‘I honestly couldn’t tell you, Nigel. Sheep are more my thing these days.’
Nigel finds this so amusing that he hugs his sides and crosses his legs and starts hopping up and down with pleasure.
‘Sheep! Sheep! Well, you said it, mate, you said it.’ And then he forgets that he was supposed to be being sulky and recalcitrant, and starts heaving planes around, making a space for the Luscombe, without even thinking about it. ‘Sheep!’
While I wait, I head into the airport café to grab a bite of lunch, hoping to see some familiar faces. At least the lovely Nathalie is still there: a proper French lady cooking proper French food.
‘Ah, Michael, ça va?’ she says, heaping a steaming portion of boeuf bourguignon on to a plate for me, as I queue at the serving-hatch. ‘Ça te plaît, d’habiter en France?’
‘Tout à fait. Je l’aime bien.’
‘Cor, blimey,’ says one of Nigel’s yellow-jacketed colleagues, in the queue just behind me. ‘Doesn’t anybody speak English around here any more? It’s like bloomin’ Allo, Allo.’
After I’ve eaten, Nathalie comes and sits with me, pulling hard on a cigarette, eager to hear news of her homeland. She looks just the same as I remember: blonde and soft and ever so slightly worn around the edges, like a well-loved paperback. She rolls her eyes at how much my French has improved since I was last here. For her, thoroughly established in her English adventure, just a few months have passed. For me, several lifetimes.
‘I’ll be back,’ I promise her. ‘I still have to come and pick up my plane.’
Nigel has pushed the Luscombe into the watery sunshine by the time I emerge from the café. After a thorough pre-flight, I prepare to fire her up. Parking-brake on. Stick tied back. Wheels chocked. Fuel on. Throttle closed. Give the prop six swings, then three squirts of prime, then another six swings, then crack the throttle and – bingo – she starts first time. Always works like that, when no one’s watching.
But today there’s a problem. With the engine clattering away happily enough, the oil pressure is reading zero. I tap the needle. It’s not budging and – after waiting for another five seconds – I shut down the engine. I don’t want it shaking itself to pieces. A few minutes later, I try another start. Still no oil pressure, damn it. So I shan’t be flying anywhere today.
I check my watch. There’s still time to drive to the Tiger Club at Headcorn.
‘Oh, gawd. Here comes trouble,’ groans Terry, the duty manager, when I wander into the shabby Portakabin that serves as a clubhouse. ‘Frogs kicked you out, have they?’
‘No, just a few days’ home-leave for good behaviour,’ I laugh, wondering if Terry and Nigel may be twins separated at birth. Or perhaps they are simply graduates of the same school of sparkling repartee. There is a split-second hiatus as I click my transmitter back on to the frequency marked EBB (English Blokish Banter). I happen to know that Terry is a teddy bear beneath his gruff exterior, but it’s tactful to play along with his miserable-old-bugger act.
‘So you’ve decided to come and annoy me,’ he continues.
‘I missed you, Terry. Found I couldn’t live without you.’
‘Oh, yes? Missed my ugly face, did you?’
‘Your charming personality, mostly.’
‘Liar.’
‘Any chance of my taking one of the Moths up for half an hour or so?’
‘That depends if you’re planning to crash it or not.’ Terry gives me a long hard stare. I grin back, expecting him to crack, but he doesn’t. ‘Anyway, where’s your Luscombe?’ he asks. ‘Crashed that, have you?’ Sometimes even teddy bears have their off-days.
It’s good, climbing into a Tiger Moth. It makes me feel as if I am preparing for the future, buried somewhere in the past. It’s not just that Pa flew Tiger Moths in the 1930s. Or that, as a child of seven, this was the first plane in which I ever flew. Learning to fly the aircraft has always been a first step en route to flying a Spitfire. And everything about the plane just feels and smells so right, with its majestic curves, its primitive instruments that look as if they were hauled up off the Titanic, and the old magenta-and-silver de Havilland colour scheme. I suppose it all felt new-fangled and sporty when Pa used to fly these things.
