Doodlebug Summer

ALISON PRINCE

1 Pauline and Me

2 The Start of It

3 Rockets

4 What Now?

5 Terror

6 Ambulance

7 Afterwards

Glossary

Historical Note

Map of England and Northern Europe

Imprint

‘It's such a good tree,' Pauline says.

‘Yes. Lovely.' We both know how we feel about it – words aren't needed, really.

It's almost three years since our tree nearly got destroyed, but we still have these moments of feeling glad it's here.

I'm above her, sitting astride the big branch that sticks out sideways. Pauline's in the place where the main trunk divides. She doesn't like being higher up, she says there's too much air under her feet. I don't mind. It's like being on a big horse, riding through the sky.

I can see the bomb crater over the top of the bushes from where I am, it's near the barbedwire encampment where the anti-aircraft
guns are. There's water at the bottom of the crater now, and brambles are growing round the edge. It isn't the only one. A whole stick of bombs fell on the common that night, but this is the one that nearly got our tree. We didn't know until we came up a day or two later. Most of its smaller branches had been blown off and it looked an awful mess, but it was still standing.

The air raids stopped soon after that. Nights went by, and the sirens didn't sound. We went on sleeping in the shelter in our garden for quite a while, then Mum said she thought we could come back indoors. It's been great to sleep in my own bed, with a proper bedside light instead of a Hurricane oil lamp hanging on the concrete wall and casting weird shadows.

‘We had a letter from my dad this morning,' Pauline says.

‘Did you? Is he OK?'

Her dad is away in the Army.

‘Yes, he's fine. He says the war will be over soon – he reckons we've got them on the run.' She means the Germans, of course. Pauline always sounds very tough, like her dad.
He used to work in the garage on the corner of our road until he got called up. I remember him as a thin man in a navy boiler suit, with red hair like Pauline's only cut so short that you wouldn't know it was curly.

I wonder if he's right about the war ending. I was six when it began, and I'm eleven now. Looking back to when I was small, everything seems full of sunshine and ice creams, though perhaps I'm just remembering the good bits. The streets used to be lit up at night and we didn't have to pull blackout curtains across our windows. The shops were full of things to buy if you had the money. Now, most of them are boarded up because of bomb blast, and there's nothing in them anyway except the rationed stuff: meat, cheese, sugar, margarine. One packet of butter a week, to share between four of us. Mum divides it up into four dishes, otherwise my brother Ian says it's not fair.

‘Dad thinks he might be home by Christmas,' Pauline goes on. ‘But Mum says we mustn't count our chickens.'

Pauline's mum is skinny, too, like her husband. She works in a munitions factory, putting explosive into shell-cases, so Pauline and her big sister Chrissie look after the two younger ones a lot of the time. It's a bit of a squeeze in their small house, and there's no indoor toilet – you have to go across the yard. Lots of houses are like that.

We're lucky really. Our house was built just before the war, and it's got a bathroom and toilet upstairs and another little toilet outside by the coal shed. And there are three bedrooms, so I don't have to share with Ian. He's not five yet, but he's fussy about the way his stuff is arranged. He hates it if you move anything. I leave things all over the place, and he thinks that's awful. We'd drive each other up the wall if we shared a room.

‘Katie,' says Pauline, ‘have you done your homework yet?'

‘Course not.'

I know what she's going to ask.

‘Can I come round to yours and we'll do it together? It's just the French, really.'

I try not to sigh. ‘OK,' I say.

Pauline hates French. She's good at maths, though, and I'm rubbish, so I suppose it's a fair swap. But that means we'll have to spend tomorrow afternoon doing homework. I usually leave it until Sunday night, but Pauline can't come round in the evening. None of us go out after dark on our own. Even though it's been quiet for so long, you still never know if there might be a raid.

‘Thanks ever so much,' Pauline says. ‘About half-past two?'

‘Fine.'

She's climbing out of the tree. ‘Got to go,' she says. ‘Mum's on early shift, and Chrissie's going to the pictures with May. I said I'd look after the little ones.'

She's like a grown-up in some ways, getting on with whatever has to be done. I think I'd grumble about it, but she never seems to mind.

Hedge has come to do the garden. I always know when he's here. The smell of him reaches me as soon as I come round the side of the house. It's a mixture of earth and
tobacco and dog – and of Hedge, who looks as if he never washes.

Dad calls him ‘Hedge'. Mum says I must call him
Mr
Hedge, but somehow I can't do that. I don't call him anything.

His dog is here today, lying in the covered bit between the back door and the coal shed, on the jacket Hedge has taken off.

‘Hello, Kelly,' I say, but he doesn't wag his tail or even raise his head from his paws, just looks up at me with his yellow eyes. He's a big dog, brown and rough. I don't know what sort he is. Dad says he's like liquorice. All sorts.

