How to Fly

I flew for the first time when I was nine years old. Nobody saw it happen, but that didn’t bother me: the Wright Brothers’ earliest ascent had also been conducted in the strictest secrecy and, until public pressure forced them out of hiding, any number of successful flights had gone unwitnessed. Of course, Orville and Wilbur hadn’t attempted to do what I was doing: like Blériot and Santos-Dumont, they were changing the known world, but they weren’t committed to flying in its purest sense. They were mechanics, not angels; what I wanted was something that they had never even considered and, though I knew I was destined to fail, I wasn’t prepared to settle for anything as mundane as a flying machine. Though I admired those early aviators more than anyone else in history, I knew, even then, that the people we think of as pioneers were pioneers only of machine flight — which, for me, was as different from actual flying as a conjuring trick is from natural magic. I didn’t want to soar with the aid of an engine; I wanted a miracle, a triumph of the will. I wanted to fly unassisted, like a bird, or a medieval monk.

Like Elmer of Malmesbury, for example. According to the legend, Elmer, dressed in his usual monk’s habit, but with home-made wings fastened to his shoulders and ankles, climbed to the top of the abbey tower and threw himself off, travelling a distance of around 600 feet before he crashed to the ground, breaking both legs. It was a windy morning in the year 1010. Apparently, Elmer had spent long hours observing the jackdaws that congregated around the abbey, and he felt sure that he had discovered their secret; according to the story, told later by William of Malmesbury, he really had flown for some distance before he suddenly lost faith in his abilities and panicked, a little like Peter, who, having clambered bravely out of his boat on the Sea of Galilee to follow Jesus across the water, suddenly became afraid and began to sink. It took some time for Elmer’s legs to mend but, as soon as he was well enough, he began preparing for his next flight, convinced that his fall had resulted partly from his own lack of conviction and partly because he had forgotten to provide himself with a tail. Had it not been for his abbot, who forbade any further experiments, Elmer would almost certainly have tried to fly again; instead, he lived a long and studious life, possibly surviving until 1066, when he was able to observe the passage of Halley’s Comet, just as he had done when still a young boy in 989. Or so William tells us.

Monks, it seems, had a particular obsession with flying: not much of an advertisement, perhaps, for the religious life. Even more interesting than the case of Elmer of Malmesbury is that of Giuseppe da Copertino, who, several times during the first half of the seventeenth century, was observed to rise into the air unassisted by a number of independent and more or less reliable witnesses. His abbot was similarly upset by the news of his flight — or, possibly, his levitation — and demanded that Giuseppe desist at once. This he could not do, his ascents being altogether involuntary, so he was obliged to become a recluse, where he presumably practised his art unobserved, until his eventual reassimilation into the fold. There he remained until he died at the age of sixty. Those who saw him fly say he rose straight up into the air without warning, and hovered there for a time with a faraway look on his face, a look of ecstasy perhaps, or the expression a sleepwalker assumes on his nocturnal perambulations.

Possibly because I wasn’t a monk, my own attempt at flight, that first day, was modest by comparison. On a clear, almost windless afternoon, out on a patch of open ground near Cowdenbeath, Fife, I climbed to the top of a disused pit building and jumped off the roof. The only mechanical aids I employed were a grubby old bedsheet tied to my wrists and ankles with twine and a pair of swimming goggles to protect my eyes. I didn’t travel any great distance but I did feel a tension in the sheet at my back, and I landed further from the building than I might have expected, floating a moment, it seemed, my arms and legs splayed wide, my hands making tiny, ineffectual swimming movements, before I hit the ground, hard, and rolled sideways into a patch of broken bricks and nettles. I was lucky not to break anything, but I was also heartened by the notion that I really had flown for two or three seconds. By the end of the week, those two seconds had been transformed in my memory to half a minute; a week after that, I was back, with more sophisticated wings, and high hopes of a genuinely perceptible flight. It never happened. The sheer number of my eventual failures should have been more than sufficiently convincing but, no matter what I did, and no matter how graceless and painful my falls were, I continued to believe that willed flight was possible.

Of course, I wasn’t interested in air travel; what I wanted was to fly. My family weren’t the kind of people who could afford to travel by aeroplane—in those days holidays happened in Blackpool or Clacton—but that didn’t trouble me at all. I didn’t want to go up in the air according to a schedule, piloted by a stranger, shoehorned into my seat alongside a hundred other people. I wanted to go solo. I wanted to fly — and, in spite of my poor record, I remained convinced that it was possible. All I lacked was the knowledge: as with so many things back then, the key to the problem was more science. What I needed, I realized, was an instruction manual.

