Five Boys Read online

  She picked up the poker and struck the tap on the boiler. A plume of steam flew out with the jet of boiling water and Miss Minter had to wave a hand through it to make sure the water was landing in the bath. Then she stood aside as the range gushed and spluttered, like some geyser running its course, added a dash of salts from a green glass beaker and several jugs of cold water and invited Bobby to climb in.

  When he was undressed and in the bath, Lillian Minter pulled up a stool and they sat silently beside one another, as if Bobby was in the sidecar of her motorbike and they were enjoying a country run. Miss Minter was tempted to ask what he had been up to, but knew that whatever he said would only give her more to worry about. Besides, the parlor was calm for the first time in hours.

  “Is that nice?” she said.

  Bobby nodded. The way the water cradled him, the smell of the soap, the roaring fire—all were recognizably nice. As he pulled his shoulders down under the milky water the strange Captain and his homemade ships came back to him and Bobby wondered if the old man was ever tempted to try them out before bottling them.

  “Does your mummy soap your back for you?” Miss Minter asked him.

  At first she thought he must not have heard her. He was so still she thought he must have drifted off. But when she looked again she saw a tear creep down his cheek—watched it drop into the bathwater and send a series of ripples sweeping back and forth across its surface.

  She couldn’t believe her lack of sensitivity—was sickened by it—and had to leave the room under the pretext of fetching a towel from upstairs. She opened the cupboard and buried her head in the linen. Cursed herself over and over for making the poor boy cry. But when she went back downstairs she offered no apology and made no reference to Bobby’s tears, thinking that it would only embarrass him on top of everything else.

  She let him soak for another few minutes, then wrapped a towel around him and dabbed him dry. Got him into his pajamas and dressing gown and led him around the back of the settee where she spread an old newspaper out on the floor. Then she left the room and returned with a large jar of dried soup mix.

  She gave the jar a shake. “Now,” she said, “all these peas and beans have managed to get themselves mixed up.” She made an effort to look highly vexed. “Do you think you might sort them out for me while I have the bath?”

  She unscrewed the lid and poured the jar’s contents out onto the newspaper. Bobby looked at the mountain of dried beans and pulses—saw a whole evening’s work ahead of him—but he knelt down beside it and told Miss Minter that he would see what he could do.

  Five Boys

  CONSIDERING ALL the trouble he took over their tiny reproduction the Captain seemed to get no end of pleasure from telling Bobby how the real ships came to be wrecked. During those first few days of his evacuation Bobby thought he must have heard about every cutter, smack, ketch and man-of-war which had had the misfortune of coming up against Devon’s unforgiving coast, and when the Captain wasn’t quizzing him on what sort of shape Marjory Pye was in or what sort of sweets she was eating, the old man seemed to like nothing better than to wriggle right down in his sleeping bag and talk romantically about all the wrecks littering the seabed, fathoms deep.

  Devon seemed to draw them in just like a magnet, cracking them open on Prawle Point or Bolt Head and easing them back beneath the waves. But if they ever ran aground, the Captain said, the locals would race out and help their crew to safety, whatever the weather, before helping themselves to whatever was down below.

  A barge packed with plum saplings was once beached not far from Dartmouth and every last twig was spirited away before the gentlemen of His Majesty’s Customs and Excise had laced their boots. The Captain got to his feet and waddled over to the window. Come spring, he said, all the villages would be awash with their blossom—as if the sea had drummed up a wave of such might that its spume and spray had come crashing all this way inland.

  On the day of Sylvia Crouch’s wedding, he told Bobby, the plum blossom had been so thick on the ground that half the village went out and filled their baskets and the bride and groom stepped out of the church into a blizzard of the stuff.

  “You know how many weddings there were that spring?” said the Captain.

  Bobby shook his head.

  “Five,” said the Captain and raised the fingers of one hand.

  “And you know what newlyweds are like,” he said.

