My Friend the Enemy (3 page)

‘Can't we stay a bit longer?' I asked, looking back at the burning wreck.

‘No.'

‘Aww, but—'

‘No buts, Peter. Home.'

Mr Bennett came a little closer to Mam. ‘Why don't you let him stay?' he said, gesturing at the other boys. ‘All his friends are here. You don't want him to be the only one.'

Mam narrowed her eyes.

‘Look,' Mr Bennett carried on. ‘Everything's safe now. The soldiers are here, the raid's over. Let him go and sit
with his friends.'

‘I don't think—'

‘Tell you what,' he said. ‘I'll take you home, and Peter can stay here a while longer. Then I'll come back and chase him home myself—'

‘You don't have to do that.'

‘Why not give him a few minutes?'

Mam's face relaxed.

‘Please?' I begged.

‘What do you say?' Mr Bennett asked.

And then Mam caved in. Not to me, but to Mr Bennett. ‘A few minutes,' she said.

Mr Bennett winked at me. ‘Go on, then, quick. Before she changes her mind.'

KIM

T
he other boys spotted me coming over, and a few of them started asking questions before I'd even got to them.

‘Is it true you saw it come down?' asked Jonathan. ‘Did you see it blow up?'

‘How close were you?' asked someone else.

‘What was it like?'

‘Did you get hurt?'

I answered their questions, half enjoying the attention, half hating it. The plane continued to burn as I told them what happened, and the air was still heavy with the smell of fuel and burning rubber. But they were distracted by the sound of a motor, and everyone turned to watch an
army fire engine making its way across the field. The driver was careful to keep the green tanker off the crops, but once he came to the scar left by the crash, he drove right out into the field and stopped not far from the wreck. The lieutenant in charge started shouting orders and then they were all rushing about, busying themselves trying to put out the fire.

Everyone was quiet for a while, watching the flames die back, until Tom Chambers, one of the boys from my class at school, said, ‘What about the parachute? I saw a parachute.'

‘Me too,' Alan Parson added, but all eyes were on Tom because he was the first to say it.

In all the excitement, I'd forgotten about it. I'd seen it just after the crash, disappearing behind the thick smoke.

‘Parachute?' asked the sergeant who was there to stop us from trying to get closer to the plane. ‘There was a parachute?' He was wearing a uniform that looked to be made of itchy wool, with puttees above his gleaming boots and a rifle over his shoulder. The three stripes on his arm looked clean and new, as if they'd just been stitched on.

‘Aye,' Tom Chambers stepped forward, pleased for the attention. ‘Aye. Maybe even two, like. Three. I don't know.'

‘Three?'

‘There was only one,' said Alan.

‘Where?' asked the sergeant.

‘Over there.' Tom pointed back across the tops of the trees, in the direction the plane had come from. ‘I saw it, I did. A long way off. Maybe over Armstrong's place.'

‘You're sure about this?'

‘Aye.'

And then all the children were nodding, even the ones who hadn't seen it. I wondered how it was that none of the soldiers had seen the parachute, but the sky
was
full of black smoke, and everybody would have been watching that, not looking for a parachute.

The sergeant told us to stay right where we were, and hurried down the hill, going straight to the man in charge. The lieutenant was tall and strong-looking, with a cap on his head and a moustache on his lip.

They spoke for a moment, the sergeant turning to point up at us, then both men climbed the hill to where we were waiting.

‘Who saw this parachute, then?' said the lieutenant when he reached the top. He stood with his hands behind his back, his right wrist resting on the flap of his holster, and he was slightly out of breath.

‘This one, lieutenant.' The sergeant pointed at Tom Chambers.

‘Is this some kind of joke? Because if it is—'

‘It's no joke, mister. I really saw it.'

‘Aye, it's true,' said Alan Parson.

The lieutenant looked around at each one of us. ‘Did anyone else see this parachute?'

I put up my hand, along with most of the other children.

‘You're sure?' asked the sergeant. ‘Because there'll be trouble if you're lying.' He leant forward and looked at each of us in turn, furrowing his brow and staring as if he
could see right into our heads and pick out the lies.

