The Runaways (11 page)

Her grooming finished, Yarra loped away down hill from the tank. At the bottom of the dip she found a pool of rain water and drank. For the next two hours she circled wide over the plain and saw many other old tank targets dotted along the down sides and hill crests. She was on the eastern portion of Salisbury Plain, an area about six miles long and five miles deep. The whole plain was about twenty to thirty miles long, a vast expanse of rolling, dun-coloured grass and downland broken here and there by smooth, shallow valleys and combes and an occasional isolated clump of trees on a ridge. In some of the deeper valleys were scrub and thorn areas. Over the whole stretch there was not a plough-patch to be seen, not a domestic animal to be found grazing. The land all belonged to the Ministry of Defence and the public for the most part was excluded. When people were admitted on special days or at the week-ends they had to keep to the rough tracks and roads which criss-crossed the plain and which were marked at frequent intervals with notices that read:

DANGER–UNEXPLODED MISSILES
DO NOT LEAVE THE CARRIAGEWAYS
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

When the red flags were flying at the Army entrance points to the plain, known as Vedettes, nobody was allowed entry except the military personnel engaged in training or manoeuvres. For the whole of the great expanse of the plain there were five Land Wardens who patrolled the roads and tracks in Land-Rovers to see that no unauthorized persons came into the area. For the eastern portion of the plain, where Yarra was, there were two Wardens.

Great tank tracks scored the slopes and plateaux of the plain. Where the tanks had permanent road crossings these were marked with black-and-yellow-topped posts to warn car drivers of the thick mud they might expect to find on the road.

It was a wide, desolate area given over by day to the troops, though even they were lost in its vastness. Also, it was the home of many wild creatures – the hare, the fox, the stoat and weasel, the wild deer, the rat and the rabbit and a few families of feral cats – household pets that had wandered into the wilderness and reverted to their ancestors'old way of life. Sometimes a sheep-killing rogue dog round sanctuary on the barren terrain and made forays at night down into the farmlands that bordered it. In the air above the plain flew the buzzard, the kestrel and the sparrow hawk, all of them ever alert for the movement below of pheasant, partridge, and the small birds that lived in the tall grasses, the thickets and patches of wood. In fact, although the plain looked barren, it teemed with life – raven, rook, and wood pigeon, all the mice and shrews, and the gentle slow-worm, the inoffensive grass snake, and the swift adder. At one time, unhappily extinct now and commemorated by the name of an inn on the western part of the plain, one could have seen the great bustard.

This then was the area into which Yarra had moved and close to which Smiler had found a job. Just as Smiler on his first day of work had eaten well, so did Yarra as she roamed the plain.

Walking away from the rainwater pool, she saw the movement of a field mouse in the grass and caught it in a single bound. Like an ordinary cat, she played with it for a while, throwing it around her, bounding and leaping about it as though it were still alive and trying to escape her. Then she carried it in her mouth for a little while, became bored with it, and dropped it for a scavenging crow to find an hour later.

She put up a rabbit from behind a boulder and raced, doubled and twisted with it at her leisure and finally killed and ate it. Half an hour later she flushed one of the feral cats from a clump of gorse. It was a three-year-old tabby tom. He streaked to a nearby solitary dead pine and found sanctuary on a branch eight feet above Yarra. He arched his back, lofted his tail stiffly, and spat and swore down at her. Yarra sat back on her haunches, eyed him, and spat and hissed back. But she had no desire to leap or climb after him. Maybe, deep within her, was some feeling that made her content with a brief passage of family formalities.

At mid-day, she lay in the sun just below a ridge top, her orange and black pelt merging into her background so that from fifty yards she was practically invisible. A mile away, on a distant slope, sat an old Churchill tank. As Yarra blinked her golden-amber eyes against the sun, watching the tank, there was a loud crack of noise away to her right. Almost immediately, alongside the tank, the earth fountained upwards in a plume of mud, grass tufts and black smoke. Yarra flinched at the sight, and gave a silent gape of her jaws to show her displeasure.

There was another crumping, cracking noise from the left. This time an anti-tank shell hit the Churchill in the fore part of its hull. A large piece of plating flew up into the air, spinning like an ungainly black butterfly, the whirr of its clumsy wings coming distinctly across the valley to Yarra's keen ears.

