Second Wind

Chapter 8

The tiring evening ended at last in clearing skies, and devoted enduring fireworks fanatics let off rainbow-coloured pop-pop sparkling starbursts in soggily dripping back gardens.

I knew my grandmother and Jett would both be asleep when I finally left work. I couldn’t ask refuge for a second night on the sofa, anyway. One night was succour; a second, indulgence. My grandmother had never believed in lengthy bouts of bleeding-heart.

I walked the half-mile from the BBC towards my home, towards attic, telescope, chronometer and futon, deeply breathing the damp night air and promising myself an absence of November Fifth on future calendars.

When I neared my doorstep, midnight or not, there was agitation on my pager, which buzzed in the waist pocket of my trousers; a tremor rather than a noise, owing to my frequent presence in silence-demanding places. Late hour regardless, Belladonna answered my call-back with relief and my ‘where are you’ enquiry with a giggle.

‘In George Loricroft’s bedroom. Don’t tell Kris.’

‘Is there a Mrs Loricroft there, perhaps?’

‘You’re such a spoilsport, Perry,’ Bell grumbled. ‘Her name is Glenda and she wants to talk to you.’

Glenda Loricroft, dimly remembered from that fateful Sunday lunch as a shiny blonde in a pale blue sweater that stretched across the front, had a voice that Lancashire lasses would have felt at home with. Her George, she told me, had gone off to Baden-Baden, or so he said, and she wanted to know what the weather was like there, please luv.

‘Give me Bell,’ I asked, and wanted to know why I should go back into the Weather Centre on such a hunt on such a night.

‘Perry, be your age!’ Bell said. ‘Glenda thinks George is having if off with an undeclared Fraulein. If I give you date and time and place, could you tell her whether the actual meshed with what her lover-boy declared?’

‘No, Bell, it’s a non-starter. Impossible. All he has to say is that he doesn’t remember or was fast asleep.’

‘Glenda says he’s never where he says he will be. Tonight he’s supposed to be in Baden-Baden for the races, but tomorrow he won’t know it’s been snowing.’

I said, ‘Stop it, Bell. Get Kris to do it. I’m asleep on my feet.’

‘Kris won’t do a thing. He just talks about trains.’

In alarm I said, ‘Where is he? Why is he talking about trains?’

‘Something about fuel switches,’ Bell said lightly. ‘I don’t understand him. You’re the only one who follows his mind.’

‘Well... find him.’

The urgency in my voice got through to her suddenly.

‘He’s not lost!’ she exclaimed.

‘Then where is he?’

‘He said he was up on your roof.’

I went through the house in dismay and out into the cold little patch of wintry grass at the back and looked up, and there he was, sitting astride the vaulted roof of slates and leaning against a dead chimney of crumbling brick.

‘Climb down,’ I called. ‘I can’t catch you.’

‘You can see fireworks all over London from up here,’ he yelled. ‘Come up.’

‘I’m going to bed.’

‘George Loricroft isn’t in Baden-Baden,’ Kris intoned, ‘and Oliver Quigley didn’t turn up in Berlin or Hamburg, and I bet my father-in-law chickened out of Cologne.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I shouted up.

‘Robin Darcy is in Newmarket.’

I could still hear Bell’s voice distantly on the telephone, so I put the receiver to my mouth and asked her if she’d heard what Kris said.

‘He said Robin Darcy is here in Newmarket, and yes he is, he’s staying at the Bedford Arms. What of it? When he’s in England on business he often comes here to see Dad. They’ll be going to Doncaster races tomorrow. It’s the last meeting of the main Flat season. Half Newmarket will be going. My boss George has a runner for my father in the November Handicap, the big race of the day, and there aren’t any races tomorrow at Baden-Baden, the whole thing’s rubbish.’

‘He’ll be home for breakfast,’ I said soothingly, which raised a wail from Glenda and an accusation of heartlessness from Bell.

Enough, I thought. I said, ‘Bell and Glenda, please get off my phone and Kris, please get off my roof, and I’ll see you all tomorrow.’

Incredibly, there was silence. I went indoors and up to my attic for hours of solid sleep and woke early to find Kris yawning in my kitchen alcove and pouring Thai curry sauce onto tofu, his latest disgusting obsession.

‘Morning,’ he said.

‘How did you get in?’

He looked pained. ‘You gave me a key last Christmas.’

I thought back. ‘That was for waiting for the fridge repair man.’

