The Broken Chariot (4 page)

Phaeton expatiates on the golden precision of time, and declaims on the Sun God's control of the calendar, without which the earth would exist in eternal gloom. The only wish he could possibly make is to have a go at driving his father's chariot of the sun across the heavens, from dawn in the east to darkness in the west.

Half-wild horses are already snorting and whinnying behind the stable doors and Phaeton in his eagerness moves forward to open them, but Phoebus pulls him back, while all the spectators of this mighty drama yell for him to do so. Phoebus regrets his promise. ‘Only I can control them in their anger at having to go, and stifle their hurry to get there once they begin.'

Phoebus argues eloquently that the fiery chargers, once harnessed to the chariot, obey no one but him, and even he needs all his power to keep them on course. He knows for a certainty that Phaeton, his very own and handsome son whom he has just met, will be killed if he tries to drive a vehicle for which he has not the strength, skill or experience. ‘Ask me anything but that, my own resplendent lad!' Phaeton ignores such piffling appeals to reason. ‘You are a god, and promised to grant me a wish, any wish, and a god cannot go back on a promise.' Phoebus is forced to relent. ‘As my sun chariot each day is driven across the sky, so Fate must also take its course. Oh Fate, be kind!'

Phaeton exults as the steeds are led prancing and snorting out. He gets into the chariot – bodged together from a barrow out of the garden but decorated with blue paper and silver stars. Putting forth all his strength, with a heart not constant enough for any possibility of fulfilling his task, Phaeton sets off in hope of triumph.

The first stage is easy, as the animals smell the heavens and the distance they have to go, but everything happens as his father had predicted. In despair he watches his son struggle with the reins. Phaeton cannot believe that horses won't obey the laws of his dashing confidence.

Refusing to listen, they miss the signals, play wilfully and maliciously, zig this way and zag that, though Phaeton hopes they will sooner or later come to heel and take him calmly on. The struggle is noble and prolonged. Such half-tamed horses don't like to obey. Phaeton fights valiantly until, disastrously losing control, the end is certain. Yet there is something in Phaeton which enjoys this part of his travail (played to the full by Herbert) even when the chariot is breaking up.

Pieces slew all over the universal stage, a small piece, a bigger one, then one wheel, and the other. The four horses of Phaeton's apocalypse spiral across the sky to leave a wake of appalling destruction among the planets and on earth. Only when Jupiter hurls a sizzling thunderbolt and sends Phaeton to his doom is the universe saved from further havoc.

Herbert's speeches turned Phaeton into himself and himself into Phaeton, as he willed the horses to avoid his fate. At one moment he regrets that Phaeton did not take the advice of Phoebus Apollo and ask for a different wish – and he thinks of so many now that this had gone wrong – yet he exults in the glory of what he had become, and in the catastrophe he had provoked, accepting the change from nonentity to immortal charioteer, though it had cost him his life.

Three

Summer went on tramlines, winter on bumpy tracks. Every day after Christmas was endless and onerous, classrooms pungent with the stink of mildewed wood and damp wallpaper. Herbert knew something was wrong, that the life he was living was no life at all, so that when daffodils along the pathways opened into cups of brilliant yellow he told himself in the cold showers one morning after a run that he'd had enough.

Dominic responded in the one sure way to encourage him. ‘You'll end up in awful trouble. You're bound to get caught.'

Days were dragging by so ponderously he knew that when looking back on them it would seem as if they had gone quickly. A spot of table tennis in the games room didn't help. ‘I won't be. I'd rather die than stay in this prison camp. In fact I have to go before I do die.'

‘I'll miss you, then.'

‘Same here.' His compass for the escape came out of a Christmas cracker, and though the north point took minutes to settle it would have to do. He stole keys to certain doors, and knew how to open windows which were supposed to be locked; in any case there were so many that not all of them could be. His bag of essentials was concealed under an evergreen bush in the wood, wrapped against the wet in an anti-gas cape purloined from the cadet stores. Eight pound notes folded in half thickened his wallet.

‘Can I come with you?'

‘Keep your damned voice down, and serve.'

