Christopher Fletcher

Kites

I’ve flown only three kites in my life. My stepfather bought me the first. I remember seeing him from a window approaching our little mews house off Bond Street, clutching it furled in its packet as though his life depended upon it.

The previous day he had overcharged an electric plane sent for my birthday by my other father, the one left in America following a youthful marriage that didn’t pan out. The walk to the launch took us past the barley-twist facades of Mount Street and Allens the butchers (alas, no more) whose soft light, sawdust and warm meaty air I always recall pooling the pavement on autumn trudges home from St George’s primary school. From the centre of Hyde Park the plane hopped jauntily onto the breeze and kept going until it crossed Park Lane, rose above the hotels and swanky showrooms, resolved into an agitated dot, and disappeared.

The kite, however, had strings attached and would not fly away. Shortly after that, Peter became Dad.

The second was made by my grandfather. A taciturn Scot, his affection burst out in occasional acts of madness that punctuate thrillingly the memories of my 1970s childhood. ‘100… 105… 108… 111!’ he once counted through clenched teeth, hands gripped on the wheel of his mustard Rover V8 as I pressed my nose to the windscreen, the lane lines of the M20 coming at me like tracer fire. Once, barrelling through the Dartford Tunnel late at night, a Tannoy boomed at him to ‘Slow down!’ For a moment he thought it was God.

The kite was formidable, a garage-special lash-up of polythene, wrist-thick dowl and industrial insulating tape. When he let my sister and me take charge, we scudded along the ground like cloud shadows made flesh.

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