Lunchtime. Tuesday 14 April, 1970. When the school bell rang at midday, I hurried through the corridors, out to the gates, then ran for it. Down Waddington Drive and up Halberton, making sure I never stood on a crack because that was bad luck and there had been so much bad luck already that day. I knew, with the deadly certainty of a nine-year-old, that if I kept off those cracks, the astronauts would live.
At 12.24 I had finished my slice of cheese-and-tomato on toast and was contemplating which cake to eat - there was always a choice in our house - flapjack or fruit cake. (If you are wondering how I know what I had for lunch on a particular day over 50 years ago, it’s because I ate the same lunch every day). I had no idea, no more than the rest of the universe, that we were only one hour away from an entire new world order, one of those vastly significant moments in human history that people would only recognise with hindsight. A turning point was about to be reached.
The wireless was always on in our house. First you pressed a large cream-coloured button. There was a solid click then a deep hum. A tiny red light appeared. After a few seconds a satisfying warmth began to rise from the whole machine, and if you peered through the perforated wooden board at the back, you could see mysterious red gleams, like the embers of a fire. After a short 'warming up' period, the Rushby family wireless was ready.
For much of the 1960s it was our only gadget and I loved it in the way you might love a lifeline. Along its tuning display were written the names of various foreign stations: Moscow, Hilversum, New York, Tirana, and London. I had never been to any of those places and neither had my parents. Our radio was tuned to the BBC Home Service and there it remained. And although almost everything about the world has changed since those times, BBC Radio 4 (what the Home service is now) is still recognisably the same station to this day. Desert Island Discs and Just a Minute may have different hosts but they still run, as they did in 1970 when they aired at 1225. I would listen at lunchtime. On this day, I was hoping I'd be allowed to sit through to the end and hear the news headlines at 1 o'clock.
Because of that wireless I can, very dimly, recall the assassination of John F Kennedy (November 1963). I can clearly recall the murders of Martin Luther King (4 April 1968) then Kennedy's brother, Robert (6 June 1968). But none of these moments can compare, in my memory at least, with the drama of Apollo 13. On the morning of April 14, I had left to school after breakfast with the disturbing news that an explosion had occurred on the spacecraft whose codename was, appropriately, Odyssey. Like every schoolboy at the time, I followed all the space shots as closely as the FA Cup. In lessons that morning we could talk of nothing else. Would the three astronauts get back to earth alive? The lunchtime bulletin was that astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise were about to pass behind the Moon in their stricken craft. Would they ever reappear?
The previous year all we had could talk about was the moon landing. It happened on 20 July 1969 just before we broke up for summer holidays. The future was rosy, it seemed to us. There would be colonies on the Moon and expeditions to Mars. And all the voices on the wireless would be American. Astronauts were always American. Only Americans landed on the moon. The future was American. I had no particular expectation of being a part of it. We were British, our future was already in the past.
There were only nine months between the triumphant moment of Neil Armstrong's, 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind', and the anxious cry of Jack Swigert on Apollo 13, 'Houston, we have a problem'. Nine months from that climax of American power and superiority to the image of a broken spaceship, water dripping down the walls, oxygen running out, limping home around the moon.
At 24 minutes past one, when I must have been back at my school desk again, the Odyssey reached 248,655 miles from earth, the farthest that any human has ever reached in space. The astronauts retreated to the lunar landing craft. From that moment on, for America, it was all downhill.
Technological leaps should always come with a warning. Danger. This product may cause social upheaval and radical change.
'The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord,' wrote Karl Marx, 'The steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.'
By the early years of the 1970s the Rushby household had a gramophone player (capable of playing 78, 45 or 33 rpm discs), a telephone and a television. The latter was only in black and white, but I managed to watch snooker and know all the colours of the balls by their tiny variations in greyness. By 1974 the huge heavy wireless was redundant: I had my own tranny, a transistor radio with earpiece. By the 1978 World Cup the television did colour, and things were speeding up. Digital calculators, watches and electric typewriters arrived. Within a decade I bought a Sharp laptop with a flatscreen. Touch screens, smartphones and AI came galloping through.
Which generation of humanity, I wonder, could fairly claim to have witnessed the greatest and most significant forward leaps of technology? Could it be mine?
In a park outside Vilnius, Lithuania, last summer I stood waiting. The hot air balloons were being inflated. Our 'pilot' was a bumptious, talkative extrovert determined that everyone should get their requisite amount of selfies. Except I didn't care. I was alone and that made me feel conspicuous as the other passengers were all couples, and I noticed, couples who were extraordinarily attentive to each other and no one else.
