Fireweed Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword by Lucy Mangan

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Foreword by Lucy Mangan

  To this day I cannot believe this is how we did it, but it’s true. At school our English classes – that’s seven or eight hours every week, for years and years and years – were devoted to reading books aloud. Whole books. Aloud. Every word. Three or four pages per pupil, round and round we went, from The Starlight Barking and The Phantom Tollbooth in our first year, through the likes of Bridge to Terabithia in pre-GCSE years and then on to Pride and Prejudice. Lord of the Flies. 1984. Wuthering Heights (Wuthering Heights. Aloud. WUTHERING HEIGHTS) in the awful GCSE and downright hellish A-level years. Few pupils, and even fewer books, survived the experience.

  One book that did, however, was Jill Paton Walsh’s Fireweed. Partly, it must be said, because of its relative brevity. It simply didn’t hang around long enough to become a burden on your soul like that Brontë monstrosity did.

  But more than that – it spoke to us, a classful of twelve-year-olds, who were just beginning to feel the stirring of longings for independence, adventure and romance (or sex, as we called it, not knowing any better). The gradual unfolding of the love story between Bill, an unhappy evacuee during the Second World War who returns to London to fend for himself until his soldier father comes home, and Julie, a fellow fugitive whom he meets while sheltering in a tube station during an air raid fed, like all the best and best-timed books do, a need in us we didn’t even know we had.

  I simply loved it, this short, surefooted tale of life, love and London in the Blitz. It was the first book I had read that seemed to be conveying more than it actually said (and yes, E. Brontë, I’m looking at you. Again). I took it home and re-read and re-read it, unpacking a little more of its clever, compact subtleties each time but always, in the end, simply getting caught up in Bill and Julie’s adventures, hopes, happiness and bitter disappointments as they make their way through the capital’s wartime chaos and pull a life from the rubble of their pre-war certainties and expectations. They build their own tiny world together while London is, as Bill puts it, ‘knocked to blazes’ all around them.

  Thus it was that the ending – oh, that ending! – managed to catch me off guard every time and break my heart anew. As London shatters, Bill’s feelings for Julie deepen and flourish like the fireweed that takes root in the bombsites all over the city. Then, when Julie is eventually injured and hospitalised, her parents find her, and the intrusion of adults and their all-consuming concerns about class and propriety destroy Bill’s fragile idyll. He is banished from her room and, despite her mother’s brief flicker of sympathy (‘You know, Bill – she’s only a child’), from her life thereafter.

  Had I been a year or two younger when I read it I would have writhed in rage at the bittersweet conclusion of Bill’s story. As it was, I was just old enough to begin to appreciate the tender art of yearning and wriggle in delight instead at the exquisite pain involved. Now that I am older still, I feel the same but can delight almost as much in the artistry and the careful, elegant but vitally unobtrusive language involved in bringing us all to that pitch and that delicate, fragile emotion to life.

  A few years ago, I discovered that the author herself does not remain so enamoured of her work. I was at a lecture in Cambridge on children’s literature and afterwards someone pointed out Jill Paton Walsh to me. I had had just enough white wine to give me the courage to tell her how much I loved her book.

  The author listened to whatever idiotic fragments of introduction and explanation made it out of my mouth and then proceeded to tell me briskly (I remembered then that she had been a teacher before turning to writing for a living) that she did not like the book at all any more, that the parents’ intervention was crass (‘They seemed to come from another book’) and that although she had considered it all right at the time, she now looked on it more or less as juvenilia.

  Suitably chastened, I slunk away. But later my marginally mutinous teenage self rose and said – though not out loud – ‘So what?’ A book belongs as much to the reader as to the author and to my mind, then and now, the eruption of the parents into Bill and Julie’s lives seemed only an exaggerated reflection of the many daily unwanted and to teenage minds unwarranted intrusions of parents into one’s own life. They are a bombshell on their own, the breaking of a dream, a brutal reassertion of real life – and what young person hasn’t experienced that and burned with resentment of it? Bill’s embittered flames burn hotter and longer and with more just cause, but they are fed and fanned by the same teenage passions.

  So my battered, beloved old copy from 1986 remains proudly on my bookshelf – soon to be joined by this rather more prepossessing copy – and I still both remember and re-read it with fondness and a small, sweet knife in the heart as it draws to a close. I hope that this new edition will be taken down and read by a new generation who find it as illuminating, moving and rewarding as I have done for the last twenty-odd years. Ideally, not at school. And very definitely not aloud.

  For my father-in-law

  1

  Remember? I can still smell it. I met her in the Aldwych Underground Station, at half past six in the morning, when people were busily rolling up their bedding, and climbing out to see how much of the street was left standing. There were no lavatories down there, and with houses going down like ninepins every night there was a shortage of baths in London just then, and the stench of the Underground was appalling. I noticed, as I lurked around, trying to keep inconspicuous, that there was someone else doing the same. I was lurking because I wanted to stay in the warm for as long as possible, without being one of the very last out, in case any busybody asked me tricky questions. And there was this girl, as clearly as anything, lurking too.

