Chapter One

Shuffling into a more comfortable position in the relative luxury of the third-class railway seat, Jack took a closer look at his travelling companions. Opposite was a young man probably about the same age as him - eighteen or nineteen - but his fresh complexion, accentuated by his black hair, contrasted so markedly with Jack’s weather-beaten features that it made the traveller opposite look almost like a schoolboy.

‘Simmer down lad,’ thought Jack as he watched the young man fidget nervously, continually adjusting the position of his hands - their smooth skin and carefully cut nails revealed that he wasn’t a manual worker - along the edges of the journal which he was half hiding behind and half reading. The magazine had pictures of airplanes on its cover.

Next to the young man sat a rather dispirited looking couple. The man was perhaps four or five years older than Jack and was wearing an old army greatcoat and an old army face, with the ugly scar of a shrapnel wound down one side of it. He was sitting totally motionless and from the look on his face Jack had the impression that his mind was focussed unwillingly on memories he would much rather forget. Alongside the ex-soldier was his wife, who looked to be about six months gone. She, like the young man, was fidgeting nervously. She wore a worried look in the same way that many people would wear an old familiar scarf to protect them from a cold wind. Jack guessed that she was about twenty-two but the frown made her look much older. It was easy to see that when she’d been a bit younger and less worried she had been really pretty.

The couple’s brown paper parcel luggage, down-at-heel shoes, worn-out clothes and worn-out faces told all there was to tell of the poverty and hard times that they were enduring. ‘It definitely hasn’t turned out to be a land fit for bloody heroes,’ thought Jack as they all sat in silence - the silence of travellers. He couldn’t help but contrast the appearance of the couple with that of the young man with his too neatly pressed trousers, carefully folded raincoat and neatly tied tie, and the obviously new shoes.

Shortly after boarding the train Jack had opened the window of the door to look out. He didn’t know why; there certainly wasn’t anyone to see him off and he no longer felt any real attachment for Sheffield - in fact he was quite glad to see the back of the place. Before sitting down he’d closed the window, but had inadvertently left a small gap at the top. Soon after they were underway the train entered a long tunnel and the compartment filled with a dirty yellow, sulphurous smoke. Jack leapt to his feet, grabbed the large leather strap and pulled it down so sharply that the window shot to the top with such a force that it nearly smashed the glass.

‘Bloody hell!’ he exclaimed. ‘Sorry about that - it nearly gassed us all.’

‘Don’t worry, mate. No damage done and that’s nothing like gas,’ said the ex-soldier. ‘I could tell you a thing or two about gas, it’s...’ The sentence died as the haunted look once again took charge of his face.

‘No, everything is alright,’ added the young man. The worried wife said nothing, but an attempt at a small smile signalled that she agreed. The ice and the silence had been broken - conversation started and began to feed upon itself, eagerly gathering in strength.

‘Where you off to then, mate?’ ‘Greatcoat’ asked Jack.

‘Well I’ve had an almighty row with me Old Man. I’ve been on the trawlers out of Grimsby for a while - up in the Arctic - but I’ve had enough of that, so I’m off to London to see if I can make a go of it down there.’

‘What about the steel works - couldn’t you get a job there?’ asked Greatcoat.

‘I did two years there after I left school. That was what the row was about - he wanted me to go back and I didn’t want to.’

‘We’re off to Canterbury, but I’ve heard Welwyn Garden City is very nice,’ chipped in Mrs Greatcoat, suddenly eager not to be left out of the conversation.

The surprised look on the young man’s face when Jack was talking about the row with his Old Man was apparent. Jack thought the lad probably came from the kind of house where he wasn’t allowed even to mildly disagree with his father, let alone have a row with him.

‘What’s your name then, young ’un?’ said Greatcoat to the lad. ‘Where are you off to?’

The lad started.

‘Sorry, I was miles away. I’m David White and I’m going to London to join the RAF. It was my father’s idea.’

Then eagerly he began to relate some of the stories that his father had told him. All the conversation that had been bottled-up inside suddenly was set free, and it became clear that he was good with words. He held them captivated for quite some time.

A little later, Mr and Mrs Greatcoat - now revealed to be called George and Esme - insisted on sharing their sandwiches with Jack and David. They were just finishing them as the train pulled into Nottingham station. Before the train had completely stopped Jack opened the door and jumped on to the platform.

‘Shan’t be a minute - keep my seat,’ he called out. With that, he headed off in the direction of the waiting room. The door had been slammed shut and the rear guard had just blown his whistle when Jack appeared outside the carriage door, gesturing with his head for them to open the door. David nervously obliged and Jack jumped into the compartment carrying four mugs of tea. George slammed the door shut just as the train jerked into motion.

‘We were sure that you’d missed it,’ said Esme, looking more worried than ever.

