At the Firefly Gate (5 page)

NINE

FLY PAST

Each day, during the hours of sunlight, Henry found it quite impossible to believe that he’d ever really seen the smoking man by the gate, and the fireflies. The sense of being inside someone else’s body — in someone else’s clothes and shoes — had been so strong that he must surely have dreamed it. Only when dusk fell over the fields and woods, and he was alone in his bedroom or with only Pudding for company, did he start to feel edgy and anxious. Every few minutes he had to go to the window, to check there was no one by the orchard gate.

Already, though it was nowhere near dark, something was pulling him to the window. Everything looked normal. The lightest of breezes ruffled the long grasses in the orchard, stirring the leaves of the apple trees; a wood pigeon cooed from the roof above him; he heard a train, a long way distant. No one was out there; he was quite sure of that. Then, looking to his left, he caught his breath as he saw someone farther along, by the gate of Number One. Dottie. Only Dottie, steadying herself with a hand on the fence. But she was looking intently towards Henry’s gate, towards the place where the young man had stood.

Maybe she’d seen him too! Why hadn’t he thought of asking? Henry ran downstairs — almost tripping over Pudding, who had decided to curl up and sleep two steps down from the landing — and let himself out into the garden. He pushed open the gate to the orchard, noticing that the grass was now flattened where he’d trodden on it last night. He was about to call out to Dottie when he saw that she had turned and was going back towards the house. Voices floated out into the garden, Grace’s and Pat’s, arguing.

Henry couldn’t help creeping closer along the orchard fence to hear what the fuss was about. A few moments later he wished he hadn’t — they were talking about
him.

‘No, I don’t
want
him to come!’ That was Grace; he could imagine the sulky face, the defiant posture. ‘I have to put up with him every day after school, don’t I — can’t I have a day out for once, just Dad and me on our own?’

‘Oh, come on, Grace.’ Pat. ‘Try to think of someone else, for a change. Henry’s just moved here, he hardly knows anyone, I’m sure he’d like to go —’

‘Henry? The Air Display? Oh, I bet he’d love it.’ That was Dottie’s warm voice with the chuckle in it. ‘You could have a lovely day, the two of you and your dad —’

‘No! I want to go with Dad, just the two of us! I don’t want to be lumbered with a little kid like Henry. It’ll all be ruined if he tags along!’

‘Don’t be so obstinate,’ Pat tried. ‘Why should it be spoiled?’

‘Because it will! If you’re so keen for Henry to go, tell you what, Henry can go with Dad and I’ll stay at home.’

There was a silence then. Maybe Grace had stomped into another room or gone all huffy and refused to say any more. Afraid of someone coming out into the garden and seeing him sneak away, Henry crept back to his own gate. He felt hot all over with embarrassment and the sense of unfairness.
A little kid like Henry
— the cheek of Grace! After he’d trudged over the fields with her this afternoon, so that she could ride Amber! It must have been Pat’s idea for him to go to the Air Display; he hadn’t invited himself, had he? He wanted to go, really wanted, after hearing Simon and the others talk about it; but he knew that Mum and Dad would have to stay in tomorrow, because an electrician was coming and someone to fit carpet.

Anyway,
he thought with a rush of defiance,
I’d rather miss it than go with that nasty, spiteful
user.

As it turned out, a lot of the Air Display came over the cottage, so Henry didn’t miss it after all. He was helping Dad to clear the garden, sorting out broken flower-pots and bits of glass and tangles of ivy and cobwebs, when the Red Arrows zoomed overhead. They flew over with a tearing swoosh, so low that Henry couldn’t help ducking; then they fanned out as if unzipping the sky into three sections.

No more garden clearing took place after that. Henry and Dad stood by the back gate, peering into the sky, waiting to see what would happen next.

‘We’ll definitely go next year,’ Dad said. ‘But it looks as if we’ll get quite a good view from here.’

Mum came out, bringing the binoculars, and they took turns at squinting into the sky and trying to focus. ‘Our own private air-show!’ Mum said. ‘No need to queue in traffic or search for parking places or toilets. And it’s free!’

