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1. Low Flying

When the car stopped Andrew was the first to get out.

Since they left the old house, four hours ago, he had been trapped in the back, wedged between the carrycot and the guinea-pig hutch. On one side Edward growled to himself in the carrycot and on the other the guinea pigs whistled fretfully.

Andrew climbed over the hutch and was out on the road before Mum had switched off the engine. He had been sitting in one position for so long that his knees cracked when he tried to straighten them. On the far side of the car, Dad climbed out with all the maps on his lap. Andrew heard them slither to the ground, one after the other.

Mum was the last out. She was also the tallest, which was why she was driving, with the seat pushed back as far as it would go, instead of navigating in the passenger seat, which was pushed forward to make room for the crate of beer bottles behind it.

‘“Only three hours to Pallingham,”’ said Mum, quoting something that Dad had said earlier, before they set out. ‘Eighty minutes to the hour, by my watch.’

‘You should have followed my directions, I had the maps,’ said Dad, scrabbling for them underneath the car.

‘If I’d followed your directions we’d be a mile out to sea by now, and heading for Denmark.’

Andrew left them arguing and crossed the lane to look at the new house. All he could see from the car was a gate in the hedge and the name on it. ‘Tiler’s Cottage’. He had hoped that a country cottage would be thatched but presumably a tiler wouldn’t have thatch on his roof.

He could see very little more from across the lane. The house was long and low, lurking behind the bushes with its head down. The only visible part was the roof, tiled, with a window in it. He had been promised the attic room for his own, but he noticed that the window was broken. He wondered what kind of a view he would get through it and turned round to look.

It was all sky.

Apart from the house and the hedge it was all sky. He had always imagined that if you lived in a flat place you could see for miles across the rolling plains but now he found that it wasn’t so. The horizon was in the next field.

It was a field of furry barley. Andrew, having lived all his life in towns, had never seen barley except in a photograph. He was rather pleased to see it alive and growing in a Norfolk field. The geography master had taught Andrew that Norfolk was flat, fertile, and full of water. Andrew had never found any good reason for believing what he was told in geography lessons, so he was almost surprised to find that it wasn’t a mountainous desert, littered with bones.

The field opposite the house was full of green plants that looked like beetroot disguised as cabbage.

‘Sugar beet,’ said Dad, coming up behind him. ‘You’ll see it growing all over East Anglia. Come and give us a hand with the livestock, will you?’

Andrew went back to the car and picked up the guinea-pig hutch, which was resting on the bonnet. Mum was carrying Edward; Dad had the crate of beer bottles. He made his own beer and the bottles were all dead men, waiting for the next brew.

They went into the garden and Mum pulled up the house agent’s sign with SOLD stuck on it and put it down behind the hedge.

‘All ours, now,’ she said. Dad unlocked the front door and they went in.

There was no hall. The door led straight into the living room, dark and haunted by the smell of the last owner’s last meal. To the right was a little slip room where the stairs went up. Ahead, another door led into the kitchen. The doorway was so low that Dad’s hair brushed the lintel as he went through. Mum followed and hit her head on it.

Andrew wanted to explore, but he was sent back to the gate to flag down the removal van as it came down the lane.

‘Otherwise it will go straight past and all our furniture will be carried on to Yarmouth and points East,’ said Dad.

‘East of Yarmouth is the sea,’ said Mum. ‘I wish you’d take my headroom into account, next time you chance to be buying a house.’

Andrew went out and took up position on the bank opposite the front gate. There was a long drop into the sugar beet. Looking down, he noticed a rat prancing through the beets. He had always understood rats to be poisonous and dangerous but this rat was clean and genial-looking: a country rat. He stood upright to look around him. Being a little higher meant that he could see further but not very much. Beyond the beet was a tall hedge, then the sky again.

He stood astride the bank and stared up into it, until his eyes went out of focus and his head became so hollow that when he looked down he could see sky underneath him as well as above.

There seemed to be no sound at all.

Then he heard a far-off growl, as faint as a lorry crossing a distant bridge. He scanned the sky until he discovered where it was coming from. Immediately overhead a tiny, dark dot was moving, so slowly that at first he could not be sure that it moved at all. At once, the little sound changed to a furious roar, so suddenly that he half expected to see the sky crazed all over like a cracked bowl. Across the fields came a vicious black aircraft, so low he thought he could have touched it, only when it passed over him he was crouched on the bank with his head down. When he looked up after it, it was no more than a thin slit in the sky out of which rolled wave after wave of booming sound.

‘Are we being dive-bombed?’ asked Mum, over the gate.