‘I'll be no trouble. Curse it, I missed!'

‘A person only has a chance to get clean away if he's by himself.' Herbert was sorry he'd told him. ‘Do it later, if you like.'

‘I'll be no good without you.'

‘Oh, stop whining, or I'll give you a bloody nose. Just remember me to Rachel.'

‘She doesn't care about you. She thinks you're stuck up. She wrote it in a letter.'

‘So much the worse for her.' He put an arm on Dominic's shoulder, then took it away in case anyone else came in. ‘Let's pack up this stupid game.'

‘What about your parents?' Dominic believed he was trying to live out one of his fantasies. ‘Have you thought of them?'

‘You must be crackers.' He couldn't find the right tone, so shaped his most effective sneer. ‘Haven't seen them in years. I even forget what they look like.'

‘They'll be very cut up.'

He certainly hoped so. ‘Serve 'em right. I'll bump into you one day, I expect.'

Seeing him unassailable, Dominic promised to turn Nelson's blind eye on his escapade, wished him good luck, and, fatuously, hoped they wouldn't recapture him before reaching neutral territory.

Wearing plimsolls, and boots around his neck, he went after midnight into the headmaster's study and found his Identity Card in the alphabetical file, heartbeats calm, steady fingers following his flashlight's beam.

The main door, daunting and heavily studded, was unbolted, but even so he slid up the library window without it squeaking and went over the sill. Good field craft enabled him to reach the outer fence, where he used a rope hidden behind a greenhouse cloche to scale the wall in the best
Caged Birds
tradition.

Darkness made him feel more than usually cold, though his battle-dress was buttoned and scarf well folded inside. Under cover of the wood he pulled on his boots, laced them well, and put the plimsolls under his arm. He had counted the paces in from a certain post so as to find the bush which covered his few possessions wrapped in the cape. Picking up a dead stick to poke the cabbage-smelling soil he wondered why it wasn't where it was supposed to be. Such mishaps always occurred when you set out on the great escape, but cold sweat pricked his face as he prodded the soft earth in different places, and looked under all shrubs within reasonable radius.

Fury at his incompetence would betray him. There was no saying how wide of the mark he was. If you made one mistake you made another. And then another. To bolt without a change of civvy clothes, toilet articles, penknife, and Barney's copy of
Caged Birds
would turn him into a cadet-scarecrow never daring to show his face. Luckily the school ordnance map was folded into his tunic pocket, as well as a few other odds and ends.

He stood a full minute without moving, telling himself that his exploit was now in the realm of real life. He was over the wall, but could go back if he liked, and be warm again in bed, where he had a dummy of himself made of pillows and discarded kit. Barney's flashlight was dim, and he had chosen a night before he might think to install a new battery. Who, in any case, would dream of someone doing a bunk? He wanted to go back but couldn't, because it was safer to push on. I'd look a right fool getting caught on my way back because I'd turned yellow.

Hang around much longer and I'll be seen and recaptured. He returned to the edge of the wood, took out his luminously dialled compass, and once more measured the paces in. The moonless night was no help, since all the bushes looked and felt the same in his beam of light, already less brilliant than when he had set out.

Another navigational run in, with more methodical poking, and the stick tapped what he was looking for. A sneeze shot out that must have been heard for half a mile. Of course, it always did at this stage. He stood awhile, still and silent, holding his nose to stop another. Using his handkerchief to mop the mucus, he thought it exceptionally bad luck to be stricken with the full house of a cold on getaway night.

Trees and hedges were indistinguishable in the dark and, well behind his timetable, he used his compass to cross fields, his previous daylight reconnaissance only a vague help. The outline of a great elm took out the mixture of stars and cloud, made the night a deeper pitch of black. He paused to get a bearing, and the fluting bars of an owl's beat startled and prodded him on till he broke through the hedge at the exact point where the lane forked. Exulting in his skill – and jolly good luck – all he had to do now was march half a mile by the cover of the right-hand hedge and find the main road.

To move without noise meant putting the plimsolls back on, but he didn't have them. Another mistake. They must have dropped while poking for his bundle among the trees. Now his pursuers would have a clue as to the direction. Listening for the noise of bloodhounds, he heard only the wind which hid the sound of him knocking claggy soil from his boots against the bole of a tree.

