They were both big boys, and neither was showing any sign of tiring. The fight seemed to go on and on, the punching and the wrestling and the rolling over and around, and the boys watching began gradually to murmur like trees in the wind. Gazing, obsessed with the need for one or the other to win, they began to stir uneasily as their own champion was rocked by a blow, or to murmur in support if he landed a punch or twisted the other boy out of range; and listening, Derek found these sounds even nastier than the silence had been, and the more so because he knew he was making them himself.
It was Johnny Wiggs who brought the end of it, and he did it by breaking the silence: the silence that had seemed magical, a spell cast in such a way that so long as no sound was made, except a gasp or a wordless grunt, the fight would go on and on without end. Johnny Wiggs had begun to look as though he were winning; in their last long scuffle he had managed to hold Tom pinned down helplessly long enough to thump at him viciously several times and to send the breath gasping out of him and begin a trickle of blood from his nose. But at the last moment Tom had curved his back and given a great jerk, and tumbled Johnny Wiggs sideways into a particularly thorny bramble clump; and then they were apart again and stumbling, panting, to their feet.
They stood a yard or two apart, glaring, ready; but Tom was clearly winded by the last scuffle and swaying where he stood. Johnny Wiggs clenched his fists and bobbed lightly on the balls of his feet and laughed jeeringly at Tom with the confidence of the one who was about to win.
“Hey, sailor boy,” he said softly. “Running out of steam, sailor boy? You’re not much good, are you, sailor boy, not without your sailor suit? Need a nice uniform like Daddy’s to prove what a brave boy you are.”
In the group watching, David Wiggs laughed loudly, and his cronies sniggered; Derek felt his cheeks grow suddenly hot and saw Pete jump angrily to his feet. But before either of them moved, Tom moved, did more than move. He leaped at Johnny Wiggs with his mouth clenched tight and his eyes open very wide, and he seemed to shake him as a cat shakes a new-caught mouse before he hit him, once, very hard and very fast. Nobody saw the fist move or even land, but they heard a horrible clicking sound as Johnny Wiggs’s jaw rammed shut, and they saw Tom’s arm drop down, and Johnny Wiggs stagger for a moment and suddenly fall down in a heap on the ground.
Tom stood where he was, looking down, breathing heavily, and his face relaxed and smoothed itself out so that for the first time since the fight had begun, he looked like himself again. The boys from the White Road were murmuring like bees around Johnny Wiggs’s prostrate form. Peter and Derek and Geoffrey hovered, fascinated and a little scared, behind them, and after a moment Tom shook his head as if to dislodge something from the top of it and came and stood over the group and pulled two of the boys aside. But at the same moment Johnny Wiggs groaned and put out an arm and pushed at the ground and sat up, rubbing his chin.
Perhaps if the two boys had spoken, or even looked at one another, it would have broken the spell. Perhaps it would have taken away the huge and awful strangeness of the mood that still hung over them all: the sense of something unfamiliar and frightening and impossible to understand. Perhaps. But before Johnny Wiggs could even raise his head and look up at Tom, before anyone could do anything, the silence and the sunshine and the whole spring day fell to bits, and out of nowhere into the sky there rose the thin climbing, growing wail of the siren that meant an air raid. Up in its wailing curve of distorted music it went, gathering strength as the note went higher, until it was shrieking its loudest along the waving line, whooo—ooo—whoooo—ooo, up, down, up, down, filling the sky, filling the ears, filling the whole world. And as Derek listened to it and flinched beneath it, he was afraid, and he knew he had never been afraid in this way in his life before.
He looked at the others, all the others who had been under the spell of the fighting, too, and he saw the same fear on every face.
He looked up at Tom, and Tom was looking at all three of them.
“Go home,” Tom said. “Go on, it’s a raid; you’ll have to. Over the gate at the top of Everett. Go on now, run.”
Everyone was scattering. Johnny Wiggs was up on his feet, shaking his head and rubbing the back of his neck, and with the White Road boys clustering around him, he began to move past the thicket toward the back of his house. Tom turned toward his own fence.
“He was smashing,” Derek said softly, even through the alarm buzzing in his head.
“Mmm,” Geoffrey said, and he meant it, but the noise of the siren was dissolving him. “Come on.”
Peter stood still and called, “Tom!”
Tom glanced back over his shoulder.
“You won,” Peter said.
Tom grinned at them and flapped both hands to wave them home. They turned to the gate of the field, and they found themselves face to face with David Wiggs. None of them had noticed that he was still standing there.
Nobody said anything. For a moment they stared. Then David Wiggs puckered his weaselly face and spat, viciously, at Peter’s feet. And then he ran.
