Dawn of Fear (14 page)

There was no time to do anything, and perhaps nothing to do even if there had been time. The siren was still pouring out its warning, and they felt urgently that they had to be away and at home before its last dying wail began the long prelude to the danger of the raid. Derek felt it now as he had never felt it before. “Come on,” he said, and ran.

Over the gate that ended Everett Avenue, and its one strand of barbed wire that was really no hindrance after all; past Tom's house; down the road. Derek veered away from them to his own gate as the siren's note began dangerously to wail its way down.

“See you tomorrow!”

Geoff ran without seeming to hear, but Peter grinned
over his shoulder and waved. “I'll call for you, Derry—be seeing you!”

 

B
UT THEY
did not see one another again that day. The first raid was not a long one and never came close; Derek and Hugh heard only very distant gunfire and did not even go down into the shelter, though Mrs. Brand kept them close to her and ready to run if there should be need. The all clear sounded after about an hour. Derek spent the rest of the day indoors, since his mother was still edgy, and played with Hugh. He was so shaken by the fight, and the strange feeling it had brought, that he was glad of the quiet house and the chance to build his small brother castles and towers of wooden bricks. It was a comfort, a proof that whatever might be prowling outside, his own world and the people closest within it were still secure.

He was in bed and asleep when the night raid came. He had not heard the siren, and he never knew how long the raid had been going on before he woke. There were so many thumps and bumps in the night outside that it might have been in progress for hours. He had been dreaming about the fight: an unpleasant, distorted dream in which Tom was fighting not the elder Wiggs but his brother David. Derek was watching with Peter, and suddenly the fight took a horrible mad turn, and the two who were fighting stopped punching one another and
turned and came across to where Peter and Derek were sitting, and Tom looked down at them with that frightening face full of hate and said, “It's your turn now,” and David Wiggs laughed, and then suddenly changed from laughing to the same hating face and spat on the ground at Peter's feet as he had during the real day. And Derek was swamped by an awful fear. It engulfed him as if he had jumped into a bottomless lake, and nothing else existed except the feeling of being horribly afraid.

And it was out of that fear that he woke into the noisy night, blinking in relief at the reality that was, in spite of the noise, so much better than the dream. But something of the fear stayed with him, whether from the dream or the day before, and he listened uneasily to his parents talking in low, concerned voices beside the door of the room.

“It's getting much closer,” John Brand said. “I really think we should take them down to the shelter, Mary.”

“Couldn't we try the cupboard under the stairs?” His mother sounded unhappy. “They say it's the safest place in a house. They'd be almost as safe there. It's such a cold night, and Hugh's cough—”

“I want you to be safe, too,” his father said gently. Out of one half-open eye Derek saw him put his arm around Mrs. Brand's shoulders and give her a hug. “Come on now, wrap him in plenty of blankets. The Thermos is in the kitchen all ready. I'll get Derry up.” Then he was
bending over Derek and slipping an arm beneath his head. “Come on, old chap, wake up. We're going down in the shelter for a bit.”

Struggling into sweater and shoes and dressing gown, Derek felt empty and sick with fear of the night and the noises it was making. He was still woozy with sleep, but the fear was there, very strong and unfamiliar, and he did not know how to handle it. As they went quickly out into the darkness, he held tightly to his mother's hand and looked up and saw the white crisscrossing arms of the searchlights sweeping the black sky, and small and far off the bursting stars of shells, and below and behind it all the red glow in the eastern sky, as if he were seeing them all for the first time.

In the small dank, earth-smelling box of the shelter, it was better at first, because they were all close together. Even though the noise outside grew steadily worse, Derek lay curled and relaxed and almost fell asleep. But at the pit of his stomach the fear still crawled. And all at once it jabbed him viciously as the roar of a diving plane shrieked out of the dull background of rumbling and thumps, and while it still filled his head, there were two great crashes somewhere close. He felt his bunk quiver, and he jerked upright and hit his head on the roof. He had a glimpse of his father's face, strained and intent.

Then the third explosion came, and it was as if the world had blown up. The noise poured through his head so that it sang in his ears even after he knew that it had
stopped. He ducked automatically and stayed crouched with his head on his knees. He had never heard anything so shatteringly loud. His bunk and the whole shelter shuddered and shook, and outside in the night there was a sequence of other smaller, closer noises, noises of breaking and clattering and something that sounded like tiles falling from their own roof. The shelter gave a second tremor much fainter than the first, and then the worst close noise was gone, and there was only the rumbling again and the sound of the guns, and Derek raised his head fearfully and stared at his mother and father in the dim light of the jumping candle flame. His mother reached up and took hold of his arm and held it tightly. “All right, love. All right.” Blanket-bundled in her arms, Hugh whimpered, and she bent her head to murmur to him.

John Brand moved to the candle and pinched out its flame between his finger and thumb, then warily pulled the blackout curtain and the wooden cover over the shelter entrance a little way aside. Derek peered out at what little of the gap he could see, and gasped. The night was not dark now. It was a dusky red, and its light was strangely flickering.

His father turned back. He rattled a box of matches and gave it to Mrs. Brand, still holding the entrance open with one hand.

“Down the road,” he said. “Looks like a direct hit. I shall have to go and help, love.”

 

 

“Oh, John—” Mrs. Brand said, and her voice was shallow and quavering as Derek had never heard it before.

“Look,” John Brand said, “it must have been the one plane. Off course from the factories, like last time. There's nothing else coming down. Not now.”

