The Machine Gunners (3 page)

"Keep that torch straight. I knew a girl wouldn't be any
good."

"Oh, shut up." But the torch beam straightened and held steady.

"Put that light out!" The yell came from the edge of the Wood. Audrey screamed and dropped the torch. There was the sound of breaking glass and it went out.

"Oh God," said Cem. "That's Fatty Hardy. Shush." But Chas went on sawing like a mad thing. He was nearly through that aluminium strut and he wasn't going to be cheated now.

He felt the strut give, and the gun fell agonisingly on his foot. He grabbed it up, and immediately it shook and leaped in his arms. A golden-red light filled the clearing, and a noise like Guy Fawkes gone mad. He let go of the gun, and the noise stopped. But he could see, where the aircraft tail bulked large against the sky, a great ragged hole had been torn in it.

A police whistle shrilled on the edge of the Wood.

"God, that's done it," said Cem. "Shall we run?"

But Chas sat hunched in a dream of power, remembering the vibration against his foot, the red sparks shooting up and, beyond them, flights of dark bullets winging through the dark enemy sky.

"What we going to do?" whispered Cem frantically.

Abruptly, Chas returned to the present. Even shaking from head to foot, he was still the one who thought up the plan.

"What's your Guy's legs made of?"

"Sticks."

"Get one out."

"Whaffor?"

"We're putting the gun up it."

The gun went, though it split the Guy's trousers.

Chas despaired. And then suddenly the night turned white, black, white, black, white. A great hammer banged on the dark tin tray of the sky, crushing their eardrums again and again. Anti-aircraft guns. Then, in the following silence, came the noise of an aircraft engine.

C
hug-chug-chug-chug.

"One of theirs," whispered Cem. The dog whined and fled. Fatty Hardy shouted, and the whole group of bystanders were streaking away to the nearest shelter. Then that hammer was beating the sky again. Echoes of its blows rippled away, like someone slamming doors further and further off down a corridor.

Chas stared at the sky, trying to guess where the next white flashes would come from. They came in a scattered pattern moving west. Five at a time. That was the guns at the Castle. Then a group of three together. That was the guns at Willington Quay.

"What shall we do?" whispered Audrey.

"Take your bike and get to a shelter. We can manage without you."

"But I shouldn't be out in the open during an air raid."

"You don't think these trees will shelter you from anything?" said Chas brutally. She went, wobbling wildly across the waste ground.

"What about us?" said Cem.

"I'm getting this gun home while the streets are empty. This air raid's the best chance we got."

"The wardens will stop us."

"Not if we go by Bogie Lane." Bogie Lane was a little-used cinder track that led through the allotments to near home. "No one'll think of looking there."

"Right, come on then."

The blackness of night was back. As they dragged and bounced through the dark, the warning note of the air raid siren sounded.

"Dozy sods. Caught asleep as usual," said Cem in disgust.

"It's a sneak raider. They glide in without engines."

"And he's hit something." Cem nodded to the west, where a rapidly growing yellow glare was lighting up the rooftops.

"Or else they got
him.
Must be Howdon way."

"Only the one. All-clear will sound in a minute."

But it didn't. They were halfway up Bogie Lane when they heard the
chug-chug-chug
of enemy engines again.

"More than one."

"Six or seven."

Ahead, the night lit up as if great blue floodlights had been switched on. Blue points of light hung motionless in the sky, brighter than stars.

"They're dropping parachute flares."

The
chug-chug-chug
grew nearer. They felt like two small flies crawling across a white tablecloth. Up there, thought Chas, Nazi bomb-aimers were staring down through black goggles, teeth clenched, hands tight on bomb-release toggles, waiting for the cross hairs of their bombsights to meet on Bogie Lane and the two flies who crawled there.

They dived for cover into a patch of winter broccoli. It smelled safe, because they had some in the vegetable rack at home. Chas envied the broccoli; because whatever happened, it would still be growing here tomorrow in the sane world of daylight, just ordinary. As ordinary as the Fry's Chocolate sign that the allotment owner had used, upside down, to mend a hole in his fence...

Chug-chug-chug.
Overhead now. They were safe, because bombs always dropped in a curve in front of bombers. He had watched them fall in newsreels of the Polish Champaign, out of black Stukas...

