But no weather-man, however profound his knowledge or intuition, could guess the skies right all the time and, as over the British Isles especially, the fickle winds could change direction without giving notice, to be accurate eighty-five per cent of the time was miraculous.
Kris’s early autumnal depression intensified day by day and it was from some vague impulse to cheer him up that I agreed to his suggestion of a Sunday-lunch flight to Newmarket. Our host, Kris assured me, would be catering for at least twenty guests, so my presence would hardly overload the arrangements. ‘And besides,’ Kris added with mild routine sarcasm, ‘your face is your fortune, you can’t get away from it. Caspar will slobber all over you.’
‘Caspar?’
‘Caspar Harvey, it’s his lunch.’
‘Oh.’
Caspar Harvey might be one of Kris’s wealthiest farming cronies, but he also owned three or four racehorses whose trainer twittered in nervous sound-bites in my ears from Monday to Sunday. Oliver Quigley, the trainer, temperamentally unsuited to any stressful way of life, let alone the nerve-breaking day-to-day of the thoroughbred circuit, was, on his messages system, audibly in awe of Caspar Harvey, which was hardly the best basis for an owner-trainer relationship.
I had met neither man face to face and didn’t much want to, but as the day of the lunch approached I kept coming across references to ‘that gift to racing, Caspar Harvey’ or ‘Caspar Harvey in final dash to honours on the winning owners’ list’ or ‘Caspar Harvey pays millions at the Yearling Sales for Derby hopes’, and as my knowledge and curiosity grew, so did my understanding of the Quigley jitters.
The week before the Caspar Harvey lunch was one of those times when I gave the top two forecasts, at six-thirty and nine-thirty each evening, daily working out the probable path of air masses and going in front of the cameras at peak times to put my assessments on the line. Many people used to think that all Kris and I and other forecasters did was to read out from someone else’s script: there was often surprise when we explained that we were in actual fact forecasters, that it was we who predicted the weather ourselves, using the information gathered from distant weather stations and having discussed it with colleagues. We then went ‘live’ and unscripted — and usually alone — into a very small studio where we ourselves placed the computerised weather symbols on the background screen map of Britain.
There are well over two hundred weather stations covering the British Isles, each reporting local wind speeds and direction and barometric pressure into a large central computer housed in the main Meteorological Office in Bracknell, near Ascot, west of London. Into that computer too came data from all over the world, and one could draw from it everything the world’s weather was likely to do in the next forty-eight hours. But nothing was ever certain, and a lurch of high atmosphere pressure could let in a polar gust that would refrigerate our cheerful expectations into unconvincing explanations.
The late September Sunday of Caspar Harvey’s lunch, though, dawned fine and clear with a chilly wind from the east, conditions that would remain that way all day while the farmers of East Anglia harvested their late-ripening barley. ‘Perfect for flying,’ Kris said.
Kris’s aeroplane, a low-winged single-engined Piper Cherokee, was approximately thirty years old. He, he frankly acknowledged, was its fourth owner, the third being a flying club that had sometimes put six hours a day on the propeller log (Kris’s only gripe) and rubbed old-age patches into the cracked leather seats.
My first reaction to the antique rig a couple of years earlier had been, ‘No thanks, I’ll stay on the ground’, but in his home airfield’s echoing hangar Kris had introduced me to a mechanic who understood the relationship between loose screws and sudden death. I’d put my life in Kris’s hands on the mechanic’s assurance that old though the Piper might be, it was airworthy to the last rivet.
Kris, in fact, had turned out to be a surprisingly competent pilot. I’d expected him to be as volatile in the air as in his general behaviour but instead he was soberly responsible at the controls and only as high as a radiosonde balloon afterwards.
Many of our colleagues found Kris a difficult companion and asked me in mild exasperation how I dealt with his obvious leaning towards my company. I usually answered truthfully that I enjoyed his slightly weird views on life, and I didn’t mention that in his depressive periods he talked familiarly about suicide as if discussing an unimportant life choice like what tie to wear for early breakfast broadcasts.
It was regard for his parents, and for his father in particular, that deterred him from the final jump into a path of a train (his preferred method of exit), and I reckoned that he had less self-hatred and more courageous staying power than many who’d given in to a death wish.
At the time of Caspar Harvey’s lunch party, Kris Ironside at thirty-one had outlasted the macabre instincts of a succession of young women who had temporarily found the idea of suicide fascinating, and was beginning to face the possibility that he might yet make it to middle-age.
In appearance, apart from the overall tall and willowy build, he was noticeably good-looking with pale blue intelligent eyes, wiry blond stick-out hair that refused help from barbers, a strong blond moustache and, on screen particularly, a sort of half-grin that dared you not to believe his every word.
He kept his flying pride and joy on White Waltham airfield and to its upkeep devoted the bulk of his income, gleefully informing anyone who would listen that it left aerobic exercises out of sight as a keep-fit heart-stresser. He greeted me at White Waltham with what I knew from experience to be super-charged happiness. His Cherokee, parked by the petrol pumps, was taking aboard fuel that was no more stable than himself, each wing tank being filled to overflowing to expel any water formed there by hot saturated air condensing as the aircraft cooled after last time out.
Kris, never one of the old goggles-and-white-silk-scarf variety of pilots, was wearing a plaid heavy wool shirt with a Norwegian-knit sweater on top. He eyed my dark trousers, white shirt and navy jacket and nodded approvaclass="underline" in some way he considered my all too conventional appearance to be a licence for his own eccentricity to flourish.
He finished the refuelling, checked that the two wing tank-caps were screwed on tight and then, having with my help pushed the little white aeroplane a short distance from the pumps (a small courtesy to other refuellers) he methodically walked around the whole machine, intoning his checklist to himself as he touched each vital part. As usual, he finished by unclipping and opening backwards each half of the engine cowling, checking that the mechanic hadn’t left a rag in the works (as if he would!) and also wiping the dipstick clean before re-inserting it down into the sump, to make sure there was a satisfactorily deep lake of oil there to lubricate the engine. Kris had never been one to take foolish chances when it came to flying.
Once aboard and sitting in the left hand (captain’s) seat he equally seriously completed his pre-starting checks — all switches in good order, and things like that — and finally started the engine, gazing concentratedly at its gauges.
Used to his meticulous ways, I sat placidly waiting for satisfaction to relax the tension in his backbone and hands, until at last he grunted, switched on his radio, and informed the Sunday controller up in his glass tower that Ironside in his Cherokee required take-off clearance for a simple flight to Newmarket, return expected at about seventeen hundred hours local time. Kris and the controller knew each other well; the exchange of information was a courtesy, more than an obligation. Cleared to taxi, allowed the tower. ‘Thanks, kiddo,’ the pilot said.
Kris was right, it was a lovely day for flying. The Cherokee lifted off light-heartedly with its easy load and swung round towards the north as it climbed away from base. The noise of the engine in a cross between a growl and clatter made casual conversation difficult, but talking anyway was ever superfluous up there higher than eagles. Pleasure as always sat like a balloon in my mind, and I checked our progress against the map on my knees with unalloyed contentment. Maybe one of these days... why didn’t I... learn to fly?