All Fall Down

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Contents

Jenny Oldfield

Dedication

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Two

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Part Three

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Copyright

 

 

Jenny Oldfield

ALL FALL DOWN

Jenny Oldfield

Jenny Oldfield is one of the most successful writers of popular fiction series for children. Trademarks of her work are compelling plotting and a sense of adventure and fun. Her latest series is Muddy Paws (Hodder). Ten-year-old cousins and best friends Lexi and Lily are poles apart when it comes to personality. They don't always see eye to eye . . . but they are united by their love for all animals and the summer holidays sees them conjure up animal mayhem . . .

Jenny also writes fiction under several pseudonyms including the Dark Angel and Beautiful Dead trilogies as Eden Maguire. Young, Gifted and Dead and Killing You Softly appear under the name Lucy Carver, while in the Stardust Stables series Jenny writes as Sable Hamilton.

Jenny was born and brought up in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Even as a child she wrote stories and made tiny books complete with illustrations. She still lives in Yorkshire and enjoys walking, playing tennis, riding and travelling.

Dedication

For my sister, Christine

Part One

Dark Days

September 1939

Chapter One

The wireless kept up its steady hum in the corner of the living room as Sadie sat in a shaft of sunlight on a perfect September morning. In her mind's eye she could see the slick crooner huddled over the microphone, oozing syrupy words to his lady love.

Sadie sighed and looked up from her mending. ‘Bertie, turn that down, will you?'

‘Ma!'

‘Turn it down. I can't hear myself think.' She only had the wireless turned on for the Home Service News, not for the Cream in My Coffee, nor Tiptoeing Through the Tulips. She snipped her thread and examined the darned heel.

‘You can't hear yourself think in any case,' came Bertie's smart reply.

‘No, but you'll hear me box your ears soon enough.' She rolled the pair of grey woollen socks together and turned back one ribbed end to make a neat parcel, then she tossed it to Bertie to catch. ‘Butterfingers.'

Geoff lunged across the table and grabbed the socks before his brother could. Bertie leapt to his feet. ‘Gave me them here.'

‘Or else what?'

‘Or else.'

Homework books scattered as the boys wrestled. At the opposite end of the table Meggie mustered all the dignity of her sixteen years. She wore her dark hair swept back from her forehead and hanging in a glossy roll to chin length. Her frock, printed with blue forget-me-nots and yellow daisies, with a neat white collar,
was one of Sadie's more ambitious sewing efforts on a machine handed down by her sister, Hettie.

‘How can I get any work done in this monkey house?'

Meggie was studying to be a telephone operator. With her nice voice and quick brain, the Post Office had taken her straight from school. Sadie had high hopes that she would one day make something of herself.

‘You would if you went to your room.' Sadie held her temper.

‘I don't see why I should. You could make them two shut up just as easy.'

Geoff and Bertie, faces red and shiny from their tussle, skidded the hearthrug against the polished fender.

‘Here.' Walter stuck out a leg to stop them cannoning into his fireside chair. ‘Good job there ain't no fire lit.' He went back to his paper, and the
Express
's ‘No War This Year Or Next' column.

Meggie closed her books and gave in with bad grace. ‘You're no better than a pair of monkeys, you two.'

The boys hooted and cat-called after her. ‘Miss High and Blooming Mighty, who's she think she is?'

‘Vivien Leigh.'

‘Deanna Durbin.'

‘Dorothy Lamour.' Geoff shimmied across the room after her. Bertie pouted and made wet kissing sounds.

‘Don't try coming into the kitchen, I'm going to wash my hair.' She slammed the door in their faces.

‘Oo-er.'

‘Friday Night is Amami Night!'

‘That'll do, you two,' Sadie warned.

‘Yes, let's have some hush.' Walter stood up to give the wireless a thump. The humming stopped, the valves crackled as he twiddled the tuning knob. In the short hush they realized the music had stopped, interrupted by the sonorous tones of the BBC announcer. It was just gone eleven o'clock on an unusually quiet Sunday down Paradise Court.

‘What's he say?' Sadie left off darning a fresh pair of socks and let them drop in her lap. She could hope right until the last second
that it wasn't what they feared, that the broadcast by the Prime Minister would bring relief from the worry about the shenanigans in Europe. She glanced at Walter for reassurance.

