“That was why we thought it was a good place for a camp in the beginning,” Derek said gloomily.
“I worked it out,” Tom said. “I reckon they just came up to the end of Everett, outside my house, and over the gate into the big field and around the backs of the Everett Avenue houses through the cabbages. Easy. All they had to do was make sure none of the soldiers happened to be watching them.”
They took two more loads across the road, and when the last was delivered, Tom took them with him to see the point of ambush. He showed them a break in his own back garden fence, and beyond it, in the big tree-scattered field that they had never seen before, a thicket of scrub and bushes in the middle of which they could just make out a reddish-brown glimmer that was the heap of mud from the Ditch. It was clear that the heap could only be visible from where they stood; the thicket seemed to curve toward them in a sort of arc, and the thick tangle of branches and trunks would easily shield anything within the arc from being seen by even the keenest eyes looking from the other side.
Derek saw this and approved it, but at the same time he reflected with a faint sinking feeling that this ideal thicket seemed to be a very long way from Tom’s garden fence. To reach it, they would have to cross a lot of open field. He looked across to the left at the back fences of the houses of the White Road, lined there with the untidy, unbeautiful, somehow private look that the backs of houses always have. When he found the fence that was bent downward, a break in the long line, and must therefore belong to the Wiggs house, he thought that it seemed very likely indeed that the Wiggs gang could, if they were looking, have an easy view of anyone crossing the field from Tom’s house to the curving thicket.
He said, “Are you sure you really got it all over there without them seeing you? I mean with the wheelbarrow and all, weren’t you awfully easy for them to spot from over there?”
Tommy Hicks grinned. “You’d be surprised,” he said. “I used to get across this field every day without being seen when I was a kid your age, and there’s a lot more cover now than there was then. Now listen. The first bit is the most difficult, after you’ve got out through the fence into the field. Nobody can see you while you’re actually getting out, because the top corner of our garden blocks the view, but after that you have to dart very quickly for a yard or two to get to the first bit of cover. That is, you have to dart, run for it, if you’re my size, but four people running across one after the other would be a bit of a risk, and I reckon you three are small enough to do it better by wriggling through the grass. Indian style. Are you good at that?”
“Course,” they said, not without pride.
He looked from one to another of them and nodded seriously, though Derek had the feeling he would have preferred to be laughing at them. Or perhaps not; he was obviously enjoying all of this quite as much as they were.
“Well,” Tom said. “I’ll go first. This is a practice run. Derek, you come after me. Then Geoff, then Pete. We go from one bit of cover to the next, and each of you must watch the one in front of him very carefully to see where he goes to and how he does it. And copy it exactly. Specially you, Derek, because you’ll be watching me and sending back what I do, and I’m the only one who knows the way. You watch me get to the first cover, and then the second, and when I’m there, you leave here for the first. Then when I see you’re at the first, I leave the second for the third, and when I’m there, you leave for the second. And so on. The same for all of you. All right? That means that each of us is always one stage away from the one in front. It sounds a bit slow, but there isn’t enough room behind each bit of cover for more than one person, so the first one has to leave it before the next one gets there.”
“Um,” Geoffrey said doubtfully.
“Oh, come on,” Pete said. “That’s not hard.”
“Sounds awful complicated.”
“Only the first time,” Tom said. “Try it anyway. All right? Here we go then.”
He squeezed out through the gap in the planks and crouched at the other side of the fence; the others stood back so that Derek had a clear view of him. The way was a surprise from the beginning; Tom slipped suddenly sideways, to the right, as if he were making not for the thicket but almost in the opposite direction. Derek saw him run, crouching low, and pause beside a bush that was not much bigger than he was himself—“That’s the first piece of cover,” he thought—and then drop to his hands and knees and crawl rapidly through the long grass to a group of three small trees. Once he was there, they could no longer see him, but it was obviously the second stage.
“Go on, Derry,” Peter said.
Derek slipped through the gap in the fence, smelling the faint, friendly creosote smell of the thin planks. He stood nervous and excited in the field, and heard the blood thump in his neck, and glanced over at the mysterious wired-in shape of the anti-aircraft camp at the far side of the field: even if the Wiggs gang couldn’t see them, would one of the soldiers notice them and come running from there? Pushing the idea away, he fixed his eyes on the bush that was his first landmark, dropped to the ground, and wriggled through the damp grass with the side-to-side snake crawl that was, they had long ago discovered from experience rather than lessons, the only way to stalk without having your bottom sticking conspicuously up in the air. He was so intent on perfecting his wriggle that he ran his face into the bush before he realized that he was there, and jerked sideways. Prickles: of course, it was a hawthorn bush. Probably most of the bushes and trees in this field would be hawthorn; that, with the brambles, was the only thing that grew in his own back field. Raising his head, he saw Tom, clearly vis ible now, move on from the group of trees in another zigzagging direction that would bring him closer to the thicket; almost as soon as he started, he was cut off from view by the trees, and Derek felt a moment’s panic and began wriggling hastily off again in his wake. Now that he was away from the shelter of the fence, the field seemed very open; he felt that anything could at any moment pounce on him from above. But at the same moment he realized that there was no danger after all of losing the way, even with Tom out of sight; the passing to and fro of the wheelbarrow had flattened the grass and weeds along this way to the thicket so that it was as clearly marked as a rabbit’s path. Here and there he could even see a few clumps of mud that must have dribbled off the load in the barrow. Reaching the trees, he glanced up and saw Tom peering back at him from behind a gigantic clump of nettles. Looking back at the fence, a long way away now, he saw Peter standing waiting to leave the gap. Geoff was presumably somewhere in the middle. It was like a chain. Tom vanished again, and Derek crawled on more confidently.
