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him to stop.His cousin Sunny, the Duke of Marlborough, said: ‘I do not suppose I shall get the chance of writing you many more letters if you continue your journeys in the Air. Really, I consider you owe it to your wife, family and friends to desist from a practice or pastime—whichever you call it—which is fraught with so much danger to life. It really is wrong of you.’ F. E. Smith told him he was being ‘foolish’ and ‘unfair to his family’.
    His cousin Lady Londonderry said he was ‘evil’. His wife, Clementine, was distraught—and sometimes Churchill would steal away without even telling her. ‘I have been very naughty today about flying,’ he confessed on 29 November 1913, as though he had been to the larder and eaten the children’s pudding.
    His next instructor was another dashing young captain, Gilbert Wildman-Lushington. On 30 November—his birthday—Churchill spent the whole day with Lushington, much of it in the air. The captain wrote to his fiancée, Miss Airlie Hynes, about his exuberant pupil. ‘I started Winston off on his instruction about 12.15, and hegot so bitten with it I could hardly get him out of the machine, in fact except for about ¾ of an hour for lunch we were in the machine till 3.30. He showed great promise, and is coming down again for further instruction and practice.’
    The brief lunch had taken place in Lushington’s cabin, where Churchill spotted a photo of the young woman. When was the wedding? he asked. Captain Lushington replied that he was saving up for it—and you can imagine that teaching Churchill was a useful freelance income. Alas, the wedding never took place. Three days later Lushington himself was killed, side-slipping in the very plane he had used for the lesson.
    There isan eerie letter from Churchill to Lushington, presumably written on the evening of the day they had spent together. He asks why he couldn’t seem to make the rudder work, and why it seemed so stiff. ‘Probably the explanation is that I was pushing against myself,’ he says, cryptically. Lushington writes back, confirming that this is indeed probably the case. He has tried the rudder and it seems fine: ‘You were pushing against yourself,’ says Lushington, before taking off again for his last doomed flight.
    We might ask: how can you push against yourself? What does that mean? Did Churchill really understand what was happening with these primitive flaps and levers? Did anyone?
    He swore to Clementine that he would give up, after the death of Lushington. Then in 1914 he swore again that he would do so, after he invited French air ace Gustav Hamel to come over the Channel from Paris, and give a display to the Royal Flying Corps.
    Hamel took off from Paris and was never seen again. And yet on Churchill went with his flying.He was constantly nipping over to France, glorying lark-like in the high places, boasting about the speed and the convenience of the air. By 1919 he was back at thecontrols, and in the immediate run-up to this fateful episode at Croydon he had been given all sorts of presentiments of doom.
    On one occasion he had got completely lost in a storm over northern France, and had to descend until he could see a railway line by which to steer his course. Only the previous month he had sustained a serious smash at the Buc aerodrome near Paris. The long grass had slowed his take-off, so that the plane’s skis hit the edge of a concealed road at the end of the runway.
    The plane did a somersault—like a shot rabbit, he said—and he ended up hanging upside down by his harness. Now he was about to be violently and involuntarily reunited with the soil of Croydon, and if his life had flashed before him he might have reflected that he had behaved recklessly for years.
    When we look at the prodigious bravery of his early military career, we are driven to the conclusion that he actively courted danger. It is as though he hungered—like Achilles or some Arthurian knight—for the