Blitz Next Door (5 page)

Trespassing
. Pete decided
that
felt like a mean word to use about an old lady who seemed so lost. OK, so if he found one of those big lads from the canal path mooching about in the garden, he’d say
he
was trespassing. Though not to his face. And threatening. But that tiny old lady? She’d spooked him. A little. But Pete didn’t feel
threatened
by her. And how did Mum even know she
was
trespassing? Maybe she lived nearby. Or maybe she used to… Maybe she was visiting…

Pete was in the shelter. Taking shelter. Ever since Dad had arrived back from the hospital, Mum had been snarking about the time he’d spent away from the house on the one day he’d promised to be around as much as he could.

“Happy to play the big daddy with someone else’s family. What about your own, Steve?”

Ouch. Pete was glad Dunny had left to check out Wee Stookie’s new stookie. It was horrible hearing and seeing Mum like this, so worn out and ragged, she sounded mean.

Too mean for Pete.

He slumped on one of the benches and flicked Dad’s torch on and off, letting the thin yellow beam play over the whitewashed walls. When it found the rhyme
he had read earlier with Dunny, Pete held the light over that date:

13
^th
March 1941

Pete fixed his eyes on it until the writing swam out of focus. This made his lids feel heavy. He let his head rest against the cool wall behind him and tilted his face to the spot where a shaft of sunlight stole through a gap in the roof. As its heat bathed him, Pete’s grip on the torch loosened and his mind sank down into the twists and turns of a stolen half-dream.

He was travelling at first. Fast. Along the motorway from London to Glasgow. Faster than he liked. Strange things that the un-dreaming part of his brain knew shouldn’t be there dotted the hard shoulder. A stall, for instance, selling off all his football figures, two of them mini Simon and Alfies in England strips. Pete passed a Wee Stookie-sized version of himself breaking his heart, begging Mum to be allowed to keep the figures if he stored them out of the house. Mum, eating a banana, ignored him while the actual Wee Stookie bounced up and down behind her. His hair had grown long and fair and he wore it in two plaits that kept flicking out at Pete like switching tails, catching him in the eye.

Pete tried to open his mouth to make his dreaming self beg Dad to stop the car so he could buy his figures back. But not only did his lips feel superglued shut, he couldn’t seem to catch Dad’s attention over the soaring screech of a siren that started up from nowhere.

“Dad, what’s wrong?” Pete’s dream-head was urging, but Dad wasn’t listening, just driving.

“Stop the car.”

Pete knew he was struggling to move, but sleepiness pinned his heavy limbs to the bench like a magnet. And the siren continued to blast his eardrums.

In his dream-state, Pete was afraid. Afraid of the noise. Afraid of the danger the siren was warning him about.

This is a dream
, Pete’s non-dreaming self came through to remind him.
Don’t worry. You’re going to wake up soon
.

“OK.”

Even though he was asleep, Pete knew he had said this word aloud. He heard it in his head despite the siren, and understood he was in the shelter now, no longer travelling. No longer with Dad. Although Pete sensed he wasn’t alone. His “OK” hadn’t bounced off empty walls. It had been absorbed by clothing and the people who wore it. Pete could feel them around him even though his eyes were closed. Smell them too: wool, scent, tobacco, the same sharp nip of ammonia he recognised from Jenny’s nappy when it needed changed. He could sense tension in the way these people he couldn’t see shifted and winced and made the bench creak as the siren wailed and wailed above them.

And then the siren stopped. The silence which followed was almost as unbearable as the noise it replaced. Very close by, Pete heard a baby whimper. Someone opposite him was muttering a prayer –
Our Father who art in heaven
– another voice joining in. Then another, as a tremor rippled the bench and grew into a powerful vibration. Pete heard planes droning overhead, drowning out the prayer, and knew they
were flying far lower than they should if they were harmless. Something bad was about to happen, Pete realised, and he tried to brace himself just as he sensed all those around him were bracing themselves too. The baby bleating. A girl breathing in and out far too fast…

Then there was a great bang. Pete jumped to his feet, wide awake. The torch clattered to the floor, the light snapping out as it fell.

