The Kingdom by the Sea (8 page)

Later in the evening, he would drink from black bottles, and put his arm around you, and tell you the story of his life, or philosophise.

“Everything’s good for something, Harry, everything’s good for something. A dead fish has no use for its body, but the seagull that finds it has. A wrecked ship’s no good to a sailor, but it’s good for firewood. This war’s bad for sailors,
but it’s good for me. I find dead ‘uns, you know. Drag ‘em above high water, and go for the coastguard. They pay me a pound for every dead ‘un. An’ when I die, I hope I go on the beach. Good for the fish, good for the gulls. I don’t want to lie in no dark hole when I’m dead.

When he started to talk about being dead, it was time to retire to the shed for the night. Lie cuddled up with Don, and listen to Joseph shouting at himself, and at his dead mother, and at God.

And then it was morning again.

You never asked what you were eating with Joseph cooking. But the funny thing was, it always tasted good. And you never got ill. And you learnt so much; it was like being back at school again.

Until the day the bombers came. The British bombers.

They hadn’t been on the beach more than two hours, when the first bomber came. Hard up the coast, at zero height, skirting Beacon Point and the Scars: a mutter, a roar, a scream of engines. Tiny bombs dropping from its yellow belly, at the yellow markers floating so peacefully in Druridge Bay. It was a strange bomber to Harry; not one out of the war magazines or aircraft-recognition booklets his dad had had. It had a little solid pointed nose, and two pointed engines, and an oval tailfin. Must be a new sort.

The tiny bombs exploded, sending up plumes of white
foam, and banging Harry’s ears painfully But Joseph was dancing again, waving wildly as the second bomber started its run.

“Tide’s coming in. Fresh fish for tea tonight. Run and get boxes, lad. All the boxes you can find.”

Harry fetched all the boxes they had. Joseph had obviously given up beachcombing for the day; he just stood and watched and waved as ten bombers came, one after the other.

Then the bay was quiet again. Where were all these marvellous fish?

And then suddenly a wave broke on the shore that was silver. A solid wave of fish, tiny and large and enormous. And all dead. Fish to pick up in handfuls. Fish to fill boxes till they could hold no more. And still the fish came. And still Joseph capered, drunk with joy.

When the fish stopped coming, he put on his suit, and went to Amble to telephone, leaving Harry on guard.

Soon after he returned, a green van came, with three men to load the fish. They stared curiously at Harry, before they paid Joseph, and drove away.

Joseph turned to Harry and said, “Those men asked your name. I think they’ve gone for the poliss. They don’t like you being with me. They think I’m potty.” He tapped his head. “They think I’ll do bad things to you, because I’m
potty.” He tapped his head again. “Better go now, Harry. Go and find your own beach. I taught you all I know. The sea will be your mother and father now. Goodbye.”

Then he turned and walked away, not up to the shed, but towards his bike and Amble. As he mounted, he shouted, “I didn’t see which way you went.”

And then he was gone.

And Harry was on the run again.

Harry only went about two miles up the beach, and then found a cranny in the crumbling cliffs. He wasn’t sure if a policeman would come, or if it was just Joseph’s way of finally getting rid of him. But best not to take chances. A policeman was much too big a thing to take risks about. Policemen were final; you couldn’t fight policemen.

But he reckoned the police were much too busy to come searching the cliffs. Or plod along the beach without their bikes. They would watch the roads; ask people at their cottage doors whether they’d seen a boy and a dog go by. The best thing was to lie low, till everyone had forgotten about him.

He lay low on a ragged patch of cliff top where the fields
didn’t quite come to the cliff edge. He didn’t want any bother with farmers either. There was a slightly worn path along the edge of the cliff; but he hid himself from the path in a patch of gorse. Don seemed quite content to lie with him. The sun shone in fits and starts, but it would have been very dull, if it hadn’t been for the beach and the sea. Tide was going out, leaving strands of sparkling black sea-coal, and half a ship’s lifebelt, and a couple of empty bottles. Higher up, above the high-tide mark, there was plenty of dry seaweed that would make a soft bed for the night, if you shook the sandfleas out of it… he would never be bored beside a beach again, thanks to Joseph.

