Cast a Horoscope — Suzi Stembridge

Rosalind Peters, known as Roz, is an air-stewardess in the early 1960's; in the days when they were called air-hostesses. With a one hour induction, a training flight to Paris and an afternoon swotting from her manual, she is embarking on her first flight at night and she is solely responsible for thirty-six passengers on a Viking aircraft. The chief pilot of the small Yorkshire-based charter airline is her captain and in these days of fledgling package holidays her passengers are businessmen going to Hamburg to play hockey. It doesn't take long for the sardonic captain, ex RAF and Berlin airlift, and seeming to the youthful Roz as middle-aged and corpulent, to size up the rooky learner. But rather than suffering the agonies of initiation Roz is won over by the Captain's winning smile and the joy of flying. The whole glamorous Mediterranean world is opened up to Roz. Greece: Athens when one could walk inside the Parthenon on the Acropolis, Lindos on Rhodes with pristine beaches, Crete when airplanes landed on grass airstrips, Cairo: when you could touch the Sphinx and Jerusalem: when the airport was in the Jordanian quarter, not to mention Tangier: city of blackmail and torture, and all before the days of mass tourism. But Rosalind's middleclass background is conditioned to preserve her virginity and allow her to make a good marriage; these are days when strict rules govern life outside marriage and young people are expected to abide by what is acceptable in respectable society. Do her Northern roots compete to draw her back from the heat and dust of a Europe fast recovering from, but still affected by, the horrors of two world wars? In an era when sex outside marriage, worse illegitimacy and adoption carry such stigma will Rosalind find true love and be able to resist the temptations and excitement on offer in this liberated life style? Will the consequences of her actions affect other lives?