The Downs from Above: A Psychologist Therapies Herself with Hang Gliding

By Michael Annette

When Christine takes up hang gliding, she becomes entwined in her friend Laurie’s love affair with Katerina, a German adventurer. Katerina’s disturbing nature puts his life in jeopardy when he flies his hang glider, and Christine, a psychologist, gives herself to support him. In so doing, she finds her human heart. The reader sympathises with the torments of youth, gets a taste of the thrills and spills of early hang gliding and is entertained by the good fellowship inspired by the birth of the sport. It is hang gliding’s creation story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lynsey Publications
• Release date: Oct 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739565428

Book preview

9781739565428.jpg

The Downs from Above

A Psychologist Therapies Herself with Hang Gliding

Michael Annette

The Downs from Above:A Psychologist Therapies Herself with Hang Gliding

Published by Lynsey Publications

[e-mail]

ISBN 978- 1 -7395654-2-8

The moral right of Michael Annette to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Copyright © Michael Annette, 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the copyright owner.

Typesetting and cover design by Charlotte Mouncey www.bookstyle.co.uk

PART I

Chapter 1

‘Look at those geese up there, Christine,’ said Laurie.

We were in a fix. Our motor had just packed up on our journey to the 1975 World Hang Gliding Competition in Kossen. So I had to wonder what made him spot those distant birds. By spotting them at that moment, he incidentally made me watch out for more than geese. In fact, it has never worn off that he did that to me. I have faced, or endeavoured to face, my subsequent disasters in a comparable birdwatching spirit.

At the time, I was wary of him. He specialised in surviving his hang gliding crashes, which wasn’t a number one attraction. I didn’t imagine it was all luck that kept getting him out of trouble, but I liked to keep out of trouble myself.

However, he was famous for saying with regard to crashing that what counted every time was who you were. That made me wonder if I really knew who I was. I knew I was untested and just to look at him made me feel it was no good being complacent about it. I might have found out who I was by having a fling with him, because he did look able to put me right, but that option was out, seemingly. He had a girlfriend.

Instead, I sought to find out who I was by being a good flyer. I could never have faked how that business seasoned me. Our reflexes are tuned with use, they show what we know. Fledgeling status never returns, though childhood can do so. How it shows chiefly though is in how we keep up the habit of putting our all into our days. The past and present are worlds apart and we live in both. I recall how those geese alleviated our distress; time is reversed. But what I value today, what sustains me most, nigh on fifty years on, is how I became entwined in his affair and how his trauma became mine.

The five of us on that Kossen trip, Giles and Pauline, Large Ears, Laurie and me, had met up at Giles’s place. Giles had said, ‘Bung it in,’ concerning my gear, then, ‘Fit everyone?’ Words that filled us all with vim, because they were delivered with vim. ‘Bung it in. Fit everyone?’ I’ve since used those words myself to put on the style, exhibit vim, never failing to mentally thank Giles for putting that vim in me.

Then we were off, away, psyching ourselves up for the competition. I recall it like a sweet dream in a slumber after a replenishing day. Purring across the continent, France, Germany, taking turns at the wheel, racing Della and Boyd down the moonlit tarmac, crushed in Giles’s Volkswagen camper, our gear packed around us. I revelled in our ad hoc procedure to keep the driver awake with mugs of coffee and flying anecdotes, and gloried in our disgusting repartee. I loved everyone in the world.

I knew there was a mistake somewhere. I could generally trust myself not to be a victim of stupidity. I’d motorcycled to Cape Town and not once fallen off my motorbike. That proved to my satisfaction I was doing well to think before I acted. I couldn’t have let myself go if it was the last way I’d ever get out my rut. Yet no one would have thought so who had seen me before we broke down.

Was that me, the girl who yesterday ran round the edges of the playground on her own, then had somehow got to Oxford, gained a doctorate in clinical psychology and still felt gauche? Me now one of a gang with the gleaming eyes and twisted mouths of kids around an Elvis pinball machine?

Our motor started to cough and jerk. Giles whispered, ‘She’s missing on one cylinder. Keep the revs up, Laurie.’ Laurie murmured that he had his foot right down. Our camper only just chugged over the hill. No rude word was spoken. No one even expressed dismay. I didn’t find that strange. Everyone was thinking positively, that was all. But I noticed it. As we rolled down the other side, we all peered ahead in the hope of seeing a light of civilisation.

