Five Boys

by Mick Jackson

  They gathered by the war memorial late on the Sunday afternoon to gaze at the runes of the bullet holes. Someone suggested getting a ladder so that they could run their fingers along the tiny cracks and crevices, but no one could be bothered to go and look for one. Then they set off down the lane, from one bullet hole to another, like a tour around old Pompeii, with Bobby and Aldred newly promoted to second lieutenants alongside Finn and Hector, and Harvey and Lewis bringing up the rear.

  They came to a halt outside the Mercers’ cottage. A few bits of the drystone wall were still scattered in the lane and Hector turned one over with his boot and wondered aloud how things might have turned out if Mrs. Mercer had failed to find a foothold or been pushing her one-lunged husband in his wheelchair and had had to abandon him.

  Lewis was pointing to the broken lupines, indicating the area where Mrs. Mercer had landed among them and the likely path of her flight, when there was a violent rapping at one of the windows and the boys looked up to see Mrs. Mercer herself shaking a bandaged fist at them. For a couple of seconds they stood their ground, as if they had been doing nothing wrong and were determined that they had every right to be there. Then they turned and, engaging one another in rather self-conscious conversation, shuffled off down the lane.

  On the whole, the village tended to tolerate the Captain’s odd little habits. If he wanted to lock himself away all day with his boats and bottles then that was his business. Harvey’s mother reckoned she was about as much of a captain as he was and the one time Hector’s father tried to coax some nautical anecdote out of him he swore you could see him piecing the story together as he went along. But if sitting hunched over a tray all day was considered quite harmless during peacetime, doing so on a Sunday when the country was at war was something else again. Some of the Boys had heard their mothers use the word “unpatriotic” to describe such behavior and as their own attitude toward the man alternated between ridicule and suspicion it wasn’t long before they managed to link the Focke Wulf’s visit with the Captain’s semaphore.

  Bobby and the Five Boys met one night around the back of the graveyard to discuss the possibility that they had a Nazi sympathizer in their midst. Establishing the Captain’s guilt took only a matter of seconds. What took a little longer was agreeing to a suitable response. Lewis proposed setting fire to the Captain’s cottage, and for a while they all sat around and imagined the flames spewing from the windows and the old man trapped inside. Finn and Hector were in no hurry to oppose the idea, knowing that sooner or later one of the other boys would voice their concerns, and it was Lewis who eventually pointed out that any incriminating charts or codebooks would go up with the Captain and the proposal was put to one side.

  Other offensives were bandied about—there was much talk of tunnels and rope with hooks attached to the end of it—but all the Boys wanted to do was break into the Captain’s cottage and have a snoop around. It was generally accepted that the attic room from which he sent his semaphore was probably the heart of his operations, where all his files and papers would be stored, and from that point on the discussion concentrated on how they might make their way up to it and what they might be likely to find.

  Aldred was all for forging a letter from Miss Pye, full of hints and promises, with a map and directions to some far-flung tryst. Finn suggested luring him out into the garden and hitting him over the head with a brick. The longer they waited, they knew, the more chance there was of common sense prevailing, so they resolved there and then to break into the Captain’s house on the night of his next semaphore, which would enable them to find out who he was sending messages to. Hector proposed that Bobby should be the one to do it. It would, he said, be a sort of initiation, although the word meant nothing to Bobby or any of the other Boys.

  Bobby was so relieved to be on the same side as the Five Boys that any misgivings he had about creeping up on the Captain were swept away. If the old man was stupid enough to draw attention to himself, he thought, then he would just have to face the consequences.

  Bobby was a bag of nerves all day Tuesday and hardly touched his supper, which got Miss Minter worrying that the Five Boys had been at him again, and as he crouched in the alley by the Captain’s cottage at eight o’clock what little food he’d managed to get down him threatened to come back up.

