Judgment Day Read Online Free PDF Page B

Spelbury had tripled, quadrupled in size. Only the street plan of the town center, an elongated triangle enclosing an open space, and the Friday cattle market remembered its ancestral function. It was still in trade, of course, but no longer trade of a local nature: pigs and sheep and cows. Nowadays, the container lorries feeding Spelbury's factories might come from Scotland, from the east coast, from the continent.
    Ten miles away, R.A.F. Willerton sprawled runways and silver hangars and several acres of red brick housing for personnel across the landscape, and provided considerable extra purchasing power for the Spelbury shops, and clientele for the Saturday-night discos, the pubs, and the two cinemas.
    Aircraft noise split the skies, periodically. Laddenham could congratulate itself on not being beneath one of the main flight paths. On the whole, the aircraft swept north up the river valley before turning right for Europe and the Middle and Far East, or left for elsewhere. The gleaming, backswept planes were alleged by knowledgeable locals to carry hydrogen bombs; others disputed this. The less sinister transport aircraft, low slung and erect-tailed, lumbered about the horizon all day long, so much a part of the scenery that a landscape painter, seeking local exactitude, would need to incorporate one, pottering above the low hills, the hedge-striped valleys, the greens and golds and fawns of the agricultural midlands.
    The R.A.F. display team, the Red Devils, was based at Willerton.
    The first time Clare Paling saw them was on the morning after her conversation with Peter about her occupation—or lack of it—and three days after her exchange with George Radwell in the church. She had dropped the children at school, been to Spelbury to do the week's shopping at Sainsbury's, and then, on a whim, driven straight out of the town in the opposite direction to Laddenham. She had stopped the mini, presently, on the side road, at a point where the road crossed a small stream by way of an old stone bridge; a delectable riverine landscape of willowsand watermeadows and buttercups. She sat on the wall of the bridge and saw flowing weed, like green hair, with little white flowers blooming just above the water, dragged this way and that by the current. It was early summer. The grass was thick, the trees in full leaf; the willows along the stream bank were a sharp yellow-green against the steel gray of a rain-cloud behind them, a miraculous effect of light and texture. And then suddenly there was a disturbance of air; a wind that sprang up from nowhere; a blackbird shrieked; a bullock cantered off with its tail up. Across the skyline, above the willows, across that pewter backcloth there swept a scarlet aeroplane, not a hundred yards away, not, it seemed, a hundred yards above the ground, a huge scarlet steel dart, quite soundless. It was there above the trees—and then gone so quickly it could have been a hallucination.
    There came another, and another, and another, with only yards between them. She stood up, her hand to her mouth, amazed. And then the sound arrived: a great tearing roar, rising and falling, once, twice, three, four, five times—once for each plane.
    It was astonishing. She was filled with wild exhilaration. The shock of it. The beauty of those shapes fleeing across the dark sky, the brilliance of the color; the sudden intrusion, the sense of something quite merciless and irresistible blasting its way across the tranquil countryside. There was a hot metallic smell in the air now. And, looking away and upwards, she saw them again, but high, high up, thousands of feet up, tiny scarlet gnats flying in tight formation, making an arrow that vanished into a gray heap of cloud.
    She found the whole thing intensely stimulating anddrove home too fast, narrowly missing an accident, the sight of the red aeroplanes still printed on her eyeballs.
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    Sydney Porter was erecting runner bean poles when the Red Devils came