It wasn’t long before I began to notice sketches of wings lying about the house and soon there were little models in balsa wood and paper. One of the things that annoy me every time I read about Julian’s flight is that it’s not treated as a proper scientific achievement. People talk as if he flew by magic or just willed himself to stay in the air. They seem to think if no one in human history, not even Leonardo da Vinci, could make wings that would carry a man, Julian Harp can’t have been human or his flight must have been a miracle. And now Vega tells me there’s a new sect called the Harpists and they believe Julian wasn’t a man but an angel sent down as a sign that God has chosen New Zealand for the Second Coming. I’ve even wondered whether Vega doesn’t half believe what the Harpists say and it won’t surprise me at all if she leaves the Open Pentecostals and joins them.
Gradually I learned a lot about the wings because designing them and building the six or seven sets he did before he got what he wanted spread over all that winter and most of the following summer, and once Julian had admitted what he was doing he was willing to explain all the stages to me. I don’t suppose I understood properly very much of what he told me because I haven’t a scientific sort of brain but I do remember the number 1.17 which had something to do with the amount of extra energy you needed to get a heavier weight into the air. And also .75 which I think proved that animals as big as man could fly if they used their energy properly but animals that weighed more than 350 pounds, like cows and horses, couldn’t, not even in theory. But the main thing I remember, because Julian said it so often, was that everyone who had tried to fly, including Leonardo da Vinci, had made problems instead of solving them by adding unnecessarily to the weight they had to get into the air. The solution to the problem Julian used to say was not to build yourself a machine. It was simply to make yourself wings and use them like a bird. But you could only do that by making your arm approximate to the structure of a bird’s wing—that was what he said—and that meant flying upside down. Once you imagined yourself flying upside down it became obvious your legs were no longer legs but the bird’s tail, and that mean the gap between the legs had to be filled in by a triangle of fabric. In theory your legs ought then to grow out of the middle of your back, about where your kidneys are, and that of course was one of Julian’s biggest problems—how he was to take off lying flat on his back.
But his first problem and it was the one that nearly made him give up the whole project was finding the right materials for the framework. He must have experimented with twenty different kinds of wood and I was for ever cleaning up shavings off the floor, but they were all either too brittle or too heavy or too inflexible. Then I think he got interested in a composition that was used to make frames for people’s glasses but you would have needed to be a millionaire to pay for it in large amounts. It was the same with half a dozen other materials, they were light enough and strong enough but too expensive.
By the middle of that winter Julian was ready to give up and go to work. It was certainly difficult the two of us living off what I earned at Gomeo’s and paying the rent but Julian was so happy working on his wings even when he was in despair about them I said he must keep going at least until he had given his theory a proper trial. It was about this time he decided nothing but the most expensive materials would do and he wasted weeks thinking up schemes to make money instead of thinking how to make his wings.
It must have been June or early July he hit on a solution. He had gone to Sir Robert Kerridge’s office, the millionaire who has a big new building in Queen Street, and offered to take off from the building as a publicity stunt if KO would put up the money for making the wings, but he hadn’t got very far because the typists and clerks mistook him for a student and he was shown out of the building without seeing Sir Robert. It had begun to rain heavily and Julian had no coat and no bus fare and he walked all the way back to Kendall Road that day with nothing to keep him dry but a battered old umbrella with a broken catch and a match stick wedged in it to keep it open. When he got home he couldn’t get the match out and he had to leave the umbrella outside in our little concrete yard. He was standing at the kitchen window staring out and I didn’t ask him about his idea of taking off from the Kerridge building because I could see it hadn’t been a success when suddenly the match must have come out and the umbrella sprang shut so fast it took off and landed on the other side of our six-foot paling fence. I could see Julian was very angry by now because he walked slowly into the neighbour’s yard and back with the umbrella and slowly into the shed and out again with the axe and quite deliberately with the rain pouring down on his back he chopped the umbrella to pieces. I went into the other room to give him time to cool off and when I came back ten minutes or so later he was sitting quite still on one of our kitchen chairs with the water running off him into pools on the floor and held up in front of him between the thumb and the forefinger of his right hand was a single steel strut from the framework of the umbrella. He seemed to be smiling at it and talking to it and even I could see what a perfect answer it was, light, thin, strong, flexible, with even an extra strut hinged to the main one.
