by Mick Jackson
The more time he spent in Lillian’s company the more he found her to be an unlikely combination of frailty and strength—forever turning her good ear in his direction and dozing off in her armchair, yet capable of splitting great logs with the axe by the back door and heaving huge pans up onto their hooks.
But by far the most significant discovery of Bobby’s first week in Devon was that thinking about his mother or father, far from bringing him any comfort, actually stirred up in him the most dreadful misery—a homesickness of such depth and breadth, of such debilitating terror, that he was convinced that he was going insane. So he began to steer any thoughts which seemed to be headed in their direction around to something else and make his way through the day from moment to moment, and with great deliberation, as if carrying a sleeping baby to bed. It seemed to spare him any pain on top of that which was inevitable. Yet the first sip from a mug of sweet tea or the warmth of the bathwater had a way of sidestepping his resolution and bringing home to him all the good he was going without. Then he would have to rein himself in and concentrate on something cold and dead and unyielding—would have to hold on tight until the danger passed.
Bobby’s second bath didn’t cause half as much fuss as the first one or use up anything like as much fuel. Lillian washed his hands and face with a flannel, then let him soak for a couple of minutes. But as she sat on her stool, with the towel in her lap, looking forward to having the bath after him, it occurred to her that she couldn’t very well ask him to sort out the soup mix again when all the peas and beans and lentils were still perfectly sorted from the time before.
As she buttoned up his pajama jacket Miss Minter asked Bobby if he was allowed to use scissors. He said he thought he probably was. And once he put on his dressing gown he was led around the back of the settee, wondering what kind of things the old lady might need cutting up. He watched as she dragged open a sideboard drawer and handed him a pair of ancient scissors. He inserted his finger and thumb and tried them out and was still snipping at the air when Lillian dropped a stack of newspapers on the rug and knelt down beside them. She opened one up and began nodding and raising her eyebrows as if she found it very interesting.
“Now, I’d say that some of these pictures look like they could do to be cut out,” she said.
Bobby agreed that they did. She turned the page and pointed at one or two photographs she liked the look of and encouraged Bobby to do the same.
“I shall leave you in charge,” she said and got to her feet. “But take your time. We want them nice and neat.”
By the time she stepped into the bath she could hear Bobby busily snipping away behind the sofa. He had already cut out a British soldier guarding the wreckage of a downed Me 109, a tram on its side in a tangle of overhead wires and a bearded sailor leaning on a harbor wall with a Capstan Full Strength wedged between his fingers and the same dreamy expression as the Captain when he talked about shipwrecks or Marjory Pye.
“I’ll put them in a pile,” Bobby announced from behind the sofa.
“Good boy,” said Miss Minter and slipped down, so that the water came right up to her chin.
On the first Monday after the outbreak of war Mrs. Fog stood at the front of the class in her gas mask. The straps clamped her hair to her head—made her look like a muzzled bear. She stood with her hands on her hips, defiant, staring at one desk then another until the only sound in the classroom was the air wheezing in and out of the filter at the end of her snout. The children were beginning to find her behavior deeply disconcerting—were beginning to wish she would stop staring and open her mouth—although Aldred Crouch thought it quite possible that she had been talking for several minutes but they just couldn’t hear what she had to say.
When she finally peeled the mask back from her face her hair sprang back to life. She pulled a handkerchief out from the sleeve of her cardigan and blew her nose. She had it on good authority, she said, that Mr. Hitler had plans to drop gas on the village. And as the idea of Hitler’s gas coiled around the children’s ankles Mrs. Fog added that if any boy or girl needed proof of the terrible damage gas could do, they need look no farther than Joseph Stewart of High Cross Farm, uncle to their own Connie Barlow, who was blinded by mustard gas in France in 1917 (which came as quite a shock to young Connie, who’d always been under the impression that her uncle Joe had been blind since he was a baby and deeply resented the poor man being paraded before the class).
When the Germans dropped their gas on South Devon, the children learned, their only refuge would be the gas mask at their side, and the time it took them to get it out of its box and over their face would determine whether they lived or died. Mrs. Fog opened her desk drawer and took out the clock she used on the annual sports day. Then, row by row, the children were directed over to the coat hooks to collect their gas masks and told to find a corner for them in their desks.
Mrs. Fog folded her own mask back into its box and slotted the lid back down on it. Then the children watched as her hand crept toward the clock.
“Is everybody ready?” she said.
They could hardly have been more so—could already make out the distant rumble of German bombers—but had to wait for what felt like an eternity, with Mrs. Fog’s hand hanging in the air, before she finally called out, “Gas attack!” and hit the clock.
The only children not holding their breath were the ones screaming. There hadn’t been this much excitement in the classroom since Hector Massie had set fire to his coat. Children were struck in the face by their neighbors’ elbows, gas masks and boxes went flying and in no time the boys and girls found themselves choking on the imaginary gas.
But within a minute or so they all managed to get their masks on, and when the last child was finally sitting bolt upright Mrs. Fog hit the clock again. She turned its face to her and shook her head.
“Too slow,” she said, “and much too sloppy.”
She cast a withering glare over at Lewis, who had somehow managed to get his mask on upside down. Lewis Bream, she calmly informed his classmates, would now be gassed to death.
So, before the next wave of planes was summoned Mrs. Fog went through the four steps again: separating the straps between fingers and thumbs, tucking the chin into the ridge at the bottom, pulling the straps back over the head so that the mask was snug against the face and running one’s finger around the edge of the rubber to ensure there were no gaps for the gas to get in.
The children stuffed their masks back into their boxes and the boxes back into their desks. Mrs. Fog reset her clock, then raised her hand and looked around the faces, as if almost daring someone to make a sound. Her forefinger floated before her face, with all the children’s eyes on it. At one point it seemed to be heading toward her lips, to try and squeeze even more silence out of an already silent class, then at the last second changed its mind and shot toward the window.
