‘Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air’, by Richard Holmes – review

‘Caelum certe patet, ibimus illi’ was the phrase blazoned on the side of the Royal Vauxhall, an 80-foot, red and white candy-striped coal gas balloon launched from Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1836 to fly overnight from London to the continent. The motto is from Ovid: ‘Surely the sky lies open, let us go that way!’

It well captures the exuberantly adventurous temper of the early days of ballooning, that gorgeous dead-end in the history of human aviation. Richard Holmes himself caught the ballooning bug in a Norfolk fairground aged four, he tells us, when his RAF pilot uncle fastened a red party balloon to the top button of his aertex shirt. The spirit in which he relates the stories of the pioneer generation of balloon aeronauts is thoroughly informed by love: his sense of ‘the mental release, the physical heart-lift, the calm perilous delight’ that is to be found in the basket of a rising air balloon.

If you were to consult, in the imaginary picture dictionary so useful in school playground disputes, the entry for ‘Class Act’ you would see a picture of Richard Holmes. (The entry for ‘Old Pro’, mystifyingly, depicts a scene involving Wayne Rooney but Holmes’s mugshot should be there too.) This is a book in which the delight the author clearly took in researching and writing it carries over to the reader. So puckish is its pleasure in its details and in its gusts of digression that footnotes — many of them autobiographical or of the ‘thereby hangs a tale’ variety — are marked with a whimsically superscripted icon of a balloon, rather than the usual asterisk. And he has a lovely wit and ease of address.

You had to be pretty brave to go up in one of these things, and the many characters here — from showmen and hucksters to scientists and explorers — all sit on a scale that runs from plucky to outright insane.