Come the Hour (11 page)

They got off the bus at the end of a long, grey street and walked to Arthur’s house. The front doors of the houses opened directly on to the street. Here and there, women in flowered aprons sat on stools or hard chairs on the pavement, chattering, laughing, fanning themselves with bits of paper. There seemed to be children everywhere, some of them, he saw with surprise, hardly more than babies. No cars, he saw; not even a bicycle. The children seemed to be alone.

‘Where are their mothers?’ he asked.

‘Inside,’ Arthur said, ‘doing their housework or baking or something. The older kids look after the little ones, and there’s always an adult about somewhere. It’s very neighbourly.’

They arrived at Arthur’s house and he opened the door. ‘My mam’ll be in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘Come through.’

They walked down a short narrow hallway to the kitchen at the back. Arthur’s mother was making bread. She wiped her floury arms on her apron and shook Charlie’s hand. ‘Pleased to met you, Charlie,’ she said, smiling broadly. ‘I expect you’d like a cup of tea.’

‘Thank you,’ Charlie said. ‘I’d love one.’

‘Sit down then.’ She bustled about, pouring water into a teapot from a black iron kettle on the range. ‘Have a piece of currant pastry,’ she said. ‘I’ve just made it.’

‘Thank you,’ Charlie said again. They sat down at the kitchen table. Charlie took a bite of the currant pastry, aware that Arthur was watching him. It melted in his mouth, crumbly and sweet. ‘That’s the best pastry I’ve ever had,’ he said.

Arthur’s mother smiled delightedly. ‘Good lad. Always had a good hand with pastry. Have some more.’

Arthur laughed. ‘You’ve made a good impression, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Praise my mam’s pastry and you’re a friend for life.’

When they had finished, Arthur took him up to his room. It was simply furnished, brown lino on the floor and a rag rug by the bed. There was an iron bedstead with spotless white sheets and in the corner, a washstand with a large jug and a bowl.

Arthur picked up the jug. ‘I’ll get you some hot water,’ he said. He looked about him. ‘Not what you’re used to, I expect,’ he said.

‘It’s grand,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll be very comfortable.’

‘The lavatory is out in the yard,’ Arthur said, ‘and there is a bath in one of the bedrooms. My dad put it in, in one of his flush periods. I’ll be back in a minute.’

Charlie sat down on the bed, looking about him at the gleaming lino and the sparkling window. This, he thought, must be the cleanest house he’d ever seen.

Arthur came back with the water. ‘Arthur,’ Charlie said, ‘I’m very grateful for this. It’s very kind of your parents to have me. If there’s anything I can do.…’

‘If you mean money,’ Arthur said, ‘forget it. My dad’s in work, and my mother would be upset.’ Charlie nodded and coloured a little. ‘Come down when you’re ready,’ Arthur said, ‘and I’ll show you round.’

Charlie washed his hands and face, and brushed his hair and went downstairs.

‘We’ll go and have a walk round,’ Arthur said. ‘Show you the sights.’

They walked down one long, grey street after another. The doorsteps, Charlie noticed, looked scrubbed clean, many of them edged with a neat white band.

‘White stone,’ Arthur said. ‘The women put it round the steps after they’ve scrubbed them. ‘Makes it look neat.’ He gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘They often scrub their bit of the pavement as well,’ he said. ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness, you know.’ He paused for a moment. ‘It’s the only way most of them have of keeping their dignity.’

They walked on. ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ Charlie asked.

‘My sister’s married and my brother’s just joined the army,’ Arthur said. ‘Just in time to get his head blown off.’ He smiled. ‘You’ll meet my father tonight. You’ll have to be prepared for my father. He’s Labour to the bone. You’ll be getting a party political lecture probably.’

A group of children ran shrieking along the street, many of them, Charlie noticed, in ill-fitting old clothes, and some of them without shoes. ‘Look at them,’ Arthur said. ‘It’s a disgrace.’

‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘It is.’ He was aware of a deep shame.

They came to a small municipal park, some green lawns, sparsely planted flower-beds and a tree or two.

‘Here we have the only breathing space,’ Arthur said with heavy sarcasm, ‘for the workers to relax. But can the children play here? No.’ He pointed to the signs: KEEP OFF THE GRASS. ‘And there’s a park keeper employed to make sure that they do. Can’t have the workers’ children running about on the grass or climbing the trees, can we? They might get above themselves.’