Julian was impatient now to get on but he needed a lot of umbrellas because his wings were to be large and working by trial and error a lot of struts would be wasted. We couldn’t afford to buy umbrellas and in two days searching around rubbish tips he found only three, all of them damaged by rust. The next morning he was gone when I woke and when I walked up to the museum steps where he was standing staring out across the harbour he said we would have to steal every umbrella we could lay our hands on. So that afternoon and every afternoon it rained during the next few weeks I left Julian at home working and I went to some place like the post office or the museum or the art gallery and came away with somebody’s umbrella. It was easy enough when Julian wanted women’s umbrellas but when he wanted the heavier struts I always felt nervous walking away with a man’s. Occasionally there were umbrellas left at Gomeo’s in the evenings and I took these home as well. Soon the spare room upstairs, the one Vega sleeps in now, was crammed with all kinds and I got expert at following a person carrying the particular make Julian needed and waiting until a chance came to steal it. I still have a special feeling about umbrellas and sometimes even now I steal one just because it reminds me of how exciting it was when Julian was getting near to finishing his final set of wings. I even stole one at the town hall on the night of the National Orchestra concert when that poet read the ode the Government commissioned him to write about Julian and the Orchestra played a piece called ‘Tone Poem: J … H …’ by a local composer.
I should mention that all the time this was going on Julian was in strict training for his flight. I used to tell him he was overdoing it and that he didn’t need to train so hard, because to be honest I always felt embarrassed in the afternoons sitting on the bank watching him panting around the Domain track in sandshoes and baggy white shorts while Halberg and Snell and all those other Auckland Olympic champions went flying past him. But Julian insisted that success didn’t only depend on making a set of wings that would work. It depended on having enough stamina left to keep using them after the first big effort of getting into the air. The flight he said would be like running a mile straight after a 220 yard sprint and that was what he used to do during his track training. He had put himself on a modified Lydiard schedule and apart from the sharpening-up work on the track he kept up a steady fifty miles jogging a week. There were also special arm exercises for strength and co-ordination and he spent at least ten minutes morning and evening lying flat on his back on the ironing board flapping his arms and holding a ten-ounce sinker in each hand. Julian was no athlete but he was determined and after six months in training he began to get the scrawny haggard look Lydiard world champions get when they reach a peak. It wasn’t any surprise to me when he timed himself over the half mile and found he was running within a second of the New Zealand women’s record.
By now the framework for the final set
of wings was built and ready to be covered with fabric and there were only a few struts still to be welded in to the back and leg supports. Julian had bought a periscope too and attached it to the crash helmet so he could hold his position steady, flat on his back, and still see ahead in the direction of his flight. Everything seemed to be accounted for except there was still no answer to the problem of how he was to take off lying on his back. He needed a run to get started but he could hardly run backwards and jump into the air. He considered jumping off something but that seemed unnecessarily dangerous and besides he thought it would be important to hold his horizontal position right from the start and that meant a smooth take-off not a wild jump.
I suppose I won’t be believed when I say this but if it hadn’t been for an idea that came to me one morning while I was watching Julian lying on his back flapping on the ironing board he would probably have had to risk jumping off a building. It came to me right out of the blue that if the ironing board had wheels and Julian was wearing his wings he would shoot along the ground faster and faster until he took off and left the ironing board behind. I don’t think I realised what a good idea it was until I said it aloud and Julian stopped flapping and stared at me for I don’t know how many seconds with his arms out wide still holding the ten-ounce sinkers and then he said very loudly my God why didn’t I think of that. The next moment he was gone, clattering up the stairs, and then he was down again kissing me and saying I was the brightest little bugger this side of Bethlehem and for the rest of the day he got nothing done or nothing that had anything to do with his flight. Of course Julian dropped the idea of actually putting wheels on the ironing board, and the take-off vehicle he did use is the only publicly owned relic of his flight. I find it strange when I go to the museum sometimes and see a group of people standing behind a velvet cord staring at it and reading a notice saying this tubular-steel chromium-plated folding vehicle on six-inch wheels was constructed by the late Julian Harp and used during the commencement of his historic flight. It puzzles me why no one ever says good heavens that’s one of those things undertakers use to wheel coffins on, because that’s what it is. Julian had seen undertakers using them—church trucks they call them—when he was working in the hospital morgue, and when I suggested putting wheels on the ironing board he immediately thought how much better a church truck would be. I don’t know where he got the one he used but I think he must have raided the morgue or an undertaker’s chapel at night because one morning I came down to breakfast and there it was gleaming in the middle of the kitchen like a Christmas present.
If I’m going to tell the whole story of the flight and tell it truthfully I might as well come straight out with it and say Julian didn’t get any help or encouragement from the organisers of that day’s gymkhana. It makes me very angry the way it’s always written about as if the whole programme was built around Julian’s flight, and the way everyone who was there, Vega for example, talks as if she went only to see that part of the programme and even tells you she had a feeling Julian Harp would succeed. Up in the museum under glass that’s supposed to be protected by the most efficient burglar alarm system in the Southern Hemisphere they show you the form Julian had to fill in when he asked the gymkhana organisers to put him on the programme. They don’t tell you he had to call on them six or seven times before he got them to agree. Even then I don’t think he would have succeeded if he hadn’t revived two of his letter writers and had them send letters to the Herald, one saying he had seen an albatross flying in the Domain and another, a woman, saying she didn’t think it was an albatross, it looked remarkably like a man.
