The Exodus Plague | Book 2 | Imprisoned

by Collingbourne, Huw

  “Plus the boots,” said Jonathan, “They add on another couple of inches. It’s your centre of gravity that’s the problem.”

  “Really? I somehow don’t think it is within my capacities to alter that. Unless perhaps I were to tie a rope around my waist and suspend a sack of potatoes from it?”

  “An easier solution might be to have someone shorter doing the punting.”

  They both looked at Geoff. “I’ve never punted in me life,” the boy protested.

  “Then that makes three of us,” retorted Leila, “Four if you count the dog.”

  “There’s nothing to it,” Jonathan assured him, “You stand on that platform, stick one end of pole into the water until it hits the mud on the bottom. Then give it a push and off goes the boat in the other direction.”

  “Newton’s Laws,” said Leila.

  Geoff stood up and, in so doing, caused the punt to rock even more from one side to another. Holding his arms out, aeroplane-like, he made his unsteady way along the punt while Leila made her equally unsteady way in the other direction. Meeting towards the centre of the punt, they encountered a problem. In order for Leila and Geoff to get past one another, one or both of them would have to step towards one side of the boat. Each time they tried to do that, the boat rocked over towards that side, threatening to precipitate them all into the water.

  For a moment there was an impasse. Then Geoff lurched to the right and Leila shrieked, certain that she was about to be sent headlong into the river. As the shriek subsided, they became aware of laughter rippling across the water from the general direction of the Anchor pub. There were people there. Crowds of people. Apparently the spectacle of two men, a woman and a dog doing their best to sink one another to the bottom of the Cam had been sufficient to entice the customers from the pub’s warm interior into the cold and frosty darkness where they were now making no secret of their hilarity. Leila drew herself to her full height, doing her best to rock the punt as little as possible as she did so, glanced at the ribald crowd with all the dignity and scorn she could muster and announced, “We are taking the night air! I fail to see anything in the least bit amusing about that!”

  This, however, far from causing the crowd to fall silent, set them laughing again. One or two of them even called out some insulting remarks to the effect that the dog was the only sensible one in the punt.

  Eventually, Leila managed to seat herself upon a hard and uncomfortable bench in the middle of the punt while Geoff balanced upon the platform and stuck the pole down through the water until it made contact with the river bed. That gave some of the wits standing outside the pub the perfect opportunity to call out vulgar suggestions as to where Geoff should stick his pole. Geoff responded in kind with even more vulgar suggestions about where he would stick it if the person who had said that should have the temerity to repeat it.

  After a few pathetic attempts to punt the craft forward, Geoff started to get the hang of it and five minutes later he had punted them so far along the river that the crowd around the pub could barely be seen or heard in the distance.

  “Oh well,” said Jonathan, “So much for covert operations. I suspect everyone in Cambridge will have heard about our top secret escape by now.”

  And Is There Honey Still For Tea?

  “Deep meadows yet, for to forget

  The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet

  Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

  And is there honey still for tea?”

  The river babbled gently at their passing. There was little to be seen in the pitch blackness but when the clouds parted and the moon came out they were able to see frost glittering in the fields beyond the river banks and willows draping their branches into the water. The peacefulness was extraordinary. There were no cars to be heard, no televisions blaring, no distant sounds of trains or factories. There was just the gentle lapping of the water and the occasional hooting of an owl.

  “What’s the poem?” said Geoff.

  Leila was reclining in the punt, dangling one hand over the side so that the water rippled over her fingertips. “Rupert Brooke. It’s from his poem called ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. Which is where we are. More or less. Grantchester Meadows, I mean.”

  “Grantchester!” He was remembering their last visit. “You never mentioned we was going to Grantchester.”

  “We can only go where the river leads us,” said Leila, “And it leads us to Grantchester.”

  “Where the soldiers are,” said Geoff, “They nearly shot the lot of us last time we was here.”

  “But they didn’t, did they?”

  “Yeah, but then again we wasn’t trying to escape at the dead of night in a stolen punt, was we? For all we know there are guns trained on us, ready to shoot at any moment.”

