Read the book: «Propellerhead»

Normal for Norwich

95% of the people who own light planes today can’t afford to own them.

A Gift of Wings, Richard Bach

A new Thruster cost £12,000. A private pilot’s licence to fly it required a minimum of twenty-five hours flying time (though we had been warned to allow a great deal more on account of the British weather) of which a large proportion might be ‘dual’ or with an instructor, charged at around £75 per hour. My bank balance stood at £542.62 overdrawn.

Microlighting, it transpired, fell into that select category of sports—alongside base-jumping, wing-walking, sky-diving, motorcycle racing, hang-gliding, free-climbing, sky-boarding—where insurance companies were not tempted by your business, even at a 99 per cent premium. If you had life policies, health insurance or endowment mortgages, all were invalid the moment you set foot in a microlight, or at least until you emerged unscathed. A consequence of this was that, because microlights could not be insured, they could not be hired. You could not, therefore, have a few lessons, acquire a licence, then rent a machine when you felt like flying (as with a Cessna). If you wished to maintain a licence, there was no alternative but to buy a machine. There was the option of buying second-hand, but as Richard said, with an activity of this kind it seemed to make sense to buy new. Thereafter, from the moment it arrived, it was racking up expense in running, maintenance and monthly hangarage charges at whichever airfield we ended up keeping it.

Richard—the bank manager—did the sums. Although we differed in the extent of instruction we required (Richard, having a PPL, only had to apply to the Civil Aviation Authority to adapt his licence), the dismal conclusion was the same. We needed£6,000 each now, plus, for me, another £2,000 for instruction and other expenses, spread over however long it took.

Despite what I might intimate to people unfamiliar with the advertising industry, I was still a junior copywriter. I worked for a tiny advertising ‘boutique’—one of the rash of 1980s start-ups—located above a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. Richard earned slightly more but was only in the black himself because it was a condition of his employment. We were in no position to buy an aircraft. ‘Saying you haven’t got the money, is not a reason,’ said Richard. ‘It’s an excuse. It comes as no surprise to hear you’re trying to back out.’

Richard examined my bank statements and declared that, if I followed his instructions, I should be able to raise a £4,000 loan. He could raise about the same. It was not enough.

We asked one or two friends if they would care to come in on our project, but they had read about microlights in the same newspaper reports that I had and, with gracious thanks, the offer was declined. For a time it looked as if the whole scheme would have to be shelved but then it occurred to me that there must be some central organising body for microlighters, and it must have a newsletter. Why not place an ad there? I rang the BMAA—the British Microlight Aircraft Association—and they told me that their quarterly newsletter, Flightline, could indeed carry an ad if I joined (£12 per year adult member, £18 family), but they were going to press next day. I dictated: Thruster Syndicate. Third or quarter share to buy new plane. 01-381-8533.’

A week or two later, the magazine arrived. It was an engagingly homespun publication full of pictures of offbeat flying machines and advertisements for engines and propellers. I could understand hardly a word. I flicked through to the small ads. On the last page, in the Miscellaneous section, amid advertisements for windsocks (‘8 ft dayglo orange ripstop nylon, ideal for field and private airstrip use’), microlight holidays in the Lake District (‘100 hours minimum flying experience’), Mercury flying suits (‘smart gear at a smart price’), Skymaster recovery parachute (‘full instructions included’), there it was.

There were no responses.

Towards the end of April, letting myself into the flat, I just caught the phone. ‘Hullo. Hullo. The name’s Watson. Lester Watson.’ It was an educated male voice, my parents’ age, disengaged but authoritative. Assuming it was a wrong number, I did not pay much attention. ‘I’m calling about the advertisement. Yers.’ He had a most characteristic way of speaking, as if he were talking mainly to himself. ‘Yers, we were wondering about a Thruster, too. Have you got one yet? How do you find it?’ He spoke in distinct phrases, like a toy operated by pulling the string. By the time I had realised what he was talking about and mumbled that, as it happened, we had not yet done anything about it, he had moved on. ‘Come and stay and we can discuss it. We live in Norfolk. There’s an instructor nearby. We can talk to him. Dan, my son, is also interested. Salsingham is the address; Salsingham Hall. We’ll see you Friday evening then.’ I was too confused to think of a reason why I could not manage the weekend, and by the time I had thought of something, I found I was speaking to a dialling tone.

