Flying Visits
Clive James
FLYING VISITS
Postcards from the Observer
1976–83
PICADOR
To Martin Amis
Then, forehead against the pane, I suddenly feel
The longing open-armed behind the bone
To drown myself in other worlds, to steal
All lives, all times, all countries not my own.
Francis Hope, Schlossbesuch
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction
Postcard from Sydney
1 Home, James
2 Here Is the Noos
Postcard from Russia
Postcard from New York
Postcard from Japan
1 An Exchange of Views
2 Bridegroom of the Sea
Postcard from Biarritz
Postcard from Rome
Postcard from Los Angeles
1 No Stopping Any Time
2 Even with Uncle’s Dogs
Postcard from Salzburg
Postcard from Paris
Postcard from Washington
Mrs T. in China
1 The Dragon Lady Flies East
2 The Great Leap Homeward
Postcard from Epcot
Postcard from Munich
Postcard from Jerusalem
Author’s Note
THESE articles, along with some of the Introduction, appeared in the Observer from time to time between 1976 and 1983. Here and there I have restored some small cuts which had to be made if the piece was to fit the page, but otherwise I have added very little. The occasional outright howler has been corrected, but only if it was a matter of detail which I should have got right in the first place. Hindsight would have allowed further improvements but there would have been no end to the process. In the second article about China, for example, it seemed likely at the time, and for some time after, that the Hong Kong dollar would hold up. A year later, the Peking mandarins having proved intractable, it fell. If I were to rewrite the piece so as to predict this fact, it would become a claim to prescience, or at any rate no longer a report written at that moment. But like any other flying visitor, in the Far East or anywhere else, I was there at that moment, ignorant as to what would happen next, and fully occupied with making the most elementary sense of what had happened already. That has been the real story of mass jet travel: the world opening up to people who have no qualifications for exploring it except the price of a ticket. But I have never been able to believe that all my fellow tourists were quite blind. Even a postcard can be written with point.
C.J.
London, 1984
Introduction
THERE is a bad kind of travel writer who complains that the airport he leaves from herds him like a sheep, that the airliner he travels on feeds and lulls him like a veal calf, and that the airport he arrives at herds him like a sheep all over again, with the additional insult of somehow concealing all the allegedly exotic wonders that would have been revealed to him had he been allowed to make landfall by sampan or on the back of a camel.
To complain that modern travel has become a cliché is a cliché in itself. It is also an especially conceited brand of romanticism, by which you imagine yourself in the curled shoes and flowing robes of Sir Richard Burton or T.E. Lawrence. Such adventures were already beyond recapture when they were first heard about, since new ground can be broken only once. Anyway, in this as in any other field, reality should be romance enough. I like airports and airliners. Nor is this a case of frankly admitting to myself, as with my fond feelings for television, an enthusiasm that was always there but masked by intellectual snobbery. There was never any hope of generating enough intellectual snobbery to cover up my keenness for the airways.
I was already enslaved when the old compound-engined Douglas DC-6Bs were shaking my house to pieces back in the early Fifties. The house, situated in the Sydney suburb of Kogarah, lay among the approach lights to what was then the main runway of Kingsford-Smith airport – or aerodrome, as it was always called in those days. Before attaining long trousers I could already identify, from the engine note alone, the DC-4, every variety of the DC-6, the Lockheed Constellation, the Convair 240 and the Boeing Stratocruiser. They all rattled the crockery but the DC-6B could crack a Pyrex casserole dish. When the first Stratocruiser arrived via Hawaii, to the accompaniment of a tremendous publicity campaign from Pan Am, I had already been camped for two days in the sand dunes about a hundred yards from where it was due to touch down. Other members of my gang were hollow-eyed from hearing me tell them all about the wonder plane’s double-bubble pressure hull, but they looked appropriately awe-stricken when the huge machine descended right in front of us, belching gouts of flame from the exhausts of its Twin Wasp radials. Essentially a B-29 bomber nine months pregnant, the Stratocruiser was far from being the world’s most elegant airliner, but it seemed to me aesthetically pleasing beyond anything I had ever known, and even today I can hear the pained squeal from the tyres of the main undercarriage as they hit the tarmac and started rolling at 100 m.p.h. plus.
Those old piston-engined airliners would have fascinated me even had they never left the ground, but the thought of such beautiful mechanisms actually travelling through the sky was almost too much to take. In those days, flying was an activity for grown-up, fabulously wealthy people with deep voices: to my knowledge nobody in short pants had ever been allowed the freedom of the air. But one could haunt the airport at weekends, and one did. All through my early teens I was down at the airport on Saturday afternoons making myself indispensable to the cleaners sweeping out the planes. Although I was careful always to wear an old leather flying helmet in order to blend into the ambience, somehow my daydream of being asked to replace a sick co-pilot (‘Think you can handle it, son?’) never came true, and indeed I was not to get airborne until many years later. But I saw the flight-decks of most of the piston-engined airliners up to and including the Super Constellation, a version of the original Constellation which had been so often ‘stretched’ that its shadow going over our house perceptibly lowered the air temperature.
