A Great Episode Of The British Isles
By ARTHUR BISHOP
Mist and nasty fog imprisoned the English countryside. Cold, raw weather heightened the misery of groping about even for the short distance of a hundred feet. Stragglers here and there appearing like grotesque moving gargoyles bent on some sinister purpose, added immeasurably to the ghostly nocturnal setting of one of England’s worst fogs.
Shacks and mansions alike blended indistinguishably in the eerie haze that engulfed everything. A quarter mile, even a few squares afoot or by conveyance was foolhardy this night in the fogbound largest city of the British Isles. Travel was extremely hazardous.
The great Croydon airport lay 50 miles away from the heart of London, in Surrey, a suburb of the teeming city. An American passenger plane was due there at daybreak. Penniman, a little bookkeeper at a perfume shop near Picadilly Circus, bent on meeting the plane and thinking only of the priceless gift his friend in America was sending him by the airplane pilot, disregarded the threat of danger in the fog as he pedaled along on his bicycle through the countryside.
For six hours, Penniman wheeled along the trying miles cautiously but doggedly, thinking only of the great pleasure the treasured gift from America would afford his wife and two children as well as himself.
The prime minister, even the king, would highly value what this little bookkeeper was determined to soon have in his eager hands, for it was one of the rarest things in all of Merry OP England. It was something that was sought with greater alacrity perhaps than anything in the whole of England. Rich man, poor man, the nobility probably even would not hesitate to make the precarious 100-mile roundtrip that Penniman was making were they to receive what he was to have.
Suddenly, not 10 feet away, the famed airport loomed up out of the thick fog, and Penniman, though dog tired but beaming, quickened his pace the last few seconds. Dismounting and parking his bike, he made his way through the waiting room of the huge airdrome.
In a few minutes the plane, using its penetrating fog slicers, came down through the murk and rolled to a stop.
Twenty minutes later, Penniman was en route back home through the treacherous fog, his treasured gift from America tied securely to his bike—a carton of a dozen fresh eggs.
(NOTE: In England due to economic conditions, a person who has one egg a week is considered fortunate.)