Five Boys (9 page)

Two days after they’d gone, Jem Hathersage followed, pedaling out along the Totnes road on a borrowed bicycle. He was in serious danger of missing his train after a hurried few minutes’ intimacy with Mrs. Hathersage and had his suitcase strapped to his back so tightly that on the uphills it almost throttled him and on the downhills threatened to throw him over the handlebars.

Of all five fathers Alec Bream was the only man to pack his bag with any real sense of purpose. He had been predicting the war for years and thought it a war worth fighting, but his only objective was to get back in one piece, unlike his father, killed twenty years earlier, whose name
was one of those carved on the base of the village’s memorial.

Last to leave had been Bernard Crouch, Aldred’s father, for whom the whole undertaking was an unutterable shock. He had no idea how much store he set by his home and family and felt grief-stricken, as if he had left his very soul behind. He began writing home on the first day of his training—letters written in such haste and with such desperation that his wife, Sylvia, found them almost illegible. They arrived in twos and threes, quickly grew into bundles and were tucked behind his pipe rack until they nudged it off the mantelpiece, then were stuffed in Sylvia’s sewing basket, from which they erupted whenever she went near the thing.

Only Howard Kent, a bachelor, believed he served his country better out in the fields than in a uniform—an opinion, as it happened, shared by the army doctor who, after the most cursory of examinations, concluded that he was a danger not just to himself but his fellow soldiers, though whether there was something wrong with his feet or his eyes or, as his neighbors suspected, his head was never established and Howard always insisted it was his indispensable qualities as a farm laborer that prevented him joining up.

In the years since, Howard had undergone a process of intense self-modification. He had always found women to be strange and intimidating but the lack of other young men in the village did wonders for his confidence, and he began to stride up and down as if he owned the place. The new Howard Kent was, he felt, a hearty soul, worldly-wise and always willing to stop and chat with the local women—
a character, needless to say, the local women found just as revolting as the original one.

Bobby first came across him when he accompanied Lillian to the post office. Howard stood among three or four women and rubbed his chin as if grand ideas were bubbling up inside him. But even as he spoke, Bobby couldn’t help noticing how Howard kept sneaking a peek at Mrs. Crouch’s bosom, as well as any other bosoms in his range, and when he finally departed, in a blaze of laughter, the women let out a collective sigh and adjusted their coats and cardigans as if Howard’s hands had been fumbling about inside.

Bobby and Aldred had spent the morning going through Bobby’s cuttings. Despite Bobby’s best efforts, Aldred remained unshakable in his perception of London as a barren and peopleless place, finding nothing to contradict it in all the pictures of blasted buildings and brick-strewn streets. The sandbags stacked up against the walls of Whitehall looked to him like a pyramid’s foundations, and with all its toppled columns and derelict churches London seemed to grow more Ancient by the day.

There was never any real doubt who was in charge of the archive. Bobby selected the pictures, cut them out and categorized them. Aldred’s role was that of a visiting curator, albeit one with plenty of opinions of his own. The two boys would discuss at length the merits of recent acquisitions or how the collection might be filed anew, and Bobby always knew that he could easily put things in the order he wanted just as soon as Aldred was out of the door.

Two photographs were examined far more than all the
others. In the first, titled “A London store damaged by H.E.,” a dozen bicycles dangled from the joists of a gutted building, with a mound of mangled bicycles on the floor below. It provoked a profound sense of melancholy in the boys which they attempted to rekindle each time they returned to it.

In the other photograph, a group of men stood around the edge of a twenty-foot crater. Two were servicemen, resting on crutches with one leg missing and staring morbidly into the pit. A couple of civilians in flat caps stood beside them and pointed up at the sky. The roof of the hospital ward in the background was completely stripped of its slates. The men in the flat caps seemed to follow the plane as it retreated, yet the servicemen seemed to be looking at the very spot where they had lost their legs. It never occurred to the boys that the men might have been injured elsewhere, or that the two civilians might be pointing at the sky several hours or even days after the attack. It barely mattered. Bobby and Aldred’s principal pleasure in studying the photograph was to try and imagine the enormity of a blast which could make such a hole in the ground and to contemplate a life with only one leg.