When he reached the thicket, he found the cover was so dense that Tom was standing casually upright beside the damp mound of clay. Derek got up, rubbing his grass-green hands and knees, and grinned in triumph. Geoffrey wriggled up, and then Peter, and they squatted in a row looking about them in pleased discovery. It was like being in a ship at sea. They were almost in the middle of the field, with acres of open space on every side of them; the thicket was the size of a small house and made up of hawthorn trees and scrub so closely tangled that it was obviously impossible for anyone to spot them from any direction except the one from which they had come.
Tom said, “That was good. I couldn’t even see you when I looked back. Nothing moving at all. You’d all make good commandos.”
They tried to look modest. Peter said, “This is a smashing place for an ambush. Or it’s like a fort, a castle; you could be besieged in it, and nobody could get at you except from the back.”
“I don’t see how we ambush them, though.” Geoff peered ahead through the branches. “I can see the place where their camp is, but we can’t throw mud-balls that far. I mean, all they have to do is retreat to it, and we can’t get at them without going out into the open.”
“Well, I daresay they will retreat in the end,” said Tom. “But with any luck we’ll have got them lovely and muddy before then. See, I’ve watched those kids for years f
rom our house. I know what they usually do. They don’t just hang around inside their camp all the time any more than you would; they play in this field the way you do in yours. And once they’re out, they’re an easy shot from here, and if they’re caught out past these trees, they have to pass pretty close to them before they can get back to their garden. There isn’t any other way. You look.”
Through the gaps in the trees, narrow indeed as castle windows, they saw that he was right. Between the backs of the White Road houses on one side and the remnants of an ancient orchard that joined the field to the railway line on the other, there was only an open strip of land with scarcely any protection except a few odd patches of brambles. From their thicket they could land a shot on anyone within that open strip. And if the White Road gang were out, the interesting trees of the old orchard made the most obvious place for them to go—and to get to and from those trees, they should have to cross the open land.
“Suppose they decide to come and spend the day in here?” Geoffrey said.
Tom nodded casually. “They do sometimes. That’s why it’s all trodden down inside. We just have to make sure that we’re in here first. Then if they do come in this direction, that’s all the better; we’ll have them on a plate.”
“We’ll be here first all right,” Derek said.
8
Tuesday
THEY WERE there first. They were there very shortly after breakfast, knocking self-consciously at the back door of Tom’s house, each arguing with the others in violent whispers over the best way to apologize to Mrs. Hicks if they had waked her up. But there was no need. When Tom came to the door, pushing his fingers sleepily through his short curly hair as if it were a hearthrug, he said that his mother was working an early shift at one of the factories and that she had already been gone for an hour.
“Come on in for a minute,” he said.
They stood in an awkward group in the small kitchen, waiting while he rinsed a plate and a cup at the sink. There was a coal stove in one corner, of the kind that all their own houses had, serving both to warm the kitchen and to heat the water supply. Tom bent down and shut its draft door when he had finished at the sink; his most casual actions seemed odd to them, like those not of a boy but of a grown man, the kind of things that their fathers would naturally do. Derek looked curiously around the kitchen and saw on one wall a picture frame that held not a picture but a printed notice. It said: We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.
“That means the war, of course,” Tom said, watching him.
The others looked. “Did Churchill say that?” said Peter.
“I don’t think so,” Tom said. “I think it was someone a long time ago. Mr. Churchill says some pretty good things, though. Like the Dunkirk speech.”
He looked at them expectantly.
“Um,” said Derek.
Geoffrey nodded, but prudently said nothing. Peter, more courageous, said, “What Dunkirk speech?”
Tom frowned. “You ought to know it by heart,” he said, and he seemed even more like somebody’s father. He went back to the sink and washed his hands, and stood there with one hand on the faucet, looking out of the window. He said: “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.” He paused. “We shall never surrender” he said.
There was a short silence.
“I do remember it now,” Derek said slowly. “I remember my father reading it to us.”
“I heard Mr. Churchill saying it, on the radio,” Geoffrey said at once. Then he saw Tom’s eyebrows go up and added hastily, “At least I think I did.”
“You couldn’t have heard Churchill,” said Tom. “He said that in the House of Commons.”
