Doodlebug Summer

by Alison Prince

  Once he’s got an idea in his head, he doesn’t let go.

  Will this night never end? I’m aching with tiredness but I can’t imagine dozing off while all this scary noise is going on. Ian’s asleep, thank goodness. I felt him jump when the biggest explosion came, and he muttered something but he didn’t wake. I’m glad, because it was very close. The house shook and the light in the hall went out.

  Mum took the torch and went to see if we’d been damaged, and when she came back she said the upstairs windows have been blown in. And the electricity is off.

  The cupboard door is open. Mum’s stopped diving in every time one of the things comes over. She put her daytime clothes on while Ian and I were eating the sandwiches, and now she’s standing in the kitchen with a tin hat on, staring through the window. She’s drawn the curtains back a bit – no need to worry about the blackout, since we can’t put any lights on anyway. I can see her silhouetted against the flashes of gunfire. She’s knitting as she stands there, with the ball of wool in her coat pocket. She’s a good knitter, she never needs to look at what her hands are doing.

  She’s coming over to the cupboard.

  ‘You awake?’ she whispers.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You want to see what these things look like?’

  I nod and start to scramble up, being careful not to disturb Ian.

  ‘Don’t come right out, just stand at the cupboard door.’

  We watch together. Among the flashes of gunfire, a purposeful streak of orange light is heading towards us with the sound we’ve started to get used to: du-du-du-du-du. Whatever the thing is, it has a tail of flame. It passes overhead, and the noise is thunderous.

  It’s stopped.

  Mum and I dive into the cupboard and pull the door shut behind us. It’s quite a long wait for the bang this time, and when it comes, it’s distant, though still heavier than the sound of the guns.

  ‘Someone else,’ says Mum. ‘Poor souls.’

  No need to ask what she means. Someone else’s house destroyed, someone else killed or hurt. Not us. Not this time, thank the Lord. We never say much about it. If we got upset, it would make everything much worse.

  Mum goes back to the kitchen. She’s still knitting.

  I wake feeling cramped and stiff. My arm’s gone numb because Ian’s head is resting across it. Outside, the dawn is getting paler.

  Mum’s opening the back door. The guns have stopped, but there’s a quiet rattling sound, very close to the house. It could be dangerous. Surely she can’t be going out?

  She laughs. What on earth is she laughing at?

  I creep out and join her.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Look!’ she whispers.

  There’s a hedgehog by the doorstep. It’s got its nose stuck in a golden syrup tin. Syrup’s not rationed, so we get it whenever we can, and a hedgehog often comes to lick the empty tin. But this one’s jammed himself in. He’s blundering about with the can over his head, bumping into things.

  Mum and I are falling about with laughter, hands over our mouths in case we wake Ian.

  ‘I heard all this clattering – I thought it was another secret weapon,’ Mum says.

  Gently, she pulls the tin off the hedgehog’s bristles, and after a rather puzzled pause, it shuffles off round the corner to the garden.

  ‘Glass of milk and a biscuit?’ Mum asks.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘Not really.’

  I know I won’t go back to sleep again, but there’s nothing else to do. I crawl back in beside Ian. It’s not exactly comfortable, but it’s warm. And out there, everything is quiet…

  3

  Rockets

  I’m awake again. There are voices in the kitchen. It’s Mrs Potter from next door, talking to Mum.

  ‘Ted says he reckons they’re rockets,’ she’s saying. ‘Inhuman, I call it. I mean, what can you do against rockets? They don’t give you a chance.’

  Ian’s sitting at the table, eating cornflakes. He looks pretty normal, but I feel stiff and tired and grubby. I’m still in my pyjamas and dressing gown.

  ‘They say there’s a terrible mess up by Park Road,’ Mrs Potter goes on. ‘Two people were killed.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Mum gives her a tiny shake of the head, warning her not to go on about it in front of Ian. She turns to him and asks, ‘Have you finished your breakfast?’

  He nods and gets down from the table. ‘I’m going to look for shrapnel in the garden,’ he says. He always used to do that after the night raids. ‘I’ve got twenty-three bits.’