They were wondering, not for the first time, what might have happened to any bicycles which survived the fire in the shop in London and whether a one-legged man might still be capable of riding a bicycle when Miss Minter, who had been reading the newspaper in an armchair nearby, decided that they should get out of the house for a while.

“Take him up the hill,” she told Aldred, “and show him the view.”

It was in Aldred’s nature to require his own motivation for an assignment before being able to direct his formidable
enthusiasm toward it, and they had crossed the bridge and were halfway up the lane before he worked out how a hike up the hill might easily incorporate a trip down to the river and a visit to the boathouse and Old Tom, its resident drunk. The moment the trip fell under his jurisdiction his spirits lifted. He took hold of Bobby’s arm and hurried on, telling him all about the time Old Tom was famously woken when the prow of a trawler, high on a flood tide, crashed through his bedroom window and pinned him to the wall.

They marched through the village and carried on up the lane and Aldred pointed out various plants in the hedgerow capable of sustaining a man if he ever found himself out in the wilderness. Bobby lost interest when he waved at a clump of nettles and talked about how much good they’d do you if you made them into a soup and his words were nothing but a babble when they reached a five-barred gate.

A great mound of earth-caked vegetables was piled up in the field beyond it. They looked to Bobby like a heap of old boots. Aldred climbed onto the top bar of the gate and nodded at them.

“You know what that is?” he said.

Bobby had another look. Thought it looked more like elephant dung—was the right sort of color and the right sort of quantity. What had originally put him in mind of bootlaces, he now saw, were hundreds of stringy roots.

“Sugar beet,” said Aldred proudly. “There’s enough sugar there to sweeten your mother-in-law.”

He gave Bobby a wink and Bobby nodded as if he had the faintest idea what he was talking about. In fact, Aldred’s understanding of the phrase was probably just as dim as
Bobby’s, having overheard it only the summer before. But he had recognized at the time how the wink was as big a part of the joke as the actual mother-in-law.

“How do you get the sugar out?” said Bobby.

Aldred grew suddenly solemn and for a moment Bobby thought he was going to bring his hand up to his temples and do his Memory Man routine.

“Well, first of all,” he said, “you’ve got to boil it up …” He paused. “… then you keep on boiling it. And when it’s been boiling and boiling and boiling …” He paused again. “… you just sort of squash it out.”

Bobby stared at the heap of beets, wondering how any amount of boiling and squashing might cause white sugar to pour from it, when a head popped up out of the vegetables. Bobby jumped. Aldred almost fell right off the gate.

Howard Kent must have been woken by all the talk of boiling and squashing. As he came blinking toward the boys in his muddy overalls Bobby thought that it was probably much more likely that Mr. Kent had been relaxing
against
the far side of the heap of beets rather than deep within it—but it still seemed like an uncomfortable place to take a nap.

Howard leaned over the gate and looked up and down the track to see if the boys had any young mothers with them.

“What are you two up to?” he said.

Aldred was anxious to recover his authority. “I’m taking Bobby down to see Old Tom,” he said.

Howard turned and headed back toward the sugar beets. “Well, you’d better be getting along,” he said.

• • •

When they reached the top of the hill they filled their lungs, then sat and looked down into the valley. The river was flat and silver far below them and wound its way across the valley floor so benignly that Aldred decided to save all his stories of currents and drownings until they were alongside it, when things would hopefully look a little more dangerous.

He pointed out a clump of trees, packed as tight as broccoli, on a small peninsula where Old Tom’s boathouse was tucked away and, on the other side of the valley, a derelict building which had once been a cider house, run by an old woman who used to put curses on any customers who got behind with their bills.

They got to their feet and Aldred was getting ready to go charging down the hillside and already planning a little trip and tumble toward the end. He turned to Bobby to say “Ready, steady …” but Bobby was miles away.

“What?” said Aldred.

Bobby was gazing down the river, beyond the trees with the boathouse buried beneath them, to where the water glinted between the interlocking hills.

Aldred squinted but couldn’t see anything.

“What?” he said again.