There was no time to do anything, and perhaps nothing to do even if there had been time. The siren was still pouring out its warning, and they felt urgently that they had to be away and at home before its last dying wail began the long prelude to the danger of the raid. Derek felt it now as he had never felt it before. “Come on,” he said, and ran.
Over the gate that ended Everett Avenue, and its one strand of barbed wire that was really no hindrance after all; past Tom’s house; down the road. Derek veered away from them to his own gate as the siren’s note began dangerously to wail its way down.
“See you tomorrow!”
Geoff ran without seeming to hear, but Peter grinned over his shoulder and waved. “I’ll call for you, Derry—be seeing you!”
BUT THEY did not see one another again that day. The first raid was not a long one and never came close; Derek and Hugh heard only very distant gunfire and did not even go down into the shelter, though Mrs. Brand kept them close to her and ready to run if there should be need. The all clear sounded after about an hour. Derek spent the rest of the day indoors, since his mother was still edgy, and played with Hugh. He was so shaken by the fight, and the strange feeling it had brought, that he was glad of the quiet house and the chance to build his small brother castles and towers of wooden bricks. It was a comfort, a proof that whatever might be prowling outside, his own world and the people closest within it were still secure.
He was in bed and asleep when the night raid came. He had not heard the siren, and he never knew how long the raid had been going on before he woke. There were so many thumps and bumps in the night outside that it might have been in progress for hours. He had been dreaming about the fight: an unpleasant, distorted dream in which Tom was fighting not the elder Wiggs but his brother David. Derek was watching with Peter, and suddenly the fight took a horrible mad turn, and the two who were fighting stopped punching one another and turned and came across to where Peter and Derek were sitting, and Tom looked down at them with that frightening face full of hate and said, “It’s your turn now,” and David Wiggs laughed, and then suddenly changed from laughing to the same hating face and spat on the ground at Peter’s feet as he had during the real day. And Derek was swamped by an awful fear. It engulfed him as if he had jumped into a bottomless lake, and nothing else existed except the feeling of being horribly afraid.
And it was out of that fear that he woke into the noisy night, blinking in relief at the reality that was, in spite of the noise, so much better than the dream. But something of the fear stayed with him, whether from the dream or the day before, and he listened uneasily to his parents talking in low, concerned voices beside the door of the room.
“It’s getting much closer,” John Brand said. “I really think we should take them down to the shelter, Mary.”
“Couldn’t we try the cupboard under the stairs?” His mother sounded unhappy. “They say it’s the safest place in a hous
e. They’d be almost as safe there. It’s such a cold night, and Hugh’s cough—”
“I want you to be safe, too,” his father said gently. Out of one half-open eye Derek saw him put his arm around Mrs. Brand’s shoulders and give her a hug. “Come on now, wrap him in plenty of blankets. The Thermos is in the kitchen all ready. I’ll get Derry up.” Then he was bending over Derek and slipping an arm beneath his head. “Come on, old chap, wake up. We’re going down in the shelter for a bit.”
Struggling into sweater and shoes and dressing gown, Derek felt empty and sick with fear of the night and the noises it was making. He was still woozy with sleep, but the fear was there, very strong and unfamiliar, and he did not know how to handle it. As they went quickly out into the darkness, he held tightly to his mother’s hand and looked up and saw the white crisscrossing arms of the searchlights sweeping the black sky, and small and far off the bursting stars of shells, and below and behind it all the red glow in the eastern sky, as if he were seeing them all for the first time.
In the small dank, earth-smelling box of the shelter, it was better at first, because they were all close together. Even though the noise outside grew steadily worse, Derek lay curled and relaxed and almost fell asleep. But at the pit of his stomach the fear still crawled. And all at once it jabbed him viciously as the roar of a diving plane shrieked out of the dull background of rumbling and thumps, and while it still filled his head, there were two great crashes somewhere close. He felt his bunk quiver, and he jerked upright and hit his head on the roof. He had a glimpse of his father’s face, strained and intent.
Then the third explosion came, and it was as if the world had blown up. The noise poured through his head so that it sang in his ears even after he knew that it had stopped. He ducked automatically and stayed crouched with his head on his knees. He had never heard anything so shatteringly loud. His bunk and the whole shelter shuddered and shook, and outside in the night there was a sequence of other smaller, closer noises, noises of breaking and clattering and something that sounded like tiles falling from their own roof. The shelter gave a second tremor much fainter than the first, and then the worst close noise was gone, and there was only the rumbling again and the sound of the guns, and Derek raised his head fearfully and stared at his mother and father in the dim light of the jumping candle flame. His mother reached up and took hold of his arm and held it tightly. “All right, love. All right.” Blanket-bundled in her arms, Hugh whimpered, and she bent her head to murmur to him.
