Men With Kites
By ROBERT ROBINSON ITHINK stillness is the remarkable thing. Since people started going at 750 miles per hour I have begun to notice the calico-sleeved porters who weed little flower- beds along branch lines. And I keep thinking of those anglers in Northern towns who sit by the blank canals. Their still- ness is startling.
Such still, grave men. Have they found a way to the.motion- less centre in these centrifugal days ? Perhaps in the act of concentration—when they hook those muddy fish (they never keep them), or encourage those brown plots in despite of the descending soot—perhaps they liberate themselves. This is a speculation I please myself with as I watch the men fly kites in Hyde Park.. For kite-flying is another solempne pastime. As far away from the Park as Oxford Circus the bits of paper can be seen in the air. Selves hung out on pieces. of string, personal advertisements, you might just stop yourself from saying. A little too symbolical, perhaps. It is pleasant to find it in Hyde Park where the 'uneasy people are. At the perimeter, men deliver answers with feverish efficiency to men without questions. And, in the middle, classically, a still point,' men with kites. I watch the flyers, half a dozen of them, surrounded by a dense little crowd, stationary beneath the high-up immobile kites; and I recall the windy recreation ground, the heavy box- kite trailed along the grass at a frantic scamper, the surly bumping as it refused to rise. No one is running here. They sit, some of them, in the green chairs, and they are all grown-up.
Is that why there is a kind of shamefacedness among the spectators, a suspicion that they would not fly kites, a sus- picion that they must seem as if they are about to go, a pretence (almost) that they have not really stopped ? No one says anything about kites to the kite-flyers, but everyone would like to touch the string, to feel the kite strain as it hangs in the air above the Cumberland Hotel. Is it child's play 7 There are reels,. great big brown reels strapped with leather thongs to the flat hands of the flyers, miles of waxed cord round each. Camp stools have been brought, flat cloth portfolios with other, better kites in them: bird-kites, stunt-kites with tails, high-flyers with bellying pockets to catch the wind, pilot-kites that hang on the tails of bigger kites and pull them steeply into the thermal currents of the upper air, above the Corner House and the Edgware Road, above the dubiously employed and the Anarchists. There are four middle-aged men, one younger man with red hair and an old Etonian tie, and a girl in pink slacks who fly the kites. They stand together. As the air yields and eddies, the kites swarm: but, close as they are, the strings will not tangle. Easily the kite-flyers pass their reels from hand to hand; the kites slip away, cross over, heel back and the cords snake away unknotted. A small snouty park-man leans on the back of one of the green chairs. The crowd, still only a few, has closed in, and he is so near to one of the middle-aged flyers that he will find it less embarrassing to risk a comment than to remain silent. " You fly them big 'uns," he says.
The middle-aged man keeps his eye on his kite, reels in against the thermal tug.
" Nah-- " he says, contemptuously, his eye .deep in the sky "—they won't do nothing. Sit 'ere all day staring at 'em, go sun-blind."
The snouty man cannot relapse into anonymity without awkwardness in face of the slight challenge.
" That one don't do nothing, do it ? " he asks, trying to round off the contest conditionally by, making his counter- attack sound more like ordinary interest.
" Do nothing—" says the kite-man with fake explosiveness " —it'll do anything."
He lets the reel run out a few yards; two miles away and a thousand feet up the kite spirals down in a series of tight rapid turns. He plucks the cord away to the right and the kite soars off in obedient tangent, hovers, climbs and dips again.
" Slightest touch," says the kite-man, generally.
The snouty man has pioneered for us all. The kite-men make their own reels in the winter-time, we are told; they are large, beautifully varnished, and spin freely on elaborate ball-bearings. The cord has a twenty-five pound breaking- strain. But the kites themselves are simple: rice-paper and cane with crepe-paper tails to balance them and help the eye at great heights: " The smaller the better," says the middle- aged kite-man. " Do they ever get caught up with helicopters ? " asks a red-haired girl. A man explains to his wife that aeroplanes do not fly below a thousand feet over Greater London: but the man with the kite has had his high-flyer more than half- a-mile up in this very park. " Rain affect 'em ? " inquires a youth. " Disintegrate," mutters the snouty man disparagingly. The kite-man's answers have a curious half-hearted quality; as if -he finds it well enough to analyse techniques, but unim- portant. As if there has been wished on to him the deceitful business of rationalising an activity otherwise inexplicable to 750 m.p.h. people. His five companions leave him to it. " How far out can you get kites ? " someone asks.
" Six mile," he answers. And, as he drifts away from the crowd— " you can't see 'em then." The game is up. " You can't see 'em then." There's rationalising and rationalising but there's no rationalising that. The crowd has an intuition; they are on the verge of under- standing. They melt slowly away until only the snouty man remains, leaning on the back of the green chair. At last " What's a bloke fly a kite for ? " he says irritably. But there is no one left to hear.
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