Peter punched his arm lightly. “Like it?”
“It’s perfect. Nobody would ever find it here. We could build a really good one and keep all sorts of things.”
“The way this hump here goes, look, we could just hollow out a bit of the back wall and put a roof across from it to the hump, and it would be like a room. Like our Morrison, almost.”
“Like the way the sandbags are around the guns up the road.”
“We could even get some sandbags.”
“Um.”
They pondered this for a moment. Somehow sandbags would not be right for their own camp. It was a timeless fortification, theirs; it grew in their minds out of a vague mixture of Iron Age earthworks and Saxon forts. They had known about such things for as long as they could remember, and not from books or school. The leavings of the ancient peoples were all around them in the valley of the Thames and the Chiltern Hills. Regularly they saw them, passed them, walked over them: the once-besieged fortresses, ten centuries old, which lay gentle now beneath soft-sloping grassy mounds.
“Not sandbags,” Derek said.
“No. But we could put a roof. The boxes would be good for that.”
“Have to do the digging first. Let’s get the spade from the old camp.”
“Hey!” A plaintive yell came faintly down from the other side of the fence. Derek started, feeling guilty. He had completely forgotten about Geoffrey, keeping watch.
“That Geoff,” said Peter.
“Careful. He might have seen someone.”
They wriggled along the bottom of the Ditch, around the big clay hummock, and peered carefully up through the grass.
Geoffrey called, “You think you’re so good at stalking. I can see you plain as anything. Lucky for you I’m not Mr. Everett.”
Peter stood up. “You’ve never seen Mr. Everett.”
“Nor have you. Come on, you’ve been down there for ages.”
Derek heaved himself up, picking last year’s burrs off his sweater. “Come and look, Geoff. It’s just the right place for the camp.”
“It’s a moldy place,” Geoffrey said peevishly. “How can we come and go through that stupid barbed-wire fence? And I’m fed up with standing here keeping lookout. There isn’t even anywhere for me to hide if anyone comes.”
“Nobody asked you to keep lookout,” Peter said coolly. Then he relented and gave Geoff his sudden crooked grin. “Come on, hold the wire for me. We have to go and get the spade and everything from the old camp and bring them here to start digging. It really is a super place; wait till you see. There’s loads of space to make storage holes. We can make a special hidden one to take birds’ eggs.”
This was a deliberate peace offering; neither he nor Derek approved of collecting birds’ eggs, regarding it as a particularly shameful kind of robbery. But Geoffrey, firmly explaining that he did no harm by taking only one egg from each nest, did collect them, and messily blow them, and keep them labeled in boxes in his room. When they had first thought of building the camp in their usual section of the Ditch, he had greeted the thought of it delightedly as a way station for newly taken eggs.
“So long as you don’t touch our robin,” Derek said. A robin had nested two years running in a bush in the Brands’ front garden; this was the first year they had let Geoff see the tiny pale blue eggs.
“I got a robin egg ages ago,” Geoffrey said loftily. But he was mollified. “Well, let me come through and see, then, if it’s so marvelous.”
“Come and get our things first,” Peter said. He scrambled through the fence, casually ripping out a thread from his sleeve as it caught on the sharp hooked wire. “Why’n’t you stay here, Derry, and keep an eye on it? We shan’t be a minute. If we see your mum, I’ll tell her we’re just playing in the back field.”
“All right. Better tell her I’ll be in soon. And mind you get my blowpipe and darts.”
He called after them, “Be careful with the darts. There’s seven of them.”
From the stile, Geoffrey called over his shoulder, “They don’t work.”
“We’ll be careful,” Peter said.
DEREK CLAMBERED down again into the ditch as they disappeared toward his back garden. A lone cabbage white butterfly flittered around his head, lighted briefly on a patch of bare clay, and meandered off again. He swiped at it absently, out of habit. Down at the bottom, he pulled a few clumps of weeds from the area that would be the floor of the camp, and stamped the ground down as flat as he could make it. Really, it would be a wonderful secret place. A real camp, this time.