A big sign ahead. It was the German/Austrian border. I said, ‘There must be a telephone here.’

As soon as we stopped our motor died on us. The distributer head had split.

And Laurie could talk geese?

‘Look as if they’ll never need a rest, don’t they?’ he murmured. ‘I suppose their formation helps them pool their intelligence and will.’

I watched the birds racing us to the east in the eggshell sky. All they could have heard up there was the beating of their wings. They couldn’t tell it from heartbeats. I contemplated that August dawn. Its tenderness. I felt that I’d always missed the best part of the day.

Our cameraman Large Ears said, ‘Fact is, Laurie, in case you’ve forgotten, we must be in Kossen by midday to book in. All I ask is how those geese can help us.’

The rest of us grimaced ‒ except Laurie.

He noticed a deal table under the trees, away from the loosely scattered juggernauts and police loitering in their ironed uniforms, slightly at a loose end since the European frontiers had opened. Its potential spoke for itself, though no one was hungry yet. It would set us up for the day to have our eggs and bacon there. ‘An English breakfast never tastes better than on the continent,’ he promised us.

I watched him grimly pumping up his Primus. He said he believed in good bread and good coffee. My home life and the student gatherings I’d attended hadn’t introduced me to that refinement.

‘I’ll lay the table.’ I set the cutlery out with silver service precision and was delighted when he blinked at my work. Since he mystified me, I felt skittish to mystify him back.

He was two years younger than me, a little taller and slenderer, with blond hair, fine nostrils. In his eyes I perceived the sorrows of that century. He would brighten to see me but hum and haw and ask me how I was before remarking on the weather. He never touched me. If I landed badly, he studied matters before entering my territory. If I was unhurt, he said nothing to embarrass me.

Just once, he had offered me a hand up. I had waved him off. If I could pick myself up, as I could, to let him pick me up would have been a come on, a sally into his private life, and it was an unwritten law in hang gliding circles not to impose on his private life in the slightest particular. We were even careful what we said about our own lives in his presence. It was because we could tell that his affair weighed on him. We sensed that it was torrid ‒ way over our heads. It humbled us to be unable to imagine it. After I had waved him off, he had appeared to look into questions about me that would make a lady blush. Finally, he explained that his mates weren’t laughing sadistically, only recalling their own first efforts to master the technicalities. Half an hour later I was still counting the ways I could take that.

He was studying ecology at Birbeck, University of London. He had firstly studied civil engineering. He had chosen civil engineering because it would enable the family building firm to expand. However, his father had died and there was trouble with his brother over the estate, following which he had chucked everything and started afresh. I had asked him once why that trouble had made him start afresh. He hadn’t answered me.

I tried a better question. ‘Why did you choose ecology, Laurie?’

‘I’ve always fancied ecology. I feel right about myself now. Throw me your mug, honeybunch.’

Honeybunch put me in my place, because I obviously wasn’t his honeybunch. I noticed how I was geared up. I figured I was running on nervous energy. The previous night I’d been reading until two in the morning. I felt he would know the signs. A little breathlessness. I had an odd way of studying. Every time I made a cup of tea and returned to my nest of books my hand fell on a different one I was into, so I possibly spent half the time picking up the thread, making connections. I retained more that way, I believed. Laurie thought that any way of making connections was as good as any other. Once a week I scooted off to the National Film Theatre to see a foreign language film. I was particularly gone on Jean-Luc Godard’s films ‒ the fascination with youth. The images helped me with my work. I realised that I needed an activity as well, but I felt I was dealing with that issue by hang gliding. I had planned to catch up on my sleep on the road. Far from feeling knackered, I felt I’d never need to sleep again.

Laurie gravely turned his sausages. ‘Good old Large Ears.’

I could relax studying Large Ears. He was doing an eccentric dance, peering through his view-finder, unable to wait for his precious light to appear properly to start logging images with his camera. I felt his air of dedication could get him in anywhere. Despite his uncombed look, slight stoop, bulging pockets and very diffident manner when he wasn’t prowling after pictures, he only had to enter the corner of my eye to charge me with his alertness. He was close behind the top flyers, but he principally wanted to get images of us in action to put in the NHGA monthly Fly Paper, courtesy of Carot Photography. He didn’t want payment at that time, only to establish his name. That master plan had made him look prematurely distinguished.

