of?
Harry got up slowly. He hurt nearly all over, but not so badly that he couldn’t move. The man gave him a hand and pulled him up out of the shelter. Harry peered up the garden. He could see quite well because the sky to the west was glowing pink.
There was no greenhouse left.
There was no house left. The houses to each side were still standing, though their windows had gone, and their slates were off.
“Where’s our house?”
There was a silence. Then the man with the moustache said, “What’s yer name, son?” Harry told him.
“And what was yer dad’s name? And yer mam’s?” He wrote it all down in a notebook, like the police did, when they caught you scrumping apples.
He gave them Dulcie’s name too. He tried to be helpful. Then he said, “Where are they?” and began to run up the garden path.
The man grabbed him, quick and rough.
“You can’t go up there, son. There’s a gas leak. A bad gas leak. Pipe’s fractured. It’s dangerous. It’s against the law to go up there.”
“But my mam and dad’re up there …”
“Nobody up there now, son. Come down to the Rest Centre. They’ll tell you all about it at the Rest Centre.”
Harry just let himself be led off across some more gardens. It was easy, because all the fences were blown flat. They went up the path of number five. The white faces of the Humphreys, who lived at number five, peered palely from the door of their shelter. They let him pass, without saying anything to him.
In the road, the wardens who were leading him met two other wardens.
“Any luck at number nine?”
“Just this lad …”
There was a long, long silence. Then one of the other wardens said, “We found the family from number seven. They were in the garden. The bomb caught them as they were running for the shelter …”
“They all right?”
“Broken arms and legs, I think. But they’ll live. Got them away in the ambulance.”
Harry frowned. The Simpsons lived at number seven. There was some fact he should be able to remember about the Simpsons. But he couldn’t. It was all … mixed up.
“Come on, son. Rest Centre for you. Can you walk that far?”
Harry walked. He felt like screaming at them. Only that wouldn’t be a very British thing to do. But something kept building up inside him; like the pressure in his model steam-engine.
Where was his steam-engine?
Where was Mam, who could cuddle him and make everything all right?
Where was Dad in his warden’s uniform, who would sort everything out?
Next second, he had broken from their hands, and was running up another garden path like a terrified rabbit. He went through another gate, over the top of another air-raid shelter, through a hedge that scratched him horribly … on, and on, and on.
He heard their voices calling him as he crouched in hiding. They seemed to call a long time. Then one of them said, “That wasn’t very clever.”
“It’s the shock. Shock takes them funny ways. You can never tell how shock’s going to take them.”
“Hope he’s not seriously hurt, poor little bleeder.”
‘Kid that can run like that …?”
And then their voices went away, leaving him alone.
So he came to his house, slowly, up his garden.
He found his three rabbits; they were all dead, though there wasn’t a mark on them. Where the greenhouse had been was a tangle of wrecked tomato plants, that bled green, and gave off an overpowering smell of tomato.
The house was just a pile of bricks. Not a very high pile, because everything had fallen down into the old cellar.
There was a smell of gas; but the gas was burning. Seeping up through the bricks and burning in little blue points of flame, all in the cracks between the bricks. It looked like a burning slag-heap, and he knew why the wardens had given up hope and gone away.
He knew he must go away too. Before anybody else found him, began to ask him questions, and do things to him. Because he felt like a bomb himself, and if anyone did anything to him, he would explode into a million pieces and nobody would ever be able to put him back together again.
Especially, he mustn’t be given to Cousin Elsie. Cousin Elsie, who would clutch his head to her enormous bosom, and sob and call him “poor bairn” and tell everybody who came all about it, over and over and over again. He’d seen her do that when Cousin Tommy died of diphtheria. Cousin Elsie was more awful than death itself.
No, he would go away. Where nobody knew him. Where nobody would make a fuss. Just quietly go away.
Having made his mind up, he felt able to keep moving. There were useful things to do. The blankets in the shelter to bundle up and take with him. The attaché case. All proper, as Mam and Dad would have wanted it.
It seemed to take him a long time to get the blankets bundled up exactly right and as he wanted them.
In the faint light before dawn, he even managed to find Dad’s spade and bury his three rabbits. They had been his friends; he didn’t want anybody finding them and making a meal of them. He even found some wooden seed markers, and wrote the rabbits’ names on them, and stuck them in for tombstones.
Then he went, cutting across the long stretch of gardens and out into Brimble Road, where hardly anybody knew him.
He looked dirty, tear-stained, and exactly like a refugee. His face was so still and empty, nobody, even Cousin Elsie, would have recognised him.
He felt … he felt like a bird flying very high, far from the world and getting further away all the time. Like those gulls who soar on summer thermals and then find they cannot get down to earth again, but must wait till the sun sets, and the land cools, and the terrible strength of the upward thermal releases them to land exhausted. Only he could not imagine ever coming to earth again, ever. Back to where everything was just as it always had been, and you did things without thinking about them.
He supposed he would just walk till he died. It seemed the most sensible thing to do.
He must have wandered round the town all day, in circles. Every so often, he would come to himself, and realise he was in Rudyerd Street, or Nile Street.
But what did Rudyerd Street mean? What did Nile Street mean? Sometimes he
