At the Firefly Gate

by Linda Newbery

  ‘No, love,’ Dottie said. ‘Not like you mean, anyway, though I suppose he was in a way. He was in the RAF. He flew in them Lancasters.’

  ‘Oh, like Simon’s grandad — great-grandad! Was he at Lakenfield?’

  ‘No,’ Dottie said. ‘He was based at this other airfield near here. Risingheath, it was called. It’s all derelict now.’

  Coldness fluttered down Henry’s spine. ‘Was he a pilot?’

  ‘No, love.’ Dottie shook out her skein so that a length of green wool unravelled itself. ‘He was a navigator. Henry the Navigator. He was the one that worked out the maps and the wind and the speed and suchlike and told the pilot where to fly.’

  Of course. Simon had told him about the different jobs people did, seven crew to every Lancaster. Henry was Henry the Navigator. Henry’s brain was working rapidly — like puzzling away at something in maths when the beginning of the answer dangled itself in his mind and he had to cling tightly to the thread of thought, because if he let go, it would slip away and be gone.

  ‘Did everyone here have something to do with the war?’ he asked.

  Dottie nodded. ‘Felt like that, sometimes! The pub was full of RAF folk every night — there was people billeted in the village. It went on for nearly six years, you know, got to be a way of life. Even farming was war work, then. Told you I worked in an aircraft factory, didn’t I? Girls and women did all sorts of jobs, it wasn’t just the men. Girls did driving, engineering, aircraft maintenance, things we hadn’t dreamed of doing before. Course there was the army and the navy as well, but up here in Suffolk it was all flying. Handy for the coast, you see. It’s just across the North Sea to Germany.’

  ‘To drop bombs?’

  ‘That’s right. Awful, it was. People over there getting bombed, same as we was in the Blitz, and our young lads being sent off to drop bombs over their side. You’re lucky,’ Dottie said. ‘You won’t have to live through anything like that, fingers crossed.’

  ‘He must have been brave,’ Henry said, in a small voice.

  ‘Brave?’ Dottie tilted her head on one side, considering. ‘Yes, he was. And you know what was so brave? It was because he was scared to death every time he climbed into that plane. He never told me, but I knew.’

  ‘But how could he be both?’ Henry couldn’t help asking. ‘Brave and scared?’

  ‘Well, who in their right mind wouldn’t be scared? Knowing the odds?’ Dottie said, a touch sharply. ‘You wouldn’t need to be brave if you didn’t see the dangers, would you?’ Then she gave him a sideways look and said, ‘Odd thing is, you remind me of him. Reminded me soon as I saw you. And not just being called Henry. Same dark hair, same brown eyes. Same cheeky smile.’

  Henry couldn’t get his head round that. Henry the Navigator was a grown-up man, an RAF man in uniform, a man who could find the way to Germany and back in the dark in a Lancaster bomber. How could Dottie see Henry in him?

  ‘Was he the one you were going to marry?’ he asked. He glanced at the kitchen door, hoping Pat wouldn’t come out. Not till Dottie had finished telling him.

  ‘Yes, love, he was.’ Dottie stopped knitting for a moment and looked over the garden fence towards the orchard. ‘Met him over at Risingheath. I used to help out in the NAAFI van at the airfield.’

  ‘Naffy van?’ Henry repeated.

  ‘Yes, that’s right — sort of mobile canteen. It stood for . . . now, what was it? . . . Navy, Army, Air Force, Something-or-other . . . First clapped eyes on Henry when I served him a mug of tea and a doughnut.’

  ‘It cost tuppence,’ Henry said. The words were out of his mouth before he knew he was going to say them.

  ‘Well, and how would you know that?’ Dottie said, staring.

  ‘I — I just guessed.’ He could have said: and Henry dropped his change in the grass and had to grovel about to find it. I was there!

  ‘Two old pence, it would have been,’ Dottie said. ‘That’s — what? A bit less than a penny now. Anyway, that’s how we met. He kept coming to the NAAFI van. I liked him but I was too shy to tell him. Then we met again at a dance. He came over and asked me to dance and from then on I never wanted to dance with anyone else. He was only a boy really, not much older than me. And then, when we got to know each other, he used to come over to the village to meet me, when he had nights off flying. It was a long, hot summer, just like this one. We’d go walking together in the woods and down by the stream. Courting, we called it then. Sounds so old-fashioned, doesn’t it?’

