Catching Falling Stars (14 page)

“Come on,” I order my brother.

“Hee hee!” I hear him giggle. “I’m Titchy-Rich! Titchy-Rich!”

“Rich – let’s go,” I hiss at him as I walk off towards the red postbox.

“No, I want to say hello to the pig. Why do you have a pig?”

“It belongs to Charlie and Mary, who own the pub,” I hear Jess say, while I keep walking. “It lives round the back.”

“Can I stroke him, please?”

Why isn’t Rich doing what I tell him? He
always
listens to me.

“Sure. His name’s Popeye,” Jess tells him. “Here…”

As I cross the road, I turn to see Jess scramble to her feet, and pass the pig’s ropelike lead to my brother.

Oh, no … with that done, Jess starts walking towards me. What does she want?

“Oi, Hope ’n’ Glory!” she calls out, just loud enough for me to hear but not Rich. “What were you playing at with Lawrence and Archie yesterday?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, trying to stand as tall as Auntie Sylvia, and adopting her tight-lipped owl glare. I hope Jess can’t see that I’m shaking like a jelly inside.

“I mean, yelling at them like they’d kidnapped your brother,” she snaps, her birdlike dark eyes flashing menacingly. “It wasn’t
their
fault he came up to the farm – the shopkeeper sent him up there. He’d run out of chicken feed and told Rich he could buy some from the Willses!”

I didn’t know that. Rich didn’t tell me. But that doesn’t change what they did when he got there.

“They didn’t have to egg him on to take his clothes off and make a fool of him!” I snap back, as I fidget with the letter I’m still holding in my hand.

Oh, no. Over Jess’s shoulder I can see Lawrence and Archie walking with Mr Wills and Harry in the direction of the church. And now the two younger boys have split off and are ambling our way. Lawrence is walking tall, a broad, cheeky grin on his face. Archie shuffles at his side, keeping his head down and peering over at me through the mop of dark, straight hair falling over his forehead.

“They did
not
egg him on!” Jess barks at me. “They asked Rich about what it was like living in London with air raids. Next thing, he’s pulling off his shirt, trying to show them the scars he got when you lot got bombed.”

Oh.

I wince, which makes my own spider-legged scar tug at the skin on my cheek. The thing is, I
could
imagine Rich doing exactly that; trusting people a little too easily, and then taking it too far.

“Well, fine … but they didn’t have to be cruel and laugh, did they?” I point out, noticing that the boys have stopped to talk to Rich and the pig.

Jess turns to see what I’m looking at.

“Hey, Lawrence! Archie! Did you two laugh at Titchy-Rich yesterday?” she bellows at her mates.

“No!” Lawrence calls out, echoed by – of all people –
Rich
.

Archie just frowns, like he wants to shout something pretty rude at me but is holding himself back.

I quickly remind myself of what happened in the farmyard … and my tummy gives a lurch of embarrassment. They’re right; I heard boys’ voices, but no laughter.

“I tried telling him not to take his stuff off,” Lawrence calls out, pointing his finger at my grinning brother, who’s now
hugging
the pig. “I said he’d catch his death of cold!”

“I – I just thought—”

“You just thought the worst of them, didn’t you?” Jess sneers in my face, putting her hands on her hips. “Just like all the snobs in this village.”

“Jess!” Lawrence suddenly calls out, but his friend is in the middle of losing her temper with me, and is enjoying herself too much to stop.

“
Specially
that snooty Miss Saunders you live with.”

“Jess!”

“
She’s
the worst, always looking down her nose at all of us!”

I can’t get a word in edgeways, Jess is raging so.

It’s as if her voice is a roar in my ears.

Only it’s not.

The roar is something else.

I look up into the sky and see the dark shape of a plane against the blue sky.

It’s low; way,
way
too low, skimming the treetops, looming over the village.

I can make out the face of the German pilot inside, or his white teeth, at least, bared in fear at the prospect of crashing, or—

THUNK!

Out of nowhere, Archie does a rugby tackle on me and Jess, his skinny body hitting us surprisingly hard. The three of us crumple into the recessed doorway of the grocer’s shop in a tangle of arms, legs and gasped “oof!”s – just as the rat-a-tat-a-tat of strafing machine-gun bullets pepper the dirt road where we were standing just now.

And as soon as it happens it’s over, with the whine of the plane passing overhead.

For a few stunned moments we three are in limbo. I feel Jess’s body shaking in shock under my arm, and the weight of Archie half-sprawled across us both, his chest heaving as he tries to catch his breath.

Then there’s a sound: a dull thunk coming from the direction of the fields that are part of Mr Wills’ land.

“It – it – it’s crashed!” Archie stammers in shock, scrabbling to his feet.

“The pilot; he was trying to
hit
us!” I say, gratefully taking the hand that Archie is holding out to me. “Didn’t he see we were just kids?”

As I say the last word, the blood drains from my face.

“Rich. Rich! RICH!!” I yelp, shaking myself loose from Archie’s grasp and running over to the green.

I can see no one.

There’s only Popeye the pig, bucking and squealing, panicked and trying to free itself from the rope that’s holding it.

“Lawrence?” Jess is screaming, running alongside me.

We see Lawrence first, his head rising up from the cabbage patch.

