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,
