Without A Song

Chapter Ten: Dernewell

Six hours and thirty minutes later the British Airways 747 aircraft touched down at London Heathrow Airport amid the early morning madness of a busy international hub that never sleeps. Ninety minutes later, as the penetrating dawn glow replaced the orange sodium lights cauterising the darkness, I was presented with a mobile phone and the keys to a Mazda MX5 Miata by the nice people at Hertz. This was the last version of the MX-5 Miata to hit the British roads and production was due to be phased out over the next twelve months. This meant that this model had all of the bugs removed and would be ideal for the trips I planned to do. Any back seat passenger would've had to have been the size of a corgi to get enjoyment in this car but for the driver and the front seat passenger there was room aplenty. I was soon safely ensconced in the morning traffic of the M25, the orbital motorway that surrounds London. The inevitable Happy Hour, where the traffic was already nose-to-tail nudging its way north, south, west and east of the British capital. Roadworks fused running streams of flashing amber-gold with a random choice of chaotic traffic cones as far as Junction 28. From there the M25 motorway gave way to the A12 trunk road ploughing a refreshingly clear path towards Ipswich. It couldn't come quick enough. The Miata was superb for the Great British Snarl-up, the handling was seriously smooth, with plenty of instant power and the five-speed gearstick was as easy to move as a video game joystick. The big Roadworks End sign soon passed me by and I gently edged the speed to above seventy miles an hour. The car had purred like a big jungle cat prowling the motorway, now I unleashed it on the A12, leaving others in my trail and powering onwards to Ipswich and Old Dereham.

Once clear of Chelmsford I pulled over in a large layby full of truckers, where a large white mobile kitchen resplendent with a giant Union Jack flying from a long whip aerial, was doing a brisk trade. In my opinion, if you find one of these little vans with more than one trucker attached then it's the best place to stop for food. Upset a trucker and you'll upset a whole community. Upset the trucking community and it can seriously impair your income, enough to put you out of business for good. I took the opportunity to have my first proper English breakfast and a giant mug of real British tea for six months. Shiny bright, silver chrome tables and chairs littered the grass area. While I waited I took in that wonderful salty smell of freshly fried pig bacon that we're denied in Saudi. As it sauntered through my nostrils. I stood my ground and breathed it all in. Very soon I was tucking into a large plate of sausage, bacon and eggs, baked beans, black pudding, mushrooms and fried tomatoes. It was pure, blissful, overkill but oh so welcome, especially with the roar of disciplined traffic close by. An orchestral background worthy of any dining experience. A hawk hovered above, attracted by the movement of potential prey in the hedgerows. Its static flight overhead reinforced the pleasure of being back in England. As I ate I contemplated my plans for the days, weeks and maybe months ahead. Little could be planned when I knew so little of the circumstances in Old Dereham. I had no mind to tell Sue I was home but realistically I suppose I had to, she could castrate herself in hell if it was possible.

I'm not sure if it's a man thing but I find it easy to compartmentalise emotive situations so that I just focus on one situation and resolve it. Maybe I'm just too cold? Maybe I'd have turned back had I known what the good folk of Suffolk had in store for me. Maybe I should have done.

Suffolk takes a little longer to rise than most of the southeast of England, to offer yawns and move slowly past breakfast but it was no worse for it. My next stop would be Dernewell where I needed to sort out my finances and deal with the house. Get done what was there to be done, put my moniker to some paperwork and hopefully be done with it. Terri Golding was now my bank manager and it was going to

be good to see her again. I'd enjoyed our shared experiences in the South Atlantic and despite the distances and the changes in our professional lives we were never that far away if we needed to talk. With the advent of mobile phones and the Internet, communication was getting faster every day, so why could I not talk to Sue? Out at Old Dereham was our house that had once been our home, waiting for someone to return. Mike Bolt had already done a lot of work on the house so I hoped it would be no problem talking to him about finishing the outstanding projects. Strange, I no longer thought of the house as 'ours' but 'it' or 'the'. I sighed, realising that my main problem would be getting some form of communication going with my (soon to be?) ex-wife. I slugged the remainder of the dark milky tea down my throat and gave a hearty thanks to the chef whose name was Dave, then I rang Leanne Dawlish from my mobile phone. Leanne chided me for my wayside meal telling me I'd have been fed when I got to Huntly Mill. I explained that six hours of airline food, even in first class, was not enough. I'd slept most of the way back anyway trying to adjust my body's clock to UK time. The sight and smell of food from the van had been too good an opportunity to miss.