Hamilton-Paterson - Empire of the clouds: when Britains aircraft ruled the world

At some point in the mid-seventies my friend and ex-tutor, the late Jonathan Wordsworth, offered me a job fund-raising for the Wordsworth Trust or maybe it was the Dove Cottage Appeal. I was soon to be revealed as the worlds worst fund-raiser, although consistent in that never did I raise more than I was being paid. However, until this fact became undeniable I was assigned a red Vauxhall Chevette and a secretary/assistant, a Wordsworth DPhil in her twenties. She and I were introduced in Oxford on the day we were to drive up to the Lake District for an official briefing in Ambleside. She struck me as earnest in a Guardian-reading sort of way; I evidently struck her as male, although I did my best to make my gender unobtrusive.

Somewhere up in the northern Midlands I can see a moorland landscape with dark low clouds, probably in the Peak District there occurred one of those epiphanic moments which take one by such surprise that all pretences are stripped away in a flash. From behind a hill a bare couple of hundred yards ahead a vision swept into view. Oh God! Look! I cried involuntarily. It was an Avro Vulcan B. Mk 2 in camouflage livery, travelling not very fast and only a couple of hundred feet up, thanks to its terrain-following radar: almost close enough for its serial number to be legible. As if the pilot impetuously decided to put on a show for the tiny red car plodding along this empty road, it performed an almost vertical bank to port directly in front of us before going to full military power and climbing steeply away overhead at an astonishing angle. Against the dark sky the vast underside of the delta with its kinked leading edge was briefly revealed in all its ghostly majesty, the thunder of the four Olympus engines and their combined fifty-plus tons of thrust drowning out the Vauxhalls pitiful motor and setting up vibrations I could feel through the steering wheel as I watched the parallel trails of dark kerosene smoke heading up and vanishing into the cloud base. Shakily I slowed the car, repetitively mumbling something like Crikey! as my gooseflesh subsided.

I know, my companion said with the first sympathy she had so far evinced. Its disgusting, isnt it? Just war, war, war. Endless boys toys at the taxpayers expense.

I looked at her aghast. But surely it was so beautiful! I blurted. That huge triangle against the sky like some monstrous angel trailing dark clouds of glory? It was sensationally beautiful: the most extravagantly charismatic aircraft this country has ever built. Doggedly I tried to explain that, yes, were all against war, but you cant deny some of its machinery is downright sexy. That massive power, all those tons of steel just being blasted straight up into the sky as if they were so much thistledown? Sheer glory. You could feel it in your stomach as much as hear it. Surely youve got to be moved by the awesome prowess involved in designing and building something like that? The sheer human ingenuity? No?

No. My advocacy failed utterly and my new assistant spoke barely another word until we reached Dove Cottage, by which time it was clear we belonged to two radically incompatible species and I had unabashedly reverted to my native gender. The odd thing was that a second epiphanic moment occurred not long after this, and again with a Wordsworth connection. I was staying with Jonathan and his family in their ageless and remote little rented farmhouse above the Duddon Valley and we were walking one day up on Harter Fell. It was one of those comparatively rare idyllic Lakeland days when the sunlight falls unhindered from the sky with brilliant largesse as if to apologise for all the mist and rain and grey months. We were quite high up on the fell when the silence was broken by a strange bleating rumble. Suddenly there appeared from the shoulder behind us two SEPE CAT Jaguars practising high-speed contour-hugging. They passed a bare fifty yards away but below us, so that we glimpsed the pilots white bone domes behind their cockpit canopies as they flashed past in a drench of sound that rattled the hills before fading with that odd wailing quality caused by the complex echoes thrown back from the close, sheep-bitten slopes. The scent of burnt kerosene lingered faintly in the Lakeland air.

Once again I was reduced to schoolboyish excitement while Jonathan, who seldom voluntarily left the late 1790s, was genuinely pained and bewildered. His inner musing shattered, he attempted to overcome his distress with a quotation from his forebear: deep/But short-lived uproar, like a torrent sent/Out of the bowels of a bursting cloud But it didnt work as a jocular exorcism and he fell into gloom at the remorseless way in which the world is too much with us. Only I was left thrilled, although obscurely crestfallen for being so easily revealed as both juvenile and philistine. But the world moves on, I wanted to say (and probably did). The Lake District of the 1790s was no doubt full of wonderfully ethnic pedlars and leech-gatherers and ruined cottages, not to mention the music of humanity; but a couple of centuries later the hills are alive with the sound of Jaguars, whether in the air or in the car park down at Dove Cottage, and theres poetry in that, too, besides more money for the Archive. It simply requires the right poet ? No again.

I must try to be precise about this clash of sensibilities. It is made no simpler by so easily being able to put myself into a pre-industrial mood and bewail the vanishing of bucolic silence and unhurried communion with what we think of today as the natural world. On the other hand I have always been moved by the science and aesthetics of flight and of particular aircraft, just as certain mariners have been by the sea and individual ships. Still, I cant deny that in my exultation at the two Jaguars storming by at our feet and blasting apart the immemorial hush there was also an adolescent component of rebellious glee. To hell with theeighteenth century and all those visionary but often sententiouspentameters! I am a creature of my own day and age, and thatis the Jet Age! Childish, no doubt; but then aircraft have had significance for me from my earliest childhood.

At the time of the Coronation in 1953 I was eleven, and I and my friends were adjusting to our novel identity as New Elizabethans. Through childrens periodicals such as Eagle and Boys Own we were proclaimed the inheritors of a new order: a post-war Britain of amazing technological energy and inventiveness suitable for the new Jet Age. Being fervent plane-spotters, we walked about with permanent cricks in our necks from gazing heavenwards. The least sound or movement in the skies would instantly pre-empt our attention as we strained for a glimpse of one of the exotica Britain seemed constantly to be producing: experimental or prototype aircraft, most of which were destined never to go into mass production. The overwhelming impression we had was of a national industry at a peak of fertility and excitement. Scarcely a week passed, it seemed, without Britain claiming some new world record in speed or distance or altitude. Now that the near-mystical sound barrier had been definitively broken there could surely be no further limit to aeronautical progress. For my friends and I the sky was our chosen playground. The rubber-band-powered propeller aircraft we used to launch into the wind now began to seem old-fashioned. To be properly up to date, the models we made from balsa wood kits now had to be powered by little Jetex jet engines that sent them hissing through the air, trailing a plume of pale, acrid smoke behind their fashionably swept-back wings. Our identification with what was literally leading-edge technology was complete. We ran across a lot of fields, climbed a lot of trees and ventured into a good many back gardens in order to rescue our little plastic pilots glued beneath their clear bubble canopies as they manfully strove to emulate our flesh-and-blood heroes in the sky.