking, ground salt and pepper coarsely over it, and his coffee was ready, did he start to eat.
Mr Watson we had already seen. He seemed to know all about us now. He had pottered in and out of the kitchen several times, carrying files, or music, or pairs of pliers. Despite being dressed in a grubby fawn nylon jerkin, which made him look like a cross between a grip, a conjuror and a big game hunter, there was something curiously intimidating about him. ‘Do you play the piano?’ his disconcerting opening remark had been. ‘What, neither of you? Tst.’ Followed by a muttered, ‘No-one seems able to do anything nowadays.’ He was plainly a man of parts. The downstairs loo was festooned with a mass of framed photographs and faded newspaper cuttings of a younger Mr Watson—at Cambridge; in Africa; winning a by-election; as an MP at Westminster.
Nor, it turned out, was Mr Watson a novice when it came to flying. He had flown in Africa, where he had set up an engineering business after the war. His first plane, he told us, he bought for £400 and flew between Khartoum and Nairobi ‘until it succumbed. It was made of wood, you see.’ Returning to Britain at the end of the Fifties, someone told him about Salsingham Hall—the seat of an Earl complete with wings, lake and landscaped park—that was under threat of demolition. In a servantless post-war Britain of supertax, punishing death duties and agricultural prices which had fallen through the floor, there seemed no future for such white elephants, he explained; aristocratic families, in panic and desperation, were giving away their homes to anyone who would take them. Lester Watson flew up to look at it from the air, fell in love, and bought it for a song—then married Rhona and for their honeymoon took her on an air rally round Sicily.
‘Tell them about the Med, Dad,’ said Dan.
‘I was flying the Auster back to sell it,’ he said. ‘I’d paid £700 and I knew I could sell it here for more than £2,000. We set out from Marsa Matrûh in Egypt, heading for Crete. Well, we were given the wrong wind forecast. We were told it was ten knots from the west when in fact it was from the east. After two hours, there was no sign of land anywhere. Not surprising. We were sixty miles west of Crete—and we were running low on fuel. There were no direction finder beacons in those days. We had no radio. So we decided to fly on until we found a ship or a fishing vessel which could rescue us. Well, there wasn’t a ship anywhere. We had just minutes of fuel left when we saw a German tanker. I told Ron, who was with me, to write a note, telling them we were going to ditch and to rescue us. He put it in his shoe, then I flew low over the bridge and we dropped the shoe onto the deck. It was a German crew, but luckily one of them understood English. Then we ditched. Fortunately, just the week before, my brother-in-law, who’s in the Fleet Air Arm, had told me about ditching. He said the crucial thing is to land crosswind, so the waves don’t tip you up. Approach into wind’—he motioned with his hand, a chopping movement—‘then at the last minute’—he turned his hand through 90°—‘kick her round crosswind so you land with the swell. Stall her just above the water’s surface and drop her in. So that’s what I did. It was the most brilliant landing. Brilliant.’
We were agog.
He showed us his battered log book, dug out for the microlight instructor. The covers were frayed and sun-baked and the binding loose and worn. The pages recorded hundreds of journeys:‘V. Falls to Bulawayo’; ‘Mbeya to Kasama’; ‘Nairobi to Mombasa’; ‘Panshangar to Lympne (REMARKS: Honeymoon trip)’;‘Lympne to Nice (en route for Giro di Sicilia International Air Race)’; page after page, denoting thousands of hours of flying, with numerous names under AIRCRAFT TYPE: Tiger Moth, Auster, Tripacer, Gemini, Proctor, Rallye. The last entry was in 1964.
‘I haven’t flown for a bit, but, you know, it never leaves you once you’ve learnt. This Sean seems a good fellow. I hope he’ll let me update my licence without too much fuss.’
‘Did you have any other narrow escapes?’ I asked.
‘Well, once on the way from Jubâ to Malak—’
‘Where’s Jubâ?’
‘You don’t know where Jubâ is?’ He looked astonished. ‘Southern Sudan. We’d left Jubâ, headed for Khartoum, and the cloud got lower and lower. Eventually it was down to 200 feet above the ground. We were going at about 140 mph. Anyway, we eventually hit the Nile, so we knew then that if we followed it at least we’d eventually come to Malakal. We just had to hope the cloud didn’t get any lower. We did 180 miles at 150 feet. Don’t know what people on the ground thought.’ Mr Watson looked quite pleased to have such an enthusiastic audience. ‘Then there was the time we were flying down to Skojpe from St Etienne. Well, you know what Skojpe is like: we were surrounded by the military with guns…’
There seemed to be hardly a part of Africa, the Mediterranean or Northern Europe he had not visited. He told us about stalling an engine on landing at Croydon, a near-miss with a DC6 at Forneby in Oslo. ‘Coming out of Jakawalpa we got engine icing at 500 feet. Imagine that. We were literally off the end of the runway when the engine started spluttering.’
‘Did you ever make a safe flight?’ said Richard.
‘Dad, we should be going,’ said Dan, looking at his watch. He wore it with the face on the front of his wrist rather than the back.
Sean, the instructor, was based at RAF Barsham Green, ten miles away. The journey took longer than expected. The narrow, frequently fenceless lanes serpentined lazily through the Norfolk fields, and Mr Watson, who was driving, seemed in no hurry. He and Dan became progressively less certain about the way and, once again, locating the entrance of a rural airfield added considerably to the time we had allowed for the journey.
The approaches were misleadingly shipshape. At the main gate we were told to pull over, alongside the scale model Spitfire on its concrete pedestal by the entrance, while the car was searched. It was my first experience of a military airfield, and the guard house, security cameras, razor wire, safety barricades and mirrors on broom-handles for examining underneath the car all seemed very official and impressive until I later learned that, fifty yards up the road, the fence petered out into brambles and the place was open to ramblers. There was an elaborate signing-in procedure including lengthy questions from the duty officer before we were issued with a windscreen sticker and allowed to proceed.
The Norwich and East of England Aero Club, despite its grandiose name, seemed to have facilities remarkably similar to those at Popham: two Portakabins in a state of semi-collapse, propped on breeze blocks.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sean, the instructor we had come to see, was a year or two older than Richard and me. He had sandy hair, freckles and a bounce in his step. His room in the Portakabin complex was meticulously organised: papers neatly squared and piled in order of size, lined up in rows, pens laid across the top at right angles. ‘Yes, hello, yes, come in. I see, quite a few of you. Lester, Richard, Dan and Antony. And you’re interested in a Thrasher? No problem.’ (Sean, I would learn, always referred to a Thruster as a ‘Thrasher’.) ‘Yes, it’s a good little plane, the Thrasher. You’ll have some fun with that.’
There was a pause. Oddly, having got there, there didn’t seem to be much to say.
‘What’s the insurance position?’ said Richard.
‘How do you mean?’ said Sean.
‘Well, if something goes wrong, or there is an accident, are you properly insured? Or is the manufacturer of the machine liable?’
‘Are you sure you should be doing this?’ said Sean.
‘Is there any kind of brochure we can look at?’ I asked Sean.
‘No. No brochures. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you what you need.’
There was a pause. No one seemed to know what to say.
‘Right,’ said Richard, getting out his cheque book, and reaching for a biro. ‘Let’s get on then.’
Richard was like that. He just decided things. The Watsons seemed happy. Sean produced a photocopied order form and we each wrote out a cheque for £3,000. It was the largest cheque I had ever written.
I felt taken unaware. I had not bargained on any cheque-writing until much further down the line. I was used to a great deal more procrastination before committing myself to things. I felt I lacked the mental preparation—not to mention the funds—to be doing it so soon. Richard told me afterwards that people like me always lacked the mental preparation for doing anything.
No sooner had my cheque for £3,000 been filed away than Sean said
‘Right. Helmets and headsets. I recommend the standard SXP helmet with a Narcan 5000 intercom. It’s a bit more expensive, but they are better.’
There was silence, except for the scratching of Biros while we each wrote another cheque, this time for £120 each. These were filed away in a separate neat pile.
‘Do you want a radio?’
‘A radio?’ said Dan thoughtfully. ‘How much is that?’
‘A basic transceiver starts at about £400. I can get you a discount.’ We all looked at each other.
‘Maybe leave the radio ’til later,’ said Sean. ‘But you’d better order your ozee suits, if they’re to be here by the time the plane arrives. I can probably get a deal if you all order together.’ An ozee suit turned out to be a blue Thinsulate-lined zip-up flying overall.
‘Do we really need an ozee suit?’ I asked. ‘Can’t we just wrap up well?’
‘Oh you must have an ozee suit.’
The cheque was for £80.
‘You’ll need to arrange third party insurance, as we’re flying from Ministry of Defence land,’ Sean said, handing out four more photocopied forms. ‘I’ll leave you to do that yourselves.’ The form contained a number of boxes. Alongside the lowest box, containing the highest premium (£80), was a rough cross in blue biro. ‘Of course it’s up to you whether you decide to insure the hull or not. That can get expensive. Right. Now for the loose ends.’
The loose ends consisted of another £72-worth of equipment: two flying charts—a 1:250,000 scale map of East Anglia and a 1:500,000 scale map of the south of England; a perspex ruler graduated in nautical miles in both these scales; a frightening, but impressive-looking gadget like a circular slide rule called a flight course and distance calculator; a log book (which seemed premature, as we did not yet have an aircraft); a blue plastic ring binder entitled CAP 85: A Guide to Aviation Law, Flight Rules and Procedures for Applicants for the Private Pilot’s Licence; and, finally, a slim paperback entitled The Microlight Pilot’s Handbook. This was slimmer and—judging by the ratio of pictures of clouds to diagrams with arrows—considerably simpler than the thick, densely-written text books to which I had been introduced in Africa. The pages started falling out the moment I broke the spine, which somehow seemed to reflect microlighting’s marginalised role in the world of aviation. As the objects mounted, it felt a bit like the first day at school. Except, at £72, rather more expensive.
