Fireweed (16 page)

At about twelve o'clock I was feeling light in the head again, and so I went and found Marco, and shamefacedly let him feed me. I told him what had happened this time, and he flooded me with sympathy. He said I could help him with the sandwiches, and he would give me a little money when he could manage it. Then one day, when the war was over, we would have a little restaurant, and call it ‘Marco and Bill's Cosmopolitan Snack Bar'. He raised a faint smile on my stiff face, but I shook my head. ‘I can't even fry an egg, Marco. I'd be no use to you.'

Then back again to wait. This time I plucked up courage to ask at the desk how she was getting on, and if they had asked her about me yet. They said she was getting on nicely. That's all they would say.

Then, at long last, that evening, when the visitors had all been let in, a nurse came down, and said to the receptionist, ‘Miss Vernon-Greene is asking if someone called Bill has been asking for her.' My heart leapt. I stood up, and she was pointing to me. ‘You may come up,' the nurse said, and I followed her, barely able to keep myself from running ahead, and up we went, and I thought, I will be with her, any moment, any moment now …

It was Room Nine, not Ward Nine. The nurse opened the door, and I rushed in, so hastily that I bumped into the bottom of the bed, and stood there … She was sitting up in bed, smiling at me. They had cut off her hair, and bandaged her head. A few fronds of dark hair, roughly hacked off, showed under the bandage, round her face. She looked pale, and I could see, still visible, the faint mark of the bruise I had made on her lip when the blast wave caught us. But in the same moment I saw that we were not alone. There was a strange woman sitting beside her, wearing a brown hat, holding her hand. And behind me, as I looked round, a tall young man, so like her that I knew at once she had a brother, rose to his feet. He seemed to be wearing some sort of uniform, a blazer with a crest, and a striped tie. She hadn't said she had a brother …

‘Hullo, Bill,' she said. ‘Mother, this is Bill. Bill, this is my brother, Robin.'

‘Oh,' I said. Then, after too long a pause, ‘Hullo.' I looked at her. She looked at me, but then looked away. Her mother looked out of the window.

‘Did they tell you about Dickie?' she asked, suddenly. I hadn't given Dickie a thought from the moment they dug him out, ‘They've got him here, and he isn't hurt, but they can't find his mother, and …' Her voice started to shake.

‘Come now, Julia, don't upset yourself,' said her mother. ‘What can't be helped has to be put up with, dear.'

‘I'm glad he wasn't hurt,' I said.

‘They let him see me,' she said.

‘Oh,' I said, stabbed with jealousy,

‘Are you all right?' she said.

‘Yes, thank you.' I couldn't think of anything to say to her. There was nothing to say that I wanted a woman in a brown hat, and a sleek young man to hear.

‘Is the cart doing well?' she asked, in the thickening silence.

‘Don't know. Haven't tried.' I was almost mumbling. My eye was caught by a glint of silver on her bedside table – my little Spitfire lay there, half concealed under a bunch of grapes in cellophane, and towered over by a vase of flowers.

Suddenly Robin spoke. ‘Oh, er, look here, er, Bill …' he was saying. ‘Since my father isn't here, you know, I think I ought to say … Well, look, my sister's far too young to have well, friends outside the family, you know, but since in the circumstances … well, since you looked after her we can't very well forbid you … we could make an exception, if … well, if you can give me your word that there isn't anything in it.'

I knew what he was getting at. Anger flashed through me. I opened my mouth to say, ‘
Go to hell!
' and ‘
I'll see her if I want to see her, without asking you!
' when Julie spoke, first.

‘Oh, Robin, don't be
silly!
' she said. ‘
Of course
there's nothing in it, nothing at all.'

‘Oh, well, good. All right, then,' he said.

Julie's mother, looking at me with an odd sort of expression, said, ‘I think Robin only wants to thank you, Bill …'

But I was looking at Julie.

Then I turned abruptly, and went. I ran down the corridor, and ran, scrambling down the flights of stairs, and I felt as if I were falling, falling, down them. At the bottom a trolley was being wheeled along the corridor, and I couldn't push past it, to get out of there. I rushed past the receptionist, as soon as the trolley let me by, and put out my hands for the turning door, when there was Julie's mother, who had followed and overtaken me.

