where art collides

 It’s Tommy this and Tommy that

And kick him out, the brute

Rudyard Kipling

The vehicle’s new, in fact not quite finished, and you’re yet to see what it can do. You think the road ahead is clear. But it’s a high performer, it’s temperamental and you’re not quite au fait with the gears.

So it is with youth on its way to maturity. And leaving home to join the Air Force as I did at seventeen, there was no parent in the passenger seat advising me to slow down, no back-seat older siblings pointing the way.

Fresh out of training, I was posted to RAF Marham in Norfolk to help maintain radar equipment fitted to the Vickers Valiants stationed there at the time. Flight Sergeant George Tomkin, known as Tommy to his subordinates though not to his face, was my boss.

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It’s 27^th February 2008. The time 0056 hours. From a deep and tranquil sleep in peaceful Lincoln, I’m jolted into awareness by sudden ferocious thunder. This thunder, however, comes not from the clouds but from deep underground, a rumbling, rolling subterranean growl, felt more than heard as my house shakes violently around me. For ten, long seconds I hear the tiles above my head clatter and, half expecting chimney pots, I warily eye the ceiling as the overhead light swings in the streetlamps’ orange glow.

‘Terremoto!’

But this is England. After years of repressed tectonic distortion, it’s Mother England who’s abandoning her maidenly restraint to bellow and buck in a quaking orgasm of relief. Why should the Spanish word for earthquake spring into my mind? I’m transported back thirty-eight years.

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