‘You’ll need to buy a couple of jerry cans each and paint your names on the side. Now, hangarage. I’ll give you a deal for the first six months if you’re happy for me to take people up for trial flights. Shall we say £50 a month? Oh, and finally, you’ll have to join the flying club, of course.’
‘How much is that?’
‘£15. But make the cheque out to the flying club, not to me.’
Enough was enough.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I won’t join for the moment.’
‘You have to. Or no flying. It costs the same whether you join now or later.’
Resignedly I reached for my cheque book again. The pain was softened, however, when a few minutes later I was handed a blue credit-card-sized membership card. I slipped it into my wallet. Pleasingly visible for all to read alongside the club name and its winged crest were the words ‘FULL FLYING MEMBER’.
In the car on the way back to London on Sunday afternoon, I examined my jeans and shoes. The new 501s were almost black from a combination of mud, oil and green tree mould. My Chelsea boots were so caked that it was impossible to tell that they had once been suede. Both were ruined.
Mr Watson had arrived in our room at eight, as we slept off mild hangovers from staying up talking to Dan, his sister Seph, who had arrived that day and a couple of friends of his who had come for dinner. ‘Hullo, hullo. Are you up? D’you mind? There’s a fallen tree we need to shift. Shouldn’t take long but needs a couple of pairs of hands. Wonder if you’d like to help? And if you see Dan, tell him. Can’t think where he’s got to—he knew I wanted help. Shall we meet downstairs in fifteen minutes?’ And so, after a hasty piece of toast, we found ourselves, on a cool May morning, in charge of a chain-saw, bill hook, and tractor and trailer. At 10.30 am Lester had left to play the organ in the local church.
We left promptly after lunch. Over the not-quite-defrosted summer pudding, Mr Watson had mentioned some mattresses and a piano that needed shifting. There had been no further talk about arrangements for sharing the Thruster when it arrived: how we would avoid clashing, who would fly it when, how we would pay for it if it got damaged. Mr Watson had issued an open invitation and given us the run of a top-floor flat, if we wanted a summer holiday. Somehow any more formal discussion seemed inappropriate. ‘Nevertheless, I shall draw up an agreement,’ said Richard.
I was still reeling from the decisive turn my life had taken. We had ordered an aeroplane. There was no backing out: it was done. We seemed to have acquired some new friends, albeit of an eccentric and extraordinary kind. It was plain that Mrs Watson ran things, and Dan was friendly and easy-going. But, most of all, it was Mr Watson who had left an impression. He was unlike anyone we had met before. He made doing what you liked look so easy and obvious. He loved Africa, so he had started a business there. He wanted to fly, so he bought a plane. He liked the look of a mansion which everyone else saw as a liability. So he ignored them, and bought it. He answered to nobody except himself, and seemed to have complete control over his life. It was independence of mind of a fierceness that neither of us had encountered before.
That evening Richard, as syndicate administrator, drew up a ‘Contract of Agreement for the Salsingham Syndicate’. It ran to seven pages, and outlined terms of reference, terms of ownership, booking procedures, damage liability, shared expenses, individual expenses, conditions of leaving, priority of use on weekends and holidays, and other areas. ‘Isn’t it a bit formal? Doesn’t it imply we don’t trust each other?’
‘It’s not a matter of trust,’ said Richard. ‘It’s a matter of procedure.’ As Prime Suspect began on the television, I opened a cold Beck’s and settled down with The Microlight Pilot’s Handbook: ‘The advent of the microlight aeroplane has brought flying within the reach of many…’
Full Flying Member (#ulink_bc8a9136-14a6-5d87-8e4f-04821dc9b69f)
Most of the time, the aeroplane flies not because of the pilot’s activity on the controls, but despite it.
Wolfgang Langewiesche, Stick and Rudder, 1944.
We had booked two weeks holiday in July for some intensive instruction and were installed in the top floor flat at Salsingham. Now that the idea had sunk in (the commitment of a bank loan had the effect of focussing my mind further), and weekends and holidays were now sorted for the foreseeable future, I was keen to get on and learn to fly as fast as possible. I had tried to book our holiday from the day the Thruster was delivered, but Sean said he needed a few days to assemble the plane, test fly it and generally tighten up any cords and cables which, because it was new, he said, tended to stretch or slacken in the first few hours of use.
It was now quarter to ten on Saturday morning. (I had been ready to start at eight or even seven—I wanted to be sure of getting my licence by the end of the fortnight—but Sean had told me to be patient. ‘Calm down. You’ll get plenty of flying.’) There was just the hint of a breeze, enough to feel the hairs on the back of my hands and arms as we followed Sean over to the huge black hangar.
The hangar was still shut and no one else was about. Sean picked up a metal crank leaning against the side and slotted it into a socket in the vast door. Each of the eight sliding doors, he said, was filled with sand—a wartime precaution to shield the hangar’s fragile contents from bomb blast—and weighed twenty tons. He braced his weight against the crank and heaved, grunting and flushing with the strain until the door gathered momentum, the crank began to twist with a vigorous torque of its own, and the noise of metal wheels grating on gritty runners became drowned by an echoing bass rumble.
The widening strip of sunlight cut a sharp rectangle through the gloom of the interior. Through particles of dust turning in the rays was a jumble of fins and elevators, wings and wires, rotors and aerials. The space was dominated by a giant military jet that looked like a Vulcan nuclear bomber, but which Sean said was a Canberra, a 1950s reconnaissance plane, now used, he said, by RAF technical staff to practise X-ray detecting for metal fatigue. Ranged beneath its wings was a tightly-packed assortment of helicopters, bi-planes, Cessnas, flexwing microlights (most of Sean’s teaching was on flexwings) and, amongst all these fins and wings and rotor blades, apologetic and minute in one corner, was the Thruster.
Sean dodged nimbly in amongst the machines—it struck me how awkward and fragile aircraft were in an enclosed space, with all their gawky projections and wires and sharp edges and delicate surfaces—and began to loosen the mesh. He pushed a plane back a few inches, pulled another up (by its prop) to fill the gap, nudged a tail-plane round, turned a propeller a few degrees to clear a wing. In this way he cleared enough of a passageway that, by raising and lowering the tail to clear a tail-fin or a bracing wire, he could just extricate the Thruster without any part of it quite touching another machine. Finally it was clear enough for him to put the tail down and trundle it onto the sunshine of the concrete fairing in front of the hangar. For the first time we had the chance to examine our new purchase properly.
The overall effect was of a large toy aeroplane with a cheeky expression. The rounded nose of the fibreglass pod in which the pilot and passenger were enclosed, and which protected them from the weather and the airstream, gave it the smug, perky expression of a Pekinese—cute or irritating, according to taste. The wings were blue and red, the fibreglass pod was white and the tail blue. It struck me that we could have given more thought to the colour scheme. Large white capitals spelt out her registration letters—Golf Mike Victor Oscar Yankee, or G-MVOY—on the underside of the wings and on the tail. The spotless new tyres and glinting windshield added to an overall effect of pristine prissiness which had been absent from the streaked wings, faded fabric and worn-in, workaday appearance of the machine at Popham. As the progeny of more than three quarters of a century of aeronautical research and development, it was hard not to think that something was missing. The engine had a pull-start like a lawn mower. The seats were the moulded plastic, school stacking variety (minus the metal legs). The tail-wheel was off a supermarket trolley. One of the flight controls looked uncannily like—and, on closer inspection, was—a nylon cord with a bathroom light switch on the end. The impression was simply of a machine unfinished. Her wings, however, were at least a version of traditional doped canvas (if a modern, Dacron-Terylene one) and she had a wooden propeller. ‘Right,’ said Sean. ‘Let’s get Thrashing.’
I went up first, leaving Richard reading the paper in the car. Once Sean had me strapped in to the left-hand seat, he told me to hold the throttle lever (car hand-brake position, down on my left) with my left hand, take the stick in my right hand, and steer with my feet on the rudder pedals. Gingerly I opened the throttle from its tick-over rate of 3,000 rpm. We didn’t move at all until the revs had reached at least 5,000 rpm, when we sprang forward across the fairing. ‘Steady,’ said Sean, promptly reducing the power with the dual lever his side.
It all felt most bizarre. Although pressing the left pedal turned the plane left, and vice versa, there was a slight delay in the reaction (and it worked much less effectively at low speed). This made it tempting to over-react, and our path towards the airfield commenced in an undignified zig-zag. When we got to the end of the runway, Sean stopped us on a slight upslope into wind and showed me the checks I had to do. These were mercifully few, boiling down to giving the stick a good stir to see that the controls were ‘full and free’, checking our seat-belts and helmet chin-straps were done up, that the few instruments were reading within their limits, and that there was sufficient fuel in the tank. Then he instructed me to taxi round in a circle (to check for any ‘traffic’ in the circuit) and line up. ‘Off you go then. What are you waiting for?’ he said, when I had done so.
I briskly opened the throttle and immediately incurred criticism.