‘Pipe down,' was all he said. He put his ear to the loudspeaker and went on twiddling the knob. ‘It's Mr Chamberlain.'

Geoff and Bertie stopped fighting. The wireless whined and whistled. A thin voice came wavering over the airwaves, deadly serious. Germany had considered the British request to withdraw from Poland, but the Prime Minister confirmed the worst. ‘I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.'

Amy Parsons sat in her kitchen, mouth open. ‘Rob, did you hear?'

‘I heard.' He pulled a hand down his face, dragging the tense skin.

‘It's war after all.'

‘I heard.'

‘What about Bobby?'

‘What about him?'

‘Where is he?'

‘Gone swimming with his mates.' The kids didn't stay huddled round the wireless, crisis or no crisis.

Amy started up. At just turned forty-three, she was bottle-blonde, solid and vigorous. No movement was tentative, no comment half-hearted when she was galvanized into action.

‘Where you off to now?'

‘To fetch him home. He never took his gas mask.' There it was hanging from its string in its cardboard box from the door hook. She flung her coat over her apron and took down the mask.

Rob flicked the butt of his cigarette into the grate. He stood up and stuck his head out of the window, checking the street below. Opposite, on the corner of the Court, stood the Duke of Wellington, doors firmly closed. No one hung about on the pavement outside Henshaws, or by the Co-op further down Duke Street. It seemed that the whole of Southwark was glued to the wireless set. In the distance he saw four or five kids come running.

‘Keep your hair on, here he is now.' Rob eased back from the window ledge, satisfied that the sturdy figure to the fore was Bobby heading home hell for leather. It hadn't taken long for the news to get round. He saw with a shock which he only just managed to conceal that a barrage of air balloons was already rising silently into the clear blue sky like giant, ghostly whales.

‘Oh, Rob!' Amy clutched the neck of her blouse and came to the window to watch. ‘Bobby, you come up here.' Her voice broke the silence. ‘Quick as you can, you hear. It's started. There's a war on. Come quick.'

Annie Parsons sat quietly with Ernie and Hettie, her grown-up stepchildren and George Mann, Hettie's husband, in an upstairs room at the Duke. She was old – 76 this year – but not daft; had been expecting this for months. None of this ‘Peace in Our Time' malarky. If he'd still been alive, Duke would have agreed and said that Hitler was twisting them round his little finger. The Prime Minister with his rolled-up brolly, stepping off this aeroplane and that, never stood a chance. He sounded brokenhearted, poor man.

Now it was the turn of the King, broadcasting from Buckingham Palace, telling them what they already knew; that for the second time in the lives of most of them, Britain was at war, fighting for justice and liberty. ‘For the sake of all that we ourselves hold dear and of the world's order and peace . . . high purpose . . . I ask them to stand calm, firm and united in this time of trial. The task will be hard. There may be dark days ahead . . .'

‘Ain't it horrible?' Hettie breathed.

‘Well, we're ready for them.' George hid his own apprehension. The jackboot would never march across British soil as it had over half of Europe. He and Walter Davidson had already trained as air raid wardens, and though they were too old to be conscripted they were still strong and willing. The blackouts were in place, the air raid shelters built.

‘Ready for what?' Hettie's eyes were wide with horror. She and George had no children to worry about, but she shook at the idea of bombs dropping on innocent heads, of all the young lives that
would have to be sacrificed. Hettie was deeply religious; a sensitive, fine-looking woman of fifty, successful in her half of the dress-shop business she'd set up with her sister, Jess, always ready to count her blessings, not the least of which was steady, kind, unflappable George.

‘For whatever they fling at us.' He put an arm around her shoulder.

‘You watch, they'll close us down,' Annie warned. She'd read it in the newspaper; a proposed emergency measure to shut the pubs up and down the country.

‘And if they do, they'll have a riot,' George predicted. ‘We'll be open again within the week.' He turned off the wireless with an abrupt twist of the wrist.

‘Who'd have thought it?' Hettie felt marooned by the tide of events.

‘Anyone with a grain of common sense,' Annie put in. Her pointed, lined face looked grim. ‘They said the last one would end it all, but it's not in human nature.'