Heart racing, Pete groped the floor till he found it. Flicked it on. Swung it around the walls. No one there.
Because I was dreaming
, Pete reassured himself, just as the torch beam found the verse he’d read with Dunny.

Pete gasped. There were new lines added to the bottom of the verse.

Same writing
, decided Pete, although the pencil looked as if it had trembled over every letter.

“
When you are here and I am far away
,”

Pete whispered the words aloud as he read them.

“
Think me back and I will make my thoughts

fly home
,

To be there with you
.”

This message was signed:

For Mummy and Daddy, with love from Beth

“Hiya!”

The hairs on Pete’s neck were already bristling. So when Wee Stookie bobbed up out of nowhere at Pete’s elbow he nearly shot out of his skin.

“Sign my stookie. Dunny drew a big bum pooing.” Wee Stookie thrust a full-arm plaster under Pete’s nose. “Cracked in three places under here. Saw the X-ray. Made mum puke. The doctor wrote this.” Wee Stookie was pointing out the letters L.O.L. written in green marker. “But you can write something rude if you want.”

“Look at all these kisses.” Pete was supporting Wee Stookie’s arm, trying to find a space on it to write.

“Nurses,” Wee Stookie puffed out his chest, “cos I was very, very, very brave. But this wasn’t a nurse.”

When Wee Stookie tapped the drawing across his plastered knuckle, Pete nearly dropped his broken arm. It was a cartoon of a boy caught in mid-air on a trampoline, just about to bounce off. It was brilliant, catching not only the animation – legs splayed, arm flying, out of control – but the perfect likeness of Wee Stookie, right down to his freckles and his dirty knees.

“Who did this?” Pete asked, although he already knew before Wee Stookie stuck his nose in the air and pretended to flick a pigtail over his shoulder.

“Your sister.” Wee Stookie took a biro from behind his ear and gave it to Pete. “You not hear her outside a minute ago? Says she couldn’t sign my plaster because ‘silly’ –” Wee Stookie was pointing and nodding at Pete, “– made her drop her pencil. You going to write something rude or not, ‘
silly
’?”

“Watch it.” Pete hovered the pen over Wee Stookie’s arm, his mind not really on the task in hand.

“
She
did that too,” Wee Stookie tutted. “Like she forgot how to write.”

“I’m thinking,” Pete said.

“She said that too. You going to say you’ve never seen one of
these
before next?” Wee Stookie stared at his biro, eyes wide and his mouth wider. “She’s weird her. So you and her not speaking?” Wee Stookie was pointing towards the bomb crater. He giggled. “She took one look in the den and stormed off. Anyway,” Wee Stookie lifted his arm up to Pete as high as he could manage, “
write
!”

Pete scribbled on the plaster. “There.” He handed back the pen.

“What’s that even say? I can’t read yet, you know.” Wee Stookie huffed.

“
BREAK A LEG. L.O.L
.” Pete traced the letters with his finger.

“
Break a leg
? How’s that rude? It’s not even funny!” Wee Stookie, with a long puff of disappointment, had stomped out of the shelter and was squeezing backwards through a bush into his own garden, so only his head was visible as he spoke. It was disappearing too, like the Cheshire Cat.

“I wrote L.O.L.” Pete was feeling a bit pathetic. “You
know what
that
means.”

“‘
Lots of love
’,” Wee Stookie said, in a very high voice from the other side of the hedge. “
So your sister thinks
. She’s the
silly
, not knowing it means ‘Laugh Out Loud’ like even
I
know. And why does she wear a big
kilt
like a man?”

“How should
I
know? She’s not my sister,” Pete shouted after him.

“Who’s not?” The older, larger version of Wee Stookie was appearing through the same bush, face first. Without answering, Pete tugged Dunny into the shelter.

“She’s been back.”