‘Gently—everything you do in flying should be gentle. But positive. And open it fully: that’s only three quarters.’ We began to move forward along the grass, picking up speed. ‘Right, stick forward to raise the tail.’ As the tail came up, the ride stopped feeling rough and bumpy, and she moved much more easily. ‘See? Feel how much better she runs. Right, keep her straight with the rudder pedals. Now. Once you can feel that the tail’s up, just gently let the stick back to where it naturally goes, in the centre. Gently. That’s right. That’s all you have to do. Let the speed pick up now, and…there you are.’ Suddenly the ride felt smoother still, and I realised that the grass underneath the wheels was sinking away from us. ‘See? Simple as that.’ And it really was. The plane took off by itself.
I knew what to do now, from my Cessna lessons, and began to pull the stick back to make us climb. Sean briskly shoved it forward again. ‘Don’t pull the stick back yet: you’re not flying well enough: you’ll stall and crash. Just let the speed build up ’til she’s flying nicely. OK, now…just ease the stick back.’ A big flock of starlings fluttered into the air and wheeled away from us ahead and to the left.
In front of us, as we climbed, I could see a town. ‘Dereham,’ said Sean, pointing out the characteristic water tower, a big, ugly, conical edifice, as if a giant, round, plastic funnel had been jabbed into the ground as a mould and filled with concrete. (I did not realise then how much I would grow to love that water tower.) I could see cars moving along the A47 to Norwich. South of the airfield (though at the time I had no idea of my bearings) was the village of Barsham Green, with its church tower. There was another church, of worn and weathered brick and flint and a round tower on the north side of the airfield, and, to the east, a winding river meandered through lakes and gravel pits. A distinctive enough setting, perhaps, for an airfield, but the moment I looked away it disappeared and I was lost over an infinite patchwork mat of countryside.
That is pretty much all I took out of that first lesson. No doubt we practised a few turns and manoeuvres, but in no time we seemed to be back over the airfield and Sean was telling me to reduce the throttle to 5,000 rpm for my descent. ‘Gently. Christ,’ he said, as I inadvertently overdid it and we started to plummet. The approach to land was by far the hardest part. To judge, in three dimensions, an even descent from where I was in the air, to a specified point on the ground—let alone carry it out by co-ordinated manipulation of stick and throttle—was a task beyond impossible. ‘Right. I have control,’ said Sean, as I nearly hit a hedge a field short of the Barsham runway. He gave a burst of throttle which carried us neatly to the airfield.
After the confinement and intensity of the cockpit, it was good to stretch, peel off my flying suit and feel the warm air playing around my arms and ankles. The temperature had been about right at 1,000 feet with my ozee suit on. Back on the ground it was uncomfortably warm. As I slumped onto the grass, Coke in hand, and Richard strapped himself in, Sean shouted. ‘Get on with your ground school, Ants,’ (he had taken to calling me ‘Ants’). ‘Don’t just laze in the sun.’ Circumstances, however, were not conducive. The sun blazed from a spotless blue sky, with the breath of a breeze, just enough occasionally to twitch the big windsock on the west of the airfield.
For lunch Sean took us to the Barsham canteen. ‘We could go into Drear-am,’ he said doubtfully (Sean called East Dereham ‘Drear-am’). ‘But it’s hardly worth it.’ He referred, I knew, to Barsham’s labyrinthine one-way system with its platoons of sleeping policemen and 6 mph speed limit, enforced by the military police with the true viciousness of total boredom. The canteen would today win awards for its authentic war-time-rationing experience. From its bare, wiped-down counters all that was available were triangular meat paste sandwiches on curling Homepride (and maybe an apple or two) and Nice, Rich Tea or Digestive biscuits. The one concession to indulgence were some ‘Club’ biscuits, which turned out to be cracked and pale with age beneath the silver paper. A woman in a nylon apron served cups of stewed tea from a battered aluminium teapot.
After lunch, Sean showed us how to mix fuel for the Thruster. He added 200 mls of blue Duckhams motorbike oil to a 20-litre jerry can of petrol to make up the two-stroke mixture, then he swung the heavy can vigorously this way and that, twisting it as he did so to mix it. ‘Always make sure you’re putting in two-stroke mixture, not just petrol,’ he said, inserting a funnel with a stocking over the top into the Thruster’s tank. ‘You can tell by the colour. Petrol is straw-coloured. Two-stroke mixture, if you use Duckhams, has a blue tinge.’ He held the jerry can with the spout uppermost until it was half-empty, then turned it so that it emptied without surging and gulping. ‘Never fill up in the hangar, and never over grass. You’ll spill it and we get bare patches.’
My afternoon lesson felt a little better. The controls were not quite so strange, though I would not always have guessed it from Sean’s noisy imprecations. The taxiing and taking off now seemed straightforward, though Sean grabbed the throttle lever a couple of times while I was taxiing out and consistently told me to slow down. I had observed that while he made me bump and trundle along at a snail’s pace, when he taxied he opened the throttle, raised the tail and scorched along at about 30 mph.
Once off the ground, however, he couldn’t stop fussing about the air speed.
‘Always keep an eye on the air speed indicator. Your cruising speed should be 50-55 knots. Never let the air speed drop below 40 knots. What will happen if you do?’
‘We’ll stall.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
‘Exactly. We’ll stall. And what happens if we stall?’
‘We crash.’
‘Exactly. The plane stops flying and falls out of the sky unless you take steps to recover. So make sure you don’t. Keep the air speed at, say a nice, steady 45 knots when you’re climbing, and somewhere over 50 in the cruise.’ I was sure that what he said made good sense, but the air was so pleasant, and my mood felt so good that I wished he could have relaxed a bit. I had complete confidence that, even if I did inadvertently stall the aircraft, Sean would soon have the situation under control. It was a lovely summer afternoon. Beneath us a tractor was cutting hay, and the scent drifted up. Most of the fields were deep with standing corn which was just turning from green to gold. The view was fantastic—I could almost see the coast—and up here the air was cool and refreshing: there was no doubt that it was the place to be.
‘Look at your air speed. Come on, wake up. Now, make a 180° turn to the left, and I don’t want to see the bubble move.’
I forced my mind back to the task in hand. Another of Sean’s preoccupations was turning out to be the slip indicator: the ball in the horizontal glass tube in the centre of the dashboard. This was supposed to remain central in its window at all times, indicating that the controls—the stick and the rudders—were being used correctly together, or ‘balanced’, in turns. Attempt a turn with too little rudder, or too much, and the bubble shot off to the right or left. In severely unbalanced cases the bubble disappeared altogether. Since Sean had told me about it, and I had started watching the instrument during turns, I had yet to set eyes on the ball at all.
Sean told me to fill up the Thruster before we packed up after Richard’s lesson. ‘Fill her up when you put her away and you won’t get condensation forming in the tank and water in the fuel next time you fly. Then we’ll do your log book, Ants.’ Later, in his office, he opened my log book and filled out the first two lines in his firm, careful handwriting. ‘Always fill in your log book straight after flying, then you don’t forget.’ Each of my two lessons was entered separately. There seemed to be a lot of boxes, to do with multi-engines, night and instrument flying, left blank. Under REMARKS, he wrote ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9a, 9b, 10a, 10b, 11’ which surprised me. I had not been aware of doing anything more than enjoying the view, and dabbing the stick this way and that.
Two hours in the air did not seem much from a whole day devoted to flying. But as I drove us back to Salsingham—the controls of the car felt absurdly firm and precise after the Thruster—I could not remember when I had felt so tired. My skin felt tight, too, where I had caught the sun.
The Watsons had told us there was a swimming pool, and we followed their directions down a path through a wood to a magnificent walled garden lined with peaches and quinces and pears and collapsing glasshouses. On one side through a door of flaking green paint was an oval pool with matching, opaque green water. It felt icy. We decided it was tempting, but not tempting enough.
‘Look, Ants, I’m not blind. You can’t just fudge it and hope I’m not going to notice.’ It was lesson four, and we were having air speed problems again. Sean had put on his serious voice. His mood switched disconcertingly from one moment to the next. One minute we were bumbling past the Swaffham radio mast, to the south-west of the airfield, and he was larking about in the passenger seat, shouting ‘Aaaaaargh, my bollocks. My bollocks are being zapped by the radio waves. Gemme outta here,’ and he would make as if to clamber out of the plane. Then, without warning, he snapped to serious.
To tell the truth, my attention had wandered. Having forgotten, for a few minutes, to keep an eye on the air speed indicator, I had sneaked a look while Sean was in his flippant mode and noticed that it was hovering around the forbidden 40 knot mark. So I had surreptitiously eased the stick forward to lower the nose and raise my speed. Unfortunately this didn’t seem to make any difference (I had yet to learn about time-lag in instrument readings). The needle continued to drop, so I had eased the nose down further, hoping Sean would not notice until the reading had recovered, only to receive a sharp reprimand a moment later for incorrect attitude
(#litres_trial_promo) and losing height.
‘Come on. You’re meant to be flying straight and level. That doesn’t mean up and down. This is important. I mean it. So get that silly smirk off your face and stop dicking around.’ ‘Dicking around’ was one of Sean’s favourite expressions, employed to cover a multitude of sins: lapses of concentration, imprecise flying, unconfident manipulation of the controls, lax or absent airmanship, starting the engine without chocking the wheels—the reason for the undignified, though not infrequent, sight of a microlight departing, pursued on foot by its unfortunate captain—or, most of all, the antics of other members of the club, usually those of its hapless proprietor Carter. ‘Look at him, now,’ Sean would say, craning his neck to watch as a distant speck pottered out of the club Portakabin to attend to a fibreglass pond and rockery he was installing by the corner of the hangar. ‘A strange, strange man, that. Never stops dicking around, does Carter.’