  He fishes the tin bowl out from under the sink and shows Mrs Potter his collection of jagged metal fragments. They’re shell-bursts from our guns mostly, red-hot when they come down, but they’re rusty now. Those ordinary raids seem quite cosy compared with the weirdness of the night that’s just gone.

  ‘This is the best one,’ Ian says, holding up the biggest chunk. ‘Look, you can see the grooves. Dad says they put those on the shells to make them twist, so they keep in a straight line.’

  Dad. A worry jumps back into my mind.

  ‘Did you phone Dad?’ I ask Mum. ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘The phone lines are down,’ she says.

  Ian goes to the back door and opens it.

  ‘If you’re going out, stay in the back garden,’ Mum warns. ‘Don’t go round the front. And if you find anything unusual, don’t touch it.’

  He looks at her pityingly. ‘Of course not.’ He turns at the door, suddenly doubtful. ‘There aren’t any more of those things coming, are there?’

  Mum and Mrs Potter glance at each other, but only for a moment.

  ‘No, it’s all quiet just now,’ Mum says. ‘But if you hear one coming, run in here, quickly.’

  He nods. He stands at the door for another few moments, then he closes it and comes back to the table. ‘I think I’ll stay here,’ he says.

  ‘All right,’ says Mum, not making any fuss about it. ‘Katie, I put clean clothes for you next door in the dining room. Be careful where you tread. All the upstairs windows have gone, and there’s broken glass all over the place.’

  The kitchen light suddenly comes on.

  ‘That’s the electricity back,’ says Mrs Potter. ‘Try the radio – there might be some news.’

  Mum switches on the radio, but it’s just playing music.

  It seems funny, getting dressed in the dining room. I almost pull the curtains across in case Hedge is out there watching me, but it’s all right, this isn’t the morning when he comes. I’ve got my slippers on, but Mum’s put my school shoes out, I suppose because of the glass. I put them on and lace them up.

  In the hall, it seems lighter than usual. There’s a wind blowing down from the top of the stairs. I want to see what’s happened up there.

  The stair carpet is crunchy under my feet because the window at the top of the stairs has blown in. There’s a lot more glass on the landing, mixed with flat bits of white plaster where a patch of the ceiling has fallen down. It’ll be a huge job to get it all cleared up.

  The door of my room is standing open. I don’t have to go in to see that my curtains are hanging in tatters, wafting a bit in the breeze that’s coming through the empty windows. There’s glass all over my bed. How long will it be before we sleep in our beds again? I suppose we’ll have to go back to the air-raid shelter now these new things have started coming.

  It’s even worse in Mum and Dad’s room. The window frames have been smashed as well as all the glass, and the broken remains stick up in splinters, no more use than firewood. I can see through to the houses opposite. They’re worse than ours. The roofs are sagging and broken, and the one on the left where the Greens live has lost half its corner wall. How stupid we were to think the war was almost over.

  Back in the kitchen, they’re listening to the news. The announcer is droning on about our successful raids on Germany last night. Now he’s switched to a story about a man
who won a Dig For Victory competition with a giant marrow.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ says Mrs Potter.

  ‘There was slight enemy activity over southern England last night,’ he says. ‘And now for the weather forecast.’

  ‘Slight?’ says Mum. ‘What does he mean, slight?’

  She and I and Mrs Potter are laughing and groaning because this is so stupid, but Ian says, ‘How much is slight?’

  ‘Almost nothing,’ says Mum.

  The back door opens. Dad comes in.

  Mum jumps up to hug him. ‘Oh, thank goodness,’ she says. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘A bit tired,’ says Dad. ‘Been up all night.’

  ‘We’ve been up, too,’ says Ian, though he was asleep most of the time.

  Dad ruffles his hair and says, ‘I’m sure you have.’ He hangs his coat up and sits down at the kitchen table.

  ‘Is there much damage in London?’ Mrs Potter asks.

  ‘A fair bit,’ says Dad. ‘One of these things fell behind the building across the road from us. I think the suburbs are worse, though, from what I saw on the train. Catford caught a fair old packet.’

  ‘Dreadful,’ says Mrs Potter. She gets up from the table and sighs. ‘Well, better go and peel some spuds, I suppose – I’ll have Ted home for his lunch. Business as usual, eh?’

  Nobody smiles. It’s been chalked on bombed shops for years.

