I’m sitting in the gallery
of the Sheldonian Theatre, one of the most beautiful if not one of the most comfortable
venues in Oxford. Looking down across the packed floor, I see a tanned face and
a white beard through the glass of a side door. Moments later, in he comes,
wearing a beige blouson jacket with embroidered badges on it. He waves like a
king and air-punches like a prize-fighter as he makes his way through the
applauding crowd.
He’s Buzz Aldrin.
His sassy, witty ‘Mission
Director’ Christina Korb conducts the interview, trying to keep him on the
straight and narrow, but even she has trouble managing the blurted
reminiscences and anecdotes. The man is bursting
with things to tell us. He’s opinionated, forceful, waving be-ringed hands,
boasting about the Omega watch he wore on the outside of his spacesuit because
it’s kinda hard to see the time otherwise.
I read Andrew Smith’s fascinating
book Moondust: In Search of the Men who
Fell to Earth several years ago, struck by the poignant reason for its
composition. At that time, only nine men were alive who had walked on the
surface of the moon, so he set about interviewing them while he could.
Well, there’s fewer than
nine now. That is why several hundred people have queued in the chill rain
outside and will later queue for the best part of an hour to get their books
signed. I’m one of them. For a moment, we’re in contact with history, with what now seems a lost idealistic era. I grew up with the sense that space held all
potential. I’d read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian and Venusian series, and
Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury. The stars, the planets and
the dear old moon itself held out dreams of human aspiration, adventure and
fulfilment.
So we lap up the bombast
and the showboating, enjoy the clearly oft-repeated wisecracks, the whole
display of it, because although this man is 86 now he is more alive than most
we’ll ever meet and this man walked on
the moon! He wears a T-shirt saying ‘Get your ass to Mars’ and is passionate
about sending humans there, saying that a human can do in a week what took
Spirit and Rover five years. He describes his spacewalk, saying he ‘wanted to putt putt
putt around like George Clooney in Gravity.’ He’s contemptuous of the
Russians – yes, they put Sputnik up there but ‘if you put up a dumb satellite you
don’t give it a parade and everybody loves a parade!’ What’s more, they put a
dog in orbit and left it there – ‘at least we brought our monkey back.’ He
expresses regret at the loss of Neil Armstrong and talks of his family and the
kind of destiny he’d felt – his mother was called Marion Moon and his father knew
the Wright brothers – yup, it was all meant.
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| The door of the Sheldonian open with a view of the Bodleian's Divinity Schools behind |
When I eventually reach
the head of the queue and he signs my copy of No Dream is Too High, I burble something about looking up at the
moon from a Scottish garden when I was a little girl, amazed to think he was up
there. ‘My mother came from Edinboro …’ he smiles and I pass on, past the
selfie-taking crowd. Outside the Sheldonian I wish the clouds would part and I
could see the old man’s stamping ground.
I remember another night, years
ago, when I looked at the moon and it gave me an idea for a story of ‘something
strange, spectacular and out of this world’ that grew into a children’s book, Hinterland, still not published though
it made it to the shortlist of a significant prize in 2013. I remember the
magic of writing that story, of describing grey dust and a terraced crater like
an amphitheatre and ‘hanging like a jewel against the dense black void, with
fat blue oceans and swirling white clouds’, our planet. And I think to myself, I
need to rediscover what that story meant to me, and maybe, just maybe, roll it
out onto the launchpad once more and send it into the ether myself.
So thank you, Buzz.
And thank you, Blackwell’s
Oxford (best bookshop in the world), for hosting this event!
Further reading:
Buzz Aldrin: No Dream is too High – Life Lessons from a
Man who Walked on the Moon
www.buzzaldrin.com
Andrew Smith: Moondust: In Search of the Men who Fell to
Earth
Andrew Chaikin: A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo
Astronauts
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| Raindrops really, but these white globes lend a suitably otherworldly tone to this picture of the Sheldonian! |