How much I learned during those early lessons, it is hard to assess, as Sean’s instructions, even at his most incensed, impinged little on my happy reverie. Feeling that there was no immediate pressure to prove myself, most of the time I just sailed about the sky in a contented, vacuous daze, savouring the warm air and the fine view. By lesson five, however, on Monday morning, hard evidence was beginning to accrue—or so it felt—of stupidity, incompetence, laziness, hamfisted-ness, mal co-ordination and inability to concentrate, and Sean was beginning to assert himself with some asperity.
I still approached the controls of the Thruster as someone used to the controls of a car. Their effects, however, were bizarrely different. In a plane, increasing the throttle did not make you go faster, or not by much. It made you go up. Likewise, reducing the revs didn’t slow you down; it made you lose height. This (needless to say) wasn’t quite true: if you held the plane level and ‘turned up the wick’, then she went a bit faster. Cruising speed was the minimum throttle setting at which it was possible to maintain height.
In flying, two things mattered: speed and height. These were the vital commodities. Speed was what kept you airborne, what kept the air flowing over the wing: drop below the magical ‘stall speed’ and the wing ceased to be a wing and simply became a piece of debris an uncomfortably long way above the ground. Height, I was learning, was fuel; by putting the nose down, it could always be turned into speed. If things went wrong, height gave you time to recover or to find somewhere to land. It was said to be one of the ironies of aviation that the two things that made your mother think it was dangerous—speed and height—were actually the only things that kept you safe. As an old pilots’ saying ran, ‘In flying, you need speed, you need height, or you need ideas.’
Then there was the air. Wind, I knew, from Geography at school and The Microlight Pilot’s Handbook, was air moving from a high pressure area to a lower pressure area. The flyer, of course, was part of the wind (which is why, in a balloon, all is completely still: you are part of the breeze). But, used to looking at the speedometer of a car and getting an accurate reading, it was bemusing to find in a plane that while the air speed might be a steady 55 knots, we might be moving across the ground at 20 knots, or 80 knots. The point being that the moment you were airborne you ceased to be part of the landscape and became part of the air blowing across it.
Turning was another strange one. Again, in a car, you turned the steering wheel when you wanted to go left, then turned it back again to straighten up or go to the right. Always, in the back of your mind, you knew roughly where the wheels were pointing and that they were pointing in the direction you were going. In flying it was not like that at all. Once you had initiated, say, a left turn, by giving it some left stick (plus some left rudder, of course), you did not then hold the stick there, as you would a car steering wheel, until you wanted to straighten up again or go in a new direction. No, having started the plane turning, you then returned the stick to the centre, and the plane kept turning. To cancel the turn you applied an equal blat of opposite stick. I relate these facts simply and clearly here, as if that is how they presented themselves to me. But whether because Sean never explained them properly, or failed to emphasise them enough, or because my mind was simply overloaded trying to cope with all the other things I was supposed to be thinking about, they did not become clear for a very long time. And until I did understand them, I continued timorously to dab the stick this way then that, holding it in place like a steering wheel as the turn steepened, not having the least comprehension of the consequences of my actions.
Barsham was plainly a forgotten backwater of the RAF, and we had the place pretty much to ourselves. The grid of Nissen huts with their rounded roofs of moulding and mossy asbestos or rusting corrugated iron, Sean told us, provided accommodation for RAF technical staff and training facilities (for such indispensable tasks, I later learnt, as Maintenance Schedule Writing and Spares Forecasting). Despite the fibreglass Spitfire on its plinth at the entrance, there was almost no RAF flying. For all but the last couple of weeks of July, when overspill student pilots from the University Air Squadrons came over from Cranfield to train in the quiet Norfolk skies, the old brick control tower remained locked and empty. The rest of the year the huge expanse of grass (Barsham was reputedly the largest grass airfield in Europe) was shared between the local glider club, the ‘Norwich and Eastern’ and the fat hares which hid amongst the clumps of clover and daisies.
The glider club operated mainly at weekends, when the field was divided in half by white plastic markers and a big yellow winch on a lorry hauled gliders into the air on one side of the airfield. Meanwhile the aero club, a very sleepy operation, used the other half sporadically running a motley pair of tatty blue-and-white Cessnas. There were a couple of school instructors, recognisable by their white shirts with epaulettes and dark blue trousers, and there was Carter. I never did learn whether Carter was his Christian name or surname. He was fat, with a kind face, and had a fat son called Keith who looked absurdly like him and occasionally manned the radio. Sean paid them no respect. The occasional roar of one of their engines, usually merely to taxi a plane from one position to another, represented the principal excitement of the day. Apart from this the only sounds to break the stillness were the crunch and rumble of the hangar doors morning and evening, the hiss and static of the radio in the Portakabin on the occasions that it was switched on, and the scream of the microlighters’ two-strokes. When this faded, as it did soon after take-off, there was just the skylarks, the bells of the round-towered church on the north of the airfield and the occasional distant sound of hammering.
I had never taken a holiday like this. The combination of the weather, the rustic setting, a scheduled activity to give the day some (but not too much) structure, and enough country air and exertion (heaving ten-ton hangar doors, full jerry cans and the Thruster) to stoke ravenous appetites made it seem a world away from advertising, deadlines and the bars and traffic of Wardour Street.
Salsingham, too, had a curiously soul-soothing quality; partly, no doubt, because the place was so extensive. Apart from the two wings (both larger than most large detached houses), there were stables and kennels, and workshops and barns, and the park with its overgrown lake and boathouse. There was a sleepy somnambulance about the place, as if, when the clock in the pediment on the west wing stopped (at three minutes to two), all influence from the outside world had ceased at the same moment. The flat, right at the top of the house, was spartan but ideal. There was a small kitchen in one of the corner towers, a couple of bedrooms and a sitting room with a view over the lake, behind which the sun set as the ducks came in.
We saw little of the Watsons. Mrs Watson communicated with us mainly by note—irritated ones ticking us off (for bad parking or leaving doors open) alternating with invitations to supper. Occasionally we would encounter Mr Watson, in many ways a Caractacus Potts figure, driving his disintegrating orange Daihatsu, with its flapping rear doors, or carrying a spanner and a roll of electric cable. After helping to round up some escaped cattle, moving some heavy furniture, treating the obstinately opaque green waters of the pool, transferring a car battery and erecting an electric fence, we learnt to dive for cover at his approach. Life at Salsingham, it became clear, was one long, losing battle against an incoming tide of accumulating tasks. Mr Watson had a bumbling, absent-minded manner. He never showed the slightest recognition when he came across us and he never used our names, but as long as he regarded us as a source of assistance, rather than trespassers, I supposed it must be all right.
Now that I was familiar with the basic controls, all lessons took the same form: circuits, circuits and more circuits. The circuit, the core element of instruction in all flying, is an imaginary, rectangular cube of air over an airfield, about 1,000 feet high, and a quarter of a mile or more in its other dimensions, the orientation of which varies daily, sometimes even hourly, to allow for taking off—as nearly as possible—into wind. The direction (left-hand or right-hand) tends to be dictated by local topography. At Barsham it depended on the activities, or not, of the glider club, and we always had to avoid the village, the RAF buildings, two houses to the north of the airfield containing litigious locals and, for safety’s sake, low approaches over the gravel pit on the north-east side in case of an untimely engine failure.
Circuits allowed relentless practising of all the essential aspects of control of the aircraft: taxiing, take-off, climbing, levelling off, turning, cruising, following a heading, plotting the approach to land, descending and landing. If it sounds busy, it was: indeed, there seemed to be such an absurd amount to think about that I was always neglecting something. ‘Glance at the instruments,’ Sean would say. ‘Don’t gaze at them,’ as I became transfixed by, say, the needle of the altimeter, or the rev counter, or the air speed indicator, trying to get it to stay in exactly the right position. A helicopter pilot once told me that the kind of person who made a good flyer was someone who, while driving, could wash/wipe the windscreen, re-tune the radio and overtake simultaneously, without letting this in any way interrupt his conversation. I now saw what he meant. In simple ‘straight and level’ flight I had, simultaneously, to:
Keep the nose level so I wasn’t losing or gaining height.
Stick to within 4-5° of a given compass heading.
Maintain a gentle but continuous pressure on the left rudder pedal to counter the torque of the propeller and the effect of the slipstream it put over the right wing on to the fin, so that the ball remained central in the slip indicator.
Keep a roving eye on the engine temperature, rev counter, altimeter, and air speed gauges—not to mention regular checks of the fuel level.
Look out, continuously, for birds and other aircraft, and—most importantly—a suitable field for landing in case of engine failure.
This before I contemplated a manoeuvre. Fortunately, we did not have a radio, so I was spared having to keep the ‘tower’ informed of my actions in the dense and impenetrable jargon of radio-telephony.
The result was that it was never until the end of each lesson that I seemed to get the hang of it, only to find that the hour had pinged by and time was up.
Around the Tuesday a change came over Richard. It was just after he had taken his Air Law exam. Richard, like Lester, had a considerable head start on Dan and me. Having only recently acquired his Private Pilot’s Licence in Africa, the Civil Aviation Authority had declared that to be fully ‘legal’ he need only complete a cross-country flight in a Cessna to validate this licence, and then be ‘checked out’ in the Thruster. The one thing he had to do first, however, was sit and pass his UK Air Law exam, something I, too, had to do before I could go solo.