Older now, the proud smoker of several cigarettes a day, I was there again in the sand dunes when the first Boeing 707 landed, ushering in the intercontinental jet era that should have begun with the de Havilland Comet but tragically did not. My theoretical allegiance was to the British designers, but emotionally there was only one thing to do about the 707 – gape in wonder. Kingsford-Smith’s old main runway was not long enough to take the new plane so the transverse strip was extended out into Botany Bay, thereby preserving our house from the cataclysmic effect of the twice-weekly Pan Am 707 flight from Los Angeles. In fact the 707, though noisier than the later wide-bodies, made nothing like the racket kicked up by the piston engines of all those stretched post-war classics that had been fragmenting my mother’s china for the previous decade. Jet roar has no throb in it – it can howl but it doesn’t hammer. Nevertheless the good people of Kogarah were glad to be no longer in the blast path. All except me.
Farewelling an early girl-friend on her Pan Am 707 flight back to America, I stood heavy-hearted as the plane took off, not because she was going without me but because she was going instead. The aircraft looked powerful enough to reach the Moon. The wheels came up, the flaps retracted, and you could see the flexible wings take the weight as the plane went spearing up through the heat-wobble. Imagine how it must feel. Alas, imagine was all I could afford. When I left for England the means of transport was a rusty old ship that took five weeks to get there. Then there were two or three years in London when I scarcely earned enough to catch a no. 27 bus. But eventually I found myself getting airborne, not – emphatically not – because I had become rich, but because air trave
l was expanding to embrace the poor.
The Sixties were the great age of the charter flight. Before the wide-bodies had ever been invented, mass air travel was already under way. You could get to Milan, for example, for a very small amount of money if you were a student. The planes were ageing Britannias and even older Douglas DC-7Cs belonging to unknown airlines operating from tin sheds at the wind-swept edges of Gatwick or Luton, and most of your fellow students turned out to be ninety-year-old Calabrian peasant women in black clothes carrying plucked chickens. On my first flight I was petrified when we took off, largely because I had made the mistake of looking out of the window at the moment when the pilot arrived by Jeep. He was wearing an eye-patch, walked with a stiff leg and saluted the aircraft with what appeared to be an aluminium hand. Around his neck the silver brassard of a Polish award for bravery gleamed in the weak sunlight. But in the air I was too busy to be afraid. The ancient dwarf nun in the seat beside me – one of my fellow students – had never flown before in her life except when dreaming of the Last Judgment. Her rosary clattered in her gnarled hands like a football fan’s rattle and when the plane tilted to avoid the Matterhorn she sang a brief excerpt from a Donizetti aria before being sick into her plastic carrier-bag full of new potatoes. I got the job of holding her hand while the heavily loaded plane crabbed sideways on the wind and hit the runway between the two long lines of gutted old DC-4s which in those days told you that you were landing at Malpensa, Milan’s second best airport. At Linate, the first best, we would probably not have been allowed to land even if on fire.
Other early flights were equally hair-raising but somehow I never seemed to mind. There was a way of flying to Paris which involved a long bus-ride from London to a grass-strip airfield terminating at the Kentish cliffs, an even longer bus-ride from the French coast to Paris, and, between the two bus rides, an incredibly short hop across the Channel. The airborne sector of the trip was accomplished in a high-wing twin-engined British airliner whose make I will not specify, lest you take fright and cancel if you ever find yourself booked on one of the few surviving examples. No doubt it is a perfectly good aircraft in normal circumstances, but with a full load including me it took so long to get off the ground on the British side that one felt one might as well have stayed on the bus. Once again I made the mistake of looking out of the window, this time as the aircraft was pitching and yawing over the bumpy grass and dodging at full power between blasé sheep towards the cliff edge. A rabbit popped out of its hole, looked at me, and overtook us.
It was worth it just to be airborne, even if that particular flight rose only just far enough over the English Channel to clear the upper works of Greek oil tankers steaming towards each other. I used to spend all those early flights with my nose squashed against the window. Nowadays I have learned the trick of always asking for an aisle seat, so that if you have a drunken Bulgarian hammer-thrower sitting beside you at least you won’t have to climb over him to get to the toilet. But in those days I wanted to see everything happening outside, even when what was happening outside was too close to the inside for comfort. You never knew when there would be a revelation. At night the cities were like jewelled cobwebs on black velvet. Coming back from Venice on a BEA Comet 4 night flight, as one of the only two passengers aboard, I was invited to the flight deck just at the right moment to see the lights of Paris. Stacking around Gatwick in a chartered Britannia while the pilot negotiated through an interpreter for permission to land, I saw an old Elizabethan – one of the loveliest aeroplanes ever made – slip out of the cloud 1,000 feet below us. I presume our aircraft waggled its wings out of recognition rather than surprise. There was always something to look at, even if it was only a sea of cloud, and the more often you flew the more were the chances of an epiphany, such as the occasional clear day over the Alps when there was nothing under you except naked geology up which girls in dirndls ran yodelling, while the jet engines worked their continuous invisible miracle of plaiting cold air into a rope of power.
