Five Boys (6 page)

Half the posters on the classroom wall warned about germs bringing the nation to its knees. Perhaps they could claim that they really
were
fumigating him. “Germs” and “Germans” were close enough to be almost indistinguishable and if Bobby wasn’t quite German he was about as foreign as they come.

When they’d finished, the Boys pushed back their gas masks and wiped the sweat from their brows. Bobby lay in his hutch, sniveling and sodden. His hair was plastered to his head. The Boys had stopped their spraying but Bobby just kept on crying—kept on chugging like an idling engine—and as they got to their feet and prepared to leave the Boys felt their guilt creep toward irritation, then anger at his refusal to acknowledge that, if they had wanted, they could have done a great deal worse to him.

Hector tapped his boot against the chicken wire. “And don’t you go
telling
,” he said.

His words didn’t seem to make much of an impression. The evacuee just kept crying and shaking until, eventually, the Boys got sick of the sight of him and headed home.

When Aldred returned, five or ten minutes later, Bobby lay perfectly still. His visitor looked in at him, then sat with his back against the chicken wire and started fiddling with his shoelaces.

“It wasn’t poison,” he said over his shoulder. “It was just water from a water tank.”

Without looking Bobby could tell that it was the boy with the freckles and the bulging eyes.

“Where are the others?” he said.

“Having their tea,” said Aldred. “Mine’s not ready.”

Neither boy spoke. Aldred continued fussing with his shoelaces, until Bobby lifted his face from the dirt.

“Are you going to let me out?” he said.

Aldred looked up and down the allotments and shook his head. “Not just yet,” he said.

Aldred turned and directed his enormous eyes at Bobby.

“You come from London, don’t you?” he said.

Until these last few weeks Bobby had never thought of himself as a Londoner, but down here everyone seemed to think he lived right around the corner from Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square.

Bobby nodded and the boy with the freckles and the big eyes nodded back at him.

“So,” he said. “You reckon you can do it?”

Bobby had no idea what he was talking about.

“Do what?” he said.

“London,” said Aldred and opened his eyes even wider.

“Do London in a day.”

• • •

Aldred Crouch’s overactive thyroid was never going to be treated when his father took such pride in never having missed a day’s work through illness and had trouble enough making ends meet without paying doctors’ bills. An old woman once stopped Aldred in Totnes High Street and told him how she used to have a husband whose eyes used to stick out of
his
head and how
he
ended up with a goiter the size of a grapefruit under his chin. Aldred did his best not to dwell on such weird encounters, but the other Boys went out of their way to remind him of his condition at every turn. As far as his father was concerned his son’s eyes just stuck out of his head much the same as his grandad’s. They didn’t seem to cause the boy any discomfort, apart from a bit of aching just before a cold snap, which some of the allotment keepers took as a sign to cover their vegetables.

The first time Bobby laid eyes on Aldred he thought he must have slammed his finger in a door, and had often wondered since what it must be like to be so excruciatingly open-eyed, so wildly awake. But by the time Aldred opened the hutch and Bobby went stumbling down the lane he would have been happy never to see the boy again.

Any qualms he might have had about betraying the Five Boys were effectively put aside, for even if he’d come up with a story to explain his being so late, his sodden clothes and his bleeding fingers, he would not have been able to sustain it.

“Good God,” said Miss Minter as he staggered into the parlor. “Who did that to you?”

“The Five Boys,” Bobby said.

Only Miss Minter could say whether she recalled the worm on her doormat and suddenly came up with a more sinister
way of it getting inside Bobby, but the speed with which she took up the shovel from the coal scuttle certainly had about it the conviction of someone who had discovered a grave injustice and the appropriate measures long overdue. She was out of the door and up the hill before Bobby had uttered another word and he was still peeling the wet clothes off his wretched body when she hammered at the first of the Five Boys’ front doors.