‘Do you want it back?’ Kris read labels on bottles of chilli oil he took from a paper carrier. He’d been Thai-food shopping yesterday for that and lemon grass and dried spices, he said.

I said I supposed he could keep the key. Also he could use my shower (he had done so: my towels were wet) and watch my TV (now on, but mute). Making the usual dash to the door on the way to put together the Saturday morning programme — including a summing up of the weather prospects for Saturday sport (dry, cold and sunny for racing at Doncaster, blustery showers for the football international at Wembley) — I caught a glimpse of Kris marking his choices on my racing pages and starting to fill in my crossword.

I shrugged into my warm padded jacket and with temporary benevolence, as I opened my front door to depart, I asked him with restraint merely to lock up when he left.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I looked up your schedule. You’re free today after the sports forecast. I’m flying to Doncaster races. There’s an airfield next to the racecourse. Will you come?’

I closed my door on his question mark and started down the stairs. If I didn’t go he would believe it was because of wheels up and an empty fuel tank and, given his see-saw psyche, that imagined adverse judgment would convince him I despised him and that he had no friends. The answer to ‘am I my brother’s keeper?’ was ‘yes’, unfortunately, all too often.

Two floors down I reversed, though already late. When I opened my front door again Kris was standing waiting, expecting me.

‘Pick me up in Wood Lane at ten-fifteen,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget Bell said Robin Darcy will be at the races with her father.’

Kris gave no sign of alarm. ‘Ten-fifteen,’ I repeated, and ran. Well... hobbled, though things were getting better from the ankle down.

Our flight from White Waltham to Doncaster went impeccably, with Kris over-meticulous at getting every check perfect. He had actually no need to, if he wanted to impress, as I now believed (and was never going to tell him) that he was a great pilot up to a fine line on a panic scale and a lethal danger above that. Without Trox and Odin, I reckoned, there was no one safer. After that I would learn and pay attention, and know what to look for.

Doncaster took the weather that would have smiled on poor Guy F.

Kris and I almost missed the first race owing to the programme’s early start in the short daylight, but watched the second under the bright yellow-grey sky that itself brought out smiles, good humour, and the favourites as winners.

Kris and Bell advanced and retreated all afternoon in a complicated mating dance. Caspar Harvey watched them with a scowl. George Loricroft strode past, head in air, his wife Glenda scuttling after him with endless complaints of ‘Baden-Baden.’

Oliver Quigley trembled from owner to owner, excusing his losers before they’d lined up to run.

People in clusters asked Kris for his autograph. ‘Don’t you mind,’ Bell asked me, ‘that they’re asking him more than you?’

‘He’s welcome.’ As so often on 6 November, I’d collected more of a mournful battery of young reproachful eyes than an onslaught of enthusiastic name collectors. The day it worried me, I would resign.

I looked around and said to Bell, ‘Did you come with your father and Robin Darcy? I haven’t seen Robin anywhere.’

‘They came by car together,’ Bell said briefly. ‘They said they wanted to talk. I came with Glenda and she’s driving me mad. Of course, George didn’t go to Baden-Baden, why ever should he when the races are here? And as for all the other places! She never stops.’

‘What other places?’ I asked her absentmindedly, watching horses walk round the parade ring and admiring as always their loose-limbed natural beauty.

Bell dug a roughly torn memo square of pink paper out of her green coat pocket and squinted at it in the bright light.

‘Glenda says George has excuses for Budapest, where he says it was snowing, ditto heavy snow at Pardubice in the Czech Republic, more snow in Berlin, and it was freezing in Warsaw and Hamburg, and he wasn’t at any of those places, she’s sure of it. So what’s going on?’

‘I have absolutely no idea.’

‘If Glenda comes this way,’ Bell said, ‘don’t leave me.’

Bell’s pink eyelids fluttered over a thoroughly enticing smile. Kris finished signing autographs instantly and edged his long spine between myself and his (possibly) future wife.

They went off contentedly, for once, for a sandwich, nicely asking me to join them, but relaxed that I didn’t. I stayed near the weighing-room looking out unhurriedly for Robin the Round. I wished after all I’d gone for the sandwich when Glenda and her loud Lancashire voice advanced like a storm surge and smothered me with her theories.

Her dyed-blonde shiny hair was of Andy Warhol explicit brashness. Forty-eight identical Glendas haunted one’s nightmare of an art gallery.

Oliver Quigley, of all people, came to my aid, or seemed to, stuttering at my shoulder while giving Glenda a stare of quite extraordinary ill will.

