The Tunnel Read Free Page B

fair youth in abbreviated shorts – who, anachronistically, carried a sword although all his followers made the popping noise of tommy-guns or the bang of hand grenades – had disposed his men, the Germans, among the bushes on Peter’s bank of the stream, while the enemy were forced to occupy the bare sloping banks on the other side. At first there was much scouting and manoeuvring for position during which Peter, pressed close to the ground in his hiding-place, prayed that they would not find him. Later, when the two armies engaged, he was able, from his vantage point under the bushes, to see most of the action. The troops were throwing clay pellets now and the British – or the Russians – were in full retreat. Half-way up the slope the fair-haired boy caught one of the enemy, a small dark child, and began to belabour him with the sword. At first Peter thought it all part of the game, but the beating was real, and the captured member finally departed for home blubbering, with blood from his nose streaming down the front of his woollen jersey. There was something frightening in the child’s crying, a knowledge of persecution deeper than that of English boys, and Peter, crouching in his hiding-place, renewed his determination to stay there until it was fully dark.
    He lay under the dripping bushes and imagined what he would have been doing at this moment, back at the aerodrome. It was nearly teatime. After playing squash with his brother in the afternoon he would now be lying on his bed reading a book. The batman would have stoked the cast-iron stove, and the small room at the end of the long wooden hut would be warm and quiet with the black-out curtains drawn. Only occasionally, when a Stirling on night-flying test took off or landed, would the hut shake and the room be full of noise.
    He would be reading by the light of a bedside lamp and the glow from the open stove would fill the room, playing on the cream walls, on the striped Indian blanket that hung above the bed and on the few books in the dark oak shelves. From the dressing-table the photograph of Pat, strange in her stiff uniform, would look with smiling eyes at the clutter of goggles, maps, shotgun cartridges and squash balls. It had been so sudden. He felt appalled at the chaos that had been left behind for his friends and relations to clear up – unanswered letters, unpaid bills. He knew that his room would be locked by now; that perhaps already the padre had gone through his things, thrown away those which in his opinion would cause grief to the mourning family. At first he resented this intrusion into his privacy, but saw the wisdom of it and shrugged his shoulders.
    Grief to the mourning family. He thought of his mother with three sons in the RAF. One already killed, himself missing, Roy still flying. What did she think of at night when she heard the bombers flying out? He too had had his share of grief, he supposed. First his brother, then Pat. But he had refused to mourn. What was mourning, in the end, but selfishness. Mourning one’s personal loss – that was all – pretty childish, crying after the milk was spilled.
    He had been glad of the flying and the danger after Pat had died. He remembered receiving the telegram on the airfield and the rush to catch the train. How he had sat for hours in his corner seat, sending his mind ahead of the crawling train. The vision of his wife’s crushed body below the rubble of the hospital, the slow maddening hours on Crewe station, where he had telephoned and been told that she had died.
    As soon as darkness fell he came out of his hiding-place and hobbled up to the road. He was so stiff that he could hardly walk, but he soon got into his stride and set out strongly, glad to be on the move again.
    In making a wide detour to avoid the first village he stumbled into some barbed wire and tore his trousers from the thigh to below the knee. His first reaction was one of unreasonable anger, followed quickly by an