Five Boys (2 page)

When Miss Peebles dropped in a little later to check that the children had something to eat Bobby was just as baffled as she was to find that the only thing in his parcel was a newly knitted jumper with a note pinned to it, saying,
With lots of love, Auntie May.

Miss Peebles gave Bobby one of her own cheese-and-onion sandwiches and twenty minutes later he found he was having trouble staying awake. For a while he swung in and out of consciousness, then slumped into a deeper sleep and when he next came around, Miss Peebles’ sandwich was burning deep in his stomach and there was lots of cheering and stamping of feet. The other children were all crammed around the window and pointing at the sea, but the water was as flat as a millpond so Bobby closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

• • •

The vast banks of begonias and peonies at Totnes Station might well have gladdened the heart of Bobby’s mum or any one of his aunties, but seemed so shockingly foreign that as far as Bobby was concerned he might as well have been disembarking in the foothills of Kilimanjaro or the depths of Timbuktu.

Another gang of women with armbands moved in on the children, clucking and fanning their hands by their sides. All the drills and regimentation appeared to have been abandoned and Bobby found himself herded in a crowd, until he came alongside a coach with great creamy mudguards which rolled back onto running boards. Some old lady helped him up the steep steps. He took a seat but the upholstery scratched at his bare legs, and when the bus was full a large woman popped up, glanced around at all the passengers, waved, then disappeared.

Ten minutes later the coach was hauling itself up a hillside and Bobby could see the railway station down below, as well as a church, a castle and a river glistening not far behind. Halfway up the hill they turned onto a narrow lane where the hedges scraped and squealed along the windows and whipped in through any not properly closed and they were so tall that it was only in that last moment before the coach went plummeting down another incline that Bobby managed to glimpse the countryside through which they passed. He thought the whole place looked badly rumpled, as if a boy could easily fall into one of its folds or crevices and never be heard of again.

They didn’t come across a single other vehicle, but their progress was just as laborious as their journeys across London and when the coach finally pulled up it was almost
dark. They were ushered into a village hall with a tin roof. There were trestle tables against one wall with meat pies and half-pint bottles of milk lined up on them. Bobby found a quiet spot, sat on his suitcase and used his gasmask box as a table and was eating his pie when he noticed some grown-ups standing by the door. They weren’t wearing armbands, seemed to be watching the children and doing a great deal of whispering, and Bobby thought perhaps the way he and his fellow evacuees were eating their pies was coming in for some criticism, so he sat up straight, tried to catch any crumbs, and when he had finished walked to the door in what he hoped would be considered a dignified way.

He went around the side of the hut and peed into a patch of long grass. The steam enveloped him and he stared up at the sky. The stars were as sharp as stones and there seemed to be no end of them. The air seemed to find its way deeper into him. He was tucking himself back into his shorts when he thought he heard something peculiar and crossed the road to find a shallow river. And he stood beside it for a while, watching it traveling blackly beneath the trees, and dipped the tip of his shoe into it.

When he crept back into the hall the atmosphere had definitely changed. The grown-ups who had been watching from the sidelines were chatting to some of the children—were helping them on with their jackets and bonnets. Were picking up their cases and heading for the door. An hour later Bobby and two girls were the only children left in the place. The younger girl was crying. An old man had offered to take her sister but hadn’t wanted her along. Bobby was tired and wishing that the little girl would stop crying when Miss Peebles came over and said that a kind lady had volunteered
to take all three of them in her motor car and find a house for them in one of the villages farther on.

She crouched down in front of Bobby, who was tugging at the knot on his parcel.

“Are you going to be a brave boy?” she said.

Bobby looked at the toe of his shoe, still damp from the river, and tried to give the question the sort of consideration Miss Peebles seemed to feel it deserved. But in truth he hadn’t the faintest idea how brave he was going to be.