I’d seldom paid Oliver’s quivering voice or problems much genuinely caring attention, and it was with similar make-believe that I asked earnestly after the sick filly’s health. Glenda suspended her animation suddenly and stood with her mouth open wide, as if waiting for Oliver’s answer; and suddenly it was as if this encounter were between two much deeper personalities than I’d superficially seen earlier. There were glints in the Lancashire eyes that were far from funny, and I began to wonder whether all the Quigley shivering was a way of camouflaging the stronger inner man, of hiding the iron foundations that he didn’t want recognised.

I looked back to the lunch party, to the day I’d met all these Newmarket people, those strangers who now seemed familiar. Perhaps they’d showed to the world that day only their outsides, and perhaps, as with Robin Darcy, it was the inside that mattered.

‘It’s because of yow,’ Glenda said suddenly with venom, closing her lips together with pinching force. ‘It’s you that’s taking George to Baden-Baden, and don’t you deny it.’ She was accusing Oliver. She seemed oblivious of myself.

Oliver Quigley certainly looked blank, but not, to my fresh vision, from ignorance, but rather from the shock of having Glenda put into public words what should have lived in secrecy and silence.

‘And,’ continued Glenda spitefully, ‘it’s no good trying to tell me you didn’t go with him to Poland and Germany and all those places, it was snowing a lot of the time and Perry could prove it if he could only be bothered...’

‘Glenda!’ Oliver interrupted with straightforward warning and obvious menace, wiping out in one word all the dithery presentation of ages.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Glenda said dismissively. ‘You’re all angry because of the filly.’

She swivelled on her high-heeled shiny boots and marched away, her weight forward on her toes, leaving Oliver Quigley speechless and aghast, as if he’d lost both his sword and his shield at one stroke.

He switched his gaze back to me and, although it was far too late in reality, he chose to believe I’d seen and heard nothing. The quakes came back into his manner. He stuttered a good deal, but no intelligible words came out. After a while, as if he’d resumed his habitual role, he nodded vaguely in my direction and as his own personal quiver counter was more or less back to normal he unglued himself from my vicinity and was soon to be seen talking with jerkily disturbed hand movements to the filly’s owner, Caspar Harvey. Neither man looked even reasonably calm, let alone happy.

Kris, further away, bent his height down to accommodate the size of a short plump man that I with a faint shock saw to be Robin Darcy. Though I knew he had arrived at Doncaster with Caspar Harvey, Robin Darcy in actual living presence was somehow disturbing.

The last time I’d seen him had been on Trox Island, when he’d been dressed in disguising overalls and helmet, and had watched Michael carry the folder from hut to aircraft, when Michael had transported before my eyes the same sort of ultra-sensitive package that I’d been told had brought finis to a careless man from Mexico.

I watched Robin Darcy amiably pat Kris on the arm without in any way being repulsed. Normally Kris jerked away from any affectionate touch, even from Bell, though if he himself were the toucher, that was different.

Kris, I reflected without excitement, had been determined to please Robin by having us detour to Trox. Kris liked pleasing Robin, and I would do well not to forget it.

The two of them spoke intensely for a short while with Kris nodding assent. When they parted, they shook hands. I watched and wondered if Kris would tell me what they’d said. On past form, I supposed with a shrug, quite probably not.

I leaned against the rails round the weighing-room and the winner’s unsaddling enclosure and did my best to pretend that the comings and goings of other trainers and jockeys were of far greater interest than anything Glenda had said. I stood with laziness in the bright air and, as quite often, simply let random thoughts drift with disorganisation, until ‘Baden-Baden’ and ‘Poland’ and ‘snow’ announced themselves to me insistently as somehow meaningful, and meaningful because of Glenda and the filly.

Glenda was tit-tupping away in the distance. Glenda was jealous of Quigley and of Harvey...

Nonsense, I thought. As a result of the filly’s illness, Harvey had transferred his other horses from Quigley to her own husband, Loricroft, and I doubted if that outcome was what she’d intended.

Unexpectedly, with one of those inexplicable shifts in the drifting brain that delivers a revelation to a vacuum, a word arrived in my mind with such clarity that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t thought of it earlier. The word had been part of the heading on one of the letters in the folder on Trox. I’d thought I could remember only Hippostat, but now I knew there was another — and probably more significant — address, though it still lacked pin-point direction.

Rennbahn.

Baden-Baden Rennbahn.

Turn titty turn turn.

Rennbahn, in German script.