“Gas attack!” shouted Mrs. Fog.
She wore an expression of bug-eyed asphyxiation—a theatrical touch which so impressed some of her pupils they almost ripped the lids off their boxes trying to get at their masks. The ensuing calamity differed from the previous one only in that it was over sooner. There was just as much shrieking and just as much clattering of desk lids, but when they were done and Mrs. Fog looked out at the rows of masked, anonymous children she was heartened to find that they had at least all got them on the right way.
As her charges would happily testify, Mrs. Fog was not an easy woman to please, so when they saw her nod at them a wave of relief swept around the classroom and they began to pull their masks from their heads. But Mrs. Fog raised her hand and announced in a muffled voice that they must keep them on for two whole minutes—and held up two fingers to emphasize the point—to make sure they could breathe while wearing them.
The children turned and peered through their visors at their neighbors. Some fiddled with the straps. Others studied their own hands and nodded at friends across the room. It made for an eerie sort of atmosphe
re. The only sound was the air being drawn in and out of all the gas masks and the steady ticking of Mrs. Fog’s clock. Then one of the Boys discovered that by exhaling with some force it was possible to produce a farting sound between his cheek and mask. This got all the other children giggling and trying to make farting sounds of their own. They couldn’t help themselves. They doubled up in fits of laughter but when they came to take a breath found it impossible to fill their lungs.
Their eyes streamed, their chests dragged at the filters and if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Fog’s formidable presence they would have pulled their masks away. The straps caught at their hair, the smell of rubber filled their heads.
This is what it will be like when the bombs are dropped, they thought.
For a few precious seconds the war and its ridiculous paraphernalia had been humbled, ridiculed. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t funny anymore.
The pull of the gas mask’s strap on their shoulders and the knock of the box against their hips were soon so familiar as to be unremarkable, and the only novelty, apart from swinging it at the head of an adversary, was in using the limited space around the mask to store something precious and sufficiently small. Lewis Bream achieved brief notoriety by squeezing a fieldmouse into his, but Mrs. Fog’s spot checks, instigated after the mouse had chewed a sizable hole in Lewis’ mask, put a stop to that and in the intervening years the gas mask boxes were opened only during the practice on the first Monday of each month and soon became nothing but another appendage, like their scarves or gloves.
Bobby could see that the Boys were up to something. They had been in conspicuously high spirits all afternoon, glancing over at him, whispering to one another and knocking knees beneath the desks.
Mrs. Fog had spent the last half an hour comparing the sentence on the blackboard to a goods train. Each word, she insisted, was a carriage with its own important packages and parcels and every one of those carriages must be coupled up in the right order before they could head off down the track. But all the talk of trains put Bobby in mind of his own recent journey and the many miles he was from home, and when Mrs. Fog picked up her duster and swept her train of words into oblivion he couldn’t help but feel that any hopes of ever finding his way out of all these hills and hedgerows were erased with it.
As he collected his coat there seemed to be even more eyes on him than usual and he crossed the playground to find the Boys already loitering in the lane. They muttered a few words to one another and when Bobby walked through the gate Hector Massie—the boy who, a couple of days earlier, had been so convinced that Bobby had a swastika tattooed on him somewhere—stepped up to him.
“I reckon you’ll be going back along the top road,” he said.
The other Boys were all shoulders and smiles—were flushed with excitement. Bobby looked down the lane toward Miss Minter’s cottage, which seemed suddenly distant.
“I don’t think there is another way,” he said and could hear the terrible whine in his own voice.
Hector put his mouth up to Bobby’s ear.
“You know what?” he whispered. “If I were you, I’d just start running.”
There was no appeal—no arbitration. For a second Bobby froze. Then he turned and ran—toward the Captain’s cottage and the whole unknown world beyond. And as he ran some of the other children hung over the wall and watched, more excited than at any sports day they would ever attend.
Bobby ran for his life and for those first few seconds Devon was almost transcended. In his terror he almost managed to shake off the misery that had plagued his every waking hour. The village was obscured. Its sounds fell away, its faces retreated. Then suddenly Bobby felt his feet hit the ground, could hear himself puffing and panting. Could hear the Five Boys start up after him.
He didn’t get far before they caught him. He surrendered as if he knew what he was guilty of. The Boys took him by the arms and led him away, like the German pilot in the photograph Bobby had cut out a few days earlier whose plane had been downed in a Wiltshire field. And he was taken around the back of the houses and down a path onto some allotments with their sheds and canes and rows of vegetables.
Barely a word was said throughout the whole proceedings. Bobby was bundled into a hutch and the door was locked behind him with an almost professional manner. The box wasn’t much bigger than a coffin and was rich with the ammonial stink of poultry excrement. The Boys stood and watched Bobby kick at the door and tug at the chicken wire and after a while they turned and quietly walked away.
They couldn’t have been gone for more than a couple of minutes. It was only when Bobby saw them heading back that he made a sound. More words and tears came out of him in those few moments than had come out of him the whole week before. The Boys strode toward him in their gas masks, carrying their pesticide sprayers. They crouched down at the chicken wire and peered in at him. And despite all his kicking and screaming, they pumped some pressure into their sprayers, aimed them in at Bobby and turned them on.
They sprayed him from head to toe. Soaked every twisting inch of him. Pumped long enough to drown a whole army of greenfly. But they found that wearing a gas mask and exerting themselves was altogether different from simply sitting at their desks. And long before they ceased, through sheer exhaustion, and with the thrill of tormenting the evacuee still flooding through their veins, the Boys were already beginning to speculate on the ultimate price of such terrible fun.
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.
