'We're under attack,' he screamed, 'bullets are coming from every direction.' So were other golfers. As they dashed through the smoke they were met by a hail of bullets from the Simplons' back garden. Four fell on the eighteenth, two on the first, while on the ninth a number of women clustered together in a bunker they had previously done their best to avoid. And with each fresh volley the police, unable to observe who was firing from where, engaged in warfare among themselves. Even the Rick-enshaws at Number 1 who had only an hour before been congratulating themselves on the presence of police protection came to regret their premature gratitude. The contingent of police who arrived at the Club House armed now with rifles as well as revolvers and stationed themselves in the bar, the Secretary's office and the changing-room, answered their comrades' desultory fire with a positive barrage of their own. A hail of bullets screamed across the heads of the women cowering in the sandtrap on the ninth and through the smoke into the Rick-enshaws' sitting-room. In the sandtrap the women screamed, in the sitting-room Mrs Rickenshaw shot through the thigh screamed and the fire engine driver, mindless of his extended ladder, decided the time had come to get out while the going was good. The going was not good.
'Never mind that fucking fire,' he yelled at the men huddled on the back, 'it's gunfire we've got now.' At the top of the ladder a fireman didn't share his point of view. Clutching his dribbling hose he suddenly found himself moving backwards. 'Stop,' he yelled, 'for God's sake stop!' But the roar of the flames and the rifles drowned his protest and the next moment the fire engine was off at top speed down Sandicott Crescent. Fifty feet above it the fireman clung to the ladder. He was still clinging when having cut a swathe through half a dozen telephone wires and a overhead electric cable the fire engine, travelling at seventy miles an hour, shot under the main railway line to London. The fireman on the ladder didn't. He shot over and landed in the path of an oncoming petrol tanker, missing the London to Brighton express by inches on the way. The tanker driver, already unnerved by the careering fire engine, now ladder-less, swerved to avoid the catapulting fireman, and the tanker ploughed into the railway embankment and exploded in time to shower flaming petrol over the last five coaches of the express above. In the guards van, now engulfed in flames, the guard did his duty. He applied the emergency brake and the express's wheels locked at eighty miles an hour. The subsequent screech of scored metal drowned even the sound of gunfire and the Police Superintendent's howls in the bird sanctuary. Inside every compartment passengers sitting with their fronts to the engine shot into the laps of those with their backs to it and in the dining-car, where breakfast was being served, coffee and waiters mingled with diners to shoot everywhere. Meanwhile the last five coaches blazed away.
So did the police in the golf club. The sight of the burning train emerging from what appeared to be a napalm bomb exploded in the centre of East Pursley only lent weight to their conviction that they were dealing with an outbreak of urban and golf-course terrorism unprecedented in the annals of British history. They radioed for army help and explained that they were pinned down in the East Pursley Club House by suburban guerrillas firing from the houses in Sandicott Crescent who had just exploded a bomb under the London to Brighton express. Five minutes later helicopter gunships were hovering over the golf course searching for the enemy. But the policemen in the Simplons' garden had had their fill. Three lay wounded, one was dead and the rest were out of ammunition. Dragging their wounded they wormed their way across the lawn and round the side of the house, and ran for the police cars.
'Get the hell out of here,' they yelled as they scrambled in, 'there's a fucking army out there.' A minute later, their sirens receding into the distance, the patrol cars had left the Crescent and were heading towards the police station. They didn't reach it. The tanker that had exploded on to the express had doused the road beneath and the tunnel was an inferno. Behind them Sandicott Crescent was in little better shape. The fire in the Simplons? garage had spread to the fence and from the fence to the Ogilvies' potting shed. It was well named. Riddled with bullet holes it added its flames and smoke to the general pall that hung over Jessica's inheritance and lent a grisly light to the scene. The Ogilvies clung to one another in the cellar listening to the whine of bullets ricocheting round their kitchen, and at Number 1 Mr Rickenshaw, tightening a tourniquet round his wife's leg, promised her that if they ever get out of this alive they'd get out of the house.
It was the same at the Pettigrews'. 'Promise me we'll move,' whined Mrs Pettigrew. 'Another night in this awful house and I'll go mad.'
Mr Pettigrew needed no urging. The series of events that had swept through Sandicott Crescent, and in particular their house, like the plagues that had affected Egypt inclined him to renounce his rationalism and return to religion. His social conscience had certainly deserted him and when Mr Rickenshaw, unable to phone for medical assistance thanks to the scythe-like activities of the fire engine's ladder, crawled across the street to ring the Pettigrews' doorbell to ask for help, Mr Pettigrew refused to open the door on the reasonable grounds that the last time anyone had asked for medical help, namely the ambulance men, of all people, they had introduced a mad dog into the house and that as far as he was concerned Mrs Rickenshaw could bleed to death before he opened his door again.
'You can think yourself lucky,' he shouted, 'your fucking wife's only got a hole in her leg, mine's got one in her head.' Mr Rickenshaw cursed him for his bad neighbourliness and, wholly unaware that Colonel Finch-Potter, having been relieved of his penis-grater, was now in intensive care at the Pursley Hospital, tried to knock him up. It was Jessica who finally came to his aid, and braving the slackening gun-fire from the Club House went down to Number 1 and applied her knowledge of first aid to Mrs Rickenshaw's wound. Lockhart took advantage of her absence to make a last sally into the sewer. Donning his wet-suit he crawled along to the outlet of Mr Grabble's house with a bucket and a World War II stirrup pump that Mr Sandicott had kept in his workshop for watering plants. Lockhart had another purpose in mind, and having introduced the nozzle into the discharge pipe and cemented it there with putty, filled the bucket from the sewer and began to pump vigorously. He worked steadily for an hour and then undid his apparatus and crawled home. By that time Mr Grabble's ground floor was awash with the effluent from every other house in the street and all his attempts to get his ground-floor lavatory to behave in the normal manner and discharge excreta out of the house rather than pump it in had failed disastrously. Driven to desperate measures and wading through sewage with his trousers rolled up, Mr Grabble had seized on the idea of using caustic soda. It was not a good idea. Instead of going down the pipe to unblock whatever infernal thing was blocking it, the caustic soda erupted from the pan in an extremely vindictive fashion. Fortunately Mr Grabble had had the good sense to foresee this possibility and was out of the tiny room when it happened. He was less sensible in resorting to an ordinary lavatory cleanser and when that failed, adding to it a liquid bleach. The two combined to produce chlorine and Mr Grabble was driven from his house by the poisonous gas. Standing on the back lawn he watched his living-room carpet lap up the foul liquid and the caustic soda eat into his best armchair. Mr Grabble took the unwise step of trying to dam the flood and the caustic soda dissuaded him. He sat on the edge of the fishpond bathing his feet and cursing.