I did what half an hour earlier I would have classed as-impossible, and deliberately moved into Glenda’s path. Her own thoughts were elsewhere. She tripped over my foot with her fancy boots.

She said, ‘Baden-Baden’ under her breath, not paying me any attention, a view of life that changed rapidly when I offered after all to look up for her the weather, past, present, and anywhere, and any time she wanted.

‘Do you mean it?’ she demanded, eyes, voice and mind all sharpening fast to an acute awareness quite at odds with her glittery hair.

‘I can’t do it until Monday,’ I said. ‘I can’t use the necessary computer until then.’

She objected, ‘Bell says you’re the head of home forecasting. I’d have thought you could do what you like as such.’ I said I was only the deputy head, and to myself added that I wasn’t going to use up any favours on results I thought of as highly speculative. I smiled my best apologetic excuse to Glenda and truthfully explained that the mainframe computer only ran on Sundays for strictly necessary reasons. Tracing errant husbands wasn’t classed as essential or necessary.

‘And why,’ I asked without pressure, ‘does he go to Baden-Baden and those other places?’

‘Girls, of course! I’ll give you the list.’ Glitzy Glenda wasn’t quite a fool. ‘All those places are racecourses,’ she said. ‘I suppose you don’t know.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘All in Germany?’

‘What a clever boy! Not all, but most.’

‘And does your husband have runners there?’

‘Haven’t I told you, he says so? He says the races are abandoned because of snow, but I’m telling you, it doesn’t snow when he says it does.’

‘I’ll look it up for you,’ I promised.

She gave me from her handbag a copy of the list she’d given to Bell, and I glanced at it briefly before stowing it in a pocket.

‘Baden-Baden,’ she said. ‘It’s rubbish.’

I was so close to her at that moment that I could smell alcohol on her breath and see little black beads on the ends of her rigid eyelashes. The shiny blonde hair had minuscule black roots.

‘I’ll divorce George,’ she said with sudden and vicious intent. ‘And it will serve him right.’

I suddenly couldn’t be bothered to try any more at that moment to unwind any of Newmarket’s twisted and destructive personalities. I spent the hour round the November Handicap simply watching the mechanics of the different, bewitching wider world of racing, and winning a tiny amount when Harvey’s runner, the second favourite, came in third.

I wasn’t sure whether or not Robin Darcy was actively avoiding me, but in the end the meeting certainly looked accidental: one of those times when two people turn together and find themselves face to face.

We must both have had hours to prepare. We said to each other everything appropriate. I bewailed the loss of his beautiful aircraft, he rejoiced in the survival of Kris and myself. He thanked me for the letter I’d sent him from Miami airport half an hour before I left to fly home. I hoped he’d had a good journey himself: he had arrived at Newmarket yesterday, he confided.

He was friendly. He shook hands. He invited me to visit with himself and Evelyn again any time. I wanted to say to him, ‘Where’s the folder? For whom will you fix the sale of the next bargaining chip, the next bit of bomb?’

In the brown eyes behind the big black frames there was the same sort of question and answer, ‘Did Perry Stuart read those lists in the folder? He can’t have done. He couldn’t have opened the safe. He certainly heard my password, Hereford, but it would have meant nothing.’

I wanted to say, ‘Whichever of you thought of the blindfold, thank you’; and I read, ‘You don’t know how close you came to a bullet.’

I wondered what he had said to Kris... wondered what he wanted Kris to do.

I wished Robin Darcy had been an ally, not an enemy. Born clever... Why should such a man trade in death?

Too many clever men chose to trade in death.

He gave me a nod and moved off to where, not far away, Caspar Harvey, able but not brilliant, received lukewarm plaudits for his horse’s third place in the November Handicap. Nothing but winning would have pleased his bullish attitude to racing, and I thought Oliver Quigley literally to be inviting trouble when in Caspar’s hearing he said that given his training methods and his instructions to the jockey, the horse would have won.

By the end of six races, when Kris and I went back to the airfield to fly home, the extra physical demands of the past ten days had drained my normally perceptive self to the equivalent of a worn-out battery. We spent long minutes on farewells to most of the Newmarket contingent in the car park nearest to the landing ground, and I was dozing even when Kris was taxiing down the field for take-off. He changed fuel tanks ostentatiously. I pretended not to notice.

On this Saturday, late in the year for daylight landings, Kris had arranged with his friend in the control tower at White Waltham to put car-battery-powered lamps down the runway to shine a path for his quiet approach and arrival at about five o’clock, half past toast and teatime.

