Dawn of Fear (15 page)

John Brand came home at midday looking dusty and sad. He picked Derek up and held him very tightly for a moment, and then he put him down and went into the kitchen. With half his mind listening and the other half attending to Hugh's prattling, Derek heard him say, “Well, it's all over. Nothing more to be done. Just one shaky wall left that they'll have to do something about pretty soon. It was very—complete. None of them could have known a thing.” Then there was the hiss of a faucet being turned on, and no more words to be heard.

“None of them could have known a thing,” Derek said to himself, and tried to realize that he was talking about Pete, and could not. He felt tight all over, as if his skin had suddenly become too small, and he kept catching himself wondering when Pete would come knocking at the door so that they could go up to the back field and start repairing the camp.

After their meal, when Hugh had gone protesting into the bedroom for his afternoon nap, Derek stood looking out of the front window, at the holly tree in which he and Peter had found the robin's nest the year before and deliberately failed to tell Geoff for fear he might take the eggs.

“Hey, Derry,” his father said. “The sun's shining. Come into the garden and show me how well you're going to bowl this season.”

 

 

“Daddy,” Derek said. “Can I go and look at Pete's house?”

There was a silence behind him, and he turned from the window and saw them both looking at him, his father in the armchair by the fire and his mother standing by the door she had just come through, with the tray and its
two cups of tea and the cozy-wrapped teapot for the refills later.

His mother said gently, “You'll see it sooner or later when we go past, darling. Do you really think you want to go specially, quite so soon?”

“There's nothing to see, Derry,” John Brand said. “The house just isn't there anymore.”

“I know,” Derek said. “I don't want to look, I mean not like that. I just want to go.” He looked for words, but did not even know what it was he was trying to say. “I just ... thought ... I ought to. I just wanted.” He swallowed hard, and stopped.

His parents looked at one another as if they were talking, though they said nothing; and then his father said, “All right. Put on a thick jersey; it's cold out. And promise me you won't go close. Bombed houses are dangerous; there are parts that fall down later on.”

Derek nodded. His mother crossed to the chairs with the cups of tea. She said, carefully expressionless, “Don't stay more than a little while, darling.”

“No,” Derek said.

Conscious of every movement he made, as if he were watching somebody else, he dragged a heavy sweater over his head and went out into the road. The sun still shone, in and out of the bustling clouds, but there was a chill wind, and the cold bit at his face and hands and knees. He set off down the road, with his hands in his pockets and his toes scuffing at the stones, and the calm grass
fringed houses on either side and the patchwork of puddles in the road looked so totally the same as they had always looked that he did not believe that he would not arrive at Peter's front gate, and press the latch that was different from their own, and go past the hawthorn tree to the back door, and ring the bell and say to Mrs. Hutchins, as she looked with her unlaughing blue eyes, which might have been just shy, around the door, “Hallo, Mrs. Hutchins. Can Pete come out, please?”

But he was within sight of it now. The world was not normal after all.

The houses on either side, the Chants' and the Evanses', looked as though they had been hit by a gigantic fist; the Chants' house was only half standing, with its side broken away and the upper floor sticking out like a shelf, and a torn carpet hanging over the edge with a wardrobe standing on it almost ready to tumble off, both of them making the house look utterly naked, as if the life inside it had suddenly been brought defenseless into the open like an anthill cut open by a spade. The Evanses' house was not actually blown in half, but had all its windows broken and half the roof ripped away, so that only skeletal wooden beams remained. And the near wall was blackened by fire.

Peter's house, as John Brand had said, was not there.

Derek stood quite still, and stared. There was not even the ghost of a house, nothing that could be recognized: only a great pile of rubble, with a small triangular piece
of brick wall standing up at the back of it; and upturned earth that looked for all the world like their pile of clay in the field, and the blackened groping roots of a tree, and scattered chunks of paving lying in a lot of water, as if the whole jumbled mass had been dropped into a pond. In spite of the water there was a strange, strong smell of dust. Bricks and broken beams were sticking out of the hole that had been the front garden, and the cherry tree that grew in the road outside the house was leaning out half uprooted with shattered bricks all around it. And Derek saw, then, one thing that he recognized and that told him this unimaginable chaotic ruin had indeed once been the Hutchins house. He saw that the front gate was still there.

Though the low brick wall that had edged the garden had been blown out into a broken ridge of brick, the gateposts had held; they still stood there, leaning at strange angles away from one another, and from one post the gate hung half open: an entrance to nowhere. He stood there in the road looking at it, wide-eyed, appalled by the gate without knowing why. It was all wrong that it should be there; all wrong to be able to see it, or even open it, and not to be able to go through to everything that had always been there on the other side.

It was some time before he realized that there were other people in the road besides himself. Without properly looking, he glanced across at the other side. Two or three women were standing there talking, and a group of
children. Then beyond them another figure came out of a gate farther up the road and ran down toward him. It was Geoff.

He slowed abruptly as he came close, and hesitated, and then came to stand at Derek's side.

“Hallo, Derry.”

“Hallo.”

They stood there in silence, looking at the rubble.

“My dad,” Geoffrey said at last, and stopped and cleared his throat. “My dad said it must have happened awfully quick. Without them knowing.”

