Five Boys Page 5

  Phyllis Massie opened the door. Lillian Minter could hardly contain herself, but had the sense, at least, to tuck the shovel behind her back when she asked if her son was home. Hector appeared, rather sheepishly. He had a whole set of explanations at the ready, but he wasn’t given the chance to try them out. Miss Minter grabbed him by the neck. His head went down between her slippered feet. Then tremendous events were suddenly taking place around the back—a slamming and clanging which threatened to pump his body full of indigestible pain.

  Grim vengeance carried the old lady from one cottage to another, so that even if one of the Boys had wanted to warn the others, he would have had to be mighty quick. Only the clang of a shovel and the occasional howl rising over the roofs might have told the Boys who had yet to have a visit that their excuses were getting them nowhere and that retribution was on its way.

  By the time her shadow fell across the Crouches’ doorstep Miss Minter was beginning to tire, but she was determined that Aldred’s beating should be as vigorous as the first. Aldred had long since resigned himself to his punishment and when the old woman grabbed him by the scruff of his neck he wondered only how much it was going to hurt. In fact, it hurt a great deal and in time he would retire to his bedroom, pull down his pants and find shovel-shaped welts across both cheeks. But he could have taken some comfort from the fact that when the other four Boys were given a good hiding a few minutes earlier their eyes had briefly popped out of their sockets almost as much as his.

  London in a Day

  THERE WAS just enough room under the stairs back home in Bethnal Green for Bobby’s mum to wheel the Ewbank in and out. Old tins of paint were stacked up beside rolls of linoleum and cardboard boxes and Bobby’s old pram was folded up somewhere at the back. But when he slipped in and pulled the door shut, all the odds and ends ceased to matter and he disappeared into the dark.

  The coats on the back of the door embraced him—smelled of his mother’s scent, his father’s hair oil—and Bobby imagined himself stowed away on a ship off the shore of some far-flung country with palm trees waving in the breeze. The meters ticked and turned behind him, the crew could sometimes be heard hurrying up and down the stairs, and with a little effort Bobby would feel the whole ship gently pitching in the swell.

  But when the bombers came that tiny room became the family refuge on the nights when it was too cold to contemplate going down the garden to the shelter and Bobby would sometimes wake in his father’s arms as he was carried down the stairs or passed in to his mother, then they would take the coats down from the hooks and put them around their shoulders and huddle together to keep warm.

  Bobby’s mother would sometimes get claustrophobic and announce that she’d rather be bombed in her bed than stuck under the stairs and Bobby’s dad would tell her that things were bad enough without that kind of talk. Then he would start up with “I Have It on Good Authority,” or an old hymn, or “A Bridge in Donegal.” And Bobby and his mum would join in on the chorus and the songs would carry them through the dark.

  Then they’d hear the awful drone of Heinkels and their Messerschmitt escorts—would hear the ack-ack bringing them in. And that drone would slowly grow—would sweep overhead like a smothering blanket, until no amount of singing could keep it out. And they would all look up, as if they could see the planes hanging high above them and might be able to tell where the bombs would fall.

  But when Bobby thought about it down in Devon all he remembered was his father’s voice and the sleepy smell of his mother until he thought that he was going to make himself sick with grief. And when Miss Minter tucked him up on the sofa and turned the light out she might as well have cast him adrift on a raft. The walls of the cottage fell away and the vast black night arrived around him, and if he wasn’t missing his mother and father he was wondering what the Five Boys would have in store for him the following day.

  There wasn’t half as much space under the stairs at Miss Minter’s. You couldn’t stand up straight, it was full of old boots and newspapers and rusty buckets and had just a small triangular door to get in and out. But Bobby managed to make himself quite comfortable and sometimes slept for two or three hours at a time and still got back on the settee before Lillian came down.