“Hmmm…” Dunny examined the new lines Beth had written. “Bit soppy syrup:
Think me back
… Fancy a bounce?”

Hearing Dunny’s reaction, Pete was glad he hadn’t admitted the lines had brought the smallest of lumps to his throat.

He let Dunny push through the hedge first. “D’you not think it’s spooky,” Pete said, “how she keeps appearing? When we know her house was bombed and she might have been—?”

“Nah, millions of weird things happened round here cos of the Blitz,” Dunny interrupted before Pete could mention the voices from the room that wasn’t there. He started to bounce, his voice choppy. “My Granny’s twin brothers ran back into their close to look for her teddy the first night of the bombing. Their mum had to stand and watch with my granny in her arms screaming for them to come back.”

Dunny brought his bouncing to a stop with a knee
bend.

“‘The bairn needs her teddy, Ma. We’ll be two tics.’ That’s what one of them said.” Dunny had turned his head from Pete. “My granny always said she felt the twins watching over her, like guardian angels. And see last year, just before she died, and she was really sick?” Dunny sounded as if something was stuck in his throat. “Granny told my mum they were sitting on either side of her bed waiting for her. Michael and Patrick, my great uncles. It’s their anniversary too.”

Dunny began to bounce again, deep and slow. “See us Bankies? We’ve hundreds of stories like that –” he shrugged, “– specially round this time of year.” He beckoned Pete up on the trampoline. “And you thought the Blitz was just London…”

Dunny’s bounce shot Pete up into the air.

“London.”

The next one shot him higher.

“
Landon town
.”

Pete could see all the way into his garden, from the boundary hedge to his house.

“Wheeeee!”

And there was that old woman. On the edge of the crater again.

“Whoa, Dunny!”

“Whassup, Nigel, getting a nosebleed?”

“No, bounce me higher! That woman’s there.”

“Dunny obliged, then bounced himself up to the same height as Pete.

“Aye, so she is, Nigel. And I’m a spaceman on a mission to Mars.”

Ten, twelve mighty leaps later Pete had to admit his mind might have been playing tricks.

“New Bankie-boy spooks, that’s all,” Dunny said. They were lying on the trampoline now, catching their breath, watching the clouds, the birds.

“Can’t imagine what it must have been like, this place, right here, being bombed.”
So peaceful now
, Pete was thinking.

“Or kids our age being evacuated,” Dunny said. “Sent to families who didn’t want you. Starved you. That happened, by the way. For real. We did a project. My teacher said some of the poorer kids were so filthy, they hoached out the houses they went to stay in. Scabies. Nits. Pee-the-beds. My mum couldn’t hack that. She’d stick you in the garage on a bin bag to sleep. Spray you with disinfectant first.”

Dunny was chuckling, beginning to bounce again on his back, picking up enough momentum to throw himself upright.

Pete didn’t feel like bouncing any more.

“See ya.”

He jumped off the trampoline, thinking about Beth Winters and the voices he’d heard. The girl he’d heard crying had said something about not wanting to leave her mum. Wasn’t there a mention of leaving on the shelter wall too?

When you are here and I am far away
…

Could the voice he’d heard have been Beth Winters? Could she have been an evacuee? Pete was deep in thought as he made his way back through his own garden. Or was she another victim of the Clydebank Blitz?

Pete knew he had to find out, and he realised that he knew where to begin.

With Dad’s El Honcho, Mr Milligan: a living link to the story of Beth Winters.

Mum and Dad didn’t even notice Pete slipping into the sitting room. They were squared up to each other across a coffee table they were shifting, hissing into each other’s faces.

“No, Steve.” Mum dumped her end down. “You just tell him straight: ‘Jamie, I’m not working overtime.’”

“It’s not as simple as that, Jo. I’ve been out of work so long, needing the money…”

“It
is
that simple. You tell smoothie boss: ‘My wife’s stuck at home knowing nobody with a baby that’s driving her doolally.’ Better idea:
I’ll
tell him. Minute he purrs round.”

