by Mick Jackson
Such moments came about very rarely—no more than eight or ten times a year—and were the closest thing each ship had to an actual launch. One Wednesday lunchtime the Captain found himself at such a juncture—had the little finger of his right hand down the neck of the dimpled bottle on the tip of the bowsprit of an Elizabethan man-of-war, the lines all taut in his other hand and the yards just about squared off—when an unfamiliar fellow went past the window.
He could tell straightaway that he was an out-of-towner. A young soldier, if not quite young enough to be given a couple of coppers and sent out to buy some cakes, then perhaps willing to be lured in by a little ham and chutney. But for all his hopes of a conversation which might slowly be brought around to the subject of women on the heavier side, the old Captain watched in vain, with the little finger of one hand down the neck of the bottle and the fingers of the other clinging to the reins.
The Reverend Bentley had been clucking under the hood of Maureen Tucker’s pram by the church gates for what felt like long enough to satisfy even the proudest young mother and emerged just in time to see the young soldier coming up the lane. There were so many Americans in the county it took him a while to see that this particular serviceman was actually British—was wearing a lighter-colored khaki, cut from a rougher kind of cloth—and by the time the soldier was near enough for the reverend to make such a distinction he was also able to see just how badly his uniform hung off him. His collar and cuffs were flailing open; his tunic and trousers were soaking wet. The soldier stopped and slumped against the war memorial, as if he had just run a marathon.
“Everything all right?” the Reverend Bentley called out to him.
The soldier shook his head but kept on staring at the ground, which rather unsettled the reverend, and he was still wondering how best to handle the situation when the soldier lifted his head. His face was plastered with tears.
“What’s the matter?” said the reverend.
The young man seemed incapable of doing anything but quietly sob to himself. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and shook his head again.
“Where’s your tin hat?” said the reverend.
Whatever was weighing so heavily on the young man briefly lifted. He looked over his shoulder, as if he might have dropped it just a second before. But the lane was empty and he turned back to the reverend, utterly puzzled.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The reverend had reason to feel that the situation was generally improving and had just given Maureen a reassuring smile when the soldier slipped his rifle off his shoulder and pulled the bolt back. And in those few seconds it seemed to the reverend that the village and his presence in it were critically weakened. He watched the soldier climb onto the base of the war memorial, watched him lean against the obelisk for support. Saw him tuck the butt of the rifle up against his shoulder and flatten his face against the stock.
The first shot went clean over the church tower. The second hit the weathervane. Both shots were still rattling down the valley when the soldier pulled his rifle away from his shoulder.
“I can shoot,” he said, emphatically. “I can shoot all right.”
It seemed that the more he tried to put his thoughts in order, the more they slipped away from him. Then suddenly he was gulping for air again and weeping and shaking his sorry head. He had one arm around the war memorial, as if propped up by a fellow reveler after a night on the town. He hung there for a second, then clambered down and took a step toward the reverend and Maureen, who both instinctively took a step away from him. Maureen had one hand on the pram handle and she found herself gently rocking it.
“Don’t cry,” she thought. “Please God, don’t cry just now.”
The soldier opened his mouth to speak, but after a couple of moments gave up and shook his head again. Then he turned and limped off down the lane from which he’d just appeared.
Maureen Tucker would later claim that the strange lull between the soldier’s departure and anyone actually opening their door was due to the villagers making sure that all the shooting was over before coming out to count the dead. The reverend more charitably attributed the apparent delay to the peculiar clock-stopping trance he and Maureen had entered. Either way, there certainly seemed to be a moment’s grace before the doors flew open and everyone came streaming out into the street—an interval in which the only sounds were the soldier’s boots as he retreated and the squeak of the weathervane still spinning on its spike.
The next morning an army officer knocked on the reverend’s door wearing a uniform much the same as any other army officer’s but with a few more whistles and bells. He had a clipboard under one arm on which he took down the reverend’s account of the previous day’s events. The reverend spoke and the officer nodded, to keep him going, but barely a flicker of warmth threatened to cross his face. And when the reverend had said about as much as he could remember the officer asked how many shots had been fired.
“It’s a funny thing,” said the reverend. “Yesterday I’d have said two, but today it seems entirely possible it may have been three. Isn’t that odd?”
The army officer agreed that it was and made another note. The Reverend Bentley asked if it was important.
“Going AWOL will get you into one sort of trouble,” the officer told him. “Discharging a weapon is a different kettle of fish.”
Then he screwed the top back on his fountain pen and hooked it into his pocket.
“In his defense,” said the reverend, “the boy didn’t seem especially dangerous. He just seemed upset.”
The officer nodded. “And he’s going to be even more upset by the time we get through with him,” he said.
Health and Efficiency
THE OSTENTATION of the Americans’ arrival was outdone only by the modesty with which they slipped away. For weeks the lanes had been packed with traffic, as extra troops and transportation headed for the commandeered zone. A baker, with a special dispensation to enter the area, talked about whole cities of tents farther down the valleys, and Dexter Fadden reckoned that some stretches of the river were so clogged with barges that you could hop from one bank to the other without getting your feet wet. But just when it seemed inconceivable that the land beyond the roadblocks could absorb another jeep or motorcycle the villagers woke one morning to discover that the entire army had upped and gone.