Charlie felt the isolation of the place. This empty park seemed to encapsulate the whole poverty-stricken desolation of it all. Instead of being a place of peace and beauty and colour and childhood joy, it seemed only to be an open wound in this grey place, a sop, grudging and ugly. It seemed significant to him that there was no one there. He thought of the Round Pond at home in Kensington Gardens, of the children with their mothers or their nannies sailing their little boats, riding their little tricycles, running on the grass. Truly a different world. And still the women cleaned and baked and strove to keep up standards, and the children laughed and played with whatever scraps they could find. It shouldn’t be like this, he thought. It shouldn’t be like this.

‘We’d better get back and do some work,’ Arthur said. ‘That’s what you’ve come for, isn’t it? We’ll start with Bernoulli’s theorem and the theory of flight, construction and function of controls, and then we’ll do the engine. I’ve got an old motorcycle engine in the yard that we can take to pieces. Give you some idea.’

‘I’m very grateful, Arthur,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ve got to get into the RAF.’

‘Oh, you’ll get in,’ Arthur said. ‘That’s what the university squadrons were for. They’ll bite your hand off.’ He kicked a stone and it went bouncing down the street. ‘They’ll go through pilots like a hot knife through butter.’

Charlie glanced at him, wondering if he meant what he said. ‘You sound very pessimistic.’

‘Realistic, Charlie. But knowledge is strength, so they say. So we’ll give you a bit extra.’

Arthur’s father came home from work in the evening. He was short and stocky, his hair cut very short. He shook Charlie’s hand vigorously. Arthur’s mother produced a large meat-and-potato pie and peas. She gave a smaller one to Arthur. ‘Just go and give this to Mrs
Green,’ she said. ‘She’s the old lady next door,’ she said to Charlie. ‘She hasn’t got much.’

They sat at the kitchen table and Arthur’s mother gave them each an enormous piece of pie. Charlie was suddenly very hungry. The scents of meat and potatoes and gravy and Mrs Blake’s excellent pastry rose up.

‘So you’re going to join up, Charlie?’ Mr Blake said. ‘Going to be a flyer.’

Charlie nodded. ‘If I can get in. Arthur’s giving me some tips.’

‘Your parents are doctors, are they?’

‘Yes, both of them. They were in France in the last war.’

‘War,’ Mr Blake said. ‘There’s one thing if it happens – everybody will have jobs, even if it’s only killing Germans.’

‘That’s a horrible thought,’ Charlie said.

‘Aye, it’s a horrible world, Charlie. Look at the state we’re in. I’m lucky, I’ve got a job, but thousands haven’t. Look at the old lady next door. Wouldn’t get enough to eat if the neighbours didn’t help. And on this other side of us,’ he pointed with his fork, ‘eight children and out of work. Do you know what goes on?’

Arthur caught Charlie’s eye and smiled, but his eyes were dark and thoughtful.

‘The means test people come round,’ Mr Blake went on, ‘to see if there’s anything they can be forced to sell to reduce the dole. They ask if the baby’s breast fed, and if it is they knock off two shillings a week. Hundreds of boys try to get into the army to get fed, and a few years ago sixty-six per cent were rejected on medical grounds. Medical grounds! Starvation, more like.’

‘I think Charlie’s had enough of that, William,’ Mrs Blake said.

‘It’s all right,’ Charlie said. ’My parents feel the same and so do I. There has to be a better way. I was in Berlin a few months ago. There didn’t seem to be much poverty, but I suppose I wouldn’t have been shown that. They seem very prosperous, but there’s something wrong there, something nasty.’

‘I know,’ Mr Blake said. He held his knife and fork upright on the table. ‘The British aren’t like that. We don’t go in for extremes. We’ll never be communist and Mosley and his blackshirts just make us
laugh. But we want justice, and by God, after this war is over we’ll get it, or we’ll know the reason why.’

‘Well, there’s Arthur,’ Mrs Blake said quietly. ‘And boys and girls like him. They’re going to change things.’