  Henry unravelled a creeping buttercup that had flattened itself among the grasses. A dizzy feeling came over him as he thought of his dream. ‘What happened to him? Why didn’t you get married after all?’

  ‘He never came back,’ Dottie said. ‘He’d flown twelve times, him and his crew. Twelve times over the North Sea or right over Germany, with the anti-aircraft guns and the fighters. Each time, he was so relieved to get back safely, but he knew he’d got to do it all over again and again and again. Once you’d done thirty, you’d be stood down for a rest. Well, they’d done twelve and they was getting themselves a bit worked up about Unlucky Thirteen. Nineteen forty-three, this was. Come to think of it, it was just this time — middle of July. Well, Henry always said he wasn’t superstitious, but you couldn’t blame him, could you? Knowing what the odds were. “If I get back from this one,” he said, “we’ll go into Ipswich and get you an engagement ring”. And I said, “When, you mean, not if ”. And he just shook his head. He’d been trying to look cheerful, but all of a sudden this look came over his face and I could tell.’

  ‘Tell what?’

  Dottie looked across at the orchard again. ‘All of a sudden he knew. He knew he wasn’t coming back.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Henry asked.

  ‘I never found out,’ Dottie said bleakly. ‘No one ever knew. They just flew off that night, the seven of them in that Lanc, and never came back. I watched them go from my bedroom window in the Rectory. Lancs taking off, climbing, one after the other. And I listened for them coming back over, in the early hours. I’d counted them out and I counted them back in. Three planes went missing that night and one of them was Henry and his crew. No one knew what happened. No one saw anything. No radio message.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Henry thought of all the Lancaster bombers he’d seen — or dreamed about, last night, flying into the clouds and fading, as if dissolving into mist. But real planes didn’t dissolve. ‘Still? After all those years?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Dottie shook her head sadly. ‘There were so many ways it could have happened. They could have been shot to pieces or crashed into the sea or burst into flames. When aircrew went missing like that, you didn’t necessarily know they’d been killed — they could have landed in the sea and managed to get into their lifeboat or they could have bailed out and been taken prisoner in Germany. So you didn’t stop hoping, not till after the war ended and all the prisoners came home — you hoped there’d be a letter or a telegram or they’d just turn up. But I never did find out. They must have been killed, all of them, and I’ll never know how.’

  Henry’s stomach churned at the thought of all the things that could happen to a Lancaster bomber in wartime. He looked at the word THIRTEEN on the Scrabble board and saw Dottie looking at it too. She nodded slowly.

  ‘Last time I saw him, he said, “See you here, same time tomorrow. I’ll be waiting,” he said, “whatever happens.” And I thought at the time, well, that’s an odd thing to say — because of, you know, all the things that could happen. But he promised he’d be waiting and he wasn’t. He never came back.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have married someone else, after the war?’ Henry asked, although he was glad she hadn’t.

  Dottie shook her head. ‘I had my chances. But nothing else seemed quite the same, somehow, as me and Henry. Anyway, I’d promised and it wasn’t a promise I ever wanted to break. My Henry, he made things come alive for me in a way no one else could. He made me see things. We’d be walking along in th
e woods and suddenly he’d stop and listen, and say: “There’s a tree-creeper. Listen!” And then we’d look round and see it. And a couple of nights, walking back to the village, we saw a barn owl. Floating up to the trees like a great flake of snow. Once or twice there was nightingales. I didn’t know none of that, coming from the East End of London — couldn’t have told you a nightingale from a house sparrow. It was Henry showed me.’ She sighed. ‘Nineteen forty-three, this was. This week, in nineteen forty-three. Such a long time ago. And I sometimes wonder what my Henry would think if he saw me now. There’s him, a good-looking young chap of twenty-two, and me a doddery old lady! But you know, sometimes I still get the sense he’s there waiting for me, where he always waited. Where he said he’d wait. Daft, isn’t it?’

  ‘Where? Where would he wait?’ Henry asked, though he already knew the answer. He knew that the man he’d seen was Henry the Navigator, just as he knew that the bombers he’d heard last night were the bombers in Dottie’s memory.

  ‘By the gate out there in the orchard,’ Dottie said. ‘The firefly gate, we called it. Though they was really glow-worms, like I said. That’s where we used to wait for each other. Meet you at the firefly gate, we’d say. Mrs Simmonds, who lived in your house back then, used to call it Henry’s Haunt, he was there so often.’

