Fireweed Page 4

  ‘They’re too far. Right at the edge of the park,’ I said. ‘We’ll be all right here.’

  People around us were picking themselves up, and walking away. ‘We don’t want to be seen, or they’ll tell us to take cover,’ I said. ‘Let’s go over there.’ I led the way into a clump of rhododendrons, and we lay down on the leaf mould beneath the branches, out of sight. I lay on my back, munching, and looking at a patch of sky framed by the dark leaves overhead. Then I turned my head, and looked at her. She was very white; so pale that a few faint freckles across her nose and cheeks showed up for the first time.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘They blow a whistle for immediate danger, in lots of factories and offices. We’d probably hear it.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, letting out a long breath, ‘I didn’t know.’ Then we heard a droning noise above us. There was a line of white across our patch of sky. We could see planes up there, wheeling and diving, soaring, and chalking crazy scribbled loops on the sky. If they were shooting at each other the noise was drowned by the Ack-ack guns which opened up all around us, stuttering angrily at the sky. Then the fight moved away beyond Victoria. The guns were quiet. We lay there still, and looked at the empty park. It was full of birds: water birds, tree birds. They did not take cover, nor even flutter at the sound of guns. At last the all-clear sounded, one smooth note, and gradually people reappeared, and we got up, and went out of the park to see Big Ben. The blankets we had bought that morning were in a new canvas rucksack over my shoulder.

  ‘I wonder what they’re like close to?’ she said, half to herself.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Those planes we were watching.’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ I said. We walked across the top of Whitehall, just beside King Charles, waiting for the traffic. Lots of the passing cars were sploshed with brown and green paint, for camouflage, and one even had a mattress strapped across the roof, to absorb bullets. On the other side of the street was a little toyshop, selling mostly those horribly painted soldiers which people buy as souvenirs. But it had planes there too. There weren’t many toys around in the war, and most of them were horrid, but there were those tiny planes, exact little models, made of some super shiny metal that looked just like aluminium, though I suppose it can’t really have been, when people were being asked to give up their saucepans for the war effort. We looked into the windows for a bit, and I told her the names of all the different planes.

  Then I dug into my pockets, and found my very last sixpence, all that I had left of the money my father sent me, and I slipped inside, and bought one of the Spitfires. I felt a bit silly when I got out onto the pavement again, so I thrust my hands into my pockets, and sauntered off down the street, with Julie trotting beside me. ‘Just wanted a closer look,’ I said, lightly.

  ‘For an awful moment I thought you were trying to shake me off,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said, suddenly serious. ‘No, I won’t do that, I promise you. We might as well stick together. And girls really shouldn’t go around all by themselves. I think I’ll look after you.’

  ‘Thanks, Bill,’ she said. ‘You’re a brick.’

  I think it was because I had half expected her to say that anyway she had the money, that I thought this remark so splendid. I felt solid, and brick-like all the way down Whitehall.

  We looked at Big Ben from Westminster Bridge, and then from Parliament Square. We heard it strike two. Then we wandered around the Abbey, giggling at the dramatic monuments to white marble gentlemen who seemed so pleased with themselves, although they were dead.

  Outside again we walked past the statue of Cromwell; beyond it the road was cordoned off. Two men were sweeping the pavement; it was scattered across with lumps of stone, and shattered glass. As we rounded the corner of Westminster Hall we saw what it was. Half the great east window of the hall had been blown out, and was lying across the pavement around the foot of Richard Coeur de Lion, and his bronze horse, I remember how black the yawning gap in the tracery looked. It brought things home to me, that. Seeing ugly old shops and shabby houses knocked apart had not seemed so appalling as seeing the wreckage of that lovely patterned stone.

  ‘Bloody swine!’ I muttered.

  ‘How awful,’ she said, very softly. We stood looking for a minute. I remember that the fragments of stone were grey where they had been exposed to the grimy London air, and creamy yellow where they had been broken across. Splinters of glass lay among them, sparkling in pale sunlight. I looked sideways at Julie. Her face looked very still and quiet. Then suddenly, as she raised her head to toss away her hair, the gloom on her countenance lightened, till she almost laughed.