Mr Blake looked at his son, his face filled with pride and affection. ‘That he will,’ he said. ‘Clever. First person in the family to go to university, and Cambridge at that. He’ll change things.’ Charlie glanced at Arthur’s mother and saw her face fall and twist, love and pride replaced by raw, terrible fear.

Tessa arrived in the casualty department and was introduced by her father.

‘We haven’t much in at the moment,’ the casualty officer said. ‘A lady with a broken wrist – classic Colles fracture, fall on the outstretched hand. You can help me put on a back slab.’ He showed her the X-ray.

‘I’ve only just finished first year,’ Tessa said, ‘so I don’t know anything really. But I would like to be of some use if there’s a war.’

‘You’re at Cambridge,’ Dan said. ‘You won’t have to do anything except get on with your work. No one would be depraved enough to bomb those irreplaceable old buildings.’ Why are we talking about this, he thought, as if it’s real?

‘You don’t know that, Dad,’ she said, ‘and I’ll be at home in the vacations.’

‘No,’ was Dan’s first thought. ‘Not Tessa. Not both of them. She was just starting her life. Did it have to start like this? He thought of those girls in 1914, the things they had done, things they could never have imagined in those pre-war years; Amy had been there beside him, operating on the endless streams of men with ghastly wounds. He thought of the gently raised girls nursing in France, driving ambulances, carrying messages on motorbikes through the soaked and shell-rutted lanes, of the horror and the carnage. Did Tessa have to see that? He glanced at her. She seemed so calm. He comforted himself with the fact that she was only in the pre-clinical part of her training. She would be in Cambridge for the next two years. He would not even think of what might happen if the Germans invaded.

‘I think we’ll start with the basics,’ the casualty officer said cheerfully. ‘Controlling haemorrhage. How much anatomy have you done?’

‘Only the arm and the leg,’ she said, ‘and a bit of head and neck.’

He smiled. ‘That’s a good start. ‘You’ll have a good idea where most of the major arteries are.’

Sara went to tea with Kathy again. They sat in the garden in the sunshine, drinking Kathy’s mother’s home-made lemonade.

‘My mother says she’s going to send me away if there’s a war,’ Kathy said, ‘so I won’t get bombed.’

Sara stared at her, round-eyed. ‘Away where?’

‘I’ve got an aunty in the country,’ Kathy said, ‘in Kent. My mum says there won’t be any bombs there.’

Sara felt a moment of panic. ‘But what about school?’

‘My mum says that doesn’t matter – I can go to school there. She just wants me out of London.’

Sara was shocked. She had never even thought of this possibility, that she might be sent away, deprived of her school when she had only just started, of everything she wanted to do. ‘Well, I’m not going,’ she said, ‘whatever they do.’

‘You might have to,’ Kathy said. ‘They might make you. I could ask my mum if you could come with me to Kent. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’

Sara went home on the bus, deeply upset. ‘Mum,’ she said, as soon as she stepped into the house, ‘You won’t send me away, will you?’

Nora looked puzzled. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Kathy says her mother is going to send her away if there’s a war. You won’t send me away, will you?’

Nora paled. ‘I don’t know yet, dear,’ she said. ‘It depends what happens.’ She looked at Sara for a few moments. There was no use any more in pretending that nothing was happening. The child seemed to have grown up suddenly, her face set and resolute.

‘I’m not going,’ Sara said. ‘I’m not leaving home and I’m not leaving school.’

‘I just want you to be safe,’ Nora said. ‘If the government thinks the children ought to be sent out of London, you’ll have to go. They know
more than we do. I won’t have you being in danger. I couldn’t live with that.’

Sara went up to her room. She laid her books out in an orderly row on her little table. For the first time, she felt frightened, not of a war or anything the Germans could do, but of the possibility that she would have to leave her school, be prevented from doing her studies, from getting to university. ‘I’m not going,’ she said out loud. ‘They can’t make me.’

‘C
ould I speak to you for a moment, Doctor?’ Mrs Parks looked stressed, Amy thought. Of course she did – everyone was stressed.

‘Of course you can, Edith,’ Amy said. ‘Come into the kitchen and we’ll have a cup of tea.’ They sat down at the kitchen table.

‘It’s my daughter,’ Mrs Parks began. ‘She’s so worried about a war. She’s writing to me nearly every day.’