We were in the air and a long way south of Doncaster when Kris shook me awake.

‘Sorry,’ I said, yawning and reaching for the map, ‘where are we?’ It was still just light enough to see the three Rs, roads, rivers and railways. ‘No problem with those,’ I said. He always flew a straight heading.

Kris, however, wasn’t worrying about being lost but about oil on the windscreen, he said.

‘What?’ I asked blankly.

‘Oil. On the windscreen. Perry, wake up.’

It was the urgency of those last three words that sharply reached my senses. I did wake up. My heart lurched.

There were dark gold thread-like lines on the windscreen, which as I watched were joined by more lines, which were running and spreading upwards over the glass.

Horrified, we both understood what was happening. The hot oil that should have been circulating inside the engine case, lubricating the four thundering pistons, was somehow coming out into the engine compartment itself, and from there it was sliding upwards and backwards in droplets through the engine cowling’s crack-like edges to hit the glass of the windscreen... and from there, gradually to spread and cover the whole windscreen with oil... and so, effectively, blind the pilot.

The oil itself wasn’t the dirty brown-black old stuff that had been cleansing inner engine surfaces for many hours of flight. Kris always looked after his pride and joy, and he had changed his oil regularly. The disaster on the windscreen had been clean for the Newmarket lunch.

‘God Almighty,’ Kris said, ‘what the hell do we do now?’

‘Keep straight on our course,’ I said automatically, ‘so we know where we are.’

‘That’s the easiest. What if all the oil comes out? The engine will go dry and seize up.’ Kris suddenly sounded comically unconcerned. ‘And how do we land, if we can’t see where we’re going?’

‘Can we break the windscreen?’ I suggested.

‘Get with it, Perry.’

He was both sarcastic and fatalistic. ‘The windscreen’s made of toughened glass to withstand birdstrike. And even if we could break it — and what with — we would have our faces cut to ribbons, and we’d need goggles as in the old Tiger Moth days, and even then we’d be going too fast. It would be like facing a Category 3 hurricane wind, it can’t be done.’

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Keep our course and height. We’ll have to find a large public commercial airport open late on Saturday afternoon.’

‘Oh great.’ He glanced across at me. ‘How do we find one of those?’

‘It’s a doddle.’ With immense thankfulness I took note that this time we were sensibly in contact by radio with the outside world, and we did have an aeronautical map giving the radio frequencies of airports. We didn’t have parachutes or ejector seats — couldn’t have everything.

‘You keep straight,’ I told Kris. ‘I’ll get us down to an airfield.’

‘You get us down,’ he repeated, making a joke of it, ‘and I’ll crash.’

Such a damned stupid way to die, I thought. Blinded by oil... the only thing worse would be to switch on the windscreen wipers, which would fatally smear the oil into a thick continuous curtain, whereas now it was just possible to see through the thread lines to the ground far beneath.

Far... Kris was giving in to the temptation of losing height so as to see the ground better, but height gave us a better chance of clear radio reception by any airfield.

‘Go back up,’ I said coaxingly.

‘It’s my bloody aeroplane.’

‘It’s my bloody life.’

We needed a big airport as soon as possible, and fortune smiled on us for once. I asked Kris dryly if he had any objection to Luton, almost dead ahead.

‘You’re joking! A real live airport? Not so much of the dead.’

I told the area radio controller about the oil and said we would aim for Luton, approximately thirty miles away. There was an incredulous silence at Luton at our lack of any radio aid except radio itself, and we got only a laid-back assessment of our chances (slim) from a useful man in Luton’s control tower, who said he could put us over the runway and clear everything else off it, and after that it was up to us.

He gave us a private frequency for talking to him direct, so as not to clutter other air traffic.

‘On second thoughts, better than trains, perhaps,’ Kris yelled to me, grinning, manic spirits ascendant in the actual face of mortal danger.

I said, ‘A suicidal pilot is the last thing I need!’

‘It may be the last thing you get.’

‘I’ll never forgive you...’

The man at Luton said in our ears, ‘We’ve an old D/F machine here. Do you know how to fly a QDM?’

Kris said, ‘Sure’, and I said ‘Yes’, but we should both have correctly said, ‘Affirmative’, which would still not, in my case, have been the truth. D/F meant Direction Finding and QDM was an air code asking for a direction to steer, and that was the extent of my own knowledge. Kris, I thanked the fates, muttered that he had done a QDM approach once, years before, when he had got lost.

