A Horse Called Hero (2 page)

‘Bath time,’ said Spud.

‘It’s not bath time,’ said Wolfie, looking suspicious because it was always suddenly bath time at awkward moments.

‘How am I to know . . . ?’ muttered Spud, collecting a basket of fresh towels from the laundry.

There was no letter from Pa the following week either. Spud was in a new sort of mood, a harrumphing, high-headed kind of one, rejuvenated by the fall of France, by
Britain’s ‘Great Aloneness’. Posy’s father had come back from Dunkirk on a boat. Posy lived next door and her father, Colonel Cayzer, served in the same regiment as Pa. When
the Colonel came home, Posy had stopped visiting Dodo, then, shortly after, she and her sister went to the aunt in Wiltshire.

Wolfie lined his cavalry up along the tea table. ‘It’s like this in Pa’s barracks . . . one row on one side, and one on the other . . . Captain lives here, at the top . . . he
has a special box with his name over it.’ Wolfie placed Captain so that he dominated the two files of bays. ‘I will be a cavalry officer with a fine grey charger. My charger will have
hot bran mash and molasses like Captain and go on parades with brass bands and be clapped by crowds . . .’

‘Eat your tea,’ said Spud.

‘Wolfie eats derring and dash for starters,’ said Dodo. ‘Heroes and glory for pudding.’

‘You talk like a book,’ said Wolfie.

‘The both of you, eat your tea. It’s all peculiar words from the one of you, and horses-horses-horses from the other,’ said Spud, brushing aside the barracked figurines.

At dusk, when Spud began her elaborate blackout preparations, she began to mumble again about the proper place for children. Spud knew more than they did, Dodo was certain of
that, or maybe just suspected something but wasn’t telling what. The Cayzer housekeeper, Dora, was the purveyor of all gossip on Addison Avenue. Dora had probably told Spud something.

Dodo crept up to her, turning her back on Wolfie and asked again, ‘Have you heard
anything
. . . ?’

Spud paused, then set to again, adding, for the first time, adhesive tape to her blackout precautions.

‘France has been invaded, Spud, so Pa—?’

‘Bath time,’ Spud said, ready to hustle them up early to the nursery. When they were halfway up there was a knock at the hall door. Wolfie raced back down. Spud and Dodo waited on
the stairs.

‘Oh, Lord,’ said Spud, taking Dodo’s hand as they both glimpsed the young boy, blue-uniformed, the same height as Dodo, standing at the foot of the steps, holding on to a red
bicycle with one hand, an envelope in the other, his eyes to the ground. Dodo stifled a scream and froze, suddenly detached from the world and dropping, the stomach taken out of her.

Wolfie grabbed the envelope. ‘From Pa. It’ll be from Pa.’

The telegram boy sped away, head down. Wolfie was tearing at the envelope but Spud stepped down and took it.

‘Shall I?’ she asked Dodo.

Dodo nodded. Everything was monochrome, remote and cold. Wolfie was reaching on tiptoe to the telegram, the front door still open. Spud folded it quickly and backed up to the stairs, sinking on
to the lowest treads. Reaching out for Dodo’s hand, she pulled her to her chest.

‘Missing,’ croaked Spud. ‘Oh, Dodo, he’s – your pa’s missing . . .’

Dodo’s legs quaked. Spud’s words were distorted and swimming.

‘What is it, what is it?’ Wolfie was asking.

‘He’s missing, Wolfie, your pa’s missing.’

Wolfie looked from Spud to Dodo, the word ‘missing’ forming silently on his lips, growing confusion colouring his face. Now he moved his head slowly and emphatically from side to
side. Spud pulled him to her, but he squirmed away, still shaking his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Pa wouldn’t go missing.’

‘Oh, Wolfie . . .’ began Spud.

Despite the adhesive tape, the glimmer of moonlight on slate roofs between Spud’s curtains was strangely bright. In bed, Dodo’s body was rigid and frozen. The words
‘missing, missing, missing’ drummed in her head
.
She heard Wolfie’s soft, regular breathing. Asleep, finally, she thought. A dam broke and an unstoppable flood of tears
burst from her.

Later, all tears spent, empty and hollowed out, she slipped out of bed and crept to the window. Luminous white fingers searched the night sky. Dodo watched, transfixed as a
sleepwalker.

Missing, missing, missing
.

Wolfie stirred, saw her silhouetted against the window. Clutching Captain, he crept to her and looked out. With interest he observed the searchlights and the large lemon moon rising over tall
Victorian roofs.