  She might have been none the wiser had she not leaned out of bed one night and knocked over her glass of water as she fumbled for it in the dark. She wasn’t especially thirsty but the fact that there was now a small pool on the floor was enough to prevent her getting back to sleep. So she swung her feet out of bed and into her slippers and heaved herself up into the night.

  She stopped at the top of the stairs. Thought she could hear voices. She must have left the wireless on. She cocked her good ear into the dark and crept down the stairs, until she made out a solitary voice coming up beneath her feet:

  The heavens declare Thy glory

  The firmament Thy power

  Day unto day the story

  Repeats from hour to hour …

  She opened the door to find Bobby in a heap of coats, with just his head poking out, like some animal settling itself into hibernation. He stopped singing and stared vacantly back at her.

  “Hello there,” she said.

  She coaxed him out and the two of them hung all the coats back on the coat stand. Then she took his hand and led him back upstairs, counting each step as they went.

  Bobby just knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep next to an old lady, no matter how kind and considerate she might be. The bed seemed to be several yards off the ground and took some effort to get into. Miss Minter tucked him in, went around the bed in her big white nightie and climbed in on the other side. She patted the sheets into place under Bobby’s chin, propped herself up on her pillow and began whispering to him. He looked up at her—at the fine down on her cheeks … at the smooth, shiny skin on her neck.She stroked his hair and kept on talking in a warm and careful way and Bobby found that in time the Boys and the world’s terrible distances were put to one side and sleep began to find its way through to him.

  “You’re a good boy,” she said. “A good boy. And Auntie Lillian is going to keep you safe.”

  Listening to the wireless was the first foundation of Lillian and Bobby’s routine. They would finish their supper and wash the dishes in time for Children’s Hour, listen to the News and Announcements and hope that some revue would follow. Only a military band or musical recital could be guaranteed to have Miss Minter reaching for the controls.

  She tuned the wireless like a safecracker. Put her ear right up to the speaker and inched the dial between her finger and thumb. Stared straight ahead through all the whoops and whinnies, like a ship’s captain riding out a storm, and her eyebrows would rise and fall, sometimes independently of each other, as the needle slowly scythed through the cities on the glass.

  Lillian sometimes knitted and Bobby would keep his newspaper cuttings up-to-date, but as the evening wore on the gentle clatter of knitting needles would gradually slacken and Bobby would look up to see her nodding off with her knitting collapsed in her lap. And as he sat there, with the wireless blaring, Bobby would think about the waves of sound ranging across the countryside—the fields dark and empty, but the air thick with undeciphered sound.

  One evening Arthur Askey was singing one of his songs and Miss Minter was still awake and buzz, buzz, buzzing along, when there was a knock at the door. Lillian turned the wireless down and listened until whoever was out there finally knocked again, and as she went down the hall it occurred to her that the last time people came calling in the evening they were handing out evacuees. She opened the door, half expecting to find Mrs. Willcox with another one hidden behind her, but the light from the hall fell instead on the red hair, many freckles and eager eyes of Aldred Crouch.

  “Is the London boy in?” he said.

  Miss Minter looked him up and down. This was the boy who nearly put her neck out when she gave him a spanking a couple of days before. The longer she stared at him the more his confid
ence seemed to wane.

  “I can’t remember his name,” he said.

  “You mean Bobby?” said Miss Minter.

  “That’s the one,” said Aldred, his confidence fully restored.

  Miss Minter asked if Bobby was expecting him, which seemed to rather take the wind out of his sails.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, thinking that it was a rum old business when someone had to be expecting you before you were allowed to call on them.

  Miss Minter led him down the hall and into the parlor where Bobby sat on the sofa. Aldred waved and went and sat beside him, apparently oblivious to the fact that Bobby had turned to stone. Arthur Askey had made way for the sort of orchestra which, under normal circumstances, would have been turned off, but Miss Minter felt that perhaps Bobby and Aldred could do with something to paper over the cracks and for a while they sat there with the flutes and oboes picking their way through the opening bars of Dreyer’s Salutations with the prospect of great musical clatterings to come.

