Second Wind Part 1

d.i.c.k Francis.

Second Wind.

My sincere thanks to JOHN KETTLEY Meteorologist FELIX FRANCIS Physicist MERRICK FRANCIS Horseman and NORMA JEAN BENNET ETHEL SMITH FRANK ROULSTONE CAROLINE GREEN ALAN GRIFFIN ANDY HIBBERT PILAR BUSH GORDON STEVE PICKERING and THE CAYMAN ISLANDS NATIONAL ARCHIVE

PROLOGUE.

DELIRIUM BRINGS COMFORT to the dying.

I had lived in an ordered world. Salary had mattered, and timetables. My grandmother belonged there with her fears.

"But isn't there a risk? " she asked.

You bet your life there's a risk.

"No, " I said. "No risk. " "Surely flying into a hurricane must be risky? " "I'll come back safe, " I said.

But now, near dead as dammit, I tumbled like a rag-doll piece of flotsam in towering gale-driven seas that sucked unimaginable tons of water from the deeps and hurled them along in liquid mountains faster than a Derby gallop. Sometimes the colossal waves swept me inexorably with them.

Sometimes they buried me until my agonized lungs begged the ultimate relief of inhaling anything, even water, when only air would keep the engine turning.

I'd swallowed gagging amounts of Caribbean salt.

It had been night for hours, with no gleam anywhere. I was losing all perception of which way was up. Which way was air.

My arms and legs had bit by bit stopped working. An increasingly out-of-order brain had begun seeing visions that s.h.i.+mmered and played in colors inside my head.

I could see my dry-land grandmother clearly. Her wheelchair. Her silver shoes. Her round anxious eyes and her miserable foreboding.

"Don't go, Perry. It gives me the heebiejeebies. " Whoever listens to grandmothers.

When she spoke in my head, her mouth was out of sync with her voice.

I'm drowning, I thought. The waves are bigger. The storm is worse. I'll go to sleep soon.

Delirium brings comfort at the end.

AT THE BEGINNING it was a bit of fun.

Kris Ironside and I, both single, both thirty-one, both meteorologists employed to interpret the invisible swings and buffets of global air for television and radio audience consumption, both of us found without excitement that some of the vacation weeks allotted to us overlapped.

We both worked in the Weather Center of the British Broadcasting Corporation, taking it in turns with several other forecasters to deliver the good or bad weather news to the nation.

From breakfast to midnight our voices sounded familiar and our faces smiled or frowned into millions of homes until we could go nowhere at all without recognition.

Kris rather enjoyed it, and so had I once, but I had long gone beyond any depth of gratification and sometimes found the instant identification a positive drawback.

"Aren't you... ? " "Yes, I guess so. " I used to go for vacations to lands that didn't know me.

A.

week in Greece. Elephants in the Serengeti. By dugout canoe up the Orinoco. Small adventures. No grand or gasp-worthy dangers. I lived an ordered life.

Kris stabbed with his thumb the roster pinned to the department notice board. Disgust shook his hand.

"October and November! " he grumbled. "And I asked for August. " It was January at the time, August tended to be given to those with school-age children. Kris's chances of August had always realistically been zero, but with Kris hope often outweighed common sense.

It was his streak of wild unpredictability--the manic side of his character--that made him a good evening pub companion, but a week in his company once in the foothills of the Himalayas had left me glad to return to home soil.

My own name, Perry Stuart, appeared alphabetically near the bottom of the list, ahead only of Williams and Yates. In late October, I saw, I could take the ten working days still owing to me by then and return to the screen on the eve of Fireworks Night, November 5th. I shrugged and sighed. Year after year I got especially chosen and, I supposed, honored to deal with the rain-or-no-rain million-dollar gamble on fine weather for the night the skies blazed with the multicolored firework star bursts sent up in memory of Guy Fawkes and his blow-up Parliament gunpowder plot. Year after year if I got downpours right I winced over sack loads of letters from reproachful children who reckoned their disappointment to be my fault.

Kris followed my gaze down the list and tapped my name with his finger.

"October and November, " he p.r.o.nounced without surprise. "Don't tell me! You'll waste half of that leave on your grandmother again. " "I expect so. " He protested, "But you see her every week. " "Mm. " Where Kris had parents, brothers and a coven of cousins,

I.

had a grandmother. She had literally plucked me as an infant out of the ruins of a gas-exploded house, and had dried her grief for my dead parents in order to bring me up.

