Catching Falling Stars (2 page)

“Dad?” I say urgently. “That’s one of ours, isn’t it?”

Dad glances from me to Rich to the plane in the sky.

“Yes, yes it is,” he confirms quickly. “It’s definitely one of ours – you can tell from the markings. See?”

“Course it is,” Lil joins in. “So everything’s all right, Rich!”

“But why is it up there? Why is it even flying?” Rich starts fretting in earnest, moving from one foot to another. “Are there German bombs coming
NOW
?”

“No, son,” says Dad, putting a hand on Rich’s shoulder in the hope of calming him. “There’d be an air-raid warning if anything was happening. The pilot is probably just on his way from one airfield to another.”

“But what if it’s not? What if this is the proper war starting and the air-raid siren is
broken
!” Rich frets on, his eyes filling with tears. “Or – or the man who works the siren could be off sick and—”

“Shh, Rich,” says Mum, crouching down in front of him and running a hand tenderly through his hair. “Everything will be fine. We’ve got our nice, strong Anderson shelter in the back garden, haven’t we? And as long as we’re together, we’ll be safe; safe as houses. No bombs from Mr Hitler will bother us, I promise!”

“Mum’s right,” I say to Rich, squeezing his hand gently.

But the fingers of my
other
hand are crossed, hoping that Mum can keep her promise…

ONE YEAR LATER

“
Bluebells, cockleshells!
” my little brother sing-songs to my skipping, as he sits on the doorstep with the sleeping black-and-white kitten in his lap.

This one is Buttons. Its sister Betsy – the tabby – is curled up asleep on the top of the Anderson shelter in the back garden.

Rich got them both last week for his seventh birthday. It was quite a birthday; the kittens arrived and our big sister left, just like that.

“I’m off to do my bit for the war effort,” Lil announced to Mum and Dad, her suitcase already packed and in her hand.

“I’ve joined the Land Army, and they’re going to train me to help our hard-working farmers tend their livestock and crops, while all the young men are off fighting for queen and country!” she cheerfully explained to Rich.

Dad raged at Lil for not discussing it with him and Mum first
and
for lying about being eighteen to the Land Army recruitment officer, when she’s really only seventeen.

Poor Mum was beside herself. “But we’re meant to stay together as a family!” she’d said, reminding Lil of the promise she’d made Rich on the day of the evacuation, almost a year ago.

Lil just laughed, her eyes bright and her cheeks rouged pink, and kissed Mum on the forehead.

“Ta-ta for now!” she’d called out. “I’ll write soon!”

We’re still waiting to hear from her…

“Just a couple more minutes, Rich, and then we’ll go indoors and help Mum, all right?” I pant, breathless from jumping over my skipping rope.

There’s a huge pile of washing on the kitchen table. With no Lil around, I should give Mum a hand – she’s been ever so busy since she started at the parachute factory.

Till last week, Lil was employed there too. Working with the silk and the sewing of the parachutes took her fancy when Barratt’s swapped from making dolly mixtures and aniseed balls to assembling gun parts as part of the war effort.

Dad stayed on, though. And nowadays he’s no soonker home and had his dinner than he’s off changing into his civil defence uniform so he can go out on watch for enemy aircraft.

“Yes, all right,” says Rich, stroking the kitten as he starts up with the skipping song once again. “
Bluebells, cockleshells…
Aw, why did you stop, Glory?”

I’ve let the rope go slack in my hands because we’re being stared at. Hard.

A stout old lady dressed in drab shades of brown is stomping towards me and Rich, with a laden wicker basket in the crook of one arm and a newspaper tucked under the other.

“Hello, Mrs Mann,” I say politely, but I know I’m wasting my time.

Our upstairs neighbour will
always
find something to moan about. Specially when it comes to my family. Mum says we could be Mr and Mrs Archangel Gabriel and their three angelic kids, and she’d
still
hate us. “We’d be playing our harps too loud, or littering the yard with too many feathers or something,” Mum joked.

“Pavements are for
walking
on, Gloria Gilbert!” Mrs Mann says sternly as she reaches us.

She knows that Glory is the name I answer to, which is why – of course – she
never
calls me that.

“There’s no law that says you can’t play on them,” I feel like muttering back at moany Mrs Mann, but I don’t, since Mum brought me up to always be polite, no matter what.

“And how you two children can be smiling at a time like this, I really don’t know…” Mrs Mann moans on, holding up her newspaper, as if that should be a lesson to us.

The paper’s folded but I know what the headline says; I saw it earlier when I went to the shops on an errand for Mum. It’s about the bombing that’s been going on at airfields around the country.

Dad’s been talking to me about it too. In this whole year since war’s been declared, Hitler’s never bothered sending his Messerschmitts to London. People in the newspapers and on the radio; they’ve called it the “phoney war”, ’cause there’s been no fighting here, no trouble at all.

The
real
war has been happening far away, in countries safely across the sea from us – and so lots of evacuees have been drifting back home to the city.

But in the last few weeks things have changed.

German bombers have targeted ships in the English Channel and even some coastal towns – and now Hitler’s decided to take a pop at the planes and runways of the Royal Air Force. That’s what today’s papers are full of.

Dad says we’re not to worry, though; the RAF are doing a top job of seeing off the Nazi planes.

