Chapter 3
“It smells down there, and it’s all muddy. Mum’ll kill me.”
“We could look at the one in the field? It’s less overgrown.”
Tom looks up, and Patrick is pointing over the fence into the field with sheep in it.
“No, we’re not allowed to go into the field, and we’d have to climb over the barbed wire. This is OK.”
The boys pick their way carefully down the concrete steps, trying not to brush against the grubby sides. The corners of the steps are filled with mud; you could almost slide down. There is more mud at the bottom, and ivy and brambles and the debris of years. Inside the ceiling is high enough for the two boys to stand, and there are two gaps in the far wall, looking down the slope.
“It would be a great place for a camp,” says Patrick. “But we’d have to clear it out a bit.” He picks up a stick and pokes around, turning up more mud and rotten leaves. He crosses to one of the holes, and his stick is a gun, making shooting noises. “Did they fight here? You can’t see very well.”
Tom crosses and looks through the other one. “They would be attacking up hill. That’s harder.”
Nelson is sniffing around in the mud behind him, scratching at something in the corner of the room.
“Nelson, what is it?”
The dog takes no notice and carries on, scraping back the mud.
“It’s probably a rat. Or another dog has been down here. It looks like there’s drain in the corner; perhaps something is stuck down it.”
The boys cross over to look. Nelson has cleared the area above the drain, and Patrick picks up a stick and prods around the grating covering the drain, pushing the mud through to see if there is anything below. But there isn’t enough light to see anything, it looks all blocked up. Just a strong smell of something unpleasant.
Tom looks about. “There’s too much mud to make a camp, I’d need to get my dad to help clear it. But I’m not really supposed to come down here.”
“You can’t bring your Dad down, he’s not a member.”
“That’s right, we should form a club.”
“And it’s dirty, it smells of dogs. I’m going up.”
He climbs back out onto the path above, and Tom follows. They walk a short way along the path.
“That’s where we saw the ghost pilot. At least Dorothy said it was a ghost, I don’t know really. But the man looked funny. And he just disappeared. He didn’t look real.”
“Was he looking at you? Was he scary?”
“No, he was looking away, I couldn’t see his face. He was wearing one of those old jackets.”
“I never heard of a ghost here. And Dorothy’s ancient – she’s old enough to be a ghost.”
“She’s OK. She’s always friendly. She gives biscuits to Nelson and she’s not supposed to. Lets go and ask her, she can tell us more about the ghost.”
Dorothy is slow to answer the door, but she smiles when she sees the two boys, mud on their jeans, standing on the doorstep.
“You’d better come through to the back. Don’t touch anything, you can sit in the garden.”
She backs into the house, closing the door behind them, and they go through to the patio. Dorothy calls out a few minutes later, and there’s a tray with tea in a small pot and squash and chocolate biscuits.
“One of you can give me a hand with this;” and Patrick collects the tray and takes it over to the garden table. It is sheltered by a large oak tree against the fence at the back of the small garden.
“Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
“What did you mean about the ghost?” says Tom.
Dorothy looks up. “Have you seen him again?”
“No, but I hope we do. He looked just like a pilot from a game I’ve got. Wearing old military clothes. I think he heard us because he started turning round, and then he just disappeared into the corn. He couldn’t have walked through it, it’s too thick. And yesterday I was playing in the garden and I saw a plane crash. But we couldn’t find it. Dad said I dreamed it.”
“Slow down. From the beginning.” And she pushes the plate of biscuits towards them. “What sort of plane?”
Tom tells Dorothy about the plane he thought he saw crashing into the cornfield. Dorothy doesn’t say anything for a few minutes.
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“Yes,”says Patrick. “My brother told me about them. They come back from the dead and haunt you. Like zombies.” He looks a bit pale. “They do things to you.”
Dorothy looks at him. She is not smiling now. “I don’t think it is quite like that; and there’s nothing for you to be scared of. I’ll tell you a true story.
“You know I was born in the village, more than 90 years ago. I was a girl during the War. I remember the airstrip, I remember planes coming and going.”
She pauses.
“I was about your age, living in a house on the other side, overlooking the field. It was different then, there weren’t so many houses. The airfield was all open with farmland around. They kept the planes in big hangars, and there was a fence around the outside, you couldn’t go in. They built the bunkers – pill boxes we called them. You know, there’s one by the path and several more in the fields around.”
