Summer in England

THOSE WORDS ARE SUPPOSED TO CONJURE UP HALCYON SUNNY afternoons; the smell of new-mown hay, little old ladies on bicycles pedaling past the village green on their way to the church jumble sale, the vicar’s tea party, the crunching sound of a fast-bowled cricket ball fracturing the batsman’s skull, and so on.

The reality is, of course, utterly different.

It’s an early summer afternoon in June, and I’m sharing an overcrowded train carriage with an assortment of tired commuters heading back to their dormitory suburbs, and a couple of angry wasps trying to drill their way out through the toughened glass. The hamster-powered air conditioning is wheezing on the edge of a nervous breakdown, it’s twenty-eight degrees and ninety percent relative humidity out there, and the asshole behind me is playing something very loud on a pair of tinny headphones.

I’m having second thoughts about having paid fifty pounds to sit on this train, expenses or no expenses. But I don’t see what alternatives there are. I need to get from London to RAF Cosford, just outside Wolverhampton, and I don’t have a car and the Laundry certainly isn’t going to hire me a helicopter for a job that isn’t time-critical. They won’t even pay for me to take a taxi the whole way. So I’m stuck with a choice: train or coach. At least this way I get to avoid the M6 motorway…

And at least I’ve got a seat with a table. I reread my instructions as the train shudders and lurches through the parched countryside. It’s a low-priority field job: to investigate reports of eerie manifestations of a disturbing nature from one of the airframes stored in the hangar annex to the Royal Air Force Museum. The museum houses a lot of historic war-birds.