Laurie said, ‘I like the way Large Ears uses his long legs to take photos. He arrives at the crash from nowhere and bags a shot that says it all.’

‘I don’t find it easy to call him Large Ears.’

‘It comes from his name, le Gardes. It’s stuck, I think, because it’s an endearment and that’s how he takes it. Notice how he says my people. You can tell he wouldn’t want us to meet them. The name Large Ears reaches all he suppresses to keep the peace, though it has to be Hugo when he’s photographing weddings.’

‘Pauline tells me he won a sports photography competition with his hang gliding photographs.’

We watched the virgin light grope through the steaming leaves.

‘What made you take up psychology?’ asked Laurie.

‘Thought it was the only way I’d ever get to understand people.’

‘Large Ears studied chemistry at Cambridge, you know. Started a post grad course. Threw it all up for the face of a girl who got on his bus. Not a noticeable sort of face. Imagined she was a typist living with her parents. Went out once a week in a cheap pair of earrings. If her boyfriend asked her to marry him, that would be it ‒ married, kids. Large Ears said he was a photographer and asked her if he could photograph her. It got hold of him. Felt he was getting stuck in a groove in chemistry. He says groove with revulsion. Burnt his notes. Much to his father’s disgust. Called himself a photographer on his passport.’

‘I know he went to Cambridge. He told me. He doesn’t seem to have wasted much time since,’ I said.

‘You do your groundwork, you get your break, you seize it, he says. The result looks like luck. That’s when you know you’ve succeeded.’

It arrived. Large Ears darted about to get it from odd angles ‒ the sun rising over the Alps, its first rays sprinkled on the upper shelves of the old pine tree. Sudden shadows threw the tree in relief and pastel colours brought it to life. I saw how Earth was spinning like a top. There was a rustle in the undergrowth. A train whistled far away. When I was tiny, I lived much the same distance from a railway line. I had nightmares about being alive in my coffin. I had questionless journeyed a long way since then. It was a proud thing to be one of that young band of hopefuls on that border between night and morning, between turning back and going on, between sled-runs on my bog rog (standard kite) and all to come. A sled-run in those days, in case it is forgotten today, was a flight straight from the top of the hill to the bottom.

*

Della and Boyd tore the dust up beside us. Boyd was an indie kite designer. That called for a visionary outlook and it had given him the look of an ancient astrologer. When he saw our engine open, he thought we were waiting for him to peer into it. His coarse grey-flecked black beard and matching mop of hair seemed to become charged with static. That was one mark of his genius. Another was that he forgot his tools were way back home.

‘If a bloke has to see what he can do, he has to see,’ I said.

Defeated by our distributor head, Boyd taxed his inventor’s brain again. ‘Say I drive the flyers to book in. Della and Pauline wait here, if they don’t mind, till your motor’s fixed, Giles. They join us when they can.’

Giles grimaced. ‘What about our kites?’

‘Could you get them on your roof, Boyd?’ I asked. ‘It doesn’t look on to me. You seem to have brought your entire stock with you.’

‘Brekkers up, darlings,’ said Laurie.

The bread went round and the jam went round, which everyone used sparingly, a little plonk and plenty of laughter. We were all taking small bites and using whispery voices to ask for the butter.

Giles told us stories about hang gliding competitions. He had a trim moustache, chiselled features and a grin like a cheeseburger. He too fascinated me. That wasn’t just because I was on the alert, intrigued generally, and because any part of Laurie’s world seemed of interest. His lean outline only had to appear on a hang gliding site and everyone became unfocused, frenzied, and scrambled to get airborne. As a rule, he carried off the pot everyone else wanted, and he was liked for it, because he didn’t keep his joy to himself, he spread it around. Not a glance to see who was listening, the spiel just poured out and people far and wide pitched in. I’d say that was half the reason there was ultimately a Giles Coleman trophy. He made his pot-madness seem a subtly different thing from just wanting to be good. He was on the air display circuit. They gave him a patch of grass to rig up his kite and he stood beside it answering questions with his charming lack of false modesty. Why did they think he needed paying? He was the West End show that entered the popular culture and gave all the amateur shows respectability and something to aspire to. Don’t look at our poor efforts, look at the stars. I couldn’t enjoy his company without wondering what I must do to genuinely earn the privilege.