So on Friday evening, Richard and I found ourselves back in Richard’s bottle-green company Rover, in a traffic jam in the Forest Road in north-east London. To my surprise, Richard had been enthusiastic about the trip when I told him about Mr Watson. The truth was that as the novelty of returning from Africa had begun to wane and, as neither of us had girlfriends, any potential new distraction was welcome.

After forty minutes, during which we moved no more than a hundred yards, he swung suddenly into a side street, accelerated down it, turned left at the end, accelerated down the next street, decisively turned left at the end of that, accelerated again, until he was forced to brake sharply at a row of concrete bollards which separated us from the road we required. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Which way?’

The only navigational aid was an ancient black-and-white paperback London A-Z. The corners were so turned back on each other and overlapping the pages either side that it was a job to open it. When I did, the pages covering Central London, fell out—not that this mattered, as we were far outside this zone, adrift in a no-man’s labyrinth of minute print and unrecognisable roads. I had found where we were, cross-referenced it with where we needed to go, and was about to give him instructions when Richard set off again. Moments later we were at another dead end. ‘Urgh,’ he sighed, clicking his tongue. ‘I forgot you can’t read maps.’

Richard and I were used to each other’s company despite being friends by accident. In the early 1980s we had occupied rooms across a corridor in a faceless brick and concrete block of student accommodation, allowing us to observe minutely—and listen to—each other’s habits and lifestyles sufficiently to nurse a mutual but confident dislike for each other. He read maths and The Daily Telegraph, played rugby and liked student politics; he was someone I knew could not be my friend. Our natural instinct was to disagree on all things. However, as I had a refrigerator and he had a toasted sandwich-maker; and he had a car, and I had a girlfriend he fancied greatly, we ended up seeing more of each other than we would have chosen. She moved on. We were left as friends.

I had never been to Norfolk. All I knew was that it was flat, intensively farmed, on the way to nowhere and that doctors marked the medical records of patients who had survived accidents but been left slightly subnormal ‘NFN’—Normal for Norwich. It was also, at the end of the 1980s, the county that transport policy forgot. It was getting dark as the All carried us through the Thetford Forest to wide, open fields with huge metal irrigation booms. And it was after 11pm by the time we turned in through a pair of brick lodge gates and up a long drive to what was evidently a vast country house. All was in darkness except for a single downstairs window. When we switched the engine off, the sound of organ music wafted out into the cool spring night air.

We pushed on the bell of the grand main portico. There was no sound from within to indicate that it was working. After a few moments of alternate ringing and knocking, we tried the door. It had appeared to be locked, but when Richard gave it a harder shove it opened, and we found ourselves standing in a huge entrance hall, enveloped by resounding organ music. There was a yellow glow from behind an organ case at the top of the big double staircase. ‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Hello!’ The organ music continued.

‘Hello! HELLO!’ shouted Richard.

The music stopped. A male voice echoed back.

‘Hello? Is someone there?’ It was the voice on the phone.

‘Hello!’ we shouted back.

A short, wiry figure came down the stairs. He looked at us a little doubtfully, as if unsure what we wanted.

Then he spotted our cases. His face cleared.

‘Just off?’ He extended a cordial hand. ‘Excellent. Very nice to see you again. You’ve signed the book? Good, good.’ He gently ushered us back out through the door. ‘Do come again. Bye.’ The door shut with a click.

There didn’t seem any alternative but to go back in. The room was now in darkness, but we were in time to see our man disappear down an unlit passage which led into a square, high-ceilinged kitchen. When we got there he had disappeared. Or rather, he had metamorphosed into a tall, good-looking and rather formidable woman, standing by an ancient Aga. She had a pen on a string round her neck which, as she looked up, she clicked menacingly.

‘Who are you?’ she said sharply. I smiled, apologised if we were late, and explained that we had come about the microlight. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’ At that moment her husband re-emerged by another door. ‘Lester, some people are here. Something to do with lights or lighting or something. Is this something you’ve arranged?’ She looked mildly irritated.

‘Lights?’

I attempted to explain again. Lester showed polite interest but no recognition. ‘Are you friends of Dan?’ he suggested helpfully. This seemed to crystallise something in the woman.

‘What sort of time do you call this? We might easily have gone to bed. If you want to stay in this house in future, perhaps you’d care to make your arrangements with the manager, not the lift boy.’ Mr Watson had left the room again. I was beginning to feel slightly seasick, and almost wondered if I had imagined my telephone conversation with him. But Mrs Watson had moved on. ‘I suppose you want feeding. Do you think these raspberries are defrosted?’

