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years, I would say he was a very decent and responsive boy. When we learned about his flight into space we immediately remembered his very nice smile. He preserved the same smile for the rest of his life – the same one he had when he was a boy.’ Yelena remembers placing Yuri at the front of the class for a few days, where she could keep an eye on him. ‘He wasn’t really the sort of boy you could take your eye off for too long. Even right under my nose, he managed to find trouble. He pulled all the nails out of the bench at the front, so that when he and the other children sat on it, the whole thing collapsed.’ But Yelena could not stay annoyed for long. She remembers a tiny little girl, Anna, who kept getting trampled or left behind when the other children stampeded about the place. Yuri became quite protective of her; carried Anna’s satchel after school and walked her home, to show the others that she should not be picked on.

Unfortunately, he did not shine at music. ‘He participated in all the amateur talent activities. The instruments for the orchestra were a present from the collective farm. Yura played trumpet. He was always proudly walking in the front.’ The Gagarin family had to survive, rather than enjoy, these atonal outbursts, as Zoya remembers. ‘He brought his trumpet home and started to practise. Father got fed up. It was a sunny spring day, and Father sent him outside, saying he had a headache because of the noise. So he practised outside. We had a cow, and she started to moo. It was a concert for free. Everyone was laughing.’ Zoya fondly recalls her younger brother as ‘a real live wire. He was always leading games, the instigator rather than the follower. He was very much alive.’

Yuri’s favourite subjects at school were maths and physics, and he was also keenly involved in a model aeroplane group, much to Yelena’s inconvenience. ‘Once they launched one of his planes from a window and it fell on a passer-by. He was exasperated, and came into the school to complain. Everyone went very quiet, until Yuri stood up and apologized. So he probably had this urge to fly.’

Valentin remembers his pesky brother at six years old, demanding that he and his father build him miniature gliders, or wooden propeller toys powered by rubber bands. Little Yurochka would insist, ‘I want to be a hero for my country, flying a plane!’ Until the war, at least, planes were seldom seen in the skies above Klushino. Fleeting glimpses of such craft must have made a powerful impression on the boy.

When Yuri was sixteen he became anxious to get away from home and earn some kind of living. ‘He saw that life was very hard for our parents, and he wanted to get a profession as soon as possible, so that he wasn’t a burden on their shoulders,’ says Zoya. ‘Personally, I didn’t want him to go, but he said he wanted to carry on studying, and our mother said she wanted him to study, too.’ Yuri expressed his enthusiasm for the College of Physical Culture in Leningrad. He was a fit young man, not very tall, but agile and coordinated. He thought he might train as a gymnast or sportsman. Valentin remembers their father’s objection to this plan. ‘He said it was not a job. Even though it might be physically hard work, it was a silly thing to do. But the physics teacher, Bespavlov, insisted that our parents let Yuri go.’ Alexei hoped that one day his three sons would join him as carpenters, but such a plan was not really practical.

In the event, all the Leningrad places were taken. The best available option was at the Lyubertsy Steel Plant in Moscow, which incorporated a school for apprentices. Here Yuri could learn a proper trade – steel foundryman. There was much pulling of strings with relatives on his father’s side of the family for interviews, references, accommodation. In 1950 Yuri was finally accepted as an apprentice and went off to Moscow, where Uncle Savely Ivanovich agreed to let him stay with them for a while.

At Lyubertsy, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin received his first adult uniform: a foundryman’s peaked cap with a union emblem; a baggy tunic