Dawn of Fear (2 page)

“Shut up!” Geoffrey aimed a furious punch at his stomach, and Derek groaned, staggered, clutching himself, hopping in circles. Geoffrey looked pleased. Derek burst into laughter.

“Come on then.”

They whirled through Peter's gate, through the front garden, past the hawthorn tree with its dark red blossoms already beginning to break, around to the back door where Mrs. Hutchins was shaking out a rug, raising a cloud of glinting dust in the sunshine. At another house they might have hawked and coughed and howled at the dust, but Mrs. Hutchins was unpredictable. She was small and neat-featured, with her fair hair wisping out in all directions; she had blue eyes as bright as Peter's, but did not laugh as he did. Most of the time she
seemed to Derek to be either neutral, putting up with everything, or complaining.

She said at once to Peter when she saw them, “Have you been in Miss Mac's room again?”

Miss MacDonald was the lodger, an elderly teacher. There were lodgers at Derek's house, too, though they had just gone away for a week's holiday. Most of the houses in the road now had extra people living in them besides the family.

“No, Mum,” Peter said.

“There's a vase broken,” Mrs. Hutchins said, looking at him keenly. Her gaze swept over the others, too, as if she suspected them of having crept in and broken the vase. Derek shuffled uncomfortably. Finally she looked away vaguely and gave her rug a last vigorous shake.

“Can I show them the shelter, Mum?”

“She'll say no,” Derek thought. “She'll say: Certainly not, I don't want you all tramping in dirt when I'm cleaning. She'll say: Our new shelter is private.”

But Mrs. Hutchins smiled faintly, lifted her chin, and tucked a wisp of hair back beside one ear. “The Morrison?” she said. “All right. Wipe your feet, now.”

It looked like a huge box filling the space under the dining-room table. When Derek looked more closely, he saw that it was really a kind of table itself, made of steel, but with the space between its thick steel legs filled in on all four sides by walls of heavy wire mesh. There was an entrance at one end. It was like a small house, or a camp;
it would make a good camp. No one could attack it. You could sit inside and laugh at them.

“It's smashing,” he said enviously.

“I expect we're getting one, too,” Geoffrey said. There was no air-raid shelter at his house; when the warning came, he and his parents went down into the shelter next door.

“Bet you aren't.”

“Bet we are.”

“We take the cat inside, too,” Peter said. “We all go to sleep. It's warm. We were in there last night.”

Derek thought of last night, but could not find it. He felt a vague memory of his father carrying him, half asleep, outside—but when was that, last night or another? There were too many such nights to know.

He looked again at the heavy metal Morrison, into which Peter had now crawled to sit grinning up at them, and decided he preferred their own. At home, the air-raid shelter was in the back garden; a truck had delivered pieces of shining silvery corrugated iron of different shapes, some flat rectangles and some curved, and his father and Uncle Bob, the lodger, had dug a huge hole in the back lawn and built the small house that was the shelter, covering it afterwards with earth and grass so that it looked like a large bump in the lawn. There was a wall of sandbags in front of the doorway, and to get in, you climbed down on one side of them, into a trench. The floor was earth, damp sometimes, covered with sacks;
there were four bunks and a smell of gardens. He slept in a top bunk, which was, yes, far more interesting than the Hutchinses' table-cave.

“Outside, Peter,” Mrs. Hutchins said, appearing at the door. “I want to get tea; your father'll be home soon.” She had a way of addressing all her remarks to her son, over the heads of the others, as if they were not there. Derek's mother had once said Mrs. Hutchins was shy. He did not see how this was possible, which was why he had remembered it.

“I like your shelter, Mrs. Hutchins,” he said, looking at her.

“Yes,” she said. “It's one of the first. Mr. Hutchins got it through his firm.” But she smiled at him, and he thought that she looked pretty when the lines of her face went up instead of down.

They went out into the back garden, and a bird flew away from the birdbath that stood like a concrete mushroom in the middle of the lawn. Derek stared into the docile pool of water; it was dark green, with a broken snail shell at the bottom.

