Shoes for Anthony (7 page)

‘Covering fire, Private Jenkins!' shouted Captain Pugh. ‘Keep it up!'

‘Look at them, playing soldiers,' said a voice just behind me. I turned round. It was Alf. He stared down at me and gave a small smile. ‘All right, young Anthony? Did you catch it?'

I held my hand out. ‘Got the belt,' I said, showing him the welts. ‘But it wasn't too bad. They're all proper mad with you, mind.'

‘Hmmm,' he said, looking off down the street. ‘I don't mind. It was a lark right and proper. Sometimes it's worth taking the punishment, innit?'

I nodded, but tried to remember my Mam thought he was an idiot.

‘My Mam thinks you're an idiot,' I said, out loud. ‘And Bethan thinks you're irresponsible. They say I shouldn't hang round you.'

Alf gave a wry smile. ‘Irresponsible, is it? Well, well. If I was a betting man, I'd say your sister was starting to go soft on me.'

I blinked. I didn't think that was very likely, but I decided not to tell him that bit.

‘Anyway,' he said, sticking his thumbs into his waistcoat pocket, ‘I'm all right. You're all right. All's well that ends well, innit?'

‘That's a Shakespeare play.'

‘Is it, now? Shakespeare, eh? You're a gentleman and a scholar.'

I looked him up and down. Suit on, white shirt, waistcoat, polished shoes, cap. ‘Why you togged up?' I asked. ‘It ain't Sunday.'

‘Thought I'd pay a visit to your father,' he said, ‘bring him some twist. Make amends, like. See, I'm not all bad.'

‘You don't have to get dressed up to give my father baccy,' I said, frowning.

‘Well …' said Alf, with a small smirk. ‘There might be other people in the house.'

Ahead of us there was a commotion. Raised voices. A sound of tearing. I jumped down from the pavement and stood out in the middle of the street so I could see up through the line of sheets. Ade, Fez and Bozo had leapt out on Emrys and his team. They were all strutting about pretending to be Hitler. Emrys was on the floor, trying to extricate himself from a sheet. Captain Pugh was blowing his whistle.

‘You lot better scarper,' said Alf, adjusting his cap. ‘Before old Pughsy blows a gasket. I'll be off in, then. Ta-ra.'

‘Ta-ra,' I said, watching him walk on to our front door. He stood for a moment, knocked twice on the doorframe, and then disappeared inside.

I looked back up the street towards Ade and the others. They were being chased in circles by Emrys, but the boys were pulling down sheets as they went. It was chaos.

‘Come on, Ant!' yelled Ade, sprinting towards me. ‘They'll have us!'

Fez and Bozo were hard behind him, and then I saw Emrys, emerging from a wave of floating sheets, red-faced and furious. I didn't need asking twice. I turned on my heels and ran.

The den was beneath the Big Stone that faced south over the valley. On a clear day, Fez reckoned you could see all the way to Cardiff, but I wasn't so sure. We'd seen lights from bombing raids, but that was different from actually seeing the city. All the same, it was a grand viewing platform. Behind us towered the peak of our mountain and, beyond that, a mighty panorama of rolling green. The Big Stone was a large, flat-faced boulder, a relic from a long-ago rockfall that had embedded itself in an upright position. Beneath it was a shallow hollow that someone, probably a shepherd, had once built up with smaller stones. It had a weather-beaten wooden roof, but to mend the holes, Ade and I had covered it with planks we'd found by the coal tips. It was our place, now.

Inside, we had two wooden planks resting on three upturned tin buckets we'd nicked from the back of the Men's Club. They all had T.M.C. painted on the side, but nobody had ever asked after them, so we reckoned they'd been chucked out for salvage and forgotten about. We had a few wooden crates, too. One for sticks set aside for whittling, and another for mountain treasure: a sheep's skull, a few jaw bones, a clay pipe we'd dug up by the stream, an old bottle – green with a marble inside the neck – an atlas we'd found, and a lump of fool's gold we used to start fires.

Tucked at the back of the den, we had an old biscuit tin that was used to keep sandwiches in. If we were lucky, Fez might bring up a bag of toffees sent by an aunt who lived somewhere near Reading. She'd married a doctor, right posh, like, and was given to sending unexpected parcels. Fez had seen their house, once. It had a garden front and back and a bath you didn't have to carry. I hardly ever got to have sweets, but if Mam was feeling generous, she'd spoon some sugar into a cone and let me have it. She'd squeeze lemon juice into it, and I'd sit, legs dangling off the Big Stone, licking the sharp sweet sugar off my finger. Sweets were a rarity, these days, what with rationing being so tight.