Then you find there’s a lot of fuss made by some people about the fact the Governor-General was there and how wonderful it is that the Queen’s representative went in person to see Julian Harp try his wings. The truth is the Governor-General was there because the gymkhana was sponsored jointly by the fund-raising committees of the Blind Institute and the Crippled Children’s Society and he agreed as their patron to present the prizes for the main event of the day. And in case like everyone else I talk to you have forgotten what the main event was and allowed yourself to think it was Julian Harp’s flight, let me just add that it was an attempt on the unofficial world record for the one thousand yards on grass. In fact Julian had to sit round while the mayor made his speech, a pole-sitting contest was officially started, twelve teams of marching girls representing all the grades competed, the brass and Highland bands held their march past, and the police motor cycle division put on a display of trick riding. And when he did try to begin his event at the time given on the programme he was stopped because the long jump was in progress.
Of course now it’s different. It’s different partly because Julian succeeded, partly because he’s supposed to be dead and everyone likes a dead hero better than a live one, but mostly because he made us famous overseas, and when all those reporters came pouring into the country panting to know about the man who had succeeded where men throughout history had failed—that was what they said—everyone began to pretend New Zealand had been behind him on the day. People started to talk about him in the same breath as Snell and Hillary and Don Clark, and then in no time he was up with Lord Rutherford and Katherine Mansfield and now he seems to be ahead of them and there’s a sort of religious feeling starts up every time his name is mentioned.
There’s nothing to get heated about, I know, but when I hear the Prime Minister (Our Beloved Leader, Julian used to call him) on the radio urging the youth of the nation to aim high like Harp I can’t help remembering Julian so nervous that morning about appearing in public he even cleaned his shoes and with me just as nervous the only person there to give him any help or encouragement. And then when we got to the Domain Julian was told he couldn’t have an assistant with him because the field was already too cluttered with officials and sportsmen, so there he was crouching down in front of the pavilion with his shiny coffin carrier and his scarlet wings for hour after hour waiting his turn while I sat on the far bank knowing there wasn’t a thing more I could do for him. We were nervous partly because he hadn’t given the wings a full test and partly because he had tested them enough to know they would carry him. They couldn’t be tested in broad daylight and remain a secret, so Julian had to be satisfied with a trial late one night. I remember it almost as clearly as the day of the flight, Julian’s church truck speeding across the grass getting faster and faster until I could just see the wings, black they looked in the dark, lift him clear of it. Each time he was airborne he let himself drop back on to the truck because he didn’t trust his vision through the periscope at night and he was afraid of colliding with overhead wires. But there was enough for us both to know what he could do and to put me in a terrible state of nerves that afternoon watching the marching girls and the bands and waiting for Julian to get his chance.
Everyone knows what happened when that chance came. I don’t think many people saw him climb on to his truck and lie down and the few around me who were watching were saying look at this madman, he thinks he’s Yuri Gagarin. But by the time the little truck and the scarlet wings were shooting full speed across the grass everyone was looking, and when somebody shouted over the loud speakers look at the wheels and the whole crowd saw the truck was rolling free there was a tremendous cheer. There was a gasp when he cleared the trees at the far end of the ground and then as he veered away towards the museum with those scarlet wings beating and beating perfectly evenly something got into the crowd and it forgot all about the athletic events and surged over the track and up the slope through the grove of trees by the cricket scoreboard, then down into the hollow of the playing fields and up again towards the museum. I would have followed Julian of course but I didn’t have to make up my mind to follow. I was one of the crowd now and I was swept along with it running and tripping with my eyes all the time on Julian like a vision of a heavenly angel rising on those wings made out of hundreds of stolen bits and pieces. He rose a little higher with each stroke of his
wings and even when he seemed to try for a moment to come down and almost went into a spin I didn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t think about whether he intended to go on climbing like that I was so completely absorbed in the look of it, the wings opening and the sunlight striking through the fabric showing the pattern of the struts, and then closing and lifting the tiny figure of Julian another wing-beat up and out and away from us. I had stopped with the crowd on the slopes in front of the museum and Julian must have crossed the harbour and crossed the North Shore between Mt Victoria and North Head and got well out over the Hauraki Gulf towards Rangitoto before it came to me and it came quite calmly as if someone outside me was explaining to me that I was seeing the last of him. I don’t know any more than anyone else whether it was a fault in the wings or whether flying put Julian into some kind of trance he couldn’t break or whether he just had somewhere to go, but it seemed as you watched him that once he began to climb there was no way to go but higher and further until his energy was used up. I stood there with everyone else watching him get smaller and smaller until we were only catching flashes of colour and losing them again and finally there was nothing to see and we all went on standing there for I don’t know how long, until tea time anyway.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 81