The Machine Gunners (11 page)

He looked at his father, and saw a weary, helpless middle-aged man. Dad wasn't any kind of God any more. Chas screwed himself up to lie.

And for some reason Dad made it easy; maybe because he was just so tired. He never looked at Chas. He took the big family Bible off the sideboard and made Chas swear on it that he knew nothing about machine guns or Clogger. And Dad didn't even believe in God.

Chas swore with his eyes on the Bible. He could never have done it looking at his dad.

It all worked like a charm. With John's help they dug up the second Anderson shelter—the small one intended for the Nichol family. They made it entirely underground; buried deep, it could only be reached by a tunnel from the big one. They filled it with food and useful things from the bombed house—enamel jugs and bowls and mirrors.

Nothing from the bomb damage was wasted. Another foot of rubble was piled over the Fortress. The gun emplacement was roofed in with old doors and soil. Only the three loopholes for the gun showed from the outside, and that was the way you got in.

They worked on the garden, too, directing the waters of the tiny stream with dams, so that the whole area became an ankle-deep swamp through which no one could pass.

At the other side, they fixed a whole section of fence so it would fall outward when someone pulled a rope from inside the Fortress. That gave what Lieutenant Andrew Morgan had called a good field of fire.

Audrey uprooted plants and privet bushes and planted them on top for camouflage.

All was ready, just in time.

But not all the Fortress's defences were made by hands; some were made with mouths.

It was queer how rumours got around about the Nichol house. It became even more notorious in death than in life. Some people said there was another bomb there, tin-exploded, never found. Others reckoned there were ghosts; ghostly scrawlings of sailor obscenities on walls; laughter in a lighted bedroom which no longer had a floor.

Perhaps it was the fact that it looked so undamaged, though so many had died there. People pointed out its gables above the trees to visiting strangers. But no one went there, except the children.

Frost lay on the branches, and froze Clogger's breath on the eyepiece of the telescope. He wiped it angrily with his glove. But it was impossible to be really unhappy on such an evening. The sky was a dimming blue from horizon to horizon. The January evenings were beginning to draw out. Clogger consulted the gold watch-and-chain that the lookouts always carried in their top pockets. Five o'clock. Fifteen minutes more in the Crow's Nest. He scanned the horizon with the telescope again. He was shivering so much that the horizon jumped around like a kangaroo.

Then he sucked in his breath. There was a dot, low over the waves. He lost it, and couldn't find it again. A stream of frightful Glaswegian words escaped his lips. When he finally spotted it again, it was nearer. He could see it had two engines.

"Captain, sir?" Chas's head emerged from a loophole.

"Plane, sir. Twin-engined, flying low."

"Scarper!" shouted Chas. "Gun out!" They whipped the silver fabric off the gun, and pushed the muzzle past Clogger as he scrambled in.

"Ey, watch it. I don't want a hole where ma dinner is!"

Chas gripped the gun and peered down the gun sight.

"Lower the fence!" Cem undid a knotted rope and the section of fence fell away, revealing the view over the bay. There was nothing in sight.

"Oh,
no! Another
false alarm! Clogger, you been at your uncle's whisky again?"

"There
was
something. Ah tell ye. It's too far off to see wi'out the telescope yet. Wait."

And soon, there it was: a British plane, a Blenheim? Chas's eyes watered with the strain of looking. It was very low for a British plane. But perhaps it was damaged?

No. The propellers had that same queer windmill look. It was gliding in, with its engines shut off. It was black. It was
him.
And, as before, it would pass right overhead.

He lined up the sights on it. It grew bigger and bigger. Wait, wait. Finger on the curving trigger.

"Go
on!"
said Cem, and nudged him.

There was a flash and a roar. Something hit Chas in the chest, much harder than Boddser Brown's fist. He fell over backward, pulling the gun with him. He lay on the ground with the thing still punching away at his chest. Wood splinters and soil rained down. He stared aghast at a gaping hole in the roof; through which he saw the German plane, crosses and all, pass as in a dream. It looked completely unharmed.

The tremendous banging of the gun ceased. Cem stared at the enormous hole in the roof.

"Cor blimey."

