‘Maybe I’ll have a bit of a kip beforehand, then, if I can rely on you to wake me by six.’
‘I’m as much interested in this as if I was going myself. I’ll see you get woken up, and have a royal send-off. I still wish you would let me come with you and give the lads a hand. I’d enjoy it, what’s more.’
Dismal finally realised I was home, because he followed me upstairs and spread himself across the bed. It wasn’t easy to get to sleep for either of us. What troubled Dismal I had no way of knowing. He’d make an effort to get his head down, then stand up and walk across my legs for no reason, finally flopping back with a sigh across my ankles. From the woolly caves and tunnels of my half-snooze I would push such leg weight off in case he bent them permanently and turned me into a modern-day victim of rickets. Every few minutes I would wake up from the nightmare of Bill having forgotten to call me. It was nine o’clock, getting dark, and the raid had started. Searchlights criss-crossed the sky to the sound of cannonfire, and Moggerhanger’s paratroops were descending sedately through the shrapnel.
He tapped me on the shoulder at five minutes to six, and I would have felt better if I had gone for a five-mile walk instead of taking a nap, though a few doses of Maria’s Nottingham tea — on a mug of which a bricklayer could walk forty storeys up and not feel nervous — followed by a long cold shower, soon steadied my shaking hands. I insisted on Dismal’s bowl being filled, and he lapped it clean with such gusto that we gave him another, after which he stood on a leg and his tail, and flipped the bowl bottom-side-up with his tongue.
‘I’ll miss that dog,’ Bill said. ‘For God’s sake, don’t let him get killed. I’d never get over it. He runs a mile every morning to the village for my newspaper and sixty whiffs. I don’t know where you got him, but he’s a godsend.’
Dismal farted in appreciation of this eulogy, and slid under the settee. His inability to converse as a human, as hurtful to his soul as it would have been to ours if he ever succeeded, occasionally lured him into disagreeable alternatives. ‘Don’t let him get near the Roller,’ Bill said, ‘or the paint’ll fall off. It’s a distressing habit he’s got into lately. That strong cheddar plays hell with my guts as well.’
At half past six we packed the grub into the spare front seat, plus a couple of blankets to cover Dismal during the time at action stations, and to conceal the two-two rifle and shotgun. Dismal clambered in like an old age pensioner, though he couldn’t be more than three years old, and I fastened myself in the driver’s seat.
‘Contact!’
‘Give ’em hell,’ Bill said. ‘I wish I was coming with you. I’d be in that house like a three-bellied snake.’
‘I’ll be safer on my own than with a bloke like you. You’re barmy, and that’s a fact.’
He turned on that immortal berserker grin from Nottingham. ‘I know I am. It feels marvellous, though — at times.’ He thrust an umbrella through the open window. ‘You might need this. Only don’t prod Dismal. It’s the one you picked up in the tube station, remember?’
He patted my cheek, and then I drifted down the lane on a day when the pollen count was high. My anxieties vanished. Where they went I did not know, and cared less. In spite of my waving him back, Dismal flopped over onto the front seat and took silent snaps at the smoke rings from my cigar as we bowled along towards the Huntingdon road.
The cloudless day began to scare me. I wanted to turn north or south, or even to spin back east, rather than continue west for the job I had to do. I would have felt better if dusk and rain threatened and all heaters were burning to keep us warm, because then my one impulse would have been to stick to my task and get it done, just to escape the winter and jump back into the snuggery of home.
There was something festive as I glided through the lanes. My feelings were out of control. I wanted to put on my party hat — I actually looked in the glove box in case one was stashed there — and pull into the next layby for a suck at my brandy flask. I waved at a red-headed young woman by the roadside on going through a village, and she gestured with a smile that made me scared at the notion of doing something indisputably daft during the period of the raid.
The green and yellow belly of England pulled me along. My eyes fed on dark woods, on waving corn and meadows. I drove by wealthy houses. I threaded steadfast villages, no face starving or anybody in a hurry. I was glad to be travelling on a perfect evening, and happy at feeling different to everyone I passed. It was like going into battle as a soldier, because I didn’t place myself one second in front of my life. Otherwise I might stop and cut my throat.
Crows disputed for the shade of a tree when I stopped at a give-way sign. Dismal yawned, but when I pushed his snout aside I’m sure he laughed inwardly. Even a dog could sense our luck at being inside a moving car. The familiar traffic island on the Great North Road gave me a peculiar feeling to be cutting it at right angles instead of going north or south. I let half a dozen juggernauts go by before getting onto it, and a car behind hooted, expecting me to shoot into the stream with such a fast car. But I was careful, for if in my life I was to have a traffic accident, the time was now. In one way I wouldn’t have minded a collision just deadly enough to get me into hospital yet not kill me — a Blighty one, as Bill might say — but failing that I was cautious in getting across the island which actually smelt dangerous, though soon I was waving my hat at the Duke’s big shadow over the village of Ellington. On a straight but narrow bit of road a Cortina full of laughing kids drifted by at eighty, a pink rubber pig bobbing at the back window.
The tape deck treated us to popular marches by the Band of the Royal Artillery, which seemed just right for the job in hand. Even Dismal liked it, his fat tail flopping around the seat. Then came Exhortation 974 from Moggerhanger, saying I shouldn’t turn the car into a kitchen by leaving potato peelings and onion skins, pea pods and cornflake packets all over the upholstery. He must have chuckled while fiddling about with tapes in his spare moments. Dismal barked the hectoring voice down, so I buzzed the window and threw the tape over a hedge.
I mapped my way through Burton Latimer to dodge Kettering, and from then on a network of lanes took me over uplands and across the middle of Pitsford reservoir. Every two or three junctions I stopped to look at the map, because on this jaunt I couldn’t joyride and hope for signposts to put me on track. The sheet of water made Dismal scratch at the window, and before clambering back in he was thirsty again, so I emptied the plastic container into his mobile dog bowl.
I lit another of the chief’s cigars and off we went. Close to the raid area I drifted onto the main road facing north after an inconspicuous run through the village in which I saw a woman walking a dog by the post office shop, and a Volvo estate with green Wellingtons in the back parked outside a thatched cottage.
By nine o’clock a peaceful dusk was seeping in. I don’t know why, but it struck me that a yellow Rolls-Royce was an unusual car to use on such a stunt, a vehicle you would never steal if you wanted to get far without being caught. A cop-chopper would spot it from two thousand feet. We should have had Escorts or Cortinas, or a Morris that you couldn’t pick out from twenty miles away.
While waiting in position I fed Dismal a Mars Bar. He loved them, the only disadvantage being that he licked my hand afterwards to show his thanks and appreciation. Someone flashed me from behind. It was George in car C, going to take up his station half a mile south. I assumed that cars A and B were already preparing to do their stuff. I flashed George before he could turn the bend.
Another fact which came to me — and all the more sharply for being too late to be of use — was that I had committed my life into the hands of as big a set of numbskulls as it would be possible to find on God’s earth. They must have done a hundred years of bird between them, and if that didn’t prove their incompetence I don’t know what did. Yet who else could Moggerhanger have chosen? Even I had done my share. Those who had never been inside would be even less competent. Nor would they be so daft.