by Jane Rogers
I’ve been thinking about flying. I’ve moaned about Mum and Dad flying, but I should admit to you, I used to love it! I wonder if there will still be flights in your world? The one I was thinking about was the winter before MDS. I went with Mum and Dad on one of their bargain city breaks.
It was evening, already nearly dark at five o clock, and there were just a few small clouds in the sky. I was sitting by the window. As we took off and climbed higher I stared down at the lights. We were over the sprawl of greater Manchester, and I could see all the individual lights of houses, rows of lamp posts, vertical oblongs of high rise. I could see floodlit football pitches and a glowing misty blue-green rectangle which I thought might be a swimming pool. Then as we went higher the city gave way to country and the lights thinned out into single lines threaded across blackness. When we came to a town again I could make out moving lines of cars along a main road. And then right in the middle of the town’s lights there was a sudden patch of blackness. I stared at it, wondering if it was a park, puzzling at the way the lights were not patterned around it but seemed to end all higgledy piggledy. As if there was a yawning black chasm and whole streets had fallen into it.
Then gradually at the top of my porthole there began to be a brightness. And this silvery brightness intensified until I could see it was coming from a great shining balloon a thousand times bigger and brighter than anything on the face of the earth. You know what it was, Rae? The moon! And with moonlight radiating all across the sky, I could see that there were black blobs of cloud hanging here and there, between us and the earth. They were dead patches in the light. As we moved the steady pinprick lights of earth glowed on and on, disappearing as our moving position set a cloud between us and them, and reappearing as we moved on far enough to gain another sightline.
I felt happy then, Ray. Tender towards the innocent, sleeping earth. The dark hills and valleys and reservoirs and seas were all in their positions, keeping the dots of light of one village so many miles from the next, holding each single glowing house steady on its own exact latitude and longitude. And I knew the moonlight was steady too, and the full moon would always rise and roll across the sky every month at the right time. Those clouds were nothing but dark wet air, and finally they would dribble away to nothing.
Then we were descending and my ears were filled by the roaring of the engines, and my eyes with the sudden close ground as we flew over the edge of the airfield, tilting down to landing. And I stopped thinking, because I was there.
I wish everything for you, my Ray, but most of all I wish you might one day feel the peace and happiness I feel now, in sending my love to you.
Xxx, a thousand kisses, Jessie.
Table of Contents
Sunday morning
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Sunday evening
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Monday morning
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Tuesday
Chapter 10
Wednesday morning
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Wednesday night
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Thursday night
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Friday morning
Chapter 30
Today