There were no further enquiries about the microlight. In fact no one seemed to mind in the least why we were there. I made one more attempt on Mr Watson when he wandered into the library where I had been sent with instructions to get a drink. ‘A Thruster? Yes, from what I can gather they’re very good machines. Very good. We’ve been thinking about getting one ourselves,’ he said. ‘There’s an instructor near here. We could go over tomorrow, if you liked.’

Later Mrs Watson led us up a bare wooden back staircase to the third floor and along a wide passageway. It was lined with bookcases, old magazines, stacked mattresses, ancient convector heaters, old telephones, broken toys and three-legged stools with birdcages perched on top of them. The linoleum had worn through in patches, revealing undulating floorboards beneath which squawked and groaned as we crossed them. Opening doors more or less at random, she settled on a room containing two beds and a mountain of furniture stacked under dust sheets. There was a musty smell, which turned into a heavy scent of musk and vanilla near the window. As she pulled the curtains on their noisy metal runners I glimpsed a branch of wisteria, laden with flowers, which had grown through the open top sash of one of the windows. The branch was at least three inches thick.

‘I don’t think anyone’s slept in here recently,’ she said. Her tone implied that this was to our advantage. Tugging on the frayed, plaited cord of an ancient electric fire, she retrieved a brown Bakelite round-pinned plug, which she plugged in and flicked the toggle. Sparks fizzed from the middle section, where one of the ceramic bars had at some stage been knocked, though the wire remained intact. ‘Make sure you switch it off,’ she said sternly. ‘The last person left it on for three months.’

As she removed the bed covers, the bars set up a whining, moaning resonance and the tarnished reflection plate began to tick as it heated up. In the bathroom across the corridor she twisted the newest (and only chrome-coloured) tap of some four different sets of plumbing which converged upon the bathtub, crossing and weaving round each other as they led off via a maze of pipes. It emitted a groan of air. ‘You’ll have to wait until the morning for hot water,’ she said, adding, with a momentary return to her earlier asperity, ‘if we’d known you were coming, we could have switched it on.’ With that she said good night.

We had finished breakfast before Dan Watson appeared in the kitchen. Lean and high-cheekboned, radiating unhurried calm, he swept his brown hair away from his eyes but didn’t remove his sunglasses as he held out a friendly hand. He had been at a party, he explained, until five. His movements were apparently choreographed always to finish in an elegant position. He sniffed the coffee in the cafetière doubtfully, inspected the sausages and bacon that Mrs Watson had told us in a note were in a roasting tin in the oven, then set about assembling his own breakfast. He ignored most of the fare on offer, set a battered espresso machine to brew on the Aga, scrambled some eggs and added some chopped parsley. He set some butter to melt in a pan, added a big field mushroom which he said he had found the day before. Only when he had assembled everything to his liking, ground salt and pepper coarsely over it, and his coffee was ready, did he start to eat.

Mr Watson we had already seen. He seemed to know all about us now. He had pottered in and out of the kitchen several times, carrying files, or music, or pairs of pliers. Despite being dressed in a grubby fawn nylon jerkin, which made him look like a cross between a grip, a conjuror and a big game hunter, there was something curiously intimidating about him. ‘Do you play the piano?’ his disconcerting opening remark had been. ‘What, neither of you? Tst.’ Followed by a muttered, ‘No-one seems able to do anything nowadays.’ He was plainly a man of parts. The downstairs loo was festooned with a mass of framed photographs and faded newspaper cuttings of a younger Mr Watson—at Cambridge; in Africa; winning a by-election; as an MP at Westminster.

Nor, it turned out, was Mr Watson a novice when it came to flying. He had flown in Africa, where he had set up an engineering business after the war. His first plane, he told us, he bought for £400 and flew between Khartoum and Nairobi ‘until it succumbed. It was made of wood, you see.’ Returning to Britain at the end of the Fifties, someone told him about Salsingham Hall—the seat of an Earl complete with wings, lake and landscaped park—that was under threat of demolition. In a servantless post-war Britain of supertax, punishing death duties and agricultural prices which had fallen through the floor, there seemed no future for such white elephants, he explained; aristocratic families, in panic and desperation, were giving away their homes to anyone who would take them. Lester Watson flew up to look at it from the air, fell in love, and bought it for a song—then married Rhona and for their honeymoon took her on an air rally round Sicily.

‘Tell them about the Med, Dad,’ said Dan.

