Ep 3

Aircraft Types

Maddie is properly Margaret Brodatt. You have her ID, you know her name.

Brodatt is not a Northern English name, it is a Russian name, I think,because her grandfather came from Russia. But Maddie is pure Stockport.

Unlike me, she has an excellent sense of direction. She can navigate by the

stars, and by dead reckoning, but I think she learned to use her sense of

direction properly because her granddad gave her a motorbike for her

sixteenth birthday. That was Maddie away out of Stockport and up the

unmade lanes on the high moors of the Pennine hills. You can see the

Pennines all around the city of Stockport, green and bare with fast-moving

stripes of cloud and sunlight gliding overhead like a Technicolor moving

picture. I know because I went on leave for a weekend and stayed with

Maddie and her grandparents, and she took me on her motorbike up the

Dark Peak, one of the most wonderful afternoons of my life. It was winter

and the sun came out only for about five minutes and even then the sleet

didn’t stop falling – it was because the weather was forecast so unflyable

that she had the three days off. But for five minutes Cheshire seemed green

and sparkling. Maddie’s granddad owns a bike shop and he got some black

market petrol for her specially when I visited. I am putting this down (even

though it’s nothing to do with Aircraft Types) because it proves that I know

what I’m talking about when I describe what it was like for Maddie to be

alone at the top of the world, deafened by the roar of four winds and two

cylinders, with all the Cheshire plain and its green fields and red chimneys

thrown at her feet like a tartan picnic blanket.

Maddie had a friend called Beryl who had left school, and in the summer

of 1938 Beryl was working in the cotton mill at Ladderal, and they liked to

take Sunday picnics on Maddie’s motorbike because it was the only time

they saw each other any more. Beryl rode with her arms tight round

Maddie’s waist, like I did that time. No goggles for Beryl, or for me, though

Maddie had her own. On this particular June Sunday they rode up through

the lanes between the drystone walls that Beryl’s labouring ancestors had

built, and over the top of Highdown Rise, with mud up their bare shins.

Beryl’s best skirt was ruined that day and her dad made her pay for a new

one out of her next week’s wages.

‘I love your granddad,’ Beryl shouted in Maddie’s ear. ‘I wish he was

mine.’ (I wished that too.) ‘Fancy him giving you a Silent Superb for your

birthday!’‘It’s not so silent,’ Maddie shouted back over her shoulder. ‘It wasn’t

new when I got it, and it’s five years old now. I’ve had to rebuild the engine

this year.’

‘Won’t your granddad do it for you?’

‘He wouldn’t even give it to me until I’d taken the engine apart. I have

to do it myself or I can’t have it.’

‘I still love him,’ Beryl shouted.

They tore along the high green lanes of Highdown Rise, along tractor

ruts that nearly bounced them over drystone field walls and into a bed of

mire and nettles and sheep. I remember and I know what it must have been

like. Every now and then, round a corner or at the crest of a hump in the

hill, you can see the bare green chain of the Pennines stretching serenely to

the west, or the factory chimneys of South Manchester scrawling the blue

north sky with black smoke.

‘And you’ll have a skill,’ Beryl yelled.

‘A what?’

‘A skill.’

‘Fixing engines!’ Maddie howled.

‘It’s a skill. Better than loading shuttles.’

‘You’re getting paid for loading shuttles,’ Maddie yelled back. ‘I don’t

get paid.’ The lane ahead was rutted with rain-filled potholes. It looked like

a miniature landscape of Highland lochs. Maddie slowed the bike to a putter

and finally had to stop. She put her feet down on solid earth, her skirt

rucked up to her thighs, still feeling the Superb’s reliable and familiar

rumble all through her body. ‘Who’ll give a girl a job fixing engines?’

Maddie said. ‘Gran wants me to learn to type. At least you’re earning.’

They had to get off the bike to walk it along the ditch-filled lane. Then

there was another rise, and they came to a farm gate set between field

boundaries, and Maddie leaned the motorbike against the stone wall so they

could eat their sandwiches. They looked at each other and laughed at the

mud.

‘What’ll your dad say!’ Maddie exclaimed.

‘What’ll your gran!’

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***