“You don't know,” she said.

“It might have been us,” he said. “Thank God it wasn't. They need help. I'll be back as soon as I can.” He kissed her quickly. “Stay down until the all clear goes.” He pressed Derek's knee hard. “Look after them, Derry,” he said.

“Be careful,” Mrs. Brand said softly.

He went out, and Derek heard the rattle of the wooden cover going back into place, and his father was gone.

His mother laid Hugh gently on the bunk, checked the blackout, and lit the candle again.

Derek said suddenly, his voice coming out high and hoarse, “Dad isn't going to get shot, is he, Mum?”

“Of course not, love,” she said, and reached up and hugged him. “He'll be very careful. But one of the houses down the road was hit by that last bomb. Daddy could see the fire. So everyone has to go and get the people out of the house before they get hurt.”

The guns were still thumping, but the rumble of planes had died away. Derek looked at the candle flame, sending up its quivering black line of smoke, and lay back on his bunk. “Peter's dad will be helping, too,” he said. “And Geoff's. They live closer to that end than we do. I expect Pete's dad was the first there. Whose house do you think it was, Mum? Old Mr. Graham at the end of the road?”

“I don't know, love,” she said. “But I hope no one was hurt. Now you try to get some rest until the all clear goes. Hughie's asleep; we don't want to wake him up.”

Derek thought: “The guns are still making as much noise as our talking is.” But all the same he knew what his mother meant. People's voices were not usual, but small Hugh was used to the talking of the guns. They were a normal background to his sleep, every night.

 

H
IS FATHER
had not come home when the all clear sounded. The sky was beginning to lighten with the dawn, and somewhere a single bird had begun to chirrup. Derek helped his mother back into the house with Hugh; then drank some cocoa with her in the kitchen, feeling strange and adult and unreal. Flames were still flickering down the road, and it did look as though they were coming from the Grahams' house. Old Mr. Graham was the sort of man to whom one always said good morning politely; he was thin and white-haired, but very upright, with a neat waxed moustache. He lived three doors away from the Hutchinses, and he had a plump and smiling wife whom they seldom saw. Derek wondered what they would do without their house. He thought: “Pete must have a good view.”

Then he went dutifully to bed, leaving Mrs. Brand waiting in the kitchen, and his determination to stay awake dissolved as soon as he lay down and pulled up the bedclothes and felt his mother slip into the room and tuck him in. He fell asleep, and this time did not dream.

9

T
HEY TOLD HIM
in the morning, almost as soon as he woke up. The curtains were open, and around the sides of the guardian wardrobes the sun was slanting bright into the room. He sat up and looked across and saw a star-shaped cluster of cracks in the side window that had not been there the night before.

His mother and father came into the room, and his mother sat down beside him and took his hand, and John Brand stood awkwardly at the end of the bed and looked at them; and Derek looked at them both in astonishment and alarm and knew that something was very wrong.

“Darling,” his mother said. “There is some very bad news. You must be a brave boy.” Her hand clenched hard around his. “Derry darling, the house that was hit last night was Peter's house. Peter and his mother and his
father and Miss MacDonald were all killed instantly by the bomb.”

Derek sat very still. The rail at the end of his bed was golden-brown where the sunlight was touching it.

“They didn't feel any pain,” his mother said. “It was all over in a moment, and they couldn't even have known what was happening. The bomb fell right on top of the house.”

Derek said, “Oh no.” He wanted very much to say something else, anything else, but there was nothing else in his head to say. He thought of Pete coming up the road after breakfast to call for him, and found himself listening desperately for the knock on the door.

Mrs. Brand said gently, “Derry darling, it's very, very sad when people are taken away. It makes us very miserable, those of us who are still here. But Peter and Mr. and Mrs. Hutchins wouldn't like that, they wouldn't be happy if they knew we were very upset. So we have to try to be brave and think of them as we knew them. That's the way they would want it. Peter was such a sunny, happy boy.” Her voice shook, and she stopped.

Hugh was standing up in his cot. “Oh no,” he said. “Oh no, Mummy, oh no.” He looked across the room happily for the laughter that he still occasionally got when he successfully copied something somebody else had said.

Derek said, “They slept in the Morrison shelter. They sleep there every night, Pete says; they even take their cat in. I saw it. It's under the table; it looks like a camp.”

His father said, “It was a direct hit, you see. A Morrison can survive pretty well anything except a direct hit.”

“Was Pete's cat killed, too?” Derek said.

He was not paying much attention to what he was saying. The misery and fright were growing inside him like a great swelling balloon. Yesterday the world had begun going badly wrong, but it was to have been better again when today came; the bits of nightmare could have been forgotten. But instead today had brought a change that would need more than forgetting. His world had stopped, and the world he would live in from now on would be a different world. The old one with Pete in it would never come back again.

Hugh banged the side of his cot and said again happily, “Oh no.”

 

T
HE DAY SEEMED
to Derek to have no connection with reality. It was like a day in a dream from which they would surely, sometime soon, wake up. His father left the house soon after breakfast and was gone for the whole morning. A fire engine on its way home came up the road to turn around, and then went back again. There had been ambulances during the night, too, Mrs. Brand said. The houses on either side of the Hutchinses' had been badly damaged by the same bomb and people hurt and taken to hospital, but they would be all right in the end. She said nothing else about the bomb, and indeed she and Derek said very little else at all, but only
stayed close together, playing with small, uncomprehending Hugh.