He heard the sound of engines, crouched, looked up. The three Spitfires were coming back; farther away this time and more strung out. He thought: “I’m going to be a pilot one day. Or no, what I really want is to be a sailor, in a destroyer, like Commander Hansen down the road. Or perhaps I’ll be a soldier, like Daddy was in the last war. With a gun.”
He thought about the gun. His father was a sergeant now in the local Home Guard; his newly acquired steel helmet, which he called a tin hat, hung in the hall on the hatstand, and the heavy service rifle stood on its butt in the umbrella stand beneath it. The strictest rule in the house was that nobody should ever, on any account, touch John Brand’s gun. Derek had touched it only once, on the day it first appeared, when his father had ceremonially put the tin hat on his head and the rifle in his hands. They had both weighed several tons. The helmet had been so heavy that Derek’s chin had bent down to his chest for the second that John Brand had let the padded metal rest on his head; and the rifle so heavy that even with both hands and all his strength he had been able to lift it for an instant only an inch or two from the floor. And that had been that, and he had never touched the gun again.
The sun was warm. A large sleepy bumblebee wandered past his head. He forgot about the gun.
Then Peter and Geoffrey leaped down into the Ditch, whooping, Geoff carrying the spade and Peter carefully cradling the blowpipe and darts without one dart tip so much as bruised; and they set to digging out the first outline of their camp. They dug for a long while, taking turns with the rusty spade head, and by the time they had to stop for dinner, at Mrs. Brand’s distant call from the back garden, the camp was well enough begun to be fitted with its roof.
THE SKY was clear all day, and still only a few chunky clouds had drifted across it by the time they went to bed. Before his mother pulled the blackout curtains carefully over the windows in the chilly, darkening room, Derek could see the moon sailing tranquilly in and out of the clouds: gradually drifting sideways, moving in an endless flowing motion, and yet hanging always still. Then the shiny black cotton of the curtain blotted everything out, and it was dark.
“There won’t be a raid tonight, will there, Mum?”
“Well, darling,” she said gently, “I hope there won’t.”
“There’s lots of cloud to cover the moon.”
“That’s right. Let’s hope they stay at home.”
“Be awful if they bombed our camp,” he said sleepily. “It’s smashing. We’re going to put a roof on it and camouflage it with grass.”
“Remember you promised me there wouldn’t be any tunneling,” Mrs. Brand said. “That’s dangerous.”
Derek yawned. “Just walls. And a sort of dent.” He had been so full of the thought of the camp that he had had to talk about it; but he had still kept it secret—he hadn’t said where it was.
“Good night, Mum.”
She kissed him. “Don’t forget your prayers. Good night, my love.”
Sleepily he murmured the Lord’s Prayer to himself and added the usual bit about blessing Daddy and Mum and Hughie.
Hugh coughed, across the room in his cot. There was a muffled sound through the wall, like a shifting chair, from the Robinsons’ house next door. Derek snuggled down under his quilt and felt earth still gritty under one of his fingernails.
Please God look after the camp, he added. It sounded a bit odd, somehow, but he didn’t think there was anything wrong abo
ut it.
Hugh coughed again, twice; stirred, moaned, turned over. “Good night, Derry.”
“Good night. Sleep well.”
“’N you.”
And please God don’t let there be a raid tonight.
BUT IT WAS the sirens that woke him. They were all going at once: two of them somewhere farther off, well started on their long-drawn-out, eerie rising and falling note; and then breaking into it suddenly, loud and harsh, their own local siren in the village, curving up out of nowhere in that first throat-catching whine that was the most chilling sound of any except the very last, the long, long, long dying-down wail that was the worst of all. But before the last wail came, they were all on their way out to the air-raid shelter, Derek with boots and two sweaters over his pajamas, and a coat over those; Hugh lying in a bundle of blankets in his father’s arms. The night was very cold, and the moon had gone. The guns were already thumping somewhere close by, and planes were rumbling high overhead. As they hurried across the lawn, there was the night-breaking crash of a bomb, and the earth shook.