After a moment, almost everyone dropped their hand so that only three of us were still holding them up.

‘That's what I thought,' said the sergeant. ‘I know how to deal with this lot, lieutenant. It's all games to them.'

‘Thank you, sergeant,' the lieutenant said without looking at him. ‘And you boys saw it over that way?' He pointed across at the place in the sky where I'd seen the parachute.

The three of us nodded.

‘Right, then.' He turned to the sergeant. ‘Well done, Sergeant Wilkes. As you were.' And with that, he turned and marched away.

When he reached the bottom of the hill, the lieutenant shouted an order and all the men stopped what they were doing and ran over to stand in front of him. He issued instructions to the full-time soldiers and to the Home Guard, and then they started leaving the crash site, moving away in small groups until only the lieutenant remained, along with a handful of men who stayed to douse what was left of the fire.

‘Don't you worry,' said Sergeant Wilkes. ‘We'll find that Jerry in no time. We've got good men looking for him now.' He puffed himself up a bit. ‘Good men like me. It's all under control.'

‘You really think you'll catch a German, mister?' Tom Chambers asked.

‘You just watch.' The sergeant came closer to us and crouched to our level. ‘We'll get 'im, you can bet on it.'

‘What you gonna do when you get 'im, like?'

‘What do you think?' He tapped one hand on the stock of his rifle and grinned like a wolf. ‘If I see him, he doesn't stand a chance. I can put a bullet through a rabbit's eye at five hundred yards, you know.'

‘Really? That far?' Tom Chambers couldn't hide his wonder, but he probably didn't even know how far five hundred yards was.

‘Maybe even further,' said the sergeant. ‘So don't you worry, we'll give 'im what every sackless Jerry deserves. Just like we got that plane.'

Some of the boys laughed and punched fists in the air. ‘We showed 'em!'

‘We didn't show them anything,' someone mumbled beside me. ‘It crashed.'

‘What's that you said?' Sergeant Wilkes stood up quickly and looked about with a flash of anger, but everyone fell silent, some of the boys shaking their heads. The soldier waited a few seconds, scanning our faces, then he scowled and stepped back, turning to watch the men dampening the fire.

But I knew who had said it. Beside me there was a girl I didn't recognise. I hadn't noticed her before because she was sitting so quietly, just watching what was going on. She was a little taller than I was, and her hair was the blackest I'd ever seen. The only other person I knew with hair as black as that was Mrs Robertson, but she was old and everyone knew hers was dyed. The girl beside me didn't have dyed hair, though. Hers was natural, and when the evening sun caught it just right, as it did now, it looked as if it had bits of blue in it.

I didn't speak to her, I just looked at her, but she didn't seem to notice me looking. She was concentrating on what the soldiers were doing at the foot of the hill. And as she watched them, she tightened her lips, chewing the inside of her pale cheek.

‘It's a Heinkel,' she said. ‘I wonder why it was flying here.'

I glanced around, wondering if she was talking to herself or someone else.

‘I'm talking to you.' She looked sideways at me.

‘Hm? Me?'

‘Yeah, you.' She turned so her brown eyes were looking into mine. ‘You saw it crash, didn't you?'

‘Aye. Came right over the top of me. Knocked me off me feet when it blew up, it did.'

‘Lucky beggar.' Then she looked away and continued watching the soldiers as some of the villagers grew bored and started heading home, taking their children with them. A few of us stayed, though, ten or eleven of us waiting at the top of the hill on the warm grass.

I sat with my legs crossed and my elbows on my knees, casting my eyes sideways from time to time, snatching glimpses of the girl, but she didn't speak again. She just stared ahead, fascinated by the crash site, taking in every detail, not missing a thing. She even seemed to sit up a little straighter when the fire started to die down and one of the soldiers was ordered to inspect the plane.

The young soldier approached slowly, leaning his body away from the smouldering beast as if that would make any difference at all. He called back to the lieutenant that
it was too hot to get any closer, and he walked around the area, looking for anything of interest.

‘You think they're looking for bodies?' the girl asked when the soldier disappeared behind the twisted metal.

She hadn't said anything for some time and I turned to her, studying her features for a moment before she looked at me.

