Goldfarb wished he could lie back and start sawing wood, too. He’d tried, but sleep eluded him. Besides, looking at countryside that hadn’t been pounded to bits was a pleasant novelty. He hadn’t seen much of that sort, not lately.
The only thing he had in common with his companions was the grubby uniforms they all wore. When the Lizards invaded England, nobody had thought past fighting them by whatever means came to hand. After Bruntingthorpe got smashed up, he’d been made into a foot soldier, and he’d done his best without a word of complaint.
Now that the northern pocket was empty of aliens and the southern one shrinking, though, the Powers That Be were once more beginning to think in terms longer than those of the moment. Whenever officers spied an RAF man who’d been dragooned into the army, they pulled him out and sent him off for reassignment. Thus Goldfarb’s present situation.
Night was coming. As summer passed into autumn, the hours of daylight shrank with dizzying speed. Even Double Summer Time couldn’t disguise that. In the fields, women and old men labored with horses, donkeys, and oxen to bring in the harvest, as they might have during the wars against Napoleon, or against William the Conqueror, or against the Emperor Claudius. People would be hungry now, too, as they had been then.
The wagon rattled past a burnt-out farmhouse, the ground around it cratered with bombs. The war had not ignored the lands north of Leicester, it merely had not been all-consuming here. For a moment, a pile of wreckage made the landscape seem familiar to Goldfarb. He angrily shook his head when he realized that. Finding a landscape familiar because the Lizards had bombed it was like finding a husband familiar because he beat you. Some women were supposed to be downtrodden enough to do just that. He thought it madness himself.
“How long till we get to Watnall?” he called to the driver: softly, so he wouldn’t wake his comrades.
“Sometime tonight, Ah reckon,” the fellow answered. He was a little old wizened chap who worked his jaws even when he wasn’t talking. Goldfarb had seen that before. Usually it meant the chap who did it was used to chewing tobacco and couldn’t stop chewing even when tobacco was no longer to be had.
Goldfarb’s stomach rumbled. “Will you stop off to feed us any time before then?” he asked.
“Nay, no more’n Ah will to feed mahself,” the driver said. When he put it that way, Goldfarb didn’t have the crust to argue further.
He rummaged in his pockets and came up with half a scone he’d forgotten he had. It was so stale, he worried about breaking teeth on it; he devoured it more by abrasion than mastication. It was just enough to make his stomach growl all the more fiercely but not nearly enough to satisfy him, not even after he licked the crumbs from his fingers.
He pointed to a cow grazing in a field. “Why don’t you stop for a bit so we can shoot that one and worry off some steaks?”
“Think you’re a funny bloke, do you?” the driver said. “You try lookin’ at that cow too long and some old man like me back there in the bushes, he’ll blow your head off for you, mark mah words. He hasn’t kept his cow so long bein’ sweet and dainty, Ah tell you that.”
Since the driver was very likely right, Goldfarb shut up.
Night fell with an almost audible thud. It got cold fast. He started to bury himself in the hay with his mates, then had a second thought and asked the driver, “Besides the Fighter Command Group HQ, wot’n ‘ell’s in Watnall?” By sounding like a Cockney for three words, he made a fair pun of it.
If the driver noticed, he wasn’t impressed. “There’s nobbut the group headquarters there,” he answered, and spat into the roadway. “ ‘Twasn’t even a village before the war.”
“How extremely depressing,” Goldfarb said, going from one accent to another: for a moment there, he sounded like a Cambridge undergraduate. He wondered how Jerome Jones was faring these days, and then whether his fellow radarman was still alive.
“Watnall’s not far from Nottingham,” the driver said, the first time since he’d stepped up onto his raised seat that he’d actually volunteered anything. “Nobbut a few miles.”
The consolation Goldfarb had felt at the first sentence-Nottingham was a good-sized city, with the promise of pubs, cinemas when the power was on, and people of the female persuasion-was tempered by the second. If he couldn’t lay hands on a bicycle, a few miles in wartime with winter approaching might as well have been the far side of the moon.
He vanished into the hay like a dormouse curling up in its nest to hibernate. One of his traveling companions, still sleeping, promptly stuck an elbow in his ribs. He didn’t care. He huddled closer to the other RAF man, who, however fractious he might have been in his sleep, was also warm. He fell asleep himself a few minutes later, even as he was telling himself he wouldn’t.
When he woke again, something had changed. In his muzziness, he needed a moment to figure out what: they weren’t moving. He sat up, brushing straw from his hair. “What’s happened?” he asked.
One of the other RAF men, a Liverpudlian whom Goldfarb knew only as Henry, answered before the driver could: “We’re in Nottingham, we are. They’re going t’give us some grub after all.” His clotted accent said he was a factory worker from a long line of factory workers.
“Jolly good!” Goldfarb brushed at himself again, trying to get as close to presentable as he could. It was wasted effort, because of his own disheveled state and because the night was too dark to let anyone see anything much. Stars glittered in a black, black sky, but shed little light, and the moon, some days past full, hadn’t yet risen.
“We’ve soup for you, lads,” a woman’s voice said out of the gloom; Goldfarb could make out her silhouette, but no more. “Here, come take your panikins. Have a care-they’re hot.”
Hot the soup was, and full of cabbage, potatoes, and carrots. Goldfarb didn’t find any meat in his tin bowl, but the broth tasted as if it had been somewhere within shouting distance of a chicken in the not too distant past.
“Sticks to your ribs, that does,” Henry said happily. The other RAF men made wordless noises of agreement. So did the driver, who was also getting outside a bowl of soup.
“Pass me back your bowls when you’re done, lads, and we’ll serve ’em out again to the next lot who come through hungry, or maybe to some of our own,” the woman said. Goldfarb couldn’t see her, couldn’t tell if she was young or old, ugly or beautiful. Food-and, even more, kindness-made him feel halfway in love with her just the same.
When all the bowls and spoons had been returned, the driver said, “Getalong there,” and the horses ambled on. Goldfarb called thanks back to the woman who’d given them the soup.
As the driver had said, they got into Watnall in the middle of the night. The transition was abrupt: one minute they were rolling through open country, the next in among Nissen huts and Maycrete buildings that seemed to have sprung from the middle of nowhere-which made a pretty fair description of Watnall, now that Goldfarb thought on it. They rattled by a couple of ack-ack guns, whose crews jeered at them: “Coming back to work are you at last, dearies? Did you have a pleasant holiday?”
“Bugger off,” Goldfarb said, which summed up his comrades’ responses pretty well, too. The ack-ack gunners laughed.
Henry said, “What they were shootin’ at, it were up in the sky, and they weren’t in range of the bleedin’ Lizards every minute of every bleedin’ day. ‘Ad it right soft, they did, you ask me.”
“Amen to that,” Goldfarb said, and the other RAF men on the wagon added not only agreement but profane embellishment. If you weren’t a pilot, you were probably safer in the RAF than as an infantryman. You certainly lived softer in the RAF than in the poor bloody infantry, as you learned if you found yourself at the thin end of the wedge on the ground, the way Goldfarb had.