I saw Giles register the fact, though he didn’t draw attention to it, that Laurie was having what I came to call a power cut.

To look at Laurie, smouldering, listless, gave me a fluttery feeling. I supposed I should expect to have a few fluttery feelings. I was in what passed as the England squad after I’d only been flying six months. That might fool some people into thinking I was good. I mustn’t forget, as some folk did, the knowledge we’re all born with that we don’t automatically know all there is to know about hang gliding. I hadn’t been chosen. He had simply told me I needed competition experience. I hadn’t liked him making plans for me, but we’d been looking at one another over glasses of well-earned beer at the time. I had got the frothy taste of life’s potential on my lips. Some people knew how things should be, they had the touch. If he seemed one of them, as he did, I must listen to him. He also took my commitment for granted. That made me wonder what he’d spotted about me. Accordingly, I let him get me in as a sort of mascot. He was right that the others would accept me. I was on probation though.

Pauline gave Laurie a worried glance.

From the word go, I’d had my eye on her as a friend. Someone to sit with between dances. To feel safe with. That she shared my concern for Laurie clinched it. She was the next dimension to my stimulated curiosity.

An onlooker might have thought that to arrive in Kossen in time to book in we only had to keep going down the road. I knew she wouldn’t mind me attributing that to the Giles effect. She had no problem with his glory. It was generally understood he was a champion thanks in part to the fact they were a champion couple. She didn’t fly, so I also wanted to do my bit to make her feel one of us. No one minded her sitting there quietly; that didn’t assure her we appreciated how she dressed the scene, up to her ears in Giles’s unnecessary sheepskin.

‘Pauline, is it always like this when Giles is around?’ I waited while she contemplated our ambience of serenity. ‘I’ll tell you how Giles gets me. I want to say to him, come off it, Giles, you must have some complexes.’

She leaned towards me. ‘I think it’s because he’s used to weighing the pros and cons, Christine. In business, he pays for his mistakes, not someone else. Before making his first move in hang gliding, he drove over to Steyning Bowl in his E-Type Jag to watch the first experiments with foot-launched gliders, and he talked to people about it. That’s where he’s careful. But a month later he won the large glider class in the national competition at Cam Long Down, you know?’

So Pauline agreed there was a Giles effect. ‘I heard about that.’

‘I felt he should continue his studies. He thought about us and paying the bills, so I don’t mind him joining the party. He needs it, I think.’

As greatly as I wanted to shine, I couldn’t match the mad gleam in Pauline’s eye. ‘They want us to help with a push, I think.’

The garage couldn’t get the part until lunch time.

Giles thought aloud, ‘If we’re not in the comp, we probably won’t be able to fly at all.’

‘Maybe we can fly elsewhere,’ said Large Ears.

‘That’s not an impossibilism,’ said Laurie.

For some odd reason, that neologism creased us all up.

The garage boss kept coming out to take deep breaths of his pine-scented morning. He seemed partial to our spurious religiosity. We were then doing our stretching exercises and getting stuck in martial arts stances.

After a while, he beckoned us over. He’d had a word with his mechanic. A word? What sort of word? We were saved? Don’t speak too soon. His mechanic just thought he could fashion us a workable distributor head from an old one, if we agreed to pay for his time if he failed.

We looked at one another blankly, then Giles flashed us his famous grin. We flashed it to and fro between us.

An hour later, we heard our motor running.

Chapter 2

Karl Mayer the chief organiser showed a grim sort of relief when we screeched in just as the seconds to close the book were being counted down. He complained out of the side of his mouth to me, ‘You Brits don’t seem to realise.’ I said we’d broken down, but another bloke, who was still affronted by how fine we’d cut it, said, ‘The rules are the rules. If we broke them for one reason we’d be expected to again.’

Travelling at speed had kept me on a high and that reprimand was a reality check. Our presence was valued, but we had to respect the work that had gone into the arrangements. We didn’t deserve a warm welcome if we looked blasé enough to be nearly too late.

