Another excerpt from Cloud Cuckooland, by Harald Penrose. In...

Another excerpt from Cloud Cuckooland, by Harald Penrose.

In...:

Another excerpt from Cloud Cuckooland, by Harald Penrose.

In the chapter “A Forgotten Air”, Penrose includes an account of a flight by early aviators Graham Gilmour and Eric Gordon England, in a Bristol Boxkite over Wiltshire on 12th April 1911. Penrose revels in this account of the flight from the pilot’s perspectivse, and then crosses into personal recollection after the pilots have stopped to “ask for directions”:



“..ninety minutes later a small boy of seven, leaning from the corridor window of a train waiting at Templecombe station, heard the reverberating, accelerating drone of an engine quite different from the few motor-cars and motor-cycles he had seen. Then, miracle of miracles, a great aeroplane, white winged and glittering, lifted with a cavernous din above the tops of trees and sailed slowly and splendidly past. Along the length of the train scores of windows slammed down and rows of faces peered into the sky.

‘An aeroplane - an aeroplane!’ cried everyone. ‘You can see the men in it!’

Standing on tiptoe, leaning far out, the boy stared and stared until the white wings were lost to sight and the purring engine faded to the faintest him and then was gone. In the carriages and on the platform everyone was talking excitedly, glancing occasionally into the skies as though they might find the aeroplane still there..

..In the distance I heard the guard blow his whistle. From far away I felt the train jerk into motion and accelerate to its rhythmic thumepty thump. The telegraph poles flicked past in a blur. Blindly the sun-enchanted countryside spun round. But the interest of the journey to reach the sea, for which I had so long looked forward, was diminished. I was a small boy, curled in a corner seat, wrapped in a dream of wings.”

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