The stream of bullets from the machine gun missed the German fighter by miles. But it startled the pilot so much he put the plane into a near-vertical climb, and nearly stalled. While he was battling to regain control, he was spotted by a lone pompom gunner on the Bank Top, who had been seeing to his gun sight. Long lines of red stitching followed the fighter up the sky.

More pompoms opened up. One blew off the fighter's wing-tip and that seemed to drive the pilot mad. Far from trying to escape, he started a personal vendetta against the pompoms. Once he came so low, he curved around the lighthouse on the Bank Top at zero feet, causing a fat woman with a pram to faint at the entrance to Chapel Street.

The end to such mad behavior was inevitable. Three Spitfires from Acklington got between him and the sea. But the pilot seemed beyond caring. He headed straight for the Spitfires, guns blazing. They were still blazing when he blew up over the harbour mouth. You could hear people cheering on both sides of the river.

What with the explosion and the cheering, nobody had noticed a small dark mass that had detached itself from the Messerschmitt at the last possible moment. It fell nearly to the ground before a parachute opened, and it still hit the ground rather hard.

Sergeant Rudi Gerlath, of the victorious Luftwaffe, tried to stand up, but his ankle was agony. So he crawled instead, gathering the telltale folds of parachute as he went, into a clumsy bundle. He was in some sort of garden. Apart from the forest of brussels sprouts around him, the only cover was some little wooden sheds.

He crawled to the first shed, and opened the door, only to be greeted by a frantic clucking and fluttering. Hens! And where there were hens, people came to feed them. No go. He shut the door and crawled on. The next hut contained one big fat rabbit, who regarded Rudi thoughtfully while chewing his way up a long dandelion leaf.

"Rabbit, I envy you," said Rudi. "Rabbits live longer than rear gunners."

The next hut was empty, except for spades and sacks. Rudi climbed in painfully, pulling the muddy parachute after him. He looked at his ankle. It wasn't broken or even bleeding. Just sprained so he couldn't walk.

Might as well surrender, he thought. Might be a hot meal before interrogation. I'd reveal all the secrets of the Third Reich for a glass of schnapps and a lump of sausage.

He opened the hut door and shouted loudly. Nobody came. Eventually he got tired of shouting and fell asleep.

The glare of the exploding plane, right overhead, did queer things to Chas's eyes. Everything he looked at had a glowing blue hole in it, the shape and size of the explosion. He wondered whether he would go permanently blind. It would be a tragic loss to the world. He heard a BBC announcer's voice in his head say,
He could have been the finest brain surgeon England has ever seen. Even blind he is a superb concert pianist... but how sad he should never see the blue sky again... .

He went on walking around in circles and peering at things. The hole in his eyes seemed to be fading. He suddenly felt hungry and wondered what was for tea.

Cem was capering like a dervish on top of the Fortress, pulling up Audrey's camouflage bushes and whirling them around his head.

"We got him, we got him!"

"You and how many Spitfires," said Audrey acidly. "You've certainly blown a fine hole in our roof with that thing."

"Stop squabbling, you two," announced Chas with tears in his eyes. "A brave man has died. He died facing his foes. What more can any man hope for?" He felt all grand and squashy inside, like when they played
Land of Hope and Glory
at school.

But the next second he felt cross because the Messerschmitt had blown up above the waters of the harbour, and there wouldn't be any souvenirs to pick up.

"What about that hole in the roof?" asked Audrey again. "And next time you might kill somebody with that nasty great gun."

"That's what it's for—that's what I was trying to do, so! Anyway, what do stupid girls know about it? Besides he—" he pointed to Cem—"that stupid laughing fool jogged my arm."

"Weren't that," said Cem. "You couldn't hold the gun steady. You're puny, that's your trouble."

"Nobody could have held it," said Chas. "It kicks like a mule. You haven't tried firing it."

"Cem, Errol Flynn did it in that film. He charged the Jerries firing from the hip and won the VC."

"You're wrong. Only British can get the VC," shouted Audrey.

"Girls!" they all shouted together. "What do
girls
know about it?" And then they went back to squabbling.

"You can't believe what's on
films.
Wasn't a real machine gun."

"Was. It was flashing."

"Wasn't."

"Was."

"Wasn't."

