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    Hell and High Water
    Hell and High Water
    Hell and High Water
    Ebook201 pages3 hours

    Hell and High Water

    By TONY NASH

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    About this ebook

    Death; the only true certainty in life; the long sleep, the great unknown, the void, the gateway to Eternal Life or the fires and brimstone of Hell. Whether met as a welcome relief from interminable suffering, as a rejoicing at the knowledge that we shall finally enter the Kingdom of God, for which we have prayed so long, or an unbearable terror of the expected payment for our mortal sins, we have no control over it. These characters, so close to that door that is about to open, have their own views on what they will find beyond.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTONY NASH
    Release dateOct 30, 2014
    ISBN9781631737688
    Hell and High Water
    Author

    TONY NASH

    Tony Nash is the author of over thirty detective, historical and war novels. He began his career as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, later re-training at Bletchley Park to become an electronic spy, intercepting Russian and East German agent transmissions, during which time he studied many languages and achieved a BA Honours Degree from London University. Diverse occupations followed: Head of Modern Languages in a large comprehensive school, ocean yacht skipper, deep sea fisher, fly tyer, antique dealer, bespoke furniture maker, restorer and French polisher, professional deer stalker and creative writer.

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      Book preview

      Hell and High Water - TONY NASH

      Hell and High Water

      Tony Nash

      Copyright © Tony Nash 2014

      ISBN 9781631737688

      Smashwords Edition

      Other works by Tony Nash:

      The Tony Dyce thrillers:

      Murder on Tiptoes

      Murder by Proxy

      Murder on the Chess Board

      Murder on the High ‘C’

      Murder on the Back Burner

      The John Hunter thrillers:

      Carve Up

      Single to Infinity

      The Most Unkindest Cut

      The Iago Factor

      Other books:

      The Devil Deals Death

      The Makepeace Manifesto

      The World’s Worst Joke Book

      Panic

      The Last Laugh

      Historical saga:

      A Handful of Dust

      A Handful of Salt

      A Handful of Courage

      And The Harry Page Thrillers:

      Tripled Exposure

      Unseemly Exposure

      This is a work of pure fiction, and any similarity between any character in it and any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional. Where actual places, buildings and locations are named, they are used fictionally.

      "To die; to sleep; no more; and, by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream; ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause…..Who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns puzzles the will…" Shakespeare Hamlet Act 3

      TOM

      Oh, boy, he’s there again. I’m in big trouble, at least as far as this life is concerned.

      He has been there whenever my life has hung by a thread, but now, for only the second time, I can see him clearly, though I still can’t describe his features. They seem to change from second to second, encompassing the attributes of every human face I have ever seen; every colour of hair, every shape of nose, lips and eyes, every complexion, every national trait, every expression, and in essence they hold all the wisdom of the ages.

      The last occasion was bad enough. It was the first time he had appeared really close to me; close enough to touch in fact, if only I’d recognised him and been able to concentrate; the day before my seventy-third birthday, one I so nearly failed to see, but at that point I was in no fit state to recognise him, or anyone else for that matter. From the hazy, semi-conscious fragments I remember of the quarter hour I spent in his presence that day he had the appearance of an old man; a par for the three others. On every other occasion he has been young, as he is today, but the circumstances made that necessary: he had to fit in; a young man would have stood out like a sore thumb in that scenario.

      My first glimpse of him, so transitory that at the time it seemed never to have happened, or was imagination, heightened by childish terror, was on the fourth of August 1941; yet another beautiful, hot sunny day, the air so still and humid that even breathing became difficult, the sky painted a vivid, ethereal blue no earthly artist could possibly match, the only trace of cloud half a dozen barely visible, wispy mare’s tails of mile-high alto-cirrus on the far eastern horizon, over the sea that lay twenty miles away. One of a long string of similar days, each of them with not the slightest hint of a breeze, and afternoon temperatures in the high eighties, in a blazingly hot summer that seemed to go on for ever, as the summers always did in those first years of the war, an early harvest almost completed. We boys, all in short grey trousers, as was the style in those days, with knee-length socks that had been made to ‘go to bed’, as we tried to emulate our youthful hero, Just William, had spent many happy, sweaty hours whooping with glee as we chased the rabbits that broke from cover, frightened out of their wits and disorientated, not knowing which way to run as the combine harvester closed in on the last few rows of corn, hoping, and often managing to crack them over the head with the knobbly ends of our sticks as they dodged between our feet, to give a welcome addition to the meat ration; a yearly treat for us, bloodthirsty little terrors that we were; typical small boys, with boundless energy and enthusiasm for everything in the big outdoors, where we spent every waking minute except for meals, and they were grudgingly bolted down before we dashed outside again.

