by Xan Brooks
Lucy wonders why the Scarecrow wears a leather mask whereas the Tin Man opted for painted copper. She feels it would be impolite to ask. It is another of Fred’s Terrible Unmentionables. It sometimes feels that there are too many to count.
Instead she asks who dreamed up their names. If the Scarecrow named the trees, then who named the Scarecrow? By now they are walking back through the clearing. Coach overhears and says that Grantwood House named them and that, in fact, without Grantwood House they would not be people at all.
The Scarecrow snorts, but he admits that what Coach says is more or less true. “Without Grantwood House there’d be none of us and no trips to the forest. You could say that the Wizard of Oz resides at Grantwood House.”
“What’s that?” calls Coach.
“I said that Grantwood House made us what we are.”
“Now then. That’s gratitude for you.”
So far as Lucy can work out, the funny men spend virtually all of their time inside a small workers’ cottage somewhere to the north of Epping Forest, where they are provided for by a kind – and presumably wealthy – benefactor. It appears that these Sunday trips are their only regular outings, and this pleases her. She feels flattered by the attention all over again.
Crisis keeps a football in the cab and angles for any excuse to introduce it to the party. A game of traditional football is out of the question, what with the funny men’s frailties, although they eventually devise a compromise whereby Crisis and Coach take opposite sides and Toto and the Lion are installed as rival goalkeepers, and play is halted every few minutes to allow the Tin Man and Scarecrow to kick from the penalty spot. Fred christens the game “funny football” and it succeeds after a fashion and seems to mollify Crisis, even if the Lion is never entirely at his ease in goal. He has a habit of abandoning his post whenever the players’ attentions are directed elsewhere. Time and again Fred must be sent off to retrieve him.
Sunday after Sunday, the weather is fair which surely counts as a blessing. Lucy eats trifle and screws her face in distaste as she prepares to tackle another cigarette. She plays hide-and-seek and funny football and learns the difference between the hornbeam and the sycamore. The forest is teeming with fox and deer and rabbits and owls, but although she strikes out from the clearing in every direction, she never encounters another human soul. Standing still, barely breathing, she listens for the sound of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift. She hears nothing but birdsong, acorns dropping and the wind in the leaves.
On Lucy’s fifth visit, Coach reaches the clearing first, which means that Crisis is late. They stand in the shade and watch the rumbling, rocking approach of the covered truck up the rutted path. He is coming too fast, he risks breaking an axle. “Something’s not right,” Coach says in a mutter and Lucy looks at Winifred and sees that she’s nervous too. And yet Coach’s alarm turns out to be unfounded because Crisis is grinning when he steps down from the cab. The reason he’s late is down to the fact that he stopped off at the dairy, and the reason he’s rushing is that he has bought a silver pail of ice-cream and does not want it to melt. From behind the canvas in the bed of the truck, Toto broadcasts that he is sorry to report that he has already consumed most of it on the drive from the dairy, but the children are laughing; they know that he’s joking. Lucy is glad to see Edith and John laughing too. Few people, however committed, can maintain a show of sullen resistance when confronted by a tin bucket filled with vanilla ice-cream.
“But do we have spoons?” Fred wails. “Imagine the nightmare if we didn’t have spoons.”
“We got spoons, don’t you worry.”
“Thank heavens for that. I would have had to kill you all off and keep the bucket to myself.”
They sit in a circle and pass round the pail. Crisis has done his best, he came as fast as he could and dragged his undercarriage along the forest floor, but inevitably the ice-cream is half-melted by the time it’s brought out and proceeds to turn liquid in the minutes that follow. Lucy doesn’t mind – she likes it just as well. The taste is sublime, it’s like honey from Lapland.
She hands on the pail and observes the diners. John is too greedy. In racing to get the spoonful to his mouth, he dribbles most of it down his front. The Lion’s hands twitch but he refuses assistance. He’s worse than John, he’s a total mess. Coach smokes as he eats – his spoon in one hand, his briar pipe in the other – which strikes her as foolish; it means his attention is divided and his enjoyment, too. She wishes for his sake that he could manage to leave off smoking until the dessert has been finished.
