Derek Robinson - Piece of Cake

“What time is it? We ought to be getting on,” Cox said. “How far to the airfield?”

“Do stop worrying, Mother,” said Cattermole. “Have you noticed, Pip…” He yawned, and closed his eyes. “…noticed that Mother always starts worrying when it’s too late to do anything?”

Nobody answered. After a while a bird started to sing in a nearby tree. Stickwell swore at it and it stopped.

“I’m in enough trouble with the Ram as it is, that’s all,” Cox said. He had a long nose, slightly crooked where he had broken it by running into a gatepost at the age of six, and this made his face look even longer and narrower than it was. “He really hates me. You should have heard him go on about it. He went on and on and on.”

“Quite right,” said Cattermole. “It wasn’t your Hurricane. It belonged to the British taxpayer. You ought to be more careful with other people’s property. You behaved abominably.”

“I got the lights confused, that’s all. I thought green meant up and red meant down. Next thing I knew the prop was chucking out great lumps of grass and the Ram was giving me hell.”

Stickwell groaned, and rolled onto his side. “Think yourself lucky,” he said. “Chap I knew did what you did, only he cartwheeled the whole bloody kite, ass over tit, right down the runway.”

“It’s those damn indicator lights,” Cox said. “I expect he got confused.”

“He certainly looked confused,” Stickwell said. “His kneecaps were all mixed up with his shoulder blades.”

Cattermole made himself comfortable against the tree-stump. He had a tall, beefy body topped with a surprisingly small and delicate head; he looked like an idealized Grecian prizefighter, which was totally misleading: he was strong but he was lazy. “Anyway, the Ram’s in London,” he said. “Won’t be back till lunch.”

Mother Cox prowled around, kicking at dandelion heads which stood white in the darkness. The seedballs shattered and vanished immediately in the still air. “We really ought to start walking, you know,” he said.

“Where did you get that damn silly golliwog, Moggy?” asked Stickwell.

“Chap gave it me at the party.”

“Jolly decent of him.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought. Mind you, I had to fight him for it.”

“That wasn’t very nice.”

“Exactly what I told him, Sticky. He wouldn’t let go of it. ‘Look, old chap,’ I said to him, ‘this golliwog’s no damn use to you any more,’ I said, ‘one of its arms has come off,’ I said. Which it had. Then he said something rather unkind so I punched him in the eye and after that he gave me the whole golliwog, arm and all, without a word.”

“Really? Not a word?”

“Not one sodding syllable, Sticky.”

“Well, it’s the thought that counts, I suppose… Hello, here comes a bus.”

Mother Cox looked around eagerly. It was not a bus but a tractor, bellowing and backfiring as the driver gunned the engine. It slowed as it neared them and Pip Patterson shouted from the driver’s seat: “Jump up! Can’t stop! Jump up!” He was towing a farm-wagon. They scrambled aboard it and Patterson accelerated with a suddenness that jolted them off their feet. Stickwell, sprawling in a scattering of straw, saw a light waving in the roadway. Someone was chasing them. In the distance he saw a house, its upper windows lit; as he watched, more lights came on. The man with the flashlight kept chasing until they reached a downward slope and the tractor outpaced him.

Its passengers clung to the sides of the wagon as Patterson, with no headlights to guide him and with the rush of air making him blink and squint, charged down the gradient. The tractor tires bounced on bumps and spat up a thin spray of gravel. Moggy Cattermole tried lying on his front, but the bouncing hurt too much; so he lay on his back, which hurt even more; so he got to his feet just as the wagon hit a pothole and knocked him down. “Holy hell!” he shouted. Sparks were streaming out of the exhaust.

At the foot of the hill the road funneled into a narrow bridge over a river. Patterson caught a glimpse of shining water, scarred by the panicking flight of duck. He tightened his grip on the thin wheel and aimed for the center. As the walls closed in he shut his eyes. The tractor rushed across, its trailer savagely whacking the stone buttresses and leaving a trail of ragged splinters.

When the rumbling ceased, Patterson looked again. They were dashing past a sleeping pub; in the past few minutes the sky had lightened and he read the sign: The Carpenter’s Arms. A crossroads lay ahead, but he couldn’t read the signpost and he had to guess, so he guessed they should turn left and at the last instant changed his mind and turned right, winding the wheel as if the tractor were a boat and feeling it lean all its weight onto one side like a boat. Shouts came from behind, desperate enough to penetrate the din, and he glanced back to see the wagon skidding, its tail drifting wide as the wheels lost their grip. A screech of metallic pain came from the towbar. The wagon strained to escape, failed, got dragged back into line. The shouts were audible as curses. Patterson waved, and settled down to master the controls.

He barreled across the countryside for a further ten miles while the dawn gradually bleached out the night and at last the sun nudged over the horizon. They might have traveled all the way to the airfield like this if Patterson, getting too cocky, hadn’t attempted a flashy gear change while going up a steep hill. He missed the gear and had to come to a halt. He found the gear and tried to restart but released too much power. The tractor leaped forward and snapped the towbar. The wagon rolled downhill for ten yards and gently wedged itself in a hedge.

Patterson switched off the engine, set the brake and climbed down.

“You’re a maniac, Pip,” said Moggy Cattermole. He sat on the trailer, brushing straw and bits of dried dung from his clothes. His hands were filthy and his forehead was bruised. Mother Cox wore a mustache of dried blood. Sticky Stickwell had rolled in an agricultural chemical of sulfurous yellow. “You’re a raving maniac,” Cattermole accused. “Why did you have to drive like that?”

“Someone was chasing us. Had to get away. After that I couldn’t seem to get the speed down.”

“Whose is this stuff, anyway?” Cox asked.

Patterson strolled to the tail of the wagon. “Harold Hawthorn, it says here. Nutmeg Farm, High Dunning. Why?”

“Well, we pinched it from him, didn’t we? I mean, you pinched it.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe the bloke who was chasing us pinched it from Harold Hawthorn.”

“Bloody farmers,” Stickwell said. “You can’t trust them an inch.”

“Where the hell did you find it, Pip?” Cattermole asked.

“In a farmyard. Inside a barn, actually.”

“There you are, then,” Stickwell said. “Obviously a dump for hot tractors. Bloke chasing us was some sort of agricultural fence. No wonder he didn’t want us to get away. We know his guilty secret.”

“Oh, balls,” said Mother Cox.

“How did you start it?” Cattermole asked.

“The key was in the ignition,” Patterson said. “I just swung the handle and off she went, first time.”

“This must have been their getaway tractor,” Stickwell said, brushing yellow powder out of his hair.

“With a great big farm-wagon hitched on behind?” Cox said.

“For the rest of the gang, Mother,” Cattermole explained patiently. “We’ve stumbled on a very big organization. We shall probably get a medal for this.”

“We’ll get a colossal bollocking from the Ram if he ever hears about it,” said Cox.

“The Ram’s in London,” Stickwell said. “God’s in his heaven and I’m damn hungry. There’s nothing like a good healthy spew in the fresh country air to give a chap an appetite.”