Chapter 3
Inside, Jeffrey and Arthur, along with the other boys, hung their outerwear in the boy's cloakroom. From there they went to the assembly hall, which ran for two thirds the length of the playground, taking their places near the centre of the assembly. In a Logical arrangement, the older children were at the back and the younger ones in front. Girls formed rows to the left, boys to the right. All faced the stage. A narrow space in the centre separated the two groups. The teachers stood to the sides or rear. On the stage at the far end of the hall, behind a lectern stood Headmaster Perkins, a short man with beady, red-rimmed eyes. Eyes that swept a stern gaze back and forth across the children.
Mr. Perkins started each school morning the same way. He waited until the bored students began to chatter before he acted. This morning was no different. When the murmuring began the short bamboo cane he always carried slammed down on the lectern. Crack!
"Silence!" The loud, bull-like bellow coming from a man his size often startled new students when they heard it. Most pupils obeyed instantly, but usually a few continued to speak. After a wait of about ten to fifteen seconds, the cane descended again making the same loud noise and the bull-like bellow came again. "Silence, I said." Almost all the chatter stopped then. One student here, and another there, carried on talking knowing that there would be a third and final order. Disobedience of that invited retribution later in the form of a sharp blow with the cane across the offender's fingers. Crack! "Silence!" The third command stilled every tongue.
Mr. Perkins' beady eyes scanned the rows of pupils, seeking to observe lip movement. He spotted none and sighed. A possible twinge of disappointment furrowed his brow before he spoke.
"To start today, I have a message for those of you who are evacuees." He paused to allow his eyes to rest on one evacuee after another. Then he continued. "Peter Ross ran away from his billet earlier this week. The silly boy ran away back to London because he said he missed his parents. Well, I want to warn the rest of you not to do anything so foolish. On Tuesday night a bomb fell on his parent's house where the family apparently preferred to stay rather than go to a shelter. They are now all dead, Peter, his father, his mother, and his brother George. The rescue workers pulled Peter out alive but very badly injured. He died later in St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Evacuees should take note; the government of this country went to a great deal of trouble and expense to move you out of the city to a place of greater safety. They did this to keep you safe from the threat of heavy bombing. Keep that fact in mind, and stay where you've been billeted. Your foster parents are working very hard to make you comfortable."
Nobody spoke. Later that day Jeffery decided that all the teachers must have already heard the awful news. But right at that moment he felt sick. The bacon and fried bread that Arthur had given him churned in his stomach. His legs became weak and wobbly and his head seemed to swim. Peter and his brother George were both dead. It was hard to believe. George had not come to Marwell because he'd been just over the age of fourteen when the war started, too old for the evacuation. Jeffery remembered him well from a time before the war when a group of boys had been packed into a classroom waiting for a nature film to be shown. He had been seated next to George. George had pulled out a pocket watch and asked. "Do you know how to tell the time?" When Jeffery said, "no," George had explained how the hour was divided into sixty minutes and that into five minute segments, which were further divided into half and quarter hours. It was so simple that Jeffery had wondered why he'd not understood how to tell the time before.
But it was Peter who'd been his real friend. Many times they'd gone to the swimming pool together, or caterpillar collecting in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and sometimes sneaking onto the Underground to ride the Inner Circle. The last summer before the war they'd had a glorious time.
Then the evacuation order had come, and the bus that met the evacuation train had dropped them off at the strange school where Farmer Selkirk had picked Peter and Arthur from the crowd and hurried them away. Peter never complained about the hard work at the farm, but Arthur often did. Not, as far Jeffrey knew, to anybody other than himself and Peter. There was really no one else to complain to. It wasn't long before Arthur started wetting his bed, and then he got blamed when a haystack caught fire and burned to the ground. Peter, however, was never unhappy about the work. Everybody on a farm worked hard he said. But he missed his family, and when the blitz started he worried they'd get hurt in the air raids. What, he kept asking, would he do if they all got killed by the bombing and left him alone in the world.