Bang, bang, bang.
The hammer was at it again, right overhead. That meant a new danger: falling shell-shrapnel. Chas could hear it, whispering and pattering down like steel rain all around.

"Go on!" screamed Chas. "Get the bastards, kill the bastards!" Then silence, blackness, nothing. The parachute flares had gone out.

"Come on," shouted Chas, dragging Cem to his feet. "They'll be coming back in a minute."

The bogie wheels crunched along the cinders, and they could hear the hard
knock, knock
of the machine gun on the bogie's plank. They got back to the Square before trouble started again. A rough hand grabbed Chas's shoulder.

"Where the hell you been?" It was his father, wearing a tin hat. "Your mother's worried sick."

"She knew I was going down Chirton," squawked Chas.

"Get down the shelter. Who's that with you?"

"Cem."

"Get him down as well. I'll go and tell his mother he's safe."

"What about the Guy?"

Mr. McGill dragged the bogie roughly against the garden hedge. "It'll have to take its chance."

"Eeh, you had me worried sick," said Mrs. McGill,
"and
Mrs. Spalding here, too." Mrs. Spalding nodded and sniffed. Her son Colin, in the bottom bunk, looked self-righteous. "Her Colin never leaves her back garden at nights. He's a good lad.
And
I was cooking fish and chips when the siren went, and I had to turn the gas off and now they're ruined and I don't know what else we're going to have for supper because there's only dry bread in the house,
and
your father's supposed to be on night shift and he can't get to work for the raid so we'll have no money,
and
I wonder that they don't pay him for being a warden, after all he works hard enough at it..."

Chas lay back on his bunk and let her words drift over his head. He was thinking about the machine gun out there in the dark.

"... and leading Cyril off straying with you." Cemetery's real name was Cyril, which was why he preferred being called Cemetery. "I mean, leading Cyril astray like that ... if anything had happened to him I could never have looked Mrs. Jones in the face again."

"Bairns shouldn't be let wander in the dark these days. Real wickedness, I call it," said Mrs. Spalding. Chas shot her a look of hate from the shadow of his bunk. She had fat knees in ginger stockings, which kept straying apart so he could see she was wearing apricot knickers. Her legs were mottled through sitting too close to the fire. His mother's legs, dangling over his head, had pinker stockings, and thank God she always kept her knees together.

They sat round, bleary-eyed in the dawn light. No more windows had been broken in the kitchen. The paraffin heater and the stove were on again.

"I put Cem's bogie in the greenhouse," said Mr. McGill. "By God it's a rare weight. What'd he make his Guy of, drainpipes?"

"Dunno," said Chas, cutting his fried bread into careful cubes. "I'll take it back tonight."

"You can take it back this morning. No school today. The all-clear's still not gone."

"Do you think it's safe?" asked Mrs. McGill. Her husband looked out at the cloudless November sky.

"They'll not come again. Or the RAF lads at Acklington'll have something to say about it."

"Is there much damage in the town?"

"Nothing. It was Howdon that copped it. They hit a gas main and it's still burning."

After breakfast, Chas crept down to the greenhouse with his father's wrench. The greenhouse had had a boiler and hot-water pipes for heating before the War, when coke was off the ration. Now it was drained dry, and Chas had found he could take the ends off the big fat hot-water pipes. The machine gun could be slid down inside, if he could get those sticking-out drums off it. He fiddled with them carefully. He didn't want to blow the end out of his father's greenhouse.

He got them off in the end. One was full of live bullets and the other full of spent cartridge cases. Chas hesitated. He'd have liked to have taken one or two bullets to school to show around. But... once Fatty Hardy found that bomber's tail, he'd be round all the schools making inquiries, and there was always some kid who blabbed... Better safe than sorry.

He wrapped the gun in cloth and slid it into the water pipe without looking at it further. He screwed the end of the water pipe back on. He hid the drums of bullets in the thick straw of Chinny's hutch.

He'd just finished when his father came down. "You pulling Cem's Guy to bits?"

Chas controlled a guilty start, and said casually, "Just mending the leg."

"You leave that to Cem. It's his Guy. I sometimes think you're a bit too free with other people's property. Got no sense of mine and thine, that's your trouble."

