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Beach Landing

 

Beach Landing

During the fifteen or so years I was art director for the Kodak Calendar I discovered that ‘recce trips’, the much-envied excursions with the selected photographer to the ideal locations for the calendar theme, provided more terrors than pleasures. Colleagues, of course, could not agree. They considered them a very convenient excuse for having the whale of a spree.

My first move would be to make a date with the relevant Tourist office in London.  The Icelandic office was wonderful. They listened carefully to Jack Oakley, the photographer chosen for the job, and caught on to the whole idea instantly. Dozens of photographs of locations were spread out for me. I told them we wanted black beaches and fields of wild flowers, with a smallish hotel as close as possible to that sort of setting. They said there were hundreds of places like that.

The date was fixed, the day arrived and we found ourselves drinking a morning coffee in the lounge of a Reykjavik hotel. I had decided that a good look round from the air would be a good idea, and on arrival we had booked our pilot. Now he drank coffee with us. An hour later we climbed aboard a Piper. All was right in this best of possible worlds.

We told the pilot we wanted to land near a beach somewhere. Just to get the feel of the place. In our four-seater Piper it was quiet and smooth. A few minutes after take-off the pilot pointed down to a long, thin, black beach in the shadow of a vertical cliff. He said he would land there. It looked about the width of our front garden path. We thought he was winding us up. He was not. He went down. And of course the width of the beach increased considerably. But just as the wheels were about to hit the wet sand he had second thoughts, opened the throttle and we surged upwards and curved sickeningly away over the sea. He said, ‘Let’s do that again.’

Jack said it didn’t really matter. He shrugged and said he often landed there as an air ambulance and it was tricky but possible, and we said again no, no, really, it didn’t really matter. We tried to swallow and failed, saw we were going down again, sinking lower. We cringed in our seats and then hit a water-filled hole in the beach and bounced, to the accompaniment of what felt like an explosion. The plane, having leaped, slithered down again and rolled to a stop.

A happy group of children ran to us from nowhere and watched us unstick ourselves from our seats and climb down. My knees were in shock and I have to confess that it did nothing to soothe them to watch the pilot walking to the rear of the aircraft and examining the tailwheel rather too carefully for my liking.