25-05-2025
Why I jumped out of an aeroplane with a Duchess and public school headmaster
I blame the wine. I was sharing a bottle on a beautiful summer's day last year with my old friend, Francesca (Chica), Duchess of Norfolk, when she suggested we do a charity sky dive. The rosé was chilled, the food delicious and May 2025 seemed a long way off. So I agreed.
The speed at which the plan came about was amazing. Chica had walked her dog only that morning with a neighbour, Linda Woodhouse, who had suggested the whole mad scheme. Come lunchtime the three of us had committed to jump.
As the months to take off ebbed away, I was mostly quite blithe about the prospect. Every so often, however, the absurd, daunting reality of it poked its nose into my thoughts.
Chica confessed she was scared not of the jump but the landing and the prospect that she'd 'break both ankles'.
But having just become patron to The Sussex Snowdrop Trust, which supports children with life-threatening illnesses, the potential to fundraise overcame her reticence.
Neither athletes nor dare devils, we are three women of the same certain 60-ish age. And there are easier ways to raise cash, so why skydive? Two of our husbands thought we were mad, but I call it the 'if not now, then when?' spirit. As my old Fleet Street boss used to say: 'Do it darling, you're a long time dead.'
We were not entirely strangers to the skies. Chica had recently been up in a Spitfire – an imaginative Christmas present from her husband. Linda had already skydived, in a cool pink flying suit for a breast cancer charity, and I had swooped around above Lake Annecy, in France, a few years before, knuckles rather white, harnessed to a flimsy Para-Pente frame and parachute.
Then there is the fact that two of us, now healthy, have had cancer and appreciate the power of publicising and fundraising for charity – and this charity is truly terrific. The Snowdrop Trust sends nurses to care for very sick and terminally ill children in their own homes, and teaches parents how to treat their children too. It also offers financial assistance to parents who care for their child. The testimonies of families involved are, inevitably, very moving.
So the nature of the cause, combined with the fact that we are too old to worry about making fools of ourselves but too young to give in yet to the sedate pursuits of retirement, proved irresistible.
We booked a pub near the airfield in Old Sarum, Salisbury, the night before the jump, where we, including husbands, all had dinner together. Preparations were non-existent. I had a totally irrelevant pedicure, Chica decided if she could jump out of an aircraft she could add to an already exhilarating couple of days by entering her horse in an event the same weekend, and Linda had, coincidentally, just finished a three-day fast.
Neither Chica nor I had quite the right gear though. In my case this was not unexpected: I'm still remembered for scaling a mountain in China in the late Eighties wearing kitten heels. My unworn tracksuit bottoms were unearthed, along with pristine white trainers, but as we wore enormous Ghostbuster -style jumpsuits over all of it our efforts were largely irrelevant.
Thankfully, the day of the jump itself was glorious: sunny, clear and the wind 15 knots. During our induction we met the group of four we'd be jumping with.
This turned out to be the headmaster of Charterhouse School, with two teenage pupils who had suggested a skydive for The Fountain Centre, a charity which supports cancer patients. As their fourth team member, a housemistress at the school, said: 'Once the girls had asked him, it was pretty much impossible for him to say no.'
Briefing was well-organised and tightly managed. There's not much time to think about chickening out. You are weighed, given a jumpsuit and a harness, practice some of the jump positions and moved onto the airfield. You only meet your tandem jumper then. Mine was George, a cheery South African who had done 12,000 skydives. We were packed into the plane, sitting between each other's legs.
Sitting on the floor at the door of the plane before pushing out at 10,000ft is, as Chica put it, 'insane'. It's an utterly counterintuitive moment as your brain says: 'This is so wrong'. But by then it's too late, and with a leaping heart you fall gasping into the freezing, rushing air for the freefall at 125mph, strapped to a man you have met only minutes before. Then the parachute opens and there is almost instant silence. I saw Salisbury Cathedral gleaming in the distant sunlight and kept wittering on about how beautiful it all was.
I think it must have been worse for Chica, waiting and watching as we pushed off into oblivion. 'I saw Linda being plucked from the plane just in front of me and reality hit,' she says. Shuffling to the edge with Hink, her Dutch instructor, she shouted 'Holy moly. Let's get this done' only to be told: 'Not yet!'
Finally she was bundled out. 'The first five seconds were utterly horrendous, a sensory overload, disorientation and a roar of the air,' she says. 'Then I started to enjoy the freefall. When the parachute opened, joyous peace.' Apart, she confesses now, from a great deal of swearing.
Linda too contrasted the 'terrifying' freefall to the 'surreal stillness and calm' of the descent once the parachute opened.
We all landed bottoms down – laughing, then staggering about. There was a huddle of husbands and dogs at the side of the airfield looking touchingly relieved at our safe return. Chica asked the headmaster how he felt: 'I'm still processing it,' he said thoughtfully, as we three capered about, giggling, high-fiving and hugging in a mixture of pride and relief.
And although I'm glad it's over, I would do it again in a heartbeat. Chica, though, is of a different mind: 'Would I do it again? Absolutely not.' She is thinking about abseiling though.
When I told Maureen, my 95-year-old mother-in-law, that I was jumping from a plane at 10,000 feet, she said she wished she could come with us. The power of a charity challenge is compelling, whatever a woman's age. It's amazing what can come out of a dog walk with a friend.