‘She hasn’t blacked out the moon,’ he said, setting the lead figure on the sill where it shone like marble. He began to advance Captain from one end to the other. ‘Spud
has forgotten to black out the moon.’ He looked up and saw that Dodo’s cheeks were glistening and silvery, her eyes swollen. ‘“Missing” just means they don’t
know where he is, doesn’t it? But Pa can see that moon, he can see it too where he is.’

Dodo saw Wolfie’s fierce, starry eyes and her face contorted with agony and grief.

There was a knock at the front door. It opened and closed. Voices. The wireless in the kitchen was turned on. Dodo put a finger to her lips and turned from the window, listening.
Dora
.
Dodo hesitated. Had Colonel Cayzer told Dora anything? Dodo crept to the door and beckoned. Wolfie crept earnestly behind her, glad to be on a reconnaissance mission with Dodo, though he knew that
tonight this wasn’t a game.

They huddled behind the kitchen door. Dodo, ear to the painted panel, frowned in concentration, heard whispering, then more distinctly, Dora’s voice: ‘What’re
you going to do? The children can’t stay here . . .’

There was silence from Spud, then Dora again: ‘The Colonel said . . .’

Dora’s next words were an indecipherable, urgent hissing, then there was silence, then both of them were suddenly whispering at each other at the same time, their voices rising.

‘That can’t be true . . .’

‘. . . all back – that is, the ones that . . .’

‘The Captain’d never do . . .’

‘The Colonel says . . .’

‘Are you sure . . . ?’

‘You’ve got to face it . . . wouldn’t dare show his face even if . . .’

When Spud spoke again, her voice was unusually meek. ‘I’ll make the arrangements tomorrow . . .’

Dodo clenched Wolfie’s hand.

The wireless was turned up for the 9 p.m. bulletin and they heard the reassuring growl of the Prime Minister, heard him say that Britain would ‘fight on, if necessary for years, if
necessary alone’.

Suddenly an air-raid siren sounded, abrupt and chilling. Dodo leaped up and pushed the door open. They burst in and threw themselves into Spud and Dora’s ungainly heap under the kitchen
table.

There was a roaring, another roaring, then a menacing screech, a second screech and a third, all at the same time – the air was bursting with roaring and screeching until Wolfie’s
teeth were rattling, his limbs shaking. He squeezed himself against Dodo. The shriek grew louder and louder like an approaching train. He felt Spud’s shivering, the bulk of her wobbling like
a jelly, the fabric of her skirt shivering like a sail against his bare feet. He scrunched his eyes tight, clenched his legs to his chest but couldn’t stop the image of a train rushing
directly at him, straight at his head, couldn’t stop the bomb that was coming straight at his stomach. One hand gripped a chair leg, the other a fistful of Dodo’s flannel
nightdress.

After what seemed a long while, the bomb fell far away, in a distant plop.

The single continuous note of the All Clear sounded. Spud recovered herself and began to disentangle her lower quarters from the table legs.

‘Clapham,’ she said with satisfaction, then began to chide the children for not being in bed.

‘That was the sound of human beings trying to kill other human beings,’ whispered Dodo almost silently. She had a good memory for words and that was something Pa had once said.

Dora was buttoning her coat. From the doorway she gave Spud a significant look.

‘I told you, safer out of London . . .’

Dodo turned to Spud, mouth half open, but Spud intercepted her.

‘Bed,’ she said abruptly.

Next morning, Spud steamed to and fro and up and downstairs with clothes and coats. When she paused for tea, she picked up two leaflets that had slipped through the letter box
on to the mat.

If the Invader comes
, Spud read,
the order is Stay Put. Do not believe rumours. Keep watch. Do not give the Germans anything
. She put it down in disgust. Dodo sat silently at
the window looking out. Spud picked up the second pamphlet and read:
Parents warned: Bomb Risk Near. Keep off the streets as much as possible.

This gave Spud greater satisfaction, which she denoted with a large harrumph. Loaded with fresh ballast, she picked up a basket and steered towards the laundry room.

‘I’ve no choice,’ she said, her back turned. ‘Even your school’s been closed.’

She emerged, tank-like, with a basket of freshly ironed laundry. Wolfie pursued her into the nursery, where she was berthing, with the basket.

‘But we can’t’, he said furiously, ‘not till Pa comes home.’

‘You’ll be needing sensible clothes.’

‘We’re not going.’

‘I’ll take you on a special outing this afternoon.’

‘I don’t want to go on a special outing,’ replied Wolfie.

Spud heaved a suitcase down from the top of a cupboard, and said, puffing, ‘We’ll go to the Army and Navy stores.’