“Let's go and feed the chickens,” said Geoffrey. He fished out the snail shell and threw it at the base of the birdbath; it smashed and scattered, leaving a small wet mark.

“Look here a minute,” Peter said. “In the garage. I got something for the camp. For the Ditch.”

He pushed open the garage door. “See—we can use them to keep up the roof when we've dug the hole. Like in mining. So the earth won't collapse.” He showed them two packing cases made of a thin white wood, and they stared. They had never seen packing cases, only the cardboard boxes that the grocer sometimes relinquished to hold the cans and packages that their mothers brought home. And the cardboard boxes were precious enough; hoarded like treasure, to be used over and over again.

“Where'd you get them?”

Peter grinned. “They're my dad's. But he won't mind.”

“Have you asked him?” Derek said doubtfully.

“He won't mind,” Peter said again, and laughed. He was an unworried boy, more often in trouble than any of them, but always a carefree kind of trouble. Derek liked him better than he did Geoffrey. You could be sure of Pete; he wouldn't ever shove you from behind unexpectedly or say spiteful things; and once when they had all three torn a curtain in Derek's house, Pete had gone straight to Mrs. Brand and taken the blame, with Derek trailing guiltily behind. But Geoff had run home.

“Pet—er!” His mother was calling. “Come in now.”

“I better go to tea, too,” Geoffrey said. “Those boxes are good.”

“We'll start digging tomorrow,” Peter said to Derek. “Come and call for you in the morning, all right?”

“All right.”

Geoffrey ran across the road to his own house, and Derek wandered home, weaving in and out between the puddles, as near as he could get to the middle of the road. No cars were likely to interrupt him; there was little traffic in the small world of Everett Avenue, except bicycles. It was a private road, leading nowhere, and altogether unpaved save for its curbstones and drains; a stony road, a quiet turning off the main highway, ending abruptly in a field. Beyond the field, the Great Western Railway stretched across the horizon, so that life in Everett Avenue was accompanied by the murmur of cars on the highway at one end, and the distant roar of trains at the other.

From the field that lay between the road and the railway came a raucous noise, suddenly: the hollow, off-key tapping of metal on baked clay, a hammer on a pipe. Clear and rhythmic, it went on for perhaps half a minute. Derek stopped beside his gate and stood listening. The tapping meant that he must run indoors; but after all he was nearly there already. It came, he knew, from the antiaircraft post in the field beyond the top of the road; there were guns up there, and soldiers, and sandbags, but all in mysterious isolation, for everything was fenced in with barbed wire, and the boys had never been able to get close. The tapping on the pipe usually foretold an air raid; and a few moments later the warning for everybody else, the long wailing up-and-down siren, would rise into the sky. But as Derek stood there listening now
and found nothing following but silence, he knew that this was one of the other times, when the tapping meant nothing very important at all. It was simply calling the soldiers to come and have their tea.

Tea. He shut the gate and ran indoors. His mother was carrying plates into the front room. “You can take some if you don't drop them,” she said. “One at a time.”

Derek took—one at a time—the knobby white milk jug, the pot of plum jam, the breadboard with its rectangular grayish-faced loaf of bread. He saw his mother take a certain handleless cup from the larder. “Toast?” he said hopefully. “And dripping?”

“I shouldn't be surprised,” said Mrs. Brand, smiling. “I didn't mean to light the fire, with coal so short, but Hugh was cold. Go on back in, now, or he'll be up to mischief.”

Back in the living room, Derek kept his small brother at bay and unhooked the brass toasting fork that hung beside the fireplace; he knew the bread would crumble if he tried to spear it properly, but he could let it hang suspended by its top crust from the prongs—while his mother, using an ordinary short fork, toasted three pieces of bread to his one.

“They've got a new shelter at Peter's house,” he said. “It's under the table; it's funny. Not so nice as ours. Mrs. Hutchins said it was a Mosson.”