They say G-ACDC is the oldest Tiger Moth still flying, although it has been crashed and rebuilt so many times that the only truly original part remaining may be the fireproof data-plate. I climb on to the wing-root, then down into the wooden cockpit, feeling the hefty rudder pedals under my feet as I do up my straps. Then I don my leather helmet and goggles, too, enveloping myself in the muffled sensations of this otherworld.
A few minutes later, I am taxi-ing across Headcorn’s bumpy grass, weaving left and right because it’s impossible to see anything over the nose. At last, lined up between the white runway markers, I open the throttle.
The vibration of my leather helmet slapping against my eardrums is deafening. For a second, we veer sharply to the right. Alarmed, I counter the torque with left rudder, and then both feet are jiggling and dancing on the pedals as G-ACDC gathers speed. The tail comes up first and – blimey, that was quick – we are airborne.
The climb attitude is steep, the noise ferocious – I can feel it all the way up my spine – and everything is shaking from the clattering of the Gipsy Major that’s hauling me skywards. Much as I adore my Luscombe with its little 65hp Continental, there is something raw and pure and ancient about climbing at full power in a heavy plane with a dirty great beast of an inefficient engine roaring it into the sky.
And then it’s getting colder as I climb above the scattered clouds, wanting to gain enough height to try some spins. Spinning still frightens me, ever so slightly, but it thrills me, too. Putting a plane into a spin, on purpose, is not unlike looking down the barrel of a loaded rifle.
At three and a half thousand feet, I lock the anti-stall slats, haul back on the stick, kick in some hard right rudder, and watch fields and trees filling and whirling in my vision like green linens in a tumble-dryer.
How extraordinary, I think to myself, that this is still possible in the twenty-first century: to rent an ancient biplane – the oldest of its type still flying – and set it spinning vertically towards the earth in a sunlit sky above the fields of Kent. Levelling off, I unclip my radio mask and take a lungful of the icy air. When first I learned to fly, five years ago, I was disappointed to discover that – because flying is scientific and technical and subject to all sorts of laws – the one thing it could never be was romantic. But today, as I swoop and dive, and feel the cold blast of the wind above the clouds, and listen to the ancient Gipsy Major still grinding out its galloping horsepower, I feel as never before the intense romanticism of flight.
Next I cruise towards Dover and out over the glittering water, just far enough to allow me to make a graceful arc back over the White Cliffs. I feel a familiar pang as I do so, a pang I have never fully understood. A longing for something I never knew. I miss England, even though I am right here, flying over the top of it.
I wish there were someone with me now, wish there were a leather-helmeted head in the front cockpit, a gloved hand offering a thumbs-up in the rushing slipstream.
If I could place anyone there now, crouched in that cockpit, grinning at the clouds and the blurred needles of the ancient instruments, who would it be? Clara Delaville, who stole my childhood heart? Zuleika, chasing her grandpa’s ghost? For a moment I wish it could be my grandfather, Pa, dreaming of his perfect omelette even as he banks us in a steep turn over the White Cliffs, with the ball perfectly centred and the speed pegged at sixty-five.
And then I realize that it would be none of these. It would be me as a little boy in short trousers and tortoiseshell National Health specs, infatuated with aeroplanes, dazzled by the very idea of ever growing up, let alone learning to fly.
Michael, aged seven, reaches behind him from the front cockpit, and I shove my arm out into the slipstream to grasp his tiny hand.
‘This is so co
ol,’ crackles a high-pitched voice from somewhere far away.
32
BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS
Filled up with flying, and having arranged for the Luscombe’s oil pump to be examined, I return to France. At the start of my adventure, the man in the paper-shop warned me that it would take six months before the locals began to accept me. And, lo and behold, almost six months to the day after my arrival, the ice is beginning to thaw. Not that people weren’t friendly from the start; they were. But – with obvious exceptions, such as Gilles and Jérôme – they were friendly-at-a-distance; more wary than warm. Now they are beginning to invite me over for un apéro or for dinner, and to call out to me in the street. I am beginning to feel at home.