‘I know,’ Amy said. ‘We all are, Edith, aren’t we? What can I do to help?’

‘She says her husband will be called up for sure. He’s only
twenty-seven
and he works in a chair factory in High Wycombe. That’s not a reserved occupation. He’d have to go for certain.’

Amy thought she knew what was coming. ‘I’m so sorry, Edith,’ she said. ‘It’s a dreadful time.’

‘She wants me to go and live with her if war breaks out,’ Mrs Parks said. ‘She says she can’t manage the children on her own, especially with the baby.’

‘I understand,’ Amy said. ‘Of course she can’t.’

‘She says she might have to get a job. She won’t be able to manage on army pay.’

Oh God, Amy thought, every little thing, every life disrupted and spoiled and possibly ended. And for what? Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh Edith,’ she said. ‘It’s all so awful. How can anyone even contemplate it? Hitler must be mad.’ Mrs Parks reached out and took her hand. For a few moments they sat in silence, hands joined, both mothers, both afraid.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Mrs Parks said. ‘I don’t want to leave you at a time like this. I’ve been really happy here, helping you, watching the children grow up. They’ve been good years.’

Amy wiped her eyes with her fingertips. ‘I know, Edith. We’ll miss you terribly, but you have to look after your own family.’ She paused. ‘Charlie says he’s joining the air force if it happens. He’s been learning to fly at Cambridge.’

‘Oh. Little Charlie. It doesn’t seem five minutes since …’ Mrs Parks closed her eyes for a moment. ‘It hardly seems possible. All the children. I wish she hadn’t had another baby. What a world to bring a baby into.’

‘They’ll be all right,’ Amy said. ‘You’ll all be in the country. They won’t be bombing there.’

‘But suppose they get here – those Germans? They seem to go anywhere they want.’

‘They won’t.’ Amy said firmly. ‘We just have to believe they won’t. We haven’t been invaded since 1066 and we’re certainly not going to let it happen now.’

‘I lost my husband at the very end of the last war,’ Mrs Parks said. ‘Almost on the last day. All for nothing. My daughter never had a father. And now my grandchildren …’ Amy could find no words to comfort her. ‘What would you do, Doctor? How would you manage?’

‘Don’t you worry, Edith,’ Amy said. ‘I’d have to find someone else. I’d miss you more than I can say, but I’ll find someone.’

Mrs Parks got up. ‘Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe I won’t have to go. We’d better get those blackout curtains made, though, just in case. I believe they’ve still got some stuff at John Lewis’s. And we should lay in some candles and matches and some torch batteries.’ She sighed. ‘I’d better go and finish the dusting.’

Amy sat on for a few moments. She rubbed her brow with her fingertips. Edith was the kingpin of the house; she’d been a fine housekeeper and a reliable friend for ten years. She would have to find someone else who perhaps would live in, in Edith’s little flat at the top of the house. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to work, and God only knew how bad it might get, how much and how many doctors might be needed.

The days wore on through August. Dan went off to work each day, Amy did her surgeries and clinics and visited her patients with a kind of mechanical efficiency. The atmosphere was extraordinary, tension and apprehension were everywhere. Some of the mothers in her clinics were close to panic. ‘What will we do? We’ll have to send the children away, to the country, Canada, Australia, anywhere away from here. Will we ever see them again?’ She could share the pictures that were in their heads, the pictures that had been in the papers of dying men and women and children in Spain after the German bombing. She thought of the Jewish children, sent alone to England by their agonized parents to escape the horrors of Germany. Surely it couldn’t happen here?

Not knowing was the worst thing, she thought. If you knew what was going to happen, you could prepare yourself; prepare your mind and your actions. Otherwise imagination could run riot. She saw the physical preparations all around her – trenches dug for air-raid shelters in the parks, barrage balloons tethered, ready to be raised, shops running out of heavy black fabric for blackout curtains and sticky tape for the windows to stop flying glass. There were already men in the streets with bells and rattles and tin hats, ready to give the alarm if there was poison gas. That frightened her the most. She remembered all too clearly the men in the last war, gassed horribly in the trenches. Surely to God they wouldn’t do that to the children? The country seemed to be moving steadily to an inevitable and terrifying future.

