SUZANNE Baker-Downes has never had a head for heights.

So she is getting increasingly nervous about throwing herself out of a plane in a fundraiser for Soho Parish primary school.

“I’m on my way to becoming road pizza,” Ms Baker-Downes said.

The skydive comes at a difficult time in her life. She said: “My mother passed away and… I’m an only child.

“It’s left a huge, gaping, hole in my life. I’m just feeling alone in the world. But I think if my mother was alive she’d be saying to me: ‘oh go for it you crazy old bat’.

“She wouldn’t be surprised in the least.

“I thought now is the time to grab the bull by the horns and do something different.  Throwing myself out of the plane, this is definitely something different for me. I could sit here and mope. But I’m tired of moping.

“I’m massively terrified of heights. I went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower once. I thought ‘that’s me done with heights now, I’ve ticked off the bucket list, now let’s go get a beer’.

“I can’t stop thinking about it. I have this vision of my fingernails attached to the hatch. Fortunately I am strapped to someone who may be a man or a woman. I’m counting on whoever it is to peel my fingers off the plane.”

She added: “The trouble is I’m the sort of person who when I say I’m doing it I’m doing it. But I am terrified.”

Soho Parish school, which has stood in Great Windmill Street since 1884, has low rolls and has for many years been struggling because of the Department for Education’s funding- per-pupil system.

A major source of revenue was the annual Soho Food Feast, which raises £45,000 a year through ticket sales with the help of Soho’s restaurant proprietors.

When the feast was cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic, the school launched a fundraiser to “Save the only school in Soho”.