The Machine Gunners (8 page)

"And my bloody rabbit's ninety-four," retorted Chas, but without much heat. He was nosey, so he let himself be led in. They passed the Lodge at the entrance, with its windows boarded up and people's names chalked on the door.

"That's where Graham the gardener lives," said Nicky, "but he's gone to Birmingham to work on munitions." The drive zigzagged through thick damp rhododendrons, and ended up nearly where it had started. There was a great white front door, like a Greek temple, but the paint was peeling off it. A sailor sat on the steps cleaning his boots. They stared at him, but he just said, "Bugger off," without looking up.

"We've got ratings billeted on us," said Nicky. "Come round to the kitchen. Might be something to eat." They went in. There
was
something to eat: a loaf still warm and a seven-pound tin of butter, opened and left lying like a tin of cheap peas. Nicky carved great lumps off the loaf. It bent like a concertina, and stayed bent. Chas stabbed into the deep well of butter. You could have got lost in it. Chas had never seen so much butter in one place since the War. "Whereja gettit?"

"Oh, it comes off the destroyers. Everything comes off the destroyers." Nicky kicked at a mass of empty gin bottles that lay stacked under the kitchen sink. Chas thought his mum wouldn't have liked that much. Or the plates of cold egg and bacon in the sink with cold water dripping on them, or the half glass of something brown with a dead fly in it. He suddenly felt sorry for Nicky; money wasn't everything.

"What does your mum do?"

"Not much since my father got killed." Nicky's father had been a ship's captain. Before the War, Chas had often seen his ship steam in, with its great white hull and yellow funnels. Captain Nichol had always dressed in spotless white too, with yellow braid on his shoulders. Every time he came home, he gave parties and garden parties, and Mrs. McGill said that people who got invited really thought they were somebody.

Then, in January 1940, the
Cyclades
was hit by a German torpedo off Gibraltar, even though she was camouflaged with grey stripes, and smiling handsome Captain Nichol vanished beneath the waves forever, and his photograph never appeared in the local paper again.

"Have some more," said Nicky, pointing at the bread.

"Ta," said Chas.

"What
are
you doing, Benjamin?" The new voice was haughty, but rather wobbly. A tall thin woman was standing in the doorway with a glass in her hand. Chas thought she looked like a film star gone wrong. She was still wearing her dressing gown, though it was just four o'clock. There were stains down the front; they could have been tea or marmalade.

"What are you
doing?
Who are these
children?"
Mrs. Nichol let go of the doorpost to come into the room, staggered, and changed her mind. Her dressing gown was falling open and Chas thought she wasn't wearing much. He felt all queer.

"Fiona, what are
you
doing?" Another voice, a man's, came from the room behind Mrs. Nichol.

"That's the chap in charge of the ratings," muttered Nicky. "He lives here too."

"Mind you behave yourself, Benjamin," said Mrs. Nichol vaguely, and drifted away.

There was a long silence in the kitchen.

"Let's go and see the goldfish," said Audrey abruptly. They went down the long back garden. It was full of interesting things: walls and steps and statues, and queer marble pots on stands. Chas wondered if those were the pots where Mrs. Nichol kept her money; his mum always said the Nichols had pots of money. But ivy was growing over everything.

They peered into the green depths of a large pool, and were rewarded by a flash of red-gold all of six inches long. Nicky sprinkled breadcrumbs onto the thick green water, and the fish rose, mouthing silently.

"There used to be twelve of them," said Nicky. "My father imported them from China, but this is the only one left. He's called Oscar."

"Hello, Oscar," said Audrey softly.

"He only speaks Chinese," said Chas. "What's at the bottom of the garden?" There was a huge rockery, all overgrown with ivy, too, and the gravestones of cats and dogs. Nicky knew all their names, and talked about them as if they were still alive. The last, wooden, cross had no name on it.

"What's that one?" asked Chas.

"That's for my father," said Nicky, and the other two looked away.

"What's over the fence?" said Chas at last, stammering. He climbed to the top of the rockery and peered over. And there it was—the view down to the bay and the sea; exactly the way any Germans would come.

"I vote we make a secret camp here in the rockery," he said.