  Aldred was on the roof of the church tower with his imaginary binoculars directed at the Captain’s cottage. The moment the light went on in the attic he dropped to his knees, crept over to the far wall and put his head through the parapet.

  “He’s there,” he whispered down into the darkness. “He’s there.”

  Lewis saluted and set off across the graveyard. He’d been standing among the gravestones for the last five minutes and was glad to be leaving them behind. He marched down the path but covered the last few yards on all fours, as agreed in the briefing, and popped his head above the gate. He waved at Harvey, who was crouched beside the war memorial, and when he waved a second time Harvey spotted him and waved back.

  Finn leaned against the corner of the Captain’s cottage and Harvey was aware that he could easily have strolled right over to him, but dutifully crawled around the base of the war memorial and waved in Finn’s direction until he disappeared down the side of the house.

  Bobby was wearing Aldred’s balaclava. It was meant to help him sneak about the place without being seen but seemed to be doing nothing but generate a great deal of heat and make his ears itch, and he was still debating whether to take if off and put it in his pocket when Finn came jogging down the alleyway.

  Hector was right beside Bobby and patted him on the shoulder.

  “You ready?” he said.

  Bobby nodded, took a breath and headed toward the Captain’s porch.

  He must have got to his feet a bit too fast after so much crouching. Ail the blood which should have been in his head seemed to be slopping around in his boots. But he kept his eyes on his destination and tacked his way toward it like a drunk. And once he was inside the wooden porch he paused and hung off the door handle for a few seconds to try and recover himself.

  He must have opened that door half a dozen times during his first few days as an evacuee and when he thought of all the cakes and peculiar conversation he’d shared with the Captain a wave of shame threatened to wash him away, but he threw his weight into the door, and the door popped open. Then he was in the Captain’s parlor, with the Captain nowhere to be seen.

  As he closed the door behind him Bobby felt as though he was shutting the door on his own prison cell. He tiptoed into the room, stood and looked around for a moment before crawling into a corner and hiding behind an armchair. He drew his knees up to his chin and studied the weave of the material a few inches from his face to try and calm himself, but his head felt as if it was boiling and Aldred’s balaclava was now damp and heavy with sweat.

  “What if he smells me?” Bobby thought. “What if he smells me hiding in his house?”

  It had been agreed that Hector and Finn would count to a hundred before knocking, so that Bobby would have enough time to hide away, and as he sat there he was sure he could hear them slowly reeling off the numbers out in the alleyway. The bottled ships were stacked all around him and Bobby thought of all the work that had gone into them. Then he imagined the tiny ships lying wrecked on the floor in a sea of shattered glass and the Captain standing among them, heartbroken. He reached a hand out and lifted down the nearest bottle, and was still looking in at all the flags and the tiny cannon hatches when Finn and Hector began to hammer at the door.

  They must have got themselves all fired up because they hammered a second time before the Captain was even halfway down the stairs. Bobby saw him go by, pulling his dressing gown around him, and as soon as he heard the door open and Hector and Finn start talking, Bobby crept out and headed for the cover of a table, with the neck of the bottle still gripped in his hand. He got to his feet and set off up the stairs, watching each plimsolled footstep, expecting a loud cre
ak with every one, and was so preoccupied with the stairs that when he reached the attic he thought he must have entered the wrong room.

  There were no radios, no charts, no Nazi banners. Just the telescope balancing on its tripod and a couple of boxes up against a wall. He crept forward, could still hear Heck and Finn blathering away far below him. He bent over, put his eye up to the eyepiece and squinted into it. A second later he recoiled, blinking. Stared at the floor, bewildered, before putting his eye back to the telescope.

  Whatever subject Finn and Hector had decided to bring to the Captain’s attention could not have been half as engrossing as they had hoped, and Bobby was still peering through the telescope when he heard the door slam shut and, a moment or two later, the Captain’s feet on the stairs. All the briefings were suddenly redundant. He was meant to gather some evidence, hide in the back bedroom and make his escape when the Captain returned to his semaphore. But there was no other bedroom and if he ran down the stairs now he would only meet the Captain coming up.