Accordingly, we had both been desultorily cramming the air law statutes detailed in CAP 85: A Guide to Aviation Law, Flight Rules and Procedures for Applicants for the Private Pilot’s Licence. CAP 85 was not a racy read. In fact, in both its tone and content it reminded me unpleasantly of my short and lacklustre legal career. It was full of sentences like ‘Pilots flying beneath TCA or SRA should use the QNH of an aerodrome situated beneath that area when flying below transition altitude.’ However, if we were to get our licences, then learn CAP 85 we must. So, at spare moments, we had taken to quizzing each other on such essential questions for the single-engined, non-radio daylight pilot as:
What sign does an aircraft marshaller make to indicate to you to open up your starboard engine?
What Secondary Surveillance Radar code on mode ‘C’ should be used by an aircraft in the event of two-way radio failure?
In level cruise, at the same altitude, at night, what does an anti-collision light together with a green and a white navigation light closing on you on a steady relative bearing of 330° indicate?
Committing the statutes to memory temporarily levelled our relative flying experience, though inevitably Richard was well ahead. The rules of aviation in the UK were not dissimilar to those in Africa and by Monday evening he had felt ready to sit the paper in Sean’s office. Naturally, when I saw him afterwards, I asked how it had gone.
‘How did what go?’
‘You know—the exam. Air Law.’
‘Oh that? Messed up a couple of questions.’
‘Bad luck. Do you have to do it again?’
‘No. You only have to get 70 per cent to pass.’
‘You got more than 70 per cent? What did you get?’
‘98 per cent. Stupid mistakes too.’
Gone was the shared ‘novices-at-this-absurd-activity-together’ attitude of before. Nor, over the rest of the evening and the following day, did it return. Outwardly, he was the same as ever, good-humoured, friendly, affable. Only when it came to matters of aviation was his tone altered. It had acquired a didactic note. Where previously he had responded to a casually inane remark about the Thruster being like a tennis ball to land with a sympathetic nod, a murmur of agreement and, perhaps, a close shave that he had had that morning, now he responded seriously, taking the opportunity to dispense some advice that might help me deal with my difficulty. It wasn’t that I minded, or that I didn’t think it was justified—I was happy to receive all the help I could. But we were no longer equals and, for the first time, I felt the chilly draught of my inexperience and the catching up that had to be done.
Having passed the exam, Tuesday afternoon was scheduled for Richard’s qualifying cross-country flight in one of the club Cessnas. He had been checked out in the morning by one of the club instructors, and by the time we went to lunch his superiority had reached a peak. The Thruster and microlighting generally now sounded a very poor relation indeed alongside the ‘necessarily more rigorous’ disciplines of ‘general aviation’. As, after lunch, he prepared his route, drawing lines, measuring angles, confidently turning the dial of his flight calculator as he filled out his flight plan, his involved and excluding air of competence made me feel my inferiority keenly.
‘Good luck,’ I said, as I went off for my lesson.
‘See you later, Antony.’
It was about five o’clock, after an extended lesson with Sean, that I next saw Richard. As I entered the clubhouse, there was the sound of raised voices. ‘What the fuck did you think you were doing?’ one shouted angrily. ‘Think how this makes the club look. “Leave it,’ said another. ‘This is for the CAA.’ Three figures with epaulettes on their shoulders were taking it in turns to berate an unhappy-looking fourth person—Richard.
Piecing together what happened afterwards, it seemed that Richard had filed his flight plan and checked out for departure in accordance with standard procedures. Taking off, he struck north-west. Unfortunately, it seemed that he had omitted to check the club notice-board for information about local events, or, once airborne, to change his radio from the Barsham local frequency to the area frequency, Norwich Control or RAF Marham. Oblivious, he had entered the Marham Military Air Traffic Zone panhandle, crossing the approach to the main runway as a pair of Tornadoes were on final approach to land. The RAF, anxious to know who was trespassing in their air space without contacting them at such a time, put out calls on both their own frequency and the Norwich frequency. They were unable to raise Richard, who was by this time circling overhead at Sandringham, an opportunity, he told me, that seemed too good to miss—but unaware that, with the flag indicating royalty in residence, this was prohibited, purple air space. Tiring of this, and still oblivious to the now considerable ground-efforts to contact him, Richard continued round the coast towards Great Yarmouth.
Further trauma was to follow as he crossed the approach to the main runway of Norwich International Airport. Had he called, as he was supposed to, to check Temporary Restricted Airspace, he would have been aware of the Red Arrows coming over that afternoon. As it was, he was overhead as the famous jets, in close formation, were arriving at 1,000 feet across the North Sea. When their on-board radar indicated conflicting traffic, they aborted their approach, but, again, went unnoticed by Richard. Attempts to contact the unidentified Cessna from the ground now became something of an aviation priority in East Anglia, as Norwich air traffic control worked through all the likely frequencies without success. The Cessna’s markings were finally reported visually by another plane to Norwich. They identified the plane as belonging to the Norwich and East of England Aero Club, whom they contacted by phone.
Richard, meanwhile—well-pleased with how easily his cross-country was passing off—now turned west for his homeward leg. Unfortunately he opted to do so at 1,200 feet in the busy Cromer Helicopter Corridor to North Denes heliport, prohibited space for fixed-wing traffic. Breezing into the circuit overhead at Barsham Green, perhaps used to non-radio approaches in the Thruster, he neglected to call up the tower. As he could see no other planes in the circuit and the windsock indicated little or no wind, he decided to land as he pleased, forgetting to check the designated direction of take-off and landing displayed in the ground signals area in front of the clubhouse. Hurtling in downwind on the side of the airfield reserved exclusively for the gliding club, in front of a glider on the point of launch, he taxied briskly over to the apron, pulled up and got ready to report a successful flight. It was only then that he discovered that the effect of his actions, broadly speaking, had been like kicking an ants’ nest.
Richard’s confidence was dented by this incident, but dented less than I might have imagined. As I would discover with flying faux pas, so long as nothing and no one has got hurt, the fuss quickly dies down. By Wednesday lunchtime the pursed lips, shaking heads and mutterings of the club instructors had turned to wisecracks. Richard was told that, so long as he agreed to re-sit his radio-telephony exam, he would not be reported to the CAA and he might consider the matter closed. I received the incident with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it served Richard right; he had only got what he deserved. There was the strangely reassuring comfort of seeing a good friend in trouble, and the overall result was a return to the happy status quo of ‘us versus aviation’. On the other hand, if Richard, born administrator and high priest of procedures, could make this kind of cock-up, what hope was there for me?
My concerns, however, had no chance to get any further, as, later on Wednesday, there came a far more dramatic setback: one which brought all our flying to an abrupt halt.
It was about quarter to seven, on another perfect, cloudless summer evening. Richard, now officially checked out to fly the Thruster solo, had gone off on a local flight. Sean was in the hangar briefing a pupil. I was sprawled on the grass outside with a ring binder of loose-leaf pages I had come across in Sean’s office entitled Thrsuter (sic) Pilot’s and Operator’s Handbook. It was an interesting document. The down-stroke of the ‘A’ of the ‘Thruster Air Services’ company logo zoomed with a swoop, a steep climb and a flourish round and through the other words in a graphic representation of a vapour trail, culminating in what was equally unmistakably the silhouette of a jet fighter. It seemed an ambitious image for a company selling a flying machine which had, screwed to the centre of its instrument panel, a plate stating ‘ALL AEROBATIC MANOEUVRES STRICTLY FORBIDDEN’. A machine, moreover, which was, even in a brisk tailwind, unlikely to exceed a ground speed of 70 knots.
Anyway, the writing style was breezy, talking, as it did, of a return to the golden age of aviation, where pilots must rediscover the instincts of the seat of their pants rather than relying on fancy instruments. I could almost hear the Australian accent (the Thruster was an Australian design; used, someone had said, to shoot dingos and, fitted with klaxons, to herd sheep): ‘Stalls: this little baby has had many a pilot lying six foot under…’ when my reveries were interrupted by a flexwing speeding up to the hangar entrance. Leaving the engine still running, the passenger jumped out and rushed into the hangar yelling for Sean.
Something was clearly up. A strict rule of the club was never to have engines running near the open hangar door as it could whip up grit and sand which might damage the machines inside. I could not hear what was said, above the engine. But I saw Sean stiffen, drop what he was doing immediately, and, without bothering to put on his ozee suit or gloves, jump aboard the trike, take the controls from the pilot, and take off from where they were. They were airborne before they had even left the tarmac apron for the grass of the airfield.
I got up and walked over to the figure left behind. ‘What’s up?’
‘There’s a Thruster down in a cornfield. Looked like the one we’d seen round here.’
The sentence took a moment to sink in, as my mind searched furiously for ways to explain, parry, reject or somehow defuse the information it contained. A fearsome, disorientating dread washed over me, accompanied by a slightly sick nausea. This was joined, it must be said, by a pulse of pure excitement, stabbing through the gentle glow of the evening.
It had to be Richard.
There were no other Thrusters. Not round here, anyway. In any case, the man had said as much. ‘Looked like the one we’d seen round here.’
I stared, slightly deranged, at the hangar in the yellow evening sunlight, the dangling windsock, the club Cessnas, the warm green of the landing field, all so friendly and charming a moment before. Now, I noticed them again. They looked different, dangerous, threatening… as if they were the final image of flying I was to take away with me as my memory singled out this moment for saving and filing with a burnt-in time code. Not because it was contented like the one before, but because this was when I heard that Richard had been killed.
