Peter--Chapter 2

Lights flashing and flickering, the alarm burst into life.  With a muffled cry, Stanley frantically struggled to switch it off and then sat, yawning and stretching and staring blankly at the bed sheets.  Suddenly he remembered!  Wasn’t he about to embark on the greatest adventure of his life?  This was the day he had been working for all his life.  How could he have possibly forgotten?

“Funny how in sleep” he thought, “you can forget the most momentous promises you make to yourself".  Stumbling out of bed, his feet blindly found the comfort of his slippers.  Out of his bedroom he went groping into the greyness and silence of the deserted house.   Automatically, he washed, dressed, gobbled down some breakfast and then secured the house.  In the kitchen he put on his red pressure suit and checked that he had all he needed in the bulky pockets.

He stood on the garden doorstep, turning the key in the back door.  He paused.  A pinch of anxiety in the pit of his stomach told him he had forgotten something. His face looked pained.  He couldn’t remember.  He stroked his chin.   The word ‘apples’ leapt into his mind. “Yes that’s it”, he thought. 

 “Don’t forget the apples, Stanley.  Don’t forget the apples.” Claus’s words began echoing in his mind.  He’d always taken his old friend’s advice but this stuff about apples was a lot of nonsense.  “I won’t bother”, he thought, checking that the kitchen door was securely locked.  

He cast a glance upwards.  The night sky still lay strewn with stars, but on the horizon there was just a streak of grey dawn light. A chill in the air made him shudder as he hurried along the garden path, only stopping for a moment to look at the old apple tree that stood bare and alone in the centre of the frosted lawn.   On some mad impulse he crossed the grass and gave it an affectionate hug.  There was a sense of peace as he rested his head for a moment against the rough bark.

“Farewell, my friend” he said, and then continued along the garden path.

The old RAF Nissen hut lay at the far end, a long, tall building built of concrete with a rusty, curved zinc roof – a leftover from the old RAF base that lay deserted and empty along the lengthy of the back gardens.  His father had bought it years ago and had run his business from there.   To the neighbours it was considered an eyesore and should have been pulled down years ago; for Stanley it was his second home.  He’d taken early retirement to devote himself to his project there.  Now he felt a surge of pride and excitement as he opened wide the big doors. 

His activities did not go unobserved.   After a sleepless night, his neighbour Martha Ibbotson was watching him closely from her upstairs bedroom window.  In the background her husband Bert lay sleeping, his snores reverberating around the room. Bending forward in the dark, Martha leaned on the windowsill and squinted through the lace curtains.  The garden was enveloped in shadow but she caught sight of a figure, dressed like an astronaut, walking down to the hated Nissen hut.

“Bert, Bert!  Wake up!  Come and see this!” she cried.

 “HUH!” Her husband gave an involuntary cry, followed by a salvo of snores.

“BERT!”  Martha called insistently.  He rolled over, eyes slowly opening, to look at the bedside clock that showed 6 a.m.     “For God’s sake Martha, it’s Sunday morning!  What is it?” 

“It’s Secret Stanley.  He’s dressed in strange clothes and opening the big doors in the Nissen hut.  I think he’s gone mad.   Come and see.  Quick!”

Bert struggled up.  His face had a resentful expression.  He fished around for his slippers and staggered over to the window.  Sniffing and pushing back his hair, he pressed his head against the window pane.

“Well I’ll be.......!”  he said slowly, as though he couldn’t believe his own eyes.

“Get those binoculars down, Bert.  Quick!” ordered Mary. “I really can’t believe this is happening.  At last we’re going to see what he’s been up to all these years inside that horrible den of his.  Hurry up, Bert,”   she ordered.

Bert pulled up his pyjama bottoms, climbed onto a chair, fumbled amongst the dusty boxes on the wardrobe and eventually found the binoculars and placed them in his wife’s impatient hands.

Dawn was breaking, the darkness of night turning to a grey-blue, the rising sun in the east now appearing and sending streaks of yellow across the horizon and giving Martha Ibbotson a clearer view.  Something was slowly emerging from the Nissan hut.  To her eyes it looked like a large seagull on wheels.   First a beak and then the short body with four porthole windows on each side.    With two short wings it had a tall tail that stood up and the whole thing was on three long legs with shiny wheels.  

Martha and Bert’s mouths fell open, speechless.  “He’s been building a plane!” cried Bert.  “Well I never!”

