Read Online The Tunnel by Eric Williams - Free Book Online

responsibility – and they had dressed up as though they were going on holiday. But Bob wasn’t dressed like that. He was wearing a neat blue business suit and his collar was starched. He carried his spare kit and shaving tackle in a leather briefcase as though he had just left the office, having put everything in order, with all the loose ends nicely tied up and ready for someone else to take over; which was exactly what he had done.
    The corporal was the bullying type, one of those big fair corporals with a pale acned face, protuberant blue eyes and an air of frustrated spite. It had probably taken him years to get his two stripes, and he knew that in a few months most of the casual civilians who stood before him would be sergeants or pilot officers – and it rankled.
    They were all new to the Air Force and they were careful. It wasn’t that they were afraid of the man, as a man, but they were all keen to get into aircrew, and they’d heard that a bad report, even from a corporal, was enough to get you pushed off the course. So they stood there in silence as the corporal walked slowly up and down the ranks, picking out one after another as the butt of his sarcastic wit. Finally he stood back and told them collectively what he thought of them. ‘Don’t think that just because you’re going to wear Air Force blue you’re going to become a lot of heroes – because you’re not. Nine-tenths of you won’t get through the course anyway, by the look of you. You’re just a lot of bloody conscripts to me and the sooner you realize it the better it’s going to be for you.’ He stood glaring at them, his whole tightly-belted figure expressing his contempt for the effete civilians who were intruding on his service life.
    Then Bob spoke. ‘Corporal,’ he said; and there was something in his voice that made Peter wince, some compulsion behind his words that made him wish the man would say no more.
    ‘Well,’ the corporal said. ‘What is it? Out with it!’ And he stood there arms akimbo waiting for what the soft-looking bastard had to say.
    Bob was obviously nervous. His face was pale but his voice was even, and it was only when you watched him closely that you saw how hard he was driving himself to say what he had to say. But he said it. He explained to the corporal that they were not conscripts but volunteers, and he made the corporal apologize before they were dismissed and sent to their sleeping quarters. Peter thought at the time that Bob had been unwise, but admired the moral courage that had forced him to speak when the rest of them were silent.
    As the week’s initial training stretched into months he became very friendly with Bob, realizing what a spirit there was inside the man to force him on in the way that he was determined to go. He was rather old for aircrew, he wasn’t the aircrew type; he was too earnest, he worried too much. It was obvious that he would find it difficult when they came to fly. Even in those days he admitted that the thought of flying frightened him. He had only volunteered for aircrew because in that way he felt that he could do his best to help to win the war.
    He proved to be a good navigator, careful in calculation and meticulous in plotting; but he worried too much and tended to ‘flap’ in the air. He disdained the slapdash methods which often got the others round the course and back to base without knowing exactly how they had done it. He refused to cheat too, and swotted in his room at night while the others went down to the village pub.
    On the eve of the final ‘Wings’ exam they all wrote cribs on cigarette packets and small pieces of paper to be held in the palm of the hand. Some of them even took their class notes in with them, tucked inside their tunics so that they could read the answers to the questions in the lavatory at the end of the corridor. It wasn’t cheating in the ordinary sense of the word. They weren’t cheating one another; there were no honours to be