Gardner considered himself "the worst commando in the world" and, despite being "a small-arms expert ... [who] also knew a lot about explosives", he admitted that "I bent an aeroplane I was learning to fly".
"I wasn't what most people would think of when they imagine a refugee – I'm white, I speak English, I'm well-educated, I arrived on an aeroplane, I didn't have to risk my life in a flimsy boat.
from Both Ends Against the Middle, published in Collected Poems, Vol 2 (Oxford University Press) As a boy I loved aeroplanes and bought up such copies of aircraft magazines as I could find, but when I first flew, I was terrified and still don't like the experience.
I had never seen an aeroplane – I just knew we were getting into something that would fly in the sky.
'It was fantastic because I loved aeroplanes as much as photographs,' he says, 'but there came a point where I knew that if I stayed in engineering, I would surely die.
The novel gives a clear sense of Sark as somewhere both remarkable and beautiful, and, as I sweated and twitched through my most recent, and what I hoped would be my last, aeroplane flight, I promised myself that, should I survive, I would not only go to Sark, but go there by train and boat.
I was flying the aeroplane and I was flying it well".
I read on the aeroplanes, I read while they slept in our various apartments and hotel rooms - I read while they and my partner snorkelled in the Indian Ocean.
On the aeroplane I had stared at Mel Smith and Rowan Atkinson, whom I recognised, and a shorter, scruffier man in an anorak whom I didn't.
I just like telling everyone that I'm the Aeroplane Jelly boy".