‘I was flying the Auster back to sell it,’ he said. ‘I’d paid £700 and I knew I could sell it here for more than £2,000. We set out from Marsa Matrûh in Egypt, heading for Crete. Well, we were given the wrong wind forecast. We were told it was ten knots from the west when in fact it was from the east. After two hours, there was no sign of land anywhere. Not surprising. We were sixty miles west of Crete—and we were running low on fuel. There were no direction finder beacons in those days. We had no radio. So we decided to fly on until we found a ship or a fishing vessel which could rescue us. Well, there wasn’t a ship anywhere. We had just minutes of fuel left when we saw a German tanker. I told Ron, who was with me, to write a note, telling them we were going to ditch and to rescue us. He put it in his shoe, then I flew low over the bridge and we dropped the shoe onto the deck. It was a German crew, but luckily one of them understood English. Then we ditched. Fortunately, just the week before, my brother-in-law, who’s in the Fleet Air Arm, had told me about ditching. He said the crucial thing is to land crosswind, so the waves don’t tip you up. Approach into wind’—he motioned with his hand, a chopping movement—‘then at the last minute’—he turned his hand through 90°—‘kick her round crosswind so you land with the swell. Stall her just above the water’s surface and drop her in. So that’s what I did. It was the most brilliant landing. Brilliant.’

We were agog.

He showed us his battered log book, dug out for the microlight instructor. The covers were frayed and sun-baked and the binding loose and worn. The pages recorded hundreds of journeys:‘V. Falls to Bulawayo’; ‘Mbeya to Kasama’; ‘Nairobi to Mombasa’; ‘Panshangar to Lympne (REMARKS: Honeymoon trip)’;‘Lympne to Nice (en route for Giro di Sicilia International Air Race)’; page after page, denoting thousands of hours of flying, with numerous names under AIRCRAFT TYPE: Tiger Moth, Auster, Tripacer, Gemini, Proctor, Rallye. The last entry was in 1964.

‘I haven’t flown for a bit, but, you know, it never leaves you once you’ve learnt. This Sean seems a good fellow. I hope he’ll let me update my licence without too much fuss.’

‘Did you have any other narrow escapes?’ I asked.

‘Well, once on the way from Jubâ to Malak—’

‘Where’s Jubâ?’

‘You don’t know where Jubâ is?’ He looked astonished. ‘Southern Sudan. We’d left Jubâ, headed for Khartoum, and the cloud got lower and lower. Eventually it was down to 200 feet above the ground. We were going at about 140 mph. Anyway, we eventually hit the Nile, so we knew then that if we followed it at least we’d eventually come to Malakal. We just had to hope the cloud didn’t get any lower. We did 180 miles at 150 feet. Don’t know what people on the ground thought.’ Mr Watson looked quite pleased to have such an enthusiastic audience. ‘Then there was the time we were flying down to Skojpe from St Etienne. Well, you know what Skojpe is like: we were surrounded by the military with guns…’

There seemed to be hardly a part of Africa, the Mediterranean or Northern Europe he had not visited. He told us about stalling an engine on landing at Croydon, a near-miss with a DC6 at Forneby in Oslo. ‘Coming out of Jakawalpa we got engine icing at 500 feet. Imagine that. We were literally off the end of the runway when the engine started spluttering.’

‘Did you ever make a safe flight?’ said Richard.

‘Dad, we should be going,’ said Dan, looking at his watch. He wore it with the face on the front of his wrist rather than the back.

Sean, the instructor, was based at RAF Barsham Green, ten miles away. The journey took longer than expected. The narrow, frequently fenceless lanes serpentined lazily through the Norfolk fields, and Mr Watson, who was driving, seemed in no hurry. He and Dan became progressively less certain about the way and, once again, locating the entrance of a rural airfield added considerably to the time we had allowed for the journey.

The approaches were misleadingly shipshape. At the main gate we were told to pull over, alongside the scale model Spitfire on its concrete pedestal by the entrance, while the car was searched. It was my first experience of a military airfield, and the guard house, security cameras, razor wire, safety barricades and mirrors on broom-handles for examining underneath the car all seemed very official and impressive until I later learned that, fifty yards up the road, the fence petered out into brambles and the place was open to ramblers. There was an elaborate signing-in procedure including lengthy questions from the duty officer before we were issued with a windscreen sticker and allowed to proceed.

