He moved up with Tom and looked.
Their camp was no longer there. It had been wrecked with such savage thoroughness that it was difficult even to make out the outlines of the walls they had labored to build up. The hillock on which they stood, and which they had carved painstakingly into a sheer straight wall, slanted down now into a rough, lumpy slope. The far wall of the camp, with its battlements, was completely gone: flattened into a muddy mess of clay. The side wall of the Ditch, which they had carefully hollowed into the secret cupboard and wall of the keep, was pitted and gashed with what looked like the blows of a spade. The cupboard was gone, too, and so was the roof, and instead the whole of the bottom of the Ditch, which had been the floor of the camp and was now a muddy, trampled bog, was scattered with torn-up fragments of newspaper and splintered pieces of wood.
None of them said a word. They stood and looked.
The three-armed bramble that they had planted at the camp entrance lay feebly in the muddy chaos, torn into three pieces. Between the crushed branches there were the crumpled remnants of a cardboard box, and here and there broken pieces of eggshell. Scattered over these were other relics that Derek did not even recognize at first. Only when he stepped silently down, the first of all of them, and picked up an odd-looking giant splinter, did he see that his blowpipe and all its lovingly carved darts had been broken into very small pieces and dropped like confetti on top of the rest.
There was no sign anywhere of Peter’s gun.
The thing that Derek noticed last of all was a thing that seemed to have no meaning: a small black heap that he took to be a wet crumpled rag, lying neatly in the very center of all the mess. His eyes and mind flickered on to it, and he wondered emptily where it had come from, and then he looked away again to a small blue-flecked fragment, pathetically delicate against the trampled orange mud, that he knew was a piece of Geoffrey’s blackbird’s egg. He stared down at it, not daring to look at any of the others. Peter stepped down beside him, slithering a little, and put one foot out gingerly to prod the crumpled black rag; Derek watched him, still numb.
Peter said, “It’s the cat.”
“The what?” Derek gazed blankly, uncomprehending; and as the toe of Peter’s shoe gently stirred the heap, he saw first the frayed end of a dirty piece of rope, and then something that could have been the tip of a very small black nose. “Oh no,” he said. “Oh, Pete, it can’t be.”
Geoffrey slipped down beside them. “Yes it is,” he said.
“Is it dead?”
“Course it is.”
“P’r’aps it’s just hurt,” Derek said, without hope. “It could be just unconscious. Couldn’t it?”
Peter squatted down and put one hand gently on the small black heap. “Feel,” he said.
Derek swallowed, and bent down and touched it, and felt the stiff curve of a small knobby backbone and wet fur that was very cold. He drew his hand back quickly and said, without any thought of shame, “I feel sick.”
“Poor little cat,” Peter said, and put one finger under a small dead paw.
“Who did it?”
They had almost forgotten Tom, and they started at the depth of his voice; he was standing above them on the hillock, the only one of them who had not moved since the first sight of the ruined camp. He looked very tall there above them, and squinting up at the sky behind him, they could not see the expression on his face. From where Derek stood, he could see next to Tom’s head the floating outline of the nearest barrage balloon that hung on guard in the sky; he saw the two shapes next to one another against the curious brightness of the gray unbroken clouds, and together they looked funny, but it did not occur to him to laugh.
“Those kids,” Peter said.
“The kids from the White Road,” said Geoffrey. “It must have been.”
Derek looked up at Tom and the barrage balloon, and he said, describing the memory as it came into his head, “We were coming out of the Ditch the other day, and we saw David Wiggs and his gang with a cat, a little black cat. They were holding it up by a rope and strangling it and poking it with sticks, and we chucked stones at them and the cat got away. And they were wild.”
Geoffrey said, “And we saw them this morning with you, just now, remember?”
Just now, Derek thought; it seemed a hundred years away. He said slowly, “They were saying something about the cat—before you scared them off—and they were laughing.”
“They were shouting at us on the way up, too,” Peter said. “David Wiggs’s brother was there with them then.”