‘It was a jet,’ said Andrew. ‘I never saw it coming. I thought it was going to crash but it went up again. I didn’t even hear it till it got here. I was watching another one, higher up.’

He looked, and saw the dot, still cruising above him, unheard now in the backwash of the jet engines, already below the horizon.

‘I wonder if that happens very often,’ said Mum. Andrew’s ears ached. He thought he heard the aircraft coming back again, but it was only the removal van, all forgotten, turning the corner at the end of the lane.

When all the furniture was in and the removal men had drunk their tea and gone away, Mum put Edward in his cot and they sat down to tea in the kitchen. It was a much disturbed meal, for every time they heard an aircraft coming, they rushed outside to see what it was: but the planes flew so fast and so low that there was never time to identify them except in the case of the helicopter that dawdled over, last of all. It was sleek and striped, like a long-distance coach with a rotor on the roof.

‘It’s as good as Farnborough,’ said Dad, ‘without the bother of having to go there.’

‘Did you know about the aeroplanes when you bought the house?’ asked Mum. ‘Were you saving them up as a lovely surprise for me?’

‘Cross my heart,’ said Dad. ‘They weren’t flying when I was last up here. All I saw was the helicopter.’

Andrew wasn’t sure whose side he was on. Although he quite liked watching aeroplanes he had only seen them at close quarters from the observation platform at Gatwick Airport, rather like seeing savage animals safely behind bars at the zoo. Having them at large, all over the sky, was a different matter entirely.

Mum put Edward to bed behind battlements of cardboard boxes and Andrew climbed to his attic with a piece of polythene and adhesive tape to mend his window.

‘We’ll get a piece of glass for that soon,’ said Mum, calling upstairs from the landing. Andrew thought that probably it would not be soon.

The attic room was small and not very light, but it was exactly the kind of room that he wanted. He stood in the middle of it deciding where he would have his wardrobe, his bookcase and his bed which was at present standing on end, behind the door. By the window, the roof sloped right down to the floor. If he put the bed there it would be just like sleeping in a tent.

There was a ledge built into the wall beside it, where he could set up his race track. He opened the tea-chest that contained his belongings and lifting out the ludo board that held them down, began to unpack his racing cars. They were all Formula One, carefully painted in real team colours. He lined them up where the grid was going to be, except for the one that had lost a wheel and was permanently in the pits. There was also one that had been run over by a full-sized car – his father’s – and was useless, except for staging shunts.

He selected his favourite and placed it in pole position and knelt beside the shelf, gently pushing the car back and forth with his finger and thinking that whole squadrons of supersonic fighters could not make up for living a hundred and fifty miles from Brand’s Hatch. When Dad had said that they were going to live in the country, no one but Andrew had taken that into consideration.

‘There’s plenty of country in Kent,’ he said.

‘Plenty of expensive country,’ said Dad, so now they were going to live in Norfolk, surrounded by mad fighter pilots and miles from the nearest race track, unless you counted Snetterton. Andrew didn’t. Not after Brand’s Hatch.

A chilly wind, blowing through the broken window pane, reminded him that he had come up there to mend it. He left the cars and went over to the window to look out. Now that he could see it properly the view was much larger. Beyond the hedge at the end of the beet field was a row of sheds and a toppling straw stack. By leaning out of the window he could see two church towers, a windmill and yet another tower painted in red and white stripes. He wondered if it could be a lighthouse and guessed that the flat place where earth met sky was the coast.

He stuck his piece of polythene over the broken pane and went downstairs. From the landing window the view had shrunk again, but he noticed a roof showing above the trees, further down the road. It must belong to their next-door neighbours, three fields away.

As he was looking out he heard a tremendous thud at the back of his head and a thousand miles away at the same time. He left the window swinging and ran down to the ground floor. Dad was at the foot of the stairs.

‘What was that, was it a bomb?’ said Andrew.

‘No, it wasn’t. Bombs don’t sound like that at all,’ said Dad. He went into the living room and opened the front door. ‘Listen.’

Far off and very high, they heard a jet engine.

‘Sonic boom,’ said Dad. ‘Surely you’ve heard one before?’

‘Not like that,’ said Andrew. ‘Was that plane breaking the sound barrier, then?’

Without thinking about it very much, he imagined the sound barrier as a high, corrugated iron fence in the sky, falling down in sections where aircraft went through it. He knew perfectly well that it was not, but he could even see it, dull red and full of rusty holes. He had first thought of it like that when he was very small and he suspected that even if he ever broke the sound barrier himself, he would never quite get rid of that fence.

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Contents

Your story starts here …

It all started with a scarecrow …

1. Low Flying