Propellerhead. Antony Woodward

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