First Paddock
FICTION

“Come on, Serge, what was it like?” The student’s question is eager with enquiry and other students gather closer - they also want to know about their instructor’s own experience and feelings of that moment.

Serge Halvorsen pondered the enquiry, moving back down the lanes of memory. The event itself could be readily recalled but events, particularly special events, occur in the context of circumstance. Surroundings which, in turn, supply an essential flavour, a melding of factors combining into a total experience. Recollection then must needs retrieve all the components beyond a mere recounting of activity.

Wandering the corridors of the mind, cluttered and crowded with a kaleidoscope of sights, sounds and sensations - the product of a full life - Serge searched for the catalyst which would again lock together the fragments of a previous reality in terms of the way it really was to him. What had it been actually like?

Edwin Muir’s words came into focus . . .

Oh Merlin in your crystal cave,
Deep in the diamond of the day.

And Serge was swept back, back into the cockpit of a particular glider on a particular day. The Perspex canopy, the crystal entrance to a fuselage cavern. High above the flat countryside. Deep in the diamond of a gem clear dawn. He was a modern-day wizard riding the sky on unpowered wings.

The sharp stab of the sun’s early light was diffused by stratus cloud faraway out on the horizon. Mist banks for the night still persisted near the rivers and streams below, etching patterns soft in outline, naturalistic, but today possessing the structure and symbolism of a Chinese landscape painting. Wisps of pale blue smoke rose from here and there as if small children were stretching sleepily from beneath green covers upon still slumbering fields.

Serge knew an inner peace. The air was thick, cold and predictable. None of the disturbing shocks of actively unstable air which required constant pilot attention to maintain altitude. In complete union with his machine, Serge sits almost still. Hands and feet are light on the controls, barely touching, but the slightest pressure and there is sure and positive response.

The glider, so often in the past seemingly ungraceful, is almost sensuous. There is no need to turn but there is time and there is desire. A requirement to observe the nose tracking steadily around the horizon. The upper wing reaching for the blue above, the lower curving across the delineated earth below - indifferent to man’s two-dimensional partitioning of territory.

The soul drinks its fill but the brain has been active. The tug pilot has done his job well, leaving the glider with the designated area in clear view. There is a good selection of landing places from which to choose.

Tension intrudes as the job at hand crowds in. A certain discomfort that this will be his first landing not at an airfield, perhaps somewhere no aircraft has ever before been landed. Yet circumstances do not permit the presence of an instructor. Reliance must be on training, the mind focusing, the glider becoming less of a partner and more of a tool.

The positioning manoeuvres are complete, the glider settled on its approach path. None of the remoteness of higher flight here, the three dimensions the craft operates in are tangibles which must be dealt with. Flight becomes a sequence of rapidly changing angles, distance, closing rates as the powerless journey nears its end.

Serge makes a final check that there is adequate space for the broad wings to pass between the trees along the approach fence, that the machine is on a comfortable overshoot path across the longest ground run available. Satisfied, he operates the flaps, watching the glide steepen, centralising the aiming point in the windscreen, seeing the chosen touch down point expand towards and around him.

Over the fence with ten feet to spare. Pulling out of the approach dive and skimming the ground. The final fleeting transition between what was and what is. Rumbling of the undercarriage through the soft European turf, speed decaying and the machine coming to rest.

For a brief moment, there is total quiet. The objective has been achieved. The glider is resting safely in the meadow and Serge has met his requirement.

But within the pilot there remains a lingering reluctance to return fully to earth. Hands and feet remain upon the controls, wishing for a moment more to retain contact, however tenuous, with the sky of a diamond dawn.

“SARGE!” The cockney corporal’s voice is strident in the stillness. “Come on! Are you all right?” He thrusts forward, hampered by equipment, to look into his pilot’s face, scanning for injury.

Hands and feet relinquish the controls. Serge lifts a weapon from its stowage. Already the pale smoke children are eclipsed by more adult columns of black smoke rising from glider tugs that will not be going home again.

The harsh cracking of automatic weapons gains in frequency, punctuating the cries of voices without language - a defiance which has echoed down the centuries since a male ape first lifted a club in anger against his fellow.

Serge does not look back as he follows his men from the big assault glider with its black and white invasion bands. Neither does he look up to a blue tranquillity that stretches from horizon to horizon, also spurning man-made borders. He is already involved in a darker reality that, for him, will last another two years.

“Serge, come on, what was it like?”

The lush greenness of Europe fades back into memory, replaced by the reds and browns of inland Australia. The greying instructor twirls his glass around a little on the tabletop and brings back into focus the questioning young face as memory retreats.

“My first paddock? It was a bit different, and I have mixed feelings about it! But we are sitting here to discuss your first paddock tomorrow, and I will be going with you. Now, this is what we shall be doing . . .”

- Helix