I’d reached a woozy level of thinking ‘fire’ and ‘dammit, we have fuel in both wing tanks this time’, and various comforting little items along those lines, but the rescue mob outside jemmied the door open and scooped us carefully and quite fast out of our nose-down cabin and covered the fuel leaks around them and us with foam and expedition.
Kris woke up moaning, a noise that shocked him into silence and a weak grin. By the time the first news camera with microphone was seen advancing among the uniforms, his concern had been wholly transferred from the living to his mangled treasure, which no one would let him inspect.
I could have told him that the obvious damage was a nose wheel with broken struts, three burst tyres and propeller blades bent into right angles.
I stood on the grass, shivering, while someone with kindness wrapped a blanket round my shoulders, and I watched Kris lose the battle against stretcher-bearers and other good-natured forms of restraint.
It was inevitable, I supposed, that the question of why had the oil leaked out of the engine should be one of the first needing an answer and almost the last to get it.
For some reason my mind was inclined sometimes to clear sharply in a crisis, and it was then with a jolt that I remembered Kris’s friend setting out the landing lights at White Waltham. Our saviour from the Luton tower, coming down from his heights, promised amiably to alert him, with a consequent widening of the bad and good tidings, and no chance of a modest disavowal. Everyone at White Waltham chatted onwards and agreed that the weathermen had nine, or better, twenty-nine lives.
Being carried off by paramedics — against his will — Kris urgently told me as he passed to stay with the Cherokee to the death (or to the scrap heap) as oil should not have got past his eagle-eyed checks; and indeed I was well aware, as he was carted protestingly to onward transport, that we had in fact flown safely to Doncaster a few hours earlier with the engine oil intact.
I folded the blanket from around my shoulders, returned it non-committally to an ambulance and, covering most of my too easily recognised face with a hand, became a gawping bystander among others. Never mind that Kris wanted to know, I too was fairly anxiously curious. Except for the direction-finder and its operator in Luton’s control tower, and but for Kris’s ‘give-it-all-you’ve-got’ semi-crash landing, the BBC would have lost two forecasters permanently, and on a cloudless fine evening, no less.
Inevitably in the end Kris and I became news-fodder with names, but I did stay with the Cherokee to the crane-lifting stage, for which Kris next day (out of hospital custody), said ‘Thanks, kiddo’ absentmindedly and demanded to know what I’d learned.
I said, ‘When we... er... landed, there was no dipstick in the engine.’
He stared at me fiercely. We were up in my attic surrounded by the Sunday papers he’d brought with him. All the later editions had given us front page slots with a frame or two of the nose-down wreck and our best BBC faces, with unstinted and not unduly complimentary comments on our recently reported escape from our flight through a hurricane. Two crashes within two weeks was excessive.
‘It was not pilot error,’ Kris asserted, deliberately ignoring any possible embarrassing reference to fuel tanks. ‘You saw me use the dipstick yesterday morning when we took off. I wiped the stick clean and put it into the engine sump to make sure there was enough oil, and there was. And I put the dipstick back and screwed it up tight, and no oil came out on the way to Doncaster.’
‘No,’ I agreed.
‘And I didn’t look at the oil level again at Doncaster. Go on, say it, I didn’t do that check again as we hadn’t come far from White Waltham — like I didn’t check the oil that day for coming home from Newmarket. No one checks the oil after such a short flight.’
I said, ‘You certainly did not remove the dipstick at Doncaster and not put it back.’
‘You’d swear to it?’
I’d been semi-asleep at Doncaster but I would have bet my life on his carefulness... as indeed I had done in Odin... and nearly drowned for it...
At Doncaster there had been no pressure on him. The panic scale had registered zero. He wouldn’t have made an elementary mistake.
The alternative had to be faced. Someone else, not Kris, had taken out the dipstick at Doncaster and not put it back.
Kris shook his head to any question about Robin Darcy, but in good spirits collected his newspapers and went down my stairs, slowly for him because of the medics’ warning of dizziness and concussion; and I finally admitted to myself, chiefly as a result of a stabbing indrawn breath, that I’d possibly cracked a rib or two at Luton.
I’d been treated well there, courtesy no doubt of my employment by the Weather Centre, and I’d learned how very lucky we had in fact been, as the single wide runway and the airport itself lay on a hill above the town. The control tower people, aghast, had seen our first heavy bounce throw the Cherokee off its straight course, and we’d been heading across grass towards a steep downwards slope when Kris had opted for his dramatic full stop.
Kris’s Cherokee would be stowed safely in their hangar, they said, and there it would stay until the accident inspectors came to write their report. I would please meanwhile not talk about no dipstick. Silent as mushrooms, I said.
I phoned my grandmother and dispelled a flourishing outbreak of heebie-jeebies. The Stuart feet, I assured her, may have been in the recent wars but were this time safely on the ground. She could however hear the lighthearted relief in my voice and unerringly understood it.
‘You might not always escape,’ she said worriedly. ‘Wear a bullet-proof vest.’
By Monday morning we had yielded the front page to an eloping heiress and there was no denying the fact of my cracked ribs. Maybe two, I thought: not more. And no lung-piercers, the really extremely bad news.
I’d done much the same damage once before by falling down a Welsh mountainside. A visit to a doctor resulted at that time in ‘grin, bear it and take aspirins’ advice: after Luton there seemed nothing to improve on that, except the distraction attained by looking up snowfalls in Europe.
Glenda surprisingly was apparently right. If her dominating George had reported icy temperatures as an excuse for infidelity, he hadn’t been truthful, regardless of faithful.
I made a list of the actual air temperatures and inches of snowfall for all the places and cities I’d been given, and none of them matched. Either Glenda or George, or both, was playing winter games.
I telephoned Belladonna, reckoning to catch her at breakfast after she’d come in from riding morning exercise, and I located her with Loricroft and Glenda, eating cornflakes in the Loricroft kitchen. Racehorse trainers, it seemed to me, led half their days in the kitchen. It was warm there in winter, Bell explained.
Kris had refused sick-leave, she said, and would be forecasting on Radio 4, as scheduled, and he had already told her that for the five weekdays ahead, starting on that day, Monday, I would be doing television forecasts in the evening after the six o’clock and nine o’clock news.
‘Mm,’ I agreed. ‘Could you and Glenda spare me any time tomorrow morning, if I come over?’
‘Is it good news for Glenda? Do you want to talk to her? Will you be bringing Kris?’
I said ‘Maybe. Perhaps. And no.’
‘Hang on,’ Bell said and put her hand over the receiver I guessed, while she asked her boss and his wife for their reaction, because in a minute or two she was saying, ‘Perry? How about Wednesday? George says if you’re here early enough you can see his jumpers going over the schooling fences.’