  Miss Minter couldn’t believe that Aldred had the gall to show his face, but her manners finally got the better of her.

  “Would anybody like a glass of milk?” she said.

  Aldred’s huge eyes swiveled around onto her. “Thank you, Mrs.,” he said. “I would.”

  She turned the wireless down so that it banged and crashed a little less intrusively and, as she passed, whispered to Bobby, “Why don’t you show your guest your cuttings?”

  Bobby had no intention of showing Aldred his newspaper cuttings. Bobby’s only wish was to make Aldred feel so unwelcome that he would be driven out of the house. But self-consciousness seemed not to come naturally to Aldred and as soon as Miss Minter was rattling around in the pantry Aldred pulled a booklet out of a pocket, waved it in Bobby’s face and dropped it in his lap.

  He shuffled along the settee and before Bobby had even opened it he could feel Aldred’s warm breath on his neck.

  HOW TO DO

  LONDON

  IN A DAY

  was printed on the cover, above an etching of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and beneath it, “A Handy Guide for Quick Sight-Seeing.”

  Bobby opened it up. Each page of text was accompanied by a sketch of a London landmark. But what made the biggest impression on Bobby was the age of the book—not just that it was scuffed and had a crease down its cover, like the creases in the palm of his hand, but that the sights depicted in it bore such little resemblance to any Bobby had visited with his parents or seen through the coach window a few weeks before.

  The Albert Memorial was bathed in sunshine, its concourse deserted, except for a single stationary carriage and a horse which seemed to be sleeping on its feet. The Tower of London sat in its own oasis of tinted trees like a castle in a fairy tale, with all its flags flapping, the Thames blue and tranquil beside it but barely a boat or beefeater in sight.

  The information on the opposite page was the kind of thing Bobby would normally not bother to read but an occasional sentence, such as “The handsome memorial to Queen Victoria, unveiled by the ex-Kaiser, opposite Buckingham Palace,” had been heavily underlined and the margins were covered with illegible scrawl.

  Nelson’s Column had just a handful of figures strolling beneath it, wearing the same tall hats and long, trailing dresses as the guests in a photograph Bobby had once seen of his grandparents’ wedding.

  “Trafalgar Square,” said Aldred and tapped one of the lions at the base of the column. “Designed by Sir Edwin Landseer—1867.”

  Bobby had never heard of any such man, or any such year, and for a while just sat and stared at the book in silence.

  “Have you ever been to London?” he said, after some consideration.

  “I’m not old enough,” said Aldred. “But my dad has.”

  The only time Bobby had been to Trafalgar Square it had been packed with people. He’d bought a tub of bird-seed from a man in a wooden hut and the moment he’d stepped away from it the pigeons had descended on him like a mob.

  Aldred plucked the booklet from Bobby’s hands and flipped through a few pages. When he passed it back it was open at its middle pages where a small street map was printed, covering an area from Tower Bridge to Buckingham Palace. The staples—one just to the east of the Temple and the other by Waterloo—had rusted, and the paper around them looked as if it had been singed by the flare of a match. Only landmarks of the stature of the British Museum or the Houses of Parliament were marked on it. The roads were empty, except for a pencil line, which wiggled along them like a discarded rubber band, and appeared to have wiggled along one or two others then been erased.

  “What’s it for?” said Bobby.

  “It’s my route,” said Aldred.

  “What route?”

  “For doing London in a day.”

  Bobby stared at the map. The penciled line was hooked with arrows, to indicate the journey’s direction. The city’s streets had been filled in like a maze in a puzzle book.

  “Test me,” said Aldred.

  Bobby stared at the map then back at Aldred.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “On London,” Aldred insisted. “On my route.”

  Bobby shrugged his shoulders.

  “Just say the name of a place on the map,” Aldred said.

  So Bobby looked down at the booklet and read out the first words he laid eyes on. “The Bank of England,” he said.

