The two awkward incidents that neither of us mentioned to each other, we found ways of glossing over to friends. Richard’s accident was a typical example of the kind of life-threatening situation that these machines routinely placed one in; the tacit implication being that only quick reflexes and presence of mind had saved him. Our present lack of an aircraft—with its absence of a single mitigating circumstance—merely served to underline what dogs to handle they were, even under the very best flying conditions.
And it worked. Already we had acquired a gratifying whiff of romantic daring and amateur enterprise, which we made no attempt to play down. Microlighting was still an eccentric novelty sport. We had become known as ‘the aviators’. People talked about us. I was too far down the runway—so to speak—to pull out. I was ‘committed’. Besides, from a purely personal angle, it would have been unacceptable to admit defeat now. The Thruster had begun to annoy me. I could still hear Geoff’s stinging challenge from the Popham trip: ‘a lot of people find it impossible…only a few can learn to land a tail-dragger’.
It was November before the Thruster was ready. After the two months back in London, the Watsons and the events of the summer had already become as remote and unreal as a half-remembered dream. Even Richard had disappeared from my life, having been sent away to a regional branch of the bank for one of his interminable training courses. But Guy Fawkes day, a Saturday, found me standing in the hangar with Sean—my first solo trip to Norfolk—inspecting the repaired Thruster.
The cockpit had been completely rebuilt. There were new aluminium spars, new wing struts and, in place of the former ‘flimsy’ (Sean’s word, not mine) aluminium main axle linking the leaf springs of the undercarriage—the part which took the brunt of the strain of any heavy landing—he had inserted a stout box-sectioned girder of mild steel. ‘To stop you culling her again, hopefully,’ he said. Even with all her new parts, the Thruster still bore signs of her skirmishes. Sean had not had time to repair the gashes in the pod from Richard’s accident (there were still grains of corn, chaff and straw in nooks and crevices), and the wings, from their second sojourn on the hangar floor, had acquired more smears of oil and grime.
It was the first time I had been to Norfolk since the summer, and Barsham was a very different place. The sky was the colour of grubby pillowcases, the ground was sodden and most of the leaves were off the trees. The air smelled of damp and autumn, and the big windsock twirled and flapped restlessly.
The flying conditions, Sean said, were borderline, but having come all the way up, I insisted we try. He said it was too gusty to practise landings, and directed me away from the airfield to practise general handling. What little technique I had acquired over the summer seemed to have deserted me, as the machine bucked and rocked in the gusts. Sean kept having to take the controls to steady her. After twenty minutes he said, ‘This is pointless, Ants. You’re not going to learn a thing,’ and the lesson was abandoned. ‘Look, we’ll try again this afternoon, if you want. The wind may have dropped a bit by then.’ But by three o’clock it was hardly better, and though we went up for a full hour this time, I was only left more confused. By four, as we came back over the airfield, car headlights were visible on the A47 and yellow lights shone from the windows of the houses in Barsham village and the outlying farms.
On Sunday, I called Sean from Salsingham after breakfast. The row of poplars in front of the north front of the house—my wind index—still rustled unceasingly, but I was determinedly hopeful that conditions might be better at Barsham. I would learn in due course what a naive hope this was. If the poplars even twitched at Salsingham, it meant that at Barsham, with its huge expanse of open ground, there would be a stiff breeze; if they were rustling, it would be blowing a gale. Sean sounded as if he was still in bed. ‘Ants, look out of the window. Look, it’s not my fault. It’s just the way it goes.’
I had not considered the weather a barrier to flying before—or, indeed, in relation to anything before. Nor had it struck me that, in winter, flying time would be dramatically reduced by the shorter period of daylight. All the flying I had done so far, both in Africa and earlier in the year, had been in fair weather. Through August it had never been so bad that Sean had cancelled a lesson (though sometimes he had suggested waiting until the evening when the wind dropped). September and October had been settled and fine, in London anyway. While obviously some days were better than others for flying, the almost complete weather-dependence of the activity had not occurred to me.
And so began an inordinately frustrating period. Impatient to sort out my landing problems, I determinedly headed for Norfolk at every possible opportunity. From Wednesday onwards, I would telephone Weathercall daily, to listen to the three-day forecast for East Anglia. It was, invariably, utterly noncommittal. The recorded voice (which I came to know like an old friend) told me of unending ‘areas of low pressure coming in from the Atlantic’. On television these became translated, by Ian McCaskill, into handy catch-all symbols of a cloud, with a bit of a cheery yellow sun peeping out behind, plus—to cover every option—two fat raindrops. The key piece of information that I required—wind strength—was not supplied. On the ground at Barsham Green, this could mean anything at all, from howling Fenland gales to nondescript East Anglian murk (a regional speciality I now learnt) whereby the fields and hedgerows beyond the windsock on the far side of the airfield faded away into white winter gloom. Every Friday I would call Sean and he would say, ‘Dunno, Ants. It’s very unsettled at the moment, so it’s hard to say. Check the forecast, you might be all right’. This, because it was not an emphatic no, I would take as an OK, and set out.
What motivated this almost deranged determination to head for Norfolk under such blatantly unpromising circumstances? The fact was that my mission had acquired a new urgency since Richard had become officially ‘legal’ to fly the Thruster. With his seduction platform up and running, he was already making vigorous attempts to exploit it, issuing casual invitations for flying weekends to practically everyone he met. I, on the other hand—still unable to fly except as Sean’s pupil (or Richard’s passenger)—had, as yet, little to gain: for me, the Thruster remained no more than an irksome cost centre, racking up regular and substantial overheads. (Even in London, if Richard were present, the extent to which I could talk up my role with our new toy was greatly restricted. Several times, girls had turned from Richard to me with a half-purred, ‘And you fly too?’ To which, under Richard’s self-satisfied gaze, I was forced into circuitous, defensive explanations, by the end of which all interest had long since evaporated.) The situation was highlighted in the last weekend in November, when Richard’s pretty nineteen-year-old sister, up visiting friends at the University of East Anglia, brought several of them over to Barsham to check out her brother’s new microlight. As if Richard’s salacious satisfaction at this prospect were not enough to endure, my own position of ‘flying partner’—hardly above passenger—permitting me only to assist in such menial chores as cranking open the hangar doors, man-handling the Thruster, refuelling, engine-starting and, apart from that, simply to act as general ground stooge, fielding banal questions from adolescent men, was intolerable. Richard, meanwhile, soaked up wide-eyed attention, gasps of delight and clinging female hands in the air. Accordingly, until this situation could be rectified, my former London life at weekends, was placed on unconditional hold—and strangely, I did not miss it a bit.
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