Free Kissed a Sad Goodbye by Deborah Crombie Page A

between the clusters of buildings. Then the splotches spread together until it was the clumps of houses that stood out, dark patches against the green of the rising hills.
    The children grew quiet again, absorbing the strangeness of the countryside, and the temperature continued to rise. When the train ground to a halt, a moan of tension ran through the car and Lewis felt a wave of nausea. They waited, whispering, but soon the train began to move again.
    As the heat grew and the children became more anxious, the special treats eaten by many inevitably came back up. To make matters worse, it was soon discovered that the train had no toilets. Lewis tried pinching his nose to block the stench, but it only made his thirst worse. Simon Goss had gone to sleep, slumped against Lewis’s numb shoulder. The younger children who weren’t sleeping grizzled for their mothers, a continuous keening of misery.
    The train slowed once more. Lewis opened eyes he had squeezed shut against the glare. His eyelids felt sticky. Licking his parched lips, he squinted at the station sign as the train squealed and shuddered to a stop. Dorking. Wherever that was. He closed his eyes again and leaned his head against the window, wondering if he’d dozed and dreamed that they were doomed to stay on this train forever.
    The sound of an engine roused him. He looked out, blinking. A green coach pulled up to the station, then another, atid another. Men shouted commands and the buses were maneuvered into position beside the platform. Lewis felt his heart thud as the children woke and a stir ran through the car.
    The loading of the buses went smoothly, as most of the children were too hungry and exhausted to cause any trouble. Lewis’s class was put with another, and as their coach pulled away from the station, the children clutched their parcels and stared out at the red-bricked buildings of the high street. But they soon left the town behind, and the road ran west into wooded, rolling hills and the afternoon sun.
    Lewis had found himself near the front of the coach, and to quell the panic rising in his chest at the sight of all that openness, he spoke to the driver. “Where are we, mister?”
    The driver, a thin man with a leathery face and wispy hair, glanced back at him and smiled. “Surrey, lad.”
    That didn’t mean anything to Lewis. He tried again. “How far is it? Where are we going, mister?”
    Another flick of the man’s eyes in the mirror and he replied, “Ten miles or so. Not far. You’ll see.”
    Subsiding in his seat, Lewis thought the man had a funny sort of accent, all stretch ed-out and blurry-sounding. But at least they’d be off this bus soon. The twisting and rising and falling of the road was making him feel all-over queer, and he wrestled with the catch on his window until he managed to get a bit more air.
    He tried closing his eyes, but that only made it worse, so he looked at the great, green hump of land rising away to the right.
    Following Lewis’s gaze in his mirror, the driver said, “That’s the north Surrey Downs, lad. Old earth, that is. Feet have walked that way since the Dark Ages.”
    Lewis did not find the thought comforting.
    After a bit they turned off to the left into a lane no wider than the coach. The lane dipped down between thick hedges, curving and turning, and at every bend Lewis gasped in terror and squeezed his eyes shut. Surely they would crash into the hedge, or meet something coming the other way, but the driver seemed unconcerned and eventually Lewis relaxed a little.
    Then the hedges disappeared, and a triangular bit of grass appeared. A few houses were clustered round it, and a ways up the hill on the opposite side rose the steeple of a church. The coach continued past the green and into another narrow lane, but this one had houses either side, and it came to a dead end at a long, low building that bore the legend: Women’s Institute.
    They had arrived.
     
    “KIT SHOULD BE BACK AT THE flat by