‘How did you manage to do that without spilling it all?’ asked David, suitably impressed.

‘Oh, you soon learn that trick at sea,’ said Jack, smiling and passing round the LNER cups, pleased to be able to repay his companions’ kindness. The tea went down very well.

As they put down their empty cups, the corridor door was abruptly pushed open by the rear guard, a tallish man with an officious bearing, a thin pencil moustache and a thin pencil face.

‘Who opened that door after I had blown my whistle?’

David looked pale and frightened, but before he could say anything Jack was on his feet.

‘I opened it, guard. There was a crowd at the buffet so it took me longer than I expected. Sorry - I didn’t mean to cause any problems for you.’

The guard put on a self-satisfied sneer. ‘Don’t you realise, you young whippersnapper, that you were breaking railway regulations? This is a very serious breach of the rules and these cups here...’

Jack interrupted him. ‘I did say sorry, guard.’

‘Well for your information, sorry is not good enough.’ He prepared to start once again. Jack, now flushed with anger, brushed past him into the corridor, turned and snapped:

‘Thee get tha sen out here!’ in his anger momentarily reverting to the dialect that he’d grown up with. Jack abruptly slammed the door shut behind the guard, who turned to glower at him. When he caught Jack’s eye, he received a very nasty shock - a terrifying metamorphosis had taken place. This was very different to the young man that he’d been ticking off in the compartment. Those penetrating blue eyes were as cold as the ice in the Arctic where Jack had spent so much time during his formative years. Although the guard stood head and shoulders above him, it was as though their roles had been reversed. The guard turned quite pale. From the impressive width of Jack’s shoulders it was easy to visualise the powerful arms and torso beneath the dark blue seaman’s jumper that he was wearing - he’d been described by some of his shipmates as being ‘built like a small brick shithouse.’

Now it was Jack’s turn. In his time at sea he’d learnt quite a few choice variations of the English language - he’d been taught by well-practised experts.

‘Now listen here, you pig-shit of an excuse for a man,’ Jack began, his voice with the cutting edge of a polar wind. ‘I left the train to get cups of tea for my friends in there. In case you haven’t noticed, one of them’s a woman who’s in the family way and her husband is an ex-soldier - unlike yourself - who’s spent years of his bloody life fighting and getting wounded for the effing likes of you. They don’t need any jumped-up bugger trying to throw his weight around upsetting them and making an almighty bloody fuss over a pissing little thing like opening a door.’

Jack continued uninterrupted and uninterruptable for several minutes, his language becoming progressively more Anglo-Saxon.

The guard’s thin lips became tight and white at the edges, his jaw muscles making small convulsing bulges near his ears and his cheeks taking on a purple tinge. Nobody talked to him like this. He would not have it - but he did and he kept silent. For the first time in his life he was completely intimidated - even the Head Stationmaster didn’t frighten him this much. It was the eyes of the young man, his voice and the way that he held himself, the very essence of fearless and aggressive strength... but most of all it was the eyes.

In a moment of courage the guard started to say, in a conciliatory tone: ‘Well sir, I had waved my flag and...’ He was cut short by a look from Jack that sent a chill through him, making him wish that he’d kept quiet.

‘You can take your flag and stick it up your arse for all I care, so piss off and crawl back into your hole.’ With that Jack turned and re-entered the compartment. The guard didn’t follow, but returned to the rear guard’s van, to brood and think of all the quick answers that he should have made - but in his heart of hearts he knew that he would not have dared.

For a while after the confrontation in the corridor, the atmosphere in the compartment was very strained and subdued but before the train was halfway to London they were busily chatting once again. ‘And what’s tha going to do now?’ His Old Man’s words met, mingled and merged with a chance remark of David’s and sowed the seeds of an idea in Jack’s mind and the seed of his future with it.

How many lives at some time or another have been changed by a chance remark, or just a single word? Probably most - the capricious nature of fate cannot be denied and so it was for Jack. Although when he looked back he could not be sure which of David’s comments it had been that formed the pivotal point in his life, Jack was fairly certain that it must have been something that David had said about working in hot places. That, without doubt, had more appeal than the thought of spending more time in those bitterly cold Arctic waters. Four years of sailing to the fishing grounds had been hard, very hard, and he’d definitely had enough, even if the chance of finding another berth occurred. He’d become a first-rate seaman - a leading hand - and maybe he might have made skipper in ten years, that is if he lived that long. Every winter some poor sods didn’t return from the ‘fishing grounds’, and Jack had no intention of joining the numbers of those lost at sea.

‘It sounds as if joining the RAF might suit me.’ This remark of Jack’s was the only stimulus that David needed - certainly no recruiting Sergeant could have extolled the virtues of a life in the RAF more eloquently or persuasively. During one of David’s more dramatic accounts of a desert battle involving the air-force, George chipped in with an urgent note of caution.