  ‘Oh, look, Bill, look!’ she said, pointing to the Lionheart, riding above us. Proudly, above his head, pointing skywards, he held his great long-sword; but the sword was bent. At first glance it made the great horseman look comic; both of us were laughing aloud. But then, as we let laughter die away we saw that it also made him look resolute, and turned the cheap heroics of his gesture into a battered defiance that would not be overcome.

  The sweeper nearest us raised his head and, nodding towards the statue, said to us:

  ‘Don’t seem to bother ’im, do it?’

  ‘Will they be able to mend the window?’ Julie asked him.

  ‘Stones is easier to mend than bones,’ he told her. ‘Mind you gets tucked up safely at night, young miss.’

  We wandered on. ‘Now we’ve got a rucksack to put things in,’ I said thoughtfully, there are a lot of things from home I wish I had.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘My penknife, for a start. And my torch. And something to read when I can’t get to sleep in those shelters. And I’d very much like a shave.’

  ‘Shave?’ she said, incredulous. ‘You don’t need to shave!’

  ‘I jolly well do! About once a week or so.’

  ‘Well, I can’t see any beard on you.’ She stared at my chin.

  I raised my hand instinctively, and stroked the soft absurd pale down that grew there. She laughed again.

  ‘Really, Bill, you don’t need to shave that off! That’s not a beard!’

  ‘It makes me feel a fool,’ I said, sourly.

  ‘Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. Well, let’s go back to your house.’

  ‘I suppose I really ought to go and see if my aunt’s there again now,’ I said. I hadn’t really meant to go back right away. I felt very reluctant, as though something nasty would happen if I saw anyone I knew, though I hadn’t the sense to work out why I felt like that. Stands out a mile to me, looking back, but as Julie said, I wasn’t very quick on the uptake. After all, I was only fifteen.

  We went home on an Underground train. It was very smelly down there, because of all the night shelters. They left their stink behind them. The barricade was still across the road. The doorstep was even more dirty, and all the windows looked dead; I don’t know how it is that one can see from the glass, as one can in human eyes, when there’s nobody at home, but it’s true. We didn’t walk straight up the street to be caught and warned off by the warden, but slipped round the little lane that led between the small gardens at the back. That too had a notice, UNEXPLODED BOMB, propped up against an old oil can, but we just walked past it.

  I opened the gate at the end of our garden, and we went down the path. It looked different: the leaves were all golden yellow on the apple tree, and the grass had grown long, and was jewelled with dew, even then, in the afternoon. At the end of the garden, next to the house, was a deep pit, about six feet wide, into which the windows of the basement looked. It had stone steps into it, which led to the back door. And lying in this sunk place, lodged against the kitchen windowsill on one side, and against my aunt’s parsley and mint patch on the other, was the bomb. Its nose-cone was on the windowsill, poking through a broken pane, and its finned tail was on the herb bed. We stared at it, fascinated. Looking up I saw broken branches in the apple tree, and looking down I saw a long scuffed mark on the lawn.


  ‘Look, Julie,’ I said, excited. ‘It fell into the tree, and that must have broken its fall a bit, and turned it sideways, so that it slithered along the lawn, instead of falling on its nose, and that’s why it didn’t go off. It just slipped along there, and stuck.’ Indeed, the scuff marks and scratches on its grey sides were already bright with new rust and where the leaky gutter spilled over it it had grown a streak of livid green algae, absurdly, as though it meant just to stay there, and weather into the surroundings like a fallen tree.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

  I think I would have said it if she hadn’t, but now she had I felt different. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I want my things.’

  Her face whitened, visibly, as I watched. ‘But we’d have to go right under it!’ she said.

  ‘Cowardy, cowardy, custard!’ I said, to make myself feel brave.

  ‘Are you really going to?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Really.’

  ‘Well, if you are, I’m coming too,’ she said, firmly, taking a tight hold of my hand, and marching me towards it.

  So we went. We walked down the steps, and across the narrow yard, stooping under the bomb, past it, and getting to the door. I slipped my hand round the doorpost, and found the key, as always, wedged between the doorpost and the wall, where the fit was bad. I turned it in the lock, and let us in.