Yarra got up and moved away, going over the downland ridge behind her and seeking another resting place. She was at the start of learning many lessons. She was to come to know the sound of guns firing, the crack of a rifle, the mad chatter of automatic weapons, the whip-crack of artillery and the slow, heavy thump of large calibre shells exploding – and to move away from all such sounds. She was to come to recognize the deployed line of battle-dressed infantrymen moving up to a crest, the rattle of an approaching tank or troop carrier, the movement of Army jeeps on road and grassland, the monstrous gnat-song of helicopters in the air above – and to move away from them all. But on most days the plain was free to her and the other animals and birds during the early morning hours and again in the slow-stretching evening hours, from five or six o'clock onwards, when the Army packed up its warlike gear and went back to barracks and billets at the sprawling garrisons and encampments of Larkhill, Bulford, Tidworth and Warminster. All this Yarra was to learn, but not without danger and many a sharp lesson, given once and not forgotten.

On this, her first day, she moved and hunted in comparative peace. She killed two hares in the afternoon and ate them both. Since she only needed about three pounds of meat a day to keep her satisfied, and had now had far more than this, she hunted no more. It was this that saved the life of a young deer that, hidden in a stretch of bracken, scented her as she approached downwind. The deer broke cover and went away in a long, leaping, bounding run. Momentarily Yarra moved in pursuit, impelled by a natural reflex action. But after a few yards, she broke off the chase and stalked into the bracken from which the hind had broken. She found the deer's couching place, sniffed around it and then lay down and rolled and scrubbed her back on it, taking pleasure from the deer's scent just as a dog rolls in ecstasy over the long dead body of rabbit or rat.

As the light began to go from the sky, and great banks of high-towering, dark rain-clouds slowly formed in the west and began a ponderous sweep across the plain, Yarra went back to her tank. She found her way easily for at no time during the day had she been more than a couple of miles from it. She slipped into the hull as darkness came and sniffed around. She played for a moment with an empty beer bottle and then stopped because she disliked the noise it made on the steel flooring. She arranged her bed, dropped to it, stretched herself, shook her head and settled to sleep.

Seven or eight miles away Smiler was settling down for the night in the barn. He had arrived home at last light. The door had been shut all day so that he knew Yarra could not be in the barn. In fact, the garage assistant (all the local inhabitants were full of gossip about the escaped cheetah) from whom he had bought his bicycle lamp had told him that the radio had reported that it was thought that the cheetah had gone down river towards Wilton and Salisbury. Anyway, she hadn't been sighted by anyone that day.

With Ford Cottage itself all neat and tidy, and no obvious signs in it of Smiler's brief occupation, Smiler now took up permanent quarters in the barn. He had everything there he needed. He had his clothes, the borrowed radio, two borrowed blankets from the spare bedroom, a small store of food he had bought in a Sutton Veny grocer's on the way back, and drinking and washing water in a bucket he had found in the lower part of the barn. He had his bicycle lamp for light should he need it, soft hay to sleep on, the alarm clock to wake him in the morning, and the bolt across the trapdoor so that no one could take him by surprise during the night. The first day of a new regime was almost over. He had got himself fixed up. He had got himself a job that paid well and gave him one square meal a day. Samuel M., he told himself, you are in clover. He switched on the radio very low and lay back for some pleasant listening before he drifted off to sleep.

Back at Danebury House in the large, untidy sitting-room Mrs Angela Lakey was sitting in one of the leather armchairs before the fire, smoking a cigar and sipping now and then at a glass of whisky. Tonks was asleep before the fire. Miss Milly was sitting in the other chair, writing out the monthly bills for the kennel boarders.

She sipped now and then at a glass of sweet marsala wine of which, she was very fond, although it tended to give her indigestion.

Mrs Lakey said, ‘Well, what do you think of the boy, Milly?'

‘He's a good boy, Jelly.' Jelly was her nickname for her sister and Mrs Lakey had learned to put up with it over the years, though she didn't like it.

‘Could be,' announced Mrs Lakey slowly. ‘Tonks has taken to him. That's a good sign.'

‘I've taken to him, too,' said Miss Milly, and added, ‘The next time I'm over Crockerton way I think I'll call in and have a word with his aunt.' Then, after sipping at her glass of marsala again, she went on, ‘And Jelly – you were doing your mean act with him. For all the work that Johnny has to do seven pounds a week is not enough. He should have eight.'