Then he saw a smudge just above the water, like an insect caught in the sun. And a gust of wind brought a short blast of sound up the valley—the same drone of an engine that Bobby had picked up a few seconds before.

“It’s a Spitfire,” said Aldred.

Bobby shook his head and kept staring down the river. “It’s too rough for a Merlin,” he said. And they both stood and watched as the plane kept on toward them—real now
and its engine constant—until Bobby suddenly laughed out loud.

“It’s a One-Ninety,” he said. “It’s a Focke Wulf.”

Bobby waited and for a while Aldred stood firm beside him. Bobby’s eyes never left the approaching plane, which had now ceased to be a mere fraction in the valley and become the only important thing in it.

The closer it came the more speed it gathered about it, until suddenly it was tearing a great hole right through the day. Then it was over the woods below. Then dipping a wing to pull out of the bend in the river. Then heading straight toward the boys.

Bobby wasn’t aware of Aldred’s departure. But seeing the fields and hills so easily breached threatened to overwhelm him. And something in the dull shudder of the airplane’s engine had him back home, tucked away under the stairs.

“The heavens declare Thy glory,” he heard his father singing, “the firmament Thy power …”

The plane leveled its wings and swept up the hillside—the same hillside Bobby and Aldred had just been contemplating running down—and Bobby stood and welcomed it and the confirmation that it brought with it that the war and his mother and father were all alive and well.

It took the brow of the hill thirty yards to his right and in that blink of an eye, he saw the pilot—the face with the mask clamped over it, the hunched shoulders, the hands on the controls—saw him glance out of the cockpit as he went over and take Bobby in. Then he was gone and there was nothing but the great roar of its engine and the flash of its undercarriage as it went tearing on its way.

Aldred was still getting to his feet as Bobby ran past him.

“Did you see that?” Aldred shouted after him. “Did you
see
that?”

Then they were both running back toward the village. Chasing the plane, as if they had a hope of catching it, with its engine still roaring in their ears and the rattle of gunfire up ahead.

T
HERE WAS
only the one good lung in Mr. Mercer—the other had gone bad many years before—and the only time the other villagers tended to see him was when he went up and down the lane in his Bath chair, with his little wife struggling behind. His jackets always looked a bit too roomy, his shirt collar always had an inch or two to spare, so that when he heaved himself up out of his wheelchair there was often a moment or two when his clothes seemed to be considering staying where they were.

The Reverend Bentley’s constitution was not much better than Mr. Mercer’s. When he arrived in the village he was already so ridden with arthritis that even a handshake could bring tears to his eyes. The villagers thought it odd that their new vicar, when introducing himself, should keep his hands tucked deep in his pockets and nod wanly at them, as if the spiritual grace which came with the dog collar would reach out and do the job for him. Marjory Pye reckoned he must have been warned about the dangers of getting his hands caught in agricultural machinery. In fact, the reverend would have liked nothing better than to step out as first batsman for the village cricket team (if they had had one) or stay up half the night reading the latest Dorothy Sayers, but turning the pages of any book with those knotted clumps of knuckle was just about impossible, let alone
the church Bible, which sat on the lectern like a block of stone, its pages blunted by the thumbs of all the vicars that had gone before.

So within hours of landing in the village the Reverend Bentley had resolved to find an able-bodied boy to mark the passages in the pulpit Bible and assist Mr. Mercer on his slow shuffle from Bath chair to organ seat. And when he opened his front door an hour or two later who should he see striding down the lane but Aldred Crouch, his glands pumping at their usual phenomenal rate, which the reverend mistook for a look of steely determination and it seemed to him that here was a boy of application and rocksteady reliability, who could probably pump out a hymn or two along the way.

Aldred took the job on the spot. He had never been so flattered—had never felt so proud. The reverend’s assurance that he would be rewarded not only in the next life but might find a few coppers in his pocket on Easter Sunday and Christmas Day was neither here nor there. And so it was that Mr. Mercer’s shortness of breath, the reverend’s arthritis and Aldred’s own overactive thyroid came together in a trinity of affliction and rewarded him with his own key to the church.