Later, when they heard the jangle of an ice-cream van outside, Dad bought choc ices, so that they really could pretend they were having a day out. Getting neck ache from craning upwards, they watched helicopters, a pair of stunt biplanes with people standing on the wings, then fighters with an ear-numbing thunderclap of jet engines. Next — getting a cheer from Dad — Spitfires and a Lancaster, two small planes and a large one with a blunt nose.

‘Old war planes,’ he explained. ‘Grandad worked on Spitfires in the war, as an engineer. Here, have a good look.’

Henry adjusted the binoculars and saw the two small planes like clockwork toys flanking the bigger Lancaster. The drone of their engines, he thought, was even more exciting than the great whoosh of the jets that had flown over earlier. The din of the supercharged jets had made the whole sky shake, but the sound of these engines — old wartime engines — was somehow more thrilling. It made the planes seem brave and determined, pushing against the sky.

‘There were lots of airfields round here in the war,’ Dad said. ‘Because it’s so flat, and so near the coast. Lakenfield was one. Grandad worked at Waddington, up near Lincoln.’

He had once shown Henry a photo of his grandfather — Henry’s great-grandfather — as a young mechanic in overalls, winding up the propeller of a Spitfire. In the cockpit sat a faceless figure in goggles, muffled up in a scarf. How odd that a fighter pilot was what Grace wanted to be! In his imagination, he substituted her for the goggled pilot in the photograph. She looked ludicrous. Girls might be able to train as fighter pilots now, but they certainly hadn’t fought in combat in the Second World War. Henry knew that much.

‘Afternoon, Dottie!’ Dad suddenly called out, above the retreating drone of the aircraft as they flew into the sun. ‘Enjoying the show?’

Henry looked along in the direction of Pat’s garden. Dottie was by the washing spinner, holding it with one hand to steady herself. She held up the other hand to shield her eyes as she gazed towards the aircraft being swallowed up by the sun’s glare. She didn’t hear Dad at first; after a few moments she turned, blinking and confused, like someone waking up slowly. Then Pat came out of the house and called to Dad across Number Two’s garden: ‘Come and have a cup of tea. I bet you could do with a break.’

Dad explained about the electrician and the carpet fitter, but Pat told him to leave a note on the front door saying
Please knock at Number One,
and they all went along — Mum, Dad and Henry. It was much nicer, Henry thought, going to Pat’s when Grace wasn’t there.

‘Wotcha, Henry,’ Dottie said, giving him a huge wink. ‘We get just as good a view from here, don’t we?’

Henry kept thinking about what Grace had said, that Dottie was going to die. She might be making it up — you couldn’t tell, with Grace. But if it was true, what did it mean? Would Dottie carry on getting thinner and thinner and smaller and smaller? Would she be taken away to hospital? Or would she simply not be there one day? But whenever Dottie spoke to him and looked at him with those amazingly bright blue eyes, she seemed far too full of life to be at any risk of dying.

‘Takes me right back, seeing them planes,’ she said, as Mum and Dad sat down. ‘That was the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, did you know that? That Lancaster’s one of only two in the world that can still fly. The other one’s over in Canada or somewhere. Apart from that, you only see them in museums.’ She sighed. ‘Think of all that effort, making them. They used to fly right over here, them Lancasters, three or four times a week. I used to count them out as they flew off towards the sea, and count them safely in when they came back. Enormous, a Lanc seemed then. Course, if you saw one now, next to one of them big Jumbos, it’d look like nothing at all.’

‘You were here in the war?’ Dad asked.

Dottie nodded, holding out her cup to Pat for a refill of tea. ‘That’s right, love.’

Henry thought it was funny the way she called Dad ‘love’, as if she thought of him as just a boy.

‘Evacuated from the East End, I was,’ she went on. ‘Me and my sister. Came to live at the Old Rectory just behind the church.’ She nodded in the direction she meant. ‘You know the house with the big lime trees? Fell on our feet, we did. Not like some. They treated us like family at the Rectory. Even though they was so posh, and us just a couple of scruffy Bethnal Green kids.’