  I was fifteen that year, and she seemed sometimes younger, sometimes older. She looked older now, because she had that air adults have, of knowing exactly what they are doing and why. Now I come to think of it, lurking is the wrong word for her; I was lurking – she was just staying put. But I knew she was playing some game like mine, because she hadn’t any bedding either. She was clever at getting out unnoticed. She waited till a great loudly-yapping family with kids all sizes came swarming past her, and then just tagged along behind them. I joined their wake too. Mum and Dad were staggering under so many blankets they might perfectly well have been carrying ours too.

  When we trudged up the steps to street level, she looked around her. So did everyone else. There was always less damage than you would think. This time, as far as I recall, the street looked the same as it had done the night before. She wasn’t looking for bomb-damage though, she was wondering which way to go. I went along beside her and said ‘Hello’.

  She just glanced at me, and then went hurrying on, looking straight ahead of her, but that quick glance stopped me in my tracks for fully sixty seconds. There was no mistaking the expression in them. She was terrified. She was running now, down towards the Law Courts. But when some bowler-hatted Johnnie turned round to look at her she slowed up, and went in a trotting sort of walk, sidling through the people, not looking back. I went after her. I don’t really know why.

  She left the Strand, and went down into the warren of little streets between the Strand and the river. I lost her for a bit, so I slowed up, and looked around. There was a great crater in the Strand, with the cars going gingerly ro
und the edge of it. There were a lot of new shrapnel holes in the pavement, and across the river there were still fires burning on the South Bank. Down towards Charing Cross an ambulance bell wailed shrilly.

  I found her again sitting on a bench in the Embankment Gardens. I came up behind the bench so she shouldn’t see me, and then stepped smartly round, and stood right in front of her, so she couldn’t very easily jump up and run away.

  ‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘What did you run away for?’

  She looked up at me, eyes wide. ‘I’m cold,’ she said in a shaky voice. ‘I want something hot to drink.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I haven’t any money.’ I was down to my last sixpence.

  ‘I have. Take me and buy some breakfast.’ I just looked at her. ‘You can have some too, if you take me,’ she said.

  I was very hungry. Too hungry to turn her down, but I didn’t feel like leaving it at that.

  ‘Why did you run away?’ I asked. She looked at me coldly, with large brown eyes.

  ‘I didn’t know what sort of boy you were,’ she said. ‘You might have been anybody,’

  ‘I am anybody,’ I protested.

  ‘You’ll do all right for taking me to have some breakfast,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, crossly. ‘Why don’t you go by yourself?’

  ‘Girls don’t go around by themselves like that,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I don’t know where to go.’

  ‘Well, how much money have you got?’ I thought of all the eating-places I knew near by.

  ‘Plenty for bacon and eggs,’ she said. My mouth watered embarrassingly at the thought.

  ‘Wizzo!’ I said. ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘Hold my hand,’ she said, getting up.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So that we look like brother and sister. Then nobody will ask us what we’re doing by ourselves.’

  ‘Brother and sister, holding hands?’ I said, disgustedly, but then she looked as though she might be going to cry, and her hand was still held out towards me, so I took it, quickly.

  ‘If you start crying all over the Embankment, that really will look inconspicuous,’ I said icily. Then I relented a bit (well, I hadn’t had anyone to talk to for days and days, and I couldn’t keep up the iciness). ‘You don’t have to worry,’ I told her, ‘I’ve been doing it for a week, and nobody has noticed yet!’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Getting along on my own, with no grown-ups,’ I said. ‘Like you’re trying to.’

  ‘Have you really?’ she said, suddenly grinning at me. ‘How terrific! How do you do it?’

  ‘Oh, I have things worked out,’ I told her, loftily, not wanting to throw away my moment of glory. ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  ‘It must be easier for you,’ she said, as we crossed out of the gardens and began to walk up towards the Strand again.

  ‘Why must it?’ I asked, annoyed at her for being disparaging.

  ‘Well, you’re a boy, after all, and then, well you see, I’ve run away!’

  ‘So have I,’ I retorted. ‘And if you think it’s so easy, I suppose you won’t want me to tell you how it’s done!’

  I thought she would fall off her high-horse at that, and say ‘Please tell me, oh, please’, but she said, ‘Anyway it will be easier with two of us.’

  ‘You’ve got the hell of a cheek!’ I told her.

  ‘You haven’t any money for breakfast,’ she said, and that was true, and there we were at the door of Marco’s Cosmopolitan Snack-Bar, and the heavy warm smell of frying and coffee was wafting round us.

  I glared at her, and she said ‘Pax. What’s your name?’

  ‘Bill,’ I said. That isn’t my name, but I decided in that split second to lie about it just in case, and then I couldn’t bring myself later to admit I’d not trusted her, and tell her my real one. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Julie,’ she said.

  ‘Ciao, ciao!’ called Marco, as we went in. ‘I was worried about you, amico. Where did you eat yesterday?’

  ‘Oh, I was the other end of town, Marco. Too far to come,’ I said. I didn’t like to say I had run out of money.

  ‘Listen,’ said Marco, his accent getting thicker as he spoke with feeling. ‘As long as you know – anything you want, you ask Marco. I get you good food, I ask no questions, I not even think questions. So long as you know. I am your friend, Marco, your big friend.’