Had he? That was the question. Was his body, even at that moment, slumped in the smashed wreckage of the Thruster?
‘Was…was the pilot okay?’
‘Couldn’t see. Looked as if the machine had nosed over.’
This wasn’t part of the plan. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Thoughts flooded through my head. What could have happened? Had the Thruster broken up in mid-air? Christ, how horrifying was that? I had been in it only an hour before: it might have been me. Had everyone been right after all? Were these machines just death traps? Why had we trusted them? Were we out of our minds? Placing our lives in the hands of a company who could not even spell their name right on the cover of the handbook?
And, round and round, again and again: Richard. Could he really be dead? No more Richard. What would I do without him? Who would be my best mate? What about our flying plans? What about our holiday? Who would I share the flat with? What would I say to his parents?
Of course, if he really were dead…it did give our hobby quite an exotic, boulevardier ring…and it certainly highlighted the risks we were facing—and consequently our extraordinary courage to have taken up such an activity—not to mention providing an eminently good reason to give up…tchaaargh…how could I think such things? About Richard…my best mate. At a time when he may be dead.
DEAD.
I felt ashamed I had pinched his bacon at breakfast without telling him. What a childish and odious thing to have done. The maddening impotence of my situation took hold. All I could do was hang about, waiting for further information. If he weren’t dead, what shape was he likely to be in? What was the most likely injury from a flying accident? Spine presumably. Jesus. And the ambulance had not even been called yet. There wasn’t even anyone I could talk to. I did not know what to do. I certainly couldn’t continue reading the Thruster Handbook. It no longer seemed an amusing example of the quirky charms of amateurism. It had become a chilling testament to the idiocy of not doing things properly.
For fifteen minutes I paced about in an agony of lonely imaginings, until one of the white-shirted Cessna instructors came out of the Portakabin. I had seen him around but had never spoken to him before. ‘You Tony?’ His face and voice were kind and reassuring. ‘Sean’s been on the radio. It’s OK. Your mate’s had an accident but he’s fine.’ He paused, then gave a sniff. ‘Doesn’t have much luck, does he?’
It would be wrong to say that the news of Richard’s survival came as a blow. But it would be equally wrong to say that it was not in some way anti-climactic. Perhaps preparing myself for the worst, as a defence mechanism, I had decided that Richard was definitely dead, or—at the very least—badly injured. Now, as I sat down on the ground again, the planes, the hangar, the summer evening all came up for emotional re-evaluation in the light of this information update. Relief flooded over me, and I felt exhausted. But, now that his survival was not in doubt, I also felt annoyed at having been put through the trauma. Now that the drama was over, all that remained was tedious information gathering and—no doubt—clearing up. There was a sense of let-down; and, with it, of irritation. Richard was okay, I told myself. That was the main thing. He was fine. But our plane? Was that fine? A flood of less charitable thoughts entered my head. Was the machine damaged? If so, how badly? Did it mean we would miss any flying tomorrow? At that moment, Sean arrived back.
‘Ugh!’ he groaned, shaking his head mournfully. ‘Why did he have to choose standing corn? There are lovely fields all round here, and he chose one of standing corn. Phwah! She was running lovely as well. Come on.’ He slung a battered metal tool box into the back of his van. ‘I dunno. You boys.’
It took some time to locate Richard from the deep lanes running between high hedges that divided the fields to the south-east of Barsham Green village. At length Sean spotted a yellow combine through the hedge which he remembered was working nearby and we parked in a gateway.
When Sean had flown over, Richard had been standing beside the plane, waving. It had been impossible to see how much damage had been done to the plane. Now I could just see the tail of the stricken Thruster sticking up over the standing corn, with Richard, expressionless, alongside. Sean grabbed his tool box and I followed his clanking progress round the edge of the field, brushing flies and insects from my face and arms.
The Thruster was a sorry sight. Her propeller was broken, splintered at both ends. Several spars were bent. The pod was torn and gashed on one side. Dust, straw and heads of corn littered the cockpit. With the arrival of the combine from the adjoining field—the farmer obligingly cut a swathe up to and around the Thruster—clouds more dust and chaff were blown into every nook they had not already reached. ‘She lost all power,’ began Richard. ‘I went as far as I could but I couldn’t maintain height.’
‘They’re so reliable, these engines. So reliable,’ said Sean, shaking his head and making what point I’m not sure as he set to with a spanner. ‘Are you sure you weren’t hearing things?’
I do not know whether I was expecting some kind of apology or, at least, some word of regret from Richard. If I was, I didn’t get it.
‘So it didn’t exactly fail,’ I said, realizing, as I said it, that it was perhaps not the most helpful comment to have made. Irritated by Richard’s bland lack of remorse or—I suppose—injury, I wanted to prompt some reaction out of him. He said nothing. ‘Well, so long as you’re all right. That’s the main thing,’ I said, viciously.
It was nine thirty and getting dark before we dropped our sad freight—de-rigged, on the farmer’s trailer—back at the hangar. She looked very forlorn as, in the darkening gloom, we laid the wings on the dusty cement of the hangar floor, then manhandled the pod and fuselage into a corner. I wanted Sean to reassure me that the Thruster could be mended tomorrow and we could be flying again by tomorrow afternoon, that I could still get my licence by the end of next week. He saw my face. ‘Look, this is flying. It happens. At least no one got hurt.’
As Richard and I drove home neither of us spoke. Partly it was tiredness. But there was an unresolved heaviness between us, something more than tiredness and disappointment. Nor was anything said next morning, when we watched Sean, notebook in hand, pick carefully over the Thruster to order up the necessary parts. In fact, neither of us ever mentioned the incident again.
We were now at a loose end. We had booked two weeks holiday and it was only Thursday of the first week. It was going to take a couple of days at least for the replacement parts to arrive, a couple more after that for Sean to find time to fit them (this was his busiest time of year). I was bitterly disappointed. We debated reading by the pool at Salsingham. But on Friday morning we were discovered by Mr Watson and, after assisting him to clear a land drain, it became clear that lasting peace was not to be found there.
Over the next few days we drove up to the north Norfolk coast near Holkham, drank in pubs and walked on the beach. We joined the queues of cars that threaded their way around the Broads. We visited Houghton Hall. We went to see films in Norwich. It was fine; if only it was what we had wanted to be doing. As if to taunt us, the heat wave continued: each morning dawned insolently cloudless, windless and perfect. By the following Tuesday night, Sean had the Thruster back in one piece. The pod was still cracked like an eggshell in two places, with splints of glass fibre poking out of the tear. Straw and stray seeds of corn were still lodged in corners and crevices. The wings and tail had picked up a number of minor scuffs and gashes and streaks of oil and grime in transit.
We had four days of holiday left, but by then the weather had turned. The sky was overcast and the wind had got up. It was too blustery, Sean said, for novice instruction. I fitted in two more lessons, mainly at my insistence, but I seemed to have forgotten everything. With just eight hours recorded in my log book, I returned to London.
Despite the disappointment of the holiday, the sun seemed to have come back out on life. Advertising was booming. Creative departments, which had an evocative (pre-digital) aroma of Magic Markers, Spraymount and ArtClean were exciting places to work. My days alternated pleasantly between flirting with three minxy secretaries, sitting in our Chinatown office with my feet on the desk trying to shoe-horn celebrities I wished to meet into scripts, and trying to swing location shoots. I spent happy periods pottering in Soho and got out of the office on periodic factory visits or to one of the sound studios, editing suites or post-production facilities sprinkled through the basements of Soho. When times were quiet, I went to matinée cinema performances in Leicester Square. Voice-over recordings gave me the chance to patronise famous actors like John Hurt and Ian Holm (‘Bit more emphasis on the ‘U’ please, John. Equip-U-Office Equipment. That’s it, John, you’ve got it’).
We now automatically headed for Norfolk every weekend unless there was an overpowering reason not to. For some reason, the image from Out of Africa where Meryl Streep reaches back for Robert Redford’s hand in the flying scene above the clouds had lodged in my head. Already, I had visions of the Thruster carrying myself and a young model or actress that I might shortly meet on a shoot or at a casting session, plus a bottle or two of champagne and, perhaps, a few blinis, to a quiet area of Holkham beach. A slightly different version found us amongst the cow parsley of a shaded but sun-dappled corner of some unknowing farmer’s field, wrestling for the last morsel of a ripe peach as the juice ran down our chins. All that lay between me and these promising daydreams was the minimum twenty-five hours of flying time (with instructor or supervised solo), my General Flight Test, and a few straightforward multiple-choice ground exams. I imagine some similar idea was in Richard’s head.
Accordingly, we fell into a more-or-less standard routine. On Friday night we would drive up to Salsingham, ready for me to take a lesson with Sean the next morning. In the afternoon I would switch to the passenger seat, and Richard, now fully legal, and I would head off together on a cross-country flight. On Sunday the process would be repeated, after which, tired but fulfilled, we would head back to London. This was the idea anyway. But the weather did not return to the clement skies of our summer holiday, and with Sean a lot busier at weekends it was hard to determine how instructive these weekends were. With less time to become immersed in the flying, I often arrived for my lesson still distracted by the week’s unsolved advertising problems and unmet deadlines. The period between putting away the Thruster on Sunday evening, and getting back into the cockpit (if all went well) the following Saturday morning, seemed like a lifetime.