‘So you never went back to London?’ Mum asked.

Dottie shook her head. ‘Betty married and settled in Ipswich. I was going to get married too, only it never came off. But I liked it here in Suffolk, so I stayed. I worked in the NAAFI canteen for a bit, then later I got a job in the aircraft factory. After the war I learned to type and got an office job. Me, I never did get married, but I got a job in Ipswich, to be near Betty. She was the only family I had after Mum and Dad died.’

Henry twiddled a stalk of grass, sitting by Dad’s feet with a glass of Coke. He couldn’t imagine someone as old as Dottie having a Mum and Dad. Or making aircraft in a factory. He’d seen pictures — rows of girls and women working away, wearing overalls and turbans, singing while they worked to make the hours pass. Making bits of Spitfires and Hurricanes.

‘You know what?’ he said to Dottie. ‘You could have made a bit for one of those Spitfires that just went over!’

Dottie smiled at him. ‘Maybe I did, Henry love. Who knows?’ And she gazed into the sky where the planes had been. ‘Just seventeen, I was, when I moved out here. East End girl straight from the Blitz. Glad to get grass under my feet instead of pavement.’ Then she looked at Henry in an odd way, that made him think it was someone else she was seeing, not him at all. She went on, ‘We hadn’t been here long when I met him, on the airfield.’

‘Met him?’ Mum asked. ‘Who?’

‘Henry,’ Dottie said. For a second she sounded like Grace — impatient, answering in a
who-did-you-think-I-meant
sort of way.
Who did you think I was talking about?
Henry stared at her, and Mum echoed, ‘You met Henry?’

‘Yes, he —’ Dottie began. But at that point another aircraft came over, drowning what she said, and they all looked up at what Dad said was a Hercules, a huge, bulky plane that looked too heavy to get off the ground. Then, when the noise faded, there was a loud ring at the front door followed by an impatient rapping — someone had obviously been waiting to be heard for a while. It was the electrician and the carpet man, both at once.

Later, when the new carpet had been laid in the front room and the air was full of tiny fibres that got into his nose and tickled, Henry went outside in case any last aircraft displays or parachute jumps could be seen. Mum and Dad were making sandwiches for tea in the kitchen.

‘Do you think she’s a bit gaga? Dottie, I mean?’ Mum asked. She was speaking in a low voice, but Henry could still hear.

‘Talking about Henry, you mean?’ Dad said. ‘I shouldn’t think so — she’s sharp enough otherwise. But she does seem to have taken quite a liking to him.’

Dottie, gaga! Henry wanted to rush in and shout at Mum, ‘Of course she isn’t! She’s as clever as you are, and much better at Scrabble!’

Gaga!

But he didn’t go in. It would be difficult to explain why he liked Dottie so much — more than anyone else he’d met since moving to Crickford St. Thomas. He looked across at Pat’s garden, but they’d all gone indoors, taking the chairs and the Scrabble with them — there were only a few starlings on the lawn, pecking at cake crumbs. He felt cleverer than Mum and Dad: obviously Dottie hadn’t meant him. There was another Henry.

He would ask her on Monday.

TEN

COUNTING THEM OUT, COUNTING THEM BACK IN

Sunday afternoon was so hot that when Henry stepped outside it felt as if the sun was melting him into gloopiness, like a wax candle. Even Mum and Dad tired of gardening and sat reading the Sunday papers in the shade outside the back door. Henry had thought he and Simon might play football at the rec, but it was far too hot for that.

‘We could go over to the stream,’ Simon suggested. ‘There might be sticklebacks.’

‘Can we?’ Henry asked his parents. He knew by now that Simon liked wildlife of all sorts, particularly frogs and toads.

‘How far is it?’ Mum asked Simon.

Simon made a vague guesture. ‘Not far. That way, out in the fields. There’s a footpath.’

Once Mum had satisfied herself that they wouldn’t have to trespass or cross any fields with bulls in them, she agreed. ‘Don’t get too hot,’ she warned.

