The winds were in their favour. That’s what Frank had told her when Miriam showed up at 8:00 a.m. as agreed. She’d hardly slept, was out of bed at 5:00 a.m., downstairs in the kitchen drinking tea, imagining she heard planes overhead. She and Edmund had breakfast together, a tense, terse conversation about the headlines, as if there wasn’t drama enough being played out in their own kitchen.
“Ready?” he said, when she took her cardigan off the hook.
“I think I am.” A peck on the cheek, a measured squeeze of her arms, and she slipped through the door. Then he sat down to put his shoes on, to get ready for his own day at work.
She clambered up into the cockpit of the Gipsy Moth, leveraged one leg on the wing while the other swung over into the hollow of the plane. The seat was frigid, the air still damp from the morning fog that clung to the low-lying areas.
“Contact,” Peter called out, spinning the propeller.
“Contact,” Frank responded, pulling the throttle forward.
Miriam braced against the roar of the engine, gripping the edge of the cockpit as the airplane rumbled forward. Frank guided it toward the grass runway, then they were gaining speed, the bounce a shock to her body until they were airborne, suddenly gliding, all resistance of land gone.
The steady roar of the engine rumbled in her body, a constant reminder that blood was thrumming through her veins. The uplift brought a lightness to her stomach, and for a fleeting moment she thought she’d be ill, but it was something else she felt, not pain or sorrow or fear, an impression so intense she thought she might faint. She held her head back against the cockpit, closed her eyes, and felt the brisk wind on her face. When she dared open her eyes, it was upward she looked; the fear of what she might see if she looked down left her paralyzed. She heard Frank’s voice through the earpiece but couldn’t understand what he was saying.
She closed her eyes again, but that made her dizzy so she pulled herself up tall in her seat, breathing in the battering air until she could steady herself. She was here, up in the same sky she’d viewed from her bedroom window. The airplane that called to her only two weeks ago had led her here.
One more breath. She dared look over the side and glimpsed the landscape, not as she imagined it as one great swath of green but more complex, lush, and segmented, the properties distinctly demarcated, the houses scarce and diminutive, the tonal range of fields prompting her to guess what was being grown in each plot.
Frank was speaking to her again, and this time she picked up the earpiece and held it to her ears.
“The village is to the left of us.”
She looked out to the place where she’d been born, where she’d been schooled, where she’d met Edmund, who must now be scanning the skies, or holding an ear alert for the sound of an engine. She was surprised at how compact the village looked against the sprawl of countryside.
The plane banked as Frank circled for a better view, and Miriam gripped the sides, though she was getting used to the movement. They’d been flying into the sun, and now that they were turning, she felt the heat on her face, and that alone seemed a reason to be there, for that pure burning warmth. They were past Middleton, and she began making mental notes of the features below. She saw a thread of water that must be Walker River and the rise to the right of it would be Shipton Downs. She calculated the distance between the bridge and the downs, holding her hand to place thumb and finger as points four inches apart. She knew this distance to be six miles, and this began her lesson in scale and perspective. Her father had taught her to draw, assigning her landmarks to sketch. She would come to learn more of mapping, casting back to the Middle Ages when science was at its lowest ebb and the drawing of a map was determined by the artist’s memory of other maps he had seen, or accounts of travellers, or facts of geography that everyone knew to be true. Sometimes it was the shape of the piece of skin or wood that was available for drawing on that determined maps. These were the factors she would think of when she began replicating what she saw from the air.
They were flying along the railway. Miriam looked ahead to see the plume of steam that announced the 9:30 train from London, and then they were upon it, flying over the train in an exhilarating rush of propulsion. The airplane swooped up, drew a circle, then headed back to the airfield. Miriam looked at the controls in her cockpit, imagined herself using them to fly the plane, hand on throttle, eyes on compass, the magnetic wand flickering as they traversed the sky.
“Heading back, now,” Frank shouted.
She waved acknowledgement, then instantly felt sorrow as she became aware that in minutes they’d be on the ground. The county no longer seemed an abstraction to her, but land she could map out, mark the roads, rivers, churches, and farms that would make sense from the air. She made mental notes of all the landmarks she recognized. This was a world of looking down and seeing, so far away from the one of looking up and dreaming.
Her stomach floated as they made their descent, and already as they neared the earth she was wishing she was up in the air again. She felt the weight of tangibles, noticed the contours, shapes, and colours of buildings come into view as they skimmed across the air, just yards from the grass. Then a dip and they were jolted onto the runway, rambling to a stop.
Frank was already out of the airplane and coming to her, pulling the flap to her cockpit down so she could get out, but she was so dazed she was unable to move. She could hear Peter’s voice in the distance, then the two men talking, and she sat fiddling with her gloves. When she finally stepped out, she could only thank Frank, unable to register the conversation between the men, and not wanting to leave where she had just been.
“I must go home now. I promised Edmund I’d be home for lunch.” She was brusque in her departure, and hardly noticed the flush in Frank’s cheeks.