Chapter 24:
TOMMY'S STORY
Some of the gaps in Tommy’s story had started to fill themselves in on the day he felt the earthquake. At first it was as if the earth itself was moving up and down; then it was like waves inside his head. He held on to the fence of the house he was passing, wondering if he was going to be sick. Then a lovely peaceful feeling swept through him and he walked on down the road. He looked up when he reached the Canadines’ house and there were Andrew and Mrs Canadine at the window. Had they felt anything? He smiled up at them and imitated a wave going up and down. Andrew made the same sign back and Tommy felt sure this meant that he had felt it too. He smiled with relief, gave a cheery thumbs up and walked on home with his newspaper.
It was when he settled down with a cup of tea in the kitchen and was just unfolding the paper that a picture came into his mind that seemed like a memory. There was an orchard. A man was standing on a step ladder picking apples and putting them into a wicker basket. Just that. It was like an old photograph that he had unexpectedly come across, but he could not remember who the man was or when the picture was taken. And somewhere there was a name. He did not know whose name it was, but it was almost there, like a word on the tip of his tongue.
Further fragments came back to him over the course of the next few days, though it puzzled him how he could ever have known about some of them. It was as if some part of him had been keeping watch even when he was apparently incapable of knowing anything. The pieces moved themselves around until finally a complete chunk of his story was back together again.
He had finished work late that fateful evening. He could not remember what the work was or where the place was. He had taken a short cut down a narrow street. There was a paper shop on the corner with a rack of magazines just inside the door. One of them was an aviation journal with a picture of a Victor bomber on the front cover and the words ‘The Handley Page Story’.
He continued on down the street. A van was almost blocking the further end. Three men were pulling sacks out of a storeroom and humping them into the van. He noticed that the doors of the storeroom seemed to be twisted and broken. He began to edge quietly back out of the street. He would go for the police. Then one of the men spotted him and gave a shout. He considered making a run for it but thought he might get shot at. The other two rushed up, grabbed him and dragged him into the storeroom which was full of broken packing cases. He decided it was wiser not to fight back.
“You haven’t seen anything, right?” said the third man. All three of them were wearing black masks. It was a frightening sight.
“Don’t risk it, boss!” said the taller of the other two. He grabbed one of the crowbars they had been using to break open the packing cases. He took a great swing with it and caught Tommy on the side of the head. There was a moment of searing pain, a blinding flash of light and he collapsed on the concrete floor.
“You idiot! I said no violence! You may have killed him!” shouted the boss. “Get him into the van. If he’s still alive he may remember the number plate or something else we could be traced by. We’ve got to get him out of the way until we’ve left the country.”
“Let’s just finish him off.”
“No, I said no violence. Put him in with the sacks.”
The three men hauled him over to the van, slung him in and piled the last few sacks on top of him. The tall man managed to sneak the wallet out of his jacket pocket as they did so. Then, with a screeching of tyres, the van sped off into the darkening streets.
“Put your foot on it, Kev!” Several hours had passed. They had raced up the M1 and were now threading their way through country lanes with the boss calling out directions. The lane they were on ran alongside a railway track and a heavy goods train was lumbering along beside them. “There should be a bridge over the railway line in a minute or so. Yes, there it is. Pull up on the bridge. Hurry!”
“Why, boss?”
“Just do it! Don’t argue! It’s time to get rid of our passenger.”
They leapt out and hauled Tommy’s limp body out of the van as the engine disappeared under the bridge. “Over the top with him!” They heaved him over the parapet, jumped back into the van and sped off towards the airfield.
Tommy’s body, bleeding and badly bruised, lay on a pile of shingle in one of the last trucks. Near dawn the train came to a halt and the trucks were shunted into a temporary siding next to a rough track. The two drivers uncoupled the engine and continued their journey north. Lorries would come to unload the shingle later in the week.