  “I doubt it,” said Jonathan, “I think they are more bothered about keeping the hostiles out than keeping us lot in. We are nothing to them. Why should they care where we go or what we do?”

  “Even so,” said Leila, “It’s probably best to err on the side of caution. Talk quietly, muffle the row-locks, whatever they may be.”

  “Punts don’t have row-locks,” said Jonathan.

  “Well then, muffle whatever punts do have.”

  To anyone who is unfamiliar with Cambridge, the proximity to the town of open countryside often comes as a surprise. Within half an hour of leisurely punting, they had left behind them the town with all its colleges, shops, pubs and hotels and moved into a landscape of fields and trees. At times, the density of the trees was so great that, even if they had been boating in daylight rather than at night, they would have seen little of the surrounding countryside beyond the crowding woodland.

  The river twisted and turned so that frequently they could see neither where they had come from nor where they were going to. In places the punt pole failed to reach the river bottom and they were left to drift until once again Geoff was able to find sufficient purchase.

  Punting is not a fast or efficient means of travel and Geoff was soon weary with the effort. Jonathan offered to take over. They were engaged in the fraught process of walking past one another down the centre of the punt when Leila called out to them – “Lights!”

  “What?” said Jonathan.

  “I saw some lights. In among the trees. Over there.” She pointed to the thickly wooded bank on the left-hand side of the river. They fell quiet. Geoff and Jonathan stood statue-still, watching and listening.

  “I can’t see anything,” said Jonathan.

  “Me neither,” Geoff added.

  But then they saw it. Flickering dimly beyond the trunks of the trees, a dim light, then another. The lights of two, maybe three torches. Then there was a splash in the water near the punt. Before they had time to speculate on its cause, Geoff cried out in pain. Something had hit him on the shoulder.

  There were more splashes in the water. Jonathan found an LED torch in his rucksack and shone it towards the bank. A group of crouching, ape-like figures stood there. They were bobbing up and down and cackling, picking things up, stones from the rover bank in all probability, and throwing them with all their might at the punt. Geoff grabbed the punt pole and pushed them off with some force. As they moved faster down the river, the gang of rock-throwers gibbered and screeched. The punt picked up speed but the rock-throwers matched them. Another stone caught Leila on the head. She let rip with a torrent of obscenities and threatened to rip the entrails from whoever had thrown the stone. But then the punt moved around a sharp U-bend in the rover and suddenly they were out into open country again, with fields stretching away on either side. The rock-throwers gave up pursuit, screaming their frustration and anger as the punt moved away from them. For whatever reason, it was apparent that they did not want to leave the cover of the trees.

  And so the punt carried on moving down the river. It drifted past the Grantchester Meadows, then past the little village of Grantchester itself. Then everything happened at once. The punt juddered to
a stop. The sudden impact knocked Geoff into the water. Leila and Jonathan sprang to their feet, thereby nearly capsizing the punt. Bobby the dog let out a howl that would surely have been heard for miles around.

  Jonathan turned on his torch and aimed it at the water surface. There was no sign of Geoff. Then, some yards distant, there was a great splashing as Geoff’s head bobbed to the surface. He spat out a good mouthful of water and swam towards the punt where, with some difficulty, Jonathan and Leila pulled him aboard.

  “What the Hell happened?” Geoff said.

  “I have no idea,” said Jonathan. He looked all around. The landscape could be only vaguely discerned in the form of ghosted outlines silvered by moonlight.

  “I’m bleedin’ freezing,” complained Geoff.

  “Then freeze quietly,” hissed Jonathan.

  There was a fairly substantial bridge a short distance ahead of them. It looked like a road bridge. Closer to the punt, something had been stretched across the water. It was hard to see what it was. It looked like a wire. Jonathan moved towards the front of the punt and reached out a hand to grasp it. It wasn’t a single wire but a whole mesh of linked-wires. It seemed to be wire fencing. The sort of fencing that farmers used to make their fields stock-proof. The upper edge of the fencing was about two feet over the water surface. The lower edge stretched away under the water. Presumably it had been weighted down. At each side of the river, a big wooden stake had been driven into the river bank. The wire fencing was attached to the stakes. The end result was a barrier right across the river. The punt had run into the barrier.