The twins seemed to be extraordinarily cheerful, Charlie now as obsessed with flying as Tessa was with medicine. Of course they saw the danger; they must. But they were so full of life, of optimism, of the absolute youthful certainty that life would go on for ever. They put me to shame, she thought. I must be as they are. I must forget the last war. This is a new challenge. It will not be the same. But why? Why, twice in one lifetime?

‘We’re going out on Friday night,’ Charlie said one day. ‘We’re going to the Café de Paris. It’s Rob’s birthday.’

They came downstairs that evening, looking so young and so happy
and so handsome that Amy’s heart turned over; Charlie was in a dinner jacket and Tessa in her blue evening dress, silky, bias cut, clingy around the hips and swirling out below. They are beautiful, she thought, as all young people are – beautiful in their promise, not children any more, and not quite adults either – somewhere in between. How was that bridge to be made? Gently, with time, or a bitter wrench from one to the other?

‘You both look lovely,’ Amy said. ‘Have a good time.’

‘Oh, we will.’ Tessa kissed her cheek. ‘Don’t worry, if they drop a bomb on us, we’ll be all right – the C de P is underground.’

Amy paled. ‘Don’t joke, darling.’

Tessa grinned. ‘What else can you do? Come on, Charlie. The taxi’s waiting.’

They arrived at the Café de Paris and walked down the long steep staircase to the small dance floor with the tables around it. The band was playing a version of
Moonlight Serenade
. Their friends were waiting. ‘Good band,’ Rob said.

‘I love Glen Miller,’ Tessa said. ‘Cheers you up like mad.’

Rob grimaced. ‘We could do with cheering up. I hope I actually live to see my next birthday.’

‘None of that,’ Charlie said. ‘Of course you will. You can come and live here, underground, like a mole. Spend the whole war safely tucked away in the C de P.’

Rob laughed. ‘Hope they’ve got enough champagne to last.’

‘Well they’ve got enough for tonight,’ Charlie said. ‘Let’s dance. Eat, drink and be merry.’

‘Shut up, Charlie.’ Tessa said. ‘Don’t finish it.’

Amy and Dan sat over their coffee in the sitting room. Dan looked grey and drawn. He looks older, Amy thought. Weary.

‘What’s happened, darling?’ she said. ‘Something new?’

‘We’ve been ordered to clear all beds of chronic cases,’ he said, ’move them out of London. They want those fifty thousand beds for civilian casualties, just for a start, and God knows if that will be enough. Some people seem to think we’ll need hundreds of thousands. They’re putting huts up in the hospital grounds to make more wards.
It doesn’t bear thinking about.’ He took Amy’s hand and drew her close. ‘Do you want to leave London, darling? You could go to your father in Kent. He’ll be safe there, in the country. I’d feel better if you did.’

‘Not on your life,’ she said. ‘I’m staying here. I’ll be needed, and anyway I think we should stay together. I’m not leaving you, whatever happens. We’ve got to be here, always, for the children – when they come home.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I thought you would say that.’

She looked up at him. ‘Do you think I should go back to surgery? I could do some retraining.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘If it happens, this time it’ll be a civilian’s war as well. We’ll need the family doctors. The common things will still go on – people will have babies, the kids will still get sticky ears and measles and chickenpox. They’ll all have to be looked after even more.’

She leant against his shoulder, solid and comforting. ‘The Ministry’s survey of London GPs is in,’ she said, ‘about whether we’d work under emergency conditions. Ninety per cent of them say they would stay. I’m not going to be among the bolters.’

He kissed the top of her head. ‘We’ll do it together then, like we did before.’

Charlie came home from a weekend in Cambridge looking very pleased with himself.

‘I’ve done it, Dad,’ he said, ‘I’ve done my cross country and passed the papers. I’ve got my licence. I am a pilot, of sorts.’

Dan shook his hand. ‘Well done, Charlie. Very well done. We’ll tell your mother. I think it’s an occasion for a glass of champagne.’

‘Clever old you, Charlie,’ Tessa said. ‘You’re a star. Old Biggles Charlie.’

Amy hugged him. ‘What did you have to do, darling?’

‘Some papers,’ he said, ‘about navigation and weather and air law and stuff. And a flying test and a cross-country flight.’