Tommy was vaguely aware that the painful jerking motion had stopped. For a long time he just lay there, but as a grey light started to come into the sky he slowly dragged himself into a sitting position. His head was pounding and his whole body ached. He was terribly thirsty. He did not know who he was or where he was or why he was there; he just knew he had to find some water. With a great effort he raised himself up and looked over the edge of the truck. There was a stony track and beyond it a field of cabbages. The cabbage leaves looked wet. He could lick the rainwater off them if he could manage to get out, but every movement sent agonising pains shooting through his head.
He lay down again on the gravel but the thirst was so insistent that he dragged himself up once more and managed to roll over the edge of the truck, falling to the ground with a bone-juddering crash. He lay there for several minutes then slowly crawled across the track and in amongst the cabbages. For the first few yards the cabbage leaves were only slightly damp but he licked them eagerly nevertheless and ate some of the leaves and stalks. He crawled further into the field and found a big leaf that had collected a silver pool of rainwater. He leaned over it and carefully sucked up the water but then a terrible jab of pain went through his head and he relapsed into unconsciousness. Two days later he was found there by a farmer.
Everything was a blur, suffused with other much earlier memories. He thought he was being pursued by guards in black uniforms, guards with guns and whips and dogs. When the farmer lifted him gently into the trailer of his tractor he thought he was being taken back to the prison camp but he was too weak to try to escape.
The farmer’s wife wanted to phone for a doctor but he begged her not to. He was so agitated she thought it better to wait for a while. She had taken care of the various accidents and injuries sustained by her own three children and knew how to bathe his wounds and bandage a pad onto the side of his head. She looked in on him before she went to bed and he seemed to be sleeping peacefully. When she brought him a cup of tea the next morning, he had gone. Her husband thought it best not to tell anyone – it would only cause complications and there was so much work to be done – and reluctantly she agreed.
Tommy stayed on the run – as he thought – for nearly three weeks. He did not like stealing things, but he managed to steal food from farms and cottages and gradually worked his way further north across country. Once he had a lovely meal of raw peas from a field and once he found some delicious young carrots. He was so hungry it did not matter that they were muddy. He wiped them as clean as he could and ate them eagerly.
Gradually his strength returned. It was cold at night but he huddled up in ditches or furrows in the fields and covered himself with straw and bracken. The wound on the side of his head had now healed and he discarded his bandages in a field of turnips. He began to realise that there were no formations of fighter planes flying overhead, no sound of bombs, no screams, no searchlights, no wailing of sirens. The part of his mind that had taken command based on his childhood experiences went back to being a far off memory. What was left was a man who did not know who he was, where he was, or why. Slowly he became used to this situation and in later years did not really believe people when they claimed to know all sorts of details about their lives. He thought they were joking.
Eventually he plucked up courage to walk into a small town. He had been looking at it
from a line of hills for several days. A road lined with grey stone cottages led up a steep hill to a market square. The market stalls were empty but there were shops round the square. It was mid morning and there were a number of people about. Some of them looked at him curiously. He was quite a sight: muddy, unshaven, dried blood on the side of his head, his clothes in tatters.
There was a café near the corner. A wonderful smell of hot bread and coffee wafted out from it. He went to the window and looked in longingly. There was a glass cabinet with cakes and pastries, and little tables where people were eating some of that lovely food. He became aware that they were all staring at him and then he felt a hand on his shoulder – the police! He flinched away, but it was not the police. “It’s all right, mate, I won’t hurt you.” It was a kindly-looking man in shabby clothes. “Are you hungry? I don’t think they’d want you in there, not in the state you’re in. I’ll get you something. Just wait here. I won’t be a minute. Don’t go away, mind.”
He went into another shop and reappeared with a sausage roll and a cardboard mug of coffee. “I put sugar in it. Hope that’s all right. There’s a bench over there. Let’s go and sit down.”
They went and sat down. The hot sweet coffee was wonderful. The sausage roll was superb. “I’m Bernie, by the way. What’s your name?”
Name? Did he have a name? For some reason the name Victor came into his head. “I’m called Victor. Victor Handley.” That was strange. He did not think he was really called that.
“Glad to meet you, Victor. I expect people call you Tommy, don’t they? Mind if I call you Tommy?”