  Bobby looked frantically around the room, still gripping the bottle. Felt as if his balaclava was about to burst into flames. The Captain had taken off his dressing gown before he’d got to the top of the stairs. He strode into the room, threw it to one side and went straight over to the telescope. Put his eye up to it, then pulled away. Looked again, shifted the barrel an inch or two to the left. And when he was satisfied that it was back where it should be, he turned to shut the door.

  Lewis and Harvey had joined Aldred on the church tower the moment their signals had been passed down the line and with a little effort could just make out Heck and Finn chattering away to the Captain. They saw Bobby appear behind the attic’s net curtain. Saw him peering through the telescope. Then the door to the Captain’s cottage slammed shut.

  Lewis turned to Aldred. “That’s not long enough,” he said.

  Bobby stuck his head out between the net curtains and stared helplessly into the night, and the three Boys abandoned their binoculars and began waving and hissing to him across the great divide. When the Captain swept back into the attic the curtains were still settling. The Boys watched him go straight over to the telescope, look through it, adjust it. Saw him turn and shut the door, then slowly return to his handkerchief waving, with Bobby spread-eagled against the slates just a yard or two to his right.

  The Boys ducked back behind the parapets.

  “What’s he got in his hand?” said Lewis.

  “A bottle,” said Aldred.

  Lewis tried digesting this information. “Why a bottle?” he said.

  Bobby didn’t dare move for two or three minutes. He lay there with his feet in the gutter, convinced he’d be spending the rest of his life stuck up on that roof. Then he got the idea that if he could only climb up to the chimney stack he might find a less precipitous way back down and twice set off for it only to slide back down to the gutter with his fingers clutching at the slates.

  He rested his cheek against the cold roof and brought the dimple bottle up to his face. Looked in at the ship. He thought of all the strong men on a boat like that. Then he went down on all fours and, with his left knee dredging the gutter, began to crawl away from the window until he reached the corner of the house.

  The ground was a good forty feet below him. In a couple of minutes, he told himself, it would all be over. He saw himself being congratulated by the other Boys. Then he turned, swung his legs out over the gutter and began to ease himself down into the dark.

  He fished around for the drainpipe with his foot. The gutter dug into his stomach, and he had to lift himself out and away from it before being able to drop down and get his arms around the pipe—a maneuver he thought he’d successfully completed when his descent was suddenly halted; something pulled at his hair and he realized that Aldred’s balaclava had snagged on one of the gutter’s brackets. He hung there, as quietly as possible. Didn’t have the strength to pull himself back up and was not about to let go of the drainpipe. He began to slip. The balaclava began to throttle him. He could feel the power in his arms and legs begin to fail. He felt a blackness slowly flood his vision and the blood in his head go cold. Then his neck slackened, his head dropped back, slid free and he left the balaclava hanging from the gutter, with a hank of his hair in it.

  The Boys watched in awe as he climbed down the side of the cottage. The only thing which would have impressed them more would have been if he’d slipped, fallen and broken his neck. But as soon as he was on the ground they charged down the steps of the church tower, and once they’d reconvened in the graveyard any inclination to praise him for his heroism had been superseded by their eagerness to hear what he’d spied through the Captain’s telescope.

  Bobby seemed reluctant to share his findings and the more cagey he became the more the Five Boys pressed him.

  “Ladies,” he said, at last.

  The Boys looked at one another.

  “What sort of ladies?” said Hector.

  Bobby rubbed the back of his neck. “Ladies,” he said, “like your mums.”

  The Boys were dumbfounded. They had never imagined that their mothers might be caught up in a spy ring. It was almost inconceivable.

  “At the keep-fit class,” said Bobby, “at the village hall.”

  The Boys still didn’t understand.

