January, and we’re in Spain. But this is not the Spain most people know. The rain is incessant, it’s freezing cold, and the wind sounds like a jet engine playing the bagpipes. We’re driving slowly along the side of a broad, sweeping valley that stretches way into the distance, a crazy-quilt of lush green pastureland, any greener and it wouldn’t seem natural. Above us the steel gray sky is cram-packed with fast-moving rain clouds that spit and snarl down at us as we peer ahead. With that familiar sinking feeling, we realize we’ve been on this stretch of road before. We don’t know where we are, the clock is ticking, and we’re hungry.
George Brookes, small for his age and as blond as an angel, is upside down. He feels the chill of an unmown lawn on the crown of his soft, ten-year-old head. Then it vanishes, leaving a stain of dampness in his hair. A second later, thdump... his skull slams into the grass again.
“Out!” his mother cries. “Out!”
Her fingers dig hard into his ankles. With each word she lifts him up, then, with the next one, drops him.
“Get... out!”
My career began with two strokes of good luck—fate you might say, because as instances of good fortune none could have bettered them. After the War, towards the end of which I served as a cook in His Majesty’s land forces, I returned to England and, armed with the ability to knock up a wholesome bully beef stew for three hundred, presumed to pass myself off as a chef. In my new, ill-fitting suit (we all got a new, ill-fitting suit) I talked my way into the kitchens of a modest hotel in Scarborough, and several years afterwards found myself working in one of the superior hotels on the Yorkshire coast. I won’t tell you where, because about a decade later, at a moment when I gained some brief, local notoriety for swallowing slugs, my former employer there wrote to beg me never to divulge the name of the place to another living soul.
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