I am beginning to recognize, too, that the routine of life at La Folie is a rare blessing: the cat coming to claw at my head in order to wake me for feeding duty; the chickens streaming out from the chicken house, one by one, with Titus always bringing up the rear, struggling to squeeze his mighty tail-feathers through the pop-hole door; the sheep galloping down the hill to greet me, gazing warily at me as they munch their luzerne. Chopping wood, cleaning the chimney, stoking the stove.
Repetition and routines begin to seem important; the more boring and strenuous the better. I am a dilettante by nature, all too easily seduced by the next shiny excitement that comes along. And the more I think about what may be involved in becoming a hero, the more some element of repeated grind – of Sisyphus pushing his rock up a hill, day after day – forms part of the picture.
My contemporary heroes are not drawn from the beautiful brilliants; from the footballers or tennis players or rugby men gifted with unnatural magic in their boots or wrists. No, they are the grunting sufferers: the Olympic rower, incarcerated yet again in a windowless room, hauling out repeated agony on his screaming ergometer; the middle-distance runner, training her body to the point of injury and past it, crawling over broken glass to a distant horizon way beyond my own threshold of imaginable pain; the round-the-world sailor, straining night after night to push her boat through lonely ice-storms, utterly alone. My dad, who may have been carried aloft on the shoulders of his peers for a single moment of pure sporting glory at the age of eighteen, kicking a rugby ball that no one else dared kick between two uprights, but who then spent forty years trudging daily into an office to do a job he didn’t enjoy, because he had a family to support.
And me? While my puny repetitions are structured on a daily basis, I am beginning to glimpse a wider landscape; beginning to sense for myself how nature plays out her invisible patterns and repetitions on a far grander scale than human beings – even those standing on the shoulders of giants – can ever hope to match. The stars wheel above me in the heavens. The universe stretches out around me, towards infinity.
The next day finds me standing on a French hillside, at five o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, counting small black sheep. I know there should be five of them. But I have counted twice. And the discrepancy can mean only one thing. Oh. My. God.
Without fireworks or brass bands; without bunting strung from every roof; without even any obvious signs of gestation, it has happened.
My first lamb has been born.
Watching this knock-kneed, hop-skippety creature bouncing around its mother, Daphne, I can hardly believe it is such a recent arrival on the planet. The tiny creature looks so ready for life.
Following the advice in Sheep for Beginners – my copy dog-eared with reading and re-reading – I pick up the lamb and walk backwards with it towards the sheep shelter, holding out the damp, fragile form so that Daphne can see it and smell it. She trots after us, yelling furiously, while the rest of the sheep fan out in a fighter escort, baying with angry solidarity.
And now a moment of panic. I have laid the lamb in the straw inside the shelter, but Daphne stops a few yards away, making a hell of a racket, unwilling to enter what is clearly a trap. Instead she turns and begins to walk away. The lamb bleats weakly – more ‘wwrrrr’ than ‘baaa’ – and, for a second, Daphne stops, head poised, listening. Then she continues to walk away.
I grab the lamb again; carry it towards its trembling mother. This time, Daphne’s maternal impulses prove stronger than her instinct for personal safety, and she follows her child into the prison where I have placed it. The door clangs shut. And I race off to telephone Gilles.
I don’t know if my newborn lamb is a boy or a girl. I’ve had a good look at its bits and pieces, but I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking for. There’s definitely a little bibbly thing dangling between the hind legs, but Ceilidh the guinea-pig-eating dachshund had one of those, and she was a neutered female. Hence the need for Gilles, although I’m also hoping for his reassurance that the lamb is in good health. It looks a bit wobbly to me, and I’m not sure that it has eaten, or even if Daphne’s teats are both fully operational.
‘C’est un petit mâle,’ says Gilles gently, examining the lamb. He’s wearing his familiar grey jumper, a mass of loose threads, which has been mended and darned so many times that the original garment must have ceased to exist. He hasn’t brushed his hair. Josette, walking stiffly beside him in her matching wellies, looks better than I was expecting, though I can see her concentrating hard to manage her pain. She makes all the right sort of cooing noises about how mignon the little fellow is, even though she must have seen several thousand newborn lambs before. Then her husband expresses a squirt of milk from each of Daphne’s teats to demonstrate that all is well.
‘See how one is smaller than the other?’ he asks. ‘That’s because the lamb has already fed from one side.’
