Fireweed Read online

  It was a horrible day. A cutting north wind was blowing, and the stall keepers stamped their feet, and whistled into their upturned collars to keep warm. Money was short too, because nobody was shopping who didn’t have to. I had a bit of trouble finding work, but Big Ben and Little Bert took me on for a couple of hours, mainly out of kindness, I think,

  ‘How’s the girlfriend?’ asked Little Bert.

  ‘Who? Oh, she’s all right, thank you.’

  ‘Bit of all right. Wouldn’t mind myself, if I weren’t too old for her,’ said Little Bert, winking at me.

  When my couple of hours with them were up, I went off looking for something else. The stalls were no good; they weren’t taking enough money to be ready to payout any. But in a side street I found a frail old boy trying to put bits of furniture from a bombed-out house onto a handcart, standing in the gutter.

  ‘A bob to do it for you, Guv,’ I said. He looked at me thoughtfully, and sniffed. Then he painfully reached into his pocket, and brought out a handful of change, and turned it over, and muttered to himself, counting it. At last he said, ‘Done.’ By that time I felt a real swine for taking anything, and so when he got his things loaded up, I trundled the handcart round into the next street for him, and helped him unload it into a neighbour’s garden shed.

  By this time I was famished, as well as cold, and I bought myself a twopenny-worth of chips from the fish and chip shop, just chips, to save money. After that I found a cold-looking newspaper vendor at the entrance to an Underground station, and I offered to mind his stall while he went off to lunch. It was a pretty late sort of lunch, but he said he’d be glad of it.

  Newspapers were selling all right; the war was good for that sort of trade. There was an air-raid warning while I stood there, but people didn’t take much notice of it. And when he came back it was nearly four o’clock, and I thought I’d call it a day.

  I was dead tired when I scrambled down the stairs to our den, and opened the door to the front room. And after all this time I can still see in my mind’s eye what I saw then when I opened the door, and remember the astonished pleasure it gave me. A fire was burning brightly in the grate, and the paraffin lamp hung from a hook in the ceiling. Everything was clean and neat. The table from the other room had been pulled through, and put in one corner, and spread with a green-and-white cloth. There were plates, and knives, and forks set out there, and a loaf of bread. Beside the fire, on the tiles inside the fender, stood a little primus stove, with a pan simmering on it. The warmth of the room reached out and embraced me, laced with a slight smell of methylated spirit from the stove.

  Julie looked up from a book, and smiled as I came in. ‘Hullo, Bill,’ she said. ‘I’ll just put some more coal on the fire, and then I’ll serve up your tea.’ I don’t think in my whole life till then I remember being made to feel welcome, coming home.

  The coal scuttle was full, and she piled a generous shovelful onto the flames. Then she picked up that pan, and brought it to the table, and took off the lid. A delicious meaty smell filled the room. She poured out thick ladlefuls of stew, and set the plate before me.

  Then she began to serve herself.

  ‘Julie, where did you get it all from?’ I asked.

  ‘All what?’ she said, defensively.

  ‘The meat. Meat is rationed. And the coal.’

  ‘The coal is all right. It’s from the cellar. There’s a door that goes under the front steps, and through into a cellar under the pavements. It was a bit blocked up, but not too much for me to clear, and there’s quite a bit of coal there!

  ‘And what about the meat?’

  She flushed. She picked up the pan, and turned away from me, taking it back to stand in the warm. ‘I found a ration book in one of the drawers there. They were all kept there, but one had slipped over the top of the drawer and fallen into the cupboard below. It must have got left when the others were taken. It’s the cook’s one. It’s registered with a shop near here.’

  ‘Well, but …’ I protested.

  ‘Well, we have to eat, don’t we?’ she said, tossing her hair back. ‘And it isn’t stealing. I paid for it!’

  ‘It’s someone else’s ration.’

  ‘But we aren’t eating ours. Someone has got our books.’