He let dusk descend before he went on along the cliff path. He didn’t wait till total dark, because, although these cliffs weren’t very high, he didn’t want to fall down them. He was hungry, but he was used to being hungry by this time. He could wait till morning, if he had to.

It was not quite dark when he saw the cottage, right on the edge of the cliff. There was no smoke coming out of the single chimney. And it was a funny place for a cottage to be, somehow. The land seemed to be crumbling under its edge, and it was tilting ever so slightly seawards, as if it might fall down the cliff at any moment. But it wasn’t falling apart; it was tilting all together, like a tin toy cottage. It had no garden, and no sign of life.

He crept closer. The windows looked funny, not right somehow. There were slates off the roof, and dusk showed through the rafters. Not much shelter from the rain there. But worth a look. He tiptoed up to it, silently as he could.

He touched the wall. It wasn’t brick, he realised with a shock. It was concrete, with bricks just crudely painted on it, and the paint was flaking off, like the old stage scenery at school. The walls were cold smooth concrete, and very thick. And the windows were just painted on as well, and the little blue curtains. In the middle of each painted window was a machine-gun slit.

It was a pillbox, just got up to look like a cottage. Even the pointed roof was a flimsy fake; with a flat concrete roof underneath. That was why it was starting to slide down to the sea all in one piece, without falling apart. A pillbox from 1940, a pillbox for the Home Guard.

The steel door was half-open, and part-buried and jammed in the sand, so it wouldn’t close. It had door-panels painted on it, and a number thirteen - somebody’s old joke.

He sniffed inside. Just the smell of the sea, covering a faint, dirty dried-out smell, which he knew very well. Somebody, a long time ago, had used the pillbox as a lavatory. That meant that nobody official ever came here any more. This was 1942, and the Home Guard was a joke, because everybody knew that Hitler wasn’t coming now.

He went inside, and lit one of the stumps of candle he’d nicked off Joseph. (Well, he was owed something, for loading all that fish.) The floor was thick with sand - two or three inches, blown in by the wind. And there were things left lying, besides the mummified brown curls that were making the faint dirty smell. There was a browned
Daily Mirror
from two months ago - that would come in useful for the loo. And there were bottles, beer bottles, that could be used to store water. And a box that could be broken up for firewood.

But there were other things that baffled him. A pair of sandy snake-like objects, that turned out to be a pair of woman’s stockings. And a little gold thing that glinted fat yellow in the candlelight - a cheap earring. What the hell were dressed-up women doing, in a dump like this?

But the great thing he found was a real fireplace, with real ashes in it. Pillboxes weren’t supposed to have fireplaces… but he supposed since the fake cottage had to have a chimney, the Home Guard had made the most of it.

It occurred to him that he could make this place very snug. Somebody had already blocked up the machine-gun slits with a mixture of sacking and half-bricks, for some reason…

He suddenly missed the dog. He went to the cliff edge and saw it moving, a dim shape, down on the beach,
running between the bands of seaweed, nosing here and there. Don was looking for his supper. Lucky Don.

He didn’t do much that night. Just picked up the mummified filth from the sandy floor with paper, and threw it over the cliff. Then he spread his blankets, and lay down listening to the sound of the sea.

Don soon came back, carrying something slimy in his mouth that smelt strongly of fish. To the sound of Don gnawing with gusto, he fell asleep.

The next day was the most exasperating so far. It started all right. He was wakened in the dawn, by the sound of the tide turning; he had all Joseph’s habits by this time. He was on the beach straightaway, looking for what the tide had left.

There was plenty of good big sea-coal; but he had no straw baskets to carry it in. He had to leave it in a row of little heaps, till he found a fish box. The fish box was big, and he filled it too full of coal, and it was heavy to carry. By the time he’d carried three boxfuls up the cliff, he was weak and weary.

He tried to dig free the iron door from the sand, so he could close it and keep his things safe. But when he had dug enough sand away, he found the hinges were rusted solid and wouldn’t budge. So, by the time the sun was well
up, and people might come, he had to bundle up his things and find a hiding place for them in the false roof over the pillbox. Slates kept falling off, revealing his hiding places.

The real trouble was, he didn’t know if this was a safe place or not. He didn’t know if people still walked here, along the cliff path. Couples with dogs; nosy kids, because it was Saturday morning again.

