‘A.F.S.?’
‘Auxiliary Fire Service. Mother feels the same.’ He slammed a fist into the open palm of his hand. ‘I wish I could visit them just to see if they’re safe.’
‘There might be a letter waiting fer you now,’ said Will encouragingly.
‘I doubt it.’
They stared up through the colourfully-clad branches. The sun spread through them like a warm X-ray lighting the thin skeletal lines in each leaf.
Will and Zach chatted quietly absorbing the peace of the river and then turned back to the village.
They dropped by at the Littles to see if there had been any post but there was none. Zach carried on towards the graveyard cottage with Will and they took Sammy out for a romp in the fields. By the time school had started it felt late enough to be the afternoon.
To their surprise and delight, sitting next to Miss Thorne at the front of the class was Geoffrey Sanderton.
‘Mr Sanderton and I have decided to choose a nature project,’ began Miss Thorne. ‘This means that we shall be going on expeditions which you will plan. We would also like some of you to write and illustrate a nature diary.’
Zach looked a little disappointed.
‘In addition to the project we shall be reading some of the nature poets, William Wordsworth, for example, some of Shakespeare’s sonnets.’
At this Zach beamed.
‘I thought it would be rather a good idea,’ added Geoffrey, ‘that, as we have to be careful with the amount of paint we use, we could create pictures using different-coloured leaves and bark and anything interesting that you can find, and it might be fun too if we made up short poems to go with them.’
‘Perhaps an epic saga based on some expedition,’ said Miss Thorne gazing directly at Zach. ‘And George,’ she remarked, looking up at him. ‘You will be in charge of some of the nature trails we shall take. Now are there an…’
She was interrupted by a knock at the door. Geoffrey opened it. Zach looked towards the hallway and was surprised to see Aunt Nance. Miss Thorne disappeared into the hallway with her and returned shortly. She glanced at Zach.
‘You’re to go home,’ she said gently.
Zach felt very hot and a little sick. He rose quietly from his desk and left the classroom. Will listened to his footsteps fade away down the hallway. He glanced up at Miss Thorne who caught his eye and quickly turned away.
‘Right,’ she said briskly, facing the class. ‘Let’s see how your spelling has deteriorated over the summer holidays.’
The remainder of the morning was taken up with sums, sharing out books and planning the first ‘expedition’, but Will’s heart was elsewhere. As soon as it was lunch he ran to the Littles and knocked on the back door.
‘Come in, Will,’ said Mrs Little, opening it. ‘Zach will be pleased to see you. He’s upstairs packing.’
‘Packing?’ gasped Will. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’
‘His father has been badly injured. One of the large warehouses by the docks caught fire and he was buried under fallen timber for several hours. He’s in a hospital in London.’
Will ran upstairs and found Zach kneeling over a small, battered case. He was holding a photograph of his father. He looked up at Will. His eyes were pink and swollen.
‘I’m catching the Friday train to London,’ he said, his voice quivering. ‘Mother doesn’t want me to, but I begged her to let me. I have to see him in case…’ and he became hoarse and stifled a sob. ‘In case I never see him again.’
Will squatted down beside him.
‘I want you to take care of this,’ he said, handing him his old tattered copy of Shakespeare’s works. ‘It was my great-grandfather’s.’
‘Oh, Zach,’ protested Will, but Zach’s pained expression prevented him from refusing. He took the book and smoothed the leather covers with his hand.
‘I’ll look after it real fine.’
They spent a miserable afternoon together. Ginnie and George called round after lunch and Carrie rushed in later, for a few brief moments before having to fly home to do her homework. It was a wretched time for Zach as he wanted to leave immediately. All the waiting only increased his feelings of frustration and helplessness.
The Littles drove him to the station in Weirwold the following morning. His mother had said that whatever happened he was only to stay in London for the weekend. She didn’t want him to be injured as well and she knew that his father would have felt the same way.
The day after Zach’s sudden departure was Will’s tenth birthday, Saturday September 7th, 1940.