Did he remember the procedure?

Not clearly, he said. A joke, he thought it. He typically would.

Our helper at Luton resignedly told Kris to press the ‘transmit’ button and say nothing, then turn left and after two minutes transmit again, and he told us he now knew which blip we were on his dial, and he knew what we should steer to reach him, but he couldn’t tell how far away we were from him, and he wouldn’t know until he could see us on his doorstep.

He might see us, we told him, but we couldn’t see him. Oil seemed to be coming out faster. Forward visibility had reduced pretty much to zero. The side windows were starting to fog, with droplets blowing backwards in streaks.

We travelled straight to Luton airport with his expert help, Kris again flying on instruments as if born to it and telling weak jokes all the way. Lights were starting to show on the ground in the still see-through bits of glass along the lower edge of the side windows. Kris’s stream of jokes dried as the radio operator carefully steered him round in a pear-shaped sky pattern that ended with the Cherokee lined up with the single wide runway, that now lay a mile straight ahead.

The runway ran from west to east. We were to land towards the west, into the prevailing wind.

To my private dismay, landing to the west meant also facing into the setting sun. The last rays of sunset hit the oil and made the windscreen a glowing golden enclosing glory, exciting and beautiful and more deadly than ever.

‘Jeez,’ Kris said. ‘I’ll write a poem.’

‘Not just now.’

‘Say your prayers.’

‘You keep your mind on getting us down.’

‘We’ll get down anyway.’

‘Safely,’ I said.

He grinned.

The voice from the control tower said in our ears, ‘I see you clearly. Lower flaps... descend to two hundred feet... maintain heading... allow for a ten knot crosswind from the left...’

Kris checked that I’d set the altimeter to match the height of Luton’s airfield above sea level and lowered the flaps, the wing sections that gave greater lift at slow speed.

‘This isn’t Odin,’ he said. ‘Pity really. We could do with a nice warm sea here for a splash-down landing.’

I’d thought the same. The oil was thicker on the windows, and getting progressively worse.

‘You’re about a hundred feet up...’ the radio said in my ear. ‘The runway’s straight ahead. Can you see the ground at all?’

‘Can I, shit,’ Kris said, which wasn’t in the air manual.

He throttled back the power to settle onto his normal landing speed and held the heading straight.

The tower said, ‘Stay straight... good... reduce power... no, increase power... hold it steady... reduce power... sink... straighten the rudder. I said straighten... straighten.’

Travelling at landing speed we hit the ground extremely hard and bounced back into the air with every bone shaking, with even our eyes insecure in their sockets.

Our airspeed read 80 miles an hour on the dial and was now dropping too fast. At 60 we’d be going too slowly for the wings to keep us aloft.

‘Power on,’ yelled the tower. ‘Power... level out... left rudder.’

‘I can’t see a bloody thing,’ Kris said, his teeth grating from the shock through our bodies.

‘Power... POWER...’

Kris pushed the throttle open and held the nose steady, and again we hit the ground with a frightful crash, though this time we bounced off grass, not off the hard runway, and were heading heaven knew where, still with a lethal but necessary airspeed giving us lift enough for a liveable landing and still with the setting sun golden-red in our eyes.

Kris said loudly, ‘To hell with this,’ and pulled the throttle right back, chopping off the fuel and stopping the engine, which would have been fine if we’d had any wheels on the ground, instead of ten feet or more of air beneath us.

Normally Kris’s landings consisted of a smooth nose-up float followed by a feather-soft transference of wheels to earth. This time with the speed dropping off alarmingly fast, leaving Kris progressively without any effective control, we hit the ground again and bounced again into the air and bounced again, slowing, slowing, each bounce shallower but at the wrong angle for the wheels to stay down.

Kris from instinct finally pulled the control column yoke right back, raising the nose until the wings stalled and, with no lift left, the aeroplane’s propeller dipped down and dug a deep groove in the earth. There was a screeching and a banging of metal and there were two human bodies being flung about. There was a terrifying sudden and final standstill with the fuselage and tail plane pointing half way to the sky.

The oil on the windscreen still shone radiantly, the glass unbroken, the last red-gold gleams of sunset slanting across towards a motionless dusk.

Silence. Stillness. My head rang.

It had been a miraculous deliverance and a splendid piece of flying, and within a minute we were surrounded by foam trucks and ambulances and police cars and half the county of Bedfordshire that had been listening on the so-called ‘private’ frequency dedicated to our troubles.