  ‘Oh, I suppose so,’ I said, eating it readily enough. I didn’t want to tell her what was really worrying me about it, which was that someone might check up. Perhaps the cook had got a new ration book, and someone might notice that she seemed to be drawing two rations. And if someone checked up … I hadn’t a clue what would happen to us if we got found out. I supposed we must have broken a lot of regulations. I pushed the unwelcome thought away. But after all, it was for this, for her, that I had turned my back on Dad; and to lose it for a ration book …

  When we had eaten we had to stand shivering in the kitchen to wash up, with a kettleful of hot water. And then we went back to our warm armchairs. There was a card-table, with cards in a little drawer over under the window, and we pulled it up by the fire, and raced each other at clock patience. Then we found a jigsaw, and did that. Cook seemed to have had a passion for them, for there were about a dozen of them in her cupboard. I remember the picture we were making was of Trafalgar Square. Pigeons flew through it everywhere, and all the pieces were covered in feathers, and were hard to get in the right places. That was a good evening. It was wonderful just to be warm; just to have a real chair to sit in, and to be somewhere quiet, somewhere private, by ourselves.

  Really, it amazes me to remember how comfortable we made ourselves there. I can see it as a pool of warmth and safety, I suppose because the paraffin lamp made such a glowing, friendly sort of light. It glinted on the china when we ate, and made our faces look smooth and soft. For a little while the burden of worry lifted from my mind, and rolled away, and I realized just how oppressed and anxious I had been. We had now no need to fear the onset of winter; we had no need to stay out in all weathers. And I was learning a good deal about the markets; I had a plan to mend the axle of a broken cart I had seen lying in a derelict place, and set up in business on my own. Like all the other streetmongers I could buy from Covent Garden market in the morning, and sell at a profit in the street. Then I would really be paying our way, and we could cease to fear the ending of her money, and the disaster that would bring.

  I was planning it in my mind as I sat and warmed my toes by the fire.

  And it worked out fairly well. There were drawbacks to the den, of course. There was a risk that someone living on the other side of the square might see us, coming and going, or spot our smoke, and might report us in some way to the faceless ‘Them’ of whom we were afraid. If I had known about street warden patrols I would have worried about them too. And food wasn’t easy. We had to have lunch in a café, to save coupons, but there wasn’t anywhere near enough to buy breakfast. Nearly everything was rationed, and one book wasn’t enough for us. We ate a lot of bread, but we had pitifully little butter and marge to put on it. I remember breakfasts of one rasher of bacon, sizzled in a pan and shared between us, and five slices of bread apiece, wiped round the pan in chunks until the last smear of bacon fat had been eaten.

  Another drawback was the raids. We could hear them much better on the surface. Instead of a distant thump or two, we could hear the crashing rumble of houses falling after the bangs. There was a warden’s post just beyond the other side of the square, round the corner from the houses opposite, and we could hear motor bikes roar by, carrying messages, and hear the alarm bells of fire-engines and ambulances, hear people running and shouting outside.

  But after the days we had just lived through, all drawbacks, all brief stabs of fear, were outweighed by a row of chestnuts roasting on the bars of our fire, and the feeling of wealth that having things that wouldn’t go in a rucksack gave us. It was absurd, really, when the house above us was in such complete ruin, that all the things for cleaning and house-keeping in it were still safely stored away downstairs, but we found every
thing we needed. Julie washed our filthy clothes, and ironed them, and hung them on a clothes-horse round the fire to dry. We couldn’t bathe there, but we found the Sunlight Soap van quite near us one morning, when the raids had been very near, and we got another bath from them.

  I don’t suppose it lasted much more than a week; at this distance of time I can only remember three evenings there. There was the jigsaw evening, and an evening when Julie had gone to Boot’s Circulating Library, with Cook’s ticket, and brought home books for us. She had chosen The Master of Ballantrae for me, because she knew I had brought Kidnapped away from home. Now I come to think of it, it must have taken me longer than one evening to read The Master of Ballantrae; but the bit I remember reading, with tingles of fear running down my spine, is the scene where they dig up his body in the moonlight, expecting him, hoping against hope for him to be still alive, and the Indian servant tried in vain to rouse him. I got to that bit late at night, when Julie was already asleep, and the fire had died right down to a mere smoulder, and the description of the pallor of death on the moonlit face gave me the creeps so badly that I found the sound of a raid outside almost a relief, since it took me out of the book and gave me something else to think about.