      Hot sun beaming down from a clear blue sky, repeatedly reflected from the bouncing blades of the antiquated harvester, worn shiny from constant contact with the strong wheat and barley stalks; fine chaff filling the air, impregnating our hair and clothes, making us look like moving haystacks; chaff that would take a week to comb out of our hair and have us scratching the itches those tiny, needle-sharp pieces stuck fast in our clothes caused; the excited cries, thick home-made cheese sandwiches with pickles, and cold tea from a pop bottle with one of those clamp-down Corona ceramic tops, the war and everything else temporarily forgotten. For us boys, Heaven on earth. There were no handheld toys to divert our attention in those days, unless you counted home-made catapults, whizz-sticks and conkers. If we missed the bunnies with our sticks there were always men around the edges of the field with twelve bore shotguns, They were all good shots and no rabbit ever got away. If we didn’t managed to clobber one we would always be given one that had been shot to take home and boast to our parents that we had. We were congratulated for our prowess and it went in the pot. Mother would remove any pellets she found when she cleaned and skinned it, and say nothing, but the truth always came out when Dad’s teeth connected with a bit of lead at the table. He had been a regular soldier for sixteen years in his youth and had retained the colourful vocabulary, never calling a spade anything other than ‘a bloody shovel’, though I never heard him use the ‘F’-word, even in the latter stages of his massively spread cancer.

      Back at school in the autumn, boasting of our success, we lorded it over the city boys, whose hols we rated insipid compared with ours.

      One of my older sisters, Cissie; Mary, really, though no one ever called her that, was taking my newborn baby sister, Jane, out for a walk in the beautiful Silver Cross pram, the Rolls Royce of prams, a classic, and so unlike the brash, utilitarian buggies that babies are pushed around in today, and I had said I wanted to go with her to show her where the bits from the damaged Blenheim had fallen on some houses near the Boundary, knocking off some tiles, as the badly wounded navigator jettisoned everything he could move, trying desperately to help the aircraft maintain height long enough to reach the runway, only half a mile but at that moment possibly an eternity away. They had barely made it, limping over rooftops just feet below them, though the navigator and the air signaller had died from their wounds after they’d landed. At least they died on English soil. So many planes didn’t come back at all. We’d count them off and count them back in, and it was rare for them all to return from a mission. Once, on quite a big raid, none of them did. We boys stood a long time in the dusk, half a dozen of us, late for tea and shivering as the evening chill came on, hoping they’d run short of fuel and landed on another ‘drome, but we heard the next day that they had all been lost. It was nothing unusual. If we thought of death at all it was in the abstract.

      I really wanted to go with Cissie to show off my new blazer; a prize possession and my ninth birthday present from Mum and Dad, though whether there would be anyone out and about to see it I didn’t know and didn’t really care. New clothes were a rarity. It had used up a lot of clothing coupons.

      We lived on Cromer Road, a couple of houses up from The Firs pub and the RAF guardroom, which they’d built on the road leading into St Faiths aerodrome, where our three lodgers, Bill, Graham and John, who worked for the Bristol Aircraft Company, toiled for long hours every day, trying to keep their Blenheim aircraft flying, despite the sometimes terrible damage they came back with from raids. The workers had come back to the house yesterday with a great story: an aircraft from our aerodrome had gone to attack a power station at Gosnay, in the Pas de Calais, and on the way had dropped a container on the airfield at St Omer-Longeunesse, which had in it a new pair of artificial legs for one of our great heroes, Douglas Bader, whose other tin legs had been lost when he was shot down a short while before. He had, for a time, been stationed close by, at RAF Coltishall, and I and my fellow schoolboys knew all about his exploits, and hoped one day to emulate them.

      Like all my friends I desperately wanted to grow up quickly to be a pilot, hoping, stupidly, as small boys do, that the war would go on long enough for us to achieve our goal. We spent hours watching the planes that flew over us at chimney height, waving frantically to the pilots as they passed, and knew many of them by sight, and some of their names. As well as the Blenheims of 110 and 114 Squadrons, there were also Spitfires of No.19 and No.66 Squadrons and Boulton and Paul Defiants of A Flight, 264 Squadron based at Horsham St Faiths, the latter made by the Boulton and Paul factory only a few miles from us on the outskirts of Norwich. We loved the Spitfires most, with their wonderfully ear-splitting Rolls Royce Merlin engines, and the incredible aerobatics the pilots often indulged in over our heads, though we’d been told they had been ordered not to. With their life expectancy they didn’t give a damn and must have thought it was better to go out with a bang. We worshipped them.

