George Findlay looked like a scrap dealer, with a dirty face, a beaten up cloth cap and an old leather jerkin, as worn by the soldiers in the armoured corps.
He turned up at the farm with an ex-army transporter. John smiled, as he recalled seeing many similar ones transporting tanks to and from his unit.
George regarded the smooth-looking businessman with shrewd eyes. Both men belonged to different ends of the social spectrum, but a spark of acknowledgement seemed to ignite.
John noted the jerkin.
“Tanks?”
“REME, sir. I was with a heavy recovery unit.” The ‘sir’ came automatically as soon as George heard the other man speak.
“Where did you serve?”
“Africa with Monty, and then…”
“I know, Italy and up through the back door. I was the same. Bit of a bugger, wasn’t it?” John asked, smiling.
George took his hat off, revealing an almost totally bald head.
“It had its moments, guv’nor. You?”
“Dragoons; we started out with Cromwells and then they were replaced by Grants and Shermans.”
“Phew, those Yank jobs brewed up nicely if hit in the wrong place,” George said. “Mind you, they were easier to work on than a lot of our jobs.”
“That’s true, but then most tanks we had were liable to blow up. The damn Germans had far better guns and armour. We used to call Shermans the widow-makers. They were fine going forward, but I hated showing my arse to the Hun.”
“Officer?”
“I was a major when demobbed.”
“Didn’t fancy staying on, then?”
“No, I’d done my bit. How about you?”
George smiled.
“I rose to a corporal once, but I got busted for a misunderstanding with a Redcap.”
“Ah, not the first, and you certainly weren’t the last. What happened?”
George shrugged.
“He thought I’d had too much to drink and I thought his dad had been to bed with a monkey.”
John laughed. It was like a breath of fresh air being with this old soldier. The years fell away, and both men relived the camaraderie they felt during those awful days.
“Ah, and he won?”
George grinned.
“Yeah, I suppose.”
“Right, now you’re here, you might as well look at the old girl,” John said, leading the way to the old tractor shed.
George looked at the elderly tractor, rubbing his chin and sucking air in through his teeth. John could see the indecision in the other man.
“Look, I’m not that bothered, I just want it gone. I’ve sold the farm and all the land and the new owners don’t want this as a sitting tenant. What’s it worth to you?”
George pulled up his sleeves and tinkered with the engine. John, like so many men of his class, sat back and admired a magician in action. A few minutes later, George inserted the starting handle and after half a dozen turns, the engine spluttered into some semblance of life. It sat there chugging, wheezing and belching dark fumes out of the exhaust pipe that sat like a locomotive’s steam funnel on top of the engine.
“It goes then?” George said, unnecessarily.
“So it seems; after a fashion,” agreed John.
“That makes a difference. I suppose I can use this in my yard.”
“Oh?” John asked, sensing that he might at least make a few pounds.
“It’ll need some work.”
“Of course it will.”
“Parts may be a problem.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Five pounds?”
“How about twelve?”
“Ten?”
“Done!”
John shook hands warily with the scruffy ex-army mechanic. Then he watched him drive the tractor onto the flat-bed transporter. Clearly the vehicle was designed for a much larger vehicle, for it looked rather lost and forlorn sitting there, still squinting at the world. John actually felt sorry for the old tractor.
George counted ten grubby pound notes into the impeccably clean hand of the ex-officer.
They shook hands once more, and John watched the tractor disappear from his life forever. Just as the transporter drove round the corner, there was a metallic clang as something fell off and landed on the road. Oblivious to his loss, George kept on driving and so John walked to the corner to investigate.
It was that curiously curved lump of metal that had been on the tractor.
He picked it up and was surprised at how little it weighed.
“Looks like something from an aircraft, sir,” said his chauffeur, who had seen it fall as well.
John handed it to him.
“Chuck it, or something, Baldwin, there’s a good fellow,” John said, returning to the car.
Frost glanced around the vicinity and in the absence of an obvious receptacle; he placed it in the boot of the car with the intention of throwing it away later. He then drove his employer to his next meeting. Both men soon forgot about the farm, the tractor and the lump of metal.
John owned three cars: the Daimler that he used when on mundane meetings, the Rolls for the better sort and an old Austin Healy that he used for his own recreation very occasionally. The latter had not been out of the garage for several weeks.
On Saturday mornings, when Neil Baldwin took a couple of hours to wash the cars, he occasionally allowed his son to help him. Little Billy was only five, but was a bright and helpful little boy. He adored the big cars and would pester his father to let him help, just so he could sit in the back and smell the richness of the leather and polished walnut.
It was Billy who found the metal thing when his father was cleaning out the boot of the car. Not that it was dirty or even looked as if it might get dirty.
On seeing it he grabbed it and lifted it out of the boot.
“What’s that, Billy?” his father asked.
“Dunno, it was in the boot, dad.”
Neil looked at it and remembered from where it originated.
“Ah, a bit of junk from the farm. Go put it in the bin, there’s a helpful chap, Billy.”
Billy headed towards the dustbins, holding both the knobs on the ends of the C. The metal warmed slightly and suddenly became pliable, bending almost like a piece of stiff rope. Billy stopped and made it go in a straight line, like a rod. As soon as he took his hands off it, it reverted to the ‘C’ shape.
“Wow!” he said to himself. “That’s good.”
Instead of throwing it away, he went indoors and put it in his wardrobe in a box with his other special things. One was an old bomb-sight that his father had given him from a German bomber that had been shot down near where he’d been stationed in the RAF during the war. There was also his father’s box of soldiers, an old steel, British army helmet, a Lee Enfield bayonet and a box of used .303 cartridge cases.
Over the next few years, he looked at them occasionally, with friends or even by himself. He never managed to get it to change shape again, so once he left home for university, he forgot about them all. The box was placed in the attic with a lot of other stuff, and William Baldwin managed to live for fifty more years without them.
Three
Heathrow Airport January 2009.
The British Airways flight from Accra was full, as always. Having taken off at a minute or so before midnight on the previous evening, it was early morning as the weary travellers walked the marathon distance to the immigration all to line up for their passports to be checked.
Most of the non-Europeans wore inadequate clothing for the freezing temperatures outside, so the British winter was about to be a shock to many of them.
Shortly before reaching the hall, the dark young man in the crumpled suit and the elegant young Asian woman in western dress split up. He dropped back and allowed her to walk on ahead, alone.
Clutching a Portuguese EU passport, he joined the line for EU citizens. She was ahead of him, to the right in the British passport queue, but in the automated scanning line. Only those people with the microchip in their passports could access these machines.