“So is Mr Milligan coming over?” As soon as Pete interrupted he knew he shouldn’t have bothered. The look Mum shot Dad, and the unspoken reproach it held –
He’d better not be; there’s curtains to hang
– sent Pete slinking out the room.

“Won’t be long, champ,” Dad called after him. “Mum and I just having a chat.”

“More like ding-ding: Round One,” Pete whispered under his breath.

He sank down on his bed, put his hands over his face, sliding them round to his ears when he realised he could still hear Mum’s voice. Shrill. Close to tears: “Have you any idea how it feels to be so tired, Steve?
Day in, day out. Don’t answer that: you don’t.”

Pete could hear the low rumble of Dad’s voice too. Pete knew he would be trying to say the right thing, and wished he could interrupt his parents with something so interesting or funny that they would both forget their argument. Maybe even start laughing. But he knew if he tried to catch their attention right now, he’d only wind them up. Make things worse. Better to keep out the way.

Pete was just reaching for his guitar when the wall connecting his bedroom to fresh air next door shuddered as though someone had kicked it or shoved something hard against it.

“Mummy!” yelled a girl’s voice, clear and impatient. “The trunk’s not in the wardrobe. I’ll try the cubby hole.”

Through the wall, Pete heard the squeak of a door opening. Footsteps passed into the corridor that wasn’t there in the house that wasn’t there. Beth Winters’ footsteps, Pete presumed. Scuffy. Light.

Where’s she going?
Pete left his own room, ran along his own corridor and downstairs. He could hear Beth – it had to be Beth – humming a tune as she descended. When her hand brushed the wall, Pete shivered as though her fingertips had tripped along the hairs on his arm. He felt sure that only a thin layer of lathe and plaster separated them.

But it’s impossible
. Pete was at the bottom of the stairs now.
What am I doing?
He paused, almost relieved he couldn’t hear Beth any more. No more footsteps. No more humming. Only Dad.

“Jo, we’re going round in circles. You’d rather be
broke in London? Moved back in with your mother and her bloody cats? Away you go.”

Underneath Pete’s staircase he felt the vibration of a faint thud followed by the clatter and graze of objects being flung around.

Beth must have gone into her cupboard under the stairs
. On balance Pete decided he’d prefer to track a girl who shouldn’t be there to hearing the misery of his parents slugging out Round Two.

When Pete had gone exploring the house with Jenny, he hadn’t taken more than a peek inside the cupboard under his own stairs. Now he was surprised how large and deep it was. Almost as deep as the shelter, though it was only ceiling height at the entrance. Once Pete was a couple of strides further inside, and before he let the door swing shut, he could see the headroom shrank a stair-size at a time until there was only crawling space at the back.

Apart from a few candle stumps and old paint tins near the entrance, it was empty. The bulb swinging over the door didn’t work when Pete tried the switch, so he could barely see to the far end. It was pitch black in there; nothing but the bumpings and scrapings from the cupboard through the wall echoing through it.

Halfway inside his own cupboard, Pete was already stooping, no more borrowed light from the hall to help him see what lay ahead. There was a chill draught blowing up the legs of his jeans through the floorboards. In case he bumped his head on the low ceiling Pete dropped to his knees, groping his way forward. He could still hear objects being flung and dragged and pushed about through the wall parallel
to where he was crawling.
What’s she doing?
Pete turned on all fours to face the adjoining wall, thinking he would put his head against his side to hear more clearly.

But Pete hadn’t reckoned on cobwebs –
Arghhhh!
– or things that felt like cobwebs catching his face. Pete yelped. He thrashed in the dark, swiping his hands through his hair, clawing at his eyes.

“Geroff. Go away!”

His voice sounded like someone else’s: hollow and muffled as the notes of his panic sang from the dense dark stone and the thick wooden stair treads around him.

“Horrible. Yug. In my mouth.” Pete was too busy flailing and spluttering to notice that the noises through the wall had paused, until he heard a voice break through his own rapid breathing.

A girl’s voice: “Jamie? Is that you?”