J
UST ABOUT
the last person Miss Minter expected to find standing on her doorstep was Mrs. Willcox. Mrs. Willcox in her tweeds and brogues and her Robin Hood hat with a feather sticking out of it, smiling for all she was worth.

She lived several miles away and on the few occasions the two of them had met had never been particularly friendly, so Miss Minter had good reason to wonder what she was doing smiling on her doorstep so late at night, wearing an armband which, in Miss Minter’s mind, signified death and grief and funerals and therefore nothing to smile about at all.

The county had been
inundated
, Mrs. Willcox was telling her …
simply inundated
, without even bothering to say hello, and asking if we had the right to deny a London child a breath of
decent country air.
She was making no sense and showed no sign of abating. It was a little performance all its own and Miss Minter soon found her attention slipping and began to stare at Mrs. Willcox’s cape and wonder how she managed to get in it and was thinking what a staggering pair of hips the woman had, when a young child’s head peeped out from behind them and stared right back at her.

“… and so we were
wondering
…,” Mrs. Willcox was saying. “That is to say, we were
hoping
…” She took a
breath and rolled her eyes. “… if you might, possibly,
save our skins …”

Miss Minter looked up at the face beneath the Robin Hood hat, then back down at the boy.

“Just until we sort ourselves out,” said Mrs. Willcox, smiling.

“A boy?” Miss Minter said.

Then Mrs. Willcox started talking again—seemed to think that as long as she kept talking and smiling, every obstacle would fall away—and even as Miss Minter watched, slipped her hand down the boy’s back and (still talking, still smiling) pushed him forward until he was forced to take a step.

Being asked to look after a boy was, for Lillian Minter, akin to being asked to juggle handkerchiefs or swallow swords. It simply wasn’t in her repertoire. She watched the feather on Mrs. Willcox’s hat bounce down the path and bob along beyond the hedgerow and was still standing in her doorway when the motor car roared away. She turned and looked at the boy beside her. He seemed to have a great many bags and parcels attached to him and Miss Minter thought that if she removed some of them she might have more of an idea what sort of boy she was dealing with.

She prized Bobby’s hot little hand off his suitcase handle and led the way down the hall. The case was small but surprisingly heavy and as she headed toward the parlor she wondered what on earth it might contain.

Boys’ things
, she told herself.

She sat the boy down on the settee by the fire and had a good look at him. His coat was buttoned right up to his throat.

“It must be windy in Mrs. Willcox’s motor,” she said, which seemed to Bobby to be more of a statement than a question, so he carried on looking around the room.

They sat side by side for a while in silence. Then Miss Minter turned to him and said, “Does your daddy let you look at the newspapers?”

Bobby nodded.

Miss Minter leaned over the end of the sofa, picked up a couple of old
Daily Sketches
and dropped them in his lap. Bobby looked at the newspapers as if he might have to memorize them.

“Do you like treacle toffee?” the old woman asked him.

Bobby nodded again.

That night he slept on the settee, under an eiderdown, which smelled powerfully of mothballs, and rested his head on a pillow which was about as accommodating as a sack of cement. He lay on his side, with his hands tucked between his legs, kept wriggling to try and make himself comfortable, until he felt the settee’s cushions begin to shift and spread beneath him, and decided that he had better lie still or risk being swallowed up.

He was surprised not to have been told to brush his teeth, and when he clamped them together they still took some getting apart. He thought about the paper bag Miss Minter had offered him and the oily slabs of toffee inside. Of slipping a finger between a couple of pieces which were welded together and trying to wrench one free.

He dozed off for a few seconds, then forced his eyes open. Found that he was indeed in the parlor of a strange old lady, many miles from home. He thought about the train and the coaches. Thought about his mother not wanting to let go of his hand. He stared at the fire, to try and
calm himself down. Concentrated on it—and found that it had caves, like the bag of treacle toffee, but caves that were alive and red-hot at the core.

