Prologue
Nat’s interview for KWT-TV really paid off. The morning after, just as we all were finishing breakfast and preparing to head off to the airport, Nat’s dad’s staff received a call from someone representing Mrs Levy, the ‘plastics magnet’ as I thought Nat had called her. You remember, the lady we met up at Lake Erie with her two granddaughters.
Mrs Levy offered that the Education Foundation she had set up in her husband’s memory would provide a $1 million dollar donation to the restoration fund of the USS Olympia if the State of Pennsylvania would make a matching donation and promote an educational initiative similar to the one run over the border on the USS New Jersey when Nat’s dad was elected Governor. She seemed pretty certain he would be. Not only that, but she offered a personal deal too. If Noah went ahead and worked up the sketches he had made on the Olympia into a set of detailed drawings for a series of limited-edition prints, she would buy the originals and then donate them to the USS Olympia restoration trust for permanent display, along with paying for the ward room on the Olympia to be restored in order to exhibit them. Nat could hardly wait to get on the phone to Noah to tell him the news, then begin to start working out a price for Noah’s original pictures. I’m guessing Nat was on to it the moment the flight taking me, mom and dad back home reached rotation speed and the nosewheel lifted up…
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Almost straight after getting back from our stay with Nathan’s family, I started back at school again to do two more A levels. Well, continue my Physics A level and add a Chemistry A level to it. That lasted for just three weeks before I had to change schools. Now, I know what you’re thinking, but it was nothing like that!
On our return to the UK, dad was promoted and with that came a posting to be Senior Military Officer at the communications centre at ISS Boddington just outside Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. We moved house and I changed schools but, to be fair, there was a benefit to that too. My new college, not far from the Doughnut where dad also spends quite a bit of time, is pretty good and in addition to my A levels in Physics and Chemistry, they offered me a Foundation Course in Materials Engineering to fill in the spare slots in my schedule. That kept mum happy as it is meant as a lead-in to an engineering degree if I choose to go to university.
We struck lucky on the house move too: ISS Boddington is on the site of the former RAF Boddington and dad was allocated the old Station Commander’s house as our quarters. It’s a big, old house with loads of rooms and a garden that is bordered on one side by the River Chelt – pretty useful for my kayaking! There’s also a dead good pub nearby, The Old Spot, where we had lunch on our very first day at Boddington whilst we waited for the removal van to catch up to us. The landlord assumed I am over 18 and neither mum or dad mentioned otherwise so another win there.
In addition to the house, we now also have a flat in Wapping. Dad’s job requires quite a bit of time to be spent up in London, several days a week typically, and so instead of doing loads of commuting he decided to rent a flat up there. It’s on the third floor of an old warehouse – Dundee Court - right on the banks of the Thames and only couple of minutes’ walk from the pub I took Shane, Kyle and Lee to when they came to visit last year. Very useful for weekend breaks and holidays for me and mum up in town!
Now dad has a new role, so does mum: she’s set up her own business, obviously spurred into it by not wanting to be outdone by me! Dad’s new job is primarily a staff role and so mum has been freed up from having to do all those unofficial things commanding officers’ wives are expected to do like look after every family on the patch, run charities and clubs and generally be superhuman. The idea for her business came from when she tried, and failed, to buy some more of the wine Noah’s family makes. Nobody stocks it over here, not even Berry Bros & Rudd, and when I checked with Noah if they did actually have an importer in the UK, it turned out they don’t. Well, they do now.
Mum decided that was a business opportunity, particularly when she discovered how restrictive dealing in and, even more so, exporting wine from the USA actually is. Noah’s family can’t just sell to an export agent, they have to go through a State-owned intermediary and all sorts of complications like that, and so don’t bother. For mum, dealing with bureaucracy is like waving a red rag at a bull and so when every body said it was just too difficult, she set out to prove them wrong. I think Nat’s dad probably got a great deal of ear bending along the way but the outcome was that mum now has an import agency bringing in wine not just from the Mason vineyard but from quite a few other Pennsylvania vineyards too.
The really good wines, like the Mason’s Heritage Line, come over already bottled but most of it, where the margins are way lower, comes over in bulk tanks and mum has it bottled here: glass is heavy and way too expensive to contemplate trans-Atlantic shipping. After bottling, it’s distributed through some specialist dealers. The really good stuff she distributes directly through her own network of contacts, especially targeting some of the USAF airbases over here and the restaurants surrounding them, providing ‘a taste of home’ as her marketing strapline goes. She even supplies the American Embassy!