"Oh, yes please," said Audrey. Nicky nodded, after a moment. They were his only friends, and he wanted to keep them.

"Where
you
bin?" asked his mother.

"Nichol's house."

"You
what?"

"I've been to Benny Nichol's house. He's got a goldfish six inches long, in a pool."

Mr. McGill set down the newspaper with its glaring headline
Invasion Imminent?
and took off his reading spectacles. "What you been up to now?"

Chas's voice went up to a screech of righteous indignation. "Nothing! I was walking home with him, and he said he'd got this fish, and I said he hadn't..."

"You are
not
to go there again. And you aren't to play with that Nichol boy again."

"Why not?"

"Never mind why not. Because I bloody well say not."

"Look, tell me why? You always tell me why I can't do things." His father looked at his mother, and his mother at his father. They both seemed acutely embarrassed.

"We can't tell you. You're too young to understand."

"But it's a marvellous place to play..." Sensing their embarrassment, Chas pressed on unmercifully.

"You can play anywhere else you like. But not at the Nichols' house, and that's final." Mr. McGill vanished again behind the
Daily Express.
Mrs. McGill went on with her ironing. Chas knew a brick wall when he saw one. But he also had a taste for getting round brick walls. Nicky's house had suddenly become the most desirable place on earth.

"Oh damn," said Audrey, "I've split another fingernail." She sucked and bit at her nail meditatively, looking up at the sky. It was a fine sunset for December, with a rim of sun just showing over the trees to the west.

"I'll go and get some lemonade," said Nicky. They watched him running and ducking toward the house, keeping out of sight of the sitting room where his mother was, with the officer.

"He's not a bad kid when you get to know him," said Chas.

"My mother doesn't like him," said Audrey. "She's told me not to come here."

"Mine too." Chas scuffed his foot. "What's everyone got against the poor kid?"

"I think it's because his mother... drinks."

"So does my granda, but everybody likes him."

"Well it's... you know... sailors." Audrey blushed; Chas blushed.

"The barrage balloons are high tonight. Must be going to be a raid."

"Go on, they only send them up that high to test their cables."

They both looked up at the barrage balloons. There were five round the mouth of the river, each known to the locals by an affectionate nickname. There was the South Shields Sausage, and the Willington Windbag. The nearest one was called the Fish Quay Buster. Their raising and lowering, by RAF men sweating at winches, was a regular treat for crowds of children; nearly as good as going to the cinema. For the adults, they were a kind of air-raid barometer, except that no one really knew what their raising and lowering meant.

At this time of night, the last of the sunlight caught them, long after the rest of the earth was dark. When they were very high, they glowed so small and bright it was impossible to tell them from the first stars. But they were not that high tonight. You could see their silver sides and fat fins; they looked like flabby silver elephants, nosing this way and that in the light breeze.

And then, and then... Chas gasped. Black on the blue dusk from the east it came: black, twin-engined, propellers idling like fans, soundlessly gliding slow and low. A German aircraft.

A moan broke from Chas's lips; not of fear, but frustration.

"The gun!" But it was a mile away, in Bunty's Yard.

The plane drew nearer, lower. A faint sighing came from it, a whistling of strings and wires, like a kite. It was a fighter, with four cannon in the nose. The fighter wobbled, the nose veered and the tiny black cannon-mouths pointed straight at Chas. A face without goggles looked down at him from the cockpit, from rooftop height and only a football pitch away.

"Get down!" screamed Audrey.

"What's happening?" said Nicky, and dropped a whole tray of lemonade on the remains of the rockery.

But Chas stood, glaring at the pilot of the fighter. He was a Britisher! He didn't jump into holes like a rabbit for no German, even if he
had
four cannon. The German would laugh if he did, feel powerful.

"Nazi pig." He stuck up two fingers in the air, and not Churchill's way either.

The pilot laughed. The plane filled the sky. And then there was an earsplitting roar, and the air was full of black oily smoke.

I'm dead, thought Chas. I'm dead and I didn't feel a thing. Then he started coughing and his eyes started streaming.

"I'm in Hell," said Chas, and wasn't very surprised. But it seemed Audrey and Nicky were in Hell too, for there they were lying at his feet, coughing as well. And the smoke was thinning and there was the fence and...

