(What could be more glamorous than Ryanair 2016? Read on for secret revelations about this 1971 picture...)
March 2016. The
Ryanair Boeing 737 appears out of the low,
Breton cloud above the end of the runway at Dinard airport.
An announcement
comes over the speakers in the tiny departure lounge. The public address system
sounds as though it had been purchased at a fire sale outside The Wheeltappers
and Shunters Social Club. The message
instructs that passengers should have their home-printed boarding cards ready
“So as not to hinder the 25-minute turnaround time”.
My fellow
passengers stow their Daily Mails. A blonde and pony-tailed Ryanair operative
completes her measurement of hand-baggage items, and issues one last 35 Euro
fine to a protesting passenger whose Daily Express has been found to protrude
by more than a centimetre. We embark as
swiftly as the previous plane- load had alighted. A bearded cabin attendant called
Dragan giggles his way through the safety procedures, as only a Serbian impersonator
of Graham Norton could. We are then invited to purchase a scratch-card, a
mobile telephone top-up or a sachet of whiskey which looks like a urine
sample.
In the garish yellow and blue vinyl cabin, I opt for a snack item and a coffee, the combined cost of which works out at the same price as the seat: ten pounds.
The coffee bears the name of a major supplier, and is served in a paper cup with a plastic lid and a warning that
hot, spilled coffee can hurt your inner thighs.
The beverage is of generic, corporate quality, but transports me, Proust-like, to the first time…
It was the
first time, and I was fourteen years old.
April 1971.
April 1971.
The heat of caffeine had rushed to my head and to every extremity. I could feel my heartbeat quicken, and the cool-hot perspiration bloom on my forehead.
The first time; and also at 20 000 feet above the
English Channel.
A cup of freshly filtered Café Jacques Vabre.
The only coffee I’d ever tasted before had been from a
bottle marked “Camp”. Its label had a fellow in a turban serving a moustachioed
bloke in a kilt and an army officer’s jacket, and who looked worryingly like
Freddy Mercury.
Earlier on that April Tuesday morning in 1971, our
gaggle of school-trippers had boarded a London-bound British Midland Vickers Viscount at
Elmdon airport, Birmingham. The venerable Viscount had made a wheezing and long-winded
turbo-prop take-off, followed by a half-hour struggle against an unseasonal headwind
above the M1 motorway. Then a faultless third-attempt landing at Heathrow. We disembarked, and were followed by the captain, who wore whiskers and a
rakish eye-patch, presumably to hide an injury sustained during the Berlin
air-lift.
(Enough waffle. Ed)
Our teacher, Yorkshireman Mr Sewell, immaculately
dressed in a mid- blue suit and a trilby, shepherded us to the transit lounge.
In contrast to our propeller-driven hop to London, the
Air France flight to Lyon would prove to be an exercise in style, refreshment, and 1960’s/70’s TV personality name-tagging.
For starters, our mode of transportation was a
Sud-Aviation Caravelle.
There it stood, on the tarmac, on the other side of the picture windows. Blue and white and chic against the drizzle. The clean, graceful, silver lines of the wings, and the two jet engines sitting at the rear of the fuselage were the trademark of the Caravelle’s design. It looked like a Fifties fighter aircraft, French from nose to tail, even though the manufacturers had borrowed the engines from Rolls Royce, and the nose section from the ill-fated De Havilland Comet.
There it stood, on the tarmac, on the other side of the picture windows. Blue and white and chic against the drizzle. The clean, graceful, silver lines of the wings, and the two jet engines sitting at the rear of the fuselage were the trademark of the Caravelle’s design. It looked like a Fifties fighter aircraft, French from nose to tail, even though the manufacturers had borrowed the engines from Rolls Royce, and the nose section from the ill-fated De Havilland Comet.
“Possibly the finest medium-range jet in service”,
commented one of our classmates who went by the sobriquet of Pedro. “It has an
impressive glide-ratio in the case of
engine failure, y’know. They tested one once out of Paris. Shut down the
engines and it glided all the way to Dijon. Took 42 minutes, if you’re interested”.
We didn’t know it then, but Pedro would become a pilot himself, one day.
What I did know was that all of this was new and
exciting and a far cry from any travelling I’d done before; mainly by Walsall
Corporation double-decker buses on the Number seventeen route, or by latter day
chars à bancs registered to Churchbridge Motor Garage (or, worse, Harper
Brothers of Cannock).
To add to the excitement, Mr Sewell told us that there
was a BBC film crew and cast booked on our flight. He had even been informed
that the programme in question was the popular oil-industry adventure series called
“ Troubleshooters”.
This explained why, half an hour later, after a
take-off reminiscent of an RAF nuclear-warning scramble, and sipping that first
cup of real coffee, a kid from Cheslyn Hay, Staffordshire found
himself in conversation with Ray Barratt.
Click on pic to hear Troubleshooters theme...
Click on pic to hear Troubleshooters theme...
It was uncanny. Here was the voice-over icon of our
childhood TV years: Commander Shore in Stingray; Thunderbird 5's commander, John Tracy, and numerous heroes and villains of those Gerry Anderson classics...
And here was Ray, who had previously had roles in The
Avengers, The Saint, and even Emergency Ward Ten for goodness’ sake, talking to
me as if we were old pals, in a craggy Australian brogue. He was smoking a
Gauloise, and had ordered a 9.30 a.m. Scotch on the rocks.
“Now, take it from me, young feller, the main interest
in visiting France is the wine and the ladies. So just you take care.”
