We have no argument with the people of Iraq.
‘Have you gone raving mad?’
The pilot’s laughter grows even more hysterical when Michael says this, and then the goggles and the leather helmet are torn off, and Tabitha Winshaw turns around to say: ‘You know, Michael, it’s just as I thought – these things are terribly easy, once you get the hang of them.’
Row, row, row the boat, gently down the stream Merrily, merrily, merrily, menily
Life is but a dream.
‘Where’s Tadeusz, for God’s sake?’ shouts Michael.
Our goal is not the conquest of Iraq. It is the liberation of Kuwait.
‘Do you want me to show you how it’s done?’ says Tabitha.
Michael is shaking her roughly backwards and forwards.
‘Do you know how to land this thing? Just tell me that.’
‘This dial, you see,’ says Tabitha, pointing at one of the flight instruments, ‘is the Air Speed Indicator. Green for normal, yellow for caution. See here, where it says VNO? That means the normal operating limit speed.’
Indeed, for the innocents caught in this conflict, I pray for their safety.
Michael watches as the arrow on the dial starts pushing its way out of the green arc and into the yellow arc. The speed of the acceleration is making him feel sick. The arrow is now at the upper end of the yellow arc, at a point marked VNE.
‘What does that mean?’ he says.
‘Never exceed,’ cries Tabitha. She is almost jumping out of her seat with excitement.
‘For God’s sake, Tabitha, slow down. This is dangerous.’
She turns around again and says, reprovingly: ‘Flying, Michael, is never dangerous.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘Not at all. It’s crashing that’s dangerous.’
And then, with a shrill, lunatic howl of laughter, she pushes the joystick forward to its fullest extent, the plane tips forward and now they plunge, hurtling downwards at unthinkable speed, and Michael is hollow, his body is an empty shell, his mouth is open and everything that was inside him has been left way behind, way up in the sky …
I’m going down, I’m going down, I’m going down.
Tonight, as our forces fight, they and their families are in our prayers. Row, row, row the boat, gently down the stream
The noise is deafening, the terrible whine of engine and air-stream, and yet above it all he can still hear Tabitha’s mad laughter: the endless, hideous laughter of the irredeemably insane …
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
No president can easily commit our sons and daughters to war.
I’m going down, I’m going down.
May God bless each and every one of them.
Going down …
This is an historic moment.
Until there comes a point …
Merrily, merrily
Comes a point where greed …
Merrily, merrily
A point where greed and madness …
And then there is the final scream of metal, the piercing laceration as sections of the fuselage start to tear themselves apart, until at once the whole plane breaks up and shoots off in a million different directions, and he is in freefall, diving, unshackled, nothing but blue sky between Michael and the earth which he can see clearly now, rising up to meet him, the coasts of continents, islands, big rivers, big surfaces of water …
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
I am no longer in pain …
Life is but a dream
I am no longer afraid …
Life is but a dream
… because there comes a point where greed and madness can no longer be told apart. This dividing line is very thin, just like a belt of film surrounding the earth’s sphere. It’s a delicate blue, and this transition from the blue to the black is very gradual and lovely.
The world could wait no longer.
THE WINSHAW LEGACY
∗
A Family Chronicle
MICHAEL OWEN
PEACOCK PRESS
Preface
by Hortensia Tonks, B.A., M.A.(Cantab.)
Signor Italo Calvino, an Italian writer held in some considerable esteem among the literary cognoscenti, once remarked – very beautifully, in my view – that there is nothing more poignant than a book which has been left unfinished by its author. Such fragmentary works, in the opinion of this distinguished gentleman, are like ‘the ruins of ambitious projects, that nevertheless retain traces of the splendour and meticulous care with which they were conceived’.
How appropriate, how sweetly ironic, that Sig. Calvino should have delivered himself of this lofty sentiment in the course of a series of essays which were themselves left incomplete at the time of his death! And how fitting the phrase now seems, when applied to the present volume, the truncated work of an author cut down, as it were, in his literary prime, which shows him writing at the height of his powers (and which in time, perhaps, will be recognized as his masterpiece)!
I knew Michael Owen well, and feel towards his book much as a doting parent must feel towards a favourite child, for it blossomed and took shape under my benign aegis. And so when we at the Peacock Press heard the bitter news of his death, our initial sense of shock and bereavement was succeeded by the knowledge that we could do no better justice to his memory than by sending his last work upon its way with all despatch. It is for this reason alone (despite the malicious hints which have been dropped in various quarters of the press) that we publish it so soon after the sensational events which have recently aroused keen public interest in the Winshaw family and all its doings.
One might lament the keenness of this interest; but to ignore it altogether would surely be folly. I have therefore taken the liberty of including, by way of introduction to Michael’s history, a full and detailed account of the horrific murders which took place at Winshaw Towers on the night of January 16th this year. The composition of this chapter – compiled on the basis of authentic police records and photographs (more graphic and distressing, I am told, than any previously encountered in the long career of the pathologist who supplied them) – gave me no pleasure at all; but the public has an absolute right of access to even the most disagreeable particulars of such an affair. This is a point of high principle, and one which we, as publishers, have always been proud to uphold.
It also occurred to me, in my capacity as editor, that there were certain passages in Michael’s manuscript so laudably academic in tone, so rigorous in their historical perspective, that they might have proved a trifle daunting to those readers who were drawn to the book out of little more than a natural and wholesome curiosity to know more about the January massacre. My advice to such readers, then, would be that they can safely ignore the main body of his narrative, for my intention in the remainder of this Preface is to summarize, in a few concise, vivid pages, the entire early history of the family whose very name – once a byword for all that was prestigious and influential in British life – has now become synonymous with tragedy.
∗
Tragedy had struck the Winshaws twice before, but never on such a terrible scale.