Songs of Love & Death

An hour later, he found Hadrian’s Wall. Hard to miss, even grown over with grass and all sorts like it was. It marched stolidly along, just like the Roman Legions who’d built it, stubbornly workmanlike, a gray seam stitching its way up hill and down dale, dividing the peaceful fields to the south from those marauding buggers up north. He grinned at the thought and sat down on the wall—it was less than a yard high, just here—to massage his knee.

He hadn’t found the plane, or anything else, and was beginning to doubt his own sense of reality. He’d seen a fox, any number of rabbits, and a pheasant who’d nearly given him heart failure by bursting out from right under his feet. No people at all, though, and that was giving him a queer feeling in his water.

Aye, there was a war on, right enough, and many of the menfolk were gone—but the farmhouses hadn’t been sacrificed to the war effort, had they? The women were running the farms, feeding the nation, all that—he’d heard the PM on the radio praising them for it only last week. So where the bloody hell was everybody?

The sun was getting low in the sky when at last he saw a house. It was flush against the Wall, and struck him somehow familiar, though he knew he’d never seen it before. Stone-built and squat, but quite large, with a ratty-looking thatch. There was smoke coming from the chimney, though, and he limped toward it as fast as he could go.

There was a person outside—a woman in a ratty long dress and an apron, feeding chickens. He shouted, and she looked up, her mouth falling open at the sight of him.

“Hey,” he said, breathless from hurry. “I’ve had a crash. I need help. Are ye on the phone, maybe?”

She didn’t answer. She dropped the basket of chicken feed and ran right away, round the corner of the house. He sighed in exasperation. Well, maybe she’d gone to fetch her husband. He didn’t see any sign of a vehicle, not so much as a tractor, but maybe the man was—

The man was tall, stringy, bearded, and snaggle-toothed. He was also dressed in dirty shirt and baggy short pants that showed his hairy legs and bare feet—and accompanied by two other men in similar comic attire. Jerry instantly interpreted the looks on their faces, and didn’t stay to laugh.

“Hey, nay problem, mate,” he said, backing up, hands raised. “I’m off, right?”

They kept coming, slowly, spreading out to surround him. He hadn’t liked the looks of them to start with, and was liking them less by the second. Hungry, they looked, with a speculative glitter in their eyes.

One of them said something to him, a question of some kind, but the Northumbrian accent was too thick for him to catch more than a word. “Who” was the word, and he hastily pulled his dog tags from the neck of his blouson, waving the red and green disks at them. One of the men smiled, but not in a nice way.

“Look,” he said, still backing up. “I didna mean to—”

The man in the lead reached out a horny hand and took hold of his forearm. He jerked back, but the man, instead of letting go, punched him in the belly.

He could feel his mouth opening and shutting like a fish’s, but no air came in. He flailed wildly, but they all were on him then. They were calling out to each other, and he didn’t understand a word, but the intent was plain as the nose he managed to butt with his head.

It was the only blow he landed. Within two minutes, he’d been efficiently beaten into pudding, had his pockets rifled, been stripped of his jacket and dog tags, frog-marched down the road and heaved bodily down a steep, rocky slope.

He rolled, bouncing from one outcrop to the next, until he managed to fling out an arm and grab on to a scrubby thornbush. He came to a scraping halt and lay with his face in a clump of heather, panting and thinking incongruously of taking Dolly to the pictures just before he’d joined up. They’d seen The Wizard of Oz, and he was beginning to feel creepily like the lass in that film—maybe it was the resemblance of the Northumbrians to scarecrows and lions.

“At least the fucking lion spoke English,” he muttered, sitting up. “Jesus, now what?”

It occurred to him that it might be a good time to stop cursing and start praying.

London, two years later

SHE’D BEEN HOME from her work no more than five minutes. Just time to meet Roger’s mad charge across the floor, shrieking “MUMMY!”, she pretending to be staggered by his impact—not so much a pretense; he was getting big. Just time to call out to her own mum, hear the muffled reply from the kitchen, sniff hopefully for the comforting smell of tea and catch a tantalizing whiff of tinned sardines that made her mouth water—a rare treat.