Fireweed (2 page)

‘Well, you're a boy, after all, and then, well you see,
I've
run away!'

‘So have I,' I retorted. ‘And if you think it's so easy, I suppose you won't want me to tell you how it's done!'

I thought she would fall off her high-horse at that, and say ‘Please tell me, oh, please', but she said, ‘Anyway it will be easier with two of us.'

‘You've got the hell of a cheek!' I told her.

‘You haven't any money for breakfast,' she said, and that was true, and there we were at the door of Marco's Cosmopolitan Snack-Bar, and the heavy warm smell of frying and coffee was wafting round us.

I glared at her, and she said ‘Pax. What's your name?'

‘Bill,' I said. That isn't my name, but I decided in that split second to lie about it just in case, and then I couldn't bring myself later to admit I'd not trusted her, and tell her my real one. ‘What's yours?'

‘Julie,' she said.

‘Ciao, ciao!' called Marco, as we went in. ‘I was worried about you, amico. Where did you eat yesterday?'

‘Oh, I was the other end of town, Marco. Too far to come,' I said. I didn't like to say I had run out of money.

‘Listen,' said Marco, his accent getting thicker as he spoke with feeling. ‘As long as you know – anything you want, you ask Marco. I get you good food, I ask no questions, I not even
think
questions. So long as you know. I am your friend, Marco, your big friend.'

‘Thanks Marco, I know. Bacon and eggs for two, and a cup of tea …'

‘Coffee for me,' said Julie.

‘Ah!' said Marco. ‘Is good. Is better to have coffee. Black or white, Miss … Miss?'

‘Julie,' she said. ‘White please.'

‘White coffee for Miss Julia,' he said, with a flourish. For a moment I thought she looked a bit startled. As soon as he moved away from the table she said, ‘Is he all right? Is he really your friend?'

‘He's all right. He's not really a friend. But he guessed I was up to something, because I came here so much on my own. He's jolly sore about having been interned as an enemy alien, because he's lived here years and years, and only had another few weeks to go for his naturalization to come through. Or so he says. They let him out again though, so I suppose that's true. But the whole business made him very angry. He says he doesn't like people who push people around, so I reckon he's on our side.'

Marco brought bacon and eggs, and tea for me, and coffee for her. My tea was in the usual thick white cup with brown chips on the rim, but he brought Julie's coffee in a pot, with a jug of hot milk, and a blue cup, unchipped.

‘Thank you,' she said, smiling.

I remember seeing that she was smiling very nicely, and realizing that this was why her cup wasn't a chipped one. I was a bit rueful as I gulped my lukewarm tea, but I tucked into that plate of bacon and eggs gladly enough.

‘It's jolly nice in its way, but it doesn't taste quite the same, somehow,' I said thoughtfully, mopping up yellow egg-yolk with a chunk of bread.

‘He cooks in olive oil,' she said.

‘You are my friends,' said Marco, appearing to pour more coffee into Julie's cup, though she could perfectly well have done that herself as far as I could see. ‘For you, I cook in the olive oil. Only the best for you.'

A few more people were straggling into the place: two air-raid wardens in tin hats, and some workers on their way between shelters and work.

‘You stay here as long as you like,' said Marco. ‘You sit, you drink coffee, no hurry, plenty room.'

‘Tell me about running away,' said Julie, looking at me over the coffee pot.

I told her a bit. I can't really remember how much. After all this time it's no good trying to remember just what I said; when I try to remember I remember very clearly what it was like, what I might have told her; and I remember trying to impress her, thinking that if I made out that I had had a rough time she would see what a brave, tough type I was. And pathetic though it seems to me now, I think I really did think things had been rough.

