A moment later a steward, with a knowing look, ushered us through a doorway, and we followed him across the tarmac to the waiting plane. Standing by its ponderous, uptilted fuselage and dressed in the outlandish costume, goggles and all, which was then de rigueur for airline crew, was no less a person than the pilot. And in no time, while Dad waited below, this same fancy-dress pilot had somehow whisked me up behind the huge, bristling, forward engine and sat me down amidst an array of instruments which would now seem impossibly archaic but which seemed to me then like the very stuff of the future.
I was entranced, Sophie. Entranced.
Perched beside that pilot in that ancient Argosy, I almost forgot my father standing beneath us on the tarmac. It was as if he had pushed me forward into this wondrous outlook on the sky, had made me a present of it, then discreetly withdrawn. I might soar away; he would remain. And though he had staged it all (slipping a coin into the steward’s hand: Yes, of course, no trouble, no trouble at all for Major Beech, v.c), perhaps he was aware, himself, of being only half present. I can see now that throughout that homeward journey his feet must have been, so to speak, still on the ground, still caught in the mud. And I was being lifted up and away, out of his world, out of the age of mud, out of that brown, obscure age, into the age of air.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 in London, where he still lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and, most recently, Tomorrow. He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a collection of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.