Where batches of my meteorological colleagues had wives, husbands, live-ins and one-nighters, I had sometimes--my grandmother's nurses. I wasn't unmarried by design, more by lack of urgency or the advent of Cinderella.

As AUTUMN APPROACHED the Ironside manic-depressive gloom intensified downwards. Kris's latest girlfriend left him, and the Norwegian pessimism he'd inherited from his mother, along with his pale skin, lengthy jaw and ectomorph physique, was leading him to predict cyclones more often than usual at the drop of a single millibar.

Small groups of the great wide public with special needs tended to gravitate to particular forecasters. One a.s.sociate, Beryl Yates, had cornered weddings, for instance, and Sonny Rae spent his spare time advising builders and house painters, and pompous old George told local councils when they might dryly dig up their water mains.

Landowners, great and small, felt comfortable with Kris, and would cut their hay to the half hour on his say-so.

As Kris's main compulsive personal hobby was flying his own light aircraft, he spent many of his free days lunching with far-flung but welcoming farmers. They cleared their sheep out of fields to give him landing room and had been known to pollard a row of willows to provide a safe low trajectory takeoff.

I had flown with him three times on these farming jaunts, though my own bunch of followers, apart from children with garden birthday parties, had proved to be involved with horses.

I seemed particularly to be consulted by racehorse trainers seeking perfect underfoot conditions for their speedy hopefuls, even though we did run forecasts dedicated to particular events.

By voice transfer on a message machine a trainer might say, "I've a fancied runner at Windsor on Wednesday evening, what are the chances of firm ground? " or

"I'm not declaring my three-mile chaser to run tomorrow unless you swear it'll rain overnight. " They might be pony club camp organizers or horse show promoters, or even polo entrepreneurs, begging for the promise of suns.h.i.+ne. They might be s.h.i.+ppers of brood mares to Ireland anxious for a calm sea crossing, and they might above all be racecourse managers wanting advice on whether or not to water their turf for good going in the days ahead. The prospect of good going encouraged trainers to send their horses. The prospect of many runners encouraged spectators to arrive in crowds. "Good going" was gold dust to the racing industry, and woe betide the forecaster who misread the clouds.

l r But no weatherman, however profound his knowledge or intuition, could guess the skies right all the time, and, as over the British Isles especially the fickle winds could change direction without giving notice, to be accurate eighty-five percent of the time was miraculous.

Kris's early autumnal depression intensified day by day and it was from some vague impulse to cheer him up that I agreed to his suggestion of a Sunday lunch flight to Newmarket. Our host, Kris a.s.sured me, would be catering for at least twenty guests, so my presence would hardly overload the arrangements.

"And besides, " Kris added with mild routine sarcasm, "your face is your fortune, you can't get away from it. Caspar will s...o...b..r all over you. " "Caspar? " "Caspar Harvey, it's his lunch. " "Oh. " Caspar Harvey might be one of Kris's wealthiest farming cronies, but he also owned three or four racehorses whose trainer twittered in nervous sound bites in my ears from Monday to Sunday. Oliver Quigley, the trainer, temperamentally unsuited to any stressful way of life, let alone the nerve breaking day-to-day of the thoroughbred circuit, was, on his messages system, audibly in awe of Caspar Harvey, which was hardly the best basis for an owner-trainer relations.h.i.+p.

I had met neither man face to face and didn't much want to, but as the day of the lunch approached I kept coming across references to "that gift to racing, Caspar Harvey" or "Caspar Harvey in final dash to honors on the winning owners' list" or

"Caspar Harvey pays millions at the Yearling Sales for Derby hopes", and as my knowledge and curiosity grew, so did my understanding of the Quigley jitters.

The week before the Caspar Harvey lunch was one of those times when I gave the top two forecasts, at six-thirty and nine-thirty each evening, daily working out the probable path of air ma.s.ses and going in front of the cameras at peak times to put my a.s.sessments on the line. Many people used to think that all Kris and I and other forecasters did was to read out from someone else's script, there was often surprise when we explained that we were in actual fact forecasters, that it was we who predicted the weather ourselves, using the information gathered from distant weather stations and having discussed it with colleagues. We then went "live" and un scripted--and usually alone into a very small studio where we ourselves placed the computerized weather symbols on the background screen map of Britain.