Read The Haunting of Toby Jugg Online
Authors: Dennis Wheatley
I wonder what luck I’ll have when I try that out on Taffy this evening. If I succeed I’ll be out of here by the end of the week. I have got to be; the new moon rises on Thursday.
It was no good. I have never before realised how difficult it is to catch a person’s glance and hold it for any length of time. Taffy was engaged for his strength—not his brain. He is only about five feet ten, but broad and long-armed, like a gorilla. His hair is dark and curly, and his eyes are small; but his face is as round as
a full moon, and he has a curiously feminine quality. He stood there, docile as usual, at the foot of the bath, for a full ten minutes while I was soaping myself, but every time I said something to him to attract his attention he just looked at me for a second, then looked quickly away again.
At last, in desperation, I said to him: ‘Taffy, have you ever tried staring anyone out?’
‘No, indeed, Sir Toby,’ he replied. ‘What would I want to be doing a thing like that?’
‘For fun,’ I said. ‘Come on; look straight at me and let’s see which of us can make the other blink first.’
‘Fun it is, is it?’ he repeated with a sheepish grin; and for a moment his round brown eyes peeped at me from beneath the dark, curling lashes that many a girl would envy. But almost at once he dropped his glance, gave an embarrassed laugh, and muttered: ‘A strange game it is, and I no good at it.’
I felt that it might arouse the oaf’s suspicions and a permanent resistance if I persisted further, at the time; so I chucked up the attempt and ate my dinner in a very bad humour. But I am hoping that I’ll catch him napping some time today. A good chance is bound to present itself sooner or later; the trouble is that I have no time to waste.
After dinner last night, to take my mind off my failure with Taffy, instead of switching my radio off at the end of the nine o’clock news I listened to a broadcast on the war. I must confess that I haven’t been taking very much interest in the war of late, owing to preoccupation with my own troubles; but hearing this commentator quite cheered me up, as it seems that in this past week or so things haven’t been going too badly for us.
The best bit of news is that General Alexander has succeeded in extricating all that was left of our army from Burma. It must have been hell for them all these months, fighting desperate rearguard actions in that ghastly country against enormously superior forces, and it is a miracle that they were not surrounded and cut to pieces.
It was Alexander, I remember, who assumed command in the last phase of Dunkirk, after Gort had gone home, and was himself the last man to leave the beach there. I think he must be a
really great General, as any fool can make a break-through if the odds are in his favour and he has plenty of supplies, but it requires military genius of the first order to conduct a successful retreat with war-weary troops who are short of everything. Now that he is back across the Chindwin, on the Indo-Burmese frontier, it should be easier to get supplies and reinforcements up to him; so let’s hope that he will be able to hang on there and prevent the Japs from swarming down into India.
The Ruskies are still getting the worst of it in the south, and the Germans claim to have driven them from their last foothold in the Crimea; but the success of Marshal Timoshenko’s counter-offensive against Kharkov more than makes up for that. Those Russian battles are on a scale that make our little set-tos in Libya look like backyard brawls, and they must be costing the Nazis tens of thousands of casualties a week. If only the Russians can keep it up they will yet bleed Hitler’s Reich to death.
This morning’s bulletin was cheering, too. Yesterday Coastal Command put on another good show. Our bombers caught the
Prinz Eugen
off Norway, slammed several torpedoes into her, and raked the decks of her escorting destroyers with cannon-fire. God, what wouldn’t I give to be able to fly again!
As must be obvious to anyone who, knowing nothing of me, comes upon this journal and has read so far, I got the better of Helmuth in the end. During those last three weeks on Mull, as he was constantly with me, his influence proved so strong that all my efforts to throw it off were in vain; and I was still in the same state when, on September the 24th, we returned to Weylands.
For the first week of the term I continued to be a bit befuddled and half-persuaded by his arguments; but about a fortnight earlier old Wellard had died, and I imagine that Helmuth was already hard at it, intriguing with Uncle Paul and Iswick to get himself appointed to the vacant Trusteeship. Anyhow, on October 1st he was summoned to a meeting of the Trustees in London. After I had spent twenty-four hours without seeing him my mind began to clear, and the next night I decided to make a bolt for it.