Will spent the morning at the Hartridges’ and Padfields’ cottage. In the afternoon he and Tom decorated the living room. Mrs Fletcher and Mrs Thatcher arrived armed with home-baked cakes and biscuits while Aunt Nance brought home-made ginger beer and a parcel that Zach had left for him. By late afternoon, the cottage was filled with children, with Tom, Ginnie and George leading the games. The high spot of the party, however, was when everyone swarmed round the cottage screaming hysterically and hiding from Tom who was chasing them and pretending to be a monster at the same time. They played musical chairs and pass the parcel, ate doughnuts with their hands tied behind their backs, passed oranges to each other under their chins and, of course, ate.
Will left Zach’s parcel unopened until the last person had gone home and he and Tom had sat down to relax with a cup of tea. The table was already littered with books, sweets and pots of paint. He picked up Zach’s parcel and began to unwrap it.
Inside was part one of an epic adventure called ‘The Villainous Doctor Horror’. At the bottom was a little postscript. It read ‘P.S. Part two will be written on my return.’
In addition to the poem were two new paint-brushes, a second-hand book on painters, and a lopsided sketch of Will in an artist’s beret and smock. It showed him standing at an easel. The canvas on the easel was empty but Will himself was covered in paint.
‘I shall put that on my wall,’ said Will half to himself and half to Tom.
At eight o’clock they listened intently to the news on the wireless.
It was reported that flares had been dropped all over London and hundreds of German planes had been spotted. Spitfires and Hurricanes had soared up into the skies to fight them. It was one of the longest massed raids that London was experiencing. While the news was being read, heavy bombing was still continuing.
‘Hope Zach’s all right,’ said Will, frowning. Tom puffed at his pipe.
‘He’s so skinny, a bomb would probably skip past him.’
‘I hope so.’
The next day, for the first time in weeks, it rained. Will woke to the sound of it scuttling down the roof and bouncing off his open window. He washed and dressed quickly. Tom was already in the church organizing extra seating arrangements, for it was to be a national day of prayer.
At 10.00 a.m. the villagers were shocked by a Special News Bulletin on the wireless.
‘It is estimated,’ said the announcer, ‘that four hundred people at least were killed in the first few hours of air attacks. 1,400 are believed to be seriously injured. London’s Dockland is on fire and many homes in the East End have been blitzed to the ground.’
The Littles still hadn’t heard from Zach or his mother, and Will grew steadily more anxious. He woke in the early hours of Monday morning from a nightmare of amputation units, people with their heads blown off, vans with ‘Dead Only’ written on them, and disfigured bloodstained people wandering and screaming through dense rubble.
He and Tom switched on the wireless for any early morning news flashes. According to recent reports there had been continual bombing throughout the night and fires were burning all over London. Becton gas-works had been hit. Moorgate lay in smoky ruins. Balham had been badly smashed. Bombs had fallen on one of the platforms on Victoria Station and on the outskirts of Windsor Castle. The news was devastating.
Will hurried on to school and spent the morning outside, gardening. He joined George, Ginnie, Lucy and Grace on a blac
kberrying expedition in the afternoon, and returned at dusk, flushed and happily tired only to hear that Dover was being bombed.
The following morning he awoke to the sounds of voices downstairs. It was odd to have visitors so early unless, of course, he had overslept. He rose quickly and clattered down the ladder. As he approached the front room, he recognized the voices, they were the Littles’. His heart gave a lift. Perhaps they had news of Zach. He strode in excitedly and they turned to face him. Dr Little looked grave and Aunt Nance had been crying. They didn’t need to say anything. He knew that Zach was dead. In one black moment he felt his legs buckling up underneath him and he collapsed into unconsciousness.
22
Grieving
In the weeks that followed the news of Zach’s death, Will survived each day in a zombie-like daze. Outwardly he carried on as normal, helping Tom, and catching up with school work. Inwardly he felt too numb even to cry.
He avoided the Littles’ cottage as much as possible and chose to walk to the school or shop by the church and cottages. At school, finding it painful to sit next to an empty chair, he would scatter papers untidily over the two desks in an effort to hide Zach’s absence.