  That was two weeks ago. We know what the things are now. Doodlebugs, people call them. Flying bombs. They come over more by day than by night, so we can see them. They’re like stubby little aeroplanes, only they don’t have a pilot. They’re packed with explosive, and they work on a rocket motor that stops when it runs out of fuel. Sometimes they nose-dive and blow up at once, other times they glide for a long way, you never know.

  All the schools are closed for the time being. And we’re into the summer holidays now, so they won’t open again until September. Mum won’t let me go and meet Pauline, she says it’s too dangerous for us to be out on our own. I don’t even go round to the shops with her, because Ian’s scared to go out and I have to stay and look after him. It’s the same for Pauline – she’s stuck in the house or the air-raid shelter with the little ones.

  There’s a weird kind of excitement about the doodlebugs. We never know when they’re going to arrive. It’s not like the old raids when the siren went to warn that planes were coming, then sounded the All Clear when it was safe again. It’s never safe now. These things are being fired from the coast of Holland, where the Germans occupy the country, and they get here so fast, there’s no chance of any warning.

  Dad goes to work as usual. He says life has to go on. I don’t like him being away in London, I’d rather we were all together. Leaving us each day is probably worse for him, though. Everyone knows most of the doodlebugs explode south of London, before they get as far as the centre.

  They’re difficult to shoot down because they go so fast, but anti-aircraft guns wouldn’t be much good anyway. The rockets explode when they hit the ground, so shooting them down in built-up areas wouldn’t be a good idea.

  It says on the news that our barrage balloons are catching them before they get to the city, but Mrs Potter’s husband says they hardly ever get one. He’s on a barrage balloon site, down in Kent, so he knows what’s going on. The balloons float in the sky on long cables, and if a doodlebug catches its wing on them, it’ll crash straight away instead of flying on to the city. But the balloons aren’t very close together, so most of the bombs get through.

  Our fighter planes have started going after them. I love watching when they do that, it’s really exciting. If a pilot can catch up with one, he comes alongside it, both of them flying at terrific speed, and gets his wing tip exactly under the wing of the doodlebug. Then he tilts his plane and flips the thing sideways, and it goes bumbling off in a new direction, away from London. It’s a dangerous game, because if he gets it wrong the bomb will blow up. It often works, though, and it makes you feel like cheering when it does.

  Ian gets in a panic when I stand in the garden and watch what’s happening in the sky, even though I wear a tin hat. He doesn’t have to worry. If a doodlebug’s engine cuts out, there’s time to run for the shelter, but he stands at the top of its steps, screaming at me to hurry.

  The War Damage repair people have mended our windows, but they’ve used thick wartime glass that you can’t see through properly. It just about lets the light in, but the front bedrooms look greenish, as if you’re in a dirty fish-tank. Not that it matters – we don’t go upstairs much now – we’ve got a Morrison.

  That’s an indoor shelter like a big table made of solid steel. Mum and I hauled the mattresses down from upstairs and pushed them inside, wedged with some cushions, then tucked sheets over it all as best we could. It’s not quite like a real bed, but the four of us can sleep there side by side. It’s more crowded than the shelter in the garden was, but we can’t sleep in that because the canvas of the bunks has rotted away in the damp. Morrisons are supposed to protect you from being crushed under the wreckage if the house gets blown up. I think it’s a good idea – much handier than having to rush out across the garden, though we do nip into the outside shelter during the day if we happen to be out of doors.

  Dad hates the Morrison – he says it makes him feel as if he’s shut in a box. That’s rubbish, of course – it’s a steel table with open sides, so it’s not dark or anything. But it’s less than waist-high to an adult, so you can only get in by crawling, so I suppose he feels a bit cramped.

  Ian loves it, though. He spends quite a lot of time in there with his blanket and Bun. He’s got a passion for doing jigsaws at the moment. They’re the wooden sort, with quite big bits. He’s supposed to put them away before we go to bed, but he doesn’t always manage it.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, boy,’ Dad said when he tucked him in one night, ‘this bed’s like a timberyard.’

  Ian laughed a lot. He’s got a weird sense of humour. He kept saying, ‘Timberyard, timberyard,’ as if it was a kind of poem.