So if Dad says we’re not to worry, then I’m not going to let moany Mrs Mann scare me.

“The war will be on our doorstep any day now, mark my words!” she barks as she disappears into the passageway.

“Ignore her! Silly old moo,” I say to Rich, pulling a face at Mrs Mann’s back. “
Bluebells, cockleshells
… Uh-oh. What’s wrong?”

I stop skipping again when I see the panic in my brother’s eyes.

“Glory, Glory, Glory?” he says, shuffling nervously from one foot to the other. “What was she saying? What does she mean? Are soldiers coming? Will there be shooting? Is the war here at last?”

“No, not at all,” I say sharply, and grab my brother’s hand. “Let’s go inside and see Mum, shall we? Maybe if we ask nicely she’ll give you some money for that new
Wizard
comic you wanted…”

I’ve got to act fast and get my brother indoors and distracted, ’cause once Rich starts panicking, it’s incredibly hard to calm him down. He’ll spiral into tears and screams and then the net curtains will start twitching like billy-o, with neighbours either sympathizing with our family for having such a peculiar, nervous child, or tutting about his ridiculous behaviour.

Thankfully, at the mention of his favourite comic, Rich gives a little hiccuping gulp, and I see I’ve got his attention. This might be all right if—

WEEEE-oooooo-WEEEEEE-oooooo-WHEEEEE…

A sudden ear-bursting, heart-stopping whine blasts through the air, the sound rising and falling ominously.

Me and Rich, we’re both frozen to the spot.

“It’s fine,” I tell him in a firm voice. “It’s just an air-raid warning. It hasn’t meant anything before; it probably won’t come to anything
this
time either.”

“GLORY! RICH!!” Mum calls urgently to us through the passageway.

“Coming!” I shout back, realizing that me and my brother have to get to the shelter and fast.

We run inside and for a second – after pulling the front door of the flat closed behind us – the sound of the siren is thankfully muffled. Then it whines painfully loud again as we dive through the back door and into the yard, where Mum stands in front of the arch of the Anderson shelter, beckoning us both to bend down and hurry inside the low entrance.

“Quick!” she says, a tendril of dark hair escaping from under the scarf tied around her head.

Rich, clutching Buttons, dives in first. But I pause just long enough to scoop Betsy from the top of the shelter, where she’s hunkered on the thick layer of earth and growing veg that covers it.

“Betsy!” Rich calls out from the gloom of the shelter. My eyes haven’t got used to the lack of light yet, but I manage to plonk myself down on the scratchy wooden bench beside him. It’s not hard; the shelter isn’t exactly roomy.

“Oh, no … no,
no
!” comes Mrs Mann’s voice from the far end of the wooden bench opposite. “We are
not
having dirty animals in here, thank you very much!”

What moany Mrs Mann just said; it would be funny if Rich wasn’t getting upset again. The shelter has a damp earth floor, rust blooming on the corrugated metal “walls” and a soggy, musty, metallic smell like the inside of our bin. I’d rather bury my face in Betsy’s or Buttons’ fur
any
day than spend time in this rotten, dank hole. Specially when I’ve got to share it with Mrs Mann.

I don’t even know what she’s doing here. She doesn’t usually come to the shelter; she likes to hide under her kitchen table.

“Shoo, shoo!” she shrieks, as if the kittens were rats on the loose instead of our beloved pets.

“No!” yelps Rich, trying to scramble after a scampering Betsy and Buttons.

But I’ve caught my brother by the back of his long grey shorts, and Mum is already fastening the wooden door shut.

“The kittens will be fine, Rich,” she says quickly. “I just saw them run inside. They’ll be cuddled up under the bed in a minute, all nice and safe.”

No, they won’t. Mum’s lying – she didn’t see Betsy and Buttons run inside because I pulled the back door closed behind me, even though I shouldn’t have. Dad told us that if a bomb struck a building, it was better to leave the doors open so the force of the blast could escape, and less damage would be done.

But I’m not going to think about that, because no bombs have ever come near us.

I’m not going to think about the fact that Mum is now sitting on my right in the darkness, reaching for my hand and squeezing it tighter than she ever has.

“Glory, Glory, Glory…” Rich mumbles on, burrowing himself into my left side.

“It’s fine, it’s all fine,” I say softly, soothingly, hoping he can hear me above the siren’s insistent wail.

“Huh!” harrumphs Mrs Mann, from her bench. “I doubt that
very
much.”

For an old lady, her hearing is amazingly good. And my eyesight’s improving; with the light seeping in from the top and the bottom of the badly fitting shelter door, I can
just
make out the shape of her in the corner. She’s like a walrus. A fat, grunting, bad-tempered bull walrus. Maybe that’s why she’s here; she’s got too big to go crawling under her table.

“I’ll thank you not to frighten the children, Mrs Mann,” Mum says in a voice that’s tight and tense.

She’s probably thinking about Dad at work, hoping he can get to the public shelter quickly.

“Me? You’re accusing
me
of frightening the children? Well, I’ve never heard the like,” grumbles Mrs Mann. “
I’m
not the one who has put my children in danger, Mrs Gilbert. I’m afraid it’s
you
who has stubbornly refused to send your children to safety!”