The early teenage me probably never spotted the anomaly of cheering every successful US launch, and then retiring to my bedroom to carefully stipple lozenge-pattern camouflage onto a Pfalz biplane. If I thought about the two at all, I probably saw the one as the natural continuation of the other. If liquid oxygen and astogration were the future, then wire bracing and pusher propellers were their past, the essential history without which the epic of flight could not be understood.
I had, after all, grown up surrounded by aviation. My father had wanted to fly ever since he was a boy and had offered himself to the RAF when he passed his (Scottish) matriculation in 1943. But they, noticing that his intended degree was aeronautical engineering, told him that he should get that first, which would make him more valuable to them later. (A perfectly reasonable request, given that no one could then foresee how much longer the War would last). So he flew at weekends, as a member of the Reserve, and by the time he graduated, the War was over.
But a pilot with an engineering degree was still valuable, so after acquiring a doctorate he left Glasgow and went down to Farnborough to join the Empire Test Pilots' School: the men who flew at the cutting edge of aeronautical design, pushing new aircraft to the edges of their performance envelopes to see if they could do what was expected of them. As a civilian, though, surrounded by military personnel, he was something of an anomaly himself; but he eventually left the School less because of that than because, three months before I was born, he and some colleagues came spinning out of the sky in a stalled Valiant bomber which they recovered with only a few hundred feet to spare. (The Valiants were subsequently relegated to second-line duties, and then retired altogether). Deciding that if he was to be a father, it was time to fly a desk instead, he remained on the ground until his retirement -- first at the Aircraft & Armament Experimental Establishment at Boscombe Down, then at Ministry of Defence headquarters in London, for the Tornado project in Munich, and finally in London again.
So with all this going on in the background, it was inevitable that I would want to be a pilot when I grew up. And, further, that I would want to do what he never did: fly for the RAF.
In the meantime, I continued to make plastic model aircraft kits. I wanted one of everything, and Airfix obliged by expanding their product range to such an extent -- including even the most obscure German types which had served on the Eastern Front, such as the bizarre Blohm & Voss BV-141 with its fuselage and single rotary engine offset either side of a central wing -- that I had to temporarily forget about Revell and Frog kits if I was to keep up. (An aside here for US readers: Airfix was and is the chief UK manufacturer of plastic model kits, and like biro and hoover is another of those proper names which subsequently developed a "generic" identity. The subject came up in a dinner conversation with a couple of US fans at Precursor, who had never previously heard of Airfix. The chief US model manufacturer, it seemed, was Lindbergh, whose imported products I had seen on the shelves of some of the more cosmopolitan model shops -- but at prices far beyond my pocket-money). But Frog did kits of some obscure aircraft, too, such as the Fairey Barracuda with its high wings and underslung torpedo (and, like more naval aircraft of the period, inadequate engine and armament). And once I had exhausted the European theatre, it was time to turn to the Pacific, to strange new types like the gull-winged Chance-Vought Corsair, the remarkable Douglas Blackhawk night-fighter, and -- so huge when assembled that even in 1/72nd scale it would scarcely fit atop my wardrobe -- the gleaming silver B29 Superfortress. (The nose art, of a Betty Grable-esque leggy blonde, proclaimed it to be "Joltin' Josie, The Pacific Pioneer". It was some years before I realised how unexportable the kit would have been if the nose art had been "Enola Gay").
Then one day the entire school was lined up for local authority sight tests (this was long before charges were introduced for such things), and I discovered why I had some trouble discerning the teachers' writing on the blackboard when sitting anywhere other than the front of the class. I was mildly short-sighted, and would have to wear glasses to see longer distances.
Which meant no flying career for me. Sure, I could be ground crew, or an engineering officer of some sort, but what's the point of joining a flying service if you won't be allowed to fly? Not even an airline would take me on, except as cabin crew; but I wanted to drive the things, not serve rubber chicken to a scrum of tourists on their way to some Spanish beach.
Things were never the same after that. My interest in aviation remained, but the subject seemed less important than before; and as it waned, so I found that it was being replaced by an interest in science fiction. What else, as Gemini was replaced by Apollo and the historic lunar landings approached? But examinations were also approaching, and in the lurching summers of 1968 and 1969, with their underlay of disappointment and exhilaration, I also began to develop an interest in medieval European history (although the examination papers were chiefly concerned with the nineteenth century -- but, I reasoned, one couldn't hope to understand Bismarck's drive to unify Germany without first understanding how the idea of a German nation had arisen a millenium earlier). And out of this teenage collision between technology and history -- between Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire and a War which ended with the first (and hopefully the only) use of nuclear weapons -- there eventually arose the interest in politics which informs the majority of my writing and led me to spend a large amount of the eighties outside fandom, campaigning to ensure that there would be a nineties.
Curiously, I have never owned a volume of aviation history, although one book which helped shape me was precisely that: Dexter's and Ward's The Narrow Margin, a history of the Battle of Britain in which I first met what I later understood to be the contingency theory of history: the argument that if some event had not occurred, or had taken a different form -- in this case, Goering's decision to cease bombing the RAF's fighter airfields, and switch the Luftwaffe's attention to the cities -- the outcome could have been very different -- in this case, the elimination of RAF fighter opposition had the Luftwaffe continued to bomb the airfields. (The contingency theory of history, on which SF's alternative histories hinge, is often conflated with the "great men" theory of history, which argues that events are set in motion by certain key individuals, without whom the outcome will be very different; but the conflation is false, and there's no reason why contingency shouldn't sit easily alongside Marxist versions of history "from below", of popular movements for change which force events into being). That 1969 edition of the book now sits in my father's own extensive collection of aviation literature, which I expect to eventually inherit (if only because I know that none of my siblings will be interested).
And someday, perhaps when I'm retired and if I'm lucky to live that long, I hope to be able to re-read it. And to read (some of) the other titles as well -- for although I may not as fascinated by aviation as the teenage me of twenty-five years ago, I have a strong residual interest in what aircraft are, and what they can do. (Even when we go on holiday: for my partner Judith, an airliner is a coach with a wing on each side, and some engines either hung underneath or attached to the tail, but I like to know what kind, and where to sit in order to get the best view of the flaps as they slide in and out). And I still build plastic model kids -- not, now, the Mustangs and Lancasters of World War Two, but helicopters, in part because they take up less space, but also because, in an age when everything is as streamlined as possible and you can't actually see the engine, rotor blades provide the same sense of movement, of something awkward but agile, as a propeller. And some idea, perhaps, of what early aviation might have been like.
Although one could get closer. Many years ago, I made a New Year resolution to take up hang-gliding, which like most New Year resolutions never got any further. But perhaps it's time to try it -- the Wright brothers might have been the first to achieve powered heavier-than-air flight, but Otto Lillienthal was certainly the first human to achieve unpowered flight, and has been the inspiration to all gliders ever since. You, a wing, the rushing wind: isn't this supposed to be the true essence of flight?