I hadn't really understood about war. Grown-ups talked about it, and they listened to the news more than they had done before. I liked spotting planes; I learned from the
Boy's Own Paper
what all ours, and all theirs, looked like, fighters and bombers, but it didn't mean anything much to me. I was living with my aunt. She had looked after me and my father since my mother died. I don't think she really wanted to, because she grumbled a lot. My father was still at home the first time they started sending children out of London. Evacuees, they called them. My class at the school went half empty one day; then there was only me and one other boy; then there was no class at all. The school closed down, and the teachers went off to the country to teach the kids there. My aunt wanted to send me too, but my father said ‘The family stays together', and went on saying it steadily until she stopped talking about sending me away. So I stayed put.

It was deadly dull. I did a lot of shopping for her, and I was so bored I was glad to. It used up a lot of time, because there were suddenly queues at a lot of the shops. You had to register with one shop for things that were rationed, and that meant you couldn't go somewhere else if the queue was long.

The funny thing about the war was that nothing at all happened for ages and ages. All those kids had been sent away, and then there were no bombs at all. Now and then I saw a Hurricane, or Spitfire fly over our quiet street, and once I saw a Heinkel, but it was just flying over, not doing anything. Like everyone else in the street we got an Anderson shelter, a great package of bits of corrugated iron. We put it up in the garden, and covered it with earth, Dad and me working together the whole weekend. When it was finished he went round to the pub, and brought back a jug of beer, and we sat in the kitchen, and he poured some out for me. My aunt was furious, and nagged him about giving it to me, because I was too young.

‘He's done a man's work today,' my father said. I didn't like the beer, but just to show her, I drank rather a lot. It made me sick, and while I was hanging over the bathroom basin my aunt appeared from her bedroom, in curlers, and yelled ‘I told you so!' all over the place.

Sometime that summer my Dad's call-up papers came and he went off into the army. My aunt grumbled more than ever. He didn't write; he was never much good at putting words to things.

Then when they started putting up posters again, and making appeals on the wireless to send children out of London, my aunt decided to send me. I was furious; two of my best friends had just come back.

‘You're going off with the rest of them this time,' she said to me. ‘It's too dangerous here.'

I remember her saying that. I was standing with my back to her, looking out of the front room window. The street was sunlit, and the roses were blooming all over the front gardens. A horse stood outside the next door house, between the shafts of the milk cart, peacefully champing in his nosebag. The milkman was out of sight, but I could hear the chink of bottles.

‘Dangerous?' I said. ‘Here?' Suddenly her dry hard voice changed. She sounded wild as she answered,

‘It's too much for me, do you hear?
You
are too much for me! You argue, and cheek me, and won't do what you're told, and eat more than I can buy on your ration book, and I can't keep track of you at all. You go out, and I never know where you are, and
you
don't care at all! What would it be like having you to worry about when the bombing starts? It's little enough you care about it. You just want to have a good time, as if it was nothing to you, as if there wasn't a war on! Well, you can just get out of it, and someone else can worry about you. I might be able to keep out of the line of a bomb, if I've only myself to take care of!' By the time she'd finished all this, she was crying, sniffing into her handkerchief.

I'd never really liked her. Looking back now, I can see that a great growing boy must have been a trial to a spinster with a small house, and not as much money as she had been used to, and getting on now, going grey, getting slower around the house. I didn't think of that then. I turned on her, furious.

‘Before you send me anywhere,' I said, shouted rather, ‘you ought to write to my father, and ask him!'

‘I have written,' she said. ‘I've told him that you've gone. Posted it this morning.'

The ground was slipping from under my feet. ‘You old bitch!' I yelled at her.

‘I was right,' she said. ‘You
are
unmanageable. It's a good thing you're going. For your own sake. And you are not, ever, to talk to me like that again.'

‘If I can't talk to you how I like, I'm not going to talk to you at all!' I said.

‘Please yourself,' she snapped.

So that's how it was. We spent the next two days in utter silence, not saying anything to each other, even at mealtimes. She never read anything, but she could stare at the salt cellar all through a meal, till it nearly gave her a squint. It was a china salt cellar, with a few mauve flowers painted on it, now half rubbed off with age. I read, or pretended to read,
Kidnapped
. But though it was open in front of me, beside my plate, I had a head full of rage and scarcely read a word. John and Peter had only just been allowed to come home from their evacuee billets, and now I was being sent off; I'd have no friends left at all.