“Ah,” Tom said softly. He came down the muddy slope into the camp, or what had been the camp, digging in his heels to avoid sliding, and he looked down at the cat. He said, “Someone must have drowned it.”
“Oh no,” Derek said quickly; he felt his throat jump at him again, and swallowed hard. “Wasn’t—couldn’t it just have got all wet in the rain?”
“Not that wet,” Tom said. Then he stiffened and turned his head quickly. “What’s that?”
They heard faint voices and laughter, and scrambled up in time to see several figures running and leaping away toward Everett Avenue out of the front section of the Ditch, on the other side of the high impenetrable fence that ran parallel to the backs of the Everett Avenue gardens and cut the Ditch into two halves. The figures ran to a taller figure waiting for them at the end of the White Road, and waved mockingly back behind them, and disappeared.
“That’s Johnny Wiggs up there,” Tom said. He thrust both hands hard into his pockets and scowled. “That settles it.”
“It was them, then,” Peter said.
Geoffrey said bleakly, “I suppose they wanted to see how we looked when we found it all.” He bent down and picked up the tiny curved piece of the broken blackbird’s egg, and the splintered handle of one of Derek’s darts, and looked across at the blank churned earth where the secret cupboard had been. Then his head jerked up. “Pete. Your gun. Where’s your gun?”
Peter shrugged. “It’s not here, is it? One of them must have taken it.”
Geoffrey got up. “Well, you never know. They might have chucked it away.” He began roving around the edges of the Ditch, peering into the grass.
“Beasts!” Derek burst out. “The mean dirty beasts!” He looked up at Tom. “It was such a good camp, it really was. We had it all finished up. And now we haven’t even got a chance to use it once. We had some of Geoff’s birds’ eggs in the secret cupboard, and a blowpipe and darts I made, and Pete’s six-shooter gun with the carved handle, and we left them here, and they just—” His voice wavered and disappeared, and he pointed miserably down at the litter on the mud.
“Well, they aren’t going to get away with it,” Tom said. “And we’ll rebuild your camp and make it even better than it was.”
“There’s no point,” Peter said drearily. “They’d only come sneaking in and bash it down again.” He looked out down the Ditch toward the White Road, empty now except for two briskly walking housewives with shopping bags. “But if that David Wiggs has got my gun, he’s jolly well going to give it back.”
“He will,” Tom said. “And they won’t come near your camp again, either. We’ll show them.”
“I don’t see what we can do,” Derek said. “We can’t even fight them, not all at once—there’s too many of them. Three against seven just isn’t any good.”
“Four against seven,” Tom said.
There was a silence, and they stared at him.
Peter said, “But you aren’t—they didn’t—I mean, it’s us they were getting at. You don’t have to get into a fight because of us.”
“That wouldn’t be fair,” Derek said. He added hastily, “Fair on you, I mean.”
“I don’t care,” Tom said. “Anyway, you don’t think those kids did this all on their own, do you? Johnny Wiggs is mixed up in it somehow. It wasn’t any kid who drowned that cat. Or at any rate, they wouldn’t have had the nice little idea of putting it here for you to find. If you ask me
, they need to be taught a lesson. All of them. I watched you making that camp of yours.”
“Hey!” Geoffrey came jumping down from the far side of the Ditch, where he had been poking about beside the fence. “Look, I found this in the grass over there; they must have just buzzed it away. But there isn’t any sign of your gun, Pete.”
He was holding their old broken spade, which had been stowed in the secret cupboard with all the rest. They had left it clean, after rubbing it carefully with handfuls of grass. Now it was caked thickly with hunks of damp mud.
Geoffrey rubbed his finger down the spade, sending down a shower of muddy flakes. He said without looking up, “Um—I thought, if we’ve got this to dig with—perhaps we could bury the cat.”
There was a short silence. Then Peter said briskly, “Good idea.”
“Are you really sure it’s dead?” Derek looked again at the small black heap.