  If he wanted to, Henry could say: ‘He does wait. He does haunt. I’ve seen him, waiting there. Waiting for you. Perhaps he’s waiting there now. And I’ve dreamed it all, the canteen and the tea and the doughnut and the tuppence. I saw bombers, I heard them. Last night. Twelve Lancaster bombers flying over and nine coming back.’ Something weird was happening. Dottie’s thoughts and memories and the other Henry’s were getting themselves all mixed up with his. And a sense of black dread coursed through him, blotting out the sun and the grass and the garden. Your turn next. My turn. Something terrible was going to happen and he had no way of stopping it. He lay back and looked up at the sky, but it was so huge that he felt he would fall into it and be lost for ever; his stomach reeled, as if he were tumbling through miles and miles of empty air. He rolled over on his front and closed his eyes to stop himself throwing up. There was a cold tremble all the way down his arms and his legs. He tried to swallow, tried to breathe normally.

  ‘Hey! You OK, lovey — a touch too much sun?’

  Dottie’s voice seemed to reach him from a long way away. But now Pat was coming across the grass, saying, ‘OK then, Dottie. Let’s finish this game. You’d better help me, Henry. She’s beating me by miles.’

  Henry blinked and sat up. By looking at the Scrabble board and the tea-tray, he could push back the feeling of dread; but whatever it was, it was still there waiting for him. Your turn next. My turn.

  While he was gazing at Pat’s rack of letters, something occurred to him. He must get Simon’s great-grandfather — Rusty Dobbs or Lucky Dobbs or whatever his real name was — to come over and talk to Dottie. Because if it was the same Rusty Dobbs in the dream, and if Henry had been Henry, then they knew each other. And maybe it had been on Henry the Navigator’s thirteenth flight that Rusty Dobbs had got flu. Good luck for Lucky Dobbs, bad luck for Henry.

  Pat’s letters were EDITHCD. There was a word there if only he could find it.

  TWELVE

  TWO-FACED GRACE

  ‘If you’re writing back,’ Dad said, when Henry showed him Nabil’s postcard and cartoon, ‘you can ask if he’d like to come and stay.’

  ‘Can I? Great!’

  ‘When would be a good time?’ Dad asked Mum.

  They were in the middle of eating. Mum got up to glance at the calendar on its hook above the fridge. ‘Last week in August?’

  Dad nodded. ‘Fine with me.’

  ‘By the way,’ Mum said, sitting down again, ‘I’m staying at home tomorrow — the plumber’s coming. I thought it’d be nice to invite Grace for tea.’

  Henry pulled a face. ‘Yeukk! Do we have to?’

  ‘Henry!’ Dad reproved.

  They were having salad and new potatoes with butter. Henry loved these usually, but now he started rolling the small potatoes around with his fork instead of eating them. A happy thought occurred to him. ‘She won’t want to come, anyway.’

  ‘I’m sure she will,’ Mum said. ‘With Dottie ill, it can’t be very cheerful in her house. She’ll probably be glad of the change.’

  Huh! Henry thought. Grace was the one who was always sulking. It’d be far more fun to have Dottie round for tea.

  ‘What’s the problem, Henry?’ Dad said. ‘Don’t you like Grace?’

  ‘She’s such a nice girl,’ Mum said.

  Henry prodded a tomato with his fork. ‘Nice!’

  ‘Bit bossy, is she?’ Dad said knowingly. ‘You want to stand up to her, Hen. Don’t let her walk all over you.’

  ‘Don’t call me Hen,’ Henry muttered. He could imagine it all too clearly: Grace and her friend Tracy calling him Mother Hen or Kentucky Fried, flapping their wings and making chook-chook noises whenever they got on the coach. The Strawberry variations were bad enough.

  ‘You ought to make more effort to be nice to her,’ Dad said. ‘Perhaps she’s shy. She always strikes me as a bit awkward. Not necessarily unfriendly.’

  Shy! Grace? Henry nearly snorted into his lettuce.

  ‘Besides,’ Mum said, ‘you want Nabil to stay, Dad and I want Grace to come to tea. That’s fair, isn’t it?’

