 Harper Collins presents What Does This Button Do, an Autobiography by Bruce Dickinson, read by Bruce Dickinson. Forward. I'd been circling for two hours over Mimansk, but the Russians would not let us land. Landing permission denied, said in a Best Star Trek original series, Mr. Chekov Accent. I didn't know if this controller was an Iron Maiden fan, but he would never have believed me anyway. A rock star moonlighting as an airline pilot. Incredible. In any case, I didn't have Eddie on board, and this wasn't Ed Force One. It was a fishing expedition. A Boeing 757 from Australia's Airlines with 200 empty seats, and me as a first officer. There were only 20 passengers from Gatwick to Mimansk, lots of men called John Smith, close personal protection, all of them armed to the teeth. Not that Lord Heseltine needed it. He was pretty good at swinging the mace around when he had to. Then there was Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph. He was on board, too. I wondered if the Soviet controller had ever read any of the leader columns. I thought not. What sort of fish are there in Mimansk? I had inquired of one of the John Smiths. Special fish, he dead-panned. A big fish, I offered. Very big, he concluded, as he left the cockpit. Mimansk was the headquarters of the Soviet Northern Fleet. Lord Heseltine was a former Secretary of State for Defence, and what Max Hastings didn't know about the world's armed forces wasn't worth printing. The world below us was secret and obscured, submerged beneath a cotton wool bed of low cloud. To negotiate, I had a radio and an old Nokia mobile phone. Incredibly, it got a signal halfway round each holding pattern, and I could text our airline operations who would talk to Moscow via the British Embassy. No sat-phone, no GPS, no iPad, no Wi-Fi, as James Bond says to Q at the beginning of Skyfall, a gun and a radio. Not exactly Christmas, is it? After two hours of going round in circles, physical and metaphorical, the rules of the game changed. Unless you go away, we will shoot you down. Hmm. One day, I thought, as we turned and headed towards Ivalo in Finland, I should write a book about this. Chapter 1. Born in 58. The events that aggregate to former personality interact in odd and unpredictable ways. I was an only child, brought up as far as five by my grandparents. It takes a while to figure out the dynamic forces in families, and it took me a long while for the penny to drop. My upbringing, I realised, was a mixture of guilt, unrequited love and jealousy, but all overlaid with an overwhelming sense of duty, of obligation to do the very best. I now realised that there wasn't a great deal of affection going on, but there was a reasonable attention to detail. I could have done a lot worse given the circumstances. My real mother was a young mum married in the nick of time to a slightly older soldier, and his name was Bruce. My maternal grandfather had been assigned to watch over their courting activities, but he was neither mentally nor morally judged mentally enough to be up to the task. I suspect his sympathies secretly lay with the young lovers. Not so my grandmother, whose only child was being stolen, by a ruffian, not even a northerner, but an interloper from the flatlands and seagulls spattered desolation of the Norfolk coast. East England, the Fens, Marshes and Boggs, a world that has for centuries been the home of the non-conforming, the anarchist, the sturdy beggar, and of hard-won existence clawed from the reclaimed land. My mother was petite, worked in a shoe shop, and had won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School, but her mother had forbidden her to go to London. Denied the chance to live her dream, she took the next dream that came along, and with that came me. I would stare at a picture of her, on point, probably aged about 14. It seemed impossible that this was my mother, a pixie-like style at full of naive joy. The picture on the mantelpiece represented all that could have been. Now the dancing had gone out of her, and now it was all about duty, and the odd gin and tonic. My parents were so young it's impossible for me to say what I would have done had the roles been reversed. Life was about education and getting ahead, beyond working class but working multiple jobs. The only sin was not trying hard. My father was very serious about most things, and he tried very hard. One of the family of six, he was the offspring of a farm girl sold into service, aged 12, and a raffish local builder and motorcycle-riding captain of the football team in Great Yarmouth.