So we leave mother and child to their own devices and, as we do, I am thrilled to see the lamb butt its tiny head beneath Daphne’s undercarriage for a mouthful of milk from her fuller teat, and its tail begin to whirr like a propeller. I am going to call him Camillo, the name of one of my favourite Shakespearean characters. This may be because the first time I saw The Winter’s Tale, starring Survival-Kit Toby at Windlesham, Camillo’s costume had been made out of our old sitting-room curtains, donated by my mother the previous year.
Everything is going to be OK.
But Gilles looks quite ill when I tell him what I’ve done on the potato front for the potager. He did tell me to buy some seed potatoes to plant. And those twenty-five-kilo sacks from Gamm Vert seemed like such a bargain. So I bought two. We stand beneath the warm afternoon sun, looking at my sacks of spuds, and then at the would-be potager, and then back at the spuds.
‘C’est beaucoup,’ he says, scratching his head in a look-what-the-funny-Englishman-has-gone-and-done-now kind of way.
‘But Gilles, we English do eat a lot more potatoes than the French,’ I plead, unwilling to admit that I thought that if you planted one small new potato in the spring, it would become one big old potato in the autumn.
‘Even so, when you come to dig them up, you may find that seven hundred kilos of potatoes is rather a lot for one person.’
A week later, I have three jet-black lambs, their pure new wool not yet bleached to chestnut by the sun. Camillo has a white stripe on top of his head, like a badger. Claudette is a perfect, skittish little madam. Of the three, Emil is very much the runt of the litter and my absolute favourite. The poor chap began life as a girl, until Gilles came and took a look at him and pointed out that he has a couple of extra bits attached. I still haven’t got the hang of this.
‘Emily has turned out to be Emil,’ I tell my mother on the phone.
‘Oh, you can’t have!’ she gasps.
‘Not a meal, Mum. Emil.’
But as I wander out to feed the sheep in the late-afternoon sun, I can see immediately that something is not right. Seven Rastafarians come galloping to greet me. And one lies, curled up, asleep in the grass. It is little Emil. I race over to him.
He is not sleeping. A panicked eye gazes up at me. His knock-kneed limbs twitch. Emil is panting like a steam train, his stomach pulsing, a froth of beaded bubbles at his mo
uth.
As gently as I can, I scoop him up into my arms. I have always wanted to hold a lamb like this. I know there is only one reason I can do so now. Emil and I gaze at each other, both equally afraid. Please stay alive.
Emil’s mother, Doris, thunders after me, bleating wildly, as I carry off her precious charge.
Spinning the Espace around, I smash the passenger-side indicator on the bumper of Serge’s van. No time to inspect the damage now.
‘C’est un agneau, un cas urgent,’ I rasp at the bored lady in the vet’s surgery. ‘Can somebody please help me?’
Hearing the tremor in my voice, she leaps into action. ‘In there,’ she says, peering into the box cradled in my arms. ‘Oh, what a beautiful black lamb.’
‘C’est grave,’ says Pascal the vet, the moment he begins to examine Emil.
‘So what can you do?’
‘C’est très grave,’ he repeats. We look into each other’s eyes. ‘All right,’ he shrugs. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
With the second injection in his neck, Emil goes into spasm. It looks as if he is trying to gallop headlong into the air. I lay my hand softly on his flank and he subsides, still panting.
‘If he’s still alive in the morning, inject him with this,’ says Pascal solemnly. ‘If not, you must bring him in for an autopsy.’
In a daze, I carry Emil back to the Espace. He is still breathing fast, but seems more peaceful now. I start the car, and – as we move off – reach out a hand to lay it on his chest.
Oh please, no.
I switch off the ignition and sit in silence for a moment. For the second and last time, I scoop up the warm body in my arms, cradling the lolling head, gazing at the gleaming Bakelite hooves, stroking the soft wool on his lifeless back. He feels so almost alive. I try to close his eyelids, but Emil continues to stare at me with that same frightened, please-help-me expression.
Pascal looks up in surprise as Lear returns with Cordelia in a cardboard box.
C'est La Folie Page 22