  Bobby reached out his arms and mimed some of the spins and twirls he’d seen through the telescope. Without the Indian clubs, they looked remarkably like the Captain’s semaphore.

  The Boys sat in silence and considered the implications.

  Aldred was staring at Bobby. “Where’s my balaclava?” he said.

  If the Invader Comes

  THE PEOPLE of south Devon had always taken great pride in their coastline and had a particular affection for their beaches. But when the war came that affection suddenly soured and they became the place where the enemy was most likely to come sweeping in.

  Lorryloads of soldiers turned up and spent all week sinking great lumps of concrete into the sand. Laid thousands of mines and rolled out great coils of barbed wire, so that by the time they left, the beaches looked less like a place anticipating a battle and more like a place where one had just passed through.

  In the years since, France had fallen. Now German E-boats patroled the Channel, and morale among the villagers had never been lower when they woke one morning to find a leaflet on their doormat, headed

  If the

  INVADER

  comes

  WHAT TO DO AND HOW TO DO IT

  The text was laid out below in four narrow columns, like a political manifesto with all the optimism trimmed away. Instead, the dead hand of the War Office prevailed, cheerlessly listing the steps each civilian should take if the enemy ever landed on their shore. One’s primary concern, it said, should be to hamper the invading army’s progress and accommodate the British forces’ response, but while the pamphlet went to great lengths to emphasize the need to keep one’s head, its very existence did nothing but convince the villagers that the enemy was at the door and might come bursting in at any time.

  Vigilance, the leaflet insisted, was paramount. Rumors should be given no credence, and in the unlikely event of an invasion the British troops would be served best by people staying put rather than blocking the roads in flight. In fact, if necessary, they should consider putting their vehicles out of action to avoid them being commandeered by the enemy—a recommendation a local police constable was said to have inflicted unstintingly (and somewhat prematurely) on his bicycle, hiding its various parts all around the house and flower beds. A few days later, when his need for his bicycle outweighed the likelihood of an invasion, he set about reassembling it, but it was never quite the same. He couldn’t remember where he’d hidden the saddle. The bicycle could still be ridden for shorter journeys, with him standing on the pedals—an inconvenience he sought to conceal by looking intently over the hedgerows as if suspecting nefarious activity there.

  Certainly, the threat of inv
asion was real enough for every villager to lie in bed at night and imagine the invading army—stormtroopers marching past the post office or gangs of men, blacked up, creeping along the ditches with their bayonets drawn. But if everyone had their own idea what the invaders might look like, they all came up from the coast, still gritty from their landing, and talking in the same strange Germanic tongue—so when the South Hams finally fell it was doubly confounding for the locals that the invasion should come from the north, rather than the sea, and consist not of Germans but of gum-chewing Americans.

  They came in twos and threes at first—high-ranking military men who stepped out of chauffered cars in their trench coats to point their batons across the fields or stare through binoculars along Slapton Sands. And, since all the signposts had been uprooted as a precaution against a possible invasion, they were often obliged to stop their cars and ask the locals where they were.

  These occasional sightings encouraged precisely the sort of rumor the War Office disapproved of—of German battleships massing out in the Channel, of extra armaments being shipped in to keep them at bay. Of fifth columnists arrested at Blackawton in possession of a map of Buckfastleigh. All sorts of rumors did the rounds that autumn, but the ones concerning American servicemen coming to south Devon to prepare for landing on continental Europe came up with such frequency that the others eventually fell by the wayside to be replaced by variations on this single theme.

  An additional and more worrying rumor was that, in order to accommodate these maneuvers, a great swathe of the county was to be requisitioned and all its inhabitants cleared from the site—a bit of gossip only the gloomiest Jeremiah could have taken any pleasure recounting, since no one knew where this commandeered territory was meant to begin and end. So when posters went up announcing important meetings in village halls, everyone had an idea what they might be about, even if they could never quite conceive such an evacuation coming to pass.