The Tunnel Read Online Free Page A

roots. There were swedes, yellow and unhealthy-looking. He chose two of the smallest and took them back with him to the loft. When he tried to eat them they were coarse and hot and fibrous, and caused a thirst that made him curse himself for not filling his water-bottle the night before. He felt tempted to forage round the farmyard for water, but he forced himself to stay where he was.
    Several times during the day a man wearing khaki breeches and a short black coat came into the barn. To Peter, peering through a hole in the floor, he looked as though he might be a French prisoner of war. Each time the man came to the barn he seemed more French, but Peter resisted the impulse to reveal his presence and waited impatiently for the evening.
    As the day passed he began to feel the cold, even in the hay. He searched the barn thoroughly for old clothes but could not find even a sack. He stuffed some of the hay inside his battledress blouse, and fell asleep again.
    Soon after dark he started on his third night’s walk. His feet were badly blistered and his calf muscles had set, so that he had difficulty in walking. His tongue was like leather and he was sick several times – a thin bile that made him feel as though he had a hangover. He drank some water from a ditch by the side of the road, and thought bitterly of the chocolate he had left uneaten in the aircraft.
    As he loosened up he walked more easily, but he was light-headed and careless. More than once he passed people on the road, not being quick enough to dive into the ditch before they saw him. Must pull m’self together, he thought, mustn’t get caught. He ducked his head in a stream and felt refreshed.
    This night he walked straight through villages. He was too tired to go round them. I’ll rest up on the border, he decided, and stalk the last mile or so. For the present he felt impelled to move forward as fast as he could, his mind already grappling with the problem of crossing into Holland – an unknown country occupied by the Germans, yet holding out some hope of help from a friendly people. He tried to remember what he had been told of this border, whether it was guarded or merely submerged into the giant stronghold of Occupied Europe, but his memory told him nothing. He slogged on, driven westward by the compulsion that had driven him ever since he had landed.
    In the early morning he came across some mounds in a field. In the frightening half-light of the lonely plain he thought that they were air raid shelters, that he had stumbled on to a shadow factory or a barracks. He paused for a time, looking at them, and discovered that they were only potato clamps. He dug some potatoes out with his hands and ate them. They were old and nearly as hard to stomach as the swedes.
    In his determination to reach the Dutch border as soon as possible he did not choose a hiding-place until it was too late. Dawn caught him unprepared in a bleak and empty countryside. All around him, as far as he could see, there was nothing but an unending expanse of flat marshy ground, almost colourless in the early morning twilight. Now and again a patch of water caught the light, reflecting it back, cold and metallic-looking, against the murkiness of the ground. As colour swiftly hardened from the softness of the early dawn a chill wind came from the north-east, ruffling the water in the meadows, pressing the damp serge of his battledress trousers against his legs. He walked on in the ever-increasing light, until he came to a thin hedge which grew at the lip of a wide ditch. He followed this away from the road, and crawled beneath some brambles into the most uncomfortable hide-out he had yet chosen; damp, cold and only partially hidden from the road.
    He slept fitfully for about an hour-and-a-half and then, wakened as usual by the cold, he lay shivering and muttering to himself. He tried to control the violent trembling of his limbs, but it was beyond control. It came in spasms like an ague,