I found Richard Ferris’s How to Fly at a church jumble sale. It was published in 1910, by Thomas Nelson and Sons, one of those chunky, durable hardbacks aimed at the more serious child, alongside How It Is Made and How It Works (‘Splendid books for boys, telling them just what they want to know’). The front cover showed an aviator in a perilously fragile craft—something like a tea-chest fitted with wings and the wheels from an old pram—soaring among clouds in a sky of faded cerulean. Maybe it was the colours that first drew me to the stall where the book lay, innocently priced at sixpence, between an old-fashioned bicycle pump and a tattered golliwog; more likely, though, it was the fact that the pilot, an intent, hunched figure in a flying cap and what looked like a safari jacket, was not only alone in his craft, but barely in it at all. His head and his entire upper torso were completely open to the elements: flying like that, in this makeshift crate, he would have felt the cool air of the upper atmosphere on his face, he would have smelled the ozone, tasted clouds. That picture alone was probably enough: the first page, however, closed the deal, and my sixpence was duly passed over. What I read that day is with me still:

The air which surrounds us, so intangible and so commonplace that it seldom arrests our attention, is in reality a vast, unexplored ocean, fraught with future possibilities. Even now, the pioneers of a countless fleet are hovering above us in the sky, while steadily, surely, these wonderful possibilities are unfolded.

This thrilled me. I had visions of a thousand souls wandering the heavens, each in his own, solo craft, powered by nothing but human will. I didn’t connect this vision of flight to the aeroplanes I knew about: those were nothing more than huge buses, chugging along from stop to stop. To buy a ticket and board an aeroplane wasn’t flying; it was air travel—and air travel was what businessmen did or families off on holiday to Malaga. When I studied the contents page of this marvellous book, what I saw contradicted every tenet of air travel that I knew about: ‘The Air’, ‘Laws of Flight’, ‘Balloons: how to operate’, ‘Balloons: how to build’ and, best of all, ‘Biographies of Prominent Aeronauts’. The men and women who jetted to and fro above my head in commercial aircraft weren’t aeronauts, they were passengers and, from what I had seen at the pictures, they didn’t do anything at all, except drink gin and tonic and look out of the window at passing clouds. They weren’t exposed, they couldn’t taste or smell or feel the sky, like Claude Grahame-White, ‘the most famous of British aviators’, or Léon Delagrange, who gave up a promising career as an artist to smash the world speed record in 1909, ‘travelling at the rate of 49.9 miles per hour’, but was killed the following year ‘by the fall of his machine’. Those men had flown: compared to them, the ever-increasing company of airline passengers might just as well have been on a Sunday afternoon coach trip to the Trossachs, with flasks and sandwiches and scarves to keep them warm.

So, to my child’s mind, air travel had nothing to do with flying; but it only became a lie, as such, in the late Sixties and early Seventies. By then it was hopelessly accessible; by then it had been sold too hard, it was too remote from the ether and it was too safe. The sight of a modern plane passing overhead presented none of the beauty and awe I experienced when I studied plate twenty-two of How to Fly, a grainy photograph entitled ‘The Wellman Dirigible America starting for Europe, October 15, 1910’. Here, a cigar-like airship tilted dangerously above what looked like unlimited ocean, utterly vulnerable and just fifty feet from the cold, dark water. This was flying. It was easy to doubt aeroplanes, because they had been reduced to machine noise and safety features; it was easy to doubt the pilots in old war films, with their immaculate uniforms and ridiculous moustaches. It was easy to doubt the happiness of air hostesses, because they smiled so hard—and it was impossible not to doubt the moon landings, because Neil Armstrong and his colleagues were so very serious. Like everything else we saw on television, Apollo was all Fifties rhetoric and odd haircuts, another outmoded and surprisingly cheapskate pantomime to divert us from the nagging sensation that something true was happening elsewhere. Remembering it all now, I can’t tell one event from another: the badly lit, pockmarked dust of the moon surface blurs with the badly lit face of the dead president’s brother on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel, the look in his eyes betraying the ordinary realization that history repeats itself in the most casual ways, and the same people get away with the same crimes, time and time again.

People were flying off in all directions: to Acapulco, to the moon, to spy on the Russians, to bomb the Vietnamese. Aeroplanes were passing overhead all the time, but nobody I knew was on them. Once, flying had been an adventure; now it was merely glamorous. Once, the men and women who took to the air needed courage and skill; now all they required was money. Once upon a time, people had really flown — people like Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; now they, and the flights they had taken, were as remote, and just as unreal, as imperial Japan. By the time I first boarded a plane, anybody could do it and so, by definition, it wasn’t worth doing. It was a chore. For a long time, looking out of an aeroplane window was like watching television: nothing I saw was entirely real, it was all travelogue, just a step away from cinematography. I half expected a commentary, in a well-practised Oxford English accent, telling me what to look for in the landscape below, or naming the types of cloud that I could see on the tiny screen: cumulus, stratus, cirrus, nimbus, mammatus, contrail, altostratus, cumulonimbus.