by Alan Clark
Right, I thought, that clinches it. Seized with the same sort of irresistible inspiration that had taken hold of me in the committee changing-room, I slunk stealthily behind the stand and over to the burning fishing-boat. The name of this tableau, I now saw, was ‘Nemesis’. Most of the staff, or crew, had drifted off into the crowd by now, but they had left their torches, several of them still smouldering, propped up against the sides of the float. Nobody saw me as I took the healthiest looking of these and carried it back to the rear of the judges’ stand. I leaned it casually against the canvas, which almost at once began to smoulder then, in places, to grow red. I took to my heels.
When I got to the station there was a lot of hissing and clanking going on. A train was waiting at the platform.
‘Single to London? You’re cutting it a bit fine, aren’t you, mate? Eleven-and-three, then.’
I had it, to the penny.
Once on board I sank back luxuriantly on the seat of the second-class carriage. Well? What now? Friends in Chelsea? Gabbitas Thring again? A phone call to my parents? None of these concepts aroused in me the dread and revulsion that they ought, and habitually did. In the distance, but readily identifiable, I heard the sound of bells. Fire-engine bells.
I closed my eyes and the train started moving.
A Note on the Author
Alan Clark was born in 1928. A British Conservative MP and diarist, Clark is perhaps best known from the years that he served as a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher's governments at the Departments of Employment, Trade, and Defence, and in the Privy Council. Despite being a slightly controversial character politically, he wrote throughout his life and parts of his diaries were published and subsequently televised. He was the author of several books of military history, including his controversial work The Donkeys (1961), which is considered to have inspired the musical satire, Oh, What a Lovely War!, and Aces High, The War in the Air Over the Western Front 1914-18 (1973). He died in 1999.
Discover books by Alan Clark published by Bloomsbury Reader at
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Aces High
Summer Season
The Lion Heart
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1963 by Hutchinson & Co
Copyright © 1963 Alan Clark
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eISBN: 9781448209675
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