Avalanche of Daisies (32 page)

Steve was pleased to note that he was still calm. He took out the wounded man's field dressing and bound up his hand. ‘It's a clean wound,' he told him. ‘You'll be out of it now. Back to Blighty.'

‘Thanks, corp. D'you get him?'

‘Yep. Won't shoot anyone else.'

But the fire from the woods had them pinned down and
that
was getting worse. It was coming from a
concrete pill-box they could just see at the edge of the wood.

‘Now what, corp?' Dusty said.

Steve was trying to work it out. The machine gunners had a good range and there was no cover apart from the embankment, so it would be suicidal to run out into the field, and although they could lob a few grenades, they wouldn't do enough damage unless they could get them through the door. But before he could answer, the flame thrower had arrived and was in spectacular action.

The flame it threw was a hundred yards long and spurted from the gun like a dragon's tongue, bright yellow and scorching everything in its path. They could feel the heat of it from where they crouched, smell the wood burning, hear the roar as it engulfed the pill-box. Dark figures tumbled out into the wood, some on fire and screaming. And the guns were silenced. It was the most dramatic thing Steve and Dusty had ever seen. As they told one another much later that evening, standing by the leaguered tanks, smoking and chatting like the old comrades they were.

‘S'been a fair old day, all in all,' Dusty observed. ‘Snow's stopped. Jerries retreated. Them flame throwers worked a treat. We shan't have so much nonsense with the buggers now. They was giving up in droves. How many prisoners did we take, d'you reckon?'

‘'Bout forty.'

Dusty gloated. ‘That's the style. Lock 'em all up, rotten bleeders.'

They smoked in silence for a minute or two, looking out over the flat dark countryside. I've not done too badly, Steve thought, for my first day as corporal.

‘'Nother day gone,' Dusty said.

‘Marked off?'

‘Yep.'

‘How many's that?'

‘Five months, two weeks and three days,' Dusty said with great satisfaction, and began to sing. ‘
Oh eleven
more months an' eight more days I'll be out of the calaboose. Eleven more months and eight more days they're going to turn me loose.'

Home, Steve thought, and remembered it suddenly, with a yearning that cramped his guts. Warm chairs by a warm fire, the smell of bacon frying, the wireless playing. The High Street full of crowds, the row of shops, Dad's tobacconist's, Mum's butcher's. The Town Hall. Barbara running down the steps holding his hand. Barbara in bed with those white arms round his neck pulling him closer …

There was a muffled roar from somewhere in the distance, immediately followed by three more in quick succession.

‘What the hell's that?' Dusty said, as they both turned to look.

Across the river, in German-held territory, four white vapour trails were climbing the sky, two to the left, two to the right.

‘Ack-ack?' Steve wondered. But there were no explosions. The trails simply went on climbing, higher and higher, forming four white parabolas in the ink-black sky. They couldn't be buzzbombs because
they
flew straight, once they'd been launched. They weren't planes either because they were climbing too fast. But if they weren't bombs or planes, what the hell were they? There was something sinister about that long trajectory heading out to sea.

‘Some sort of gun,' Steve decided, being practical. ‘Long range. They're testing it.'

‘Good job they ain't firing at us,' Dusty observed. ‘That's all I got to say.'

But London was on the other side of the Channel. Oh Christ! They couldn't be firing at London, could they?

They watched until the vapour trails faded and disappeared.

‘Ah well!' Dusty said, stubbing out his cigarette
under the toe of his boot. ‘We shall know soon enough. I'm for a spot of shut-eye.'

Sis and Barbara sat up late that evening too, although they hadn't intended to. Sis had a lot of Union letters to catch up with and took down her writing box as soon as the cloth was cleared. Barbara made up the fire, and sat in the armchair beside it, to darn her stockings and sew a button on her blouse. Then she was at a loss to know what to do next.

‘I s'pose I really ought to tidy up some of your papers,' she said, gazing into the fire. ‘I keep tellin' Steve thass what I'm here for.'

‘You could try that lot on the sideboard,' Sis suggested, without looking up. ‘The file labelled Beveridge Report. The dog-eared one. It's mostly newspaper cuttings. I've been meaning to get it sorted for ages.'

‘How d'you want it done?'

‘Chronological,' Sis said. ‘There's dates on most of 'em, somewhere or other.'

So the file was discovered and the sorting out began, with the date rewritten in red ink in the top right-hand corner of each cutting, ‘so's you can see it'.

At first Barbara simply restored order without looking at any of the documents. But then she discovered that one of them was a letter.

‘You don't want this in with the articles, do you?' she asked.

Sis didn't look up. ‘What is it?'

‘It's a letter to
The Times.''

‘Who from?'

Barbara looked at the signatories. ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of York and the Archbishop of Westminster, and the Moderator of the Free Church Council.'

This time Sis looked at her. ‘
Five agreed standards for social organisation after the war,'
she quoted and
grinned. ‘I should just say I do. Your Steve gave me that. Read it.'

So, as it was Steve's gift, Barbara sat on her heels and read the list. It was a considerable surprise, for although two of the items on it were what she would have expected from a group of churchmen, that a ‘
sense of a divine vocation must be restored to man's daily work'
and that ‘
the resources of the earth should be used as God's gift to the whole human race, and used with due consideration for the needs of the present and future generations'
, the other three were not.

