#6: Henry goes flying
I started this blog with the ambition of writing a post every week.
It doesn’t seem to be going very well…
In my defence I started it during a period of ample downtime due to being furloughed, thanks to the pandemic. Then life kind of got in the way. I went back to work, got a new job and things got busy for the rest of the year.
I really want to keep the blog going. I enjoy the practice of writing and of updating the website. So it’s still a blog… but every sometimes.
An anecdote exists from my early childhood that is supposedly true but could just as easily be fiction. It remains shrouded in the mist of the intervening decades and the faded memories of those involved.
I usually roll it out as a light-hearted story to explain the origin of my lifelong interest in aviation. Or at least, an early symptom of that interest.
Although I’m the main character, it happened at such a young age that I have no recollection of it. The version I recount is based on how it was told to me by others. It has developed over the years with various embellishments I have added to it.
Allegedly, it involves a ladder.
A ladder that had been left standing against the side of the house by my father. Or it might have been an uncle, or both (no one is certain) after performing some sort of chore. Cleaning the roof, maybe painting it, or clearing leaves away, or some such thing.
In the first act, I stride into view and spy the ladder that has carelessly been left in situ. In a moment of genius, I realise it presents the perfect opportunity to conduct my first ever experiment in aerodynamics.
In Act II (although it’s not entirely clear who was present at the time) adults come looking for me, wondering where I had disappeared to. It was obviously far too quiet inside the house.
They found me, so the story goes, standing on the roof with a large plastic shopping bag tied to my belt by the handles with several pieces of string – fashioned together as a makeshift parachute.
Holding it above my head in one hand and glancing over the edge at the vertiginous drop below, I was poised to leap off and test my aeronautical equipment with the exuberant naivety of youth… lacking any notion of self-preservation.
In my mind I must have thought that once I jumped, I would simply drift gently down towards the earth with a soft landing. Because that’s how parachutes work, right? And I had just made a parachute.
So, stand back everyone. Hold my juice box.
So… obviously I didn’t jump and break my neck, or I wouldn’t be here to tell you about it. Someone probably yelled at me to keep still until they could come up and rescue me.
These days it serves as a salutary tale of my precocious youth, masquerading as an anecdote to support the idea that I had an early propensity for flying. It’s a story I’ve happily told at regular intervals since then whenever given half a chance, usually to the chagrin of anyone who’s heard it more than once.
But memories fade and stories become legends. After many years of recounting it more or less as I’ve set it out above, I recently decided to ask my mother about it – just in case I’d been telling fibs all those years.
She corroborated it.
That still doesn’t necessarily mean it is true. Her memory is just as fallible as mine.
I’ll try to be objective and remove the absurdly romantic notion that a child no older than four years of age knows how to construct a parachute, even a rudimentary one. In all likelihood I was simply found climbing up the ladder... and stopped before anything serious happened.
Just like the fisherman’s tale, how far up the ladder I actually progressed before being saved from dire straits is wide open to interpretation. And amnesia. Over time the fish has grown another fin or three, sprouted arms and learned to play the ukulele. But hey, never let the truth get in the way of a good story, right?
I continue to bore people with this tale of peril that almost certainly would have resulted in spending only a few short years on this planet with an early demise, but it is nevertheless offered as concrete proof that I was obsessed with flying at an early age.
That part is true. I really have been obsessed with flying for as long as I can remember. Although I must make a distinction here between flying and aviation.
Flying was the dream.
Aviation was simply the means to that end.
I love aviation in almost all its forms. But if I could fly, on my own, without an aircraft… imagine how that would feel…
Catching the wind.
Riding it.
Joining with it.
I remember being at the beach as a kid and seeing seagulls up close for the first time. Close enough that I could see individual, perfectly streamlined feathers. Every now and then a small ruffle might momentarily appear in a single feather as one made minute movements and corrections, to harness the breeze and stay fixed in position – while waiting for the right moment to swoop in and steal whatever snack I was holding.
I vividly recall that childlike fascination of watching birds and wanting to be able to do what they could do. Wondering what it must feel like, the sheer thrilling sensation of it.
I constantly pestered my mother with questions, demanding to know why I couldn't fly. Surely I could just jump off some nearby tall structure? A cliff perhaps? Why not? It didn’t seem fair.
In primary school I would stare out of the classroom window at the blue sky and the fluffy clouds, daydreaming about soaring through it. In my spare time I would go outdoors and lie on my back in the grass, staring upwards and experience an exhilarating reverse vertigo. If I focused on one spot in the sky and if the clouds were moving quickly enough, it felt like the clouds were still and the earth was moving beneath me.
As a child, I read Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. I was thrilled by the idea that here was a bird that flew simply for the pleasure of it, not because he had to. The other gulls thought he was nuts, wasting energy on practising and perfecting his flying technique, rather than only flying when necessary to get food.
But then I got to the part where it all gets a bit strange – he crosses into a different dimension and meets aliens – or something. It got a bit too weird for me, so I preferred to put the book down at that point where he was just a keen aviator and left it at that.
Even as a kid, I knew that no amount of flapping my arms and making aeroplane noises was going to get me off the ground.
I happily accepted aviation the means to the end. I’m fortunate enough to have been born relatively late into the 20th century when mankind’s solution to cheating gravity was already well advanced. There are countless others who have experienced the same wistful longing throughout history, gazing enviously at birds and never even coming close, like poor old da Vinci.
Look at the image below. On the left is the first powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight at Kittyhawk, North Carolina in December 1903. I think you recognise the other one. Only 66 years separate these two events.
