Friday 15th April 1983

I Have Control

This is a bonus post for my paid subscribers. As well as travelling through the British Isles in my story of bunking off, I want to travel back through my life and, most of all, back through my life around aeroplanes. I have had my head in the clouds since I was seven years old when someone took me to Barton Aerodrome near to where I grew up in the back streets of Salford. It may have only been three and a half nautical miles from the back-to-back house I grew up in to the threshold of Runway Two Six Left at Barton but it seemed a world away. There was so much grass, I’d never seen anything like it. Up until that point in my life everybody I had seen looked like they’d just walked out of a Lowry painting: beige, bent over and recovering from a bout of bronchitis. Descending from the skies in the little white and blue aeroplanes were smiling, pink-cheeked people. I decided that these were the people I wanted to be around. This is where I wanted to spend my life.

On Friday 15th April 1983 I don’t live in Salford anymore, now I live in St. Annes-on-Sea on the Lancashire coast, just outside Blackpool. We moved here last year, hoping life would be different, it isn't in many ways. St. Annes is different, though. In Salford we had a hairdresser’s on the corner of our street and in the next street was a corner shop that sold just about anything and everything; sweets, cigarettes, six-inch nails and sliced meats. They said that the only reason you couldn’t buy sliced elephant there is that it wouldn’t fit on the bacon slicer. When we moved to St. Annes there was a baker’s just around the corner and, next door, a milliner’s; I mean, a fucking milliner’s, and it’s not even 1953 or an Ealing film. At the end of our road instead of burnt-out garages we had sand dunes and a beach. That is not Salford.

A fucking Milliner’s

It wasn’t long after we moved here that I joined the air cadets, one of my first friends at my new school was a cadet and suggested I went along. I did and I love it, it’s all about aeroplanes and the instructors know about things I never even dreamed of. One of them, Mr. Massey, seems to know all about navigation and triangles of velocities and things. If I keep on working hard then I can learn about that when I’m a Senior Cadet. For now I’m a First Class Cadet, I passed my exam three weeks ago and got the badge and that means that I’m now allowed to go flying. That’s why we’re waiting outside Woolworth’s for a bus.

It’s my fourteenth birthday. Today I might fly an aeroplane.