Damned Good Show Read Online Free PDF Page A

spars for the wings, every part of the tail unit, had to be cut from sheets of balsa. Bits broke. Silk and Langham argued over the meaning of the plans. They cut their fingers; ran out of glue; assembled items wrongly and had to start again. But when the fighter was finished—doped, painted, gleaming—its making had built a bond between them. For the first time in his life, Silk felt worthwhile.
    On a day when the rest of the school was watching a cricket match, they sneaked out with the SE5a. There was a perfect place to fly it nearby: the Downs, a mile or more of parkland. “Here?” Silk said, but Langham was carrying the model and he kept saying there was a better place further on.
    After fifteen minutes he stopped at the edge of the Downs, where the Avon Gorge fell sheer for a couple of hundred feet. “This is a fat lot of good,” Silk said. He had to look over the wall, it was irresistible, and his guts clenched at the depth of this huge, airy canyon, with seabirds wheeling far below. “Watch!” Langham called. As Silk turned, Langham launched the plane into space.
    The image stayed with Silk for the rest of his life: that splendid little fighter, bright in the sunlight, whirring away into the terriblevoid, sometimes bucking as the breeze caught it but always sailing the air, as balanced as a bird. He watched every dip and turn the SE5a made until it crashed into an old quarry face a quarter of a mile away. When he looked around, Langham was watching him with a small, crooked smile.
    Silk chased him until his lungs burned and he stumbled and fell. Langham sat on his heels a safe distance away and made a daisy chain.
    Eventually Silk said. “You can’t do things like that.”
    â€œYes you can. Anyone can do anything. You can do something about your rotten haircut, for instance.”
    â€œThree weeks’ work. And you deliberately crashed it.”
    â€œDidn’t it look marvelous? A mile high, it looked. I’m going to learn to fly.”
    â€œYou’re potty. You’re cuckoo.”
    â€œWell, cuckoos fly.”
    â€œMine’s a perfectly good haircut.”
    â€œIt looks like a perfectly good lavatory brush. And your shirts don’t fit and you can’t tell jokes and whenever a girl comes in sight you go cross-eyed. I bet you can’t dance.”
    â€œGo to hell.” It was a word Silk had never used aloud before.
    â€œYou can’t swear properly, either. Look: come and stay with me in the holidays and my sisters will teach you the foxtrot.”
    This was all too much and too fast for Silk. “Why?” he asked.
    â€œOh … because. I’m thirsty. Let’s get some ice cream.”
    Langham, and Langham’s sisters, showed Silk how to live. He discovered a taste for good clothes. He discovered a sense of humor. He discovered that girls were no threat, which doubled the pleasures of life at a stroke. And above all, he discovered that almost nothing was worth taking very seriously because he was intelligent enough and handsome enough to stroll through life with little effort.
    After Clifton, he had strolled into the Royal Air Force, into a commission, into Bomber Command, and now into a war. No doubt it would be risky but it would also be fun. And there was always Tony Langham for good company.
    Perfect.
    Langham got on the phone and found a dance band: Joe Buck and his Buckaneers. “Can’t do this week,” the bandleader said.
    â€œAre you all booked up?”
    â€œAll canceled, is more like it. Bloody government’s gone and shut down the dance halls because of the emergency. That’ll teach Hitler a lesson, won’t it?”
    â€œBut if you’re canceled, why aren’t you available?”
    â€œSax, trumpet and bass are working night shift in the munitions factory. Clarinet’s gone to Sheffield for his medical. Trombone’s on ARP duty. I can do you piano and