Nevertheless, they were back eating their school dinners the next day. The rubble that had been old Mrs. Jenkins’s house was still untouched, and the bomb crater was still there in the middle of the road, huger than ever but firmly fenced off with trestles and ropes and red flags that were really pieces of rag knotted to the ropes. Teachers and sometimes a policeman were there keeping watch at the beginning and end of school, and at playtimes and dinnertime, but even so, you could get close enough to see that there was no remaining scrap of shrapnel to be had and that the big pipes in the bottom of the crater had been mended.
Most of the houses on the other side of the road had paper or boards over their windows where the blast had shattered the glass, and one of them had a large chunk of the old road surface lying half across its front-door step. The small boy who lived there was now a playground hero and could be seen every day, before and after school, escorting small troops of listeners across the road into his now fenceless front garden for a close look at the piece of road and a short lurid lecture about what would have happened to his family if it had skated its way a few feet farther on.
His fame lasted for about a week. After that the bomb crater was filled in, and the few remaining jagged pieces of wall from the Jenkins house were pulled down. And the memory of the near miss was eclipsed by a daylight raid that kept the entire school in the air-raid shelters for an hour and a half and produced no bombs, no gunfire, and no sound even of a single plane, but used up half a jar of the headmistress’s carefully hoarded shelter-time candy. And the small boy who had been famous was knocked down in the playground by the mean-minded gang of the school bully, just like anyone else, and skinned his knee.
5
Saturday
THE SIRENS had wailed every night of that week, and every night had brought another blurred memory of a stumbling blanket-wrapped walk into the garden; of the shelter smell and the flickering flame of the candle and the thump-thump of the guns.
But the next weekend, Derek and Peter and Geoffrey finished their camp. It was only after they had finished and sat down in it for the first time that they noticed the chill that was in the wind blowing through the gray day; in their hours as preoccupied moles, their business had kept them warm. They looked proudly about them. After some careful hollowing of its sides, the little two-walled, timber-roofed room was big enough now to contain all three of them if they squatted close; they could even sit on its floor, which was covered with newspapers from the wastepaper sack in Derek’s garage and was, at least until the next rain fell, not damp. Sitting there, out of the breeze, they could see only the sides of the Ditch and the clouds and the top—duly battlemented—of the earthen half wall they had built across the Ditch as a barricade. The box cupboard in the side of the miniature room contained, in neat, proud order, Derek’s darts and blowpipe, a flimsy cardboard box holding three of Geoff’s birds’ eggs, and Peter’s six-shooter, which was the most prized and realistic weapon any of them possessed. Two of the eggs that Geoffrey had put there were from a starling’s nest and not very special. (Starlings, according to Geoff, were as big and as common a pest as dandelions.) But the third was his only blackbird’s egg and therefore had value. Peter’s gun had so much value that he was still in two minds whether to leave it in the camp at all. He turned now and picked it up. It was a splendid long-barreled metal gun, friendly to the hand, of a kind that nobody could ever find in a shop now; such things had vanished when the war began, and all money and metal went toward real guns.
“I don’t think I ought to leave it,” he said.
Geoffrey said reproachfully, “My blackbird’s egg is here. And Derry’s blowpipe.”
“But you could get another egg. And Derry could make another blowpipe.”
“But that’s not fair. We said we’d all leave something.”
“Pete could leave something else,” Derek said. “The gun might get rusty. You know how it looked the time we left it in his garden all night.”
Geoff said obstinately, “He could wrap it in newspaper. That would keep the damp out.”
“Not if it rained. The paper would get sopping.”
“No it wouldn’t. Not in the secret cupboard. The rain wouldn’t get in there.”
“You don’t know. It hasn’t rained yet since we built it. The water might come pouring through.”
“Well, it’s not fair,” Geoffrey said. “If Pete doesn’t leave his gun here, I’m taking my blackbird’s egg home.”
“You are mean,” Derek said, suddenly furious. “You’re spoiling everything. You always do. You like spoiling things.”
Geoffrey turned crimson. He stood up. “All right,” he said tremulously, and he bent and took the box with the eggs inside and cradled it under one arm. “You’re always on Pete’s side. Everything’s always my fault. Well, you can keep your stupid camp. I’m going home.”
“Oh, come on, Geoff.” Peter scrambled up and dabbed awkwardly at his shoulder. “Come on. Put the eggs back. I’ll leave my gun here, too. He’s quite right,” he said sideways to Derek. “It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t.”
Geoffrey paused and kicked at the side of the Ditch.
“Come on,” Peter said again.
“Well,” Geoff said, and he sniffed. “Well, Derry’s got to say he’s sorry.”
“What for?” Derek said indignantly.
“For saying beastly things, that’s what.”
“I only said—” Derek stopped. Peter’s heel was pressing unobtrusively into his ribs. He glanced up, but Peter was still looking straight ahead at Geoffrey. “Oh, all right,” he said. “I’m sorry. For goodness’ sake come and put your old box back.”
“Perhaps we could put the gun in there, too,” Peter said. “With the eggs. That would keep the damp out all right. Would there be room?”