  “What idiot put that there?” Jonathan said, “If we’d been going faster, we could have killed ourselves. I mean, not that we could have gone faster in a punt. But if we’d been in a speed boat or something…”

  “I suspect,” said Leila, “that whoever put it there couldn’t care less whether we killed ourselves or not. Maybe there really is no escape from Cambridge after all.”

  Jonathan wasn’t convinced. The wire barrier was a nuisance, he said, but no more than that. They would be able to drag the punt onto the river band, carry it around the barrier and continue down the river on the other side.

  “That would be a good idea,” agreed Leila, “if it weren’t for the soldiers on the bridge down there.”

  Were there soldiers on the bridge? It was too far away and the night was too dark to be sure. There were some vehicles there, though. Big vehicles. Trucks. Armoured vehicles. Maybe even a tank. Or were they letting their imaginations run away with them? They might, after all, be perfectly innocent civilian vehicles, mightn’t they?

  The risk wasn’t worth taking.

  “Did I mention I’m freezing?” Geoff moaned, “Not to mention drenched to the skin?”

  “You did,” said Leila and pointed to the punt pole, “Nothing a bit of exercise won’t sort out.”

  And so, grumbling to himself, Geoff began punting back the way they had come. They would find a secluded spot around one of the bends in the river and hope that the soldiers hadn’t seen them. The spot they found was already occupied by three swans who made their displeasure known at having their sleep disturbed. Bobby chased the swans. The swans chased Bobby. After five minutes of this the dog and the swans came to an agreement. The swans would move one willow tree to the right if the punt (and Bobby) moved one willow tree to the left. Jonathan, Leila and Geoff got out of the punt, sat on the ground and were just about to formulate a plan of action when they were disturbed by a ferocious-sounding growl. The growl was coming from a dog, and the dog wasn’t Bobby.

  Ham and Eggs

  There was a thick slice of gammon ham, a fried egg and two pieces of fried bread per person. The smell of it was delicious. It was, without a doubt, a magnificent breakfast, even though it was much earlier than they were in the habit of eating that meal – ten past one according to the old-fashioned ornamental clock that stood mid-way between the two porcelain figurines of 19th Century milking girls on the mantelpiece.

  “You get that inside you and you’ll feel all the better for it.” Mrs Alsop was a large, well-padded woman who looked like everybody’s idea of a farmer’s wife, which is just as well, because a farmer’s wife is exactly what she was. Not that she thought of herself that way. As far as she was concerned, she was a farmer and Mr Alsop was the farmer’s husband. But Mrs Alsop was careful never to give any hint that she nurtured such radical ideas. In spite of the fact that Mrs Alsop chose which animals to buy at auction, which foodstuffs to get from the wholesaler, when to plough the fields and when to trim the hedges; in spite of that fact that it was she who did the accounts and she who bought the insurance, she was careful to let Mr Alsop continue to believe that he was in charge of everything and she just leant a hand from time to time, the way any dutiful wife should do.

  Mr Alsop sat in an old rocking chair next to the fire. He was smoking a pungent pipe while Sheppy, a dog of uncertain heritage, lay across his slippered feet looking as though he was sleeping but always keeping one eye open, mainly to watch Bobby. Sheppy didn’t much approve of having another dog in the house and he wanted to make sure that no liberties were taken by Bobby – such as, for example, eating any table scraps which were, by long established tradition, the rights of Sheppy and Sheppy alone.

  Leila, Jonathan and Geoff were seated around an old wooden table. Geoff was wearing dry clothes that Mrs Alsop had loaned him. They had been her son’s clothes, she said. Nobody asked where her son was. They knew the answer might be one that the woman didn’t care to give.

