My feet dangled into space, and for a moment I wondered if Biggles had got his measurements wrong and it was more than four feet to the bottom; but then my feet squelched into several inches of a slimy substance that I preferred not to think too hard about, and I touched the floor. I reached up my hands, and pulled the tool box down, placing it on the floor beside my feet, then reached up again, took hold of the lavatory bowl, and manoeuvred it back into its correct position. I took four bolts from the tool box, pushed them up through the four holes into the base of the lavatory, and hand-turned them until they were sufficiently tight to prevent the lavatory from moving. There was a small hole in the centre of the lavatory, through which I could see up into the tiny room; the light was on, but that would go off soon, when the maintenance men switched off the generator.

I stood bent double in this hell-hole, where I was to spend the next sixteen hours, listening to the sound of my breathing through the gas mask, idly hoping that some giant man-eating alligator hadn’t decided to make this place his home. It was cold, very cold, and I was already getting cramp from being arched. I didn’t want to sit down in that horrible mire, but I had a tough day ahead, and if I didn’t get some sleep tonight, I wasn’t going to be any good for anything.

As I gingerly began to lower myself down, I decided that, compared to this place, the Black Hole of Calcutta would be like a honeymoon suite at the Savoy.

Chapter 9

9

Totes is a small town that lies midway between Dieppe and Rouen, and is really more a large village. Like many sleepy French places, it straddles two main roads. At one end of Totes is an outstandingly beautiful manor house, with red brick walls and white shutters, set some way back from the road. Half a mile up a cart track behind it, is a cluster of barns, silos, cowsheds, chickens, dogs and pigs, the central point of which is an ancient, grey stone farmhouse.

The proprietor, Gaston Leuf, was a wizened old farmer, with a shrivelled body and a wrinkled face. Except when he was sleeping, he had never been seen without a blue beret on his head and the stump of a yellow Gauloise sticking out of his mouth. If you ever wanted a photograph of a classic French farmer, you’d travel a long way to find a better specimen than Gaston Leuf.

It was a glorious early November morning, and the whole of Normandy was shrouded in a three-foot-high mist that the sun was slowly dispersing. The whole land looked like a fairy-tale setting, and there was a feeling of serene peace.