“I don’t know. There might. Have to make sure it wouldn’t break them.” Geoffrey sat down again and fussed happily with his box and the hollows of crushed paper that held the small fragile birds’ eggs, and Peter grinned over his head at Derek and bent down to hand over the gun.
THE SECRET CUPBOARD was not greatly secret, but not immediately visible, either, being set in the angle between two walls of their almost-room, which by now they had christened the keep. They pushed their things as far back as they would go, and scattered grass and leaves over them as camouflage. Then they remembered Tom Hicks’s advice and went into the back field with the spade head to find an offshoot of the brambles small enough to be transplanted to their camp entrance. They found one, eventually, but the job was more complicated than they expected, and it was only after much digging and groping and a great variety of scratches on arms and legs that they had a small bramble, with three sprawling arms, replanted in the Ditch. The long prickly arms, which they had hoped would wave menacingly in the air, lay drooping on the ground like lifeless snakes.
“D’you think it’ll grow?”
“Looks dead already.”
“P’r’aps we should water it.”
There was a gloomy silence as they contemplated the journey across the field, over the fence, and down Derek’s back garden, and the complications of explaining why they would want a bucket and some water.
“There’s a tap on the allotments. But it’s all the way over on the other side.”
“We’d have to get a bucket anyway.”
“Perhaps it’ll rain.”
“Listen!” Peter put up his hand, and they stopped obediently and listened, but there was nothing except the faint rumble of a truck on the distant main highway.
“What’s up?”
“I thought I heard the pipe. From the anti-aircraft camp. Yes listen, there it is again.”
They could hear it now, coming in waves as the breeze caught it up and dropped some of it down: the hollow regular clatter as someone in that invisible camp, the real camp, which somehow they never even thought of as having the same name as their own, beat out the private signal of an impending air raid.
/> “It’s the warning,” Geoffrey said.
“No it isn’t.” Derek flapped one hand at him confidently. “It’s their teatime. You always hear it in the afternoons. It just means someone’s calling the soldiers to come and have a cuppa.”
But then out of the gray day the other sound came whining, too, over the railway and the fields, past the floating silver barrage balloons, from the fire station in the village: the familiar, slow wailing whine, eee—ow—eee—ow—eee—ow, of the siren that was their own air-raid warning.
They made off like dutiful rabbits, over the fence, across the field and the garden, and each of them was breathless in his own house by the time the siren was slithering down its final dying wail out of the sky. And although the raid was more or less a false alarm for Everett Avenue, with only a very faint rumbling of bombs or guns a long way away and the all clear sending up its one long note very soon, they did not meet again that day, being kept at home by their mothers in case the warning should go again. But there was no other raid. A thin drizzle of rain came instead.
Derek spent the rest of the afternoon indoors building and rebuilding an airfield out of wooden blocks for Hugh tirelessly and joyfully to bomb with a toy plane; but he felt tranquil about it, with no sense of time running wasted away. After all, they had finished the camp. There it was, across the field, safe under its camouflage, waiting for them, looking after the six-shooter and the blowpipe and the birds’ eggs. Or perhaps the gun and blowpipe and eggs were looking after the camp. It didn’t matter. Either way it was there, and theirs. He felt old and fatherly playing with small Hugh, who could not understand such things.
6
Sunday
SUNDAY BREAKFAST was scarcely over when Peter and Geoffrey came knocking at Derek’s door.
“Let’s go and get Tom,” Peter said. “Show him the camp. He said he wanted to see it when it was finished.”
“It rained last night. Shouldn’t we go and check up first, to see if anything got washed away?”
“Ah no, it wasn’t much. Look, the path’s dry already. Come on.”
They trooped out into Everett Avenue, absently kicking stones into puddles in the way that was forbidden as being hard on their shoes, and went up into the unfamiliar territory at the top of the road, past the Ditch on one hand and the White Road on the other. David Wiggs and a few of the White Road gang were kicking a ball about in the distance, halfway up the road, with a bigger boy lounging against a fence watching them, a boy so big that they would have taken him for Tom if that had not been unthinkable. David Wiggs and his cronies yelled and capered and gibbered at them and were loftily ignored.
“Who’s that boy?” Derek said.
“David Wiggs has a big brother,” Peter said. “Must be him. Tommy hates him. I think they were at school together; they used to fight all the time. Tom said the Wiggs boy is older than him and he ought to be in the Army, but he got out of it somehow, and he sells things on the black market instead.”
“Bet that’s what David Wiggs’ll do, too.”
They chanted the iniquities of the Wiggs family all the way to and through the Hicks’s front gate, and then Geoffrey and Derek fell silent in the unfamiliarity of a strange house and garden. It was not a pretty garden. There were no crocuses or daffodils or shrubs as there were elsewhere in the road; only a small lawn bordered by blank flower beds. Tommy Hicks had no father, Derek remembered; he had died or vanished or something, years before.
Peter led them confidently to the back door and knocked. “Morning, Mrs. Hicks,” he said to the turbaned head that appeared around the edge of the door. “Is Tommy there? It’s me and Derry and Geoff, and we promised to show him something.”
