After Brock (18 page)

The Fort Knox episode was especially interesting in that it wasn't the experience of one man alone: Lieutenant Mantell was with several colleagues when there appeared in the sky a brilliant white object (with, said some, a red border at its base) about 300 feet in diameter and moving westwards. Then it descended gently, to remain stationary (as Sam's apparition had) for an hour and a half. Men in the lieutenant's company noted a trail of green mist. When eventually it climbed back to approximately 10,000 feet, the airmen decided to pursue it. They dispatched four Mustangs, one piloted by Mantell himself. The higher this ‘saucer' ascended, the higher Mantell and his plane climbed. When he reached 25,000 feet, he blanked out: his loss of control caused the Mustang to fall and crash, at Franklin, Kentucky. So Mantell's story is that of the first death brought about (if not intentionally) by UFOs. People said later that what drove the pilot onwards and upwards was the planet Venus, shining with greater-than-usual brightness that January 7. But there were those who declared that, on examination, Mantell's body showed marks of having been lethally fired at, and who could have done this but aliens? – an end so frightening the Pentagon used all its powers to keep it secret from the public.

Nor was that the only history the Pentagon held concerning the arrival of well-equipped extra-terrestrial beings. There was currently a belief that time was ripe for a new influx of similar arrivals, but would the CIA permit access to information and open discussion? Of course not.

Wow, what terrific material! Pete vividly saw himself relaying fascinating high spots from stories like these to his audience at Broadcasting House and to his vast listening public beyond it. He could imagine the look of stunned admiration on the face of Bob Thurlow, a letter from whom he awaited daily.

One reference book informed him that the great psychologist C.G. Jung had taken an interest in Unidentified Flying Objects, and had written about them in his autobiography,
Memories,
Dreams, Reflections.
Remembering Sam Price's mandalas, Pete looked out this famous book and located it on the library shelves easily enough. Turning to its index, he found the entry: ‘UFOs pp 239, 354 ff, 366,' and chose to follow up the middle one of these, to read the following:

‘In one dream, which I had in October 1958, I caught sight from my house of two lens-shaped metallically gleaming disks, which hurtled in a narrow arc over the house and down to the lake. They were two UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects). Then another body came flying directly towards me. It was a perfectly circular lens, like the objective of a telescope. At a distance of four or five hundred yards it stood still for a moment, and then flew off. Immediately afterwards, another came speeding through the air: a lens with a metallic extension which led to a box – a magic lantern. At a distance of sixty or seventy yards it stood still in the air, pointing straight at me. I awoke with a feeling of astonishment. Still half in the dream, the thought passed through my head: “We always think that the UFOs are projections of ours. Now it turns out that we are their projections. I am projected by the magic as C.G. Jung. But who manipulates the apparatus?”'

What – or rather, who – did
that
remind him of?

   

This piece of purloining nearly deterred Pete from his choice, for it showed him how thoroughly Sam himself had intellectually penetrated UFO territory. Wouldn't this make for difficulties? Wouldn't he be better off with one of his earlier possibilities? Kites, for example. And as it happened, when he got back to Woodgarth, his favourite of the two Brats was waiting for him in the hall, with a ‘Bro, look at this!' Robin with his red cheeks and bright eyes did distinctly resemble the family's redbreast who held such winter dominion over their front garden. This human Robin was holding before him a sheet of blue paper which had been inserted in some Christmas gift book, headed ‘How to Make a “Sled” Kite for £1.70.'

‘Well, you haven't got a single one of the materials asked for, have you?' observed Pete, who never needed long to absorb a document, ‘a sheet of heavy-duty polythene! Where will we find that? And a roll of “Cardoc” nylon cord, eh? Haven't noticed many of them around! Cheer up, Robs, we can get 'em easily enough when the shops open tomorrow, and then we'll have a go.'

‘No, I don't think so!' came Dad's measured, cross voice, from disconcertingly near; Pete had forgotten that in the three-day-week he worked two days from home rather than in his office, ‘Robin, your brother Peter has his A Levels to prepare for, if I am not mistaken. He certainly hasn't time to go traipsing round shops looking for special types of polythene, let alone spending valuable hours putting the contraption together… I'll help you to do that, Robin,' he added, giving away the real reason for snubbing Pete: that he himself would enjoy making the kite; it'd take his mind off his worries.

