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.
