The Tunnel Read Free

its contents: a water-bottle of thin rubber, shaped like an old-fashioned purse; a bar of chocolate, stale and already covered with whitish powder; a small brass compass; a book of matches; Horlicks tablets and some cakes of concentrated food. Incongruously among this workmanlike assortment was a packet of chewing-gum. He unwrapped the water-bottle, filled it from the stream and added two of the purifying tablets. He tied the string tightly round the neck of the bottle, fastened it to his belt and climbed back on to the earthen road.
    The farm when he passed it was quiet; not even a dog barked, and Peter imagined the farmer and his family sleeping again after the bombers had gone. He walked carefully past the outbuildings, round several fields of ploughed sandy soil, and once more into the forest which stretched ahead.
    He was almost enjoying himself now, his first panic resolving into a firm determination to avoid capture - to get back, somehow, to England. It was good to walk alone in the forest, alone with a single clearly defined objective. A quiet, slow, lonely campaign after the noise, urgency and clamour of the last few months. He began to walk more slowly, savouring the silence of the woods.
    Another wave of bombers droned their way towards England, thousands of feet above his head. He looked up, but they were too high for him to see. His young brother Roy had been flying tonight. How strange if it should be he who flew, like a homing pigeon, so far above. He imagined the crew immobile at their stations. Soon they would be crossing the Dutch coast. They would lose height over the North Sea and, as they drank the last of their coffee, would make the jokes that are always made as a bomber nears its base. Family jokes, no longer funny, but made because they expressed the solidarity of the family. His own crew had acquired that solidarity flying for hours through the darkness of the sky. Seven men enclosed in a shell of battering roaring noise, invisible to each other but joined into intimacy by the microphones of the intercom.
    He imagined the front-gunner slowly rotating his turret as he quarters the sky for enemy aircraft. Alone in the clouds, alone with his guns and the stars and the queer thoughts that enter a man’s head thousands of feet above the earth. It is cold in the turret. The gunner is unable to see the bulk of the aircraft behind him. Only when he listens for it is he conscious of the sound of the engines. Suddenly there is a click in his earphones, and softly and casually, as though the man’s hand were resting on his shoulder, he hears the voice of the rear-gunner talking to the navigator. Above the roar and batter of sound in the lonely turret he hears the voice as though it were his own inner self speaking, more intimate even than his own voice which, if he were to speak outside the microphone, would vanish with the whistle of the wind. The voice, disembodied, speaks softly in his ear. It says, ‘Where are we, Joe – astronomically speaking I mean?’ and the crew laugh. And then the pilot’s voice, ‘Shut up, rear-gunner, we’re not clear yet. Get back to your job.’ And the rear-gunner’s reply, ‘OK, skipper – just waking up the navigator.’ And the earphones click again, and all is silent.
    The crew in the aircraft overhead would be thinking of the flarepath and boundary lights of their own aerodrome, and all the well worn routine of the homing bomber. The final circuit before landing. The friendly WAAF driver on the dispersal truck. The sleepy ground staff waiting to bed the aircraft down for the rest of the night. Then the interrogation, and eggs and bacon in the mess.
    Whatever they were thinking they were going home; while he was alone in the middle of a pine forest in Germany, slow and earth-bound, ill-equipped for a journey that would last at best for several days.
    The forest appeared to be endless. During the past few hours he had crossed several roads, lying for minutes