Getting away presented no difficulties. I packed into one small suitcase some spare underclothes and a few personal belongings; then, having read a book till about half past three in the morning,
I quietly carried the case downstairs and strapped it on to the back of the first bicycle that I came upon in the staff bike-shed. As it was seven miles to the station I had to take an unauthorised loan of the bike; but I knew that it would be returned in due course, since I meant to leave it in the station cloak-room and post the ticket for it to the school bursar.
At the station I slipped the ticked into an envelope that I had all ready for it, and at the same time posted a note that I had written to Julia, asking her to do her best to stop Helmuth trying to find me, and telling her that she was not to worry about me, as I should be very well looked after at the place to which I was going, and that I would write to her within the course of the next few weeks. Then, twenty minutes later, the milk train came in and took me to Carlisle.
As I was still technically a schoolboy I thought it possible that when my absence was discovered a hue-and-cry would start after me, and I was uncertain what powers the authorities might have to send me back, so I had already decided to take evasive action. London was the place they would naturally expect me to head for, so, instead, I took the train from Carlisle up to Glasgow. That afternoon I went to the City Recruiting Office there and volunteered for the R.A.F.
My age was then eighteen and three months, but I could have passed for a year older had I wished, as I was both tall and well-built; also I was, as the police descriptions term it, ‘A person of good address’, so I had little fear of being rejected. But I did not mean to sign on in my own name, as it was quite on the cards that in another few hours the police would be looking for me, and the thought that I might be caught out in that part of the business made me go pretty hot under the collar.
I knew that I would have to show my identity card and there was no disguising the Weylands address, as it had been issued to me there the previous May; but my name had been inserted simply as JUGG, ALBERT, A., with no ‘Sir’ or ‘Bart.’ in a bracket behind it to give away my title, and the previous evening I had added the letters LER to both the block-letter surname and my scrawled signature. It was a bit of a risk to take, as the card informs one that any alteration of it is punishable by a fine or
imprisonment or both; but I felt that if I could get away with it the odds would be all against anyone up in Glasgow associating the missing heir to millions, Sir Toby Jugg, with Aircraftsman Albert Juggler—and get away with it I did.
I found those first few weeks in the R.A.F. extraordinarily exciting. A high proportion of my fellow recruits were Glasgow mechanics, but there were also clerks, salesmen, colonials, farmers, small tradesmen and other types, most of whom had previously been entirely outside my ken.
The life, too, was utterly different from anything I had ever known; although I did not find it as hard as I had expected, for we were excellently fed and very well looked after. No doubt the routine and restrictions inseparable from communal life under discipline would have palled after a bit, but to start with, for me, everything held the glamour of strangeness, and every new face I encountered held a thrilling real-life story of effort and achievement—or failure, which could usually be heard over a can of beer.
During the ten weeks that I was in the ranks I had no chance to get bored with any one set of companions, as in less than two months the grading system caused me to be transferred from one hutted camp to another four times. It takes a lot of people to keep an aircraft in the air, so out of the many who offered themselves comparatively few possessed the qualifications and had the luck to be graded for operational training: the others had to be content to serve as ground-crews, signallers, clerks, tradesmen and in all the scores of jobs without the conscientious performance of which the operational people could not have functioned. But my youth, health, keenness and high standard of education led to my being picked as one of the lucky ones; and it was that which resulted in the discovery of my true identity.
My one object when I volunteered had been to become a fighter-pilot, and constant application coupled with the O.K. from half-a-dozen medical boards and selection committees had got me as far as this fourth station. When I had been there about ten days it came to my turn to be summoned for a personal interview with the Station Commander.
