I Can't Stay Long
Page 24
It was a long run back as we re-entered the cloud, and I was filled with a faint grey dread. Racing down through the storm, all bearings and dimensions lost, the Concorde now seemed ungainly, impossibly huge.
Still the flight-deck voices were chatting away in my ear. They could have been driving up the M1 on a dirty night.
‘Twenty-three miles west of Radstock.’
‘Ten miles.’
‘Over Radstock.’
‘Cut rate of descent – save juice.’
‘OK, chief.’
We were now bumping a bit in the hurtling cloud. We seemed to have been flying through this stuff for ever.
‘Tell you what, Johnny. We’ll make one pass at two thousand. If we don’t like the look of it, then we’ll pull out quick.’
‘Radar on. Radar on.’
‘Ten miles west of airfield.’
‘Two thousand. No lower, Johnny.’
Grey rain, grey cloud, nothing else in the universe. Only the huge and shining wing. We flew on for a while in silence.
‘Dreadful,’ murmured the captain. ‘Tumpty-tum – quite dreadful. Johnny, did you switch on X?’
‘Sorry, skipper – I forgot.’
Shouts of laughter, squeals. ‘Better do it then, hadn’t you? And remind me about the windscreen wipers. And let’s bring up the Flying Manual with us next time, eh? Ha, ha! Ho, ho! Hum hum.’
More peering into the gloom. More murmurs of ‘Well, well – dreadful.’
‘Six miles north-west of airfield, chief.’
‘North-west, for god’s sake?’ (Hysterical laughter, now.) ‘All right, better put the wipers on … No, no! not yet! Remember last time – we switched ’em on too soon and they fell off half way along the runway.’
The countdown started. Everybody was having a ball; but I was searching the cloud for signs of good earth and Gloucestershire. We must have been at 2,000 feet, but I saw ghosts of trees and houses rush close past me as I went through false-pregnancies of landing.
‘1,000 feet … 600 … Nose down … 500.’ I had been listening, intently, and thought I’d missed something. ‘400 … 350.’ I wanted to yell, ‘Have you forgotten the landing wheels?’ But there was nothing I could do about it now.
‘We should see the lights. Ah, there they are.’ They suddenly shone in two lines across the wet grey earth. We slid out of thick cloud at under 400 feet, turning sweetly to meet the runway. ‘300 … 200 … 100 … 50 … 20 … 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 …’ There was a slight bump and rumble as the great aeroplane touched down, a hundred tons of it from some ten miles high. Fields and buildings rushed past us, it was Fairford all right, lines of white figures waited in the streaming rain.
An hour and three-quarters since take-off, and perhaps fifteen minutes of that confirming that our airfield was still where we left it. It had been an instrument landing, and that practically blind. Now I knew what those gadgets meant.
‘Gentlemen,’ someone said, as we unfastened our seat-belts. ‘You have experienced a normal flight in abnormal conditions. I think you’ll agree that the result of that experience is to prove that the Concorde is simply a normal aeroplane.’
My own experience, I feel, might be summed up differently. True, for the first time I had travelled faster than sound. I had even reached Mach 2.07 without pain. Moreover I had travelled more miles, in that one and three-quarter hours, than in the first ten years of my life. But emotionally, in fact, I’d been nowhere, seen nothing. We might as well have been circling above cloud over Cheltenham. There is no doubt that the Concorde is a magnificent contrivance – you can leave in daylight for New York and arrive to find it waiting for sunrise, go half round the globe and find your friends still aren’t quite ready for you – and that it performs with triumphant élan. The device is fantastic; it could telescope the world. It could also diminish our sense of distance and wonder.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements are due to the following publications in which essays included in this collection first appeared:
The Daily Telegraph Magazine, for ‘Paradise’, ‘Arrack and Astarte’ and ‘Concorde 002.’
Encounter, for ‘Ibiza High Fifties’, ‘A Wake in Warsaw’ and ‘A Festive Occasion’.
The Evening Standard, for ‘The Firstborn’.
Leader Magazine, for ‘A Drink with a Witch’ and ‘The Hills of Tuscany’.
Mademoiselle, for ‘Love’, ‘Charm’, ‘Voices of Ireland’, ‘Spain: the Gold Syllable’, ‘Mexico’, ‘The Sugar Islands’ and ‘Gift from the Sea’.
The New York Times Book Review, for ‘Writing Autobiography’ and ‘True Adventures of the Boy Reader’.
Redbook, for ‘The Village that Lost its Children’.
Vogue, for ‘First Love’.
The Geographical Magazine, London, for ‘Whitsuntide Treat’.
The following essays have been broadcast by the BBC: ‘Appetite’, ‘An Obstinate Exile’ and ‘Eight-Year-old World’.
Part One of ‘The Firstborn’ exists as a separate publication under the imprint of the Hogarth Press, which has kindly given permission for its inclusion in this collection. Part Two originally appeared elsewhere.
The author would like to thank Mr Nicholas Bentley and Mr John Raymond for their care and patience in helping him to make this selection and to prepare it for publication.
THE BEGINNING
Let the conversation begin...
Follow the Penguin Twitter.com@penguinukbooks
Keep up-to-date with all our stories YouTube.com/penguinbooks
Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your Pinterest
Like ‘Penguin Books’ on Facebook.com/penguinbooks
Listen to Penguin at SoundCloud.com/penguin-books
Find out more about the author and
discover more stories like this at Penguin.co.uk
PENGUIN CLASSICS
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by André Deutsch 1975
Published in Penguin Books 1977
Published in Penguin Classics 2015
Copyright © Laurie Lee, 1975
Introduction Copyright © Simon Winchester, 2015
Cover Photograph © Stanley Devon/The Times/News Syndication
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-23718-2
* The disappearance was only temporary.