‘You still got a Hitler moustache, man,' said Fez, pointing towards Ade. ‘If the Mozzies see you, you're done for.'

Ade put a hand to his top lip and rubbed. ‘They can't see it from up b'there, man!' He threw his other arm up towards the clouds.

‘They can,' said Fez, pulling an army knife from his pocket. ‘They've got magnifiers. For when they're doing the bombing runs. Pilot looks down, sees Hitler's moustache. He's not going to take chances.' He reached into the whittling box and took his pick.

Ade checked the back of his hand. A long, black smudge was smeared across it. ‘Has it gone, Ant?' he said, looking towards me.

‘Sort of. It's more Errol Flynn now.'

‘Pilots don't want to kill
him
, though, do they?' said Ade. ‘We got anything in the tin?'

I went to the back of the den and pulled the lid off the old biscuit tin. There was a half-eaten jam sandwich with a few ants on it. I picked it out and flicked the ants off. ‘There you go,' I said, handing it to him.

‘Ta,' he said and bit into it.

‘Here they come!' said Bozo, standing a few feet from the den. He was pointing up into the evening dusk. ‘At least three squadrons.'

Ade and I scrambled outside. The sky was dappled with a deep pink blush. The birds had stopped calling and over the bottomless quiet of our mountain we heard the first rumble of the aircraft. Mosquito bombers, all in formation. Their snub noses sitting squat between shoulder-mounted wings, twin engines humming, bearing the heart-lifting insignia of the RAF.

‘Where to, d'you reckon?' said Bozo, face turned upwards.

‘Germany. Must be,' said Fez, still stripping the bark from his whittling stick. ‘They've been on night raids for ages. Ever since Little Blitz.'

‘Yeah, but where in Germany? Get out the atlas, Ant,' said Bozo, his one good eye locked on the aircraft. ‘Did you know Mozzies are made all from wood. D'you think we could make one? How long do you reckon it would take us to make a plane out of wood?'

Fez looked at his stripped twig. ‘Dunno.'

‘I made a shove ha'penny board once,' said Ade, crouching and poking at an ant nest. ‘That took two weeks.'

Bozo scrunched his face into a ball. ‘Probably take us ages, then. For a plane.'

Everyone nodded.

I'd pulled the atlas out from the crate of mountain treasure. The cover was faded blue, with
Colliers World Atlas and Gazetteer
printed across it in broken gold lettering. Many of the pages were missing, either torn out to start fires or ruined by damp. I flicked through to the European section. We'd taken care not to rip out any page of mainland Europe, so that if there was a place mentioned on the
Pathé News
, we could come up to the den and find it.

‘Germany. There you go.' I placed the atlas down on a patch of moss, and crouched, knees by my ears, to investigate. Bozo sat cross-legged beside me.

‘Flick back to Britain,' he said. ‘Then we can work out the route.'

I turned back a few pages and Bozo, seeing Wales, laid his finger on the planes' starting point. ‘What direction d'you reckon, Fez?' he said, squinting upwards.

‘More that way this time,' said Fez, holding his arm out and pointing left.

Bozo trailed his finger across the page until he reached its edge. I flicked it over for him. ‘Going over the Netherlands, I reckon,' he said. ‘Might be Belgium. Must be doing a drop over the top end. Hamburg? Berlin?'

‘I bet it's Berlin,' said Ade. ‘About time we got 'em back for Cardiff, like.'

‘And London,' I said, hooking my hands over my knees.

‘Yeah, but mostly Cardiff.'

We all stood up and watched in silence as the formation faded into the dusk. Fez, as he always did, saluted them for luck. We followed suit and as the planes disappeared beyond the horizon, the deep quiet of our mountain settled back into itself.

I turned to pick up the atlas and put it back in the treasure box. I felt the wind first, a rush of air through my fringe, and then the noise. I looked up. A Mosquito, no more than fifty feet above our heads, ripped over us with a deafening roar. I clamped my hands to my ears and stared up at the grey underbelly tearing over me. Ade and the others were jumping and cheering. I instinctively flinched as if I would get caught up in the wheels like a mouse picked off by the kite, adrenalin coursing through me, and in a heartbeat, it was gone, flying away over the valley to join the formation and find its prey in other lands: beautiful, graceful, deadly.

