"Let's go and stay in my sister's cottage in the country", Holly suggested one Saturday, so we did.
She was the scattiest girl I had ever known and these were the days before SatNav, so what should have been a 2 hour journey to the Surrey countryside took around 4 hours.
At the end of a grassy track, there was the medieval thatched cottage, sitting within acres of green farmland held back by a narrow quadrangle of wooden cattle fencing.
The elm boards and joists of the bedroom floor were so steeply warped that you could have placed a tennis ball at the door and it would have bounced off the opposite wall a full three feet back into the room. I slept on the higher side of the bed and throughout the night found myself on top of Holly, not through lust but by the sheer force of gravity.
The whole house shifted and groaned so much during the warm Summer evening that nobody would have been able to tell the difference between a ghost and a burglar.
Around dawn I was awoken by the electronic buzzing of bees, but as I drifted upwards into consciousness I understood that the noise was produced by tiny petrol engines.
Leaving her asleep upstairs I went out to see a group of men in the neighbouring field, all flying model aircraft.
One man was wrestling with a giant of a plane with a 7 foot wingspan, and he told me that this weekend was its maiden flight after over a year of construction in his garage.
I offered to help him launch it and he readily agreed. He cranked the prop and it fired up. The engine note was about 2 octaves deeper than his fellow's. This sounded like a 100cc thing.
I and another took one wingtip each and gradually sprinted into the clear field until the bird left our fingertips and took flight.
It laboured on and upwards in ever increasing circles until it attained a height of several hundred feet, then its creator began furiously jerking on his control stick as the huge plane began spiralling down in ever decreasing circles. He lost radio contact.
The plane hit the ground nose first at great speed and turned itself into matchwood.
He was amazingly sanguine about it.
"Back to the drawing-board!" were his parting words.
I went back to Holly and we had breakfast.
Did you ask his name? Could have been my brother. His behemoth survived its maiden flight, and he still was tweaking it when he passed on. I think his son took it.
ReplyDeleteIt was too early in the morning and about 35 years ago, so I wouldn't have remembered any names.
DeleteI hope his next project was more earth based; either that or a rocket, where loss would be a sign of success.
ReplyDelete... depending on where it landed...
DeleteMy son in law flies self built aircraft. At a club meeting another's lost radio contact, dived down and put an onlooker into hospital.
ReplyDeleteStalking big game might be safer!
I am always nervous about large kites being flown on crowded beaches. They come down with a hell of a force sometimes.
DeleteYet another lost skill. So much easier to fly a drone out of a box from Currys or Argos. So much less inspiring.
ReplyDeleteBut so much easier to spy on your neighbours.
DeleteHaving first read this just before I went to sleep last night I was quite shocked this morning when glancing at the final sentence to see that you went back to Holly and not C.
ReplyDeleteC was going to be her discreet name, but I decided to use her real name. There was only one girl involved. I couldn't cope with two.
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DeleteYes. The breakfast but was a cop out but I got bored and wanted to finish it quick. You can re-write it if you want.
DeleteYou didn't leave that up long.
DeleteI had second thoughts that it was probably a euphemism. I re-wrote the last sentence simultaneously when I read it first time round.
DeleteOh. You mean Holly's C?
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