Miss Thorne asked him to be in the Christmas play and, although he agreed and took part in rehearsals, the whole procedure felt very unreal to him. Miss Thorne was pleased with him but he felt as if his body and voice were totally expressionless.
Even in drawing and painting classes he would sit and look blankly at the empty page in front of him, devoid of ideas. His private classes with Geoffrey Sanderton were just as bad.
‘I ent got anythin’ left inside me,’ he would say repeatedly, for he felt that half of himself had been cut away, that life without Zach was only half a life and even that half was empty.
Most of the time Geoffrey set him still-life pictures to draw, so that for several hours Will could forget the dull pain that gnawed his insides and concentrate on the shapes in a bowl of fruit, the colour of a flower or the shades of light that fell on a bottle and boot. But always, when he left Spooky Cott, the same dead feeling sunk into him and all his activities seemed meaningless.
Four months passed. Christmas saw heavy rationing but Will didn’t notice, for it still seemed a very rich one to him. He and Tom made toys with scraps of wood and paints and Ginnie and George came round to help.
Since September and the continual blitzing of London that followed, the number of evacuees that came flooding into the village grew weekly. Many had no homes in London to return to. At Christmas several parents came to Little Weirwold to share in the festivities, with their children. Tom and Will decided to make toys for those that had lost one or both of their parents and for the many that were so poor that they wouldn’t have had presents anyway. Will welcomed the opportunity of doing anything that would take his mind off Zach. He still tended not to talk very much and, apart from when he was rehearsing, he would withdraw into his numb little shell. Tom carried on as normal, waiting for the moment when Will would finally accept and mourn his friend’s death.
Carrie had completed her first term at the high school. She arrived home long after dark and after tea she would immediately begin her homework, go to bed, rising early in the morning to learn Latin declensions or French verbs, before leaving again for school. The weekends and Christmas holidays were the only times anyone saw very much of her. She missed Zach dreadfully for he was one of the few people with whom she didn’t feel such an odd fish. She didn’t dare let her parents know of the unpleasanter aspects of grammar-school life, as her mother still didn’t approve of her going and her father had worked so hard for her uniform and sports clothes. For that, she would be eternally grateful for it made some of her difficulties easier to bear. Her main embarrassment was her accent. Most of the girls in the school spoke a different kind of English, a posh B.B.C. English like Zach. Their parents paid fees whereas she was a poor scholarship girl, with an accent that many of the girls either ridiculed or could not understand. Ginnie had said that she was beginning to talk more la di da and her mother was constantly telling her not to let ‘that school’ go to her head. She didn’t put on a different way of talking intentionally, it was just that all day she was mixing with teachers and girls who spoke differently to the people in Little Weirwold. She was beginning to feel that she neither fitted into Little Weirwold nor the Girls’ High. She was grateful that there was so much school work for her to do and her loneliness acted as an incentive to work harder.
She called in on Will several times but as soon as she mentioned Zach he would always abruptly change the subject. This added to her loneliness, for she dearly wanted to talk about him to someone.
One chill afternoon in January however, an unforeseen event caused Will finally to accept Zach’s death.
It was a bitter raw day and, although Will was wearing a heavy overcoat, scarf and balaclava, the frost penetrated into his very bones. He let the graveyard gate clang noisily behind him and set off towards Spooky Cott, taking as usual the route around the fields on the Grange side. He always avoided retracing the way he and Zach had taken on their last morning together.
It seemed as if the very ground had frozen. The hard furrows in the fields were as immobile as waves of corrugated iron, and the few surviving tufts of grass that remained crackled as his boots hit the hoar frost that coated them. Eventually he came to the gap in the hedge which served as Geoffrey Sanderton’s gate. He crunched his way up the tangled garden and knocked on the door. He glanced round at the trees which were now quite naked and thin, and blew into his hands, stamping his feet into some semblance of life. He was just thinking how vulnerable the trees appeared when Geoffrey opened the door.