It would be impossible
not
to get too hot, Henry thought, unless you stood up to your neck in a river. He felt the sun striking through his T-shirt and prickling his bare arms as Simon led the way along the footpath beside the church and out into a grass meadow.

‘I’ve been this way before,’ he told Simon, recognising the way Grace had brought him on Friday. The stream — the tree-shaded part of it Simon was making for — was down in the dip to their left; ahead, over the brow of a rise, was the stony track that led towards Amber’s paddock. It would be fun, Henry thought, to show Amber to Simon, and impress him with the story of the wild gallop. He’d call Amber a horse, he decided, rather than a pony; she was almost big enough to pass for a horse. He could make it sound like a one-horse Grand National. ‘Let’s go this way first,’ he told Simon.

A flurry of birds flew out from the low trees beside the stream and the water glinted coolly, making him wonder for a moment if it wouldn’t be more fun after all to paddle and look for sticklebacks. They reached the stile that led to the stony track, which they followed until it forked by a barn. Here, Henry soon realised that he must have taken a wrong turning. There was no shelter, no pony. Instead the field-edge was rising slowly towards a rusted gate. The rough path under their feet ran beside a dry ditch fringed with poppies and nettles, then became concrete, cracked and broken, with grass pushing up through the cracks. Henry and Simon climbed the gate and stood looking at the flat, open area, bordered by shrubby trees. The track widened, joining another at a sharp angle.

‘You know what this place is?’ Simon whispered.

Henry had no idea why Simon felt he had to keep his voice low — there was no one around — but he found himself whispering too. ‘No. What?’

‘It’s the old airfield. This is one of the runways. And that building over there must have been some sort of control tower.’

Henry looked at the crumbling brick building with broken steps leading up to a doorway. ‘How old?’ he asked. ‘This place doesn’t look as if it’s been used for centuries.’

‘There weren’t such things as aeroplanes centuries ago, dingbat.’ Simon gave him a friendly shove. ‘It was used in the war. I know cos my grandad was here, Grandad Dobbs.’

‘What did he do in the war, your grandad?’

‘Actually he’s my great-grandad — my dad’s grandad. He’s ancient, eighty-something. He flew in a Lancaster. But he wasn’t a pilot, he was a flight engineer. He told me all about it. There were seven of them, in a Lanc, all with different jobs: pilot, wireless operator, rear gunner — I forget the others. And all Grandad’s crew were killed one night, only Grandad wasn’t there cos he was in sick bay, with flu. They all died, all his best mates he’d been with since he trained. For a long time, he said, he wished he’d died with them. He felt guilty, for getting flu. He should have been there.’

‘To get killed? That’s a weird thing to wish.’

Simon shrugged. ‘That’s what he said.’

‘So didn’t he fly any more after that?’

‘Course he did! The war was still on. But he got transferred to some other airfield, with another crew. He was lucky, he said. One time he was due to fly, only there was something wrong with their plane so they couldn’t go, and seven out of the twenty planes got shot down that night. And another time he’d just left his position to go for a pee — they had this chemical toilet thing in the back, he said, it stank something awful — when a stream of bullets from a fighter tore through the fuselage right where he’d been sitting. That’s how he got his nickname. Lucky Dobbs. Before, he was always called Rusty.’

‘Rusty? Dobbs?’ Henry’s mind snagged on the names. For a second he felt his feet hot in boots and smelled crushed grass and doughnuts. Next moment that thought had flittered just out of reach, like a piece of thistledown on the wind. If only he could catch and hold it . . .

‘Yeah, Rusty, cos he had red hair just like me,’ Simon explained. ‘But after all these lucky misses, it was Lucky Dobbs. His crew started to think he was their good luck mascot. He could fall in a dung heap and come up smelling of roses, they said.’

Got it! Into Henry’s mind floated the grinning face from his dream, the bright eyes. Rusty Dobbs! But how — As soon as he’d grasped it, tried to make sense of it, he began to doubt his memory. Perhaps he hadn’t dreamed the name Rusty Dobbs at all — had only heard it a few moments ago from Simon. Then another thought struck him. ‘You know what? The first time, when he had flu — if it wasn’t for those flu germs, you wouldn’t be here now.’