  Bobby wasn’t sure that he did.

  “They have a habit of becoming mothers-to-be,” the Captain said.

  He turned and stared out of the window, and it occurred to Bobby that perhaps the old man never left his cottage and that the rest of the world only existed through the buckle and sway of the glass.

  The autumn after the weddings, the Captain said, the whole village seemed to be pregnant. Nothing but pregnant women bumbling about the place.

  “Such stomachs,” he whispered. “Such lovely, womanly weight.”

  He’d watched them traipse down to the shop and stretch their backs at the war memorial. But one week they all disappeared. The streets were empty—they must have been indoors with their feet up—until the district nurse came cycling down the hill. She went hurrying from one cottage to another. The woman was nothing but a blur of gaberdine. Then the village was quiet again, until the young mothers finally crept out into the sharp light of February with their big black prams to show their boys off. Just five minutes at first, but taking more time as the days grew milder. Then whole hours spent hanging around the war memorial, chatting and generally blocking up the roads.

  “Which is where the Five Boys come from,” said the Captain.

  He turned to Bobby. “Have you come up against them yet?”

  Bobby shook his head.

  The Captain nodded and turned back to the window. “Well, I don’t doubt you will,” he said.

  The faces on the Five Boys chocolate bar wrapper just about managed to encompass a child’s entire emotional range, from the pitiful child at the beginning to his gleeful counterpart at the other end. All one had to do, the wrapper seemed to suggest, in order to bring about such a happy transition was give in to your boy’s demands. But if the villagers first used the phrase because their own five boys were born within weeks of one another and, from the day they first toddled, toddled together (making it nigh on impossible for anyone but their own parents to tell them apart), the name stuck because the Boys never lost their capacity to exhibit almost any emotion at the drop of a hat.

  In time, they began to develop their own characteristics. Aldred and Lewis were never going to be as big or broad as Finn or Hector; Harvey would always walk around in a bit of a dream. But they had their own collective spirit. And while most of the villagers regarded them as a harmless, if occasionally hotheaded, little tribe, others felt sure they detected a certain menace whenever they were in one another’s company.

  Mrs. Heaney once came across them huddled at the roadside. As soon as they saw her they all jumped to their feet.

  “What are you up to, you Boys?” she said.

  But the Boys didn’t answer. They just stood and stared, until she finally left them to it and walked off, wondering what poor creature they were torturing or what sort of black magic they were attempting to conjure up.

  News of the arrival of an evacuee didn’t reach the Five Boys until Friday evening, but first thing Saturday they were all lined up on the bridge just down the road from Miss Minter’s, hoping to catch a glimpse. Finn thought they should just walk up to the old lady’s house, knock on the door and ask to have a look at him; the others wanted to do some sneaking about and the matter was still under discussion when Lewis spotted Miss Minter coming down the lane toward them and they all hid behind a hedge.

  As soon as she’d passed, the Boys raced over to her cottage. They peered in through every window. Either the evacuee had slipped away straight after breakfast or was hiding under a bed upstairs, and he’d left nothing lying about to give the Boy
s any idea what an evacuee might actually look like in the flesh.

  Given their knowledge of the local terrain and the thoroughness with which they covered it the Boys expected to flush him out during those first few days, and would have done so, no doubt, if the Captain hadn’t been telling Bobby to keep his head down whenever they walked by the window, which in the end only made the Boys more determined to make the most of Bobby when they finally got hold of him.

  The education of the local children was as slow and steady as if they were roasting on a spit. On their first day they were installed in the front row, under the very nose of Mrs. Fog and every autumn graduated to the row behind, it being the governors’ one decree that they be exposed to plenty of reading, writing and arithmetic before being flung out into the fields.

  The children grew as they receded. The boys’ voices dropped, the girls’ bosoms swelled. So when they cleaned their slates at the end of the day and held them up for Mrs. Fog’s approval they formed a gently sloping roof, which she was sometimes inclined to see as the shelter their education provided them but, just as often, as an indication of how little knowledge they’d retained.

