Good Enough For Nelson (15 page)

‘Sah.’

‘Carry on, Purple Platoon.’

‘What was all that about?’ asked Purple Platoon, when Bombulada got back to them.

‘I don’t know.’

’For God’s sake Bombulada,’ said McAllester wrathfully, ‘why didn’t you sing out and tell him when he got to a bit you didn’t understand?’

‘I didn’t understand
any
of it.’

‘Ye Gods. Well, we’ll just have to do what we can with the exercise plan. Have you got that, with all the map coordinates on it?’

‘Sah... I mean, yes I have.’

‘Let’s get off then.’

A line of lorries was drawn up by the flagstaff, and to faraway cries of ‘Bags of go, Jellicoe’ Purple Platoon and the other Roughex teams embussed. Syllabub was shivering as he climbed over the tail board.

‘Much colder where you’re going, mate,’ said the Royal Marine driver. ‘Come on then, ‘op in, let’s be ‘aving yer!’

McAllester sat in front with the driver whose name, he found, was Baines.

‘Bit early for this sort of carry on,’ Baines remarked, as his lorry ground up the hill away from the College.

McAllester rubbed his eyelids, still suffering from the disembodied feeling of having been yanked out of sleep too early. At that hour the town was absolutely deserted, the houses and gardens still asleep. There was not even a cat, let alone a milkman or a paper boy in sight. The empty roads reinforced McAllester’s sense of chilled melancholy. They really were a lorry-load of outsiders, transiting from one strange existence into another.

‘Got yer first aid kit?’ said Baines, conversationally. ‘You’ll need it. Last term one poor chap got frost-bite. Lorst three toes on his right foot. Poor fellow,
he’ll
never play football again. This time last year one bloke got sunstroke. Went all purple and choking in the face. Like an overripe plum.
Terrible
sight.’

‘Must have been,’ said McAllester.

‘Darky, too. Should have been used to the ‘eat, you’d have thought.’

They were climbing higher, Baines using ever lower gears, passing cultivated fields and friendly villages, until they were leaving all signs of human habitation and civilisation, all hope of warmth and succour, far behind. A wind began to buffet the windscreen. A light mist closed in. Peering out, McAllester could see nothing but wide wastes of heather and reeds and space and mist, stretching out for ever on either side. The air temperature had plummeted. Baines had his wipers and his headlights going. The mist thickened. The sun finally went behind clouds, as though it would never appear again. A rain began to fall, lightly at first, and then more steadily, and then very hard indeed, so that the lorry’s windscreen wipers could barely clear it.

‘Do you know where we’re going?’ McAllester asked.

‘Can’t tell you that. You’re supposed to work it out. But sooner me than you, I
can
tell you.’

They came up behind another lorry. McAllester saw the pale, stricken faces of other Roughexers peering out at him. Soon, the lorry turned off, to another part of the moor. McAllester tried to catch the name on the sign-post but missed it.

‘Last year, we had to force our way through.’

‘Through what?’

‘Demonstrators.’

‘What sort of demonstrators?’

‘Demonstrating against the armed services using Dartmoor for offensive purposes. They want to turn the whole of the moor into a wild-life preserve. Got quite stroppy about it. Very stroppy.’

Baines stood on the foot-brake so sharply that McAllester momentarily left his seat. He could hear from the scuffling and thumping behind that Purple Platoon had been thrown off their feet.

‘Yer ‘ere,’ said Baines. ‘Yer ‘tis. That’s the sign-post.’

McAllester looked out. It said ‘Tamar Tor. Unsuitable for motor vehicles.’

‘Unsuitable for every bloody thing, if you ask me,’ said Baines. ‘Everybody OUT!’ he roared, without looking round.

Purple Platoon scrambled out over the tailboard. Syllabub landed heavily, under the weight of his radio. When he straightened up, McAllester could see that he had grazed some skin off his left palm. He was moaning quietly.

Baines drove off, and the moment the sound of his engine had died away, the silence of the moor seemed to flood back. Then, they heard the sound of the wind, blowing over miles of desolation. Near them, through the mist, they could see a sloping hillside, a stretch of bog and reeds and cotton grass and thick clumps of moss. The rain had slackened to a steady downpour. A file of a dozen sheep ran past, their hooves pattering on the tarmac. The last one in the line was coughing, as though asthmatic.