Miss Minter had always been a light sleeper, so when she surfaced briefly around four the following morning, to plump her pillow and turn to face the wall, her dreams parted just long enough for her to recall Mrs. Willcox smiling on her doorstep and the boy on the settee down below.

She stared into the dark and began to wonder. Wondered what young boys were fed on … how much sleep they needed … how to keep them occupied. If she could only stop him from starving or drowning or catching pneumonia, until someone with the proper qualifications came along, she told herself, then she would have more than done her duty and could set about trying to forget the whole sorry affair.

The only boys she had any experience of were the ones in the village, who seemed to divide their time between a sort of sleepwalking stupor and a primitive savagery, with not much in between. But even these village boys were a mystery to her. There was no telling what went on inside them and the only thing Miss Minter’s encounters had taught her was to give them plenty of room, like young cattle, in case they started kicking and bucking about.

She stared at the ceiling until daylight dragged the room from its shadows, racking her brains for tips to do with boys. She must have heard
some
thing over the years, she thought, but the only thing she could come up with was the supposed benefit of getting children out of doors. It was an idea which made more sense every time she returned to it, especially a boy from London whose lungs
were apparently full of soot. A lack of any other ideas did nothing but lend extra conviction to this one and though, in truth, Miss Minter could see no particular virtue in being exposed to the elements when there was a fire in the grate, she began to see the wisdom in getting a child away from the house, so that any harm which befell them might be blamed on somebody else.

As she dressed she told herself that no matter how ill-conceived her attempts at child-minding, it was essential they be carried out with unwavering authority. So, even as Bobby ate his bread and jam Lillian was fetching his jacket from the coat stand, and before he’d finished rinsing it down with a cup of tea she was feeding his arms into his jacket’s sleeves. He was barely awake when he found himself being ushered out through the same doorway Mrs. Willcox had been so eager to usher him through the night before. He put the brakes on long enough to ask Miss Minter what time he was expected back. Miss Minter assumed an expression of unflappable self-assurance.

“You’ll need to be home before it gets dark,” she said.

Bobby looked up at the sky, which had not a trace of darkness in it. The hours of daylight seemed to stretch right over the hills. He wondered if the days down here were somehow shorter and turned to put this to the old lady, but she was already shutting the door in his face.

B
OBBY STOOD
by the gate, bewildered, while Miss Minter watched from an upstairs window and quietly willed him on his way. Left and right both seemed to go nowhere. There was nothing to aim toward, but after some deliberation Bobby buttoned his coat, turned to his left and followed the lane down to a bridge, then onto a crossroads, and went straight on up the hill.

The night had swept away all the motor cars and coaches. Bobby had never had so much space to himself. It was a disconcerting feeling, and as he tramped up the lane the hedgerows towered around him and he entered a steep green corridor of stillness, with a ceiling of blue sky high overhead. He hiked up that lane for what felt like half an hour, with nothing but his own anxious thoughts bearing down on him, then the hedgerows finally fell away and he passed the gates to a farm, then a couple of cottages and a post office and more cottages, each with its own orderly garden and smoke pumping out of its chimney pot.

The whole village appeared to consist of nothing but the three lanes which met at the war memorial, where Bobby stopped and read the inscription to see if there were any dead soldiers with the same surname as his. There weren’t, so he crossed the road and had a look at the big old church and the gravestones scattered around it and was studying
the church notice board when a loud tapping sound suddenly started up.

He turned around, but the village was deserted. Not just devoid of people, but spick-and-span—as if someone had just been through it with a dustpan and brush. There was no natural place from which the sound could have originated and Bobby was beginning to think he must be losing his mind when the
tap-tap-tapping
started up again and he spotted a figure at the window of a cottage who, seeing how his tapping had finally got Bobby’s attention, began to frantically wave at him instead. Bobby glanced over his shoulder—thought the figure in the window must be waving at someone else—but the lane behind him was just as empty as the one in front and the more baffled he became, the more tapping and waving he seemed to provoke.