‘Bill,' she said. ‘Don't take any notice of Robin. He meant to thank you for looking after Julia so bravely. If you would like to come and see us at our house at Richmond, we should be delighted to receive you there.' She had a lovely smooth even voice. She held out a small white card with an address printed on it. ‘Will you come?'

Dumbly I shook my head.

She looked at me again with that oddly sympathetic expression, and said, ‘You know, Bill, she's only a child.'

I closed my eyes and leaned back against the door, and it turned, like a roundabout, and threw me out into the night.

I could not walk, I could only run, driven by the angry grief within me as leaves are driven by the wind; poor draggled leaves, lashed by the driving wind. They wrapped round my ankles as I ran, overtook me, and dropped down in front of me. Through and through my head went her voice, saying
of course there's nothing in it, nothing at all
. Soon I ran out of breath, and stood, gasping the raw cold air, watching the leaves go on without me on the wind. O western wind, when wilt thou blow. O western wind …

I thought being dead would be a good way out. I remembered the fire-watcher on Hungerford Bridge, dead, with reflected fire in his eyes. So I went to a fire station, and volunteered. They did ask me how old I was, but when I lied they seemed to believe me. They gave me a tin hat, and a lot of instructions, and sent me up on to the roof of a big office block in the Strand, to sit beside a field telephone and watch.

I discarded the tin hat at once, and I waited for death to rain down on me, eagerly, with longing. That was the night of November the twenty-third; the first night for fifty-seven nights that there were no raids on London at all. So there I was, all night long, quite safe, under the shining stars.

In the morning I tried another way; I went off to volunteer for the army. I only had to give myself a year or two extra to be taken on as a trainee cadet in the Engineers. Perhaps I would learn enough to be an engineer after all. There were a lot of other fellows there, smiling, and exchanging names, and one in particular I liked the look of, called Ronnie. He was standing next to me when we stripped down for the medical, and all across his back was a livid purple scar nearly an inch wide.

‘Whatever happened to your back, Ronnie?' I asked him.

‘'That?' he said, grinning. ‘That was a bit of me Dad's greenhouse, with a bomb behind it. It's my war-wound that is. How about you; you got a war-wound?'

‘Me?' I said. ‘Nothing. Not a scratch.'

Years later, when the war was over and done with, it occurred to me that she might not have meant what she said. Perhaps she only said it as a sort of cover, to shut him up, and make sure we
could
go on seeing each other. I hope that's what she meant, because I hate to think she was the sort who might just make use of someone, and then chuck them; I hope that's what she meant for her sake, though it's too late now to make any difference to me, either way. I wonder why I didn't think of it at the time.

I think of it now, leaning on a broken wall, looking at St Paul's. You can see it much better now that everything round it has been knocked down. All around me there are open acres, acres of ruined and desolate land, where the bombs fell. Over there the square tower of a gutted church survives as the only landmark, till the harmonious walls of the cathedral rise exposed in the background. It's quiet here, and beautiful, for into this wilderness the wild things have returned. Grass grows here, covering, healing, and russet sorrel in tall spikes, and goldenrod, swaying beside broken walls, full of butterflies, and purple loose-strife, and one plant, willow herb, that some people call fireweed, grows wild in this stony place as plentifully as grass, though it used to be rare enough to be searched out, and collected. It is a strange plant; it has its own rugged sort of loveliness, and it grows only on the scars of ruin and flame.

I suppose they will build on this again, some day: but I like it best like this; grown over; healed.

My thanks are due to almost everyone I know who is old enough to remember 1940; to many other authors whose work I have consulted, and to Miss Elizabeth Almung, who gave me invaluable assistance.

J.P.W.

Jill Paton Walsh was born Gillian Bliss in London in 1937. Jill has won several awards, including the Whitbread Prize, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Universe Prize, and the Smarties Grand Prix. In 1970 FIREWEED won the Book World Festival Award, and her adult novel KNOWLEDGE OF ANGELS was nominated for the 1994 Booker Prize. After living for many years in Surrey, she is now settled in Cambridge. In 1996 she received the CBE for services to literature, and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Visit Jill at her website:
www.greenbay.co.uk/jpw.html

Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hot Key Books

Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT

First published by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in 1969

Copyright © Jill Paton Walsh 1969

Foreword copyright © Lucy Mangan 2013

Cover illustration copyright © Paul Blow 2013

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4714-0173-2

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