Christopher Priest - The Separation

Aircraft were flying low over the centre of the town, their engines straining and roaring. I thought I was used to the noise of aero engines, near and far, hostile and friendly, but these were entirely different. Waves of deafening sound battered against the sleeping town.

Once the brief panic of being woken by a loud noise started to recede, I realized what was happening. The planes must be taking off from a local airfield. I was fully awake in seconds. I scrambled across the room, threw the window up, then leaned out and craned upwards.

The planes, powerful twin-engined bombers I recognized as Wellingtons, were travelling low above the roofs, swift, dark shapes outlined against the faint glow of moonlit clouds. The sound of the engines was more than a loud roar: it was a physical concussion of noise, beating not only against the walls and windows of the building but creating a perceptible rhythm against my head and chest. I was exhilarated by the endless reverberations, the shattering, thrilling commotion. I soaked up the sound like a man feeling a downpour of rain after a month in the desert. It was a terrifying but enthralling experience, something so powerful and engulfing that I felt it could not be understood until it was shared with others. Yet I realized, with a sudden jolt of surprise, that I seemed to be alone. There was no traffic in the blacked-out street below, there were no pedestrians walking home, no one else standing at a darkened window to stare up at the deafening sky.

Then I thought, then I realized: this is not real.

A sense of dread sank through me, a familiar sick-feeling anxiety that I could no longer trust my senses. Once again I had woken from what I thought was sleep to what I thought was reality: to a lucid imagining.

I could shrink away from it as I had done before, let the sinking feeling of dread course through me and take me with it, waking me up properly and pulling me out of the delusion. This time, though, I chose instead to remain, to experience the illusion to the full.

I stayed at that window while wave after wave of bombers took off across the town, sweeping low over the roofs. I tried to count the planes: fifty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, more and more, roaring off into the vengeful night.

I rejoiced in the unreality, letting the magnificent crude cacophony of powerful engines flood around me, drowning me in their deluge of sound.

Barnham is a market town to the west of the Lincolnshire wolds, built of pale red brick and tiles, a windy place that morning, under a sky thick with low, leaden clouds. At the back of the town, beside the railway station, there were stockyards for the weekly livestock markets. In the narrow streets close to the centre of town, the houses were built in terraces, backing on to each other, but there were larger, more prosperous-looking houses where the town started to blend with the countryside. I walked past them, following the main road in the direction of Louth, but found myself in flat, uninteresting farmland, marked out with trees and hedges but with few other features to give ease to the eye. I looked in all directions as I walked, knowing that there were two RAF bases in the immediate vicinity of the town, but I could see no signs of anything that might signify the presence of an airfield: a water tower, hangars, a windsock. I turned back.

A short while later I was walking again down the High Street in the centre of the town, past the pub where I had spent the night. I glanced up at the window where I had imagined I was standing in the dark. It looked smaller from street level, as if even when fully open it would not be large enough for a man to stand by it and lean through. Familiar shops were open along both sides of the main street and people were going about their unexceptional chores of shopping and making deliveries around the town. It was a place rather like Macclesfield, without the interesting Pennine scenery.

I knew my brother was based at RAF Tealby Moor, close to a village of that name, but the direction signs had been taken down all over Britain the previous year. I didn’t want to ask the way: ever since the war began in earnest most people were wary of strangers.

I found a cafe and drank tea and nibbled at some sweet biscuits, not sure what to do next. While I was still sitting there I noticed a number of airmen were walking down the High Street, some of them in small groups or pairs, others singly. Thinking that Jack might be among them I finished my cup of tea and went outside.

Jack was not there. The RAF men were a mixture of officers and men, apparently unconcerned with differences in rank while they were off duty. I was impressed by their casual manner, the fragments of flippant RAF slang I overheard as I passed. One or two of them looked at me strangely.

At the western end of the High Street was a wide, flattened area, partly a car park and bus depot. A cream-painted single-decker bus was standing next to the public lavatories. A young man in a blue RAF uniform and cap was sitting behind the wheel, reading a morning newspaper.

I sauntered over, trying to look as casual as possible. The airman folded his newspaper and looked at me incuriously.

“Morning,’ I said. ‘You’re the Tealby bus, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

I retreated, walking across the road to where there was a small park. The heavy clouds were thinning away to the east and soon I was able to enjoy the spring sunshine. As I wandered, around I kept my eye on the waiting bus. At about a quarter to eleven the airmen began drifting back to the bus, climbing aboard noisily and waiting inside for the others. A group of six kicked a ball around in the dusty area. When the bus was full the driver started the engine, turned out of the parking area and set off towards the west.

I went quickly to the side of the road and watched the bus as it drove away into the distance. After about half a mile it slowed suddenly, making a left turn.

RAF Tealby Moor was about two miles from Barnham, a long but not an impossible walk. I arrived soon after midday, discovering that the road along which I had seen the bus heading brought me directly to the guardhouse at the main gate. The airfield was laid out in farmland away from the village from which it took its name, with no other houses in the vicinity. It was clear that any civilian seen hanging around outside the entrance to the base would be challenged. I kept my head down and my hands stuffed in my pockets. I walked on past the gate.

The road followed a long stretch of the perimeter fence. Once I was away from the main cluster of admin buildings and hangars, the fence became a double strand of barbed wire, presenting only a token barrier against the outside world. As I walked along I saw many of the aircraft at dispersal: they had been moved out to positions around the perimeter so as to present a more scattered target should enemy intruder aircraft appear. The planes were Wellingtons, with their round, snub-nosed fuselages, twin engines, gun turrets at front and rear. Most of the aircraft were being serviced or repaired by technical ground crew, with auxiliary power supplies wheeled up to the aircraft, ladders propped against the sides of the planes, men standing or squatting on the wings next to the opened nacelles of the engines.

As I walked past them, no one inside the base took any notice of me.

Eventually the road and the fence took different routes, the road swinging left and dropping down a shallow incline towards a bridge across a narrow river. I could see the church spire of a village in the near distance. The perimeter fence turned sharply to the right, heading out across the fields. From where I was standing I could see that it was where the main runway ended in a wide apron, allowing the aircraft to turn before or after using the runway. I saw a few signalling installations, a couple of huts, a caravan, the long straight road of the concrete runway.