15th April 1983
I first posted this on Substack back in December so, unless you have had the great good sense to pay for a subscription and, therefore, have full access to the archive of all my posts, it’s not available to you any longer.
As this is what happened precisely forty-one years ago today, I thought I’d give people a second chance to read it. Call it a birthday gift if you like.
Friday 15th April 1983
It’s my fourteenth birthday. Today I might fly an aeroplane.
I’ve been an air cadet for a smidge over a year (and exactly one year officially) and today I am waiting in St Annes Square with a small group of fellow cadets. We’re waiting for a bus to arrive. When it does, there are already cadets from other squadrons on board and we still have to stop to collect some more on the way to RAF Woodvale just outside Ainsdale on the other side of the Ribble estuary. It’s only twelve miles from St. Anne’s Pier to Ainsdale beach but it’s an hour and a half by bus through Preston and past places I’ve never heard of before: Much Hoole, Moss Houses and Tarleton.
Battle of Britain
When we arrive we all file off the bus and into a big hut, it looks like the kind of place you see on the film Battle of Britain, all made of wood and sitting on the edge of the airfield. There’s one big room with lots of plastic chairs laid out for us and a there’s a screen on the wall at one end. We’re moved around and shouted at by staff cadets, I suppose they’re only three or four years older than us but they seem much more. They all wear green all-in-one flying suits rather than the RAF blue trousers and dark blue shirts we all wear. One day I will get myself a flying suit somehow.
Once they’ve managed to get us sat down and something like quiet, they put on a film. It plays on a noisy projector at the back of the room, sat on a high table. It’s not intended to keep us entertained but to keep us a little bit scared. Cadet John Andrews goes for his first flight in a red and white DeHavilland Chipmunk.
It starts with footage of the Chipmunk flying through the air above green fields and music borrowed from a particularly poor seventies porn film. It then cuts to shots of the pilot talking to the cadet in the back cockpit of the aeroplane. These bits are quite obviously filmed on the ground with the cameraman bobbing the camera around a bit to make it look as though they’re airborne. Both John and his pilot have awfully, terribly nice accents, not like us Northerners. John also wears a light blue shirt and a tie. The narrator on the film is even more 1950’s BBC than the actors. It looks like it was made forty years ago but it’s less than five years old. Perhaps this is what it’s really like down south.
Rarggle dum Nimminy
Even though the film’s not old, it’s been shown four times a week since it was made and the projector is definitely here because it was surplus to wartime requirements, that means the film jumps and skips and slows down and speeds up; making big sections of it unintelligible. So, you end up being told in a cut-glass accent: “It’s very important to rarggle dum nimminy, always remember that and never rimble targ nonfy.” And things like that.
The film does manage to make it clear though that your chances of being alive at the end of today are quite slim and that something as simple as a rogue ballpoint point or the wrong shoes could bring you to your doom. Even making it to the aeroplane seems far from certain.
You wear an inner cloth flying helmet with padded earphones then, over the top of that, a silver “bone dome”, a helmet designed to keep enough of you identifiable for the coroner. The film points out that the walk from this hut to the aeroplane is dangerous with noise and moving aircraft and spinning propellors and everything muffled so you can’t hear someone shouting “Watch out!”.
The film shows John’s flight going wrong, without making it clear that this is all theory and not an everyday occurrence. John is told to abandon the aircraft and take to his parachute.
Jamp, Jamp
The narrator tells us that the pilot will calmly say “Jump, jump.” Though, to us, it sounds more like jamp, jamp.
“Jamp, jamp, sir.” John replies as though he’s been offered a biscuit and politely refused.
It is pointed out that you might be worried about your flight and that you might get sick and that being worried makes it more likely you’ll be sick and that you might now be worried about being sick, too, making vomit more or less a certainty. But don’t worry.
Then the film ends with a shot of John Andrews smiling smugly to himself for no apparent reason given the fact that he’s been through every emergency imaginable. Then there’s some more porn music before the staff cadets inform you that if you’re sick, you’ll have to clean the aeroplane out and none of your friends will ever be able to fly because it’ll take you hours. But don’t worry.
You can watch the film for yourself here.
There’s quite a while before we’ll have the chance to fly so we go and sit outside to watch the aeroplanes, the smell of newly mown grass deeply imprinting itself on the synapses of my largely inner-city brain. The sound of birds and the warmth of the spring sun on my face. Every now and then an aeroplane will start up and taxy out, another will arrive back and taxy in. The sounds, the smells, the sights, may the best days of my life be like this.