‘I know.’

‘You owe that flu bug.’

‘Thank you, O generous germs,’ Simon said solemnly, with a little bow. ‘Or if he hadn’t needed to pee.’

They walked on, along the cracked runway. The air rose from the baked concrete in a faint shimmer of heat. Something about the place made Henry feel edgy. The words of Grace’s stupid song ran through his head again:
They scraped him off the runway like a dollop of strawberry jam . . .
He hated that song, without having the faintest idea why it should bother him so much. But, in the war, it must have been real. People must have had to parachute out of flaming planes, had to decide: jump, or die in your burning aircraft.

He almost reeled with dizziness, facing himself with that choice. Blackness took over his mind, unfathomable, streaked with flares and tracer fire and explosions. It took an effort to bring himself back to
now,
his feet solidly on the ground, walking over the concrete and the thrusting weeds. Another runway swept across the middle of the airfield between big triangles of grass that had been cut for hay. Any minute now, he thought, remembering what Mum had said about only walking on proper footpaths, a farmer would drive up on a tractor and tell them off for trespassing. It felt wrong to be here. All the same, he’d rather face the angry farmer than the fear that was making his stomach churn and his legs tremble.

An old hangar loomed at them behind a dense belt of shrubs. Henry had a wild vision of it being full of brand new Spitfires, straight from the factories. He imagined young pilots in overalls running towards them and leaping into the cockpits, the way he’d seen in the old films Dad liked to watch. He hesitated, but Simon walked straight up and looked in at the open front.

‘Hay bales,’ he said. He sounded disappointed, as if he’d had the same idea as Henry. ‘The farmer’s using it as a barn.’

Henry felt as if they’d walked right out of the real world. He wondered if they’d be able to find their way back to the village, but when he turned and looked, he could see the church tower of Crickford St. Thomas rising above the trees of the Old Rectory, less than a mile away.

‘Come on!’ Simon shouted. ‘I’ll be a Spitfire, you be a Stuka dive-bomber!’ And he ran along the runway, arms out, making an ‘Eeeee-ow!’ noise as he swerved and ducked. Henry tried to make Stuka noises and actions, but it didn’t feel right in this strange place. He fended off the Spitfire attacks half-heartedly, and was glad when Simon tired, wilting in the heat.

‘Let’s go down to your stream,’ Henry said. ‘Or I’ll burst into flames.’

At home, tea was all cold things — ham and salad, strawberries with ice-cream, orange juice with chunks of ice. Henry told his parents about the deserted airfield, and after the meal Dad fetched the local map. Henry had the odd feeling that if he tried to return, he wouldn’t find it.

‘Yes, here it is.’ Dad’s finger pointed at the triangles of runway, not far from the orange lines of roads and grey rectangles of houses that marked the village. ‘Airfield, disused. Risingheath.’

Simon leaned over to point. ‘This green dotted line means public footpath — look, it leads there from behind the church, the way we went. So we weren’t trespassing after all.’

‘Risingheath. I remember the name now,’ Dad said, peering closer. ‘I read it in some war book or other. But you know who you could ask, if you want to know more?’

‘My grandad,’ Simon said promptly. ‘Great-grandad, really. He was there.’

‘Was he really?’ Dad said. ‘I was going to say, ask Dottie. She was here in the war. She’d know about it. What did your great-grandad do?’

Simon was telling the story of Rusty Dobbs’s flu when his mother arrived to take him home.

Although it was nearly half-past nine, it still wasn’t dark. Henry felt too wide-awake for sleep; the back door was open and he wandered out along the flagged path with a glass of milk in his hand, putting off bedtime. Mum and Dad had been working hard at the garden and it was gradually getting tidier. Where there had been tangles of bramble and teasel and nettles, there was now dug earth. A huge heap of dried plants waited near the back gate to be turned into compost, in the compost-bin Dad was going to make as his next project.