And even worse, he had nothing to eat. He’d found two dead fish, that smelt all right. He’d topped and tailed and gutted them, as Joseph had taught him. But he didn’t dare light a fire to try to cook them until nightfall. Smoke from the chimney in broad daylight would be a dead giveaway. He tried to eat the fish raw, but the feel of it in his mouth made him throw up, bitter strings of gall falling from his mouth on to the sand. He chewed a bit of his pocketful of slank, but it felt like chewing string.

He would have to walk to Amble, and try to get something at a fish and chip shop, before he died of hunger. And he might meet Joseph in Amble, and then there’d be a right row.

He walked along the cliff path, miserable as sin. Don ran before him, obviously well-fed, plume of tail waving, full of the joys of spring. He wished bitterly that he was a dog as well.

It was a mile on that he saw the Bofors anti-aircraft guns,
sticking their long thin muzzles into the sky, out of their circular walls of sandbags. Motionless. All except one, that was going round and round in the most peculiar way A bit further on, there was a low brick building with sandbags piled up in front of the windows, and a green army truck. But there was no sign of life, except that the one gun kept going round and round. It was too intriguing; he couldn’t resist it. He walked up to it, stepping over a very discouraged barbed-wire fence.

The gun stopped circling one way, and began going round the other. In his hungry state, it made him feel quite dizzy.

There was a single soldier, sitting on the seat attached to the gun, whirling his arms so fast on some handle sticking out of the gun that his arms were a blur. He wasn’t a very smart-looking soldier; he had his forage-cap shoved under the epaulette on his shoulder, and his overalls were filthy with grease.

As he circled past, he saw Harry standing there, and stopped.

“Hi, son!” He had a friendly lopsided grin, because he had a fag-end, unlit, stuck in one corner of his mouth. “You look like you’ve lost a shilling and found sixpence. All the cares of the world on your shoulders, on a lovely morning like this?”

“I’m starving,” said Harry. What had he got to lose? And the man did have a very friendly grin.

“Doesn’t your mam feed you?”

“Bread an’ scrape this morning. She’s gone to Amble for the week’s rations.” Even Harry marvelled at what a liar he had become.

“Hard for growing boys,” said the man, lighting his fag. “Try our dustbins.” He nodded towards the brick building. “Go on, don’t look at me like that. It’s wicked what they throw away, after a quiet night. When you get a Jerry raid coming over, they get as hungry as hunters, and scoff the lot. But on a quiet night, they sleep right through, and it’s all wasted.”

“Won’t they stop me, over there?”

“All gone down to the airfield for a shower. That’s a soldier’s dream, that is - a shave, a shower and a shit.” He went back to whirling round and round on his gun.

Harry walked across, and opened the dustbin lid, and saw a mountain of white sandwiches, cut thick as doorsteps, but full of corned beef. There was a bit of dirt on the top ones, from the dustbin lid, and somebody had emptied tea-slops on to the ones on the right, but by careful picking, he got a dozen good as new, just a little dry and curling at the edges. He stuffed most of them into his pocket, and bit into the best one.

“There’s a better lad,” said the soldier kindly, stopping his whirling again. From the faded stripes, almost invisible on his oily sleeve, Harry saw he was a corporal. “Tell you what, son, if you’re ever pushed for grub, this is the place to come. They get so many bloody sandwiches here they even look like sandwiches. You get sandwich fights in the barrack room some nights, after they’ve been boozing in the NAAFI.”

“Aren’t they scared the Germans might come?”

“Jerry doesn’t show his face by daylight any more up here. He knows what’s good for him. You know what they’ve got at Acklington airfield -
Spitfires.
Jerry wouldn’t get half-way across the North Sea before the RDF picked him up.”

“What’s RDF?”

“None of your business - I never said a word.” He looked down on the ground. “Hand me up that five-eight spanner, son, will you?”

“What you doing?”

“Easing the tracking-gears. I told the bloody armourer they were stiff, and he had a go at them, but he’s bloody useless. You can’t hit Jerry if the tracking-gears’ stiff as glue. So I’m having a go meself. I used to be a fitter in civvy street. This is my gun. Like to have a try on her?”