“Morrison,” Mrs. Brand said absently. She looked at small Hugh, playing happily with a spoon. “Too late for us to have one, now we've got the Anderson outdoors. It
would have been better for Hughie's cough, though. Getting him up every night to go out there in the cold...” She sighed. “Ah, well.”

She spread Derek's toast with the granular brown dripping from the kitchen cup, and sprinkled it with salt. He munched contentedly, gazing into the fire. Castles in there: battlements and towers golden-red and glowing; suddenly, a leering face; then as suddenly nothing, but only a patch of tar and a tiny spurting yellow flame. He said, “Can I poke the fire?”

“It doesn't need it, darling. You can't make toast with flames.”

“When's Daddy coming home?”

“Soon. After
Children's Hour.
”

“A boy at school said they're bombing the railways out of London every night now,” Derek said.

Mrs. Brand was silent for a moment. Then she said firmly, “You don't want to believe everything you hear from the boys at school.”

“Why is Daddy working on a Saturday?”

“He has to sometimes, you know that, when there's lots of work to do at the office.”

“
Children's Hour,
” said Hugh. He was guessing, but he was right; it was nearly five o'clock. Derek turned on the radio. “These sets take a long time to warm up,” he said, quoting a current catchphrase. “Eeeeee-ow yip-pip-pip- pip-pip...”

The radio set added a squeal of its own, and his mother laughed.

“Hello, children,” said the familiar disembodied voice. “To begin our program today, David is going to read you one of the
Just So Stories
by Rudyard Kipling, the story of ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself.'”

Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild.
And Derek and Hugh attended and listened, eating a rock cake each, while their mother cleared the dirty plates and went into the kitchen to boil water for tea and open a can of baked beans in case the five-twenty train from Paddington might this one evening be on time. Hugh was lost in the story, staring into the fire. Derek was half listening, half brooding on where they should begin building their camp in the Ditch tomorrow. “
Cat, come with me.” “Nenni!” said the Cat. “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me...
”And in their quiet room with the darkening windows, the story drew on and was followed by a play and some gentle music. Then, “Good night, children, everywhere,” said the familiar voice, and they answered it: “Good night.” And after the weather forecast the news began, “And this is Stuart Hibberd reading it,” and in the middle of the talk about troops and airplanes and fronts that Derek could never properly understand, their father came home. Hugh was put to bed while John Brand ate
his baked beans on toast, and shortly afterward Derek followed him, into the room where they all four now slept and where the boys would hear the low murmur of voices and perhaps the radio, comfortingly close, until they fell asleep. It was an ordinary day.

 

B
UT LATE
that night, Derek woke. He woke into a confusion of sound; Hugh was whimpering in his cot across the room, with his mother bent over to comfort him, and thunder was rumbling in the night outside. Or perhaps it was not thunder. He said sleepily, “Are we going down the shelter?”

His father's voice said, “Not yet. Go to sleep,” and he saw that John Brand was standing near the window in the dark, looking out, with the blackout curtain held open, and that the dim light in the room came not from the hall but from the sky outside. He wondered why; and half asleep but puzzled, he sat up in bed. The thunder growled and died. His father looked across at him and said in a strange, tight voice, “You might as well have a look.”

Derek clambered across the foot of his bed toward him. Even without the blackout curtains, it would have been a dark room, for two large wardrobes were set across the French windows as a protection against broken glass. But in the place where his father stood, you could see out of a window, through the apple trees in the garden, and over the fence to the eastern horizon. Lightning was still flickering at one side of the sky, but it was a
small local storm and moving quickly away. Derek felt vaguely that his father had not been looking at the storm. He gazed ahead through the gap in the trees, to where the searchlights were making their usual weaving crisscross pattern in the sky, blind white groping arms sweeping to and fro. And he saw suddenly that below the searchlights the sky above the horizon was red.

There in the east, it glowed with a reddish orange haze he did not remember having seen before, like a strange misplaced sunset, glowing in the night sky. “What's that?” he said.

His mother had quieted Hugh and come up behind them, and when she spoke, there was the same curious, taut note that he had heard in his father's voice.