“Yes,” says Tom, “we were there earlier. There’s a proper room, and you can stand up in it, and there are holes in the walls where you could see the enemy coming. They put machine guns in there.” He looks down at his jeans. “But it’s very muddy now, I’m not supposed to go in.”
“They were never used to fire on Germans, but they were used as shelters when there were air raids. There’s one in a garden the other side of the village. It was just a field then. When we were children we used to sleep in it during the raids. We had camp beds and we just lay there listening to the planes fly over.
“But wasn’t it wet and smelly?”
“It was damp, and a bit muddy, but not too bad in those days. The drains are blocked and they flood now. The mud has collected over the years and they are all overgrown. We took blankets down. Sometimes we fell asleep and were there all night. Mostly just cold. And scared. We stayed here all through the War, although some families sent their children away for safety. We thought the Germans were going to invade. I could see the English planes take off and land from my bedroom window upstairs, and I would sit and watch them with my brother. Sometimes I saw German planes fly over. There was a story that a German plane landed here. The pilot got out and they arrested him, but I didn’t see it. Bombs were sometimes dropped. I never saw planes fighting. But I did see one crash.”
The boys had stopped eating biscuits.
“It was a hot day, summer 1940. They called it the Battle of Britain. Day after day our pilots went up to fight off the German planes. At night the German bombers would come over, and sometimes there were daytime raids. I remember the day; school had broken up and we were playing out in the garden when it started raining. There was thunder and lightning, a proper summer storm. It must have been terrifying to be up in a small plane. I had gone upstairs to change and I looked out across the airfield. It was dark, with low clouds, but I saw a plane coming in low and fast towards the village, trailing smoke on one side. I couldn’t hear anything, just the rain on the roof and pouring out of the gutter outside the window.
“The runway was grass and slippery; the plane had no chance. I saw it hit the ground, skidding out of control, heading towards the church. The pilot climbed out just as it burst into flames, and he must have been hit by the blast of the explosion. He was crawling away from the plane, near to the pill box. There were some huts over there and some people came across to help him. They carried him into the bunker. I suppose it was sheltered, I couldn’t really see, it was the other side of the field. You couldn’t get at it then, the footpath was closed.
“The next day we heard that he had died; burned and injured by the crash. And later he was buried in the churchyard.”
“Amazing,” says Patrick. “Can we see his grave? Is his body still there?”
“The grave is there but it isn’t marked. It is all overgrown now, and it is a private place. You shouldn’t go poking about.”
She breathes in deeply, and pours herself another cup of tea.
“He wasn’t from here, but it was wartime and I suppose there wasn’t time to organise a proper funeral. And since then there have been stories of people seeing an airman in the village. Not so much now, but at one time they called him the village ghost. He is usually in the churchyard, or on the old airstrip watching the spitfires flying over. He is in uniform, with a leather pilot’s jacket.”
“It must have been him we saw in the field. I want to see him again. We should have gone closer,” says Tom. “Have you seen him?
“Yes, twice. The first time I was a few years older than you are. I went to a secretarial college in Tonbridge when I left school. Another girl in the village, Sarah, worked in Tonbridge and we used to get the train together from the station here. The platform has been rebuilt since then, but in those days the platform on this side ran towards the road bridge, beside the embankment below the church. There was a short cut that we would take through a hole in the fence. It crossed up a little path into the churchyard. It wasn’t really shorter, but it was more fun because you shouldn’t really go that way.
“One day we heard something as we reached the path by the church. A man groaning. He was sitting on one of the gravestones, his back to us, holding the sides of his face. It was starting to get dark and you couldn’t see clearly. I was scared, and wanted to go back. It didn’t feel right, it didn’t feel safe. Something was wrong about the man. The shadows were darker around him, and I could feel his pain, and he was angry, and full of hate. I don’t know how I could tell, I just knew.
“Sarah wanted to help him, she called out, to ask if he was OK. He wasn’t near the path, we could have just carried on. He must have heard because he stood up, slowly, and turned towards us. He was quite young, not much older than we were. But we couldn’t see his face, it was in shadow. He took a step towards us, and we just froze. There was a smell, from a nearby bonfire, and smoke in the air lifted across in front of him. Although I couldn’t see his eyes I know he was looking straight at me. He knew who I was. He took another step towards us and I think Sarah screamed. I remember hearing a scream, and she dragged me away, and then we just ran. I didn’t look back. Now it doesn’t sound like anything odd, but I knew he wasn’t real. He was dead, you could tell. He didn’t belong to this world.”