Propellerhead. Antony Woodward

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 attitude³ 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