Keith Waterhouse on how children understand the world

Clever children, anyway

Keith Waterhouse was a journalistic legend who grew up so poor that he was banned from the homes of his schoolmates because he was so dirty and gamed the library system so he could take out more than his quota of books, according to a Guardian obituary (he died in 2009). After leaving school at 14 to work as a cobbler’s assistant and then an undertaker’s clerk, he talked his way into a newspaper job and quickly worked his way up, aided by writing the bestselling novel Billy Liar. He tells the story of figuring out perspective in his first memoir, City Lights, which was followed by Streets Ahead.

I had cracked the miracle of cinematography to my satisfaction by much the same logic as I had used at the age of two and a half, to work out the principles of aviation. In August 1931 the German airship Graf Zeppelin, looking like a giant discoloured cucumber, caused a sensation by flying over Leeds. Even more sensationally, it floated over our house in Middleton Park Grove, where I was in the back garden, digging a hole to Australia. . . .

[At an airshow about the same time] As I watched a yellow Tiger Moth take off and loop the loop, I was interested to observe that the higher it went up, the smaller it got. The same principle applied to the Graf Zeppelin. It did not take too long to work out the explanation.

There was, I reasoned, something in the atmosphere, a gas or mysterious impulse like gravity, that caused aircraft to diminish in size, together with their passengers, once they were off the ground. This Tom Thumb process helped those hitherto top-heavy machines and their personnel to stay up in the air. As they descended, they passed out of this sphere of influence and reverted to their normal size.

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