‘I wonder what they’re running from?’ said Bingley.

‘I wonder
who
,’ said Caradoc.

McAllester could feel the rain settling the damp on his shoulders already. ‘Come on Bombulada, what’s next?’

Bombulada took the Roughex plan from his pocket and at once dropped it. It landed in a puddle. He picked it up, smeared and wet.

‘It would fall jammy side down,’ said Caradoc.

Bombulada shook his head hopelessly. He spread out his eloquent hands in an appealing gesture of dismay.

‘Let’s see that,’ said McAllester. Whatever the Roughex plan said about who was leader for this serial, it was already clear that the real leader was McAllester. He deciphered the coordinates of their destination, checked them on the map, took a compass bearing, and led the way off the road and on to the moor.

When McAllester felt the dampness and clingingness of the surface underfoot and, after a very few yards, felt the cold water close over his boots and soak his ankles, he knew that this was going to be a rough,
rough
Roughex. Behind him he could hear Adrianovitch swearing steadily and Syllabub saying into the hand microphone, over and over again, ‘This is Purple Platoon, where are you Base?’

‘Base, this is Purple Platoon,’ said Syllabub, in a high piping voice, like a demented parrot, ‘How do you read me?’ He lapsed into silence, but from time to time piped up again, ‘Base, this is Purple Platoon, where are you?’

After three-quarters of a mile of hard walking, McAllester looked back. Syllabub was about a hundred yards behind the rest, and obviously making heavy weather of it. McAllester went back to him, took off the radio set, and put it on himself.

‘I think we can put on our groundsheets. I’ve just remembered, they’ve got a cunningly fitted collar and buttons on them, so that we can use them as capes.’ McAllester mentally cursed himself for not remembering the capes before. Their only chance in this Roughex lay in keeping as dry as possible.

‘Come on,’ he said, when they had all put on their groundsheets. ‘We’re late.’

‘Slow down a bit, Ham,’ Caradoc said. ‘Do we have to go balls out like this all the time?’

‘Yes we do. I want to win this Roughex. We haven’t even
begun
to be tired yet.’

Although the visibility had deteriorated, and the rain was falling harder again, McAllester drove on across the moor as confidently as though he had been born on it. The others followed him, heads down, their eyes fixed solely on the legs of the man in front. From time to time, McAllester ordered a rest, and they stood together, still in a line, without speaking.

McAllester made a cast up one hillside, like an experienced sheep-dog, and then stopped.

‘Trouble?’ said Caradoc, coming up to him.

‘I’m not sure about this river. The map’s so bloody wet now I can hardly read it.’

‘I bet it’s down there.’

‘Why?’

‘It reminds me of home, the shape of the place. If there is a river, then I bet it’s down there.’

‘OK, let’s try it.’

They crossed the brow of the hill and reached a proper path. The clean, green, firm turf was a joy to walk on after the clinging moor. They walked fast, almost trotting, descending rapidly downhill until, miraculously, there was the river, opening out of the mist.

‘Well done Dai.’

‘All done by kindness.’

‘I suppose we ought to report now that we’re here.’ McAllester tried the radio, but Syllabub’s fall had evidently damaged it.

‘There ought to be an umpire hereabouts, too. Wonder what’s happened to him?’

‘He’s got more sense than to be in a place like this,’ said Bingley.

‘Ok, let’s have lunch now.’ It was only mid-morning but they were ravenous. They took the sandwiches, apple, cheese and chocolate from their packs, and ate standing in a huddled circle, while the rain continued to fall. The bread was damp and the chocolate slimy.

‘But still,’ as Cardoc said, ‘not bad for a College packed lunch.’

McAllester went down and studied the river. It was an ominously formidable obstacle, black and fast running, much too wide to jump, and looking too deep to wade. They could swim it, but that would mean they really would be thoroughly wet, to the skin. They might think themselves already wet but, as McAllester knew, they were still comparatively dry considering the conditions. It would have to be a bridge.

‘It says build a bridge,’ said Bingley who was now, after lunch, leader for the next serials. ‘But there’s nothing to build a bridge with.’

‘Bloody stupid,’ said Adrianovitch, ‘bloody bloody bloody bloody
stupid
.’

