Hang around much longer and I’ll be seen and recaptured. He returned to the edge of the wood, took out his luminously dialled compass, and once more measured the paces in. The moonless night was no help, since all the bushes looked and felt the same in his beam of light, already less brilliant than when he had set out.
Another navigational run in, with more methodical poking, and the stick tapped what he was looking for. A sneeze shot out that must have been heard for half a mile. Of course, it always did at this stage. He stood awhile, still and silent, holding his nose to stop another. Using his handkerchief to mop the mucus, he thought it exceptionally bad luck to be stricken with the full house of a cold on getaway night.
Trees and hedges were indistinguishable in the dark and, well behind his timetable, he used his compass to cross fields, his previous daylight reconnaissance only a vague help. The outline of a great elm took out the mixture of stars and cloud, made the night a deeper pitch of black. He paused to get a bearing, and the fluting bars of an owl’s beat startled and prodded him on till he broke through the hedge at the exact point where the lane forked. Exulting in his skill — and jolly good luck — all he had to do now was march half a mile by the cover of the right-hand hedge and find the main road.
To move without noise meant putting the plimsolls back on, but he didn’t have them. Another mistake. They must have dropped while poking for his bundle among the trees. Now his pursuers would have a clue as to the direction. Listening for the noise of bloodhounds, he heard only the wind which hid the sound of him knocking claggy soil from his boots against the bole of a tree.
Anyway, I’m not a caged bird bloke in bloody Germany, he smiled. I’m on the run from a rotten school, and they’ll never catch me. At the junction both ways seemed feasible. Either could lead to disaster, so he shrugged and headed to the right because the sky seemed faintly lighter that way.
After half an hour’s carefree stroll a lorry came grinding up behind. Daylight showed in grey patches above the trees, and the birds were waking up, so he would have to be more careful. Walking along the inside of hedges and going from field to field would mean making only a few miles before nightfall, so he thought it best to get into a couldn’t care less mood and nonchalantly put his thumb up for a lift.
An RAF corporal with a bushy moustache and big tobacco-stained hands helped him into the back. ‘Going far, lanky?’
‘Bristol, eventually,’ Herbert said.
‘So are we, right to the station.’ The man winked while lighting a cigarette. He offered one, which was declined. ‘You aren’t a deserter, are you? Bit early to be about. What’s in that bundle? Swag?’
Herbert pressed his tunic to make sure of the wallet in his inside pocket. ‘Good Lord, no. I’m off to Bristol to meet a friend.’
The corporal laughed. ‘A bint, eh? We’re to pick up some erks back from France. War’ll be over soon, anyway.’
‘I sincerely hope not.’
‘I suppose a lot of you young ’uns do. I’ve done four years, and can’t wait to get out. The Russians are near Berlin, that’s one good thing. It was on the wireless last night.’
Herbert had heard the same, and felt they had no right to be, because he still wanted the fray of battle, dazed by smoke and noise and not thinking of death or wounds. Draped with ammunition and a heavy machine gun, he zigzagged along the street of a German city.
But the corporal was right: it was getting towards the end, which for a while made him wonder why exactly he had broken out.
Sombre fields and hills beckoned him to the comfort and security of captivity, as he had supposed it would at this stage of the escape, but he smiled the unhelpful notion away, and only knew that he was hungry. The squalid bomb-damaged streets of Bristol put him in two minds about the war in Europe ending. The fact could only be good, though while standing in line for a wad and char on Temple Meads station he assumed that the Japanese would go on fighting for at least another three years. He might — and it brought a smile — meet up with his father in the jungles of Arakan. ‘Hello, Herbert! Good to see you. All right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Splendid. Now, we’ve just put a bridgehead across the river down there. Take your platoon over, and see that we keep it, there’s a good chap.’
He got on the London train before any policeman could loom up with a pair of handcuffs. Everyone standing in the corridor could be his enemy, but freedom belonged to him alone, as long as he looked as if he owned the train and had every right to be on it. Gloating at having outfoxed his pursuers so far let him put on his most superior and supercilious expression.
His only plan, if plan there was, had been to get to the nearest big town and then clear of it. With luck and intuition he had succeeded. Acting on impulse might make him harder to track down. He locked himself in the toilet, as his carriage wheeled at speed through the Wiltshire Downs, changed into jacket and trousers, and dropped his khaki rig out of the window just before Hungerford. Back to a different seat, where no one could possibly know him, he read a few pages of Caged Birds, which firmly bolted reality out of his mind. Time went as fast as the train, a dotted stream of pale smoke when he glanced out, as if denoting the uncertainty of his expedition.
At Paddington he went through the ticket barrier and into the welcoming noise of London with a group of soldiers. Motors and cartwheels brushed his heels as he ran across Praed Street into a luggage store. The grubby yet strong-looking case had belonged to a sailor, an RN service number crested along the side. He latched and unlatched it, felt the material and gripped its handle. The man in a khaki overall behind the counter wanted four pounds, but called out he could have it for three when Herbert turned to leave. His belongings fitted easily, which made him feel a traveller at last.
A ten-mile radius of built-up area was protection from the world so far unknown. A needle in a haystack had nothing on this, and on Edgware Road a sign drew him into the Underground. After a while he felt so much like being buried among the mummies of an Egyptian tomb that he got out and walked by Cambridge Circus to Trafalgar Square.
His packet of day-old bread unwrapped from a clean handkerchief surprised him by its quality, when in school they had complained of it tasting like baked mud. He sat on a step to eat, and couldn’t decide whether the lion on its plinth was sternly telling him to call his freedom a day’s outing in London, and to get back to school by dark, or encouraging him to look sharp and stir himself to move further away than he was already.
Flights of pigeons swooped for his crumbs, though few enough were left. A pall of exhaustion came over him. He hadn’t eaten enough, but it would have to do. When you had escaped from a prison camp it was dangerous to go into a café, and if he had to sooner or later that would be soon enough. He stood up, determined to go his way, a glance at the stone man with one eye and one arm high on his pillar who, he felt, would approve of his escape and watch over him.
Traffic was turmoil, people disturbing. He turned about and went into the post office to buy an air-letter form and zip off a paragraph telling his mother what he had done. She wasn’t to worry, but if she did, so what? such concern being her affair and not his. It was a matter of protocol more than filial tenderness. You always let your parents know where you were.
He carried his case up Charing Cross Road, wondering whether he had done right in sending the news. It was vital not to betray his whereabouts, but they were so far away that the letter would take weeks to reach what outstation such folks were holed up in. By then he would be somewhere else altogether. Anxiety was lessened by looking in bookshop windows, at the gaudy covers of bigamy and murder. He wanted to buy one, for a real adult read, but money was for food and train tickets. On wiping his nose, he felt a firm tap at the shoulder.