  The third evening I remember, I started myself, by bringing home a copy of the evening paper so that we could do the crossword after supper. I read the headline, but it didn’t mean anything special to me. It said CITY OF BENARES SUNK – ALL FEARED LOST. But when Julie saw it she went as pale as paper, and just stood staring at it.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter, Ju?’ I asked.

  ‘That ship,’ she said. ‘It’s the one I should have been on. It’s sunk.’

  I looked over her shoulder at the paper. The City of Benares had been carrying English evacuee children to Canada.

  ‘Well, thank God you aren’t on it,’ I said. ‘Thank God you ran away!’

  ‘Don’t you see?’ she said wildly, looking at me with eyes brimming with tears. ‘They think I am on it. Oh, my poor mother, she thinks …’ The tears ran freely down her cheeks. ‘Bill,’ she said, ‘I’ll have to tell her, I’ll have to go home now, I can’t let them think …’ She stopped. She saw the look on my face, and turned away. With her back to me, she said, ‘Don’t you think I should, Bill?’

  I didn’t answer. ‘Bill, I must, musn’t I?’ she said, pleading.

  ‘You have to make up your own mind about that,’ I said, icily.

  ‘No,’ she said, turning to me, flushed, tear-stained, eyes unnaturally bright. ‘No, you help me.’

  ‘If you want to go, you damn well go!’ I said. ‘But don’t expect me to say it’s all right by me!’

  She walked up and down the room, screwing handfuls of her skirt in her hands. Cruel and cold, I picked up my book, and pretended to read. In a little while she stopped opposite my chair, and said, ‘Perhaps I could telephone, and just say I’m all right, and not say where I am at all …’ Then her voice dropped, and she said, ‘I suppose they’d start to look for me. They’d get the police in. They’d trace the call. They’d find us anyway …’ I didn’t look up from my book.

  She began to pace the room again. Frozen behind my book, I was suffering hell. It was terrible to see her unhappy, to see her cry. Time and again I nearly said, all right, you go, tell them, I’ll be all right … But I would not be all right. I wasn’t unselfish enough to let her go. I stayed frozen behind my book. Later I remembered this, remembered that I could have let her go. I thought I had been punished for my selfishness.

  She took most of the evening walking and crying. At last, very late, she came up to me, and pushed my book aside from my face.

  ‘I shouldn’t have let you do it,’ she said, quietly. ‘When you let your father go because of me, I didn’t understand. I didn’t realize how much it must have cost you. But since I let you do it for me, I have to do it for you.’

  And I was so glad she would stay, so relieved, that I didn’t really listen to exactly what she said, only to what it meant to me. And our supper was burnt and cold, and so nasty that we could only eat it at all by laughing over it.

  The next day was the day we found Dickie. And in spite of all the bother he caused, it was just as well really, because it gave her something to think about, and me too, when I saw the expression in her eyes. There was always a certain expression in her eyes after that evening. It made me angry in a way; I was sure I hadn’t carried on like that about my Dad.

  We saw Dickie first when we left early one morning to go and look at the broken cart. I thought I might be able to make a new axle out of a piece of the banister-rail from upstairs, and we went together to have a look at it. There had been a raid the night before, behind the square, in a warren of poorer streets. And as we left, we saw a child, curled up on the pavement, sleeping against the railings of the square garden. We took no notice at all.

  The cart had a broken handle as well as a broken axle; we found that as soon as we tried to move it. But the thickness of the banister was about right for the axle. It was a real old-fashioned job, just like a farm-cart, with the wheels fixed on with wooden wedges; and I thought I could manage to fix it, even though I wasn’t exactly a handyman. Julie was keen to paint it, and put bunting on it, and make it look gay. She said people were so grateful for a bit of something cheerful to look at that they would come to us in hordes if we brightened it up a bit.

