Читать книгу What We’re Teaching Our Sons - Owen Booth - Страница 19

We’re teaching our sons about plane crashes.

We’re teaching them how plane crashes happen, how to avoid or survive being in one. We’re teaching them that plane crashes are incredibly rare, that the chances of experiencing a plane crash on a commercial airliner are approximately five million to one. We’re teaching our sons that, no matter what they’ve seen on the internet, flying is far safer than driving, than travelling by train, than riding a bicycle.

Nevertheless, by the time the plane climbs to thirty-five thousand feet, we’ve already taken the emergency codeine we’ve been saving for exactly this sort of situation.

We’ve seen those plane crash films on the internet. We know all about shoe bombs, and anti-aircraft missiles, and iced-up pitot tubes, and wind shear, and thunderstorms, and botched inspections, and pilot error. We know how easy it is to unzip the thin aluminium tube we’re sitting in; how much time we’d have to think about our fate as we fell through the frozen air, to think about the fate of our sons.

Our sons aren’t scared of flying. They’re excited about being allowed to do nothing but watch inflight movies for six or seven hours. They point down at the glorious crimson cloud tops, at the ships on the sea, don’t even notice the bumps of random turbulence that cause us to clench our jaws.

We don’t want to look out of the window.

We tell our sons about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince, and who mysteriously disappeared while flying a reconnaissance mission in an unarmed P-38 during the Second World War. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose father died before young Antoine’s fourth birthday.

Our sons haven’t read The Little Prince, haven’t even heard of it.

‘What are they teaching you these days?’ we ask.

Our sons put their headphones back on. We know what their teachers are teaching them. They’re teaching them to be better people.

Come to think of it, we haven’t read The Little Prince either.

We stay awake all night, listening for slight changes in the tone of the engines, for the sounds of structural failure in the airframe, for sudden announcements of catastrophe. We stare down at the lights of cities, watch for panic on the faces of the cabin crew.

We keep pressing the call button to get the attention of the cabin crew.

‘There was a noise,’ we say.

The cabin crew just smile, tell us everything is going to be okay, give us more complimentary drinks.

Our sons, more used to living in the permanent present than we are, alternately sleep or watch cartoons, magnificently unaware of all the disasters that life has planned for them.

The best we can do, we realise, is to keep their hearts from breaking for as long as possible.