Graeme Martin Lamont was six years old the first time he fell in love. It was not with a person. It was with an airplane.
On a dusty airstrip near a farm called Kiu, about a hundred kilometers southeast of Nairobi, a silver biplane circled, landed, and taxied toward a cluster of children waiting to meet it. Lamont was lifted into the cockpit for a few seconds, just long enough to take in the smell of aviation fuel and hot oil, the wires strung tight between the wings, the enormous propeller ticking as it cooled. Then he was lifted back out for the next child’s turn.
“I was passionately in love,” he writes of that moment. “There and then I made up my mind that when I was old enough I was going to have an aircraft like this and fly, fly, fly.”
That single afternoon, recounted in the opening pages of Lamont’s new memoir, Flights of Fancy: Growing Up, sets the tone for a book that is less about airplanes than about the long, winding, often improbable path a life takes once a person decides what they want.
A CHILDHOOD SHAPED BY ONE WOMAN’S NERVE
Lamont’s story begins before he can remember it. His mother, Maisie, a University of Glasgow graduate and one of the top students of her year, separated from his father not long after Lamont was born. With few prospects for a single mother in postwar Glasgow, and little support to speak of, she made a decision that would define her son’s entire childhood: she took her eleven-month-old baby and left for East Africa, first Uganda, then Kenya, where she eventually built a career and a new life.
It is a decision Lamont returns to with real gratitude. “I am very glad she did,” he writes, “as it has opened my life to a lot of things I probably would not have experienced if remaining in Scotland.” He later learned that relatives on his father’s side had offered to adopt him outright, believing they could give him a better life than his mother could alone. She turned them down.
That choice put young Graeme in Nairobi, then a British colonial hub, growing up alongside an ayah named Mariamu and a houseboy named Thomas, whose sudden removal from Lamont’s life after a fight with police became, in his own words, his first real experience of loss. It is one of several moments in the book where a small child’s memory captures something larger: a household, a country, and an era all in the middle of changing.
LEARNING TO FLY, AND TO KEEP GOING
The Kiu airstrip moment did not translate into an airplane overnight. It took sixteen years, a job at an iron ore port in Western Australia, and a stint programming computers at a joint US Air Force satellite tracking station in Woomera, South Australia, before Lamont had saved enough to buy his own aircraft: a thirty year old de Havilland Tiger Moth, purchased for 4,500 dollars, about a year’s average salary in Australia at the time.
He flew it home the long way, across several Australian states, in stages, over five days, landing at a dozen airports for fuel along the route. At one point he was met on the runway not by well-wishers but by federal police cars, having forgotten to notify base security before flying into a restricted military zone. They impounded the aircraft. He got it back a few days later, and, by his account, remained on good terms with the officers for years afterward.
It is a story told with visible affection for his younger self’s overconfidence, and it captures something the memoir returns to often: that the path toward a meaningful life is rarely a straight one, and the wrong turns are often where the best stories come from.
A LIFE MEASURED IN CHOICES, NOT INCOME
Lamont eventually settled in Tasmania, ran his own software development business, married a fellow pilot named Frances, and spent decades as a gliding instructor, both paid and volunteer. He is candid that the choices he made were not always the financially optimal ones. He turned down more lucrative opportunities in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra to stay in Tasmania. “A decision of the heart, not the head,” he calls it.
That preference for satisfaction over reward runs through the entire book. In his foreword, Lamont writes that Australia has been, for him, “The Lucky Country,” not because of wealth, but because the choices he made, again and again, led him toward friendships and contentment rather than financial gain. If the book leaves readers with one idea, he suggests, it is that a life measured by satisfaction rather than riches can still be counted a success.
WHY NOW
Lamont credits a fellow glider pilot, Tony Selwyn Hoskins, with nudging him toward finally writing the book, something friends had suggested for years given what they considered an unusual childhood. Lamont himself was never convinced his story was anything special. “I never thought of it as anything really special,” he writes, “no more than millions of other people who all have stories to tell.”
Flights of Fancy: Growing Up is the first of two planned volumes, covering childhood through the early years of adulthood and the beginnings of an aviation career. A second book, tentatively titled Onward and Upward, is already underway, covering his adult flying career and a discovery in his fifties of an extended family in Canada, Scotland, England, and Portugal that he never knew existed.
For readers who grew up in another era, another continent, or simply another kind of family, there is something recognizable in Lamont’s account: a life built out of ordinary decisions that, looked at all together, add up to something worth telling. As he puts it, the point was never really about the airplanes.
“Character building is something that occurs as we progress through life,” he writes, “learning and adapting as events occur and affect us.”
The rest, it turns out, is just the flying.
