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down his back, and he slapped viciously to try to squash it.
    His heart was pounding unpleasantly and his palms were sweating. He wiped them on his trousers, and scanned the landscape. It wasn’t flat, but neither did it offer much concealment. No trees, no bosky dells. There was a small lake off in the distance – he caught the shine of water – but if he’d ditched in water, surely to God he’d be wet?
    Maybe he’d been unconscious long enough to dry out, he thought. Maybe he’d imagined that he’d seen the plane near the stones. Surely he couldn’t have walked this far from the lake and forgotten it? He’d started walking toward the lake, out of sheer inability to think of anything more useful to do. Clearly time had passed; the sky had cleared like magic. Well, they’d have little trouble finding him, at least; they knew he was near the wall. A truck should be along soon; he couldn’t be more than two hours from the airfield.
    ‘And a good thing, too,’ he muttered. He’d picked a specially God-forsaken spot to crash – there wasn’t a farmhouse or a paddock anywhere in sight, not so much as a sniff of chimney-smoke.
    His head was becoming clearer now. He’d circle the lake – just in case – then head for the road. Might meet the support crew coming in.
    ‘And tell them I’ve lost the bloody plane?’ he asked himself aloud. ‘Aye, right. Come on, ye wee idjit, think! Now, where did ye see it last?’

    He walked for a long time. Slowly, because of the knee, but that began to feel easier after a while. His mind was not feeling easier. There was something wrong with the countryside. Granted, Northumbria was a ragged sort of place, but not this ragged. He’d found a road – but it wasn’t the B road he’d seen from the air. It was a dirt track, pocked with stones and showing signs of being much travelled by hooved animals with a heavily fibrous diet.
    Wished he hadn’t thought of diet. His wame was flapping against his backbone. Thinking about breakfast was better than thinking about other things, though, and for a time, he amused himself by envisioning the powdered eggs and soggy toast he’d have got in the mess, then going on to the lavish breakfasts of his youth in the Highlands: huge bowls of steaming parritch, slices of black pudding fried in lard, bannocks with marmalade, gallons of hot strong tea . . .
    An hour later, he found Hadrian’s Wall. Hard to miss, even grown over with grass and all-sorts like it was. It marched stolidly along, just like the Roman Legions who’d built it, stubbornly workmanlike, a grey seam stitching its way up hill and down dale, dividing the peaceful fields to the south from those marauding buggers up north. He grinned at the thought and sat down on the wall – it was less than a yard high, just here – to massage his knee.
    He hadn’t found the plane, or anything else, and was beginning to doubt his own sense of reality. He’d seen a fox, any number of rabbits, and a pheasant who’d nearly given him heart failure by bursting out from right under his feet. No people at all, though, and that was giving him a queer feeling in his water.
    Aye, there was a war on, right enough, and many of the menfolk were gone, but the farmhouses hadn’t been sacrificed to the war effort, had they? The women were running the farms, feeding the nation, all that – he’d heard the PM on the radio praising them for it only last week. So where the bloody hell was everybody?
    The sun was getting low in the sky when at last he saw a house. It was flush against the wall, and struck him as somehow familiar, though he knew he’d never seen it before. Stone-built and squat, but quite large, with a ratty-looking thatch. There was smoke coming from the chimney, though, and he limped toward it as fast as he could go.
    There was a person outside – a woman in a ragged long dress and an apron, feeding chickens. He shouted, and she looked up, her mouth falling open at the sight of