I asked Laurie, ‘Why did they pick on me?’

He contemplated a few individuals and suggested it would be courteous to show interest in the welcome buffet.

The generosity of that buffet sent us another daunting message. We had to be worth it. Not to be intimidated, we stuffed ourselves, then one another. Try this cheese flan, Christine. Eat it yourself, guts. Giles reckoned they wanted to get us bloated so we couldn’t fly. I hoped he was joking. If not, I had a lot to learn about competitions.

Laurie whispered to me, pointing with his eyes, ‘That’s Chris Wills. Bill Moyes, Joe Greblo, Dan Poynter and Geoffrey Page are here too. I think that’s Bill Moyes over there.’

‘They’ve an ambulance standing by as well,’ remarked Pauline.

Giles skipped. ‘I thought they just wanted to put Kossen on the map, but an ambulance! Perhaps there’s a silver trophy after all.’

Karl Meyer marched past us, thinking hard. He pulled up, marched another way. He didn’t mind being stopped to answer a question, but it would take someone who wanted to become famous for their boldness. He and his henchmen were acting as if Mount Everest was looking down on them. That male aspect made me squirm. By the seventies, people no longer chatted under the yew trees after church, they just wandered to their cars, but, look, there were some who didn’t let their comforts kill them and bought hang gliders. I kept that thought to myself. I would both let the team down and cease to exist if I didn’t quite go with the ethos. I also saw the attraction. The do gratified what was in the genes, to hollow out a log and paddle it a record distance. It could make me a truly serious person.

Laurie said, ‘I think they’re trying to tell us something. London might have been the capital city of the swinging sixties. That’s not now. We’ve only just joined the EEC and signed up to equal wages for women.’ He added after a while, ‘They’re shaking hands with us through the hatch of their spacecraft.’

‘They’re up in space anyway,’ I said.

‘They won’t get me grovelling,’ growled Giles.

But no one looked happy. I quietly asked Boyd what it was about. He directed me with regal vagueness to look for myself. The valley was filled with a still sediment of haze, dirty looking, as if the atmosphere had separated, like fermenting wine. I had seen that phenomenon before. I hadn’t wondered what it meant.

I furtively asked him to explain.

‘Temperature inversion.’

‘Thanks.’

A wind dummy took off and there was no lift. I understood ‒ the wind was blowing over a bed of stagnant cold air.

My name being on the competitors’ list entitled me to stroll around the machinery. I stuck with Boyd to profit from his insider knowledge. He was one of the few who’d been in the sport from day one. While many had decided the pleasure wasn’t worth the plaster, he had witnessed the whole story. He wasn’t a regular flyer but he sometimes flew one of his own designs, then he reclined beside it pretending to be in league with Jehovah. I was saddened later on to learn he was refusing to share Della with an addition to the family. I was somehow not surprised, but it woke me up a bit, because I didn’t find his air that he knew what he wanted ‒ or didn’t want ‒ unattractive. I liked the feeling that he would still be lying on his back dreaming up ways to get us higher when we were old codgers.

He presented the kites to me as if he owned them all ‒ a glider with flaps, a glider with a fixed tail. There was even a biplane. All were controlled by the pilots shifting their weight. Later on, there were kites controlled by spoilers, but only because there was always someone who had to be different. I gained the tasty sense of being part of a movement. I wasn’t a pioneer like Boyd, but I was involved in a little passing triumph of the sport. I would see the winner become the first World Hang Gliding Champion ‒ along with a few others scattered around the world, since first world competitions weren’t uncommon. I voted for this and against that with my happiness and discontent respectively.

Boyd appeared to take my opinions seriously. Keeping an eye on two people studying his contribution to the technology, he said, ‘Look, Christine, the Aussies use heavier aluminium than us because they’ve gone into tow launching.’

I guessed, correctly, that tow launching meant what it said. I appraised a mean-looking red and orange American kite. It had a very wide nose angle. ‘I quite fancy the look of it, if it’s pitch stable.’

‘Looks all right to me.’

He could tell just by looking? I wouldn’t bet he was bluffing. I parked my bog rog to the side. It was called a bog rog because its chief pioneer, Francis M Rogallo, had allegedly guarded against injury by landing in bogs.