  Henry clung to the hope that Grace wouldn’t want to come or would be busy doing something else tomorrow. As soon as the plates were cleared, Mum made him go round to Pat’s to ask. Grace, not surprisingly, wasn’t overwhelmed with excitement at the idea; she just said, ‘Oh, all right. Might as well.’

  ‘How kind of your mum and dad! Grace’ll enjoy it, won’t you, dear?’ Pat said.

  Another one who’d got it all wrong.

  Winding Henry up was Grace’s speciality. When she came round next day, she was so nice and polite that he wanted to hit her. Mum would never believe how nasty she could be.

  Grace had clearly decided to be on best behaviour. She admired the work Mum and Dad had done in the garden, said how scrummy Mum’s blackcurrant cheesecake was and had a second slice. She only called him Strawberry once, by mistake, but she managed to make it sound like a friendly nickname, and Mum laughed. It just wasn’t fair!

  Henry hadn’t told Mum how she’d tried to make him fall off Amber and break his neck. They wouldn’t believe him if he told them. They’d say, ‘No, no, Grace is such a nice little girl. You must have got it all wrong.’

  Even when Mum asked, ‘How’s your aunt Dottie, Grace? Any better?’ she didn’t shrug in her usual sulky way, as if she couldn’t care less. She said, ‘Well, she’s not too bad today, but she’s got to go into hospital next week. It’s something to do with her heart. She has to keep going for tests.’

  And she sat there all serious-faced while Mum made sympathetic noises. Henry didn’t understand. If Dottie was only going into hospital to have tests, that must mean it wasn’t all that serious, mustn’t it? Having tests didn’t mean you were going to die.

  ‘Why don’t you show Grace the quiz game on the computer, Henry?’ Mum said after tea.

  ‘Oh, yes please, Str — Henry,’ Grace said, polite as anything.

  Mum stayed in the kitchen, clearing up, while Henry and Grace settled down by the computer in the front room. Henry expected that as soon as Mum was out of earshot, Grace would go back to being her normal self, but instead she got really involved in the quiz, grabbing the mouse when it was her turn and shouting out the answers.

  ‘That was great!’ she said when they’d finished.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Henry jeered. ‘You would say that, cos you won. It’s not such a brilliant score, twenty-five. I got more than that last time.’

  ‘Want another game, then?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Henry grabbed the mouse and clicked EXIT. ‘You’re so — so — two-faced!’ he burst out. ‘All this yes, thank you and no, thank you and
lovely, thank you like you’re an angel or something. Two-faced Grace, that’s what you are! And pretending to care about Dottie! It’s never bothered you before. I’ve never even seen you speak to her —’

  ‘What do you know?’ Grace burst out. She turned to look at him, and to his astonishment her eyes filled with tears. Big, shiny tears that swelled and brimmed on the edge of her lower lashes till one spilled over and splashed on to her cheek. She brushed at it angrily and turned her face away. Just then, Dad came in at the front door, hot from the car, with his tie pulled loose and shirt-sleeves rolled up.

  ‘Hi, you two!’ he said brightly. ‘Having a good game?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Grace said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. ‘It’s a really good quiz. I was just going to tell Henry, we’ve got Flight Simulation at home. Dad’s borrowed it from someone. It’s a bit old-fashioned, but it’s still OK. You can have a go on it when you come round tomorrow, Henry.’

  Henry couldn’t make her out at all. And as if he hadn’t had enough to put up with, he got told off when Grace had gone home for not making her welcome. Mum and Dad both ganged up on him.

  ‘She was making a real effort to be nice to you! And all you did was look grumpy and sulk,’ Mum told him. ‘If you won’t be friendly back, what do you expect?’

  ‘She looked quite upset when I came in. Almost in tears,’ Dad said. ‘What were you saying to her?’

  ‘Nothing!’ Henry said hotly.

  ‘She’s anxious about Dottie being so ill, I think,’ Mum said quietly. ‘You must try to be a bit more considerate, Hen.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Henry grouched, ‘why don’t you get Grace to move in, and I’ll move out?’ He heard the way his voice sounded — rude and sulky, just as they’d said.

  THIRTEEN

  INTRUANTER

  By Wednesday, Simon had spread the word to everyone in 6M that Henry would be a class stowaway, so that no one would draw attention to him. Meeting him at the gates, Simon handed him a spare green sweatshirt. ‘There you are — school uniform. Not that you’ll need it today, it’s going to be boiling. What about Grace’s mum? What’ve you told her?’