Toto catches her eye. His hands jump as well. “Dinner with the monsters.”
“Oh please. Not a bit.”
Fred cackles at her side. “Lucy’s a nice girl. She’s as sweet as ice-cream.”
When the pail reaches the Tin Man, he turns away from the circle, puts his back to the children and uses his hook to raise the bottom edge of his mask. Then the Scarecrow takes the spoon and lifts it to his friend’s mouth and later applies his handkerchief to mop up the excess. If Lucy leapt up and shimmied to her right, she might catch a glimpse of the Tin Man’s true face, but of course she does not. Still, it is hard not to wonder what he might look like. Fred has told her that the reason Tinny wears a mask is because he is the most beautiful man who ever lived, far too beautiful to be gazed at with the naked eye, it would be like staring straight into the sun. What a fabulous notion; she’d love to believe it. But she doesn’t, not deep down, and she suspects Fred doesn’t either.
“One day soon,” Toto is saying. “One day soon you’ll be able to freeze the back of that lorry. You’ll be able to seal off the back and keep the temperature down.”
“Who will?” says Crisis.
“You will. What I mean is, you’ll be able to buy a refrigerated lorry and deliver fresh meat and fruit and ice-cream all over the country.”
“How do you work that out?” demands Coach.
“Stands to reason. Give it a few years and they’ll be all over. Refrigerated lorries. Refrigerated trains.”
“Refrigerated submarines,” puts in the Tin Man.
“I’ll tell you, Coach, word to the wise. If I had my time over and was still out and about, it would be the refrigeration business for me, no question.”
“What bollocks you talk: refrigerated trains,” says Coach. But he says it fondly; he enjoys conversing with Toto.
The Scarecrow is fortunate in that the leather mask does not extend to his mouth and chin. He helps himself to a spoonful and passes the pail and Lucy sees that he too has dripped dessert down his shirt. He says, “Edith, you’re the most sensible one here. Tell us about the outside world. Is it ready for the arrival of refrigerated trains?”
“I don’t know,” Edith says, frowning. “I don’t think so. How can you can get electric power to something without using a cable?”
Crisis claps his hands. “Ha! That’s you shut-up, Toto. Little Edith just went and took you to school.”
The world reaches the funny men in little glimmers, in Chinese whispers. These days they know it only from the newspaper, or from their conversations with Coach and Crisis, or from snatched glimpses through the slits in the canvas as they are driven out from the house. Toto has read that there are now two hundred thousand motorised vehicles on the roads of England. He reckons that the number is bound to increase further still, which will be good in some ways and detrimental in others. There has to be a consequence of all those exhaust fumes; it’s going to poison the whole country. The sky is going to fill up like a boil and one day it will burst. The Scarecrow agrees, but the Tin Man feels otherwise. The Tin Man says that the world is big and open enough to accommodate a few extra exhaust pipes along with all the factory chimneys it’s got working already. And in any case, the smoke and fumes will simply float up and out of the Earth’s atmosphere. Even if the world isn’t big enough, the universe is limitless. Let all
the poison pour up to the heavens where it can make a few space aliens cough and leave the rest of us to walk in nature and smell the roses at our leisure.
Now Coach chips in to point out that the problem with the traffic isn’t poisonous fumes but accidents. Hardly a day goes by when he doesn’t witness some collision or other and some of these have been fatal, like that smash outside of Ware last month: the labourers tossed like refuse out of the back of the truck; the woman pedestrian with her head stoved in. What a bloody sight, he still can’t shake the memory.
“Lawlessness is what it is,” Crisis says. “It’s all the same problem. No respect for the road and no respect for anything on either side of the road neither. That’s why this country’s in the mess it’s in, with the king getting barracked and unemployment lines and what-not, and Bolsheviks on every corner. Everybody wanting something for nothing and it’s the common working man who’s left holding the bill.”
