Free Fall by William Golding Read Free Book Online

cheeks bulged where the wind got in them. The wind-sock at the top was roaring and shorter than usual for the end was being frayed and torn away. They ought to have taken it down, we agreed, but there the windsock was, stays singing, the mast whipping in the rain. Johnny climbed through the wire.
    I hung back.
    “We better not.”
    “Come on.”
    We could not see more than fifty yards of the airfield at a time. I followed Johnny, running over the shuddering grass; for I knew what he wanted. We had argued about the marks that a plane would make on landing and we wanted to see—or at least Johnny did. We kept our eyes open because this was sacred and forbidden ground and children were not encouraged. We were well out from the wire, getting towards the patch where planes landed, when Johnny stopped.
    “Down!”
    There was a man, just visible in the rain ahead of us. But he was not looking our way. He had a square can athis feet, a stick in his hand and he had something huddled under his raincoat.
    “We better go back, Johnny.”
    “I want to see.”
    The man shouted something and a voice answered out of the mist upwind of him. The airfield was crowded.
    “Let’s go home, Johnny.”
    “We’ll get round the other side of him.”
    We retreated carefully into the rain and mist and ran downwind. But there was another man waiting by another can. We lay close, wet through, while Johnny bit his fingers.
    “There’s a whole row of ’em.”
    “Are they after us?”
    “No.”
    We got round the last man and were between the line and the hangar. I was tired of this game, hungry, wet and rather frightened. But Johnny wanted to wait.
    “They can’t see us if we keep away from them.”
    A bell clanged and rang by the hangar, a bell familiar to me and yet not to me in these surroundings.
    “What’s that?”
    Johnny smeared his nose with the back of his hand.
    “Nambulance.”
    The wind was not so strong but the air was darker now. The low clouds were bringing down the evening.
    Johnny tensed.
    “Listen!”
    The man just visible by his can had heard something too, for we could see him waving. The DH appeared over us, hanging in the air, misted to a ghost, her antique profile slipping away into invisibility. We heard the engine ofthe ambulance start up by the hangar and someone shouted. The man was jabbing fiercely at his can. A light flickered upwind of him in the mist and a stream of black smoke swept past him. He had a bundle of cloth on a stick and suddenly it was ablaze. Downwind we could just see another fire. There was a line of them. The DH droned past again.
    The mist was driving thick now so that the man and his flare were nothing but a vague patch of light. The DH droned round, now coming near, now receding. Suddenly she was near us in the mist, a dark patch crawling over us and on over the hangar. Her engine snarled, rose to a roar. There was a great sound of rending and tearing wood, then a dull boom like the report of a big gun. The line of flares broke formation and began to hurry past us in the mist.
    Johnny whispered to me as if we might have been overheard, whispered with cupped hands.
    “We better get out by the hangar and into the lane.”
    We ran away in the lee of the hangar, silent and awed. Smoke was drifting past the dark end and there was a smell in the wet air. A big fire was glowing and pulsing on the windward side of the hangar. As we rounded the end and made a bolt for the road a man appeared from nowhere. He was tall and hatless and smeared with black. He shouted:
    “You kids shove off! If I catch you here again I’ll put the police on you.”
    So then, for a time, Johnny avoided the airfield.
     
    The other hill where I live now had the general’s house on it. He was one of the Planks, he shot big game and hiswife opened bazaars. His family owned the brewery by the canal and you could not tell where the gasworks began and the brewery ended. But this was an entrancing piece of canal, dirty