He asked me a few Questions, glanced through my papers, and
said: ‘I see, Juggler, that you have made a pretty good showing, so far; and that your Flight Commander considers your possibilities to be above the average. I think he is right; so I propose to recommend you for a commission. You may not get it, but at all events you will be given your chance on transfer as a Cadet to Receiving Wing.’
I suppose the good man expected me to blush, stammer my thanks, salute smartly and float out as though my elation was so great as to render me airborne already. But my surprise was only equalled by my consternation, as I knew that if I let him have his way the next step was that somebody would be demanding a copy of my birth certificate. In consequence, I blurted out, a little awkwardly, that I did not want a commission; I wanted to become a Sergeant Pilot.
He went a shade redder in the face and said a trifle huffily: ‘I cannot compel you, of course; but, presumably, you joined the Royal Air Force with the object of serving your country to the best of your ability. If, in the opinion of officers such as myself, who are practised in forming judgments of this kind, you are considered to have the fundamental qualities required for commissioned rank, you must surely see that it is your duty to accept our decision and do your best to obtain it.’
Before I could reply, another officer, a Flight-Lieutenant who was sitting at a side table, stood up and said: ‘D’you mind if I handle this, sir? I think I know the answer.’
The Group-Captain looked a bit puzzled, but nodded his assent, and the Flight-Lieutenant beckoned me to follow him into the next room.
As soon as the door was closed behind us he motioned me to a chair and offered me a cigarette. He was a lean, bronzed-faced, tough-looking little man of about thirty, with very blue eyes. When we had lit up, he grinned at me and said: ‘I take it the birth certificate is the snag, isn’t it—Sir Toby?’
What the hell could I say? I knew I was caught out. It transpired that until the outbreak of war he had been a test pilot at Juggernauts—the Jugg combine’s biggest aircraft plant; and that he had recognised me from having met me on a visit that I paid to the factory with Helmuth in 1938.
I had watched the papers carefully, and no report of my disappearance had so far been published in them; so I took it that Julia had shown my letter to the Trustees and they thought it wiser to wait for me to reappear in my own time than to start a scandal by having me publicly hunted. But somebody on the Board must have talked, as Flight-Lieutenant Roper had heard that I had run away from school in a letter he had had from a friend in his old firm.
He put it to me that I was in a jam. Sooner or later I was bound to be rumbled, and it might happen in circumstances where my C.O. had no alternative but to send me for court-martial on a charge of having made a false declaration to the recruiting authorities; and following that there might be a civil prosecution for having faked my identity card. He said that, as my motive had clearly been a patriotic one, he did not think either court would take a very serious view of the matter; but one could not be certain of that, as they could not afford to give the press a chance to publish the fact that anyone had been caught out breaking wartime security measures and allowed to get away with it—and, I being who I was, it was certain the press would make it a headline story. So he thought that instead of going on as I was and risking anything like that I should be much wiser to let him try to sort matters out.
I was still afraid that once the Trustees found out where I was they would endeavour to regain control of me; but Roper said that since I had managed to get into the R.A.F. and was over eighteen, it was quite certain that the Air Ministry would never agree to release me for the purpose of being sent back to school; so I accepted his very kind offer. We agreed that he should tell the Group-Captain that I had asked for a fortnight to think over the question of the commission, and in the meantime he would put my case in confidence to an Air Marshal who was a personal friend of his.
Between them they did the trick. On the 11th of December I received orders to proceed to London and report at Adastral House. On the 12th I signed a lot of papers there, with the result that Aircraftsman Juggler was released from the service and for about five minutes I became a civilian; after which I was sworn
in again under my proper name and left the building with orders to get into a civilian suit, post my uniform and kit to the R.A.F. Depot in Hallham Street, and go on leave till further notice.
Down at Queensclere Julia and Uncle Paul killed the fatted calf for me; and when Helmuth came south just before Christmas he showed not the slightest trace of ill-will at my having got the better of him. In fact he said that, while he had felt it to be his duty to keep me out of harm’s way if he possibly could till I was called up, he thought the initiative I had shown did me great credit; so we quite naturally fell into our old friendly relationship.