*

‘Now you, Chris, go for it. Show those Frogs,’ said Laurie. To call the wacky continental flyers Frogs was our way of saying we liked them. They assured me they didn’t mind. I thought that was civil of them.

Off I went, foulard flapping, bearing in mind Laurie’s warning that my first flight off a mountain would blow my mind ‒ take my first stand-up landing and quadruple it. As the slope peeled away from my feet, my view of the valley would expand hugely, but I’d see less.

Too right. By that time, I was used to being yanked up in the air by a kite. I was able to carry on thinking: airspeed, airspeed. The actual test ‒ which made it worthwhile taking part ‒ was thinking well. I must turn right up the valley and follow the river to a road bridge. On the far side I would see a clump of pines and a red-roofed chalet. Just beside there, I would see my landing zone ‒ LZ, as the Americans called it.

I saw only a blur of fields and forested mountains. I told myself to get a grip. No need to pant. I felt I was faking my role as a competition flyer. Still, it helped to know it was called the impostor phenomenon when you feel you’re faking a new role. One team of researchers in self-esteem had found that men had more pratfalls than women because their bigger egos got them into bigger trouble ‒ women approached challenges with stealth. I supposed I could break my fear down into manageable portions. The rest I needed should be human nature.

That wasn’t the mindset of a winner, but it suited me.

At that time, I was seeking to strike a balance with my flying. Win some, cash my chips. I felt that was wise. We believe we can do it, become number one and not feel silly getting more attention than we can cope with, or we believe we can at any rate enjoy a redeeming togetherness in the hoo-ha of things like world comps, stage performances, political rallies; at the same time we know there’s no otherness like that which comes with celebrity. A lonely lost soul might likewise seek relief from solitude in crowds. Let me just cream off the bit I wanted.

Fortified by the fact I was following Chris Wills down and had a Norwegian behind me who seemed to be something too, I managed to stick to my flight plan and in due course identify a ring of fixed figures patiently awaiting my arrival. Della was among them, shooting a film. She hoped that our performances would be fun to watch in years to come and serve to remind people not to take their current state of the art for granted. However, the video camera soon made her technology obsolete.

I got in line with the windsock. Now for the tricky bit. I must be the right height to make my landing approach. The target appeared before me. No mistaking my duty. I came from the South Downs. I must prove it.

I landed in the next field. I ignored the two-edged cheer that went up. Those days, it was mandatory for the spectators to cheer whether you landed on the target or in the trees, whether you gained an extra point for standing up or lurched away with a bent A-frame, because to jump off a mountain raised the question what would happen next. A couple of years before, to start as a dot in the sky and come smoothly down and down and land nearly at a prearranged location wouldn’t have seemed a bad day’s work. I was also running at the right speed to not fall over. My legs did that automatically. Altogether, I was getting my act together. Still, to land in the wrong field did mean I couldn’t rub shoulders with those who had landed in the right field.

If my earnest endeavours seem tame today, I am sorry. No one of my time wishes to forget we had clownish tendencies back then. It’s our cherished point of reference. We don’t need it to feel proud of our later achievements, but if our earthbound estate had never humbled us we wouldn’t be able to explain how we feel today ‒ still holding onto our ineffable reward.

My particular reason is a failed marriage then a stable dead-and-alive relationship which after ten years ended in a car crash.

*

Day two, a Frenchman gained enough height above take off to come in for a top landing. Sport had been made of the inversion, which still lay below us, by laying on champagne for the first flyer to top land. At that time, I reckoned my experience in terms of feet descended, as if I was engaged in aerial tobogganing or sky surfing, so I thought of top landing as going for the champers anyway. I thought I would simultaneously have all the answers when I could top land myself.

A woman in jeans and trainers dashed to get an action photograph.

Large Ears said, ‘See that stuff she’s doing, she’s not a real photographer, she just wants to tow one of us back to her darkroom.’

The Frenchman wavered to avoid her and downwind stalled. It wasn’t a heavy crash, but his helmet came off. It rolled around ten feet away, then came to rest, like his heart.

The ambulance carried him off, no fuss, just going gently over the bumps. That was all that moved on the mountain until it turned out of sight. Then people glanced at one another to see who would break the stillness. I didn’t realise it was serious until I heard an American flyer say, eyes flicking about ‒ he had a lot