‘D'you think that's what they're doing?' she asked, raising her eyebrows at me.

‘I s'pose,' I said. ‘Aye. Maybe.' But really I hadn't even thought much about the people in the plane. Not until right then, when I remembered the gunner, terrified as the ground came at him.

‘As many as five men crew that thing, you know. You think they all died? Apart from the parachutist, that is.'

‘How do you know about that, like?'

‘I saw him too.'

‘No, I mean how d'you know how many people are in a plane like that?'

She shrugged. ‘Everyone knows, don't they?'

‘I don't.'

She made a noise as if she were laughing through her nose. A quick rush of air accompanied by a half-smile. ‘My dad told me.
And
my brother's a pilot.'

‘Is he?'

‘Yeah. And anyway, I've seen a hundred of those planes.'

‘Honest?'

‘Yeah.'

Down below, the soldier had completed his walk
around the wreck and was speaking to the one in charge, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. Behind me, some of the remaining children were growing restless, chattering and starting to mess about.

‘How come?' I asked. ‘Where've you seen hundreds?'

‘Well, maybe not
seen
hundreds,' she said. ‘But I've
heard
hundreds.'

I looked at her again, wondering why I'd never seen her before. She wasn't dressed like most of the girls I knew. Most of
them
wore dresses or shirts and pinafores, but this girl was dressed more like I was. As if she were a boy. She was wearing a pair of shorts that came to her knees and a blue shirt, open at the neck. She had grey socks, one pulled up and the other ruffled close to her ankle. The only real difference between the way we were dressed was that I was wearing a pair of old wellies and she was wearing shoes. I had some shoes at home, but I wasn't allowed to wear them. Mam was saving them for best, even though they had holes in them. She got them from Mrs Drake because her son, Matthew, was a few years older than me and had grown out of them. Mam swapped them for some old dress material, then she cut out some stiff card and pushed it into the bottom of the shoes to cover the holes. It wouldn't keep the water out if it rained, she said, but they'd be good enough for best. In the meantime I could wear my wellies, and when they got holes in them, we'd mend them. I'd given my bike up for the collection, to be turned into bullets or guns or something, but we'd kept the inner tubes and they were perfect for repairing wellington boots.

Mind you, she might have been dressed like me, but she definitely didn't sound like me. She didn't have the same accent – the same one everyone I knew had. She sounded more like the voices I heard on the wireless, or maybe like Mr Bennett. She made the words seem bigger somehow. More important. The way she said them made her sound clever, and I liked that a lot. It made me think she was special.

‘I used to lie in bed and hear them go over,' she said. ‘Last year, it was like they were coming every night. And then Big Bertha would start up. That's the gun. At least, my mum and dad always call it Big Bertha.'

No one I knew said ‘mum'.

‘Isn't your da' fightin' the war?' I asked. ‘Mine is.'

‘My brother is – he's in the RAF – but my dad's a doctor at the hospital in Newcastle. He wasn't allowed to go to war because he's too important.'

‘Oh.'

‘And, of course, then I'd hear the bombs. After the planes, I mean. It's much quieter here. This is the most excitement I've seen since I got here.'

I stared at her, the activity at the foot of the hill almost forgotten.

‘I'm from Newcastle,' she said, ‘in case you hadn't guessed.'

‘An evacuee?'

‘Kind of. I came here to stay with my aunt because Dad thought I'd be safer, but really I'm just bored. Nothing ever happens here at all, does it? Until now, anyway.' She brushed a wisp of hair from her face and looked at me.
‘Well? Are you going to say something?'

‘Er. Aye. I'm Peter.'

‘I'm Kim.' She put out her hand and I thought that was very strange. No girl had ever done that before. Even so, I put out my own and we shook. Her hand was very soft and warm and a little bit sweaty in the palm.

I watched her face, seeing the way her nose turned up slightly at the end. It made her look a bit like a drawing I'd seen in a book about Peter Pan.

She seemed to be studying me, too, then she raised her eyebrows and looked down at our hands joined together. It was as if something clicked into place, reminding us where we were, and I took my hand back, looking around to see if anyone was watching.