And now theyd all been killed. Knowing that made Jeffery's head feel funny and he thought he was going to fall over, so he sat down on the floor. Arthur looked down and then knelt beside him.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"I don't think so," Jeffery said. "My head feels funny, like it's spinning around and I want to be sick and maybe I'm going to cry."
"Oh! Don't do that," Arthur said, meaning both the sick and the cry.
Then a tall figure loomed over them. "You two boys! Why are you hiding down there talking?" Miss Peskett, a slim, older teacher had spied them over the heads of the girls and rushed over. "Mr. Perkins," she called. "I have two boys hiding on the floor and talking."
"Please, Miss. He doesn't feel well," Arthur said.
"Nonsense! If he were unwell his foster mother wouldn't have sent him to school." Miss Peskett looked upon all evacuees as a lower breed and made them do what she called 'toe the line' or else.
"Send them down to me," boomed the voice of Mr. Perkins. "They will stand up here on the stage and I'll deal with them later."
"Get up, Jeffery Fraser." Miss Peskett demanded. "Get up and go down to the stage."
"Please, Miss," Arthur started again, but she cut him off.
"You too, Arthur, go down to the stage. You know very well that you are not to speak during assembly."
The harsh voice and behaviour of Miss Peskett settled Jeffery's dizziness but not his desire to cry. He climbed to his feet.
"Are you feeling better?" Arthur asked.
"Will you please stop talking Arthur, and go down to the stage as you've been told. Go!" Miss Peskett's voice became shrill and her arm shot out, straight and stiff, a bony index finger pointing towards the stage.
Heads bowed slightly in shame, the two boys, Arthur in front, walked down the narrow gap between the boys and the girls as the glaring eyes of Miss Peskett followed their progress. The equally glaring eyes of Mr. Perkins watched as they approached the stage. When they reached the front Mr. Perkins pointed with his cane to the left hand side of the stage.
"Come up and stand over there facing the back of the stage. Don't talk."
They climbed the steps up to the stage and walked to the rear as they'd been told. Mr. Perkins watched them until they came to a stop. He then carried on with the rest of the normal assembly procedure. He made a few minor announcements dealing with slight matters of general misbehaviour on the part of students. They were to stop it. Then everybody bowed heads as he said a short prayer for the fighting men. After that everybody was required to recite The Lord's Prayer. They'd all had to do it, even the Jewish brother and sister who'd ended up evacuated to the village where nobody apparently knew who they were and which school they'd come from. Until that had been sorted out, they'd been treated like everybody else.
The prayer over, Mr. Perkins walked over to right side of the stage. There an old gramophone sat on a small table. He started the turntable whirling, lifted the arm and put the needle onto the record. A scratchy version of the national anthem rang out. Then, more or less in time with the recording, students and teachers sang "God Save the King". The anthem over, Mr. Perkins cracked his cane down again. The booming voice called out "dismissed," and the assembly broke up. The students traipsed off to their various classes. All, that is, except Jeffery and Arthur.
Once more Mr. Perkins rapped his cane down onto the lectern, and then he turned t
o the boys. "The two of you will follow me." With that he went down the stairs to his office. He pointed to the wall next to the office door. "Wait there," he said and entered his office. Ten minutes later the office door opened wide and he came out again. He stood to one side, and with a brusque backward sweep of his hand, waved them in.
He still held his cane, bending and flexing it as, with his head tilted back, he looked down his nose at them. Jeffery felt a tiny shiver of fear, and thought it possible that Arthur felt something similar.
"Now tell me, what was so important to talk about that you defied my order to be silent?"
Arthur spoke up at once. "It was Peter Ross's death, sir. Peter was Jeffery's best friend. When you said that him, his brother and his mum and dad had all been killed, he got dizzy."
Mr. Perkins switched his gaze to Jeffery. "Is that true?"
Jeffery swallowed hard. "Yes, sir! I thought I was going to be sick."
The headmaster's gaze softened just a tiny bit. He looked at Jeffery for what seemed to be a long time, and then he looked at Arthur. Saying nothing he turned and softly placed his cane on his desk. When he turned back to them he looked as stern as ever. "Very well," he said, "You may go."
Bomber Overhead Page 6