‘Hello,’ he said cheerily. ‘I’ve just put the kettle on. Sling your coat on an armchair and make yourself warm.’
Will gladly divested himself of his heavy winter garments and curled himself up at the foot of an armchair by the hearth.
‘Get those fingers loosened up first,’ yelled Geoffrey from the kitchen. ‘Don’t go sticking them straight out in front of the fire.’
But Will didn’t need telling. He remembered last winter when he had held his frozen hands above the range and how painful the sudden transition from cold to hot had been. Geoffrey came hobbling in, carrying a large pot of tea. Since having a wooden leg he had dispensed with his crutches completely and now used a magnificent ebony walking stick that Emilia Thorne had given him. It was silver-topped with strange ornate designs carved around the knob.
The cottage had changed radically since Will’s first visit. Geoffrey and Emilia Thorne had taken an instant liking to each other and between the two of them they had cleaned and painted the walls, adding shelves, bits of furniture and potted plants on the way.
‘What have you brought me to see?’ asked Geoffrey, as they sat down by the fire.
Will glanced shamefacedly down at the rug. He undid a cardboard folder and produced a drawing of a chewed-up bone in one of Tom’s slippers. Geoffrey examined it intently. Will avoided his eyes.
After they had drunk their tea Geoffrey put the teapot on the mantelpiece above the fire. Beside it, he placed a photograph of two young men with their arms around each other. They seemed to be laughing a great deal. In front of the teapot he laid his pipe.
‘Those are your subjects for this afternoon.’
Will recognized one of the young men as Geoffrey.
‘Who’s the other man?’ he asked. ‘Is he your brother?’
‘Best friend,’ he replied. ‘Killed in action. Very talented. A brilliant sculptor.’
‘Oh,’ said Will quietly.
‘That’s his pipe actually.’
‘You use his pipe?’
‘Yes. I know he would have wanted me to have it. It makes him still a little alive for me whenever I smoke it. Do you understand?’
Will didn’t, nor did he wish to. It was bad enough possessing Zach’s old Shakespeare. He had wrapped it up and given it to Tom to p
ut away in his cupboard together with the cartoon picture that Zach had drawn of him.
He sat down immediately to work. Usually he could immerse himself totally in the objects he was drawing but every time he caught sight of the laughing young man in the photograph, and the pipe, it disturbed him. They no longer seemed inanimate objects. They were alive. He began to wonder if the two men had even drunk tea together out of the same teapot.
He attempted to draw steadily but found his hand trembling. Suddenly he saw Zach on his colourful bicycle, singing and lifting his arms high into the air yelling ‘Look, no hands’ and falling straight into a hedge, and he remembered his scratched face grinning up at him. He sat for three hours at the drawing and spent most of the time gazing morbidly through the window watching the sky grow darker. Geoffrey put the blacks up and lit the gas-lamp.
‘Time to stop,’ he said, and he peered over Will’s shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ mumbled Will. ‘I don’t seem to be able to…’ His voice trailed into silence.
‘Sit down by the fire and I’ll toast us some muffins.’
Will cheered up a little at this. He curled up in the armchair.
While Will was gazing dreamily into the fire he heard a click. Geoffrey had opened the gramophone and was winding it up.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Putting on some music.’
The record made its swishing sound as the needle circled around its dark edge and then the music started. It was the same that he and Zach had listened to, when they had sat amongst the chaos and candles, the day they had first come to the cottage.
Will wanted Geoffrey to take it off. But he couldn’t bear to speak or look at him in case he broke down, so he returned to staring at the fire. As he did so he suddenly felt that it was not just he who was gazing into the flames it was both he and Zach. He could feel Zach sitting beside him, bursting with excitement and desperately wanting to move with the music, while he was happy just to listen. It was an unnerving feeling. He caught sight of the photograph on the mantelpiece and it reminded him of a snapshot that Mrs Clarence had taken of him and Zach in Salt-on-the-Mouth.
Goodnight Mister Tom Page 26