Round the Bend Read Online Free

to be for two years, and after that I should comeback to wartime England, so we thought, and it would be the same except that everything would be scarcer and more difficult than ever. We never looked ahead to think about the peace, that I remember.
    I was flown to Egypt by B.O.A.C. It wasn’t possible for Beryl to come and see me off because the time and place of departure were secret. The best that she could do was to come down with me to Morden Underground station late one afternoon as I carried my suitcase down from the digs. We walked silent together down the suburban streets; on that last walk we didn’t seem to have anything left to say to each other. Maybe she was only realizing then what the separation was going to mean. She hadn’t got a lot of imagination.
    By the entrance to the station we stopped and looked at each other. It was raining a bit, and the red buses starting and stopping at the halt just by us made a great clatter with their Diesels. I put down my suitcase and took her hands. “Well, girl,” I said, “this is it.”
    She was pretty down in the mouth. “Write to me a lot, Tom,” she said. “I’ll be ever so lost without you.”
    “Cheer up,” I said. “I’ll write as soon as ever I get there, but don’t get worried if you don’t hear for a while. If they’re sending letters round the Cape it might take anything up to six weeks.”
    “I won’t be able to sleep till I hear.”
    I grinned. “Bet you do. Tuck a bolster in beside you and make belief I’m there, and you’ll sleep all right.”
    She smiled, though she was very near to tears. “Now stop it.…”
    I took her in my arms. It didn’t matter that there were people all around at the bus stop; you saw this every hour of every day, with people going off on draft. “It’s only for two years, girl,” I said softly. “It’ll soon be gone.”
    “It sounds like as if it was for ever,” she said miserably.
    There was no sense in prolonging the agony; it was only making things more difficult for her, and we’d said all that there was to say. We kissed, and kissed again, and then I said, “I’ll have to go now, girl. Look after yourself.”
    She released me. “You look after
yourself
. Cheer-oh, Tom.” She was crying now in earnest.
    I squeezed her hand clumsily. “Cheer up, girl. It’s not for so long.” And with that I turned and picked the suitcase up and left her, and went and got my ticket. I looked back over the turnstile and she was there waving good-bye to me with tears running down her face, and I waved back to her, and then I had to turn round and go down to the train.
    I went in a Liberator, squashed in with about twenty others in the rear fuselage. We took off at about ten o’clock that night from an aerodrome somewhere in the south; we didn’t know what aerodrome it was, nor where we were going to. We flew on for about eight hours, and then in the dawn we landed. We couldn’t see anything out of the aeroplane, and when we got out on to the tarmac we found that we were in a sandy sort of place with palm trees and white houses. They told us it was Tripoli.
    We weren’t allowed outside the aerodrome; they gave us breakfast in a tent while the Liberator was refuelled, and we took off again for Cairo. We landed at Almaza in the middle of the day and it was good and hot; I had English clothes on, and I envied the chaps working on the aircraft in just a pair of shorts and no shirt. I got passed through the various formalities, and then I went and reported to the manager of Airservice Ltd on the aerodrome.
    That two years was a fine experience for me. I was in charge of airframe repairs and general maintenance. I lived in a small hotel about a mile from the airport and I had my office at the back of the hangar. We operated a large number of aircraft all over the Near East and North East Africa, and I was responsible for keeping them in the air, all except engine overhauls, which were the business of another chap.