  ‘Thanks Marco, I know. Bacon and eggs for two, and a cup of tea …’

  ‘Coffee for me,’ said Julie.

  ‘Ah!’ said Marco. ‘Is good. Is better to have coffee. Black or white, Miss … Miss?’

  ‘Julie,’ she said. ‘White please.’

  ‘White coffee for Miss Julia,’ he said, with a flourish. For a moment I thought she looked a bit startled. As soon as he moved away from the table she said, ‘Is he all right? Is he really your friend?’

  ‘He’s all right. He’s not really a friend. But he guessed I was up to something, because I came here so much on my own. He’s jolly sore about having been interned as an enemy alien, because he’s lived here years and years, and only had another few weeks to go for his naturalization to come through. Or so he says. They let him out again though, so I suppose that’s true. But the whole business made him very angry. He says he doesn’t like people who push people around, so I reckon he’s on our side.’

  Marco brought bacon and eggs, and tea for me, and coffee for her. My tea was in the usual thick white cup with brown chips on the rim, but he brought Julie’s coffee in a pot, with a jug of hot milk, and a blue cup, unchipped.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling.

  I remember seeing that she was smiling very nicely, and realizing that this was why her cup wasn’t a chipped one. I was a bit rueful as I gulped my lukewarm tea, but I tucked into that plate of bacon and eggs gladly enough.

  ‘It’s jolly nice in its way, but it doesn’t taste quite the same, somehow,’ I said thoughtfully, mopping up yellow egg-yolk with a chunk of bread.

  ‘He cooks in olive oil,’ she said.

  ‘You are my friends,’ said Marco, appearing to pour more coffee into Julie’s cup, though she could perfectly well have done that herself as far as I could see. ‘For you, I cook in the olive oil. Only the best for you.’

  A few more people were straggling into the place: two air-raid wardens in tin hats, and some workers on their way between shelters and work.

  ‘You stay here as long as you like,’ said Marco. ‘You sit, you drink coffee, no hurry, plenty room.’

  ‘Tell me about running away,’ said Julie, looking at me over the coffee pot.

  I told her a bit. I can’t really remember how much. After all this time it’s no good trying to remember just what I said; when I try to remember I remember very clearly what it was like, what I might have told her; and I remember trying to impress her, thinking that if I made out that I had had a rough time she would see what a brave, tough type I was. And pathetic though it seems to me now, I think I really did think things had been rough.

  I hadn’t really understood about war. Grown-ups talked about it, and they listened to the news more than they had done before. I liked spotting planes; I learned from the Boy’s Own Paper what all ours, and all theirs, looked like, fighters and bombers, but it didn’t mean anything much to me. I was living with my aunt. She had looked after me and my father since my mother died. I don’t think she really wanted to, because she grumbled a lot. My father was still at home the first time they started sending children out of London. Evacuees, they called them. My class at the school went half empty one day; then there was only me and one other boy; then there was no class at all. The school closed down, and the teachers went off to the country to teach the kids there. My aunt wanted to send me too, but my father said ‘The family stays together’, and went on saying it steadily until she stopped talking about sending me away. So I stayed put.

  It was deadly dull. I did a lot of shopping for her, and I was so bored I was gla
d to. It used up a lot of time, because there were suddenly queues at a lot of the shops. You had to register with one shop for things that were rationed, and that meant you couldn’t go somewhere else if the queue was long.

  The funny thing about the war was that nothing at all happened for ages and ages. All those kids had been sent away, and then there were no bombs at all. Now and then I saw a Hurricane, or Spitfire fly over our quiet street, and once I saw a Heinkel, but it was just flying over, not doing anything. Like everyone else in the street we got an Anderson shelter, a great package of bits of corrugated iron. We put it up in the garden, and covered it with earth, Dad and me working together the whole weekend. When it was finished he went round to the pub, and brought back a jug of beer, and we sat in the kitchen, and he poured some out for me. My aunt was furious, and nagged him about giving it to me, because I was too young.

  ‘He’s done a man’s work today,’ my father said. I didn’t like the beer, but just to show her, I drank rather a lot. It made me sick, and while I was hanging over the bathroom basin my aunt appeared from her bedroom, in curlers, and yelled ‘I told you so!’ all over the place.

  Sometime that summer my Dad’s call-up papers came and he went off into the army. My aunt grumbled more than ever. He didn’t write; he was never much good at putting words to things.

  Then when they started putting up posters again, and making appeals on the wireless to send children out of London, my aunt decided to send me. I was furious; two of my best friends had just come back.

  ‘You’re going off with the rest of them this time,’ she said to me. ‘It’s too dangerous here.’

  I remember her saying that. I was standing with my back to her, looking out of the front room window. The street was sunlit, and the roses were blooming all over the front gardens. A horse stood outside the next door house, between the shafts of the milk cart, peacefully champing in his nosebag. The milkman was out of sight, but I could hear the chink of bottles.

  ‘Dangerous?’ I said. ‘Here?’ Suddenly her dry hard voice changed. She sounded wild as she answered,