Propellerhead. Antony Woodward
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…’
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