The plane was nowhere to be seen.

"You fool," said Audrey. "He started up his engines. There he is."

The black shape was streaking up river. The odd gun was firing now from the ships. Black roses blossomed round the plane, above, behind, never on target.

"Go on,
get
him," screamed Chas. But the pilot was in a playful mood. He turned and looped, and spun his wings, like a boy showing off by riding a bicycle with no hands. By that time every gun had joined in. Tracers from the pompoms on the Bank Top grew like red-hot stitches on the blue serge of the sky. But they were so
slow,
always too slow to catch the German. And then he was climbing, headed straight for the South Shields barrage balloon. The sound of his cannon fire came, thin as a zipper, and a yellow rose grew among the black. The balloon was burning, falling, silver turning black, dropping off, like the paper on a French cigarette.

"Get that bloody Nazi swine," yelled Chas, jumping up and down. "Are you blind? Get your eyes chaarked!" Men shouted that to the ref at football matches.

The fighter performed a beautiful half-loop, rolled over at the top of it, and made for the Willington Windbag, which was being winched down as quickly as its frantic crew could turn the handles. The ack-ack gunners intensified their efforts.

"Oh Gawd," screamed Chas, "you couldn't hit a drunk in Guthrie's Bar of a Saturday night!" This was a phrase of his grandfather's that his mother didn't like.

It was at that moment that an overenthusiastic antiaircraft team scored a hit. On the Willington Windbag. It made a lovely bang that turned the fighter over on its back.

"Oh, no." Chas beat a tree in agony. "Where are those bloody Spitfires from Acklington?"

The German recovered and made straight at them.

"What... ?" Chas glanced up. The Fish Quay Buster, on its way down, was right overhead.

"Get
down!"
Audrey pulled him into the camp they had dug, a shallow pit three feet deep, with a wall of rocks a foot high around it. A week's striving, blisters, broken fingernails, and it felt pathetic now.

The guns were following the fighter. The flashes were terrible, the shrapnel fell like black rain. Chas threw himself across Audrey protectively. It was a man's duty.

Then the plane's cannons fired. The air stank with cordite. Shell fragments slashed through the trees and privet of Mrs. Nichol's garden. With a roar, the Fish Quay Buster exploded. The stones of the rockery glowed brighter than day. And the burning balloon was falling right on them!

They huddled together in a final terror, pressed tight like kittens. Then there was a rustling, a last roar of engines dwindling.

They got up. The trees above them were full of silver, draped in festoons like a tent roof. It was the remains of the Buster. It looked very large, and they were awed.

Then reality reasserted itself.

"Quick, grab some down. That stuff's waterproof. We'll need some for the camp." As Chas climbed and hacked at it, the air-raid warning sounded, and three very angry Spitfires hurtled overhead. You could almost hear the pilots gnashing their teeth above the whine of their superchargers.

They hid great pieces of the Fish Quay Buster in a disused potting shed.

"Good stuff, that," said Chas. "Waterproof. It'll roof in the Fortress lovely."

"What fortress?" asked Audrey.

Chas pointed to the hole in the rockery. "That will be our Fortress."

"But it's hopeless," said Audrey. "We've worked for a week and it's only a little hole."

"We need more help. It's time we buried our differences."

"Not with Boddser?" said Nicky nervously.

"No, Cem and Clogger. We must work together for the common good."

"Pompous ass," said Audrey under her breath, but not so she could be heard. She
was
tired of digging in the rockery.

"Ey, Clogger," whispered Boddser. "Want to join my gang? Show you some dirty postcards my uncle got in Port Said."

"Och, tripe," said Clogger, and walked away. Boddser didn't follow him.

"Ey, Cem," whispered Boddser. "Want to see my uncle's postcards from Egypt?" Cem, who was rather attached to camels, and pyramids, said yes. Boddser passed across a grubby pack of nude men and women in peculiar positions. Cem looked first incredulous, then embarrassed.

"Don't like that fellow's moustache," he said, after thought.

Boddser changed tack.

"Glad you've broken off with that McGill. Would you like to come round one night and play with my railway?" Boddser's railway was much more highly thought of than his uncle's postcards, being British.