  As far as the children were concerned, the years between that moment when they first entered the classroom and the moment when they finally lifted the latch on their liberty was too vast a span of time to contemplate. Their only aspirations were for a desk close enough to the stove to stretch their feet out at it or close enough to a window to seek distraction there. To Mrs. Fog, however, their slow retreat was as inexorable as if they moved on driven belts, and as time passed she couldn’t help but feel that the belts were turning faster and that some of the gentler children seemed to be whisked away far too soon, although admittedly one or two others seemed to take forever to reach the door.

  Mrs. Fog stood at the top of the stone steps on Monday morning swinging her brass handbell while the children lined up in the playground below and the terrible clanging of her bell raced down the lanes with as much alarm as a fire engine and any child in its way instinctively broke into a trot.

  Her face was full of folds and creases and framed by a mane of frizzy hair, so that her cold, gray eyes seemed to peer out at the world through something close to fogginess itself. The children took great delight in referring to her privately as “Old Foghorn,” unable to conceive that the nickname might have been in hushed circulation since their own mothers’ and fathers’ infancy anymore than they could imagine Mrs. Fog having a life beyond the school’s four walls. She lived in a different village, so the possibility of there being a Mr. Fog or even Foggy offspring never crossed their minds. She was there to meet them at the top of the steps in the morning and help them on with their coats at the end of the day. After that she probably just turned the lights out and lay down on the bare floorboards until the sun came up.

  For years Mrs. Fog had striven to instill into her children an appreciation of a life governed by Routine. Routine, they were assured, laid down the tracks and handrails which would guide them through their darkest and most difficult days. So, for her to stand at the front of the class this Monday morning with her hand resting most unroutinely on the shoulder of an unfamiliar boy was bound to cause a stir. The boy was certainly new to the school but, as the children could see, was already too grown-up to be seated in the front row, and if his plan was indeed to insinuate his way among them (and he was not simply some specimen Mrs. Fog had brought in to show the class) then that most sacred of all routines was threatened—namely, the interminable withdrawal from Mrs. Fog’s immediate firing line toward the generals dozing at the rear.

  “This boy,” said Mrs. Fog, “has run away from London to get out of the way of Hitler’s bombs.”

  The class looked the boy up and down, but found nothing singed or smoking.

  “His name is Robert,” she said, “and I want you to take good care of him.”

  She turned to Bobby. “Now, Robert,” she said. “I want you to tell the other children exactly where it is you come from.”

  Bobby’s hands, which he had been keeping stiffly by his sides, began to creep into each other’s company and before he uttered a single word his fingers were tangled in a knot.

  “Bethnal Green,” he said. Then, to show that he wasn’t frightened, added, “Just down the road from Cambridge Heath.”

  For a moment the room was silent. The children had never met anyone from farther afield than Buckfastleigh. Bobby stood there and prayed that his ordeal might be over. Then the laughter rose up and washed him away.

  Miss Minter had returned from the post office on Saturday to find a note lying on her doormat which informed her, in perfect copperplate, that the billeting arrangements were taking longer to sort out than anticipated and asking if she might hold onto Bobby for a further week or two. In so doing, the note suggested, she would earn the heartfelt gratitude of several ladies of Mrs. Willcox’s caliber. The note finished by saying that she would receive a form regarding the necessary expenses and that the village school would be expecting Bobby on Monday, first thing.

  Lillian Minter pictured Mrs. Willcox hiding in the bushes, then sneaking up the path as soon as she left the house, and wondered what chance there was of Dexter Fadden or some other overenthusiastic poacher spotting the feather on her hat among the foliage and blasting the woman to kingdom come. But on Monday she’d duly buttoned Bobby into his best clothes, sent him off up the hill, then spent the rest of the day trying to do some housework and remember what time Mrs. Fog shut up shop.