“Now we know why he cut down his hedge the other week and cleared the rubbish off that old runway”, said Martha.

 As it turned and bumped through the open hedge and onto the runway of the abandoned RAF aerodrome, the silver body of the shuttle flashed in the rising sun.

 “It looks pregnant!” said Bert pointing to the strange ball shape beneath the undercarriage.  “That’ll never fly in a month of Sundays!” he added contemptuously.

On its cone-shaped nose, Martha picked out the name of the ship in bright red letters “The....Silver....Darling” and caught a glimpse of Stanley’s head in the cockpit window.

By the derelict control tower about a mile away, Stanley brought the ‘Silver Darling’ to a halt.  He donned his helmet, secured his straps and studied his computer and the small control panel with the navigation instruments which, with a click, went from ‘Rest’ position to ‘Active’.   Stanley’s face was pale with tension.  To be truthful, he was not entirely sure that Bert was wrong.  A lifetime’s work was about to be put to the test.

“This is it!” he thought, almost holding his breath as he slowly released the throttle. .... Nothing happened.  Not a sound.  Not even a murmur.  Stanley swallowed hard and tried again.  No response.   He stared up at the panel of dials and began a thorough systems check. 

The delay did not go unnoticed. “See, I told you,” said Bert gleefully.  “He should have taken off by now. It’s a white elephant that thing.  Nothing but a big Airfix model. He’ll have to tow that back.  Bloody idiot.”

“When I report this to the council on Monday, we’ll get him out at last!  He won’t get away this time.  After all the banging and drilling we’ve had to put up with down the years”   Martha said vengefully.

Disturbed by the sound of taxiing and the appearance of a plane in the old aerodrome, other neighbours’ heads had appeared at open windows.

“It’s an absolute disgrace,” called Martha to Mrs Doulton two doors down, who nodded her head in agreement.

“Come on, Bert.  Get your dressing gown on, we’re going into the garden to sort out all this nonsense” said Martha.

What a strange sight.  Sunday morning and a motley group of neighbours in an odd assortment of dressing gowns, scarves and woolly hats, gathering in their gardens, talking angrily.

   

Halfway through his procedures, Stanley cast a glance back through the cockpit window.  What he saw gave his checklist activity a new sense of urgency.  A mile away, on the edge of the aerodrome, a posse of angry neighbours was mustering.  He ran his eye over the computer screen as, with each click, he ran a test over each function of the ‘Silver Darling.’  A note began to flash in front of him.  FUEL INSTRUCTION NEGATIVE. 

“Strange,” he thought.  “I checked the fuel gauge yesterday.”

He cast another anxious glance backwards.  A group of neighbours and their kids had clambered over the fence and, armed with brooms and sticks, were beginning to advance along the edge of the aerodrome.

 

 “Nothing for it.  Better use the reserve supply.”

Focussing on the computer, he began calmly tapping in new instructions and adjusting switches on the panel.   After a few seconds there was a hiss of steam and to his joy the ‘Silver Darling’ burst into life, vibrating and cranking its engines. Bert Ibbotson, Reg Doulton and several others who were leading the ‘sheriff’s posse’ were now on the start of the runway.

 “He should have been locked up years ago!” one of them, Sam Dickerson, cried angrily. “We could get him sectioned for this”, said another, a thin, mean-looking man called Cedric.

Suddenly they stopped in their tracks.   With a loud WHOOOSH, the craft jumped horizontally into the air.   Mouths fell open as she rose high above the control tower.   For a moment she hovered like a sparrowhawk, the long legs contracting and tucking themselves under the wings.  Then, without losing height, the ‘Silver Darling’ slowly moved from the horizontal to the vertical.  The wings retracted.   There was a roar and a boom that made the ground shake and then, on a triangle of dazzling fire, the ship went soaring skywards amidst a cloud of orange and purple smoke that entirely engulfed the control tower.  

Terrified, the posse tumbled to the ground.  In her kitchen, a tray of mugs of tea shook in Mary Ibbotson’s hands.  In the bedroom above his shop, Claus Carlson was awoken by the shaking shelves of lamps that sang out in chorus.  He jumped out of bed and ran to the window, pulling back the curtain just in time to see a craft like a silver pencil vanishing high into the sky.

“Good God!  He’s done it!  Stanley’s done it!” he exclaimed, collapsed into a chair in utter astonishment.