  Aldred nodded, very slowly, and brought a hand up to his temples, like a Memory Man.

  “The Bank of England,” he declared from behind his fingers, “was founded in 1694. It is known affectionately as the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street and comes …” Aldred paused and rubbed his finger across his forehead, “… right after the Monument and just before St. Paul’s.”

  Aldred emerged, triumphant, from his trance. Bobby was still staring down at the map. The pencil line did indeed seem to wind its way between the landmarks in the order that Aldred had listed them.

  “You seem to know your way around,” he told him.

  Aldred beamed. “Better than you, you reckon?” he said.

  Bobby was already regretting his generosity. “It’s hard to say,” he said.

  “Why?” said Aldred.

  Bobby was struggling to think straight.

  “Well, the thing is,” he said, “you’re learning it from a book.”

  Aldred chewed this over for a second, then rejected it. “What difference does that make?”

  “Well, until you actually get there,” Bobby said, “how do you know what it’s going to be like?”

  Aldred pondered this.

  “What I mean,” Bobby continued, “is how are you going to get around it all in one day?”

  “My route,” Aldred said.

  The fact that he had managed to link all the landmarks with his pencil seemed to be proof that he would be able to do the same just as easily on foot, and it dawned on Bobby that perhaps he saw the city as having the same dimensions as his own village, with streets just as empty and no building more than a five-minute walk away.

  For a while the two boys sat in silence, each stumped by the other’s stupidity.

  “Have you ever been up Cleopatra’s Needle?” Aldred said eventually.

  “I don’t think so,” said Bobby.

  Aldred shook his head and a coy smile played upon his lips. Bobby was a stranger in his own city.

  “You should,” he said.

  Miss Minter had poured out the milk but decided to give the boys a couple of minutes on their own before barging back in. So she stood in the hall, like an old maid, with a glass of milk warming in each hand, and listened to Aldred’s incredible confidence being pitted against Bobby’s modesty, as the Devonian told the Londoner all about Cleopatra’s Needle, its incredible vistas and its fateful journey to the Embankment all those years ago.

  Anxious Hands

  BOBBY STOOD in the lane, wondering which drainpipe to tap on. He had a map in his hand that Aldred ha
d drawn for him. The same penciled line that had wiggled around the streets of London wiggled up and down the village’s lanes. It had led Bobby to Aldred’s own terrace of cottages without any trouble, but the note at the bottom, telling him to “tap on pipe,” failed to specify which one. So Bobby stood and puzzled over the choice of drainpipes. Then he stepped up to the nearest one and raised his fist when a window swung open above him and Aldred appeared.

  “Wait there,” he whispered. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  He was about to close the window but stopped and looked back down at Bobby. “You’re not scared of heights, are you?” he said.

  Bobby had been so scared on so many different occasions that it would have taken him hours to sift through them all.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  Aldred nodded. “I knew it,” he said and disappeared.

  When he emerged he had on his head a balaclava which was so old and stretched that it gathered in folds on the collar of his coat. He adjusted it so that he could see where he was going, slipped his arm through Bobby’s and led him off down the lane. He wanted to know if his map had been useful … told Bobby he could keep it … said that sometimes he would just sit and draw maps of made-up places—places that nobody else had heard about. The only time he stopped talking was when he climbed up onto a garden wall and began plucking plums from a tree and stuffing them into his jacket pockets.

  “Ammo,” he whispered, then jumped back down.

  The light was fading and the village was deserted but when they got to the war memorial Aldred suddenly dropped to the ground. He dragged Bobby down next to him, slowly crawled around the memorial’s stone base, checked up and down the lane, then sprinted over to the church gates, bent double, as if some sniper in one of the nearby cottages had him in his sights. When he waved at Bobby to follow he put his head down and sprinted just as Aldred had done a few seconds before. Then they crouched by the gates, Aldred checked the lanes again, pushed the gate open and ushered Bobby in.