  ‘Look, Bill,’ she said, brushing at the sides. ‘It had blue and yellow triangles on it once. We could touch them up again.’

  ‘We have to get it mended first,’ I said, protesting.

  And when we got back after having lunch at a British War Restaurant, the kid was still there. He wasn’t asleep any more, he was tottering about on the pavement, crying, and he looked as if he’d been doing that for a long time. As we passed him, an old lady came by, and she stopped.

  ‘What’s the matter, dearie?’ she said to him.

  ‘I want my Mum!’ he said.

  ‘Shall we go and look for her?’ said the old lady.

  ‘No,’ he said, sobbing. ‘She said wait here!’

  ‘Well, then, that’s what you must do, my dear,’ she was saying, ‘I expect she’ll come back for you soon.’ We closed our door behind us.

  ‘Well, that kid’s mother jolly well oughtn’t to leave him waiting for her all that time!’ said Julie indignantly. ‘He’s been there simply ages.’

  And when I came out again, to go and buy tools and glue for the cart, he was still there, just leaning against the rails. It was beginning to rain. I bought the tools, and I went home, and I passed him yet again outside.

  ‘That kid’s still there,’ I told Julie.

  ‘Someone ought to take him somewhere,’ she said. ‘His mother obviously isn’t coming back. She must have abandoned him.’

  ‘Anything might have happened to her,’ I said.

  ‘He ought to be taken to the Child Welfare, or somewhere like that,’ she said.

  ‘Well, we can’t do it,’ I pointed out. ‘A child welfare department is the last place on earth we want to be seen at. What if they asked about us?’

  ‘Couldn’t we tell fibs?’

  ‘Surely someone else will take him soon.’

  ‘There aren’t very many people coming by here, this side of the square, Bill, now that all the houses in the row are bombed.’

  We sat down by our fire, and I began to shave the end of my treasured piece of banister, to fit the wheel-socket on the cart. But we could hear the rain dripping through the ceiling next door, and pattering on the shutters, and after a bit we couldn’t bear it. So I got up, and went out, and crossed the road, and picked up the kid in my arms, and carried him in.

  He was soaked to the skin, and shivering. Julie took all his clothes off, and wrapped him up in her blanket, while she dried them on the clothes-horse.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she said to him softly, very gently, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Dee … kee …’ he said. So we ca
lled him Dickie. But ‘Dee … kee …’ was what he said to anything, any time – to us. He never talked to us as we had heard him talk to the woman on the pavement. There seemed to be something wrong with him.

  At first, I think, he was just scared. He jumped every time we moved, or even put a cup down. When night fell he stirred in his sleep every time a bomb fell, and I stirred too, uneasily aware of the extra person in the room, and the extra problem he gave us. Julie had made a bed for him by pushing a chair up beside the window seat, to stop him rolling off, and laying him there on the dusty cushions, covered with my jacket and her mac.

  In the morning we talked about him again. ‘We’ve got to think of a good way of handing him over to someone,’ I said.

  ‘All right,’ she said, challenging me. ‘How shall we do it?’

  ‘Well, we could take him somewhere, and leave him for someone to find.’

  ‘Oh, Bill, really! He was left for more than a day for people to find, when we found him. Fat lot of good that did!’

  ‘Oh, well, I suppose that would be a bit callous. Then we must take him ourselves. We take him to the Welfare, or a warden’s post, or the police station, and just say we found him on our way to the shops. And we give them phoney names and addresses if they ask. Just the number of any bombed house will do. That would cover our tracks nicely.’

  ‘And what happens to him then?’

  She startled me. The only snag I foresaw in my suggestion was the chance that something would happen to us. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m not an expert, am I? They’ll see to him. It won’t be any business of ours, anyway.’

  She just looked at me, coldly. I felt myself flinching under her coldness.