Blott on the Landscape by Tom Sharpe

Author:Tom Sharpe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Humorous Stories, Legislators, Humorous, Satire, General, Fiction, Roads, Environmental policy, Gardeners, Fiction:Humour, Modern fiction
ISBN: 0099435470
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2002-11-06T02:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

As dusk fell over the Cleene Gorge Blott left the Lodge with a spade. He had had his supper, sausages and mashed potatoes, and was comfortably full. Above all he was happy. As he followed the park wall round to the west and found the exact spot where he had climbed over as a prisoner of war he was boyishly excited. There had been a piece of iron fencing which he had propped against the wall to give himself a leg-up. It was still there, rusting in a patch of stinging-nettles. Blott dragged it out and leant it against the wall and climbed up. The barbed-wire had gone but as he straddled the top of the wall and dropped down on the other side he had the same feeling of freedom he had experienced night after night over thirty years before. Not that he had disliked life in the camp. He had felt freer then than at any time before. To sneak out at night and roam the woods on his own was to escape from the orphanage in Dresden and all the petty restrictions of his dreadful childhood. It had been to cock a snook at authority and to be himself.

And so it was now as he pushed through the bracken and began to climb through the trees. He was doing the forbidden thing again and he exulted in it. Half a mile up the hillside he came to a clearing. You turned left here. Blott turned left, following the old instinct as surely as if there had been a path there, and came out into the setting sunlight behind a mound of stones that had once been a cottage. Here he turned up the hill again until he found the tree he was looking for. It was a large old oak. Blott went round the trunk and found the slash he had made in the bark. He walked away from the tree, counting his paces. Then he took off his jacket and began to dig. It took him an hour to get down to the cache but it was there exactly where he had recalled. He pulled out a box and prised the lid open with a hammer. Inside caked in grease and wrapped in oilskin was a two-inch mortar. He dragged out another box. Mortar bombs. Finally he found what he was looking for. The long box and the four cases of armour-piercing rockets. He sat down on the box and wondered what to do next. Now that he came to think about it, all he needed were the rockets. All he had to do was to tie a piece of string to the fin and drop it from a height on to the safe. That would do the trick just as well as firing the rocket at the safe.

Still, he had come so far, he might as well take the PIAT home with him and clean it up. It would make an interesting souvenir. Blott put the mortar back with the cases of bombs, and covered them with earth.

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