As for the airports, even the low-rent, secondary ones turned out to be more congenial than the propaganda would have had you believe. After I learned the trick of carrying nothing much except hand baggage and nothing much in that except a few good books, I quite enjoyed the delays. Even within the confines of Europe, the idea that all airports were the same turned out to be exactly wrong. In fact any airport anywhere immediately reflects the political system, economic status and cultural characteristics of the country where it is situated. During the supposedly swinging Sixties, both of the major London airports gave you a dauntingly accurate picture of Britain’s true condition, with one delay leading to another, a permanent total breakdown of the information service supposedly responsible for telling you all about it, and food you would not have given to a dog. Zurich airport, on the other hand, was like a bank which had merged with a hospital in order to manufacture chocolates. At Milan and Rome, the radar operators went on strike during a fog, and the security police, all armed with automatic weapons, stood posing dramatically while Arab terrorists walked past them carrying dismantled bazookas in golf bags. Salzburg airport was full of pictures of Herbert von Karajan, thus providing a useful introduction to a city which depends on him economically, derives its cultural justification from his mere existence, and bakes cakes the shape of his head. And at Moscow’s Sheremetsevo, the sheer number of Aeroflot jet airliners parked in lines told you something about the size of the country, the conspicuous lack of things to buy in the airport shops told you a lot about its economy, and the sullen vindictiveness with which the female customs inspectors went through the luggage of their compatriots returning from abroad told you all you needed to know about how fairly the shares had been dealt out. I watched a blue-uniformed lady looking like Geoff Capes in a wig taking a young man’s newly acquired pig-skin luggage apart, laying out his rich assortment of silk ties and stroking one by one a plump heap of cashmere scarves. Both of them settled down for a long, painful interview. You could see why Russian diplomats, on their first trip outside the Soviet Union, sometimes break down and cry in Copenhagen airport, unable to cope with the mere sight of the consumer goods on the glass shelves.
I finally got a trip on a Boeing 707 at just the time it was about to go out of style, because the first wide-bodies were already proving their routes. But it was still a thrill, not least because the destination was Boston – a long way from Europe. Over mid-Atlantic a BOAC VC-10 going the other way went past a few miles to our left on my side of the aircraft, and a mile or so above. The condensation trail came out of the cobalt blue distance like a spear of snow. As we let down into Boston, I watched the magic suitcase of the Boeing wing unpack itself, the flaps jacking out and curving down to turn the aerofoil into a parasol. It was a long time since I had bought Flight magazine every week and memorised the contents, but I was still clued-up enough to be aware that the same wing had held the B-52s up in the sky while they split the ground of South-East Asia and drove a lot of little children crazy just with the noise. There is good reason for thinking we are alive in a particularly shameful stretch of history, the only era in which the innocent have ever been obliterated on an industrial basis. But on the airliners and in the airports I found myself unable to pretend that I did not enjoy living in the twentieth century. You will find an extermination camp in the seventh book of Thucydides. People have always destroyed each other on as grand a scale as the prevailing technology allowed. But powered flight has all happened within a single lifetime. Recently I had dinner with a man who remembered crossing the Atlantic on the old Aquitania in 1903, the year the Wright brothers first flew at Kittyhawk. Even Leonardo, who could do anything, could only dream of flying. And here was I, without even a licence to drive a car, riding down out of the sky into Massachusetts after having crossed the Atlantic in a few hours. A king of infinite space, I was justifiably annoyed when the immigration officer sent me back to fill out my form again because I had not pressed hard enough to ink the carbon copy.
<
br /> Then the wide-bodies came in and the age of mass aerial migration was on for young and old. By those who flew them the wide-bodies were known as heavies and the name was soon in use among such non-practising pilots as myself. The DC-10 I found hard to love at first, especially after one of them crashed near Paris and killed a lot of people, including someone I knew. The Tristar I found disconcertingly hard to tell apart from the DC-10, until I learned to remember that the DC-10 was the one with the third engine half-way up its tail. Twenty years earlier I would have learned a hundred different recognition points but as you get older other things usurp your attention. There was no difficulty, however, about spotting which of the three principal heavies was the winner. Nobody with a proper appreciation of the Boeing 747’s looks will ever call it a Jumbo. The 747 is so suavely proportioned that it doesn’t even look very big, except when it happens to taxi past its ancestor, the 707, whereupon you feel that a mackerel has given birth to a mako shark.
Loved by pilots for its handling qualities and seemingly infinite reserves of getaway, the 747 flies like a fighter and at first glance even looks like one. In fact it looks a lot like the old F-86 Sabre, with its flight-deck bulge perched right forward like a Sabre’s bubble canopy and the same proud angle to its tail feathers. On the ground the 747 is perhaps a bit fussy underneath, like a house being moved around on a lot of roller skates, but when it gets into the air, cleans itself up, and pours on the 100,000 horsepower of its turbofans, there is nothing less awkward or lovelier aloft. Unless you had been told, you would never think of it as having 400 people on board. It looks as if there is only one man in there, having the time of his life.