The head, which had looked anxious and cross, glanced briefly at all of them and then back to Peter, and softened into a faint smile. A hand appeared and smoothed back a few graying curls that had escaped from the turban. “All right, dear,” said Mrs. Hicks. “I’ll see.”
They waited for what seemed a long time, and they were sitting in a row on the back doorstep playing five-stones when Tom Hicks came out, combing his hair. “Gang way,” he said, and he put the comb in his pocket and tipped Peter off the step with one foot. Peter rolled on the ground, with his arms wrapped around his head, and did an elaborate and noisy dying act. They saw Mrs. Hicks’s head, anxious again, pop up at the window over the kitchen sink and disappear again.
“Hallo, Tom.”
“We finished our camp. It’s all done. Want to come and have a look?”
Derek added nervously, “If you’ve got time?”
“Sure,” said Tom. “I’ve got time. Can’t stay long, but I’ll have a look-see. Shan’t be long, Mum,” he yelled into the kitchen, and the turban bobbed up and down.
They walked down Everett Avenue. David Wiggs and two other boys were sitting on the curb at the end of the White Road, whispering and sniggering; they glanced up and made derisive noises, and David Wiggs began chanting loudly, “Kitty cat, kitty cat, who’s got the kitty cat—” The others joined in; and then they saw Tom, and their voices died away abruptly. They scrambled to their feet.
Tom stopped and looked at them. He said, “Hey, you.”
David Wiggs’s forelock fell lank and stringy down to his eyebrow. He wiped his nose on his wrist and tried to look belligerent. “What?”
“Sod off,” Tom said.
He stood there casually with one hand in his pocket, towering over them all. The Wiggs boy and his friends paused resentfully for a moment, and then turned and ran; ran until they were halfway down their road in the safety of their own territory, where they turned to run backward, yelling inaudible insults as they went.
Geoffrey laughed. “That scared them.”
“That Wiggs kid is just like his brother,” Tom said, frowning after them, his face unreadable. Then he swung around. “Come on, then.”
They made their way through Derek’s garden, and as they reached the back door, John Brand came out in his slippers with some rubbish for the trash can. “Well,” he said. “Hallo, Tom. How are you? That’s quite a procession you have there.”
“Can we show Tom something in the back field, Dad?”
“Provided he throws you all over the fence,” Mr. Brand said. “That might save it wobbling so much.” He grinned at Tom. “I hear you’re joining the Merchant Navy; is that right?”
“That’s right. Quite soon now. My dad was a sailor. It runs in the family.”
“I know he was,” Mr. Brand said. “And a good one. Well, we shall all be thinking of you, Tom. And there are some of us old men who would give quite a bit to be with you.”
“There’s just as much to be done here,” Tom said. “And it’s just as dangerous.”
He sounded somber and adult; the boys shuffled, fidgeting to get away. John Brand looked at them absently for a moment, as if they were not there. “Well, the very best of luck to you, Tom,” he said, and they shook hands, and because of the uncomfortable gravity it was a release for Derek and Peter and Geoffrey to dance about Tom like sheepdog puppies, chivvying him down past the apple trees to the end of the garden. Derek said, as they crossed the back field, “We planted a bit of a blackberry bush at the entrance, like you said.”
“It doesn’t look too good, though. The rain might have helped it.”
“We didn’t half get scratched planting it. Look at that one.” Peter pushed up one sleeve and waved an arm with a long dark scratch from elbow to wrist. “My mum made me change my shirt when I came in—there was blood all over the sleeve. She was wild.”
“Well,” Tom Hicks said gravely, “that shows your bramble’s as good as barbed wire. It ought to keep any invaders out.”
But he was wrong.
They saw nothing until they had crossed the stile onto the allotment field and then made the U-turn back, around the end of the tall wire-mesh fence and through the barbed wire, into the hummocks of the end of the Ditch. That was one of the good things about the camp, that you c
ouldn’t see it until you were almost on top of it. Derek was behind Peter and Geoff. Though he knew there was no need, he had paused solicitously to push down the top strand of barbed wire as Tom cocked his long leg over it. Grinning a little in anticipation, he watched them as he felt the straight part of the wire carve its rust-grained imprint into the palm of his hand. They bounded up onto the grassy hummock that ended the Ditch, from the top of which you looked down for the first time into the camp; and then for a long moment the world froze, and Derek pressed the wire harder into his hand—even though Tom was clear over it and standing at his side—as he saw Peter and Geoffrey stop up there as if they had run into a wall, stop stock-still gazing downward, and saw the change that came over their faces.
He was looking at Peter, and he never forgot what he saw on Peter’s face. The cheerful eagerness died as if a light had been switched off, and for a second there was no expression at all, an utter emptiness, until the mouth twisted into any number of emotions and all of them black. It was like small Hugh’s face after the moment between his falling down somewhere and feeling the pain that said he had hurt himself, when he opened his mouth in a wide downward arc and brought out first a choking silence and then a wild, unhappy yell. But Peter did not yell. He turned back to them and said gruffly, “Look,” and Geoffrey turned, too, and Derek saw the same stricken look on his face.