Dickinson - What Does This Button Do?: An Autobiography

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

FIRST EDITION

Bruce Dickinson 2017

Cover layout design HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Cover photograph John McMurtie 2017

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Bruce Dickinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008172435

Ebook Edition October 2017 ISBN: 9780008172503

Version: 2017-09-11

To Paddy, Austin, Griffin and Kia.

If eternity should fail, you will still be there.

I had been circling for two hours over Murmansk, but the Russians would not let us land.

Landing permission denied, said in the best Star Trek original-series Mr Chekov accent.

I didnt know if this controller was an Iron Maiden fan, but he would never have believed me anyway; a rock star moonlighting as an airline pilot incredible. In any case, I didnt have Eddie on board and this wasnt Ed Force One. It was a fishing expedition.

A Boeing 757 from Astraeus Airlines with 200 empty seats and me as first officer. There were only 20 passengers from Gatwick to Murmansk: lots of men called John Smith, close personal protection, all of them armed to the teeth. Not that Lord Heseltine needed it. He was pretty good at swinging the mace around when he had to. Then there was Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph. He was on board too. I wondered if the Soviet controller read any of his leader columns. I thought not.

What sort of fish are there in Murmansk? I had enquired of one of the John Smiths.

Special fish, he deadpanned.

Big fish? I offered.

Very big, he concluded as he left the cockpit.

Murmansk was the headquarters of the Soviet Northern Fleet. Lord Heseltine was a former Secretary of State for Defence, and what Max Hastings didnt know about the worlds armed forces wasnt worth printing.

The world below us was secret and obscured, submerged beneath a cotton-wool bed of low cloud. To negotiate, I had a radio and an old Nokia mobile phone. Incredibly, it got a signal halfway round each holding pattern, and I could text our airline operations who would talk to Moscow via the British Embassy. No sat phone, no GPS, no iPad, no Wi-Fi.

As James Bond says to Q at the beginning of Skyfall: A gun and a radio. Not exactly Christmas, is it?

After two hours of going round in circles, physical and metaphorical, the rules of the game changed: Unless you go away, we will shoot you down.

One day, I thought as we turned and headed towards Ivalo in Finland, I should write a book about this.

The events that aggregate to form a personality interact in odd and unpredictable ways. I was an only child, brought up as far as five by my grandparents. It takes a while to figure out the dynamic forces in families, and it took me a long while for the penny to drop. My upbringing, I realised, was a mixture of guilt, unrequited love and jealousy, but all overlaid with an overwhelming sense of duty, of obligation to do the very best. I now realise that there wasnt a great deal of affection going on, but there was a reasonable attention to detail. I could have done a lot worse given the circumstances.

My real mother was a young mum married in the nick of time to a slightly older soldier. His name was Bruce. My maternal grandfather had been assigned to watch over their courting activities, but he was neither mentally nor morally judgemental enough to be up to the task. I suspect his sympathies secretly lay with the young lovers. Not so my grandmother, whose only child was being stolen by a ruffian, not even a northerner, but an interloper from the flat lands and seagull-spattered desolation of the Norfolk coast. East England: the fens, marshes and bogs a world that has for centuries been the home of the non-conforming, the anarchist, the sturdy beggar and of hard-won existence clawed from the reclaimed land.

My mother was petite, worked in a shoe shop and had won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School, but her mother had forbidden her to go to London. Denied the chance to live her dream, she took the next dream that came along, and with that came me. I would stare at a picture of her, on pointe, probably aged about 14. It seemed impossible that this was my mother, a pixie-like starlet full of nave joy. The picture on the mantelpiece represented all that could have been. Now, the dancing had gone out of her, and now it was all about duty and the odd gin and tonic.

My parents were so young that it is impossible for me to say what I would have done had the roles been reversed. Life was about education and getting ahead, beyond working class, but working multiple jobs. The only sin was not trying hard.

My father was very serious about most things, and he tried very hard. One of a family of six, he was the offspring of a farm girl sold into service aged 12 and a raffish local builder and motorcycle-riding captain of the football team in Great Yarmouth. The great love of my fathers life was machinery and the world of mechanisms, timing, design and draughtsmanship. He loved cars, and loved to drive, although the laws relating to speed he deemed inapplicable to himself, along with seatbelts and driving drunk. After losing his driving licence, he volunteered for the army. Volunteers got paid better than conscripted men and the army didnt seem picky about who drove their jeeps.

Driving licence (military) instantly restored, his engineering talents and tidy hand led to a job drawing up the plans for the end of the world. Around a table in Dsseldorf he would carefully draw the circles of megadeaths expected in the anticipated Cold War apocalypse. The rest of his time was spent drinking whisky to drown the boredom and the hopelessness of it all, one imagines. While still enlisted, this beefy Norfolk swimming champion butterfly, no less swept my waif-like ballerina mum off her feet.

As the unwanted offspring of the man who stole her only daughter, I represented the spawn of Satan for my grandmother Lily, but for my grandfather Austin I was the closest he would ever have to a son of his own. For the first five years of my life, they were de facto in loco parentis. As early childhood goes, it was pretty decent. There were long walks in the woods, rabbit holes, haunting flatland winter sunsets and sparkling frost, shimmering under purple skies.