‘I don’t want—’

‘We’ll go to Harrods.’

Spud went back into the dining room. ‘Dorothy, it’s all arranged. You and Wolfie are to leave tomorrow.’

Dodo, still at the window, bent her head.

‘But will I be with Dodo?’ said Wolfie.

‘You’ll be together, they’ve said you won’t be split up . . . it’s ever so nice in the countryside.’

Wolfie was struck by a sudden thought. ‘Will there be horses?’

‘There are any number of horses, Wolfgang, in the countryside. You’ll be going somewhere in the South West, you might even be somewhere close to where your ma used to holiday –
those landscapes she painted.’ Spud gestured to the picture on the wall but Wolfie wasn’t listening.

‘There’ll be horses,’ he told Dodo.

Dodo rose and drew close to Spud. ‘Will there be another letter? . . . Will they . . . ?’

‘I don’t know anything – nothing more than you do.’

‘But what does that mean? . . . Where is he?’ whispered Dodo, her cheeks streaming.

‘I can’t tell you any more than what you know already,’ Spud snapped.

It was a joyless excursion, Spud brusque and impatient, the toys in Harrods a dismal sight, the toy department empty of children. They surveyed a model trench scene of troops
lined up for action in front of the Maginot Line.

‘Why do we have to be on an outing?’ asked Wolfie.

‘Even the German soldiers sell well,’ an unconvincing sales assistant was saying. Dodo turned away, but the assistant pursued her, holding out a uniformed doll.

Much later, holding hands, they groped along the pavement between shadowy figures. Motors with masked sidelights and blackened reflectors moved slowly along Knightsbridge. The headlamps of buses
were cowled crescents of dim blue. Someone somewhere was intoning through a loud speaker, ‘
Thou shalt not kill. Join the Pacifists.
’

A paper was thrust into Spud’s hand.

‘“Thou shalt not kill” is a commandment,’ said Wolfie.

‘
Love your enemies, bless them that curse you . . .
’

‘Disgusting, you Methodists and pacifists and what have you,’ said Spud, jabbing her umbrella emphatically into the darkness. She never cared whether anyone listened to her and she was
prone to underlining her opinions with an umbrella. Loudly berating pacifists and Methodists, Spud commandeered a taxicab, requesting ‘Holland Park’ in a tone so emphatic as to imply
disgust with Knightsbridge.

‘Is God a passy-fist?’ asked Wolfie, climbing in.

The cab glided over the bridge, the Serpentine beneath glittering like a stage.

‘Twenty miles per hour regulation speed,’ said the jovial driver, ‘but what good’s that if the dashboard lights are off and you can’t see the
speedometer?’

‘How do you black out the river?’ asked Wolfie, more thrilled by the glamour of a city lit by moonlight than the toy department at Harrods. Beside him, Dodo, looking out over the
shining water, cried silently.

‘But why do I have to wear these trousers?’ Wolfie grumbled as Spud hustled him into some prickly tweed, fussed over his buttons and collapsing socks. She plaited
Dodo’s hair, and tied ribbons, which were surely not necessary for a train journey.

At breakfast she clattered round the breakfast table, setting down egg cups with a flourish.

‘Have we got egg? Real egg?’ Wolfie asked, amazed.

Spud sniffed triumphantly.

‘Can I have soldiers?’ asked Wolfie.

Spud shelled Wolfie’s egg, spread it on to buttered toast and sliced it into soldiers. Wolfie beamed at the golden egg that wasn’t powdered, at the butter, at Spud’s tidy
squadron on the china plate.

‘There are horses,’ he told Dodo for the third time that morning, ‘in the countryside.’ He put the last soldier in his mouth, and added, ‘Pa likes boiled eggs
too.’

Dodo bent her head, fresh tears rolling down her cheeks. Wolfie went to the dresser for the shortbread tin and deliberately picked just one figure. Spud unpinned the map, rolled it and put it in
Wolfie’s bag.

‘Keep still, Wolfgang,’ she commanded, ready with a brown label and a pin. When her back was turned, Dodo rose silently, went to the mantel, picked up Pa’s
photograph and slipped it into her bag.

They travelled to Paddington by taxicab.

‘Can’t get closer’n this,’ grumbled the driver, peering down the crowded street. He pulled up on Praed Street. ‘You’ll ’ave to walk from
here.’

Wolfie was gawping at a long crocodile of children of all sizes, all with regulation brown rucksacks, with gas masks in cardboard boxes round their necks and brown paper ration bags in their
hands.