by John Eider
Later that day I found it hard to rest. We were in an upstairs room at a disused – everywhere was disused – print works, safe and two floors up from street-level, not a sound heard all day; but still the fracas with the derelict played on my mind. And not only my mind: for though my coat had stopped the bottle’s shards from reaching my skin, he had walloped it into my chest and left me with the formings of a bruise that, lying on the carpet-tiled floor, woke me when I turned. Wareing still wasn’t sleeping though, and he was the one going hunting tonight. There was just too much he had to plan.
Half-asleep, I risked some questions that had been forming,
‘You know, we’ve missed a lot of towns out.’
‘I know,’ he answered, not turning from his pages.
‘We’ve skipped the whole of the West Country, heading north-east since we landed here.’
‘Glad you’ve been keeping track.’
‘We never even turned for Bristol, or Exeter…’
‘No we didn’t.’
‘…when there must be loads of look-out posts down that way, especially on the South Coast: Poole, Bournemouth.’
‘Yes, most likely.’
‘And how far north will we be heading once we’ve hit London?’
At last he paused and turned, ‘Crofts, has it not occurred to you that we may not be the only team engaged in this work?’
It hadn’t.
‘For the record, Bristol and Exeter, if there are any sites there, will be met by a group starting out from your old haunt in Salisbury; and as for northwards – I shouldn’t think they’ll need us much past the Wash.’
‘And the Major planned all this?
‘Well, not alone, he has a staff. How’s your side?’ (He’d seen me wince as I sat up.) ‘Let me see that. It might be a cracked rib, you know. Interesting bones, ribs: they don’t need re-setting. I suppose that if you had to break one bit of yourself two days’ walk from the nearest Army hospital, then you could have chosen worse.’
‘Oh, great.’
‘Cheer up. Take comfort in the fact that short of morphine there’s nothing that we don’t have here that anyone could give you to make you feel any better. Anyway, if you’re awake then you can make us a brew, and I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking about.’
Had you plotted our course so far on a map we would probably have covered less ground than a motorist with clear roads could once have done in an afternoon. Wareing’s conundrum had been this: that the next few targets were, though still within our region, relatively dispersed. No single plan of action he could formulate would fit, bar us taking a zig-zag pattern that covered twice the ground it needed to. And so we were to split, each taking a different route and a different target, before finding and then waiting for the other at a prearranged point. Including our journeys to the rendezvous, this would take around three days. His dilemma was further complicated by the fact that one of his proposed routes took in a sensitive site he wanted to supervise himself; leaving me the path that reached closest to London.
This solution was obvious and unavoidable, and so before I left that next morning (he staying on awhile to sleep) he ladened me not only with the fruits of his night’s foraging but also with advice,
‘It’s a big town you’re heading for, as big as you’ll find before you hit the Big Smoke, but you can still get most of the way there by field and woodland. Just keep on heading due east until you find the roadsigns.’ We shook hands, ‘And remember, if you have any trouble, catch them right here.’ He mimed a right hook at my jawline.
It would take a day and a night to walk where I was going, so we had supposed, poring over the maps together as we plotted. The night-time would cover me though as I neared the target town itself. Although we had avoided daylight movement as a rule, we agreed that travelling alone was the greater risk; and so for these few days it was permitted where possible to go by day, the better to get these solo missions over with quickly.
The expectation was then for me to get near the target by the following morning, hide up a tree or anywhere that felt safe for the day – while keeping a keen watch, of course – before creeping out with my canvas backpack on in the evening to do the work and then flee. ‘Take a couple of days over it,’ Wareing said to me as I left, as if a boss instructing an employee to take a long weekend. Such banter had relaxed us. He trusted me to do this.
Chapter 14 – An Inauspicious Approach