The Broken Chariot Read Online Free PDF Page B

wrapped in the cape. Picking up a dead stick to poke the cabbage-smelling soil he wondered why it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Such mishaps always occurred when you set out on the great escape, but cold sweat pricked his face as he prodded the soft earth in different places, and looked under all shrubs within reasonable radius.
    Fury at his incompetence would betray him. There was no saying how wide of the mark he was. If you made one mistake you made another. And then another. To bolt without a change of civvy clothes, toilet articles, penknife, and Barney’s copy of Caged Birds would turn him into a cadet-scarecrow never daring to show his face. Luckily the school ordnance map was folded into his tunic pocket, as well as a few other odds and ends.
    He stood a full minute without moving, telling himself that his exploit was now in the realm of real life. He was over the wall, but could go back if he liked, and be warm again in bed, where he had a dummy of himself made of pillows and discarded kit. Barney’s flashlight was dim, and he had chosen a night before he might think to install a new battery. Who, in any case, would dream of someone doing a bunk? He wanted to go back but couldn’t, because it was safer to push on. I’d look a right fool getting caught on my way back because I’d turned yellow.
    Hang around much longer and I’ll be seen and recaptured. He returned to the edge of the wood, took out his luminously dialled compass, and once more measured the paces in. The moonless night was no help, since all the bushes looked and felt the same in his beam of light, already less brilliant than when he had set out.
    Another navigational run in, with more methodical poking, and the stick tapped what he was looking for. A sneeze shot out that must have been heard for half a mile. Of course, it always did at this stage. He stood awhile, still and silent, holding his nose to stop another. Using his handkerchief to mop the mucus, he thought it exceptionally bad luck to be stricken with the full house of a cold on getaway night.
    Trees and hedges were indistinguishable in the dark and, well behind his timetable, he used his compass to cross fields, his previous daylight reconnaissance only a vague help. The outline of a great elm took out the mixture of stars and cloud, made the night a deeper pitch of black. He paused to get a bearing, and the fluting bars of an owl’s beat startled and prodded him on till he broke through the hedge at the exact point where the lane forked. Exulting in his skill – and jolly good luck – all he had to do now was march half a mile by the cover of the right-hand hedge and find the main road.
    To move without noise meant putting the plimsolls back on, but he didn’t have them. Another mistake. They must have dropped while poking for his bundle among the trees. Now his pursuers would have a clue as to the direction. Listening for the noise of bloodhounds, he heard only the wind which hid the sound of him knocking claggy soil from his boots against the bole of a tree.
    Anyway, I’m not a caged bird bloke in bloody Germany, he smiled. I’m on the run from a rotten school, and they’ll never catch me. At the junction both ways seemed feasible. Either could lead to disaster, so he shrugged and headed to the right because the sky seemed faintly lighter that way.
    After half an hour’s carefree stroll a lorry came grinding up behind. Daylight showed in grey patches above the trees, and the birds were waking up, so he would have to be more careful. Walking along the inside of hedges and going from field to field would mean making only a few miles before nightfall, so he thought it best to get into a couldn’t care less mood and nonchalantly put his thumb up for a lift.
    An RAF corporal with a bushy moustache and big tobacco-stained hands helped him into the back. ‘Going far, lanky?’
    â€˜Bristol, eventually,’ Herbert