The Norwich and East of England Aero Club, despite its grandiose name, seemed to have facilities remarkably similar to those at Popham: two Portakabins in a state of semi-collapse, propped on breeze blocks.¹ Sean, the instructor we had come to see, was a year or two older than Richard and me. He had sandy hair, freckles and a bounce in his step. His room in the Portakabin complex was meticulously organised: papers neatly squared and piled in order of size, lined up in rows, pens laid across the top at right angles. ‘Yes, hello, yes, come in. I see, quite a few of you. Lester, Richard, Dan and Antony. And you’re interested in a Thrasher? No problem.’ (Sean, I would learn, always referred to a Thruster as a ‘Thrasher’.) ‘Yes, it’s a good little plane, the Thrasher. You’ll have some fun with that.’

There was a pause. Oddly, having got there, there didn’t seem to be much to say.

‘What’s the insurance position?’ said Richard.

‘How do you mean?’ said Sean.

‘Well, if something goes wrong, or there is an accident, are you properly insured? Or is the manufacturer of the machine liable?’

‘Are you sure you should be doing this?’ said Sean.

‘Is there any kind of brochure we can look at?’ I asked Sean.

‘No. No brochures. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you what you need.’

There was a pause. No one seemed to know what to say.

‘Right,’ said Richard, getting out his cheque book, and reaching for a biro. ‘Let’s get on then.’

Richard was like that. He just decided things. The Watsons seemed happy. Sean produced a photocopied order form and we each wrote out a cheque for £3,000. It was the largest cheque I had ever written.

I felt taken unaware. I had not bargained on any cheque-writing until much further down the line. I was used to a great deal more procrastination before committing myself to things. I felt I lacked the mental preparation—not to mention the funds—to be doing it so soon. Richard told me afterwards that people like me always lacked the mental preparation for doing anything.

No sooner had my cheque for £3,000 been filed away than Sean said

‘Right. Helmets and headsets. I recommend the standard SXP helmet with a Narcan 5000 intercom. It’s a bit more expensive, but they are better.’

There was silence, except for the scratching of Biros while we each wrote another cheque, this time for £120 each. These were filed away in a separate neat pile.

‘Do you want a radio?’

‘A radio?’ said Dan thoughtfully. ‘How much is that?’

‘A basic transceiver starts at about £400. I can get you a discount.’ We all looked at each other.

‘Maybe leave the radio ’til later,’ said Sean. ‘But you’d better order your ozee suits, if they’re to be here by the time the plane arrives. I can probably get a deal if you all order together.’ An ozee suit turned out to be a blue Thinsulate-lined zip-up flying overall.

‘Do we really need an ozee suit?’ I asked. ‘Can’t we just wrap up well?’

‘Oh you must have an ozee suit.’

The cheque was for £80.

‘You’ll need to arrange third party insurance, as we’re flying from Ministry of Defence land,’ Sean said, handing out four more photocopied forms. ‘I’ll leave you to do that yourselves.’ The form contained a number of boxes. Alongside the lowest box, containing the highest premium (£80), was a rough cross in blue biro. ‘Of course it’s up to you whether you decide to insure the hull or not. That can get expensive. Right. Now for the loose ends.’

The loose ends consisted of another £72-worth of equipment: two flying charts—a 1:250,000 scale map of East Anglia and a 1:500,000 scale map of the south of England; a perspex ruler graduated in nautical miles in both these scales; a frightening, but impressive-looking gadget like a circular slide rule called a flight course and distance calculator; a log book (which seemed premature, as we did not yet have an aircraft); a blue plastic ring binder entitled CAP 85: A Guide to Aviation Law, Flight Rules and Procedures for Applicants for the Private Pilot’s Licence; and, finally, a slim paperback entitled The Microlight Pilot’s Handbook. This was slimmer and—judging by the ratio of pictures of clouds to diagrams with arrows—considerably simpler than the thick, densely-written text books to which I had been introduced in Africa. The pages started falling out the moment I broke the spine, which somehow seemed to reflect microlighting’s marginalised role in the world of aviation. As the objects mounted, it felt a bit like the first day at school. Except, at £72, rather more expensive.

‘You’ll need to buy a couple of jerry cans each and paint your names on the side. Now, hangarage. I’ll give you a deal for the first six months if you’re happy for me to take people up for trial flights. Shall we say £50 a month? Oh, and finally, you’ll have to join the flying club, of course.’

‘How much is that?’

‘£15. But make the cheque out to the flying club, not to me.’

Enough was enough.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I won’t join for the moment.’

‘You have to. Or no flying. It costs the same whether you join now or later.’

Resignedly I reached for my cheque book again. 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…’