Illywhacker

In 1917 I moored a Bleriot monoplane in a paddock in Darley and had it eaten up by cattle. The Bleriot engine uses castor oil and, messy machine that it is, the castor oil splatters back over the plane, covers the fabric of the wings and makes an appealing snack for cattle. Give them a night and their rough tongues will rip and tear the fabric until the craft looks like a well-picked chicken carcass.

If I had known how important the Morris Farman was to Phoebe I would have coated it in castor oil and introduced a herd of heifers, a nest of white ants, moths, grubs, vultures and men from sideshows whose specialty is eating pieces of machinery.

When you hear what follows you will wonder at my blindness. How can the fellow not know? His wife is besotted with aviation. She spends her days with navigation and maintenance. He assists her in every way he can. And yet he says he never realized the thing was serious.

I will not deny that I knew the thing amused her, but I fancied that, with children, when they came, she would put her fancies away just as I had mine. I had not abandoned my dream lightly, like a man who throws away a half-smoked cigarette outside the theatre. I dropped it with regret and sadness, but I had a family to support and I thanked God I was so lucky.

It was hard work and the hours were long. We didn't have the easy life car salesmen seem to have these days. There were no neon tubes, comfortable chairs, little glass-partitioned offices. We worked, for the most part, from big dark garages with oil stains on the floor and the parts of troubled engines beneath our feet. We did business in the street when it was fine, or in pubs and cafes when it was cold. We drank more than we should, to pressure-cook friendliness. We spent frosty nights waiting outside doctors' surgeries so that the Herr Doktor could, when his last patient had gone, enjoy a demonstration.

In the meantime, Phoebe pursued the mysteries of aviation.

I soon realized that she had no aptitude for things mechanical, had no real interest in the way things worked. She had what I can only call a poetic understanding of machinery, a belief in magic, that did not apply merely to machines but to all the natural world. Thus she planted flowers out of season, ignoring both the instructions in Yates'sGarden Guide and the ones on the seed packets themselves, as if these rules might apply to everyone else, but not to her, as if it needed only her goodwill, her enthusiasm, her dedication, for all the laws of botany to be reversed and frost-tender species would bloom outside her bedroom window. She was as impatient of the confines of reality in her way as I was in mine. She adopted mechanics' overalls as if, dressed as a mechanic, she would become one.

I bought her a copy of Sidwell's Basic Aviation which stresses the importance of a potential pilot understanding the mechanics of a craft, being able to repair, maintain, etc. Thank God for Sidwell. (There are lots of pictures.) I kept her busy with such basic points as making loops in piano wire for rigging. I showed her how to use the round-nose pliers and make the little loops. This looks simple enough when you see it done, but it takes a while to get the knack of it. I was critical of her loops. Perhaps I was too critical. In any case she dealt with this better than she did the principles of the internal combustion engine. She was careless and impatient with the gaps in sparkplugs, insisting that they did not matter, but I kept her at it, and I would find her at home at night with a dismantled magneto on the dining-room table, short of patience, a screw lost, arguing that the thing was incorrectly made, Sidwell wrong, the whole thing impossible.

The more I understood her way of approaching these problems, the more fearful I became of her taking to the air. Well, I was wrong of course, and I've had enough accusations on this subject not to need yours added to it.

If I have made these early months of our marriage sound irritable, I have not explained myself properly. I have merely let my dusty irritations blossom out like one of those Japanese paper flowers you drop in water.

They were heady, wonderful days. The nights were clear, the mornings frosty. We rose early and before I stood in Exhibition Street in my suit ready to sing the praises of King Henry Ford I would have hammered and sawn and worked to build the room for Molly who was soon to join us, planted a tree, explained a mechanical point, made love (sometimes twice), eaten no breakfast, and come to watch the cold-footed ibis (at my love's request) fossicking on the flats.