  “It’s just as well our Sheppy started woofing,” said Mr Alsop, “Otherwise I’d never have found you. He must have heard the racket your dog was making and then he just led me to you. Otherwise you’d have been stuck on the river bank all night. And come morning… well, who’s to say what might have happened?”

  “Don’t you go fretting about that though,” Mrs Alsop grabbed a log from a stack next to the fireplace and tossed it onto the already blazing fire, “You’ll be safe with us.”

  “You ain’t the first to be caught by that net,” said Mr Alsop, “Two punts and a rowing boat ran into it just this last week.”

  “What happened to them?” Jonathan asked, “The people in the punts and the boat, I mean.”

  “Will any of you be wanting more tea?” Mrs Alsop said. Her attempt to change the subject was lacking in subtlety.

  “Like as not the soldiers got ’em,” said Mr Alsop.

  “Alfie!” Mrs Alsop gave her husband a disapproving look, “These people are eating their breakfast. They don’t want to hear all your crackpot theories.”

  “Crackpot!” Mr Alsop blew an ostentatious smoke ring, “You know as well as do, m’dear, they won’t let anyone escape. They been barricading the roads in every blasted direction. About a week or ten days ago they put that barrier across the river. No one can get out and no one can get in. Not unless they have official clearance that’ll get them through the checkpoints.”

  “And if they don’t have official clearance?” Leila asked.

  The old farmer laughed. “What do you think?”

  His wife gave him another stern look. “Pay no attention to my husband,” she said, “He knows no more nor you nor I do. But he’s full of his fancies and his theories.”

  “So how do we get out, then?” Jonathan asked, “There must be a way across country, I’m guessing.”

  “Oh, you’ll be all right in the fields, I’ve no doubt,” said the farmer, “But the fields don’t go on forever. Whichever way you go, sooner or later you have to cross a road. And the roads are patrolled.”

  “Surely not every road is patrolled all the time.”

  “You may be right,” Mr Alsop blew out another smoke ring, “But it’s a risk that I wouldn’t fancy taking.”

  “We can’t stay here for ever,” said Leila, “We have to move on.”

  “Well, worry about that some other time. For now, eat up your breakfast then get a few hours’ sleep. I’
ve made up the beds for you.”

  So they ate the food and they drunk the tea and they went to sleep in warm, dry, comfortable beds. And they felt safe and snuggled and cosy. And when they woke up, there were soldiers in the house. And the soldiers bundled them into an armoured vehicle and drove them back to Cambridge.

  Sea Breezes

  “I’m told you had something of an escapade. Last night. Down the river. Very dangerous. You might have been drowned.” The Colonel was sitting in one of the older college rooms – apparently it had once housed the Director Of Studies in Norwegian Folklore but that post had now been vacated. It had never, in any case, been one of the more popular subjects.

  “The river was flowing quite calmly as a matter of fact,” explained Jonathan, “There was really no danger of drowning.”

  “That, if I may say so, is rather a naïve thing to say. Once you leave Cambridge, you are out of the safe zone. Things are rather wild out there these days. You might have been attacked. With stones or bullets or arrows.”

  Jonathan considered mentioning the rock-throwing attack that had been made upon them. But, on reflection, he decided to say nothing. It would only make the Colonel more annoyingly self-satisfied than he already was.

  “You could have been attacked with Molotov Cocktails,” the Colonel went on.

  “Yer what?” said Geoff.

  “Petrol bombs. Not at all a nice thing to have thrown at you. I’ve been on the receiving end myself from time to time so I know what I’m talking about. What I am trying to get through your thick skulls is that once you are outside the safe zone, you could have been bludgeoned, burned, bombed or blasted out of the water. Your lifeless bodies might be drifting upon the scummy surface of the Cam even as we speak.”

  “We never saw anyone,” Geoff lied.

  “At any rate, it is apparent to me that I can no longer guarantee your safety here.” The Colonel was standing by the big window overlooking the college quad. The sun was shining, birds were singing and an elderly don wearing a long, black gown was exercising the rights of his position by doddering across the grass upon which mere undergraduates were strictly forbidden to tread.