‘
Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye!
' sang Bozo, jumping up and down.

‘
Cheerio, here I go on my way!
' we all sang out, exhilarated.

The lone Mosquito cut across the sky, leaving plumes of billowing clouds in its trail. Ripples, murmurs, then gone, swallowed into the black.

‘That,' said Ade, his eyes wide and staring, ‘is the toppest thing that's ever happened in the whole of my life.'

And as we stared after it, the smell of aviation fuel in our nostrils, I knew, more than ever, that I never wanted the war to end.

‘What time do you call this?' said Bopa, as I slumped onto the floor in front of the fire. ‘What did I tell you, Em? Feral.'

‘I heard about you boys mucking up the Home Guard tonight,' said Mam. ‘Emrys is fuming.'

‘Where is he?' I said, half getting up to avoid a clouting.

‘Up the waterworks, on bivouac,' said Alwyn, who was sitting polishing a pair of shoes. ‘If you're lucky, he might have forgotten when he comes back tomorrow. I doubt it, though. Best stick a book down the back of your pants.'

Bethan appeared in the doorway into the kitchen. She was carrying a tray with a teapot and a few mugs. ‘Gonna listen to
Appointment with Fear
, Ant?' she said, placing the tray down. ‘It's starting in a minute.'

‘Oh, I hate that show,' said Bopa, ‘gives me the willies. I don't think it's right or natural to be so obsessed with dark matters. It's positively ghoulish.'

Father, who was sitting in his armchair reading a paper, took out his pocket watch and looked at the time. ‘Turn the wireless on, boy.'

I got up. The wireless was set high on a set of drawers. It was an old one, saved after a clear-out from another neighbour who'd died. Her daughter already had a wireless, so she'd given it to Mam. ‘A Mosquito went right over our heads up by the Big Stone, Father,' I said, switching it on. ‘Not high up. Right low, like. Almost so you could touch it.'

‘Oh,
newl
,' said Alwyn, curling his lip. ‘You're making that up.'

‘Am not. Right over the top of us. Came from nowhere.' I stood, waiting for Father to respond, but he didn't lift his eyes from the paper.

‘Came from nowhere? Like someone else, eh, Bethan?' Bopa shot my sister a knowing look.

‘The front of him,' said Mam, unpicking wool from an old jumper. ‘Coming round here after what he did.'

‘He's got some brass,' said Bopa, folding her arms. ‘I'll give him that. You need to mind yourself, Bethan. You're not stepping out. The wolves will gather until you pick a beau. Mark my words.'

I looked over towards Bethan. Her cheeks were flushing. Behind me, lone bells began to sound. ‘
Appointment with Fear
,' said a low, sonorous voice. ‘
This is your storyteller. The Man in Black. Here again to bring you another … placid evening.
'

‘Ugh,' said Bopa. ‘Let's sit in the back kitchen. I can't bear to listen to it. Gives me chills. I went round to Anne Evans. Found out everything. Come on, we can have another brew.'

Mam stood up and followed her.

‘Turn the lights down, Ant,' said Alwyn. ‘All spooky, like.'

I reached over Mam's chair and turned down the gas lamp that was on the table next to it, so that the only light in the room came from the flickering embers in the hearth.

‘
Loss of memory
,' the voice rang out. ‘
The eerie darkness which closes on the brain is a subject that often amuses me. Tonight, I bring a guest, Mr Gideon Barton, to tell you all about it. He's here with me now, eyeglasses on a black ribbon, his face pinched and drawn, and when he tells you about the horrors that unfold, we shall satisfy our promise to bring you
…'

A sudden, dramatic chord belted out from the wireless.

‘Oh!' cried out Bopa from the kitchen. ‘Makes me jump every time!'

‘
An Appointment with Fear!
'

A surge of dramatic strings punctuated the gloom, followed by a single, tolling bell.

‘
It was a grim business
…'

‘I'll just go sit with Mam,' I mumbled.

Bopa and Mam were sitting on wooden chairs by the back kitchen fire. It wasn't as comfy as the parlour, but was as good a gossiping spot as any. Father would only speak when he had something important to say, but Bopa had an endless capacity for chit-chat, and Mam loved to listen.

‘
Where am I
?' the voice of a young woman, agitated, cried out from the wireless behind me. ‘
My head feels queer and I want to cry
.'