“Big ones,” John Brand said.
Mrs. Brand went quickly down the earthen steps behind the sandbag wall at the shelter’s entrance, and he handed Hugh to her and turned to lift Derek down. The noise grew; planes were flying closer, lower, and the world exploded as the guns went into action at the end of the road. “Thunk ... thunk ... thuunk-thunk...”
Derek gazed upward, openmouthed, as light streaked across the sky and great sudden stars burst; the long white arms of the searchlights were groping to and fro in the black sky from those unknown places across the railway where they always sprang up at night, and one of them seemed to have gone mad. It was darting and weaving like a clumsy giant, and he saw the silhouette of a plane in its white light, a plane flying low, and he thought he could even see the crosses on its wings as another engine screamed and a Spitfire—he could see the pointed nose—came diving toward it through the beam.
“Derek!” John Brand yelled.
The sky flashed, and somewhere another of the great bombs burst. Derek went to his father, but his head was still back as he moved, the searchlight hypnotically holding his eyes. That plane was out of the light; you could hear it diving, shrieking; it was coming nearer, nearer—
“Get down,” John Brand shouted furiously, and grabbed him and pushed him so roughly inside the shelter door that Derek lurched and fell over his mother’s knees where she sat on one of the bunks. His father ducked down after him, and the plane roared as it dived over the road, and there was a rapid, horrible clatter sweeping across the world with it at the peak of the noise. The guns everywhere were hammering the sky in an uneven thunder, and close together there were several great blasting crashes as more bombs fell.
John Brand pulled the wooden cover over the shelter entrance and tugged down the curtain that hung behind it, and Mrs. Brand lit a candle that stood waiting in a wax-scarred saucer on the shelf nailed to the corrugated metal wall. Outside, the bumps and bangs went on. Derek sat down suddenly on the bottom bunk and burst into tears.
His father sat down beside him and held him tightly. “I’m sorry, Derry. Are you all right?”
Miserably Derek nodded, unable to speak for the sobs that were sending his chest up into his throat. He pressed his head hard into his father’s arm and clutched at his hand.
“I didn’t mean to be rough,” John Brand said. “But you mustn’t ever be outside when a raid’s going on. Never. Never. You know the rules. You must always get into a shelter as quickly as you possibly can. Or if there isn’t a shelter, then into a ditch, or under a tree, or anywhere close to the ground. You aren’t really old enough to be frightened, and because you aren’t, you just must remember the rules. Understand?”
Swallowing, choking, Derek nodded again. He said, through gulps, “I’m sorry.”
His father’s arm around him was like an iron bar. He said softly, “We don’t want to lose you.”
Derek looked up, blinking in the wavering yellow light of the candle, and saw Hugh watching him from wide dark eyes in the opposite bunk, and his mother sitting there silent beside him, holding his hand. She gave him a small encouraging smile, and he saw that her face was wet. “Oh, Mum,” he said unsteadily, nearly beginning again, and lurched across the shelter. “I’m sorry, Mum.”
She hugged him and wiped his face. “There now,” she said. “But you must remember what Daddy said. Always.”
“We always get down somewhere if we hear planes when we’re out,” Derek said. “Even if the warning hasn’t gone. Until we can see whether they’re ours.”
“That’s very good,” his mother said. “Now you get up into your bunk, and I’ll tuck the blanket around you. We may be here for a while tonight. You close your eyes and try to get some rest. You, too, Hughie, lie down now and go to sleep.”
There was another great thump outside, and the earth gently shook. Opening his eyes, Derek saw from his bunk the jerk of the candle flame and the quiver in the thin dark line of greasy smoke that rose from it to the low curved metal roof.
“Don’t worry,” his father said, watching him. “They’re going away. Our battery has stopped firing. It won’t be too long now.”