By the gate at the end of the garden, Henry stopped and looked out at the orchard, through the bent, twisted shapes of the apple trees. On such a warm night he expected to see the fireflies, their points of flame flickering and weaving. He’d almost told Simon about them, as Simon knew things about frogs and newts and sticklebacks and probably glow-worms as well; but had stopped on the verge of asking, suddenly sure that these glow-worms weren’t for everyone to see.

There they were, flittering and dancing, just as he’d been sure they would be. But there was no shadowy figure standing at the gate this time, no twist of cigarette smoke. Just the fireflies, dancing for themselves.

Henry turned and looked towards Pat’s house. One of the upstairs windows was lit — the window of the room that matched Henry’s, jutting out at the back. He saw a thin, white-clad figure standing there, half hidden by the curtains, looking out. For a moment he thought it was Grace, but then he saw the gleam of light on grey hair and realised that it was Dottie. Henry waved, but she showed no sign of having seen him. She was gazing towards the firefly gate.

Dottie hadn’t seen fireflies — glow-worms — for years, she’d told him. Well, she must be seeing them now. But there was something strange about the way she stood there without moving — just like Pudding when he fixed his eyes on some tiny movement that Henry couldn’t even see.

‘Henry! What you doing out there? It’s past your bed-time!’ Dad called from the back door. Henry drank the last of the milk and went in.

In the middle of the night, Henry woke up with a lurch, his heart thumping. Something was different.

Engines. He could hear engines and just for a second imagined he was back at home, hearing the roar of traffic that never stopped. But the engine noise was overhead; it thrummed and drummed at his ears, making him dizzy. Dozens of aircraft must be flying right overhead. Weird! A flight from Lakenfield, he thought; then realised that what he was hearing was propeller-driven aircraft, not the tearing sound jet engines would make. He got out of bed and went to the window.

A round disc of moon lit up slivers of cloud. Flying towards the moon, in silhouette, were aircraft in formation. Henry recognised the blunt noses, the cigar-shaped bodies and the flat tail-spars of Lancaster bombers. He wouldn’t have known what they were until last Saturday, but now he was sure.

Lancaster bombers.

He must count them all out and he must count them back in.

Pudding was perched on the gate, a dark shape in the moonlight. He crouched, ears flat, then abruptly leaped down and streaked towards the back door. Henry heard the slap and swing of the cat-flap as he rocketed in.

I must keep counting,
Henry thought. Ten, eleven, twelve, like a flock of wild geese, high and purposeful, flying out in the direction of Lowestoft and the sea. They shone silver in the moonlight. Twelve Lancaster bombers.

But that was impossible! Henry stood at the window and watched as the leaders were swallowed up in the bank of cloud. When they were all out of sight, he stared and stared at the grey fuzziness of cloud until his eyes went blurry.

Silence. He strained his ears into the night, but heard only the hoot of an owl. He had no idea what time it was, but the house felt still. When he stepped back from the window, the floorboards creaked with night-time eeriness. The back of his neck had gone all tingly and the skin on his arms was goose-bumped. He lurched for his bed, and clicked on the bed-side light. At once the room was lit up, warm and bright and normal, everything jumping out at him in sharp colours, apart from the slab of blackness at the window where he’d pushed back the curtain. He tugged the curtains closed, so that not an inch of darkness showed between them.

Then he lay down and listened to the words in his head.

It’ll be thirteen next time.

Count them out and count them back in.

He wanted Pudding, wanted to cuddle him. No matter what Mum said about cats on beds, he wanted Pudding’s warm purring company. He crept downstairs and opened the kitchen door. At once Pudding surged through and straight upstairs, his tail bristling like a toilet-brush.

‘Come on, Pud. You can stay with me.’ Henry picked up the struggling cat. ‘P’raps I’m dreaming. P’raps we both are.’

At last the cat settled beside him. Hours later, from the depths of sleep, Henry found himself counting again: felt the windows shake to the roar of engines, felt their shadows low overhead.
One. Two, three. Four. Five, six, seven. Eight.