Derek said, “So did mine.”

He felt dull and stupid. There was nothing they could say to one another yet. They would have to learn to be friends in a new way, without Peter there as well. He said at last, “Were you all right?”

Geoffrey nodded. “Our front windows were all blown in,” he said. “But we were down in the shelter next door.”

Derek looked for the first time at the houses on the opposite side of the road, and saw that several of them were blind-eyed, with jagged-edged gaps where most of their windows had been. Slowly he realized that it must have been done by the blast from the bomb. He knew about blasts: that was one of the reasons why you were supposed to get down on the ground if you were caught outdoors in a raid, because even if a bomb fell some way away from you, it could knock you down just the same. The houses near their school had lost their windows the
same way. It had not occurred to him to consider any of the secondary effects of the bomb that had hit the Hutchins house.

He heard footsteps on the loose stones of the road and turned back again, seeing Geoff suddenly grim-faced and stiff. Another boy had come up to them and was standing there with one hand held oddly behind his back; standing nervous and irresolute, as if ready to turn back and run. It was David Wiggs, alone, with none of the White Road boys.

Derek looked at him in dull surprise. He was a long way from his own territory. Did he want to talk about fighting again?
Didn't he know?

David Wiggs said, rubbing his nose nervously on his sleeve, “I been watching for you. I got something to give you.” He brought his other hand slowly out from behind his back and held it out. “Here.”

It was Peter's gun. The long dull-shining barrel, the revolving chamber, the carved black handle; Derek had not seen them since Peter had good-naturedly tucked the gun away with his darts and Geoff's birds' eggs in the secret cupboard of their camp. And then the next day the camp had been smashed into nothing, as Pete's house was now nothing, and the gun had been taken away.

He reached out and took it and held it in both hands, running one finger up and down the barrel. It was Pete's gun. Pete was really proud of his gun. He would have to make sure he gave it to Pete. He stared down at it, unable
to look up, unable to say a word, and he heard David Wiggs shift from one foot to the other and kick unhappily at the ground. And suddenly the hard lump of misery that had been lying immovable inside Derek, and stopping him from thinking about tomorrow and the other tomorrows, seemed to explode up into his throat and fill his whole head and mind; and he gave a great sob. He tried to stop it coming again, ducking his head and holding the gun so hard that the metal bit into his fingers; but a second time the ugly, ripping sound jerked out of him. And he spun around and flung one arm toward David Wiggs in something that was half a blow and half a push, so that the boy staggered backward and almost fell on the stones; and then Derek was running, blindly, fast, stumbling to escape, not from the boy from the White Road but from the house, the house that was no longer there.

He ran up the road, through the stones and through the puddles, clutching Peter's gun, with the huge ugly sobs of his misery tearing themselves up from his chest. He ran in through the gate of his own house, through without pausing into the back garden; he scrambled through the loose planks in the back fence and lurched across the back field and the stile to the allotment land. Climbing the last fence before the Ditch with no one else to hold down the barbed wire, he slipped and gashed his leg, but it did not hurt.

Then he was down in the ruins of their shattered camp, where the splintered wooden boxes and fragments
of eggshell still lay among the trampled mounds of clay. He looked wildly around him, still jerking with the strange deep noises over which he had no control; and he put down the gun, and snatched up one of the broken pieces of wood, and began furiously scraping out a shallow hole in the side of the Ditch below the place where Peter and he had buried the small dead cat. When the hole was big enough, he picked up Pete's gun and put it inside and pushed back the damp orange-brown clay to cover it, and then stamped it all down until no one could see where the hole had been.

And the sobs that were tearing him in half eased down, so that he could breathe without gasping, and under the cold sunshine of the April day he sat down in the ruin of the camp, and put his head on his knees, and cried.

1. Derek, Geoff, and Peter regard the air raids as rather exciting. When do their feelings begin to change?
   
2. What are some of the things the boys find fascinating about the war that surrounds them?
   
3. How does the war affect everyday life in Derek's neighborhood? What sacrifices must people make?
   
4. How do the boys react to the death of their neighbor, Mrs. Jenkins? Why do they react the way they do?
   
5. Initially, there is no ill will between Derek and his friends and the kids who live on White Road; though they live very close to each other, they just do not socialize. Have you ever disliked someone or felt that someone disliked you for no real reason?
   
6. The camp Derek, Geoff, and Peter build is a wonderful, secret place of their own where they can shut out the outside world. Have you ever had a place like that? Where?
   
7. The boys meticulously construct the camp, only to have it torn down by the White Road gang. Have you ever created something that took a lot of time and energy, only to have it ruined? How did it make you feel?
   
8. What impression do Derek, Geoff, and Peter have of Tommy Hicks? Is there an older person you look up to? Why?
   
9. Why do Tommy Hicks and Johnny Wiggs dislike each other so much? How is Tommy's fight with Johnny different from other fights Derek has witnessed?
   
10. Why does Tommy feel it is important to go to war? What fate does he suspect the war holds for him?
    

S
USAN
C
OOPER
is the Newbery Award–winning author of dozens of books, including
The Boggart
and the acclaimed The Dark Is Rising series.