On and On to Wigan

Soundtrack - Music for 18 Musicians - Steve Reich

Let's face it; poetry is never going to change the world - but it will make some of us feel better for some of the time.

Every time I close my eyes I see a damp and reflecting world of rain on city streets, an empty existence sustained by drugs and cheap encounters with various other low-life human beings. The world of childhood is far behind us now and all those long, hot summers are just family myths, brought to earth easily by a look back at the statistics. Humans are doing enough to make that endless summer a reality. The Ozone may be healing itself but the relentless pumping of Carbon Dioxide and Carbon Monoxide is continuing to damage our atmosphere beyond help. I am like a teenager who thinks that just by mentioning the negative things they have just begun to notice in the world, they will suddenly get everyone to see how bad things are and start making them better. Those days are gone forever. I am lost in those dark streets, the only conscious soul in a desert of pathetic creatures, struggling day to day to get their next meal, walking hand in hand with disaster and waiting for the end to take them to oblivion.

I am sitting on the steps of our sixth-form school house, watching a friend and his current partner, grapple good naturedly with each other. She squeals in a ways that makes the chess players inside look up briefly from the game and then continue with a sub-audible tut. I am hidden behind what I think are the coolest mirror shades in the world. No one can touch me for being cool; it is no crime here or even against the rules. My teachers do not care anyway and even if they did what could they bothered to do to me. I am their star, their killer application, version 1.0 of a package which will never be bettered. You would think that they had built me in one of their modestly equipped labs between the lessons on density and how to make hydrogen.

My eyes are moving beyond the mildly erotic games in the foreground, to follow a dark shadow skimming the horizon, a warplane I know for only they fly that low around here. Now I can hear it, just a slight roar of jets in the distance, divorced from its source by the speed of sound so that it travels a few degrees behind, a desperate race to return to its mother. Now it is too close for anyone not to look up. Even the chess players have moved to the window to follow it. The sound has changed quality as well as degree and in it we hear gasps and cracks and I know it has swallowed something bad, a bird maybe or some dust swept up by the combines combing the wheat fields. Now we all know it will die. We laugh together unable to connect the spectacle of this impending disaster with the plain fact that the man within it will end up vapourised if he stays with his craft like a captain with his ship.

Not half a kilometre away, it starts to climb in a steep arc until it is pointing straight up. The engine is very sick now, sparking, flaming and screaming as it disintegrates internally. Black debris falls away from it and we see it shaking trees in the distance as it reaches the ground. And at the very end of the engine’s usefulness as a propulsive force, we see a further black shape detach itself from the plane. The pilot has ejected. He was gaining height to give his parachute time to open. The plane and its master follow separate arcs until the pilot is brought up short by his 'chute which opens in a wonderful ballet and makes us all gasp audibly with the connection of the fact of the pilot's possible death.

None of us has said a word but now there are a few fragmentary phrases as it becomes clear that the next tragedy could involve us for the plane, engineless now, is looping over on its back and is foreshortened. Of course we are not in danger. Without its power, it is quiet and so close now that we hear the wind flapping the useless control surfaces; the rattle of bones it seems like. In a second we are safe as it passes over our heads and we cannot see it any more. There are exactly five seconds of complete silence; I count them on the room clock.

And then the floor shakes. There is no explosion, just a sort of short earthquake which knocks over the chess pieces. We all start talking properly now. The realisation of our salvation is not voiced but soon it is clear that we are all unhappy with how close we came to this. In the playing field at the bottom of the garden, the pilot has landed and is calmly gathering up his parachute. Two girls are walking towards him, not running but walking and giggling for he is a pilot and that is cooler than I could ever be with my kiddies shades and bad haircut. We don't know where to go now. The plane explodes.

We follow the chess pieces to the floor and cover our heads. Don't mess with the haircut. I stand up slowly, covered in dust and without a worry. We are running outside; towards the huge cloud in the distance behind the school. It has come down in a field with no one around. Something tells me we should not be doing this. How many crew does this type of plane have? Only one got out. I don't want to sound pompous and I am gauging which of the girls with us had to be escorted, sick and fainting, from the labs when we cut up pigs' eyes. I do not say anything. The fire is too hot for us to get close. The pilot is laughing in that desperately relieved way that people do. He was on his own and the fault lies with a mechanic. The girls laugh too and we all return to school. The air smells of some sort of fuel but I cannot remember what planes use. I am not so boring that I know what planes use for petrol. It starts to rain from the blue sky. The head boy lights a match for his furtive cigarette.