Lindy Kato (Writer)

I have just finished the editing course, quite challenging! I have rewritten part two of the doggo stuff. I am tempted to post the re-write and of course Nudge’s story isn’t finished…it will appear in a book at some stage (unless I die or lose my marbles first). What I thought I would talk about today is another Bucket List item. Most Bucket List stuff will be too long but the parachute jump is a pretty short thing so here we go.

Stan went to Saudi Arabia in April 1985. The day before we had a family outing, Hyde Park in London, but we saw people parascending. This is where you are dragged into the air via a landrover and then set adrift. So, a sort of reverse parachuting sans plane. I was dead keen, but he said that even if I broke both legs, he was still leaving for Saudi. I had a moment to consider caring for toddlers, eleven months just turned two hampered by broken bones. So, the bucket list would have to wait.

That’s the point of a bucket list, it can wait when you are young.

Fast forward ten years. The local butcher was a ‘jump master’. A jump master is the person in charge of skydivers. Sadly, he died base-jumping off a mountain in Norway.

He wasn’t the usual kind of butcher. He had blue twinkly eyes and a smile that made him look exactly like a naughty schoolboy. But he slipped juicy bones into the baskets of old ladies with dogs and a couple of extra sausages into the meat pack of poor families.

Around the walls of his butcher’s shop were pictures of him doing all sorts of dangerous things and in the window was a picture of him punching a mako shark on the nose. It made it to the newspaper. All this is before ‘selfies’ were a thing, so someone must have been with him and instead of helping scare off the shark, they just got out their camera!

He knew I wanted to jump, and he was qualified to teach me. Today you have to tandem jump before you are allowed on your own but in those days, you just needed to be trained. I didn’t want to jump tied to someone else for the same reason I had my own motorbike. If there is to be any death going on, it must be under my control not someone else’s.

So, I hung out with him in his shed in the evenings to learn everything I needed to jump safely. But before my jump – he managed to smack himself up so badly he couldn’t jump on the day. We were never going to jump tied together, there is one good thing about tandem jumping and that is you can just do it on the day, you don’t have to be trained. The butcher would still be my jump master, talking to me by a radio in the ear defenders.

The plane was so old and huckory – jumping out of it seemed the only sensible thing to do. It creaked and shook and smelled and had no seats. I didn’t fancy the chances of it landing. These days the plane must be certified.

So, when jump master shouts “Jump!”

I jump…and count, one, two, three, four, five. Once clear of the plane the parachute (main canopy), opens automatically by a ‘static line’. The static line is a rope tied to the plane at one end and to the bag your parachute is in on the other – so when the line between the plane and bag goes tight, it rips the bag off. You jump with two parachutes, the main canopy and a reserve. At the time this was a new thing, before then you had to open the canopy yourself and people died because they were too slow and too close to the ground by the time they got the bag off. You still need to know what to do if the static line doesn’t work. I was taught how to cut away the main canopy and open the reserve parachute if things went wrong.

The main canopy opened exactly as it should, but this is when the trouble started. We had already talked about doing some tricks if I felt good. I was keen to show off. So, I released the toggle on my right shoulder, and it flew up with a flick. I pulled on the left side toggle down and that made the canopy spin. You go much faster, and it looks out of control. Then I pulled the toggles the other way. The canopy stalls and starts to spin in the opposite direction.

I should have mentioned the tricks to my family peering skyward. Stan had a video camera, but the batteries were flat! No one was very happy with me even though I made a perfect landing. I was a bit sad. I had come down so quickly I hadn’t taken much notice of the view. I didn’t really have time to enjoy it. Nothing compares with the satisfaction of scratching something off the list though.

It cost too much to do it again that day and then one of the butcher’s students had a terrible accident and tried to push off with her feet against a building. The building won and she broke her pelvis and her legs, and the butcher lost his licence. Then the rules all changed. I have been hang-gliding but I had to do that tied to someone that knew what they were doing…being babied isn’t quite the same thing.