Calling My Name
Eventually they call my name and I go back inside. They sit me down on top of a packed parachute and strap it to me, making sure that the straps are tight enough to give me some feeling of security. The butterflies in my stomach now feel more like bats and they are not flying smoothly in formation, they’re darting about wildly. There’s a lap strap on the parachute and then one strap over each shoulder, finally there are two more straps over the top of my thighs, these go through a loop that sits between my legs before and they all connect to a big circular buckle sitting over my belly button. It’s not uncomfortable when I’m sat down.
What isn’t fully explained is that the next time my name is called and I stand up, the straps going through the loop between my legs will suddenly tighten quite considerably and will try to force quite vigorously upwards things which had only quite recently descended. The staff cadet then strides out of the door to the waiting aircraft. I waddled on behind like a chimpanzee, unable to stand fully erect due to the straps and now uncertain if anything else I have will ever stand fully erect after being squashed by these straps. Standing up also pulls the legs of my trousers a good four inches above my shoes making me look like Norman Wisdom off for his first flight.
Emperor Vespasian and Jumbo Jets
We reach the aeroplane and I climb up on the wing as shown, always on the left side of the aircraft. The reason for this, so I’m told, is that the first pilots in the Royal Flying Corps were cavalry officers who were used to mounting their horses from the left-hand side and so simply carried on that tradition. This had begun because, since the days when Vespasian was emperor of Rome, swords had been worn on the left and so it was much easier to throw your right leg over the horse. Two thousand-three hundred and forty-three years ago, Xenophon had pointed out that horses should be mounted from either side, so that they did not acquire sores on one side or develop differently on their left and right. We had forgotten that and were now climbing into our aeroplanes that way. This was probably also why, where pilot and co-pilot sit side-by-side in aeroplanes like the Boeing 747, the captain is always on the left.
In the Chipmunk, though, the pilot sits in the front and the cadet sits behind him. All you ever see of your pilot is the back of their flying helmet with their name in dymo tape and a couple of other bits of information. My pilot is Flight Lieutenant Owen. One of the cadets from another squadron said that his pilot was called Serv Du but it turned out that he wasn’t an Indian gentleman but that this label referred instead to the date when servicing was due on his flying helmet.
The staff cadet settles me in the back seat and connects up my intercom lead and does up five more straps: one for each shoulder, two around my waist and another between my legs. The pilot says hello over the intercom and asks my name. I tell him as the canopy is pulled forward and I am sat underneath this cold frame of struts and Perspex looking out over the red and pale grey wings either side of me with their red, white and blue roundels. The bats are at least now flying in formation, doing rapid circuits of my insides. Flight Lieutenant Owen then taxied the aeroplane out to the runway and opened the throttle. Everything seems to rattle for a few moments and then the rattling stops and the earth begins to fall away. The bats roost and sleep, this is incredible, it’s not like we’re flying, it is like the ground has moved away from us.
Ahead of me the instruments sit under the curved and cracked leather coaming; they show our height and our airspeed, whether we’re turning, climbing or descending and which way we’re headed. We are heading out over the sand dunes and over the sea. Getting higher and higher until the pilot spots a boat and decides to dive at it, the engine throttled back before opening up and climbing away and heading north. He’s telling me about the aeroplane and about the things that we’re passing on the shoreline as we head towards Southport.
I Have Control
Nothing is really sinking in, the sensation of being airborne in this tiny aeroplane is exhilarating. It’s like I’ve taken a drug that makes me feel free. Clattering along the coastline, the pier and boating lake up ahead. I cannot believe that I am getting to do this; me, a lad from the back streets of Salford. I’m not worried, I’m certainly not scared, I am alive.
Then he asks the question.
“Would you like to fly?”
Would I like to fly? Only for half my entire life.
“Put your hands and feet on the controls, okay, you have control.”
“I have control, sir.” I reply in the way that we’ve been briefed. He tells me to try a turn. I move the stick and watch the whole world tip over because of what I’ve done. This is just incredible. I am flying an aeroplane.
I straighten it up again when I’m told to and then try another turn in the opposite direction.
“I have control.”
“You have control, sir.” Before I know it, it’s over. But I’ve done it, I’ve flown an aeroplane.
Happy birthday.