Brookes, Bauer and Wright, my company, is continuing to grow. Well, okay, it’s mainly Will’s company really, but I now own a bit more of it than I did. While most students at ARMC are doing typical case studies and stuff in their economics and business classes, Will and Nat are running our company and getting plenty of help and advice along the way. We’re looking for a catchier name for the company, mainly at Nat’s instigation, and as he’s in charge of the business development and marketing side of things Will’s giving him free rein on the idea. I suggested ‘ACME’ as in ‘the best of things’ but Nat said that would just make us look like Wile. E. Coyote’s supplier. We’ll think of something eventually, but for now BB&W is fine.
Over the last year Will’s pretty much perfected the coding needed to do the dynamic optimisation of ambulance distribution around Harrisburg in real time based upon the data available from the highways authority’s traffic management system. After Nat had contracts drawn up to provide a service to McGregor Medical’s ambulances, I suggested that we should try doing the same thing with others who were faced with similar problems – after all, if we already have a means of acquiring and analysing position and traffic data then it shouldn’t be too difficult to tweak it for other market sectors. Nat was onto that in a flash and, believe it or not, soon got us another customer in the shape of a company that delivers chilled food and even fresh flowers to mobile vendors and wanted to streamline their logistics network.
On top of that, our original business of helping Three Rivers Telecom site their cell towers around Pittsburgh grew quite a bit and flying the signal analyser in Travis’s plane is building up a big additional database of signals that Will is tapping into to expand our offering in that sector. He reckons that is likely to be our next major growth area and decided that my input was worth more than the 5% share I was originally allocated. As a result, he redistributed an additional 2.5% of his shareholding to me, so I now own 7.5% of the company. In reality it doesn’t make any difference to the operation of the business: Will still owns the majority of it and Nathan’s share hasn’t diminished so he’s still happy, but I get a fraction more of the profits. I’m not arguing with that! It more than makes up for the fact that now we have moved house I don’t have my after-school job at the garage. I get my dividend – that’s what Will calls my share of the profits – every quarter. I’ve saved most of it so I have some money of my own when I go back to America, but I’ve taken mum and dad out for a meal a couple of times and treated myself to a new tweed jacket for shooting in too.
Nat’s dad, Paul, was successful in his bid to become Governor of Pennsylvania and of course Nat likes to hint – not outright claim, just hint – that he can take some of the credit for that. Sure thing, bud… Though Pennsylvania is governed from Harrisburg and so he spends a lot more time there than before, Paul does return to Pittsburgh most weekends, usually by helicopter, the same little ‘cute egg’ as my mum called it, that he rented when we visited them last summer. Maybe I’ll get another ride in it when I go back for my year at Allegheny.
We had hoped that I could get over to America again to see Nat for Thanksgiving but, being the last week in November, that didn’t coincide with my half term holiday and my new college was a bit uppity about me having a week off in term time. That term seemed to drag on for ever, speaking to him by phone just isn’t the same. Dad had no sympathy at all, just smirking and saying “Now you know how I feel about being apart from your mum.” Thanks dad.
It was Christmas before I got to see Nat again. He came over the day after Boxing Day, basically on the first flight out of Pittsburgh he could get after doing his ‘performing poodle act.’ We had a great time, spending a couple of days here in Boddington then heading up to Sheffield to stay with gran and grandad Wright for the New Year. It’s the first time he’s met them but they all got on well. When he discovered Nat likes history, grandad Wright dragged him off to the Kelham Island Industrial Museum to see the Don Engine being run up and Nat loved that. Okay, so I did too, but the museum is full of science and engineering stuff so though it’s right up my street I wasn’t totally sure it would be Nat’s thing. After that, we took Nat on a tour of the Kelham Beer Trail to introduce him to proper northern pubs and real ale. We only let him have half pints though.
Nat’s first semester as the college’s first ever Sergeant Major had gone really well, with him being the link between the new Captain of Cadets, a guy called Theodore Hall, and the rest of the cadets. There have been some changes at Allegheny too, primarily introduced by the Commandant but a couple of ideas suggested by Jackson Davis have also been implemented. It seems that with Jackson being Captain in a Golden Year his suggestions carried some weight.
Perhaps the most far reaching was the suggestion that, instead of waiting until part way through the first semester to appoint the Captain of Cadets, the Captain is now appointed on Prizegiving and Graduation Day at the end of each year and so is in place right from day one of the new college year. That actually makes great sense: under the old system the cadets were effectively lacking in leadership for the few weeks of the autumn semester. Apparently, it was previously done the old way because in the college’s founding year the then Commandant appointed a Captain of Cadets and it took a few weeks for him to get to know the potential candidates from scratch. After that it just became a tradition to appoint the Captain of Cadets on the first Parents’ Day of the autumn semester. Nowadays, the Commandant and staff have three years to build up a picture of the most suitable candidates and so the benefits of having a Captain in place right from day one of the first semester are deemed to outweigh the tradition.