I took another gulp of café Jacques Vabre, and nodded.
Our air hostess walked elegantly down the aisle,
enquiring if any of us required duty free.
Pedro fumbled for his wallet, and gave her a nonchalant nod. She was
busy offering each passenger refreshments , which included the aforementioned coffee, along with cheese and crackers. The cheese was Babybel, with its red wax coating. At
each offering, she smiled a perfect, hardly-at-all tobacco-stained smile.
Sitting just behind Ray and me were two young ladies
from our group. Jan and Sue seemed very grown-up, and were thumbing through an
in-flight magazine, talking girlie stuff. Sue appeared to be paying particular attention to the Babybel cheese wax. Ray turned around and winked at them.
They cast him an icy Midlands English glance which, translated into Ray’s
native Australian, would have said “get rooted”.
The two Avon jet engines were throttled back over
Burgundy; we began our descent towards Lyon Bron airport. Pedro leaned across
Ray, informing me that the engines were the same as those fitted to fighter
‘planes. “The English Electric Lightning has two of them, stacked one on top of
the other”. Ray, whose tough guy complexion was that of a buckwheat pancake,
was impressed enough to request that Pedro should be more careful next time,
and avoid knocking over the remainder of his scotch. His actual utterance
included a number of Australian familiarities such as “smarmy little
upstart”, “Pommy” and “Bastard”.
The patchwork fields of France now filled the
Caravelle’s triangular windows.
Ray raised his glass and checked that it was
indeed empty, flicking a lock of casually- Brylcreemed hair out of his eyes.
The rest of the Troubleshooters cast and crew bickered amiably behind Sue and
Jan. Pedro leaned back in his seat, twitched an imaginary moustache, made an
imaginary pre-landing checklist, and gave a thumbs-up. Only his cheesecloth
shirt, the cravate, and the orange Peter Fonda tribute sunglasses gave a clue
that he was not, yet, a real pilot.
We turned to starboard on final approach; the
sunlit Rhône valley ran north-south and disappeared into a haze perhaps eighty
miles away. And to the east, the snow-capped Alps. I did not yet know that I’d
be in that snow the following Monday, clad in desert boots, sipping Orangina and
receiving third-degree ultra-violet radiation burns to parts of my face not protected by freckles.
For the moment, it was like being in a Ladybird adventure book. Would France be
populated by those cartoon figures we’d all seen in our Modern Method French
Course text books? What did Ray mean about wine and women? Would we be able to
breathe real French air without side-effects? And what the f*#% was Sue doing with that cheese wax?
Answers to these, and many other questions, would
emerge over the next three weeks.
As our aircraft came to a halt , I could see my penpal and his parents, again through those Toblerone windows, on the other side of a chainlink fence. They were standing next to a sleek, French blue, 1966-model Citroën DS.
Our hostess smiled the baccy smile again as we walked
to the rear of the cabin, and, via a straight-out-of- Thunderbirds ramp, down
between the ticking, cooling engines and on to French concrete.
I waved to my host family.
Monsieur et Madame waved back. Even at this distance, I could see that my
penpal was not waving. Rather, he was eyeing the blonde, brunette and redhead
schoolgirl nymphs, one by one, as they descended Lady Penelope’s aluminium
staircase.
Pedro had some dissimulation and re-arranging of his
hand baggage to attend to, and was last to vacate the passenger cabin. His
facial expression froze as he reached the bottom step. Not because I was
shaking hands with Ray Barratt. Or because Mr Sewell was taking an interest in
the 200-pack of Gitanes Filtre he had purloined during the flight.
But because his host family had just arrived, and
parked next to that Citroën DS.
In a Citroën Ami 6.
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
I had started the day bidding farewell to my Mom, Dad, brother and sister in Low Street, Cheslyn Hay, Staffordshire, England. I was the first member of our extended family ever to travel abroad by aeroplane and out of military uniform. When my paternal grandfather arrived in France in 1916, it had been in very different circumstances.
And it was still only 10am.
The après-goût of Café Jacques Vabre had never been more sensual as we all headed towards a building marked “Douanes”, and the adventures began.
Stay tuned, dear reader, to discover how the rest of that April Tuesday would unfold: the DS; a near-fatal incident on the Nationale Sept, two heads in a coq-au-vin, dandelion salad, and a family lunch-time encounter with a Hungarian refugee sprinter who had defected to the West at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics…
Airfare footnote: That March 2016 Ryanair ticket cost
ten pounds. Baggage and coffee not included. Coincidentally, this was the same
as the cost of that Caravelle/Britannia flight in 1971: ten pounds. Hansard suggests that
the average weekly wage in 1971 for manual workers was thirty pounds.
Click on the blue DS to see a one of the last Caravelles in flight. Smoky engines, and a laid-back pilot who appears to hang a Gauloise out of the window after landing...
Click on the blue DS to see a one of the last Caravelles in flight. Smoky engines, and a laid-back pilot who appears to hang a Gauloise out of the window after landing...
Caravelle footnote: The type made its first commercial
flight in 1959, and its last in 2005. De Gaulle had called it “la douce
Caravelle”. Click on De Gaulle in pic below for the full story...
Some of the ageing jets
ended up as drug-running throwaways in South America in the 1990’s…and, of
course, some ended up with African airlines. Until even they got scared of the hidden cracks in those Avon jet engine components.
There: we have flown full circle. Jet engines, hidden cracks and triangles. That sorts out the secret appeal of the photo that heads up this story.
AB
June 2016