I go carefully past Kelly, into the kitchen.

‘There you are,' Mum says. ‘That's good. Run out and tell him his tea's ready, will you?'

She doesn't call Hedge anything, either.

I skirt past Kelly again and walk across the lawn.

Ian is counting the flowers on the marigolds.

‘Two hundred and eighty-one,' he says.

‘Is that good?'

‘Seventeen more than yesterday. But I haven't finished yet.'

I don't know how he does this numbers thing. I just think of marigolds as orange – I've no idea how many of them there are.

Mum flaps a hand at me through the window.
Go on
, she means.
Tell him
. So I go on, over the bit of grass where we hang the washing and past the steps that lead down to our underground air-raid shelter between the fruit trees. It'll be horrible in there after all this time of not using it, damp and musty. It's probably growing toadstools.

Hedge is squashing caterpillars on the gooseberry bushes. The creepies are striped black and yellow, and his fingers are all mucky with them. His sleeves are rolled up, and his brown arms are crisscrossed with blood-dotted scratches. He must have been pruning the roses that ramble over the fence – he never seems to mind their thorns.

He looks up and says, ‘Tea time, is it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Tha's good.'

He picks off a final caterpillar, crushes it and wipes his finger and thumb on his trousers, then sets off towards the house.
I walk beside him. I can't help looking at the scratches on his arm.

‘Don't they hurt?' I ask.

He glances at them. ‘No,' he says, and laughs in a spitty kind of way because his teeth are all broken and gappy. ‘Them's all right.'

Mum has put two big hunks of bread and cheese on a plate in the place where he sits, and a mug of tea. She's given up asking if he wants to wash his hands, he never does. I don't know how she can spare the cheese from the ration, but she manages somehow. Hedge keeps hens, so he brings her some eggs sometimes, and lots of things like carrots and leeks and beetroot. It's a big help. There's never much in the shops.

It's funny how you have to keep watching someone even if they give you the shudders. I can't help watching Hedge. He cuts the cheese up with a heavy old clasp knife he takes out of his pocket, and puts a chunk of it into his mouth with a lump of bread. He talks as he's munching, and splutters crumbs through his dreadful teeth.

‘You bin plantin' things again,' he says to Mum, as if it's a crime.

She turns a bit pink and says, ‘Mrs Potter gave me these sweet-pea seedlings, so I thought I'd better get them in.'

He shakes his head. ‘You can't be plantin' now, not when the moon's goin' down. You need to catch her when she's risin'. Tha's when things grow.'

‘Oh, I see,' Mum says. ‘Sorry.'

‘Nuther time, you just leave 'em to me.'

‘Yes, perhaps I'd better.'

My dad isn't a bit like Hedge. He plays the piano, and when we go to the library, he borrows old, dusty books that nobody else would bother with. He's hopeless about gardening. He saw some flowers growing by the coal shed once and said, ‘Those are nice,' and Mum said, ‘They're dandelions.' I quite like dandelions, really.

Mum shouts through the window to Ian, ‘Do you want some milk and biscuits?'

‘No!' he shouts back. ‘Three hundred and ten.'

He goes on counting. I can't imagine how he got to be so good at numbers when he's so young. But then, I can't imagine why Pauline has such a struggle with French.

Madame Souris a une maison.
Mrs Mouse has a house
.

Pauline and I are in a house. It's underground, so there aren't any windows, but there are gold medals all over its walls, in between framed oil paintings of mice. We won the medals because we're very good at French
.

‘What a dreadful noise,' says Mrs Mouse, frowning at us as she wipes her paws on her apron. ‘It'll be a tractor. That's the trouble when you let humans in, they bring their machinery with them.'

I was going to tell her I don't have a tractor, but then I woke up. Madame Souris was right, there
is
a noise. It's not a
tractor, though. It sounds more like a motorbike, but louder, with an engine that's not working very well. It's coming closer.

Du-du-du-du-du-du-du-du-DU-DU-DU
– Good, it's stopped. Turn over, go back to sleep again.

BANG!

The explosion shakes me in my bed.

That's
heavy
, I think. I'm used to bombs, I know the difference between the high-explosive ones and the lighter firebombs, but this is something new. The crash was incredibly loud, and I've never heard anything like the stuttering engine sound. And if there's a raid on, why haven't we heard the air-raid siren? Why aren't the guns firing?

Ian's woken up, he's crying. I switch my light on. I can hear Mum getting out of bed. Dad's not here, he's on fire-watch duty at the bank in London where he works. All the staff have to take a turn, and this weekend it's him.

The motorbike noise is starting again.