  She finally spotted Bobby at the gate late in the afternoon and opened the front door for him, but he just stood and stared at the ground. After his reception that morning he’d vowed to say as little as possible—a decision he more or less stuck to, except for his interrogation by the Five Boys at lunchtime and its continuation after school. While he made his way back down the hill the Boys had accompanied him and put various proposals to him, in an incomprehensible West Country accent, the main accusation being that he was, in fact, a fifth columnist. By the time they had finished with him Bobby had vowed never to open his mouth again.

  He seemed unsure whether or not to enter the cottage. Miss Minter tried to encourage him in by telling him about the shepherd’s pie and roly-poly pudding she’d made for supper and thought she’d finally managed to lure him in when he suddenly grabbed at the doorjamb, as if struck by a fit of vertigo, dropped to his knees and proceeded to vomit onto the bristles of the welcome mat.

  With four or five pumps Bobby’s stomach was empty. He sat back on his haunches, eyes streaming, trying to catch his breath. A fine dribble of saliva hung between his mouth and the pool of sick, like a guy rope. Miss Minter looked at the vomit and saw something writhing in it. Whatever her weaknesses, squeamishness was not among them. She bent down and picked it up.

  “It’s a worm,” she said.

  Bobby nodded. He knew exactly what it was.

  The Five Boys had followed him down the lane like moths around a lantern. Two were big, two were small and the other was somewhere in between. Bobby knew the two big ones were called Finn and Hector because Mrs. Fog kept telling them off for talking and he sensed, quite rightly, that they were the ones most intent on causing him harm.

  Hector seemed convinced that Bobby was some sort of spy or infomer, going so far as to bark a few German-sounding phrases at him to see if he might slip into his native tongue. But it was Finn who first laid a hand on Bobby, when the village was out of sight. He grabbed hold of his wrist and lifted it up. Bobby’s hand was clenched with terror.

  “Open,” said Finn. “Open up.”

  Bobby did as he was told and the other boys crowded around to have a look. Their disappointment seemed only to fuel the Boys’ conviction that they were dealing with the craftiest sort of spy.

  “Where is it?” said Hector.

  Bobby hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.

  “Where’s the swastika?” said one of the other boys.

  The small
boy with the bulging eyes, said, “We’re not going to hurt you,” but Bobby was not the least bit reassured. And suddenly they were all over him, lifting his shirt and pulling down his trousers and checking every inch of his skin.

  When they’d finished Finn clamped a hand around Bobby’s throat.

  “Open,” he said.

  Finn and Hector put their faces up to Bobby’s and said a great many threatening things. The word “mole” was mentioned several times and one of the boys asked Bobby if he knew what moles had for their tea. Then the worm was dangling before Bobby’s eyes, with a few flecks of earth still clinging to it.

  “Open up,” Hector said.

  The same worm now wriggled and twisted between Miss Minter’s fingers. She was beginning to appreciate how a boy from London might take some time to get used to being out in the country. She looked at the worm, then down at Bobby, still hunched over the doormat, and shook her head most sternly.

  “You mustn’t eat worms,” she said.

  Gas

  BOBBY’S FIRST few days at Miss Minter’s were thoroughly disorientating. The whole place was an absolute puzzle; nothing was where it was supposed to be.

  The house had its own peculiar rules and rituals. Boots had to be removed at the front door and carried to the fireside; any scraps of food were scraped from the plate into a swill bucket under the sink. Treacle toffee only came out in the evenings, to be eaten while listening to the wireless. The milk was delivered every couple of days and kept in the pantry, in a can which clanked as the milk was ladled from it and with a lid so snug that Bobby always worried he was going to unleash the lot.

  But he slowly began to develop some sense of which nooks and crannies he was allowed to poke his nose into and the few which were out of bounds, not least the small door in the flue over the range whose key he once turned to see a heap of soot fall into the pot of carrots below.