The Tin Man chuckles. “Crisis loves the old world. But it’s already been and gone.”
“Yeah well, what of it?”
“Poor Crisis. One foot in the past. You want to look to the future. Pick up some new fashions. Start learning new dances. Come to think of it, what did the old world ever do for the common working man anyway? At least these days the poor buggers have got a fighting chance.”
“Hark at him. We’ll have to paint that mask red.”
Coach says, “Working men, they call themselves. Peasants, I call them. As soon as you start barracking the king, you’ve lost your argument. Traitor bastards, I call them.”
The Scarecrow says, “Crisis, you idiot. We’re all peasants here. We’re all wanting the same thing they do.”
“My point exactly,” the Tin Man says, “It’s not red to look on the bright side. It’s not only Bolshies who want the future to be better. You know me, I’m the eternal optimist; I like to see the good in everyone. At least these protesters and picket lines are trying to get something done. You have to applaud them for trying at least.”
“Amen to that,” says the Scarecrow.
Coach says, “Now I know you must be making a sport of us. What do the pair of you know about the future? For fuck’s sake, look at yourselves.”
Toto raises his hand for calm. “Can we leave off the politics for a bit? It’s a lovely night and there’s ladies present. On top of all that, it sends my dinner down the wrong way.”
Yet later, looking back, she will recall this as her favourite evening in the forest. She will remember the warm air and the cool grass and the delicious melted ice-cream that slipped off the steel spoon on its way to her mouth. And she will recall her delight at being party to an adult conversation that attempted to gather the loose threads of the world and braid them into sense. Fred is always looking for the chance to interject and make a joke, under the impression that this is what is expected of her. But Lucy is content to sit quietly: to absorb all the arguments and weigh up what’s said. She thinks she sides with the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, but she cannot say for certain. Her head pinwheels with images of picket lines and car collisions and poor George V in the thick of the mob, his crown all askew, his mouth agape. She needs a moment to knock her thoughts into shape.
“Let’s get the refrigerated lorries on the road first of all,” says Toto. “Then we can start planning all of our perfect tomorrows.”
The world is confusing, but the forest is not. By now the girl has grown accustomed to its Sunday evening rhythms; the movement of bodies is as stately as a waltz. The trucks trundle into the clearing at around seven o’clock, drawing in from opposite directions until the very last leg when they navigate the same lonely trail. The occupants dismount and mingle for a spell and then, at roughly the point where day turns to night, they fan out into the thicket, leaving Coach and Crisis to stand watch at the vehicles. They are like the keepers at a lighthouse, guiding the wayfarers back to port by the orange glow of their briar pipes; Lucy can see them and smell them from the edge of the trees. Finally, when everybody has been safely gathered, the trucks grumble into life, headlights flaring, and take off down the track. The last movement is complete and Monday morning is already idling on the eastern horizon.
The ice-cream has been eaten. The spoons rattle and scrape inside the silver pail and she sees John shoot out a finger to collect one stray globule from the ground. And now, with great ceremony, the Tin Woodman rises to his feet and turns his bronze face to the group. He says, “I’m an incorrigible fellow and I do pray your indulgence but I am hoping I might follow one dessert with another. I now require some gentle soul to escort me on one last lap of the Yellow Brick Road, all the way to the gates of this Emerald City I’ve heard tell about. Lucy,” he says. “I wonder if you might oblige.”
10
Six miles from base, banking low over farmland, Lieutenant Bram Connors is caught by enemy artillery and knows he is lost. The rounds arrive from below and run him through like a sewing machine, punching a line of holes across the wooden frame of the fuselage. His elbow is clipped and turns instantly numb so that his hand slips on the stick and the sky slides through a sick revolution. The engine coughs and catches and then coughs again. And, curiously, what rolls into the airman’s mind at this moment is the refrain from the American battle hymn which he has not heard sung for years. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.
