Douglas Bader

Air takes four of his ten planets, with two apiece in fire, earth and water, and nothing is missing from the balance. The ten divide four cardinal, four fixed and two mutable. The chart holds no closed figure of any kind and no group of planets in a single sign. Four of the ten were retrograde: Venus, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto. The record says Bader lost both legs in a crash in 1931, talked his way back into the RAF, flew through the Battle of Britain, and made so many escape attempts as a prisoner that he was sent to Colditz.

Nothing in this chart is unusual, and that is the finding. No element is missing and no mode is empty. There is no closed figure, no stack of planets in one sign, and no contact tighter than an eighth of a degree. Set against a record of four refusals of what was physically possible, it is an ordinary chart attached to an extraordinary life, and saying so is the only honest option. A reader who expects the second to show up in the first will not find it here.

The Sun lies at an awkward angle to Neptune at twelve hundredths of a degree, the tightest contact he has, and the reading is that the self is obscured: confusion about direction, and vitality that comes and goes for no clear reason. The record supplies a reason, and it is external and documented. A reading offering an unexplained interior has landed on a record whose first fact is a specific physical event with a date on it, and where those two disagree the record is the side holding the evidence.

Mars sits sixty degrees from Neptune at under half a degree, effort with imagination behind it, read as action that benefits from feel rather than from force, which in a fighter pilot is a coincidence of vocabulary and not a finding. His Moon sits fifty arcminutes into Leo at noon with Cancer still possible, so it is left out, and the closest contact in the death sky goes with it. He died in London on 5 September 1982, at seventy two. Pluto stood in easy contact with its own birth place at just over a quarter of a degree that day and Saturn opposite its own at a third. The Moon was full and ninety six per cent lit.