Tom picked it up. The body, as it suddenly became, was stiff and very small in his large hand. “Quite sure,” he said. “Come on, then. Dig a hole. Over here.”
They buried the cat close to the tall fence and the bramble thicket, in a spot where no one normally would walk; they had first to dig out several hummocks of grass and a great many tough, stringy roots, and when they had finished, they replaced the grass so that even they had difficulty in seeing the place. Derek wondered whether they should not have had some sort of ceremonial, but hadn’t the nerve to say so. It was Peter who provided a kind of substitute: he stamped down the grass with his heel, stepped back, and said bitterly, “At least now maybe they’ll leave the poor thing in peace.”
“We ought to challenge them to a battle,” Geoffrey said.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” said Tom. He smoothed a patch of earth with his foot, took a piece of Derek’s broken blowpipe, and drew some lines. “You wouldn’t know this,” he said, “because you live in the wrong bit of the road. But this line here, see, is the end of the back gardens of the houses on the White Road. And here at this end of it, the line going off at a right angle, is the end of my back garden. Our back fence overlooks their back fences, and from my bedroom window I can see whatever’s going on in their back gardens. And all this space on the other side of the fences, between the houses and the railway line, is the field where the anti-aircraft camp is.”
They stirred with interest. “I never knew that,” Peter said.
“Well, you can’t see much because the field’s full of trees and bushes, and anyway the camp’s a fair way off in the middle of it and all wired off. Nobody can get near it. Actually nobody’s supposed to even go in the field at all—there are notices all over—but those White Road kids go there all the time.”
“I never really thought where they went apart from the road,” Derek said. “I thought it was just their own gardens.” Now that he came to think about it, he realized he had never wondered very much about the Children from the White Road at all.
“Well, listen anyway,” Tom said. “The point is this. The Wiggs garden is about halfway up the White Road, and their back fence has been all broken down for ages. It leans right down to the ground in the middle, and they can just walk out into the field over it. Old man Wiggs is away half the time driving his truck, and anyway he’s a lazy old bugger and he’s never done anything to mend the fence. So the Wiggs boys have propped up one bit of it and turned it into a kind of hut, and they use that as their base. All the White Road kids do. It’s their camp, if you like. Just the same as yours. Or the same as yours would have been. They keep all kinds of stuff in there; I’ve watched them from the top window sometimes. And they have an old tarpaulin over the bit of the fence that makes their roof. I don’t know where that came from; I dare say they pinched it from someone.”
Geoffrey said enviously, “It sounds a jolly good way of making a camp.”
Peter looked down at Tom’s drawing and rubbed the scar on his nose. “You mean, if they’ve wrecked our camp, then we could wreck theirs?”
Derek made an uneasy sound of protest and felt ashamed of it, but still uneasy.
Tom glanced at him. “Well,” he said noncommittally, “it’s worth thinking about.”
“We couldn’t just sneak in when they weren’t there and knock it down,” Derek said. “I mean, that wouldn’t be fair.”
“I don’t see why not,” said Geoffrey. “That’s just what they did to us.”
“I know they did.” Derek fidgeted, trying to find words. “But that’s why. I mean, they’re sneaky and we aren’t. I mean, we don’t pinch other people’s things, like Pete’s six-shooter, and drown cats just for fun. So we have to do something different.”
Peter said reasonably, “Well, we can’t attack their camp when they’re in it. That would be just as hopeless as trying to fight them anywhere else.”
“Yes,” Tom said. “But there are all sorts of ways of attacking. You don’t always have to just run up and jump on someone. They’re always going out from their camp into the big field. We could ambush them on their way back.”
“Ambush?”
“I told you there were lots of trees. Lots of cover. They’d never see us until it was too late.”
“Mud-balls,” said Geoffrey.
“What?” said Tom.
“Mud-balls.” Geoffrey looked at the other two, and they looked at him, and each of them stooped to the trampled wall of their lost camp and picked up a double handful of red-brown sticky mud and shaped it into a ball.