      They were not the only planes we got to know well; there were others that had swastikas on their wings: the Heinkel 111s, the Junkers 52s, the Focke-Wulf 190s and the Dornier 17s, the latter so easily recognised by their shape. The Germans called the aircraft the ‘Fliegender Bleistift’: the ‘Flying pencil’. Its strange ‘Wump-wump’ engine noise told us what was flying above us even in the dark. Those were the bombers, and we saw them regularly enough when they bombed the airfield in daylight, and heard them even more often when we were huddled at night inside the steel grilled Morrison shelter that the Ministry men had delivered and that Dad had erected under our oak dining room table. We were fortunate, huddled tight together indoors, bodies touching and warm: not for us the outside corrugated iron Anderson shelters where some of our neighbours had to spend the bitter winter nights, desperately cold, their teeth chattering, their bodies shivering and hoping like mad that the ‘All Clear’ would soon be sounded. There were other benefits, as I discovered a couple of years later, when puberty made me only too aware of the close proximity of my sixteen year-old cousin’s female body; her of the large breasts I had spied through the bathroom door she had left partly open the day after she arrived to stay with us, and the conspicuous love-bites she always flaunted like hard-won medals. She must have been clearly conscious of those contacts, since she once, on a night I would never forget, when father was out doing his air raid warden duty and mother was poorly and had stayed in their bed upstairs, slowly and surreptitiously slid her hand under my dressing gown and through the fly of my pyjamas, took a good hold of my penis, pulled back the foreskin and squeezed hard, causing an immediate ejaculation. She held it until the pulsing ended then gave it a possessive pat, as if to tell it it was a good boy, before removing her hand. The next day I dare not look her in the eyes, but as I passed her she reached out, placed her hand under my chin, lifted it and turned my head towards her. With a lascivious smile she gave me a big wink. Even now I can not believe the number of sleepless nights I spent with a throbbing erection, hoping for a repeat, twice managing to wiggle close enough to push that erection hard against her buttocks, so that she had to be able to feel it, but I was to be disappointed: there was never a repeat performance. That sole contact was to be my masturbatory memory for the next twelve months, until I genuinely lost my cherry. I learnt a couple of years later that she was known as the village bike where she lived, and that she had been sent to stay with us to remove the ever-present stigma from the family. When the Yanks arrived at Horsham St Faiths she had a ball for a while, playing the field, then married one and went to live in California. They had five kids and apparently had a lasting, loving relationship until she died two years ago. Later in life I was to meet other women like her, who genuinely loved life and romance, freely giving of themselves to all and sundry; open hearted, open handed, and, it has to be admitted, open legged. Though many other women abjure them they are the very salt of the earth.

      At his seventieth birthday party I asked my younger brother if she had also honoured him with her attentions. He was highly indignant and exclaimed, ‘You dirty, lucky bastard! No, she bloody well didn’t, and I fancied her something rotten.’

      The bombers were a regular occurrence, but then there were also the cheeky fighters, the Messerschmitts, that came in almost daily to attack the planes on the ground, crossing the coast at zero feet and hedge-hopping all the way until they reached their target to avoid detection, often arriving before our fighters could scramble. It was the early days of radar, and the warnings always came too late. It was certainly lively, living on the edge of the airfield!

      Cissie settled Jane in the pram and wheeled it out of the front door. It was blistering hot in the sun and I soon started to sweat; wearing the blazer had not been the best idea in the world, but once we reached the shade of the huge trees dotted along the pavement a little further up the road it was not so bad, and we walked the half mile to the Boundary, enjoying the walk, Cissie gabbling almost incessant baby talk to Jane, which I thought was stupid: a month-old baby would not know what the words meant. There was no traffic; petrol rationing ensured that, and no pedestrians, everyone staying indoors out of the debilitating sunshine. The road was empty.

      We bought three quarters of a pound of bully beef at the butcher’s shop at the Boundary, all of our meat ration for that week. I liked the picture of the shaggy head of the bull on the huge Fray Bentos tin; it always amazed me that the meat came from so far away in South America. Most people hated bully beef, but I loved the taste and the texture, and always wanted more.

      We began to walk home, but the siren sounded when we had gone only a couple of hundred yards, and Cissie said, ‘It’s all right, they’ll still be over the coast. We can get home before they get here.’

      With a German fighter’s top speed of 450 miles per hour, that would have given us only about three minutes, but before the last word left her lips we heard the screaming engine as the aircraft dived, and the stutter of machine guns down at the aerodrome. We began to run, still under the trees.

      The Messerschmitt 109 pilot obviously didn’t appreciate the flak he was flying through over the airfield and decided to shoot up a few houses that wouldn’t shoot back instead. We saw him turn directly towards us, no more than fifty feet above the ground.

      Cissie made the correct instant decision and cleverly pushed the pram behind the trunk of one

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