The following day they were on the beaches of Normandy—had left the fields down the road to land on the newspapers’ front pages. And, though few people were inclined to admit it, their withdrawal left a certain sense of vulnerability in its wake.
Much to the frustration of the farmers who had been lodging with relatives or leasing other, far inferior land, the Americans’ departure failed to signal an immediate return to their property. In fact, it would be months before they were even allowed to see what sort of state their homes were in. In the meantime, a small unit of Allied servicemen assessed the damage and engineered the clearance of unexploded ordnance, but as time passed and the number of soldiers slowly dwindled the Five Boys found the prospect of burned-out farms and bombed cottages too much of a temptation and about a month after D-Day, when it seemed safe to assume that the Americans weren’t about to come flooding back, they climbed over the gate on the road to Duncannon and launched their own small offensive into the overgrown fields.
Apart from the odd slipped slate or broken window the first few houses they came across were disappointingly intact. There was nothing smoking, nothing smoldering—no sign of annihilation at all. In fact, the land appeared to be flourishing. The crops came right up to the Boys’ shoulders, the hedgerows billowed out into the lanes and instead of the wasteland they’d set their hearts on the Boys found themselves in a burgeoning wilderness—a world almost healed of humanity.
They hacked their way through the undergrowth like explorers, with no idea where they were headed. They reached a lane and followed it for a mile or so, weaving between the corn marigolds and burdock which had s
prung up everywhere. Their only discovery during their first hour was a small crater which Lewis insisted was the result of a shell or bomb, and he made a great show of crouching down and placing the palm of his hand inside it, as if he might still pick up some trace of an explosion’s warmth.
As they pressed on their sense of adventure steadily diminished. They began to tire of working so hard for such scant reward and Aldred was already contemplating the difficulties of the journey home when they stumbled upon a cottage in its own dark gully with a back door hanging off its frame.
A drift of leaves spilled right into the kitchen. The remains of what looked like a small bonfire were scattered around the range. The chimney breast and the ceiling were blackened, the floor was peppered with cigarette butts and one corner of the room was piled high with old tin cans.
Finn went over, gingerly picked up one of the cans and read the label. “Chicken soup,” he said.
The Boys slowly worked their way through the kitchen like detectives. Imagined American soldiers sitting around the fire, smoking cigarettes and eating chicken soup. The others went through to the parlor but Lewis lagged behind, picked up a couple of flattened fag ends and put them in a pocket. When he got back home, he told himself, he might try lighting one up.
He joined the other four Boys—Finn had found a stick and was prodding some rags with it, and Harvey was kicking at the baseboard. If they’d brought some matches, Aldred was saying, they could have made a fire, but he was interrupted when Finn suddenly raised his hand.
“What?” said Hector.
“Upstairs,” whispered Finn. “I heard something.”
The Boys all stared at the ceiling.
“There’s nothing there,” said Harvey.
“No,” said Finn. “I heard something.”
Hector, seeing the chance to boost his own stock at the expense of Finn’s, ambled over to the staircase, listened, then set off up it. The others gathered around the foot of the stairs and slowly clomped up after him. There were two rooms upstairs, but neither had anybody in them, which was greeted with disappointment and a good deal of private relief.
The Boys resumed their meticulous examination of the house. Of the two rooms, the one at the front had been more comprehensively ransacked. The baseboards had been levered off the walls and some of the floorboards were missing, so that half the joists were bare. The windowpanes were either cracked or shattered and Hector went over, had a look at them, then squeezed himself into the sill.
“They must have sat here while they kept watch,” he announced from his cubbyhole.
The fields rolled and turned in the breeze and Hector glowered out at them, thinking what a fine spectacle of vigilance he must make, but his little performance was spoiled by a squabble breaking out behind him and he turned to find Aldred in the middle of a tight little ruck.
“Get ‘em off, Heck,” he was screaming. “They’re going to rip it.”
Hector climbed down, waded in and dragged Harvey and Lewis off him. Aldred managed to slip from Finn’s grasp and leaped across the missing floorboards. He stood in the corner, clutching a magazine to his chest.
“What’ve you got?” said Hector.
A coy smile played upon Aldred’s lips. His eyes widened and he slowly slid his fingers down the cover of the magazine to reveal a woman waving from the top of a sand dune, with both bosoms out. The Boys made another lunge toward him and Hector had to hold them back.
This teasing and lunging continued until, under Hector’s supervision and through Finn’s negotiation, Aldred was eventually talked into returning, and taking his magazine over to the window where it could be seen by everyone. It was agreed that, as he’d found it, Aldred should be allowed to turn the pages and he placed the magazine on the floor, and the others huddled around him until he was almost collapsing under their weight.
The magazine was a little bigger than his mother’s Be-Ro recipe book and had the same chocolatey print. In fact, some of the women were about the same age as the Boys’ mothers and had similar hairstyles, the difference being that the women on the magazine’s pages had not a stitch of clothing on.