Pete wasn't going to let his dad have the satisfaction of a victory. ‘Suits me,' he said, ‘I was only trying to be brotherly, as you're always saying I'm not. It isn't as if I'm bothered about kites one way or another.'

Untrue, but there you were! Still he couldn't now go on and choose kites as a special subject. He would just have to stick with UFOs, about which, he wagered, his knowledge easily out-weighed Sam Price's already.

At half-past seven that evening the telephone rang, and soon Mum was saying in what her son thought of as her most Home Economics voice: ‘Yes, and a very Happy New Year to you too, Sam… I'll pass you over to Peter, who is just in the middle of studying some A Level text or other.' (A barefaced lie!)

‘Hi, there, dude!' came Sam's drawl, ‘it's arrived, just as they promised. Right on cue.'

For a moment Pete had no idea what he was talking about. ‘They' surely couldn't mean the BBC, and yet…‘You mean…?'

‘I mean, the new car my Old Man promised me, what else, moron? Not my latest Kalashnikov or my luminous, scented sheath,' Pete's blushes deepened on the spot, ‘or my 1974 sub-scription to a Swedish girlie magazine, or whatever other desirables have just been flashing through your fertile, well-stocked mind. My new car – and tomorrow I'm going to try her out with my father – and then by myself, to see how I get on. But Friday afternoon, all being well, and if you're free, we could go out somewhere together. I can be round at yours at half past one, if you'd like that.'

‘Great!' said Pete, ‘great!' And so it seemed. This Friday heralded the last free weekend before the school term started. The whole British nation might be in financial straits, might be literally and spiritually groping around in darkness and in the seizures of bitter class warfare, but Trevor Price could still buy a new car for his maverick son. Pete had no difficulty in envisaging a drive worthy of a movie, Sam cool at the wheel and himself, snazzily dressed, in the front seat. His blood rose in him at the appealing picture.

At exactly one thirty that Friday (January 4) – a fine winter's afternoon, and not even as cold as the journalist doomsters had predicted – Sam turned up at Woodgarth. He was driving a VW

Beetle, the ‘Economy Car'. Pete felt both relieved and disappointed. Wasn't Trevor Price's choice of car for his son rather nearer what Jim Kempsey's might have been for Pete, had he felt like being generous in this respect (which itself took a good deal of imagining, his dad being such an unrepentant skinflint)?

‘Before we decide where to head off to,' said Sam, as Pete sat himself in the passenger seat, ‘
this
came for you this morning. Thank your good friend Samuel Price that his plan worked. Remember what he expects of you too.' Pete shuddered here. ‘You're more in my debt than ever now.'

‘No need to fucking rub it in!' said Pete, tearing open the envelope.

As well as the usual details, the letter added:

   

‘As this is a first in our programme – this friendly battle of the highest scorers who never actually became Highest Flyers at national level – we have decided it would be good to have another innovation. This time competitors will not undergo questioning on their special subject. Instead I will invite each of you to speak on the matter for five minutes.

‘Ten members of the audience invited by the BBC and not by the competitors (and therefore without any personal loyalties) will be given cards bearing numbers from 1 to10 to hold up after each talk. This score is then added to that achieved in the General Knowledge – and thus we get the total required for a winner. So please let me know your choice of special subject as soon as you can. Please find stamped addressed envelope enclosed.

Yours cordially,

Bob (Thurlow)'

   

Sam watched Pete reading with sly, keen, ironic eyes. ‘Any joy?' he asked languidly, hands on the steering wheel as though he were in no hurry to be off. ‘Any mention by the great Thurlow of the special subjects section for which he'll have to prepare those tricky questions to fire at you.'

Here was Pete's opportunity for admitting to – no, not ‘
admitting to'
(which smacked of guilt), for ‘informing' Sam of his choice. In fact he could make it sound as though it were an inspiration of this very minute. ‘Hey, Sam, don't you think
UFOs
would be a really ace topic. What you said about 'em has got me going again now!' But instead he clutched at the actual wording of Sam's question. ‘Bob says there's going to be no special subject question-and-answer session this time.'