  It was dark. The bomb blocked out a lot of the light. Its nasty snout was nearly resting on the draining board beside the sink. Broken glass from the window lay across the floor, and dust lay thick on the table and the dresser. Julie was shivering. I heard her teeth. You know people say teeth chatter, and that’s just what hers were doing. I don’t know what came over me, but I looked and looked, and saw how she was, shivering, hugging herself round with her arms, her eyes looking huge and dark, and it made me feel cruel.

  ‘I want a cup of tea,’ I said. ‘I’m going to shave. Make me a cup of tea.’

  We both looked round the place, seeing the horror of what I had just said. There were tile cups and the teapot on the dresser; about five steps away. Then five steps back to get the kettle from the stove. Then the tap, about three inches from the surface of the bomb. Then the stove again.

  ‘The gas!’ she said, very breathlessly. ‘They’ll have turned off the gas! They must have turned it off, must have! It might explode,’ she added in a more normal tone.

  ‘It’s an electric stove,’ I said brutally. ‘And the mains switch is just above it,’ and full of manly strength I went off up the stairs, three at a time, to the bathroom.

  I was sorry by the time I had lathered my face. I hoped she would come up and join me, but she didn’t. I hoped she wouldn’t set it off; I supposed she would kill me too if she did, and that made it all right to be up here, shaving. It wasn’t as if I was safe. My razor blades had got rusty while I was in Wales, and the water was cold, so it took some time. Then I went and fetched my torch and penknife from my room, and some clean socks while I was at it, and a shirt, and that copy of Kidnapped that I had pretended to read when I was angry with my aunt. Then I went downstairs to the kitchen.

  She had the tea made, cups laid on the table. The table had been dusted too. She had even found a packet of biscuits in the larder and put them out. Her own tea was poured out, and she was sitting reading one of my aunt’s copies of Picture Post.

  I stood in the, doorway, looking at her. I expected her to be triumphant, gloating; or maybe, to reproach me for my monstrous behaviour, sullen stares like the ones my aunt was so good at. Instead she looked up and grinned at me, and said, ‘Come and have some tea! Look at this.’

  ‘This’ was a picture in the magazine, of St Paul’s Cathedral. The heading was UNEXPLODED BOMB THREATENS ST PAUL’S. We could see a great yawning black hole in the pavement outside the south transept. Heads together, while we drank tea, we read about the bomb disposal squad, who were trying to deal with the bomb. They had dug down thirty feet before reaching it, and were still trying to defuse it when the paper went to press.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s supposed to be good.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘St Paul’s.’

  ‘How do you mean, good?’

  ‘It’s supposed to be good architecture. People who know think so. And I’ve only seen it once, when I was quite young, and I didn’t like it much then. I’d like to go and see it again, just once more, while it’s still there.’

  ‘It’ll still be there,’ I said. ‘These bomb gangs are dealing with it.’

  ‘Bill,’ she said, slowly. ‘Do you know anything much about bombs?’

  ‘Well, no, only what I’ve read in the papers.’

  ‘My father used to do them in the first war. Get the fuses out, you know. It’s very dangerous.’

  ‘Well, as long as you don’t give them a great knock on the nose-cone. That’s what makes them go off, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’ve got it a bit muddled, I think,’ she said, pouring out more tea. ‘Some of the ones that don’t go off are duds, or ordinary ones that just by some chance didn’t fall on the trigger mechanism, but some of them are real time bombs, meant not to go off till someone touches them. They make a lot of trouble you see, making people leave that area, and all that. And those ones, Daddy said, are specially made to go off at the lightest touch, anywhere on them. Or even at a loud noise. Or even a change in temperature. The people who deal with them are just about the bravest people there are, Mummy says.’

  ‘Golly,’ I said. ‘I should think your mother’s right. O.K., we’ll take a bus back to town. There’s one that goes right by St Paul’s, and you can take your last look.’ It was a sort of delayed reaction, like the way a wave breaks, and then the backwash breaks again. I was still chatting about the bomb at St Paul’s when I remembered the one behind me.