No, he did not mind. Why should they want to call him Tommy, though? And from that day on his official name was Victor Handley and, just as Bernie had said, a lot of people called him Tommy.
“I live in a hostel,” said Bernie. “Want to come along? They might have a place for you.”
The hostel was Tommy’s home for the next three years. His memory never came back but he got used to being the way he was and soon could not imagine any other way of being. He could remember meeting Bernie and the day to day life at the hostel but before that there was a complete blank.
A lady called Morgan was in charge of activities. She began to notice that the simple craftwork that was quite challenging for most of the clients, as they were called, came easily and naturally to Tommy. She did not have much money to spend on activities but she hunted in charity shops and asked around among her friends and gradually accumulated a collection of tools which Tommy kept on a bench in the corner of the workroom. Whenever things got broken in the hostel, which seemed to happen quite frequently as some of the clients were loud and rough and careless, it was Tommy who was called on to do the repairs. He was pleased to be able to pay back a little of the kindness shown by these people who had given him a home.
One day he had been looking at an old magazine that had an article about Victorian dolls’ houses. He was charmed by all their intricate details. He hunted round in the workroom and found various pieces of wood and set to work. He was enjoying himself so much he stayed up half the night and next morning Morgan was amazed to see a beautifully constructed dolls’ house nearly complete. She went out on her afternoon off and bought him a set of paints with her own money.
Even the loud, rough clients admired the finished dolls’ house and Bill, one of the managers of the hostel, was so enthusiastic he promised to try to find a buyer for it.
Tommy did not really need the money. He had been given some second hand clothing when he first arrived and most of it fitted him quite well. The charity that ran the hostel gave him a pound a day pocket money. He did not smoke or drink and was content with the simple meals the hostel provided, so he hardly spent any of it and his savings grew. They grew even faster after a local doctor came to the hostel to give all the clients a check up and Tommy was diagnosed as suffering from profound amnesia and awarded a disability allowance.
Bill did manage to find a buyer, a craft shop in the next town, that paid Tommy twenty five pounds and asked him to make some more. A few months later, when Tommy had sold four more dolls’ houses to the craft shop, the buyer for a large shop in London came north to visit an aunt and called in at the craft shop to have a look round. He recognised the quality of Tommy’s work and before he returned to London he called in at the hostel and offered to buy dolls’ houses for thirty five pounds each.
After a while Tommy found that the cost and difficulty of sending dolls’ houses to London made the extra effort hardly worthwhile. He discussed it with Morgan and Bill and they suggested that he might be transferred to the charity’s London hostel. He was sorry to leave his friend Bernie and the others who had been so kind and helpful, but he wanted to stand on his own feet and this seemed a move in the right direction. He had plans to build bigger and even more intricate dolls’ houses and there would be more shops in London to sell them to.
So Tommy moved down to London. He worked hard and after a while was selling his dolls’ houses to several of the big shops in the West End. When he had been in the London hostel for a little over two years, the charity helped him to find rented accommodation where he could have his own workroom. It was a small terraced house in Chichester Greenway.
He was sitting upstairs in the workroom thinking of the chain of events that had brought him to where he was right now, when the name that had been on the tip of his tongue for days came back to him, and with it a flood of forgotten knowledge and a great hope – a hope so great that it carried with it a very great fear. He knew exactly what he had to do. He set off up Chichester Greenway, crossed the main road and walked to the bus stop. He stood there for a long time. Would the bus never come?
The bus did come and he climbed aboard. Twenty minutes. Thirty minutes. Thirty five minutes. There was the old familiar bus stop just where it had always been. He got off the bus, his heart thumping.
Up the road to the corner. Turn left. Third block of flats on the right, just as it had always been. The hope and the fear were now so great he could hardly climb the steps. Along the concrete corridor. Fourth door on the right. It was still painted blue but badly chipped and worn. Number 4C. He slowly turned the handle. The door clicked open. Someone was sitting at the table. “Caro?”
She looked up. It was impossible. “Ernst! My Ernst! You’ve come back at last!” And Mrs Warbloff fell into his arms, crying with joy.
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Chichester Greenway Page 24