John Brand moved to the candle and pinched out its flame between his finger and thumb, then warily pulled the blackout curtain and the wooden cover over the shelter entrance a little way aside. Derek peered out at what little of the gap he could see, and gasped. The night was not dark now. It was a dusky red, and its light was strangely flickering.
His father turned back. He rattled a box of matches and gave it to Mrs. Brand, still holding the entrance open with one hand.
“Down the road,” he said. “Looks like a direct hit. I shall have to go and help, love.”
“Oh, John—” Mrs. Brand said, and her voice was shallow and quavering as Derek had never heard it before.
“Look,” John Brand said, “it must have been the one plane. Off course from the factories, like last time. There’s nothing else coming down. Not now.”
“You don’t know,” she said.
“It might have been us,” he said. “Thank God it wasn’t. They need help. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He kissed her quickly. “Stay down until the all clear goes.” He pressed Derek’s knee hard. “Look after them, Derry,” he said.
“Be careful,” Mrs. Brand said softly.
He went out, and Derek heard the rattle of the wooden cover going back into place, and his father was gone.
His mother laid Hugh gently on the bunk, checked the blackout, and lit the candle again.
Derek said suddenly, his voice coming out high and hoarse, “Dad isn’t going to get shot, is he, Mum?”
“Of course not, love,” she said, and reached up and hugged him. “He’ll be very careful. But one of the houses down the road was hit by that last bomb. Daddy could see the fire. So everyone has to go and get the people out of the house before they get hurt.”
The guns were still thumping, but the rumble of planes had died away. Derek looked at the candle flame, sending up its quivering black line of smoke, and lay back on his bunk. “Peter’s dad will be helping, too,” he said. “And Geoff’s. They live closer to that end than we do. I expect Pete’s dad was the first there. Whose house do you think it was, Mum? Old Mr. Graham at the end of the road?”
“I don’t know, love,” she said. “But I hope no one was hurt. Now you try to get some rest until the all clear goes. Hughie’s asleep; we don’t want to wake him up.”
Derek thought: “The guns are still making as much noise as our talking is.” But all the same he knew what his mother meant. People’s voices were not usual, but small Hugh was used to the talking of the guns. They were a normal background to his sleep, every night.
HIS FATHER had not come home when the all clear sounded. The sky was beginning to lighten with the dawn, and somewhere a single bird had begun to chirrup. Derek helped his mother back into the house with Hugh; then drank some cocoa with her in the kitchen, feeling strange and adult and unreal. Flames were still flickering down the road, and it did look as though they were coming from the Grahams’ house. Old Mr. Graham was the sort of man to whom one always said good morning politely; he was thin and white-haired, but very upright, with a neat waxed moustache. He lived three doors away from the Hutchinses, and he had a plump and smiling wife whom they seldom saw. Derek wondered what they would do without their house. He thought: “Pete must have a good view.”
Then he went dutifully to bed, leaving Mrs. Brand waiting in the kitchen, and his determination to stay awake dissolved as soon as he lay down and pulled up the bedclothes and felt his mother slip into the room and tuck him in. He fell asleep, and this time did not dream.
9
Wednesday
THEY TOLD HIM in the morning, almost as soon as he woke up. The curtains were open, and around the sides of the guardian wardrobes the sun was slanting bright into the room. He sat up and looked across and saw a star-shaped cluster of cracks in the side window that had not been there the night before.
His mother and father came into the room, and his mother sat down beside him and took his hand, and John Brand stood awkwardly at the end of the bed and looked at them; and Derek looked at them both in astonishment and alarm and knew that something was very wrong.
“Darling,” his mother said. “There is some very bad news. You must be a brave boy.” Her hand clenched hard around his. “Derry darling, the house that was hit last night was Peter’s house. Peter and his mother and his father and Miss MacDonald were all killed instantly by the bomb.”
Derek sat very still. The rail at the end of his bed was golden-brown where the sunlight was touching it.
“They didn’t feel any pain,” his mother said. “It was all over in a moment, and they couldn’t even have known what was happening. The bomb fell right on top of the house.”
Derek said, “Oh no.” He wanted very much to say something else, anything else, but there was nothing else in his head to say. He thought of Pete coming up the road after breakfast to call for him, and found himself listening desperately for the knock on the door.
Mrs. Brand said gently, “Derry darling, it’s very, very sad when people are taken away. It makes us very miserable, those of us who are still here. But Peter and Mr. and Mrs. Hutchins wouldn’t like that, they wouldn’t be happy if they knew we were very upset. So we have to try to be brave and think of them as we knew them. That’s the way they would want it. Peter was such a sunny, happy boy.” Her voice shook, and she stopped.
Hugh was standing up in his cot. “Oh no,” he said. “Oh no, Mummy, oh no.” He looked across the room happily for the laughter that he still occasio
nally got when he successfully copied something somebody else had said.