Missing The Boat: War Stories of Thomas Alan Dirkin

44 The Train Ride to Sheffield As part of my father’s work in the early 1950’s he travelled back and forth to Sheffield from Manchester most weeks. At a particular point of the journey he said he would start sweating and trembling. Further down the track he would return to normal. This experience went on for weeks, always at the same part of the journey as the train passed through a cutting. My father eventually did not fear the experience, but he did fear that he was physically or mentally ill. Still the experience continued. The then tumblers in the lock aligned, from the complexities of the memory. At some point during the war my father was desperately running across a field towards the cover of a ditch. An Allied bomber was badly damaged and was falling from the sky with an impact point that seemed to be just about centered on my father. The screaming harmonics of the dying plane were deafening. Those same harmonics were replicated by the train as it sped through the cutting on that journey to Sheffield. My father remembered the incident with the airplane that passed over him at high speed and crashed about seventy five yards away. Once he understood the trigger, there was an instant cessation of his physical and psychological reactions.