“Where’s Rich? Where is he?!” I demand, bounding through the cabbages towards him.

“Here,” Lawrence replies, woozily getting to his knees – and I see that he must’ve thrown himself on top of my brother.

I reach to help an equally woozy Rich to his feet, Duckie and Mr Mousey peeking out of his pockets, while Archie and Jess put their arms around Lawrence and lift him up.

You know, when I first stepped off the bus in this spot, I thought Thorntree was unnaturally quiet.

But now there seem to be people everywhere, streaming out of the churchyard and running and shouting in the direction of either us or the fields of Eastfield Farm.

“Yay! Popeye’s all right!” Rich cheers, before the stampede reaches us. “I held on hard as I could to keep him safe!”

He lifts a small hand to show the rope wrapped tightly around it.

I’d expected to find my brother shaking, a victim once again of the Nazis, but instead he’s smiling like a hero…

Auntie Sylvia’s tin of Epsom salts is coming in handy again.

She’s made a salve for the various burns on Rich’s hands.

One is his hero burn, from the rope he had wound tightly around one hand to keep Popeye from running off and into danger.

The others are stupidity burns. They’re dotted on his fingertips, where he picked molten-hot bullets from the road to keep as mementos.

Rich seems to think the stupidity burns were worth it; he’s staring at the row of dark metal bullets laid out on the kitchen table as if they’re precious jewels. Duckie and Mr Mousey are standing guard over them.

“My, my, will you look at that,” says Reverend Ashton, examining Rich’s injuries. “But you’re a strong little lad, Richard, and I’m sure those will heal in no time!”

The vicar has come to check on us after this morning’s drama.

And
to let us know what happened to the plane – and its crew.

“So, the plane landed in the Wills’ wheat field rather than in the cattle fields?” Auntie Sylvia comments as she nurses, displaying an impressive knowledge of Eastfield Farm. “Lucky for the cows, I’d say.”

“And lucky for the crewmen that the field had just been ploughed,” adds Reverend Ashton. “They parachuted out seconds before the plane came down.”

“Quite the soft landing,” Auntie Sylvia comments, now winding a bandage round one of Rich’s hands.

“Yes, though it’s just as well I got to them at the same time as Harry Wills and the other young men,” Reverend Ashton adds with a wry smile, “or the airmen’s welcome might have been a
lot
more painful, what with the pitchforks and spades the lads were waving around!”

“Would they have hurt the pilot and his friends?” Rich asks, alarmed.

“Um, no … no, they wouldn’t, I’m sure,” Auntie Sylvia says quickly, to stop my brother from fretting. “They just had them as a precaution, in case the German pilot or his crew were armed.”

“Will they lock them up in the Tower of London?” asks Rich, his blue eyes wide at the prospect. “And put them in chains?”

“No. The police will arrange for them to be taken to a prisoner-of-war camp, Richard,” Auntie Sylvia explains. “They’ll be treated fairly and allowed to write letters home to their mothers, through the Red Cross, I expect.”

Suddenly, I remember the letter in my pocket, unsent and now crushed.

I’ll post it later; if Thorntree is now just as dangerous as London, we might as well be back
there
with our parents.

“And you’re not to worry yourself, young Richard,” says Reverend Ashton, about to give my brother a reassuring pat of the hand, till he thinks better of it. “I spoke to the military police, and they say this is a complete one-off. This pilot fellow was
way
off course,
miles
from where he should’ve been.”

Rich blinks at Reverend Ashton, hanging on his every word.

“The squadron he was part of dropped their bombs in the early hours and then headed back to base. So you see, our little corner of England is still the best, safest place for you to be. The same can’t be said for those poor souls down in Lond—”

Auntie Sylvia looks as horrified as I feel hearing those words. Luckily, she dives right in before the vicar blurts out how bad things are at home and frightens the living daylights out of Rich.

“Thank you very much for coming to tell us the news,” she says while getting to her feet, which forces a comfy and surprised Reverend Ashton to do the same. “We won’t keep you. You must have so much to do!”

As Auntie Sylvia holds the back door open for the vicar, my head buzzes with thoughts of home, anxious to know the state of my city, and more importantly, my little patch of it. (Oh, I hope this raid wasn’t on our doorstep!)

“Now, I think we’ve had quite enough excitement for one day,” says Auntie Sylvia, coming back and settling herself down to bandage Rich’s other hand. “But would anyone like to hear some more cheerful news?”

“Yes, I’m sure we would, wouldn’t we, Rich?” I answer for both of us.

Rich nods enthusiastically.

“Well, for the last few weeks Reverend Ashton has been rather
pestering
me about something. Two things, actually,” Auntie Sylvia begins.

I think of last Sunday, when she sent us off to the common, on our doomed damson hunt. Sure enough, she didn’t exactly look as if she was about to engage in an enjoyable conversation with the vicar. If fact, she looked so tight-lipped and serious, I’d thought she was going to talk to him about sending us away.

“You see, Miss Montague has enlisted in the WAAF—”

“What’s that?” Rich interrupts, patiently holding his hand in the air while Auntie Sylvia pops a safety pin into the bandage to hold it in place.

“Women’s Auxilliary Air Force,” I tell him. It immediately makes me think of Lil in the Land Army, and I feel a pang of longing for my dizzy-headed sister.