By the end of August I could take off and fly straight and level pretty competently (as, Richard pointed out, anyone could). I could feel if the nose was too high or too low. I could do gentle and medium turns, both climbing and descending. And I could do full-power steep turns sufficiently accurately that the ball of the slip indicator remained roughly central in its window, and I felt the blast of air of my own wake as I completed the turn (Sean’s more rough and ready definition of a perfect turn). Descending, I didn’t need to check the air speed indicator to know when I was going between 50-55 knots: I could feel by the back pressure on the stick.
However, when it came to landing, everything went to pieces.
I just could not get it right. Some people, I suppose, simply have a better sense of space and distance than others. I found the whole exercise of gauging an even, controlled descent from an altitude of around 1,000 feet down to a few feet off the ground at a specified spot in the landscape, by co-ordinated adjustment of throttle, ailerons, elevators and rudder, virtually impossible. Even if I did manage it, once I was down to near ground level, getting the Thruster smoothly onto the turf was another matter altogether. All might be well down to fifteen or ten feet from the ground. Sean would say something encouraging like ‘Nice. Very nice. That’s a perfect approach. This is going to be good, I can feel it.’ Then, when we were a foot or two from the ground, it would all go wrong. I would flare out (the action of rounding from a descending attitude to a level one just above the surface of the runway) too early, stall too high above the ground, crash down and bounce. I would flare out too late, slam into the ground, and bounce. Even if I flared out just right, and got the wheels onto the ground, she just would not stay there. With a mind of her own she would leap into the air again in a series of terrific balloons and kangaroo-like bounces. Each time Sean would have to take over and bring her back under control. Lesson after lesson went by doing nothing but landings, landings and landings.
At one stage I thought I had it, and so did Sean. ‘One more like that,’ he would say, ‘and you can go solo.’ Then I would mess up the next one. It became a familiar routine. Each lesson he would say, ‘Right. We’ll get you solo this time Ants,’ and the end of the lesson would come and the matter wouldn’t be mentioned again. At other times he would say, doubtfully, ‘I don’t know, Ants, maybe I should send you solo. It might be the best way.’
It began to depress me. My knowledge—buttressed by Sean’s repeated assurances—that the Thruster was, even by tail-dragger standards, an exceptionally difficult plane to land, had made it an exciting challenge to start with. But any reassurance that had conferred had long since begun to ring hollow. The others, including Dan, had all gone solo ages ago.
I constructed reasons and explanations for myself. Richard had already done his licence. So had Mr Watson. Dan, living in Norfolk, had access to the plane in good weather on a regular basis, while I had to take my chances at weekends: in any one hour lesson I got, at the most (by the time I had completed each circuit), only eight attempts at landing. But the fact remained that I had now done eleven hours of flying—twenty-five if you included my hours in Africa—and I still hadn’t gone solo. It had become an issue. In every account of learning to fly that I had read, the subject had gone solo in a quarter of the time. Roald Dahl in Going Solo had done it in seven hours forty minutes. Cecil Lewis in Sagittarius Rising had soloed his Maurice Farman Longhorn after an hour and twenty minutes. An hour and twenty minutes. I even recalled that James Herriot had learnt to fly and when I looked up Vet in a Spin I discovered he had done it in nine hours. In the Battle of Britain seventeen-year-olds—seventeen-year-olds—were flying Spitfires—Spitfires—after the time I had been flying. I began to feel resentful and bitter. Why did the plane have to be stuck in Norfolk? Why was I saddled with such a lousy instructor? Why was I pouring money into this pointless activity?
I had almost accepted that landing aeroplanes was one of those talents, like rolling hose-pipes or folding maps, that either you had or hadn’t when, one showery Saturday morning on the last day of August, I did three passable landings in succession—and Sean told me to take her up alone. ‘Remember, with only one, she’ll climb much faster,’ he said. I felt far from confident.
Sean was right. Without a passenger aboard I seemed to be in the air almost before the throttle was fully open. She leapt off the ground, and once airborne seemed much lighter too, bouncing around a lot more. I was at 800 feet, the height at which I normally executed a gentle climbing turn into the crosswind leg, before I was two thirds of the way down the runway. It felt hideously lonely looking to my right and seeing, where Sean should have been, just an empty seat, with the safety harness buckled across it. By the time I reached the point where I normally turned crosswind I was already at 1,200 feet and realised that I should be levelling off. I reduced the power to the usual 5,700 rpm, but the Thruster continued to climb furiously—1,250, 1,300, 1,400 feet. I had to reduce the power to 5,000 rpm before the altimeter needle finally held steady. As I repeated Sean’s rule to myself (‘Attitude, Power, Trim’), for the first time I remembered the trimmer; I had forgotten to set it at all. Already it was time to turn onto the downwind leg. And—what was I thinking of?—I was almost halfway round the circuit and I hadn’t given a thought to what would happen if the engine failed. I should have been scouring the ground for suitable fields. And this is what I was busy doing when, suddenly, I was engulfed in cloud.
I didn’t see it coming. It must have been some low stuff, sweeping across on the breeze, as it had been all morning. I must have climbed into its path by levelling off so high.
Had I kept my head I might have guessed that, if I only lost a little height or maintained my heading for a few moments, I must soon get clear. I was in no mood for keeping my head however: this was my first solo. Suddenly engulfed in a dense, impenetrable white-out, my stripped, disorientated senses screamed helplessly for information. I scanned the instruments desperately for clues. But my mind refused to tell me what was relevant and what was not. Which dial could help? What information mattered? The readings began to leap out at me as my eyes flicked from one to another. Not to stall, that was the main thing; so I opened the throttle and lowered the nose.
After a few moments more, my only clear sensation was that I was about to fall out of the left-hand side of the cockpit: I could actually feel my weight against the strap of the harness. So to level the plane, I moved the stick tight. This failed to correct the sensation which in fact grew stronger. So I moved the stick as far right as it would go. Knowing I should accompany this with some right rudder, for a moment I became transfixed by trying to centre the ball in the slip indicator.
Then, as suddenly as it arrived, the cloud was gone. I was spiralling in a near vertical right-hand turn over the centre of what should have been my final approach. There was the airfield directly ahead. My spell of blind flying must have lasted a matter of thirty or forty seconds at the most.
I levelled the wings, reduced the power and got her down. It was not great. I bounced a couple of times. But I got her down. The relief was overwhelming. I had done it. It had been close, but I had gone solo and brought the aircraft and myself back in one piece. The cloud which had contributed so much grief had disappeared as fast as it had come and already, as I started to taxi back to the hangar, the sun was shining. Everything seemed so normal and ordinary and safe now I was back on the ground. There was Sean standing by the hangar chatting to someone; it didn’t look as if he had even noticed my drama. There was a Cessna, starting its engine. The terror in the clouds of just a few minutes before seemed from another world. It felt ridiculous and absurd to feel so shaken. ‘There you are, Ants, wasn’t so bad was it?’ said Sean.
‘No problem,’ I said.
I could not manage a smile.
The flight entry in my log book for 31 August at 11.40 was the first where, in the ‘Captain’ column, the word ‘SELF’ appeared, instead of Sean’s name. The flight lasted ten minutes. In the ‘Remarks’ column, Sean wrote in his characteristic handwriting, ‘17a’, which consultation of the necessary manuals would reveal as ‘solo flight’. It ought to have been a red-letter day, the most significant of any pilot’s training, and it was, in a way. I had done it, it was true. I was equal with the others again. On the other hand, it had not been quite the neat, clean, tidy line between the uncertainty of the past and the promise of the future that I might have hoped. I had winged it, and I knew it.
Sean suggested that I have lunch, then afterwards go out and do an hour or two of circuits and bumps to consolidate the good work. But by three o’clock the showery weather had set in, the wind was gusty, and, almost relieved, I had to call it a day.
The next day, the first of September, was fine and clear. As I took off to do some circuits, it felt almost normal to be alone in the Thruster. I did two circuits; the landings went all right, and I began to relax. But on my third circuit, as I came in to land, the machine went into a series of the old, kangaroo bounds. They were hard ones, too, each one sending her bucking and vaulting back into the air, higher and higher. Uncertain what to do, I jabbed the stick this way, then that, in an effort to regain control. To no avail. The bounces seemed to get bigger and more and more uneven, as the Thruster crashed heavily down first on one wheel, then the other. One descent was so dramatic that I thought she might go right over onto her nose. I cut the engine completely, and finally she came to rest.
It had been close, there was no question of that: I had been lucky to get away with it. I got out, started the engine and made to taxi back to the hangar. However, I found that I had to rev the engine nearly to full throttle to get her to move at all. The controls, too, had become stiff and awkward. She would not taxi in a straight line: only in an ungainly crabbing motion to the right. Distraught and furious with self-hatred, engine screaming to overcome the resistance, I finally got her to the hangar where I sheepishly confessed to my ‘hard’ landing. Sean cast an expert eye over her, ducking his head over and under the pod. He narrowed his eyes. He wagged the stick backwards and forwards. He chewed his bottom lip. Then he made his pronouncement.
‘A write-off,’ he said. ‘If not, a complete rebuild.’
He was right. To my innocent eye the plane might hardly have looked damaged, but closer inspection revealed the awful truth. Almost every spar and strut and joining plate was very slightly wrenched out of true, or bore the tiny tell-tale stretch marks, whitening or slight distortion that indicated buckling, twisting, fatigue or strain. Several people in the clubhouse, it transpired, had enjoyed a ring-side view of my performance, and with grinding teeth I contemplated what they must have said to each other. ‘Thought you were going to go over there for a moment,’ said one with a smile. ‘Didn’t really hold off enough, did you?’ said another. I didn’t know what he meant, but the cautious confidence which had followed my solo flight of the day before, evaporated. I felt humiliated and ashamed. The thought of confessing to the Watsons made me squirm. It was hardly as if there were mitigating cirumstances: it was a perfect, still, summer’s day, in a nearly new machine, performing faultlessly on the largest grass airfield in Europe. And I had written off the plane. What a pilot.