Phyllis Massie opened the door. Lillian Minter could hardly contain herself, but had the sense, at least, to tuck the shovel behind her back when she asked if her son was home. Hector appeared, rather sheepishly. He had a whole set of explanations at the ready, but he wasn’t given the chance to try them out. Miss Minter grabbed him by the neck. His head went down between her slippered feet. Then tremendous events were suddenly taking place around the back—a slamming and clanging which threatened to pump his body full of indigestible pain.

Grim vengeance carried the old lady from one cottage to another, so that even if one of the Boys had wanted to warn the others, he would have had to be mighty quick. Only the clang of a shovel and the occasional howl rising over the roofs might have told the Boys who had yet to have a visit that their excuses were getting them nowhere and that retribution was on its way.

By the time her shadow fell across the Crouches’ doorstep Miss Minter was beginning to tire, but she was determined that Aldred’s beating should be as vigorous as the first. Aldred had long since resigned himself to his punishment and when the old woman grabbed him by the scruff of his neck he wondered only how much it was going to hurt. In fact, it hurt a great deal and in time he
would retire to his bedroom, pull down his pants and find shovel-shaped welts across both cheeks. But he could have taken some comfort from the fact that when the other four Boys were given a good hiding a few minutes earlier their eyes had briefly popped out of their sockets almost as much as his.

T
HERE WAS
just enough room under the stairs back home in Bethnal Green for Bobby’s mum to wheel the Ewbank in and out. Old tins of paint were stacked up beside rolls of linoleum and cardboard boxes and Bobby’s old pram was folded up somewhere at the back. But when he slipped in and pulled the door shut, all the odds and ends ceased to matter and he disappeared into the dark.

The coats on the back of the door embraced him—smelled of his mother’s scent, his father’s hair oil—and Bobby imagined himself stowed away on a ship off the shore of some far-flung country with palm trees waving in the breeze. The meters ticked and turned behind him, the crew could sometimes be heard hurrying up and down the stairs, and with a little effort Bobby would feel the whole ship gently pitching in the swell.

But when the bombers came that tiny room became the family refuge on the nights when it was too cold to contemplate going down the garden to the shelter and Bobby would sometimes wake in his father’s arms as he was carried down the stairs or passed in to his mother, then they would take the coats down from the hooks and put them around their shoulders and huddle together to keep warm.

Bobby’s mother would sometimes get claustrophobic and announce that she’d rather be bombed in her bed than
stuck under the stairs and Bobby’s dad would tell her that things were bad enough without that kind of talk. Then he would start up with “I Have It on Good Authority,” or an old hymn, or “A Bridge in Donegal.” And Bobby and his mum would join in on the chorus and the songs would carry them through the dark.

Then they’d hear the awful drone of Heinkels and their Messerschmitt escorts—would hear the
ack-ack
bringing them in. And that drone would slowly grow—would sweep overhead like a smothering blanket, until no amount of singing could keep it out. And they would all look up, as if they could see the planes hanging high above them and might be able to tell where the bombs would fall.

But when Bobby thought about it down in Devon all he remembered was his father’s voice and the sleepy smell of his mother until he thought that he was going to make himself sick with grief. And when Miss Minter tucked him up on the sofa and turned the light out she might as well have cast him adrift on a raft. The walls of the cottage fell away and the vast black night arrived around him, and if he wasn’t missing his mother and father he was wondering what the Five Boys would have in store for him the following day.

There wasn’t half as much space under the stairs at Miss Minter’s. You couldn’t stand up straight, it was full of old boots and newspapers and rusty buckets and had just a small triangular door to get in and out. But Bobby managed to make himself quite comfortable and sometimes slept for two or three hours at a time and still got back on the settee before Lillian came down.

She might have been none the wiser had she not leaned out of bed one night and knocked over her glass of water as
she fumbled for it in the dark. She wasn’t especially thirsty but the fact that there was now a small pool on the floor was enough to prevent her getting back to sleep. So she swung her feet out of bed and into her slippers and heaved herself up into the night.