Aviation is the vehicle. If you want fly like a bird, you have no choice but to strap yourself into a fying machine of some sort – now increasingly seen as noisy and polluting. But then so are birds. When I lived by the coast, seagulls made a hellish racket whenever I was sleeping in at the weekend with a hangover. They would often shit on you too, if you weren’t careful.
I am starting to feel some guilt about flying these days, but we need to remember that carbon is the culprit rather than aviation itself. I have no doubt that the aerospace industry will find a solution. It is always innovative and has pushed the boundaries of technology ever since it has been in existence. Whether it’s a world war, an energy crisis or climate change, aviation solves its own problems.
If there is one image that sums up what flying feels like and means to me, it’s Flying Henry.
Flying Henry is an artwork by photographer Rachel Hulin, featuring eighteen images of her son Henry, at the age of six months.
The first image in the series, Cape Flight, is the banner image I use for this website, with Rachel’s very kind permission.
When I look at it, I feel that same sensation of joy, wonder and desire of having the ability to float into the air at will. It has an almost dreamlike quality to it – Henry’s cape could be his bed sheet or a duvet cover, as if he has just flown out of his bed after falling asleep, now gliding effortlessly across a grassy field in his dreams.
I discovered Henry a few years ago in a Google Image search. At the time, I had been tasked with finding a single picture that summed up my personality.
I was attending an away day at work. If you’ve spent any time working for a company of a certain size, you’ll know that you have to regularly attend some course or another. It’s an away day out of the office at a conference centre wearing a name tag, meeting new corporate colleagues, sitting in front of presentations, having group chats and breakout sessions with Post It notes and flip charts, describing personal goals to each other, learning what our personality types are and… so on.
The next day you’re back at your desk realising you’re now a full day behind on the work that you could have done yesterday and now need to catch up. You’ve already forgotten everything you saw and heard on the course, except that the white chocolate chip cookies they served during tea breaks were amazing.
At the beginning of the day, we were all supposed to introduce ourselves for a couple of minutes. As an icebreaker, we had to share one single image that we thought summed us up as individuals. I thought that if I was really being honest, then… well, this is what’s going on in my head most of the time. I might as well tell my colleagues that. I’m still that little kid dreaming about flying. I’m still that primary school student staring out the window at the blue sky and clouds. When I go to bed at night and close my eyes, this image of Henry is what I see.
Sometimes even when I’m awake.
I scrolled through Google Images for what seemed like an eternity until suddenly Henry was there in front of me. He was perfect. Right click, copy, paste. Straight into a PowerPoint slide.
I probably told the story about jumping off the roof too.
I can’t remember how well it was received on the day, or even what the away day was about. But I remember that they served good quality coffee and the carrot cake was delicious.
When I started this blog and set up mylast25years.com, I was determined that Henry should be front and centre on the site. But I wanted the original, good quality image. Seeing as I was going to use it on a public website, I also wanted the artist’s permission and blessing if possible. Fortunately, she agreed so my many thanks go to you, Rachel. Go and check her out at rachelhulin.com
When I go to sleep at night, I regularly dream about flying. The nocturnal cinema plays some hybrid of Henry mixed with flying I have done in real life. It always has a surreal quality to it. Usually I am never quite able to get completely airborne, but tantalisingly close. Little short hops, gliding a short distance, then descending back to the ground. But I can never quite stay grounded either. I have the sensation of becoming unstuck, the earth slippery beneath my feet, falling away from it into the air for another short hop.
As Douglas Adams wrote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“The main thing that flying requires is the ability to throw yourself at the ground and miss. The Guide says to throw yourself forward with all your weight and the willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt, however it will surely hurt if you fail to miss the ground. The difficulty is in missing the ground, and doing so accidentally, as deliberately intending to miss the ground does not work.”
“You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else then you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.”
Fashion house Burberry launched an ad campaign in October 2021 called Open Spaces. In it, characters are running and flying through wheat fields. It’s Flying Henry but in moving pictures. This is almost exactly what I experience when I’m asleep and dreaming about flying – they’re not able to stay airborne for long, neither are they able to stay on the ground.
Like me, they are perpetually stuck somewhere in between, clinging preciously to whatever purchase the air can provide.
There’s a wistful element to it, like Ferdinand the Bull. That childlike fascination with the planet on which we find ourselves living and what we can do with it while we’re here, always seeking new ways to understand it and new experiences. That continual sense of wonder, smelling the flowers, experiencing the weightlessness of flight, never stopping exploring.
Even Ferdinand has a delightful link to aviation. After the book was published, it was labelled as having an alternate political agenda following the Civil War in Spain. During World War II the British Air Transport Auxiliary started flying into Europe after D-Day and their pilots, who were non-combatants, used Ferdinand the Bull as their call sign.
Over The Town is a work by artist Marc Chagall. He holds his wife close as they dart through the sky like kites. His fiancée, Bella Goldenberg, recalled the elation of their engagement and wrote:
“I suddenly felt as if we were taking off. You too were poised on one leg, as if the little room could no longer contain you. You soar up to the ceiling. Your head turned down to me, and turned mine up to you... We flew over fields of flowers, shuttered houses, roofs, yards, churches.”
As for me, my wings have been clipped these days, but I can still go to that part of my imagination where I can do all the flying I want and go anywhere. Maybe this is what Jonathan Livingston Seagull meant when he learned to move instantaneously to anywhere else in the universe. The secret, supposedly, is to “begin by knowing that you have already arrived.”
Hmm. Maybe I should go back and give it another read.
Over the Town, or Sulla La Citta (1918) by Marc Chagall, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russian Federation