Derek was trying to think backward; he could remember John Brand standing proud and serious in the living room reading to them from the newspaper, but it seemed a long time ago. He said, “Wasn’t there more of it than that?”
“Lots more before it. But only one other bit at the end.”
Clearly Tom had the bit at the end in his head, too. It was Peter again who said, “What was that?”
“We shall never surrender,” Tom said again, “and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old”
“The New World?” said Derek. He had forgotten that.
“America,” Tom said.
“Oh yes, of course.”
“We had a food parcel from America last month,” Peter said. “Through someone at my dad’s firm. There was a super cake in it.”
Derek said with enthusiasm, “And your mum gave mine the sausages, remember? We had them for supper. They were the best sausages I’ve ever tasted. They must have some smashing kinds of food in America.”
Tom said suddenly, “An awful lot of our ships are being sunk carrying food like that from America. And fuel, and steel and things. When I’m on one, I’ll probably be sunk before long, too. They say you’re lucky if you last out more than two convoys.”
Sobered, they stared at him; he was still gazing fiercely out of the window at nothing. For a moment he was like someone from another planet, someone they had never seen before. He said, as if to himself, “Somebody has to sail the ships. We shall fight on the seas and oceans, Mr. Churchill said. We shall never surrender. Somebody has to go and get the things to do the fighting with. And people like that Johnny Wiggs, they don’t care about that, so long as they can sit on their fat behinds at home and dodge everything. You don’t catch people like Johnny Wiggs joining up or getting drafted, oh no. He isn’t even in the Home Guard; d’you know that? But he’s old enough. He’s six months older than I am.”
He stopped, abruptly, and swung around and grinned at them. “Come on, then,” he said. “You have to be out early for an ambush. And just keep your fingers crossed that it doesn’t rain.”
They trooped outside silently; Tom locked the back door behind them and put the key under a flowerpot beside the door. “Not that a burglar would get much joy out of our house,” he said.
The sky was a solid gray sheet of cloud. “It does look like rain,” Geoff said. “And it rained a little bit again in the night—you can tell.”
“That’s why there wasn’t a raid,” Tom said.
“It’ll have made our clay pile just gooey enough for making good mud-balls,” Peter said with relish.
“Sssh,” Derek said. They had arrived at the gap in the fence.
Tom said, “Here we go. Same rules. But you know the way this time.”
Knowing the way, Derek found, was both a good thing and a bad. He was the last in line this time, and as he wriggled from one piece of cover to the next, he felt even more exposed, knowing that if anyone were following them, he, Derek, would be the first one to be grabbed. He knew that there was no one following, of course—he looked behind him frequently, to check—but that made no difference to the empty feeling in his throat. The journey was not for practice this time; this was the real thing. The top of Geoff’s dark head bobbed now and again through the grass and scrub ahead of him, and he kept moving to stay as close as he dared. Just before the last stage of the zigzag path, he put the heel of his hand down hard on a thorn, said aloud without thinking, “Ow,” and dropped flat in panic at the sound of his own voice. But it had seemed loud only to him; when he crawled up—slowly and casually this time—to join the others in the hollow thicket, they showed no sign of having heard.
They waited there, squatting on the bare ground. There was not much g
rass inside the thicket, but only a black, granular earth crisscrossed with the thin roots of the hawthorns. They took turns at standing cramped inside the prickly depths of the largest bush, to keep watch on the back of the Wiggs boys’ house. Those not on watch kept an eye on the rest of the field all around, but there was no movement anywhere, even in the distant hump of the anti-aircraft camp. The morning crept past, and the cloud-roof of the sky began to break up so that patches of blue showed here and there, and a glimpse sometimes of a watery sun. In the first half of the morning they worked out in hopeful detail their plan of attack. They would wait until the Wiggs gang were out in the middle of the field and on their way, it was to be hoped, to the old orchard or the railway line or anything on the opposite side of the field from their house. Then at a signal from Tom, they would unleash their ambush. Tom would break a quick gap through the thinnest part of the thicket, where only slender arms of hawthorn spread up and out, giving cover enough now but easily enough trampled down when the time came; and through this gap they would send a fusillade of mud-balls, with any luck catching the enemy so much unawares that they would be coated with mud before they realized what was happening.
“We ought to make a whole lot of mud-balls in advance,” Geoff said.
“They’d dry out,” said Peter. “And they just fall to bits when they do that.”
“We could put grass in them—like bricks. They put straw in bricks to make them hold together, my dad says.”
Tom, listening to their muttering from where he stood on watch, glanced back over his shoulder. “You do that, and your mud-balls’d dry out just like bricks, too. Then someone would get hurt, and there’d be trouble.”
They sat thinking. Derek leaned out beyond the edge of the trees for a piece of grass to chew, pulling the stem slow and steady so that it slid tender-tipped out of its sheath without bringing the root with it. “We could make a lot very quickly at the last minute,” he said, “as soon as we spotted them. Then there wouldn’t be time for the mud to dry, but they’d be ready. We could even have one person doing nothing but make ammunition to hand to the others to throw. Take turns.”