She stopped at the top of the stairs. Thought she could hear voices. She must have left the wireless on. She cocked her good ear into the dark and crept down the stairs, until she made out a solitary voice coming up beneath her feet:

She opened the door to find Bobby in a heap of coats, with just his head poking out, like some animal settling itself into hibernation. He stopped singing and stared vacantly back at her.

“Hello there,” she said.

She coaxed him out and the two of them hung all the coats back on the coat stand. Then she took his hand and led him back upstairs, counting each step as they went.

Bobby just knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep next to an old lady, no matter how kind and considerate she might be. The bed seemed to be several yards off the ground and took some effort to get into. Miss Minter tucked him in, went around the bed in her big white nightie and climbed in on the other side. She patted the sheets into place under Bobby’s chin, propped herself up on her pillow and began whispering to him. He looked up at her—at the fine down on her cheeks … at the smooth, shiny skin on her neck.
She stroked his hair and kept on talking in a warm and careful way and Bobby found that in time the Boys and the world’s terrible distances were put to one side and sleep began to find its way through to him.

“You’re a good boy,” she said. “A good boy. And Auntie Lillian is going to keep you safe.”

Listening to the wireless was the first foundation of Lillian and Bobby’s routine. They would finish their supper and wash the dishes in time for Children’s Hour, listen to the News and Announcements and hope that some revue would follow. Only a military band or musical recital could be guaranteed to have Miss Minter reaching for the controls.

She tuned the wireless like a safecracker. Put her ear right up to the speaker and inched the dial between her finger and thumb. Stared straight ahead through all the whoops and whinnies, like a ship’s captain riding out a storm, and her eyebrows would rise and fall, sometimes independently of each other, as the needle slowly scythed through the cities on the glass.

Lillian sometimes knitted and Bobby would keep his newspaper cuttings up-to-date, but as the evening wore on the gentle clatter of knitting needles would gradually slacken and Bobby would look up to see her nodding off with her knitting collapsed in her lap. And as he sat there, with the wireless blaring, Bobby would think about the waves of sound ranging across the countryside—the fields dark and empty, but the air thick with undeciphered sound.

One evening Arthur Askey was singing one of his songs and Miss Minter was still awake and
buzz, buzz, buzzing
along, when there was a knock at the door. Lillian turned
the wireless down and listened until whoever was out there finally knocked again, and as she went down the hall it occurred to her that the last time people came calling in the evening they were handing out evacuees. She opened the door, half expecting to find Mrs. Willcox with another one hidden behind her, but the light from the hall fell instead on the red hair, many freckles and eager eyes of Aldred Crouch.

“Is the London boy in?” he said.

Miss Minter looked him up and down. This was the boy who nearly put her neck out when she gave him a spanking a couple of days before. The longer she stared at him the more his confidence seemed to wane.

“I can’t remember his name,” he said.

“You mean Bobby?” said Miss Minter.

“That’s the one,” said Aldred, his confidence fully restored.

Miss Minter asked if Bobby was expecting him, which seemed to rather take the wind out of his sails.

“I don’t think so,” he said, thinking that it was a rum old business when someone had to be expecting you before you were allowed to call on them.

Miss Minter led him down the hall and into the parlor where Bobby sat on the sofa. Aldred waved and went and sat beside him, apparently oblivious to the fact that Bobby had turned to stone. Arthur Askey had made way for the sort of orchestra which, under normal circumstances, would have been turned off, but Miss Minter felt that perhaps Bobby and Aldred could do with something to paper over the cracks and for a while they sat there with the flutes and oboes picking their way through the opening bars of
Dreyer’s
Salutations
with the prospect of great musical clatterings to come.

Miss Minter couldn’t believe that Aldred had the gall to show his face, but her manners finally got the better of her.

“Would anybody like a glass of milk?” she said.

Aldred’s huge eyes swiveled around onto her. “Thank you, Mrs.,” he said. “I would.”

She turned the wireless down so that it banged and crashed a little less intrusively and, as she passed, whispered to Bobby, “Why don’t you show your guest your cuttings?”