“Watch,” Peter said. He swung back his arm, and the mud-ball went sailing heavily through the air to the back fence of the house on the other side of the Ditch, where it exploded in a dull squelch to leave a flattened muddy patch on the dark wood. Derek and Geoffrey sent theirs flying after it, and there were three orange patches messily scarring the wood.
“We had a mud-ball fight once, in the other bit of the Ditch,” Derek said in happy remembering. “It was smashing. But we all got into such a row that we’ve never been able to do it again. You end up in an awful mess.”
“I can imagine,” Tom said. He dug his fingers into the mud of the Ditch and looked at it thoughtfully. “Clay. Sticky. Funny, there isn’t any of it anywhere else around here. The soil in our garden is more like gravel. It is in the big field, too, and up there.” He gestured widely at the rows of seedlings in the cabbage field and the dark turned earth.
“So it is in our garden,” said Derek. “And on the allotments. My dad says the Ditch is clay because they went so deep when it was first dug. He says there’s a layer of clay down underneath everything around here, but that you never see it usually because it’s all covered up with other sorts of earth. And I asked Mrs. Wilson once in geography, and she said so, too.”
“Mud-balls,” Tom said. He grinned at them. “How do you think the Wiggs kids would look covered in mud?”
“They wouldn’t half get into trouble,” Geoffrey said.
Peter said, with rising enthusiasm, “We could make lots of mud-balls here, hundreds of them, and take them up to your field.”
“And have stacks of them behind a tree,” Derek said.
“And ambush them.”
“When they’d be coming back to their camp to go home for tea or something—all of a sudden—splat!”
“And their camp, too. Everything all covered with mud.”
Geoffrey said hopefully, “Tomorrow? It’s Easter holiday this week.”
“Tomorrow morning,” Tom said.
7
Monday
THEY BEGAN their preparations the next morning and went on for most of the day. After some discussion of their own past mud fight, they had decided that it would be better not to make the mud-balls in advance, but to transport a stock of clay ready to be molded into ammunition on the spot. If you made mud-balls too soon, they reminded one another, they would either ooze into flat nothings or dry out enough to break into useless bits. The business of carrying clay from the Ditch to the battlefield was a problem, but only unti
l Tom miraculously produced a wheelbarrow from his garden shed. They wondered what his mother would say, but they had seen her going down the road early in the morning, carrying a shopping bag, and they did not ask. In any case, one did not ask Tommy Hicks about things; he was the man of his house.
It was a gray day again, and for most of the morning few people were visible in the road. They filled the wheelbarrow laboriously with mud three times, digging it from their old original campsite in the front half of the Ditch and wheeling it up Everett Avenue to the front gate of Tom’s house. They peered carefully each time down into the White Road as they passed, but there was no sign at all of the Wiggs boys and their gang.
“They’re back there in their camp,” Peter said.
Geoffrey said, giggling nervously, “They wouldn’t be if they knew.”
The arrival of the wheelbarrow was the most nerve-twitching moment each time. Tom would be waiting for them in his front garden, take it from them, and disappear. He said he had a way from his garden to what he called the point of ambush. They had no idea what he meant, but they waited quietly in his garden until he came back again with the empty barrow and the spade, which he had provided, at the same time.
Peter said once, “Don’t you think people must be wondering what we’re doing?”
“If anybody asks,” said Tom, “I’m just taking a bit of earth from the Ditch to put in the garden, and you’re helping me.”
“There’s nobody about anyway,” Derek said easily, though he knew he was the most nervous of them all.
“Isn’t there any way we could bring it without anyone seeing?”
Tom said, “The only other way is the way the White Road kids must have gone when they went to raid your camp.”
They stared at him. After a moment Peter said, “Isn’t that nutty? We never even wondered. How could they have got there? They couldn’t just have come up straight through the Ditch from Everett, because the big fence cuts across it between the ends of the back gardens.”