‘Dear oh dear! Strike me pink! Revolution on Radio Four. Wherever next?
The Archers
will be moving to the Mile End Road before we know it!' said Sam, ‘anyway, High Flyer, where do you reckon we should go? With the weather as good as this we should head for mountains.'

‘Yeah! But mountains to the north and west,' Pete answered instantly. For the Malverns to the south-east and the Black Mountains to the south-west were Jim Kempsey's usual choices for family afternoons-out. Pete wanted, needed, a change.

‘Suits me!' said Sam, ‘Andrew Smithers, the guy I told you about at Darnton, thought one reason the dump didn't suit me was that there were no hills around – not like here. If there had been, it all needn't have happened. He could well be right. Had I stayed put in the Marches, I might have been like any happy sixth-former of the area. Like yourself in fact – except of course, you have a giant brain, which I could match with my giant soul. Who's to say?'

Pete wanted to ask: ‘It
all
?
What
needn't have happened?' But he didn't; judging Sam's tone a tad truculent. As in his next sentence, a hipster's apology: ‘No shit for this outing, I'm afraid. No nicotine either. Clean car, clean living – that's my motto for today!' Pete felt more relieved than sorry.

But as they pulled out of Etnam Street, he realised that conversation between them, in so confined a space, was going to be sticky; Sam clearly never modified moods for anyone else's sake. His present inclination to taciturnity with sporadic sarcasm made Pete, who, as his mother had stated, not only liked talking, but liked others to talk as well, physically uneasy. He shifted about in his seat until Sam gave him a sharp, reproving sideways look. Better if they had been bowling along in a Porsche or a Lamborghini. In prosaic reality Sam concentrated on driving his  VW with an earnestness suggesting neither confidence in his own abilities nor certainty of the Highway Code. Was this why he decided not to go along the A49 (connecting Leominster via Ludlow with Shrewsbury) but to take a country route in the direction they'd just decided on: over that puzzlingly named hill, The Goggin, the dense woods clothing it quite bare now, and then through the Teme valley, with Leintwardine and its large old church presiding above its north bank?

Home territory though this all still was, Sam didn't show himself at all familiar with it. Clearly Trevor Price had not been one for outings such as Pete's dad had taken his family on. And Sam had spent most of his life away at smart boarding schools. So Pete now had to prompt Sam about turnings, signposts etc and to volunteer info about the places ahead. Impossible not to notice at such moments Sam's dark eyes swiftly narrowing in irritation, so as the minutes went by, he steeled himself to abstain from any officiousness. Even so, only after Sam commented sar-castically, ‘I take it you've already
got
your licence,' did Pete finally lay off. Sam's face had, he'd thought, been as cross, and as handsome in crossness, as a swan's when it rears its neck round towards you, to warn you off his particular stretch of a river path.

Once they'd crossed the county border into Shropshire the change in the countryside affected both youths, though neither spoke this aloud. Here it was emptier, less fertile – grazing land. Hills came higher, wilder, sheerer in their slopes, and closer. They were also more generously covered with snow from the night before. Villages were sparser, mostly hamlets made up of adjoining farms, palpably unlike Herefordshire's black-and-white half-timbered communities revolving round friendly greens or squares and with churches that told of centuries of comfortable prosperity.

As the great long natural bulwark of the Long Mynd, culminating in a weather-whitened plateau, showed more and more of itself on their right, Sam obviously felt that this little outing for the Beetle, this occasion both to test himself and to show off his dad's present, had already had some success. The muscles of his face relaxed, he became less like a cob-swan. ‘We might as well go to – what-d'you call 'em… The Stiperstones, eh Pete? I chucked a map onto the back seat; take a peek at it, and find out what roads to take.'

Pete said: ‘Stiperstones – brilliant! But I don't need to look at any map, I can tell you the best way off the top of my head.'

‘Your mighty head!' said Sam, ‘so unlike the head of anybody else!' Pete couldn't but be disconcerted by this, and the tone of its delivery. After all in the car park after
The Mikado
it had been Sam who'd defended the tests against Pete's own doubts.