‘Easy on, young ’un - fighting ain’t fun at all, not when all them bullets and shells is whizzing round and you’re not sure if the next one’s got your name on it. All of them who tells you how good it is ain’t never seen what it’s really like. Maybe up in them airplanes it’s alright, but on the ground it’s bloody awful. Oh! Sorry, Es,’ he added quickly, turning to his wife. ‘She don’t like me talking about the war, and she don’t like me swearing. I gets to dreaming about it - well it’s more like nightmares to tell the truth.’

‘I hope she didn’t hear me in the corridor,’ thought Jack. She had, but she was secretly glad that someone had stood up for her and George. It was a long time since she had felt that anyone was on their side.

David continued, using less lurid descriptions. He was telling them about some of the attacks on the Mad Mullah’s bands in Somaliland by a Wing Commander Bowhill, when Esme interrupted him.

‘Sounds like the adventures of Lawrence of Arabia,’ she said. ‘Was it in the same place?’ David was visibly disappointed that his own tale was not captivating enough, but he diplomatically told her that it was somewhere near there. She could see that he’d missed the point of her asking the question, so she quickly said: ‘Oh! Don’t think that your story ain’t exciting enough - it is, but we used to hear so much about Lawrence.’

He seemed mollified and continued. In fact he continued enthusiastically for quite some time, but clearly felt that he was then hogging the conversation, so politely stopped to let others have their say. Jack got the impression that David had many more tales about the RAF still to tell.

George started to tell them about what had been happening to himself and Esme: ‘Of course it was ‘good old George’ when I got back from the war, but not good enough for me to get me old job back. I managed to get a few odd jobs here and there, but not the work that I used to do, and the money’s been very poor - things have been pretty tough.’

‘I know what you mean, George,’ said Jack, remembering the difficulties that his family were enduring. George was anxious to continue his story and Jack could see this...

‘So you were saying, George?’

‘Oh yes, well, Es and me got engaged before I went off to join Kitchener’s Army, but we waited until after the war before we got married. With so little money coming in we haven’t been able to set up our own home yet, and have a real married life, if you know what I mean.’ David clearly didn’t, but of course Jack did.

‘You see, we’ve been living with Es’s mum and dad, and although they’ve been very good to us it’s not the same as having your own place. Anyhow, things are on the up-and-up now.’ His face brightened as he went on to tell of their recent chance of a change in their fortunes. ‘I’ve managed to get this job on a farm near Blean, not far from Canterbury, as a stockman. You see, that’s the work I’m used to.’

‘And a cottage goes with the job,’ added Esme, her smiling face indicated how important this was to her.

‘Only just in time, love. I expect you’ve noticed that me missus is expecting.’ He smiled and Esme blushed a little, and for a short while, her face lost some of its worried look. She took George’s comments as a cue for her to take up the story.

‘It’s due in just under three months.’

There was a lull in the conversation.

‘You must come and see us, if you can, after the baby’s born. We would like that, we would be ever so pleased to see you, wouldn’t we, George?’

He smiled and nodded his agreement.

‘Here, George!’ said Esme, taking a used envelope from a Lipton’s brown paper carrier bag by her feet. ‘Put our new address on that for Jack and David.’

George rummaged in the pocket of his greatcoat and eventually produced the stub of an indelible pencil. Wetting the tip, he printed with painstaking care, sticking his purple-tipped tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he wrote, in a rather childlike hand, the address to which they were heading.

David took the envelope from George.

‘We would like very much to come and see you and the baby if we get the chance. Wouldn’t we, Jack?’

It was Jack’s turn to nod an agreement, but it had not escaped his notice that David was assuming that the two of them would be together at this future date. Had his face given away what he’d been thinking? A bit unlikely, thought Jack, as he recalled one of his earlier nicknames - ‘old poker face.’

By the time they’d reached London, Jack had agreed to go to Burlington Gardens with David so that he could find out a bit more about the RAF. Jack was no wide-eyed youngster easily persuaded by romantic tales, but he did realise that when all the layers of excited description were peeled from what David had said, at the heart there appeared to be a pretty good prospect of a satisfying job, and he certainly liked the sound of it. Nevertheless he would need more information before he made up his mind. One impulsive decision was enough for one day.

George suggested to Jack that he should think about it very carefully.

‘You want to go easy, Jack. Service life ain’t all fun and games,’ he said.

David looked quite downcast at this comment but didn’t say anything. Shortly after this the train pulled into Kings Cross station and they all hastily gathered-up their luggage and disembarked. Jack and David said cheerio to George and Esme and promised to try to visit them after their baby was born. The two pairs waved to each other as they set off on their separate ways, George and Esme to the farm near Canterbury, Jack and David into the unknown.