‘Where did you have to fly to,’ Amy asked, ‘on your cross country?’

‘Birmingham,’ Charlie said. ‘There and back.’

‘How do you ever find your way?’

Charlie laughed. ‘I’ve got a compass, Mum,’ he said, ‘and a map.’ He grinned. ‘And you can’t really miss Birmingham.’

She raised her glass. ‘Here’s to you then, Charlie.’

‘Flying’s wonderful, Mum,’ he said. His face was alive, alight. ‘I’d like to do it for the rest of my life, for my job.’

Yes, she thought, yes. He’s found what he wants. ‘Would they let you do that in the RAF?’ she said, ‘as a career?’

‘No, not as I got older. You have to be young to fly combat planes, but Arthur says there’ll be a lot of commercial flying in the future, passenger planes all over the world. Especially if this man Whittle develops his new engine. I’d like to be a commercial pilot.’

Amy deliberately formed a picture in her mind of Charlie, dressed in a smart uniform with a peaked cap, not a flying helmet, walking out to a great aircraft, settling himself into a comfortable cockpit, flying between peaceful countries in safety and pleasure. She made the picture as real as she could. She saw him as older, more mature, a family man. This was the picture she would hold in her mind, whatever happened. Thoughts were things; thoughts were things.

Later, Charlie managed to get his father alone. ‘I’m joining the RAF Volunteer Reserve, Dad. That’s what its all been for.’

Dan took him in his arms and held him for a moment. ‘I know, son,’ he said. ‘We’re both very proud of you – your mother and I.’

On the twenty-first of August Dan came home early. ‘You know what’s happened?’ he said.

Amy nodded, holding out the evening paper, the headlines stark and bleak. The Russians had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler – the last thing anyone had expected.

‘That’ll leave Hitler free to do what he likes in Europe.’ Dan said. ‘Now that he won’t be fighting the Russians. It doesn’t get any better, does it?’

‘There’s something else,’ Amy said. ‘I’ve had a letter telling me to be prepared to go to Paddington Station at short notice to help with the evacuation of the children.’ She bit her lips. ‘Short notice, Dan.’ He took her in his arms and held her close.

The family was in the kitchen, having breakfast; Mrs Parks was frying eggs and bacon. The wireless was on, as usual. It was on all the time these days. For Amy it held a kind of fascinating horror – she had to listen, but dreaded what she might hear. September the first, she thought; the year was dragging on. The appalling news was given in a very calm, very unemotional way. At dawn, the German army had invaded Poland. The Prime Minister had ordered the mobilization of all forces.

Dan turned the wireless off. For a few moments no one said anything, then Charlie blew his breath out through his teeth. ‘That’s it then,’ he said. ‘It’s started.’

‘Not yet,’ Amy said, her voice cracking. ‘Not yet. There might still be some way.…’

Charlie put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. Then he went out into the sunlit garden. He wasn’t sure how he felt. His mother, he was sure, was wrong; there was no way out now. In a way it was a kind of relief – better to know what was to happen and be prepared. Was he prepared? It wasn’t the flying. He was more than prepared for that. Was he prepared to kill? Now it was not theoretical; it was real. He turned back to look at the house. He could see his family through the window. He could see his father with his arm around Tessa’s shoulders; he could see Mrs Parks with her face in her hands, and his mother bending over her, speaking to her. His family. His home. Yes, he thought, yes, I would be prepared. I will have no choice.

Tessa came out to join him. She gave a hesitant smile. ‘What happens now, Charlie?’

‘Nothing for you, Tess,’ he said. ‘Go back to Cambridge, carry on as normal. I’m going to be called up, of course. I’ll still have a lot of training to do. Flying a Spit or a Hurricane is a bit different from flying a Tiger Moth.’

‘I wish I could do more,’ Tessa said. ‘I feel so useless.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘You’ll be of enormous use when you’re trained. Vital. We’ll always need doctors. You’ll have to put it all together again – after the war.’

‘And when do you think that will be?’

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘It isn’t going to be easy, not if what I saw in Berlin is anything to go by.’

‘What will we do, Charlie? What will they do?’

He smiled. ‘They’ll lose, of course. They’re far too nasty to win. We can’t let them do that.’