Derek lay there, pressing his boots against the end of the bunk; feeling the blanket rough against his chin; smelling the shelter smell of dank earth and candle grease. He thought sleepily, “But I’m not worried.” He had never been frightened by the bombs. The raids were always an excitement, though a mixed excitement because he knew going down to the shelter made Hugh’s cough worse. That was the only reason for not wanting a raid: that and the camp. Like anybody else, he knew what it was like to be scared by things like the snapping of a large dog, by bigger boys chasing him at school, by being alone in the dark. But the guns and the bombs and the swooping planes, they were different. Nothing about them had ever really bothered him before—not, at any rate, until that fierce moment this evening, with the strange urgent note in his father’s voice and the violence with which he had pulled him down. Derek gulped again at the thought of it. That had scared him all right. It was so totally out of character in his gentle father; he had never seen anything like it before. “I won’t ever hang about again when we’re coming down here,” he thought earnestly; “I’ll get in as quick as ever I can.”
The thumping of the guns grew more muffled; merged into a familiar, almost comforting background, with Hugh’s occasional cough and his parents’ intermittent soft murmuring below. Derek drifted into sleep, thinking: “I hope the camp’s all right. I hope they didn’t get the camp.”
4
Monday
THE CAMP was intact. They were working on it again by the time the next morning was halfway through. The three of them had walked together to school as they always did: up Everett Avenue, across the main highway, and along the three side streets lined with gigantic metal objects like candlesticks that put up the smokescreen to protect the housing estate in a raid. As they turned the corner toward the school, they could see the crowd that told them something was wrong, and they broke into a run, with Peter in front as he always was sooner or later. Within moments they were in the thick of the crowd and gazing down at the huge gaping hole in the road outside the gates of the school.
Derek stood staring, mesmerized. He had seen bomb craters before, but they had always been in fields. A hole in a field, even a huge hole, was not the same as a hole in a road; this was more violent, somehow, with yards and yards of road and pavement simply gone, vanished, and the road surface and stones and gravel and clay and broken pipes left naked in layers, as if by a vast jagged slice taken from a gigantic cake. When he looked around again, he saw that there was another crater close by, where the garden of the house next door to the school had been, and that there was not much house left, either, but only a heap of rubble and one lonely wall.
“The old lady was in there.” Peter was back at his side, wide-eyed from gathering reports. “The bomb fell right on th
e house, and she got killed. There was a whole stack of bombs, bong, bong, bong. They say he must have been just getting rid of them, Jerry that is, to get away from the fighters quicker. Nobody else got killed. They say he wasn’t aiming at anything. I dunno though; I bet he was aiming at the school. I bet he was trying to hit us.”
“But it was the middle of the night,” Derek said.
“Well maybe he thought it was a boarding school.” Peter was not to be put off. “Then he could have got hundreds of us with one bomb.”
“And all he got was old Mrs. Jenkins.” Derek tried to think about old Mrs. Jenkins, who had been a familiar figure beaming out at all of them every morning and every afternoon, even though a few incorrigibles picked all her reachable roses and wrote rude words on her fence; and he found that he could not remember a line of her face, but only her cracked voice calling over the frosted path, one winter’s day, “Good morning, boys.”
“I was looking for shrapnel,” Peter said. “But it’s all gone. And you can’t get down into the crater because they’ve got that rope around it. What a swizz.”
“I found a bit in the garden this morning,” Derek said.
“Did you really? Let’s have a look.”
Derek reached carefully into his pocket and unwrapped the small jagged piece of metal from his handkerchief. He had found it quite by accident when kicking a pebble along the front garden path, and felt as though he had come across the Koh-i-noor diamond. Each of the boys had a handful of pieces of shrapnel recovered from bomb craters or exploded shells, but they were hard to come by; too many other people had generally gotten there first.
“That’s a smashing bit,” Peter said generously. “Must be from a shell. That raid went on for ages.”
“Um,” Derek said. Usually they went over their memories of night raids in lurid and exaggerated detail, but he found himself curiously reluctant this time. He said offhandedly, “They were machine-gunning the road.”