‘It looks as if we’ll have to wade across,’ said Bingley. ‘Or swim. So let’s get on with it.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ said McAllester. ‘They may be stupid, but they’re not
that
stupid. They’ve put it in the plan that this river has to be bridged, and they’ve done these Roughexes in these parts before. Therefore there
must
be bridging materials somewhere around.’

Chung Toi found them, planks, tree trunks, and ropes, hidden behind a line of straggling mountain ash trees about a hundred yards downstream from where they had stopped to eat.

‘That was brilliantly thought of, Ham,’ said Caradoc, with reluctant admiration. It was becoming clear to him, as it was to the others, that McAllester could be relied upon to see them through this Roughex.

Bingley and Chung Toi built the bridge. They were both in their elements, having both been boy scouts. ‘I were the terror of the troop,’ said Bingley. Chung Toi said nothing, but picked up young trees like match-sticks, carrying them one-handedly into position.

It was a beautiful bridge, a most skilful piece of building, with proper lashings and a smooth enough surface for them to be able to walk across upright, carrying their packs.

‘That’s bloody brilliant,’ said McAllester approvingly. ‘It’s a pity we have to take it all down again. There’s supposed to be an umpire here, but we can’t wait any longer for him in this rain.’

They unlashed the bridge, dismantled the structure, and piled the planks and tree trunks behind a stone wall. McAllester set off again at a fierce driving pace across the moor. Looking round after a time, he saw that Purple Platoon were reacting very well. Syllabub had closed up, everybody had found their second wind, and Chung Toi, who was fanatically fit, fitter than McAllester himself, was pressing hard on his heels. The only straggler, surprisingly, was now Persimmons.

‘What’s the trouble, Jas? With the amount of doubling about you do, you should be as fit as a fighting flea.’

‘I’m afraid I turned my ankle over, just after we set off after lunch.’ Persimmons’ face was white with pain. He gripped his lower lip in his teeth, and he was wincing at every step. ‘It really is very painful indeed. And it’s getting worse.’

‘Shall we take your boot off?’

‘Oh God, don’t do that! I’d never get it on again. It just feels as if it’s seized in a vice. It must have swollen up. It’ll be all right.’

’It doesn’t look like it. OK, we’ll slow down a bit. We’ve got time in hand. Give your haversack to Chung Toi, he’s strong enough to carry a whole mountain.’

‘Wasn’t there something about a nuclear explosion about now?’ said Bingley. ‘Shouldn’t we be doing something about that?’

‘We’ll note in the log that we observed it,’ said McAllester. ‘What about the long-term effects on the flora and fauna, and all that?’

‘Write down, everything destroyed, for miles around.’

‘For how long?’

‘For ever.’

‘What about decontamination routines, and all that?’

‘Write down, decontamination routines carried out.’

‘Well, I must say, that seems to cover it all.’

McAllester set off again, as fast as he dared test Persimmons’s foot. But this time he could hear Chung Toi close behind him. Although Chung Toi was now carrying two packs, the rasping of his expelled breath, the sound of his footsteps thudding through the reeds and splashing through the surface water, approached ever more closely to McAllester’s heels. Soon, he drew level. With his breathing like a grampus, his head shaking from side to side, his hands and arms dangling and flopping, Chung Toi was not an elegant sight, but he was by far the physically strongest of Purple Platoon and, after a time, he forged ahead of McAllester, leaving McAllester feeling that he had been overtaken by the original india-rubber man.

Chung Toi was challenging more than McAllester’s physical leadership. A Roughex demanded mental as well as physical endurance and every member of Purple Platoon had, after all, been selected by his own navy for his potential leadership. They might admire and follow but they could also resent and challenge McAllester’s dominance. McAllester sensed their new belligerence and he half-welcomed it. Taking the weight for all had been a great strain and he began to succumb to the treacherous pleasure of letting others take their share. So it was Chung Toi, some distance ahead, who reached the foot of Sheep Crag first. The crag was a great geological fault in the surface of the moor, forming a steep escarpment about a hundred feet high at its most difficult point. By expert mountaineering standards it was a very small climb, but for the ordinary party on foot with no special equipment it was a formidable slope of nearly vertical rock, with a few bushes and one or two wind-bent trees rooted near its top. It was well known to all the midshipmen, trainee marines, boy soldiers, police cadets, youth hostellers, boy scouts and walkers in the area and they all knew that the best way was straight up. Otherwise one had to make a detour of about three-quarters of a mile over rough country.