"What about that hole in the roof?
And
I'm not going back into the camp to make tea until you put that nasty great thing away."

"Shurrup."

"Och, we'd better do as she says, or we'll no get a cup o' tea. And ye'd better find some way of holding that gun down. It nearly shot ma head off."

"My dad could make a stand to hold it."

"Ah dare say he could. But how ye going to ask him? Ye can hardly say 'Da, make us a stand for me real loaded machine gun.' "

Chas looked thoughtful.

"I can get him to make me one. But I'll have to borrow the telescope for a few days."

"Why not? There's nowt left to watch out for now, any way."

Rudi wakened, stiff and cold. No matter how carefully he arranged them, the sacks fell off him during the night. His ankle was up like a pudding; he wouldn't be able to walk for a week.

He opened the hut door and looked out. The sky was grey. His watch had stopped and there was no way of telling the time. He was terribly hungry. Even the frosted brussels sprouts began to seem appetising. He spent an hour crawling over and gathering some. He had to suck the frost out of them before he could chew them. They were as hard as bullets.

He wished he could surrender. But no one came. He fell asleep.

When he awakened again, the sky was still grey. He was beginning to lose feeling in his legs. When he finally got the circulation back, the pins and needles were awful.

He decided to crawl in and surrender. It seemed a hundred miles to the edge of the allotments. When he got to the fence and looked through a gap, there was only a cinder track, a disused gas lamp and the high brick wall of some factory. It was getting dark and starting to snow, so he had to crawl all the way back. He became so confused he couldn't find his hut at first. He slept again.

It was the rabbits who saved him that week. Most of the huts contained a few. In their hutches he found food; crusts of toast, baked potato peelings, bran mash, drinkable water. In the beginning the beasts bolted when he opened their hutch doors to steal their dinner; bundles of warm, panicky fur hurled themselves from one side to the other, pressing their panting sides into patterns against the hutch wire. He contemplated killing one for the meat, but he wasn't desperate enough yet.

After five days the rabbits got used to him, and eyed him placidly. He spent hours in their company, giving them pet names—Birgit, Franz, Heinz. He talked to them, and they seemed to listen, drooping first one ear and then the other.

When were they fed? Why did he never see the owners? He couldn't tell. He contemplated sleeping with them, waiting to be captured. But he had an aversion to being taken in his sleep. Besides, a distrust of all humans was setting in. Not the fear of a prisoner of war for his enemies, but the distrust of a wild animal, daily growing wilder.

He only saw one other human being in all his time on the allotment—an old man picking brussels sprouts. It took Rudi a long time to pluck up courage to shout and wave. The old man gave one panicky look and ran. Rudi expected him back with soldiers, but he didn't come. Perhaps the old man had been a thief and hadn't realised Rudi was a German.

Chas knew very well how to approach his dad. He carried the telescope home and dumped it in front of him.

"Where'd you get that?"

"Cem Jones wants a swop. It was his grandad's. He wants my train set. Is it worth it?" Mr. McGill reached for the telescope, turning it over in his clever mechanic's hands, feeling the solid craftsmanship.

"Cem Jones is a fool. This is worth a lot more than your train set. Does his dad know he's swapping it?"

"Yeah, he was there. He said this was mucky old rubbish and not worth a good train set. He said
I
was the fool." Mr. McGill bridled. He didn't like Mr. Jones; there was a longstanding row between the families.

"That man knows nowt but tombstones. A bairn could see this is a good piece of stuff." Already he was taking the telescope to pieces. "Needs a bit of seeing to, though. Go and fetch me tools and the Brasso."

It was a peaceful evening, like one before the War. Granda was better, and had gone off to the pub to have a crack with his mates. Nana was skinning a rabbit in the kitchen, her brawny red arms snowed with tufts of fur. Mrs. McGill put some potatoes to bake next the fire, in their jackets. Mr. McGill worked on the telescope, laying out the parts in careful order on a sheet of newspaper. How would he ever get them together again? But he did, gleaming and shining; pointing out things of interest to Chas as he did so.

"Can I swop then?"

"Aye; you're growing up, and a railway's a bairn's thing. Better not show the telescope to Mr. Jones now, though, or he'll change his mind. Old rubbish, indeed. The man's an idiot."