  ‘Julie,’ I said. My throat was quite dry. Very slowly I picked up my cup of tea, and gulped some. ‘Julie, which sort do you think this is: the accident sort, or the time-bomb-go-off-at-any-time-sort?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ she said, looking up at me calmly, with dark, limpid eyes. ‘I haven’t a clue.’

  And I made her make the tea. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  ‘Let’s!’ she said, getting up at once. Then at the door she said, ‘Have you got your things?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I put them in the rucksack.’ I was whispering.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Only I wouldn’t like you to make us come back for them!’ I have never closed a door so gently in my life as I closed that kitchen door behind me.

  The bomb went up some time after we left. How long after I’m not sure. It wrecked the houses on either side of my aunt’s, and two houses across the road, and it blew in the windows all the way down the street. Where our house had been there was nothing left but a great hole. But the apple tree, split in two right to the root, sent up a shoot the following spring, and survived. I can get my aunt to talk about it any time.

  4

  We sat on top of the bus, choosing a seat where someone had peeled off the new mesh netting from the windows, so that we could look out. The netting was to stop the window hurling splinters of glass at the passengers, but it made it so hard to see where one was that people pulled it off. Our window was all mucky with the glue left behind by the net. It was late afternoon, with that sort of misty haze in the air that the sun shines through softly, making no shadows.

  ‘Bill, tell me how ever you’ve managed all this time,’ said Julie.

  ‘It’s not so hard as you’d think,’ I said.

  ‘But you had hardly any money; have you been getting enough to eat?’

  ‘I did have some money at first. You don’t have to pay to sleep; you just go down a shelter. Nobody notices, because there are lots of people floating around on their own. And there are special places to buy food, you know, like the W.V.S. canteen where we got lunch.’

  ‘Don’t they move around
a lot? How do you know you’ll find them?’

  ‘Well, there are dumps called British War Restaurants, that stay put, in church halls, and places like that. You can get a good meal there for sixpence, if you don’t take pudding.’

  ‘Did your money last until this morning?’

  ‘No, but I earned some. It’s not hard to do. I delivered newspapers for a few days, for a chap who’d lost all his delivery boys through evacuation; but then I found a better way. All the street markets are short handed; it’s the old gents who are left, and some of them are trying to run their son’s stall as well, and he’s in the army, or some such thing. And they pay you quite well to mind the stall, and yell “Sweet Kentish plums!” at people. The best bit is, they feed you as well as pay you – you can eat all the squashed fruit and flattened buns and broken cake you can stuff into yourself. And they don’t ask you any questions, either, not like the newsagent, who was always worrying about who I was and where my family were, and why I hadn’t gone with all the others. I got fed up telling him fibs. But the barrow-boys aren’t like that at all, they just say, “Them as asks no questions don’t get told no lies”.’

  ‘Oh, Bill,’ she said, eyes shining, ‘What fun! Can I come too?’

  I looked at her doubtfully. ‘You’d stick out like a sore thumb in that posh dress,’ I said. ‘We’d have to get you something a bit raggedy.’

  ‘How could we do that?’ she asked.

  ‘From the Salvation Army Mission. They got me this jacket when the weather went cold. They don’t ask too much, either. The only trouble is, all their stuff’s too big.’ And I pulled at my jacket, to show her how far in front of my chest it buttoned up.

  She laughed. ‘Bill, you could get two of you in there, easily,’ she said. Then she began to giggle. ‘And wait till I tell Mother. She said this dress would do to go anywhere!’

  ‘Golly, look at that!’ I said. Outside the smeary window of the bus we could see a terrible sight. There was a great wide desolate stretch of blasted houses. Piles of rubble lay thickly everywhere, with splintered timbers sticking out here and there. In a few places a wall was still standing with empty windows gaping against the sky, and all crumbled and broken into strange shapes, and blackened by fire. The bus was bumping along the road, for the road surface was full of holes. People were struggling along the pavement by a narrow path swept through the rubble; the shops were fronted with boards instead of glass, and labelled ‘Business as Usual’ in roughly painted letters. We looked in silence.