‘Nonsense, Milly. Seven's ample. Boys should work for the love of a job. All they want is a little pocket money to keep them happy.'

‘Eight' said Miss Milly. ‘ He's got to pay his way with his aunt.'

‘Seven, Milly.'

‘Eight, Jelly.'

Mrs Lakey sighed and said, ‘Toss you for it.'

‘Right,' said Miss Milly and she produced a well-worn double-headed coin from her handbag. She spun it on the table and, as it revolved on the polished surface, said, ‘Heads eight, tails seven.'

The coin settled down and showed a head.

‘I win,' said Miss Milly, smiling.

Grinning, Mrs Lakey said, ‘ You always do.'

‘Only when right is on my side. Anyway, I'm glad for Johnny. He's got a nice smile.'

‘And you've got a soft heart, Milly.'

‘And so have you, Jelly. Only you don't show it often. Yes, as soon as I get a chance I'll go and see his aunt. Poor Johnny, how awful losing his mother and father like that.'

When Smiler arrived at work the next morning he was greeted first by Tonks, and then by Mrs Lakey at the back door and invited in for a cup of coffee. This, he discovered was to be the usual custom. Over the coffee Mrs Lakey told him he was such a likely-looking lad and showed such signs of being a good worker that she had decided to up his wages to eight pounds a week. However, he would have to take on cleaning out the stables and feeding Penny and Bacon. Later, if he showed any signs of taking to it, she would teach him how to ride. ‘Though,' she said ‘ you're going to be too big, Boy, ever to make a jockey. But you look as though you may have a good seat and a fair pair of hands.'

During the following days Smiler buckled down to his job with cheerfulness and a good will, and soon knew his way around the place. Among the animals some soon became great favourites with him.

Of the setters he particularly liked two. One was a yellow and white English setter dog called – though not on his Kennel Club pedigree – Lemon Drop. The other was a black and tan Gordon setter bitch. Although called Fairy, she was just the opposite, being big, heavy and clumsy, but with a fair turn of speed whenever she put up a rabbit. When he took the dogs for the afternoon walk around the paddock and up the little valley beyond it, he always had to keep an eye on Lemon Drop because the dog had a habit of wandering. Wherever Smiler went Tonks would go with him – unless he was away with Mrs Lakey somewhere.

There was plenty of coming and going at Danebury House. People came to look over puppies they were thinking of buying, people brought and fetched cats and dogs from the boarding kennels, and once the Hunt met there before going off one Saturday. It was on that day that Smiler saw Mrs Lakey in all her glory. She was mounted on Bacon, wearing a black top hat, a creamy white cravat at her throat, black hunting boots on which Miss Milly had put a shine that, she said, ‘would wipe the eye of the sun itself'.

Smiler got to know all the calling tradesmen: the butcher, the baker, the milkman and the dogs' meat man who called twice a week. And everyone got to know Smiler (Johnny) and to accept him. Miss Milly fussed over him like a mother hen and he fed like royalty. Outside, Mrs Lakey kept him hard at work. He grew stronger and harder, and could hump a hundredweight sack without trouble, and wheel twelve loads of stable and kennel litter in an hour without being troubled for breath. After two weeks Mrs Lakey put him up on Penny and gave him his first riding lesson. It ended with him being thrown into a quaggy, watercress pool in the middle of the paddock when Penny saw one of her private fairies. But at the end of the first week Mrs Lakey said, ‘ Good, Boy. You look less like a sack of hay on a seesaw than you did.'

On the road between Crockerton and Heytesbury people got to know Smiler on his morning and evening passage and waved to him. At Ford Cottage he had fallen into an easy routine. He slept in the barn and before he left hid all his belongings away under the hay. He went into the cottage every night when he got back and checked the mail which had been delivered in case there was a postcard from Major Collingwood to Mrs Bagnall saying that he was coming back. He saw Mrs Bagnall once or twice as he passed Lodge Cottage on the Sutton Veny road. On Sunday – which was usually his day off unless Miss Milly or Mrs Lakey wanted him to do something special for overtime work – he would get on his bike and explore the country and then go into Warminster to the cinema in the evening. He earned eight pounds a week and saved the best part of it, slowly amassing a small hoard of pound notes which he kept in a tin box behind a loose board in the barn loft.