I felt angry the whole two days, and it never occurred to me how badly I was hurting myself, quarrelling with her just then. Still, that's how it was, and in the end I left without making it up with her, although she did give me a cold quick peck on the cheek on the platform at Paddington. And of course she was right that the war didn't mean anything to me, that I took no notice of it at all. I left her without even asking for my Dad's address; she didn't know where I was going, of course, and she left me without any money at all, not even a penny for a stamp to write home with.

The whole station was crammed with kids. Some were in proper groups with teachers looking after them, some were odd bods like me. We all had little bags with a change of clothes, and luggage labels pinned on our chests, with name and address written on them in capitals. My spare clothes were in a carrier bag, with ‘Harvey's Drapery' on it. Some of the kids were very little, and a few of them were howling, enough to make an awful noise, though most of them just looked blank, or frightened. There were a lot of bossy grown-ups thrusting around yelling at people, and a few parents, shut away behind the barriers at the end of the platforms, waving, and jumping up and down trying to see.

A train came in, and filled up with kids, and pulled slowly away, filling the station with a thin haze of smoke, and looking like some sort of caterpillar, with waving arms for legs. Then another train came in, and took almost everyone, but not me, or a few others who had been hanging back. Then a whole lot of girls trooped onto the platform, all wearing uniforms, and carrying twice as much as the rest of us. They were even humping hockey sticks. Some of them looked very young too. One small dark-haired girl began to grizzle just in front of me, and a great fat woman dressed all in blue hairy tweed, even to her hat, bore down on her, and slapped her back, and said loudly, ‘Chin up, Harriet, mustn't let the side down!' Just then the porters started calling to us to board the train, and so I finished up in a carriage full of little girls, with this large tweedy woman facing me in the corner, She took off her coat, and put it on the luggage rack, and sat down and glared at me.

‘I don't know what you think
you're
doing here, young man,' she said. She was wearing one of those nasty brooches made out of a bird's foot with the claws still on. ‘I think it's most unsuitable,' she added.

‘Where are we going? Do you know?' I asked her. She looked as if there wasn't anything she didn't know.

‘Don't ask questions!' she snapped. ‘Don't you know there might be a Jerry listening, anywhere?'

‘Well there isn't one here, unless it's you,' I thought, and sat and hated her while the train jerked its way out of the station.

We were in that train the whole day. She never said a kind word to any of her kids, but she certainly knew how to look after them. Her enormous bag had books in it, and spare handkerchiefs, and a bag of barley-sugar, and round about lunchtime she went up the corridor, and came back with piles of cheese sandwiches. When they had all finished eating in front of me, with me looking out of the window swallowing, trying not to look as hungry as I felt, she suddenly said, ‘Have you anything to eat, young man?'

‘No, Ma'am,' I said.

‘Well, as good luck would have it,' she said, ‘I have miscounted, and I find we have more sandwiches than we require. Here they are. You may have them.'

‘Thanks, I mean thank you,' I said. She handed them over, unsmiling.

We passed station after station, but we didn't know where we were going because all the names were blacked out. At last we got somewhere, and people got out, and stood about on the platform. All the uniformed girls and their teachers collected together, and got shepherded out, and then they didn't know what to do with the rest of us. They uncoupled one carriage, and ordered us back onto that, and shunted it off into a siding. We waited half an hour, and then another train came in, with children's staring faces at all the windows, and they put our carriage onto the back of that train, and on we went. By now it was getting dark. It was pitch dark when we finally arrived.

Wartime dark was quite fearful, because of blackout regulations. They would have extinguished moon and stars, and set wardens over them if they could have. All lesser lights were put out. We all scrambled out of the carriages onto a strange platform, without even a torch to go by. I could hear adult voices somewhere up the platform, though I couldn't understand them. We stumbled against one another, groping in the thick night. Then the station master came up with a lantern, heavily hooded, and walked up and down.