For me personally, of course, the implications were severer still. I might have gone solo, but what was the gain? With flying suspended for the foreseeable future, the incontrovertible evidence remained: I still could not land.
The Cows Just Got Smaller (#ulink_aa4c5124-0ea6-5f2e-8aee-54ca9172f878)
New Rules of the Air 1998
Rule 1: If it is not too windy, it will be too wet to fly today.
Rule 2: If it is not too windy or too wet, it will be too unstable to fly today.
Rule 3: If it is not too windy, too wet or too unstable, it will be too cold to fly today.
Rule 4: If it is not too windy, too wet, too unstable or too cold, the visibility will be too low to fly today.
Rule 5: If it is not too windy, too wet, too unstable, too cold or too murky to fly today, the aircraft will be unserviceable.
Rule 6: If it is calm, dry, stable, warm and clear today, and the aircraft is serviceable, you will have unbreakable commitments elsewhere.
Professor B.J. Brinkworth, Microlight Flying, November 1998
For weeks the mere thought of flying made me miserable and depressed. Mr Watson’s stupefied, ‘What? Not again!’ when I had informed him that the Thruster would be out of action ‘for a short time’, still rang witheringly in my ears. The first invoices of what Sean promised would be a considerable repair bill had already come in, and I was having seriously to entertain the possibility that landing the machine was altogether beyond me (I wasn’t sure how keen I was to get back into the cockpit, anyway). In fact, if it had been possible to back out of the whole project at that point, pay off the Watsons, and bail out, I might have done so. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
There had already been far too much easy talk about our aerial exploits, both to the girls at work and amongst my friends. The Watsons—especially Mr Watson—Salsingham, Sean, Carter, the Thruster, the ‘Norwich and Eastern’—all were rich seams to mine in banter and chat, and mined they had been, to capacity. The London flat, The Rachel Papers-fashion, had become propped with flying paraphernalia: photographs of us and the Thruster taken on our July holiday, Barsham Green, Salsingham, the Thruster in the cornfield. One of our big 1:500,000 aviation charts of the south of England decorated the kitchen wall, and very impressive it looked, with all its control zones and airways (especially around Heathrow and Gatwick). Books with titles like Advanced Aerobatics, Bush Pilot, Mountain Flying and Weather for Pilots had found their way onto the table in the living room, along with one of our rulers graduated in nautical miles. A flight calculator sat on the stereo. In the bathroom, Flightline had joined the rumpled soaked-and-dried-out copies of The Face and Richard’s copies of the Spectator.
The two awkward incidents that neither of us mentioned to each other, we found ways of glossing over to friends. Richard’s accident was a typical example of the kind of life-threatening situation that these machines routinely placed one in; the tacit implication being that only quick reflexes and presence of mind had saved him. Our present lack of an aircraft—with its absence of a single mitigating circumstance—merely served to underline what dogs to handle they were, even under the very best flying conditions.
And it worked. Already we had acquired a gratifying whiff of romantic daring and amateur enterprise, which we made no attempt to play down. Microlighting was still an eccentric novelty sport. We had become known as ‘the aviators’. People talked about us. I was too far down the runway—so to speak—to pull out. I was ‘committed’. Besides, from a purely personal angle, it would have been unacceptable to admit defeat now. The Thruster had begun to annoy me. I could still hear Geoff’s stinging challenge from the Popham trip: ‘a lot of people find it impossible…only a few can learn to land a tail-dragger’.
It was November before the Thruster was ready. After the two months back in London, the Watsons and the events of the summer had already become as remote and unreal as a half-remembered dream. Even Richard had disappeared from my life, having been sent away to a regional branch of the bank for one of his interminable training courses. But Guy Fawkes day, a Saturday, found me standing in the hangar with Sean—my first solo trip to Norfolk—inspecting the repaired Thruster.
The cockpit had been completely rebuilt. There were new aluminium spars, new wing struts and, in place of the former ‘flimsy’ (Sean’s word, not mine) aluminium main axle linking the leaf springs of the undercarriage—the part which took the brunt of the strain of any heavy landing—he had inserted a stout box-sectioned girder of mild steel. ‘To stop you culling her again, hopefully,’ he said. Even with all her new parts, the Thruster still bore signs of her skirmishes. Sean had not had time to repair the gashes in the pod from Richard’s accident (there were still grains of corn, chaff and straw in nooks and crevices), and the wings, from their second sojourn on the hangar floor, had acquired more smears of oil and grime.
It was the first time I had been to Norfolk since the summer, and Barsham was a very different place. The sky was the colour of grubby pillowcases, the ground was sodden and most of the leaves were off the trees. The air smelled of damp and autumn, and the big windsock twirled and flapped restlessly.
The flying conditions, Sean said, were borderline, but having come all the way up, I insisted we try. He said it was too gusty to practise landings, and directed me away from the airfield to practise general handling. What little technique I had acquired over the summer seemed to have deserted me, as the machine bucked and rocked in the gusts. Sean kept having to take the controls to steady her. After twenty minutes he said, ‘This is pointless, Ants. You’re not going to learn a thing,’ and the lesson was abandoned. ‘Look, we’ll try again this afternoon, if you want. The wind may have dropped a bit by then.’ But by three o’clock it was hardly better, and though we went up for a full hour this time, I was only left more confused. By four, as we came back over the airfield, car headlights were visible on the A47 and yellow lights shone from the windows of the houses in Barsham village and the outlying farms.
On Sunday, I called Sean from Salsingham after breakfast. The row of poplars in front of the north front of the house—my wind index—still rustled unceasingly, but I was determinedly hopeful that conditions might be better at Barsham. I would learn in due course what a naive hope this was. If the poplars even twitched at Salsingham, it meant that at Barsham, with its huge expanse of open ground, there would be a stiff breeze; if they were rustling, it would be blowing a gale. Sean sounded as if he was still in bed. ‘Ants, look out of the window. Look, it’s not my fault. It’s just the way it goes.’
I had not considered the weather a barrier to flying before—or, indeed, in relation to anything before. Nor had it struck me that, in winter, flying time would be dramatically reduced by the shorter period of daylight. All the flying I had done so far, both in Africa and earlier in the year, had been in fair weather. Through August it had never been so bad that Sean had cancelled a lesson (though sometimes he had suggested waiting until the evening when the wind dropped). September and October had been settled and fine, in London anyway. While obviously some days were better than others for flying, the almost complete weather-dependence of the activity had not occurred to me.
And so began an inordinately frustrating period. Impatient to sort out my landing problems, I determinedly headed for Norfolk at every possible opportunity. From Wednesday onwards, I would telephone Weathercall daily, to listen to the three-day forecast for East Anglia. It was, invariably, utterly noncommittal. The recorded voice (which I came to know like an old friend) told me of unending ‘areas of low pressure coming in from the Atlantic’. On television these became translated, by Ian McCaskill, into handy catch-all symbols of a cloud, with a bit of a cheery yellow sun peeping out behind, plus—to cover every option—two fat raindrops. The key piece of information that I required—wind strength—was not supplied. On the ground at Barsham Green, this could mean anything at all, from howling Fenland gales to nondescript East Anglian murk (a regional speciality I now learnt) whereby the fields and hedgerows beyond the windsock on the far side of the airfield faded away into white winter gloom. Every Friday I would call Sean and he would say, ‘Dunno, Ants. It’s very unsettled at the moment, so it’s hard to say. Check the forecast, you might be all right’. This, because it was not an emphatic no, I would take as an OK, and set out.
What motivated this almost deranged determination to head for Norfolk under such blatantly unpromising circumstances? The fact was that my mission had acquired a new urgency since Richard had become officially ‘legal’ to fly the Thruster. With his seduction platform up and running, he was already making vigorous attempts to exploit it, issuing casual invitations for flying weekends to practically everyone he met. I, on the other hand—still unable to fly except as Sean’s pupil (or Richard’s passenger)—had, as yet, little to gain: for me, the Thruster remained no more than an irksome cost centre, racking up regular and substantial overheads. (Even in London, if Richard were present, the extent to which I could talk up my role with our new toy was greatly restricted. Several times, girls had turned from Richard to me with a half-purred, ‘And you fly too?’ To which, under Richard’s self-satisfied gaze, I was forced into circuitous, defensive explanations, by the end of which all interest had long since evaporated.) The situation was highlighted in the last weekend in November, when Richard’s pretty nineteen-year-old sister, up visiting friends at the University of East Anglia, brought several of them over to Barsham to check out her brother’s new microlight. As if Richard’s salacious satisfaction at this prospect were not enough to endure, my own position of ‘flying partner’—hardly above passenger—permitting me only to assist in such menial chores as cranking open the hangar doors, man-handling the Thruster, refuelling, engine-starting and, apart from that, simply to act as general ground stooge, fielding banal questions from adolescent men, was intolerable. Richard, meanwhile, soaked up wide-eyed attention, gasps of delight and clinging female hands in the air. Accordingly, until this situation could be rectified, my former London life at weekends, was placed on unconditional hold—and strangely, I did not miss it a bit.
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