  I had a weird moment this evening. I was out in the garden, gathering plums that the wasps hadn’t got at. Everything was quiet and the sun was going down behind the trees. I could hear Dad playing the piano. He always plays after tea, for hours sometimes. I’ve grown up with his music so I don’t usually take much notice, but this time I heard it in a new way. It was very wistful and beautiful, something by Chopin I think, and it made me want to cry. I’ve never cried about the war, not even the time little Moira Blake was killed when their flat over the chemist’s shop was hit. I just thought, No, I mustn’t give in. But standing in the garden with the evening smell of the grass and the slow, lovely music, I suddenly felt the pity of it all, and tears came.

  Mrs Potter’s cat had kittens yesterday. I wanted to go and look at them, but Mum wouldn’t let me. There were six, but Mr Potter said that was too many. He took four of them up to Hedge’s cottage to be ‘dealt with’. I know what that means. Hedge will drown them. I think that’s really horrible. Poor little things. I hate Hedge.

  We’re back at school now. They sent a letter saying we’d lost so much time at the end of last term due to ‘enemy activity’, we really had to get back to work.

  Mrs Potter’s in the kitchen again. She’s always popping in. Mum gets a bit fed up with it sometimes.

  They both look up as I come in, and their faces are grave. There’s something wrong.

  ‘Katie,’ Mum says, reaching out an arm for me. ‘Something very sad has happened. You know Mr Freeman?’

  I nod. He’s a carpenter. He came here to put up some shelves for Dad’s books, and got a splinter in his thumb. Mum sat him down at the kitchen table and took it out for him with a needle.

  ‘He was killed yesterday, in that big explosion. He lived over on the estate. That’s where it fell.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ I can see him so clearly, sitting at this table where Mrs Potter is now.

  ‘Sunday, you see,�
� says Mrs Potter. ‘He was at home, playing football in the garden with his two little boys.’

  ‘Billy and Martin,’ I hear myself say. Billy is at my school. Martin’s too small to go to school yet.

  Mrs Potter is rattling on. ‘They heard a doodlebug coming and ran to their shelter, only Martin tripped and fell. Mr Freeman stopped to help him up.’ She shakes her head. ‘It was one of the sort that didn’t glide…’

  Yes, I know. We all heard it.

  ‘Is Martin—’ I can’t ask.

  ‘He’s all right,’ Mum says. ‘He was injured, but the hospital says he’ll be OK.’

  ‘What about their mum?’

  ‘She’d gone to see her sister.’

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it. At least the boys have got their mother.’

  It’s the sort of thing you have to say, but it doesn’t help a lot. Last time Mr Freeman was here, he drew a picture of a battleship on a spare bit of wood and gave it to Ian. He used to whistle through his teeth while he worked. The tip of his little finger was missing because of an accident with a circular saw, and he said he never even felt it when it happened.

  I’m going to think about him sawing wood and whistling, I’m not going to think about their garden after the doodlebug fell, there’s no point, it won’t make anything better.

  ‘His poor wife,’ says Mrs Potter.

  Why doesn’t she shut up?

  I break away from Mum and pull the back door open. Out in the garden I rage at the sun in the blue sky, furious with God, or fate or whatever it is. Why should a nice man like Mr Freeman be killed when horrible people like Hedge are walking around, perfectly OK? It’s not fair. If I could choose, Hedge would have died instead. I run all the way to the back fence where the poplar trees used to grow, and thump my clenched fists against its splintery wood because I am so angry.

  4

  What Now?

  I love the swing in our garden, especially on a warm, sunny day like this. Dad got Hedge to rig it up as a present for Ian’s birthday, but Ian doesn’t like it much, he says it makes him feel wobbly. I’m too big for it really, I have to hold my feet out in front so they don’t catch on the grass, but I don’t mind. The ropes are good and long, and when I get it swinging really high, I lean back with my arms and legs straight, and the plum tree leaves and bright bits of sky zoom one way and the other until I’m almost dizzy. Then the rocking slows down until I work it up again. This summer, with nothing much else to do except watch out for the flying bombs, I’ve spent ages just swinging. Today’s a Saturday and I’m home from school, so that’s what I’m doing right now, gently rocking to and fro.