Upsetting the Balance

“Sometime tonight, Ah reckon,” the fellow answered. He was a little old wizened chap who worked his jaws even when he wasn’t talking. Goldfarb had seen that before. Usually it meant the chap who did it was used to chewing tobacco and couldn’t stop chewing even when tobacco was no longer to be had.

Goldfarb’s stomach rumbled. “Will you stop off to feed us any time before then?” he asked.

“Nay, no more’n Ah will to feed mahself,” the driver said. When he put it that way, Goldfarb didn’t have the crust to argue further.

He rummaged in his pockets and came up with half a scone he’d forgotten he had. It was so stale, he worried about breaking teeth on it; he devoured it more by abrasion than mastication. It was just enough to make his stomach growl all the more fiercely but not nearly enough to satisfy him, not even after he licked the crumbs from his fingers.

He pointed to a cow grazing in a field. “Why don’t you stop for a bit so we can shoot that one and worry off some steaks?”

“Think you’re a funny bloke, do you?” the driver said. “You try lookin’ at that cow too long and some old man like me back there in the bushes, he’ll blow your head off for you, mark mah words. He hasn’t kept his cow so long bein’ sweet and dainty, Ah tell you that.”

Since the driver was very likely right, Goldfarb shut up.

Night fell with an almost audible thud. It got cold fast. He started to bury himself in the hay with his mates, then had a second thought and asked the driver, “Besides the Fighter Command Group HQ, wot’n ‘ell’s in Watnall?” By sounding like a Cockney for three words, he made a fair pun of it.

If the driver noticed, he wasn’t impressed. “There’s nobbut the group headquarters there,” he answered, and spat into the roadway. “ ‘Twasn’t even a village before the war.”

“How extremely depressing,” Goldfarb said, going from one accent to another: for a moment there, he sounded like a Cambridge undergraduate. He wondered how Jerome Jones was faring these days, and then whether his fellow radarman was still alive.

“Watnall’s not far from Nottingham,” the driver said, the first time since he’d stepped up onto his raised seat that he’d actually volunteered anything. “Nobbut a few miles.”

The consolation Goldfarb had felt at the first sentence-Nottingham was a good-sized city, with the promise of pubs, cinemas when the power was on, and people of the female persuasion-was tempered by the second. If he couldn’t lay hands on a bicycle, a few miles in wartime with winter approaching might as well have been the far side of the moon.

He vanished into the hay like a dormouse curling up in its nest to hibernate. One of his traveling companions, still sleeping, promptly stuck an elbow in his ribs. He didn’t care. He huddled closer to the other RAF man, who, however fractious he might have been in his sleep, was also warm. He fell asleep himself a few minutes later, even as he was telling himself he wouldn’t.

When he woke again, something had changed. In his muzziness, he needed a moment to figure out what: they weren’t moving. He sat up, brushing straw from his hair. “What’s happened?” he asked.

One of the other RAF men, a Liverpudlian whom Goldfarb knew only as Henry, answered before the driver could: “We’re in Nottingham, we are. They’re going t’give us some grub after all.” His clotted accent said he was a factory worker from a long line of factory workers.

“Jolly good!” Goldfarb brushed at himself again, trying to get as close to presentable as he could. It was wasted effort, because of his own disheveled state and because the night was too dark to let anyone see anything much. Stars glittered in a black, black sky, but shed little light, and the moon, some days past full, hadn’t yet risen.

“We’ve soup for you, lads,” a woman’s voice said out of the gloom; Goldfarb could make out her silhouette, but no more. “Here, come take your panikins. Have a care-they’re hot.”

Hot the soup was, and full of cabbage, potatoes, and carrots. Goldfarb didn’t find any meat in his tin bowl, but the broth tasted as if it had been somewhere within shouting distance of a chicken in the not too distant past.

“Sticks to your ribs, that does,” Henry said happily. The other RAF men made wordless noises of agreement. So did the driver, who was also getting outside a bowl of soup.

“Pass me back your bowls when you’re done, lads, and we’ll serve ’em out again to the next lot who come through hungry, or maybe to some of our own,” the woman said. Goldfarb couldn’t see her, couldn’t tell if she was young or old, ugly or beautiful. Food-and, even more, kindness-made him feel halfway in love with her just the same.

When all the bowls and spoons had been returned, the driver said, “Getalong there,” and the horses ambled on. Goldfarb called thanks back to the woman who’d given them the soup.