Chas said humbly, "Yes Dad." Mr. McGill cocked an eyebrow at such humble obedience, but he soon wandered off to poke at his chrysanthemums.

For some reason, Fatty Hardy did not go back and find the bomber. Others did.

Two days later, Cem whispered to Chas in school assembly, "Y'know those round things full of bullets? Got four more. They were clipped to the fuselage round the gunner's feet."

"Where you got them?"

"Under some plant pots in the shed. It's all right. Dad never goes there since the War—they're all cobwebs and chrysalises. Look at this one, it's live."

Chas jumped an inch in the air. But it wasn't a brass bullet Cem held out inside his hymn book. Only a black and yellow chrysalis. "You can hear it tapping to get out."

"Is the gunner still there?"

"Yeah. Phew, he don't half niff."

"I don't know how you can stand it," said Chas savagely. "Ain't you got
no
feelings?"

"You get used to it. It's in the family. When my father went on an embalming course he saw one fellah eating his sandwiches, reading a book propped against a body."

"Eeurk," said Chas loudly.

"If you insist on talking in assembly, boy," boomed the Head, "you can have a little talk with my cane afterwards. Yes, you with the freckles in 3A. Yes, you, the one who's turning round to look behind him so innocently. Three of the best for you. Now, school, Hymn 235:
New every morning is the Love."

But getting the cane was not the worst. Two days later, Chas saw a crowd standing round Boddser Brown in the playground. They were all looking at something and laughing.

Chas hated Boddser; he had round spectacles and cropped hair like a German, and a great gangling grownup body. He was stupid and a bully; an arm-twister who made his pleasure last a long time. One day last term he and his gang had held a kid's head down the toilet and flushed it three times. The kid nearly drowned and was off school for a week. Boddser got caned, but you might as well cane a rhinoceros. Chas sometimes dreamed of beating in his skull with an iron bar.

But he could never leave Boddser alone; he was so easy to take the mickey out of. And when he started to get rough you could always shout, "Quick fists, slow wits," or, "Don't get worked up, you'll give yourself a heart attack." Then everyone would laugh, because no one liked Boddser really. And Boddser was nearly as afraid of laughter as Chas was of Boddser's fists. Taking the mickey out of Boddser was like bullfighting; deadly but fun.

Chas walked across to the laughing group.

"Hey, what's up?"

"Hah, McGill," said Boddser, "King of the Incendiary Bombs."

"Why don't you wear your nose cone permanently—it would go with your spectacles." There was a titter. Boddser flushed.

"Got something better than a nose cone to wear. Look!"

He dangled a black leather flying helmet under Chas's nose.

Chas didn't have to guess it belonged to the German gunner. His nose told him. But he said calmly, "Where'd you get that? Woolworth's?"

"Never you mind. That's genuine Nazi. And so's this money." He showed a fistful of notes marked with Hitler's face and swastikas. "And what about this? Mein Liebling, she's called." He thrust out a photo of a blonde girl with pigtails. "She won't be getting any more you-know-what for a bit." There was a brown trickle down one corner of the photograph. Chas broke out in a sweat and felt sick. Boddser had been through the dead man's pockets. Chas turned away abruptly and walked toward the cloakrooms.

"That's better than your rotten shrapnel!" shouted Boddser in triumph after him.

"Mr. Lidded!"

Stan Liddell turned back toward the Headmaster's door, wondering what he had done to bring
that
waspish tone into the Head's voice.

"Mr. Liddell!" Henry Montgomery turned up his nose distastefully. "We have a
policeman
in school, apparently wanting to see you. He hasn't seen fit to tell me his business. Top secret, apparently. Anyway, he has asked permission to use my study to interview you. Please see it's empty by the time I get back from break. I have parents coming." He stalked away, black gown quivering with indignation.

Stan went in. There was a police sergeant standing by the fireplace, staring at Henry Montgomery's imitation-marble bust of Shakespeare. As he turned, Stan saw he had a bad limp.

"Hello, sir!" It wasn't the way policemen say "sir," it was the way a schoolboy says "sir." Familiar eyes stared out at Stan from an unfamiliar face: a face twisted by a scar that ran from chin to hairline, and tight lines of pain round eyes and mouth.