When the pilot asked us to wait, I assumed we would exchange a few pleasantries and I'd drop into conversation with someone. But no. All the couples peeled off, found a place to themselves and entered into intense conversations with each other. One pair held hands in silence, as if praying. Were they anxious flyers?
My sole interest in this touristy trip was to see what a balloon ride was like. After all, ballooning must have seemed mind-blowing to its first practitioners. In August 1783 an unmanned hydrogen balloon was attacked with pitchforks by peasants near Paris. They feared it was a supernatural monster. By September a sheep called Montaciel had been lifted off the ground and a month later three men rose in a tethered balloon. On 21 November the first real flight took place when scientist Jean-Françoise de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes managed to fly five miles, reaching an altitude of 3,000 feet. It was the first time humans had left the surface of the earth and flown. It triggered mass public euphoria, mixed with hysteria.
On December 1st the first manned flight took off in central Paris in front of an estimated crowd of 400,000 people, half the population. One of the balloonists caught the mood of the moment, "I felt we were flying away from the Earth and all its troubles and persecutions for ever. It was not mere delight. It was a sort of physical rapture." [see Richard Holmes wonderful book, Falling Upwards).
Our own balloon takes thirty minutes to fill with hot air. Then the pilot gets us all aboard, rather awkwardly in some cases as we have to climb over the lip of the basket. With an extended blast on the burners, I feel the basket drag a little, like the earth is struggling to hold us. Then we lift off and rise fast.
'Look at that dog!' shouts one male passenger in a German accent.
'My neighbour has one like that,' cries his partner, excitedly in an Italian accent.
A little question mark pings up inside my brain. Aren't they a couple? If they were, wouldn't she say 'our neighbour'?
And now the pretty young woman with blonde hair is pointing out landmarks to her partner who seems a little old for her. 'That's the castle and there's the radio tower.' She has an American voice and a funky outfit. I gather that she is East European but living in New York. I call her Melania. But how can this man, who I have called Helmut, be her partner? This German who seems ill-at-ease, wearing cheap office clothes and with improbably perfect hair. He is very attentive to her, leaning forwards to whisper, then touching his fringe nervously.
And suddenly I understand. I have been squeezed aboard as an extra. All the other passengers are on some kind of dating experience.
I lean over the basket and look downwards, chuckling to myself. One of the astonishing thing about balloon travel is that you are free to jump out at any time. The wind blows, you go with it. And your hands grip a wickerwork basket, the type of basket that has to be woven from willow. You stand on wickerwork. It doesn't seem right that such a material can fly. It should be down there holding your picnic, or a cat. Wicker baskets and flying machines are not a match, like space travel and valve radios.
Eventually we are scraping across tree tops. The sun is setting. We are coming down in an idyllic rural location. The peasants will be sharpening their pitchforks. Our pilot, however, wants to tell us about the history of ballooning.
"When the first flight ended, the balloon caught fire and all that de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes had to extinguish the flames was the champagne they had brought to celebrate. For that reason every balloon flight ends with a short ceremony."
We bump down without spilling anyone. Climb out.
He has us form a circle. "I will show you what we will do."
He takes some scissors from an assistant who has pulled up in a bus. She opens a bottle of Prosecco. He snips a few hairs from her and burns them with a lighter, then douses any fire with a few drops of fizz. Then bounds across to me. I submit. My reward is a glass of fizz. He bounds across to Melania who squeals with delight. I think Melania likes theatrics.
And then the pilot makes a lunge at Helmut who screams, grabs his hair with both hands and runs for it, pilot in pursuit. The group watch and laugh. The pilot is encouraged. He thinks Helmut is playing. Someone should sing, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. Helmut is not playing. Helmut is a bit hysterical.
I glance at Melania and see her face has fallen. I think she has understood something about Helmut's hair, something that we all twig at the same time. It's fake.
I suddenly feel sorry for Helmut. He took a risk. He wanted a new future. It backfired. In the bus back to town, he is quiet and Melania does all the talking.
In 1783 the men who invented the future were given aristocratic titles and their feats became bolder. In 1785 balloonists Theodore Sivel and Joseph Croce-Spiveli attempted to fly higher than anyone, reaching 28,000 feet. When their balloon touched down, however, both men were found dead from oxygen-deprivation and cold. The turning point had been reached. The aristocrats who were enthusiastically elevating themselves in balloons were also about to witness the fall of the society that had elevated them socially. In 1789 a mob stormed the Bastille and the old world came crashing down to earth too. Aristocrats were sent to the guillotine. Despite all their innovations and inventions, the future, it turned out, was not theirs after all.
Brilliant Kevin x