by Terry Deary
Suddenly she grabbed Brigit’s arm and pulled on it in excitement. ‘And we won! Are you going to the victory parade?’ Brigit nodded. ‘Of course, I should be in the parade,’ Gladys burbled on. ‘When I escaped from Wales I went to the Spitfire factory where my mum worked, told them I was fourteen and did cleaning. But after a couple of years they taught me how to work the machines and made the planes that beat the Jerries. I used to hate them Jerries. Hate them.’
‘But you forgive them because we won?’ Brigit asked.
‘Nah, nothing like that. It’s a funny thing but one day I was working on a lathe, the tool slipped and I gashed me hand. Quite nasty it was. They sent me to the medical room and I was nearly fainting with loss of blood.’ She held up a skinny hand to show a deep purple scar that ran across the palm.
‘They had this doctor there,’ the girl went on. ‘He was the kindest man you ever met. I had trouble understanding him – me being faint and him being foreign. And then he says he was sorry, but he was German. The only German I ever met in my life and he was normal as you and me.’
‘Yes, most of them are,’ Brigit said quietly.
Gladys slowed again and was pushed forward by the people behind. ‘Oh, I forgot, your dad was a Jerry wasn’t he? Did they lock him up – intern him – when the war was on? Have they let him out yet?’
‘They let him out very soon after the war started, because he was a good doctor and the factories needed all the doctors they could get.’
This time Gladys did stop. ‘He didn’t work at the Spitfire factory, did he?’
‘He did.’
‘What? All those secrets? They trusted him? Why?’
‘Because he’s a good man, Gladys.’
Gladys frowned and thought about it as she moved slowly forward. ‘So he must have been the one that stitched me up?’
‘I think he must,’ Brigit said.
The thin girl’s face went tight. ‘Tell him thanks from me, will you? There was me doing me bit for Britain and he was helping us as well, doing his bit.’
Brigit looked around her. ‘People are people, wherever they come from, he says.’
Gladys nodded fiercely.
A party of children wore the paper Union Jack hats they’d all been given. They ran along the crowded road, giggling. Loud dance music played in the Railway Hotel and dancers spilled out into the street and tangled with the children who joined them in twirls and skips and sways.
The music stopped suddenly and people were shouting, ‘Quiet, quiet. It’s Mr Churchill.’
Everyone fell silent and looked up at the balcony of the hotel as if they expected the prime minister to appear. Instead some workmen in brown overalls set up two large speakers pointing into the street. After crackles and hisses, screeches and squeals, the speakers settled and the distant voice of Mr Churchill could be heard.
‘My dear friends, this is your hour… a victory of the great British nation as a whole. Did anyone want to give in?’
The crowd shouted, ‘No.’
‘Were we downhearted?’
‘No.’
‘The lights went out and the bombs came down. But every man, woman and child in the country had no thought of quitting the struggle.’
Cheers.
‘I say that in the long years to come, the people of this island will look back to what we’ve done, and they will say “do not despair, do not give in to violence and tyranny, march straight forward and die if need be – unconquered”.’
Long cheers.
‘Now we have emerged from one deadly struggle – a terrible foe has been cast on the ground and awaits our judgment and our mercy.’
‘He means the Germans,’ Gladys whispered.
Churchill went on to say the war with Japan was still going on. The Americans were fighting it but, ‘We will go hand and hand with them. Even if it is a hard struggle we will not be the ones who will fail.’
This time the cheering went on a long time and faded as the dancing crowds began to sing their favourite wartime songs:
Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun.
Roll out the barrel, we’ve got the blues on the run.
A group of children burst from a side street dragging a huge straw model with a mask of the German leader Adolf Hitler. ‘We’re gonna burn him on a bonfire like Guy Fawkes,’ a tiny child screamed in delight.
A quieter group headed up towards the bombed-out cathedral for a service in the ruins. Some carried flowers to remember the loved ones they’d lost and some dabbed at their cheeks to scrub away the silent tears. In all the joy there was pain.
‘So what did you do, Brigit? Did you do your bit?’
Brigit thought a while. ‘You were building Spitfire planes… I was making bombs.’
Gladys smiled happily. ‘Munitions. Making bombs to drop on Jerry’s head.’
‘Something like that,’ Brigit muttered.
‘You did your bit too then?’
‘I think so.’
Gladys hugged the arm of her new friend hard and used her sharp elbows to get to the front of the barrier that kept the crowds away from the road.
Someone started singing the sentimental–
‘I’ll say a prayer while I am gone;
I’ll pray each night, and pray each morn;
Though we’re apart, we’re not alone,
We’ll live to share a peaceful dawn.’
Gladys gave a bitter laugh. ‘I sang that with little Jessie Burdess when we went home after we escaped from Wales. Remember Jessie?’
‘I remember her well.’
‘But we never did meet again. There was the night they bombed the cathedral. Jessie’s factory got it. They never found her.’ Gladys flared with anger. ‘What did Jessie do to deserve that, eh? She never hurt no one. It isn’t fair.’
Brigit said nothing but gave a silent prayer for the girl she remembered.
There was the distant sound of a brass band leading the parade and the crowd began to raise their voices – some singing songs from the war, some cheering and others weeping silently.
‘Why aren’t you in the parade?’ Brigit asked. ‘The workers from the Spitfire factory have a banner. You deserve to be there, marching behind it.’
Glady’s face turned pink despite the green glow of the gas street lamps. ‘I’d show them up. Look at me. Shabby as a scarecrow. Our house was bombed when I was at work – lost me Sunday best clothes. No, I don’t want no medals or parades. If they give everyone a medal then the medals won’t be worth anything, will they? They’re just for special people. You know what I mean?’
‘I know. They tried to give my mother a medal. She refused. She said the same as you, Gladys. She was just doing what she could to help us beat the enemy.’
Gladys nodded like a wise old woman. ‘It was enough to know she did her bit. Like you, Brigit, with your bombs. Like me with my Spitfires.’
The music began to swell, and the cheers almost drowned the victory trumpets and trombones as the band stomped through the main street. The girl raised her hat and waved it – the only red, white and blue she had. She looked happily into the eyes of Brigit Furst. ‘We won. And not just that. It was thanks to the likes of us. We did our bit.’
BLOOMSBURY EDUCATION
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First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
This electronic edition first published 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Text copyright © Terry Deary, 2019
Terry Deary has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
Quotations from the speeches and writings of Winston Churchill on pages 85, 125–26, and 302–303 reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown, London on behalf of The Estate of Winston S. Chur
chill. © The Estate of Winston S. Churchill
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ISBN: PB: 978-1-4729-6270-6; ePDF: 978-1-4729-6271-3; ePub: 978-1-4729-6269-0
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