We didn’t manage to get together over the Easter holidays either. I had the opportunity to go on a cadet trip sea kayaking in Cyprus and had already booked my place before Nathan managed to confirm what time he had free. Obviously, he knew well in advance what the actual college holidays were but he had to factor in a few events he felt he ought to attend with his family and then a further stint grubbing around back up in Maine looking for proof the Vikings were there. Sure enough, it turned out that we didn’t have any overlapping free time. We’ve made up for that though this summer.
Nat came over nearly three weeks ago, right after finishing his Junior year at Allegheny. The highlight of Nat’s college year was, of course, Prizegiving and Graduation Day where, as you might have expected, he was promoted and appointed Captain of Cadets for his forthcoming Senior year. He earned the promotion on merit, but that’s not stopped me giving him some stick about ‘buying his commission’. He’ll no doubt be looking to get his own back next year though as I’ll be a Cadet Lieutenant and so, in theory at least, he’ll be senior to me.
After spending almost a week here in Boddington, we caught a train up to Sheffield and stayed with gran and grandad Wright for a couple of days before moving on over to York to stay with gran and grandad Rufforth again for a whole week. I think they were more pleased to see him back than they were to see me!
One of several digs that gran has been responsible for overseeing on behalf of the Archaeological Trust has turned up some pretty groundbreaking finds over the last few years, possibly a cemetery for gladiators killed in combat in the amphitheatre, and though Vikings rather than Romans are Nat’s main historical obsession he didn’t need asking twice if he wanted to go and get to see behind the scenes at the dig. Actually, I don’t think he even got asked in the first place, just kind of glued himself to gran instantly when she said she was calling in to the site to review progress and suggested that if we hadn’t got anything else planned for the day… The dig was actually quite interesting and the finds – mainly skeletons of young adult males that had been decapitated but given good burials – have raised more questions than they have answered, not least of which is the complicating factor that there is no evidence of there having been an amphitheatre at Eboracum, which is what the Romans called York before the Vikings renamed it Jorvik. Maybe Cromwell built a car park on the site of it or something.
From York we got the train down to London to meet up with mum and dad again and stay in our flat in Wapping for a few days. I gave Nat got a tour of Diagon Alley, or Leadenhall Market as it really is, to ensure he wasn’t outdone by Shane, then he spent almost a whole day dragging me round the British Museum and the Natural History Museum.
Our stay in London coincided with my seventeenth birthday and for that dad played a blinder, linking up again with his old Sergeant Major, now Yeoman Warder, Langton. Actually, his full title is ‘Yeomen Warder of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Member of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary’, but just try fitting that on a business card. Oh, and as he made very clear to Nat, he’s not called a Beefeater. Anyway, dad and Yeoman Langton had arranged for my birthday treat to be a visit to The Keys, the secret pub within the Tower open only to Warders and their guests. As it is technically a private members’ club, and within heavily defended walls, no-one seemed to worry too much about the possibility of the police charging in if they heard I was only seventeen. After all, Her Maj employs plenty of hefty blokes with axes, halberds and swords to keep the hoi polloi out.
Finally, last week, we headed back down here to Boddington where, in addition to refreshing Nat’s kayaking skills on the Chelt, I passed my driving test and picked up my A level results. I’ve definitely been upgraded to ‘smart arse.’ I have a total of 5 A levels, all of them at the top grade: three in maths, one in physics and one in chemistry. Nat and me are just doing the last of our packing: tomorrow we set off for America. It seems weird to think that I am going to be away for a whole year. Yes, I know that was the original plan almost two years ago, but dad was going to be with me then. This time I’ll be on my own. Well, except for Nat that is. And I’ll probably be popping back here for a holiday, or mum and dad will be coming over to join me for a holiday in America – Nat’s parents have offered to host them again.
The best surprise on my birthday was saved until last. Because the Commandant at Allegheny offered me a scholarship, that meant the money dad had set aside to pay for my fees wasn’t needed and so mum and dad decided they would make my trip over to America as special as they could. In addition to giving me some of the money for spending money, they decided to treated me and Nat to a spectacular start to our year together. No, it’s not an upgrade to business class seats on our flight. In fact, there isn’t even a plane. Tomorrow morning, we are heading down to Southampton to board the Queen Mary 2 for a seven-night passage to New York.