Anyway, I'm not a caged bird bloke in bloody Germany, he smiled. I'm on the run from a rotten school, and they'll never catch me. At the junction both ways seemed feasible. Either could lead to disaster, so he shrugged and headed to the right because the sky seemed faintly lighter that way.

After half an hour's carefree stroll a lorry came grinding up behind. Daylight showed in grey patches above the trees, and the birds were waking up, so he would have to be more careful. Walking along the inside of hedges and going from field to field would mean making only a few miles before nightfall, so he thought it best to get into a couldn't care less mood and nonchalantly put his thumb up for a lift.

An RAF corporal with a bushy moustache and big tobacco-stained hands helped him into the back. ‘Going far, lanky?'

‘Bristol, eventually,' Herbert said.

‘So are we, right to the station.' The man winked while lighting a cigarette. He offered one, which was declined. ‘You aren't a deserter, are you? Bit early to be about. What's in that bundle? Swag?'

Herbert pressed his tunic to make sure of the wallet in his inside pocket. ‘Good Lord, no. I'm off to Bristol to meet a friend.'

The corporal laughed. ‘A bint, eh? We're to pick up some erks back from France. War'll be over soon, anyway.'

‘I sincerely hope not.'

‘I suppose a lot of you young 'uns do. I've done four years, and can't wait to get out. The Russians are near Berlin, that's one good thing. It was on the wireless last night.'

Herbert had heard the same, and felt they had no right to be, because he still wanted the fray of battle, dazed by smoke and noise and not thinking of death or wounds. Draped with ammunition and a heavy machine gun, he zigzagged along the street of a German city.

But the corporal was right: it was getting towards the end, which for a while made him wonder why exactly he had broken out.

Sombre fields and hills beckoned him to the comfort and security of captivity, as he had supposed it would at this stage of the escape, but he smiled the unhelpful notion away, and only knew that he was hungry. The squalid bomb-damaged streets of Bristol put him in two minds about the war in Europe ending. The fact could only be good, though while standing in line for a wad and char on Temple Meads station he assumed that the Japanese would go on fighting for at least another three years. He might – and it brought a smile – meet up with his father in the jungles of Arakan. ‘Hello, Herbert! Good to see you. All right?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Splendid. Now, we've just put a bridgehead across the river down there. Take your platoon over, and see that we keep it, there's a good chap.'

He got on the London train before any policeman could loom up with a pair of handcuffs. Everyone standing in the corridor could be his enemy, but freedom belonged to him alone, as long as he looked as if he owned the train and had every right to be on it. Gloating at having outfoxed his pursuers so far let him put on his most superior and supercilious expression.

His only plan, if plan there was, had been to get to the nearest big town and then clear of it. With luck and intuition he had succeeded. Acting on impulse might make him harder to track down. He locked himself in the toilet, as his carriage wheeled at speed through the Wiltshire Downs, changed into jacket and trousers, and dropped his khaki rig out of the window just before Hungerford. Back to a different seat, where no one could possibly know him, he read a few pages of
Caged Birds
, which firmly bolted reality out of his mind. Time went as fast as the train, a dotted stream of pale smoke when he glanced out, as if denoting the uncertainty of his expedition.

At Paddington he went through the ticket barrier and into the welcoming noise of London with a group of soldiers. Motors and cartwheels brushed his heels as he ran across Praed Street into a luggage store. The grubby yet strong-looking case had belonged to a sailor, an RN service number crested along the side. He latched and unlatched it, felt the material and gripped its handle. The man in a khaki overall behind the counter wanted four pounds, but called out he could have it for three when Herbert turned to leave. His belongings fitted easily, which made him feel a traveller at last.

A ten-mile radius of built-up area was protection from the world so far unknown. A needle in a haystack had nothing on this, and on Edgware Road a sign drew him into the Underground. After a while he felt so much like being buried among the mummies of an Egyptian tomb that he got out and walked by Cambridge Circus to Trafalgar Square.