They danced naked, hand in hand with other women (“The Three Graces”), stood naked in a field among the ricks of corn (“Summer Idyll”) and admired the view from a ferny hillside (“The Sun Goddess”), apparently oblivious to their predicament. Such a hearty lack of inhibition was having a dramatic effect on the Five Boys. They felt their blood being distributed in new and unusual ways. All sorts of ungovernable thoughts and emotions began to stampede through them. Harvey felt sick. Hector felt like fighting. Lewis was stricken with what felt like a feverish infirmity.
On one page, naked men and children gamboled alongside the women. Whole naked families erected tents, played cricket and paddled in the sea. A row of naked gardeners stood by their shovels on an allotment (“The Leeds Sun and Air Society dig for victory”), under the watchful eye of an older man who was also naked apart from his spectacles and the pipe clenched between his teeth. But most unset-ding for the Boys was the outdoor PT class in which a dozen naked women gaily swung Indian clubs about their ears.
As soon as they reached the end Aldred was inundated with demands to return to particular pictures so he turned back to the first page and began working through them again. Lewis, while being enthralled, had a growing conviction they were committing a crime heinous enough to have them thrown behind bars. Harvey had no such qualms and at one point tried to kiss the picture of an especially ample-breasted woman, only to be dragged off like a dog by Hector. Meanwhile, Finn managed to thread his stick through the Boys’ arms and elbows and tap her on her bare behind.
But each time they returned to a photograph the Boys found that some of the potency of the breasts and buttocks had dimmed a little. The lady beside the rick of corn began to grow familiar; the Three Graces failed to jiggle as they danced. And the Boys turned instead to some of the advertisements and articles between the photographs, hoping to find further revelations there. Like any other magazine, there were adverts for Hovis and Tate and Lyle’s Treacle. There were also public announcements regarding Mind Power, Vigor and Vitality and newly patented cures for Stammering and Underconfidence. But it was the news that “Eight Glands Control your Destiny” that stopped the Five Boys in their tracks. None of them was entirely sure what a gland actually did or looked like, preferring to nod sagely as Aldred read aloud that “a man is as old as his glands.” Something profoundly glandular had been happening in the confines of their underpants. The idea that there were another seven, equally powerful glands secreted about their persons (which could be boosted by sending off for a jar of “British Gland Pills”) was almost too much to bear.
Lewis got to his feet, unbuttoned his trousers and was about to urinate against a wall when he noticed a tuft of fur poking out from a gap in the baseboard.
“Dead rat,” he said.
The others looked over at him.
“You sure it’s dead?” said Aldred.
“It’s not moving,” said Lewis.
Harvey suggested Lewis give it a poke with the stick by his foot.
“Give it a smack,” said Hector, “and see if there’s any more in there.”
Lewis was not particularly keen on the idea, but was not about to surrender the stick to one of the other boys. So he moved them back to give himself some room for a little run-up, drew his stick back, summoned every ounce of vigor and vitality, then leaped forward, swinging the stick down into the rat as if he were hitting a cricket ball for six.
Rats came flooding out from every corner. Went scuttling over the Boys’ feet, brushing up against their ankles and leaping at the walls. The whole house was suddenly full of them. And the Boys ran screaming down the stairs, with rats under their feet and tumbling around them as they fought to get to the door.
They ran out into the sunlight and kept on running, crashing through the branches that blocked their way. Ran until the cottage was far behind th
em and, even then, checked over their shoulders to make sure the rats weren’t after them, before daring to slow down and catch their breath.
They made their way home, sniveling and shuddering, and had been walking for almost a mile before Aldred realized he’d left his magazine behind and that his newfound intimacy with the naked ladies was at an end. A couple of steps behind him Lewis followed, convinced that the rats were some sort of retribution for their lecherous behavior and, in a bid to purge himself, threw his cigarette butts over a hedge. Only Hector Massie contrived to find the whole thing funny, although, as Harvey pointed out, he had been the first one out of the door, and Finn marched ahead without saying a word to the others, hoping against hope that he might get home without anyone noticing that he’d wet his pants.
As they passed the woods just outside Duncannon, Lewis had the peculiar feeling that someone was watching him, and when he glanced over to his right thought he saw a man stretched out in the branches of a nearby tree. If things hadn’t been so strange already he might have said something to the others but all he wanted to do was get back home and put the whole day behind him. And within a matter of seconds he wasn’t sure whether he’d actually seen the man in the tree or not.
Victory
IF ANY OF THE villagers happened to notice Aldred’s balaclava hanging from the gutter they never drew attention to it. Only the Boys knew what it was, how it had got there and the punishment Aldred had suffered when his mother learned that he’d lost it and realized she was going to have to knit him another one.
By the time Hector and Finn gave up trying to talk Aldred into retrieving it, it had become a knitted flag, raised in honor of Bobby’s bravery. The rain drenched it, the four winds blew through it and its wool slowly turned to string. But in the gutter a few feet away, HMS Victory sat in its dimple bottle as dry as a bone, and the only danger was that the sun might heat the air around it to such a degree that it might fire the cork across the roofs.