books by writers with beards. He preferred tales of wartime aircrews’ escapes after being shot down over occupied France. He enjoyed the pitchfork’s tynes in a haystack, the shy peasant girls, the radio transmitters disguised as sewing machines, the mortal sacrifices, the Gestapo beating testicles with rubber truncheons. He admired the looks of the men shown in the jacket paintings: tough yet kind, decent and modest, with regular brave blond acne-free features. They were adventurers with right on their side, heroes whose lives were uncontaminated by equivocation and impure thoughts. Henry lent Curly such memoirs as T.D.G. Teare’s
Evader
, Bruce Marshall’s
White Rabbit
and D. Baber’s
Where Eagles Gather.
Curly had only just finished
Fugitives by Night
when Mrs Croney asked Henry to take the boy for a dental check-up.
Curly was soon anaesthetised, soon dreaming that Mr Etherington was the collaborationist dentist to whom Squadron-Leader Victor Wraxall had had to submit. He was grateful when he came round that Henry was with him. His mother so loathed the smells of gas and burning tooth enamel that she might have had a turn. Henry claimed – stoically? genuinely? – to enjoy those smells which are also undertakers’ trade smells, the smells of crematoria which are also the smells of duty and profit.
This was not the only dream that aircrew yarns would prompt.
Curly dreamed of Stanley falling, parachuteless, from a fuselage which burned to reveal an armature of riveted girders. Stanley’s howl as he plummeted through the night sky was the howl that Curly made as he woke before the body made contact with the sinuous lines of a marshalling yard where Wehrmacht troops patrolled between flaming braziers. He woke, twisted and sweating, uncertain where he was – where had the window moved to?
His howl of terminal fear woke Henry in the sleeping-bag along the other side of the small tent pitched beside a stream on a damp Cornish moor. That was the summer they took their bicycles on the train to Exeter and headed west. At Henry’s insistence – he was
in loco parentis
and now working in the family business thus a routine witness to the result of quotidian rashness – they pursued his safe-cycling policy. Viz.: ride up hills, tonic for Achilles’ tendons and hamstrings; dismount and push bicycles down hills because to achieve speeds of over thirty miles an hour on these precipitous gradients is a risky frivolity, a brief gratification of an appetite that is better suppressed. There were enough dangers without courting supplementaries – there were caravans listing and swaying like the callipygian buttocks of drug-tranced dancers; there were cars performing six-point turns in sunken lanes jammed by caravans; there were bulls sated on meadow grass and anxious to exercise; there were vipers on the heaths; there were sheep everywhere.
They bathed in hidden coves. They lay under the sun on cropped turf incised with rabbit paths. The confectioner’s red of sunset delighted them. They learned not to pitch the tent near trees which were contorted and silently screaming because that was the way the wind went, whistling as it bullied. They cooked on a spirit stove and convinced themselves that bacon and beans so prepared tasted miles better. They got used to damp clothes, to rising at daybreak, to lying outside the tent feeling themselves part of the system to which the stars belonged, marvelling at the sidereal patterning and misnaming formations with confident ignorance. When they drank from burbling steams they were, Henry insisted, refreshing and feeding their bodies as man had done since the dawn of time but without the intercession of engineers who had so denatured water that it is taken for granted rather than regarded as a gift from the Earth to its children, a gift from the Earth’s core welling through strata of immemorial accretions to be lifted high as clouds and returned to earth in a cycle of beneficence and
Evader
, Bruce Marshall’s
White Rabbit
and D. Baber’s
Where Eagles Gather.
Curly had only just finished
Fugitives by Night
when Mrs Croney asked Henry to take the boy for a dental check-up.
Curly was soon anaesthetised, soon dreaming that Mr Etherington was the collaborationist dentist to whom Squadron-Leader Victor Wraxall had had to submit. He was grateful when he came round that Henry was with him. His mother so loathed the smells of gas and burning tooth enamel that she might have had a turn. Henry claimed – stoically? genuinely? – to enjoy those smells which are also undertakers’ trade smells, the smells of crematoria which are also the smells of duty and profit.
This was not the only dream that aircrew yarns would prompt.
Curly dreamed of Stanley falling, parachuteless, from a fuselage which burned to reveal an armature of riveted girders. Stanley’s howl as he plummeted through the night sky was the howl that Curly made as he woke before the body made contact with the sinuous lines of a marshalling yard where Wehrmacht troops patrolled between flaming braziers. He woke, twisted and sweating, uncertain where he was – where had the window moved to?
His howl of terminal fear woke Henry in the sleeping-bag along the other side of the small tent pitched beside a stream on a damp Cornish moor. That was the summer they took their bicycles on the train to Exeter and headed west. At Henry’s insistence – he was
in loco parentis
and now working in the family business thus a routine witness to the result of quotidian rashness – they pursued his safe-cycling policy. Viz.: ride up hills, tonic for Achilles’ tendons and hamstrings; dismount and push bicycles down hills because to achieve speeds of over thirty miles an hour on these precipitous gradients is a risky frivolity, a brief gratification of an appetite that is better suppressed. There were enough dangers without courting supplementaries – there were caravans listing and swaying like the callipygian buttocks of drug-tranced dancers; there were cars performing six-point turns in sunken lanes jammed by caravans; there were bulls sated on meadow grass and anxious to exercise; there were vipers on the heaths; there were sheep everywhere.
They bathed in hidden coves. They lay under the sun on cropped turf incised with rabbit paths. The confectioner’s red of sunset delighted them. They learned not to pitch the tent near trees which were contorted and silently screaming because that was the way the wind went, whistling as it bullied. They cooked on a spirit stove and convinced themselves that bacon and beans so prepared tasted miles better. They got used to damp clothes, to rising at daybreak, to lying outside the tent feeling themselves part of the system to which the stars belonged, marvelling at the sidereal patterning and misnaming formations with confident ignorance. When they drank from burbling steams they were, Henry insisted, refreshing and feeding their bodies as man had done since the dawn of time but without the intercession of engineers who had so denatured water that it is taken for granted rather than regarded as a gift from the Earth to its children, a gift from the Earth’s core welling through strata of immemorial accretions to be lifted high as clouds and returned to earth in a cycle of beneficence and
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