He has been flying Camels for eight months, thereabouts. By rights he should know what he is doing; he normally does know what he’s doing; others think he is good. But now his senses are scrambled and he cannot get his bearings and the Camel has turned on him, just as they warned him it would. Everybody hates the Sopwith Camel. They hate it because they fear it and they fear it because it is high-strung and inconsistent, like a temperamental thoroughbred. It is front-loaded but bottom-heavy. Handle it with too much vigour and it goes into wild oscillations. It’s always straining at the reins, desperate to slew to its starboard side. He’s heard that as many pilots crash the Camel as are brought down by enemy fire, which is another way of saying that the bi-plane has killed them, that it does Archie’s work for him.
Except that Connors doesn’t buy it; he has always loved the Camel. He loves its skittish, darting motions; its very weightlessness is gorgeous. You need to hold it lightly, gently, as though you are dowsing for water with a rod of witch hazel, and then when you find it, the response is electrifying. Slide up and under the enemy plane. Catch Archie napping and then let the guns rip. Nothing turns to the right faster than a Sopwith Camel – it is like the welterweight boxer who throws a cold-cocking left hook. Connors loves the Camel and he assumes the Camel loves him back, and maybe it does until the moment it’s hit, when it promptly pounces on the nearest person to hand, which naturally turns out to be the man in the seat.
If he can steady himself, he may yet survive; stranger things have happened. He engages full-right rudder to balance the twisting torque of the engine mass. He bears down on the stick, hoping to outrun the danger, but it could be that he has somehow managed to double back on himself, for now he is threaded by another incoming round. This one comes running clean up the hemline, not stitching but unpicking, God’s terrible swift sword. The plane porpoises and levels out. Connors has time to draw a breath and then the fuel tank behind his seat explodes. It seems to him that this makes no sound. It registers only as a pulse in his eardrums instantly followed by a hot draft at his back.
The plane is aflame. The engine has convulsions. He turns to starboard and notes that the propeller has slowed to the point where he can identify each blade. His helmet has caught light; he can smell the leather burning. Unthinkingly he unstraps the thing and yanks it loose except that this is a mistake because now his hair is a bonfire, he can smell that burning too. The cockpit flares and the glass blows out of the windscreen frame. Connors does not know whether this is the result of the heat or a fresh artillery strike. He doesn’t suppose
it matters much either way.
The propeller spins through one last lazy rotation before coming to a halt. He takes his hands off the stick and shuts his eyes on the blaze. The heat is intense. He can feel his lids crisping, while the rinds of his ears have started to prickle; they might be guttering like candle wicks. He has no idea which way he is pointed or what altitude he is hanging at. He has no idea of anything beyond the one salient fact, so glaringly obvious it doesn’t even need stating.
Glory, glory hallelujah, he thinks.
The field is waiting and the Camel descends to greet it, gushing flames and trailing smoke and twisting in the final few seconds to present its favoured starboard wing, as though proffering a hand to be kissed. Then the plane strikes the ground and proceeds to undress itself with a series of languid, heavy movements, delivering constituent parts to stage left and stage right. The wings detach and the fuselage collapses. The plywood panels peel off the plane’s hide and some are still aflame when they are tossed back into the air.
Inside the cockpit, he feels the impact go through him. He feels it in the roots of his teeth and the knuckles of his spine, and the effect is so immense that it is almost pleasurable. He is a rock that has been slapped by a wave. He is Saul turned to Paul on the road to Damascus. Now it is as though the fuselage is being sent one way while he’s sent the other. He is aware his arm has snagged on the wire frame that holds the chassis in place, but before he can turn his head to investigate, the dispute is resolved and the resistance has gone and with that he’s thrown free. He comes to rest in wet mud and this puts him out with the swift, unfussy efficiency of a bucket of sand.
Connors stands up and falls down, stands up and falls down. On his third attempt his balance is better and his legs have some strength and he manages three confident strides before he falls down yet again. He draws deep breaths and makes himself wait and finds that it is wrong what they say: turns out it’s the fourth time that’s the charm.