‘Thass amazing,' she said as she read.

Sis grinned at her again. ‘What is?'

‘They want to change the world. They say we ought to do away with
“extreme inequality in wealth and possessions”.
Wouldn't that be wonderful? And they want every child to have – what is it? –
“equal opportunities for the development of his peculiar capacities”.'

‘Quite right,' Sis said. ‘At the moment the only kids who get to grammar school are the bright ones who win scholarships and the ones with rich parents who can afford the fees, whether they're bright or not. That's unfair and wasteful.'

The implication of what she was saying made Barbara feel as though her head were swelling. ‘So what they're saying is, if you win a place at the grammar school, they think you ought to take it?'

‘'Course. That's obvious.'

‘I won a place an' didn't take it,' Barbara confessed. ‘Pa wouldn't let me. He said he couldn't afford it.'

‘That don't surprise me,' Sis said, with sympathy. ‘I knew you'd got a good head on your shoulders. So there you are, you can see what a waste it was.'

‘Yes.'

‘So what we got to do is win this election an' see it never happens again.'

‘How would you do that? I mean, if they can't afford it, they can't an' thass all there is to that.'

‘See that they earn a good wage for a start. Then they'd be more able to afford it. That's one way. An' if the kid wins a scholarship, it should win a grant at the same time.'

That seemed a wonderful idea to Barbara. ‘If there'd been a grant when I was eleven I could have gone,' she said. ‘But wouldn't that cost a lot of money?'

‘Waste costs a lot of money,' Sis told her. ‘You leave a house without repairs and in the end it turns into a slum and you have to pull it down and build a new one. Which is another thing we got to do.'

‘What? Rebuild the slums?'

‘Pull 'em all down, the whole damn kit and caboodle, and start afresh. We got a head start in the East End, thanks to Hitler. One bomb on a terrace in that neck a' the woods an' they all fell down like a pack of cards. Jerry-built you see, nasty bug-ridden hovels. Not fit for human habitation. People live in some terrible places in this country, more shame to us. Houses with no running water, dirty little earth closets out the back, bugs in the wallpaper, black beetles. Nobody should have to live like that.'

‘No,' Barbara agreed, remembering the North End. ‘Slums
should
be pulled down.' And she thought what a difference it would have made to her life if she'd grown up in a place like Childeric Road.

‘Decent home,' Sis said. ‘That's the basis of a decent life. An' I know what I'm talking about. I've lived in some pretty crummy places in my time.'

That was a surprise. ‘Have you?'

‘Very crummy some of 'em, specially when I was a kid. We was always hard up in them days. Used to go hopping to make a bit extra. Steve used to come with us. Picking hops all day an' off to the pub to drink 'em in the evening. An' then back to talk politics round the camp fire till we couldn't keep our eyes open.'

‘Did Steve talk politics?'

‘Not in those days, no,' Sis said. ‘He was too little. Used to listen though. All ears he was. I reckon it was the making of him. He knew what sort a' world he wanted by the time he was fourteen, I can tell you that. Very idealistic, your Steve. When the Beveridge Report came out he bought a copy on the day it was published.'

‘An' I always thought politics was just about money and taxes and that sort of thing!'

‘Depends on your politics,' Sis laughed. ‘Ours is about ideas. You should read the Report.'

‘Yes,' Barbara said thoughtfully. ‘P'rhaps I should, if he bought it the day …' But before she could say anything else, there was a long dull explosion.

It sounded a long way away but it went on for much longer than anything they'd heard in the last few months, and that puzzled them. When the last reverberation had faded, they got up, switched off the light and opened the curtains to see if they could see where it had been. There was a faint glow on the horizon.

‘Something's gone up,' Sis said. ‘Ain't a buzzbomb though. That I
do
know. Unless they're makin' 'em twice the size.'

‘We'll hear about it tomorrow,' Barbara said, as they left the window and went back to their sorting.

The next day the rumours were contradictory. Some people said it was a gas main, others an accident at a munitions factory, others a house struck by lightning. It wasn't until late afternoon that any real news came through and then it was alarming. Whatever it had been, it had happened in Chiswick and had done tremendous damage. ‘Knocked down half a street,' the clippies told one another. ‘Terrible casualties. Ever so many killed.'

‘Then that's no gas main,' Heather said trenchantly, when Sis called in at the butcher's on her way home. ‘Don't give me that. It'll be another bomb. You mark my words. An' if there's one, there'll be more of them.'

Sis made a grimace because it sounded all too likely.

‘How you getting on with Barbara?' Heather said, very casually.

‘OK,' Sis said. ‘She ain't a bad kid.'

But Heather had closed her face. ‘Handsome is as handsome does,' she said. ‘I reserve judgment on that one.'

But she was proved right about the rockets. The next morning they were woken just after dawn by another thunderous crash and during the day there were three more. There were no official statements, but everybody knew that London was under a new bombardment. News of the explosions passed swiftly along the tram grapevines. This was a bomb that arrived without warning. Some said it travelled so fast you heard it coming, with a ‘sort of swishing noise'
after
it had exploded. And it was huge. Every explosion caused immense damage and the blast was felt for miles around.

There was still no official explanation. But a few days later there was an explosion in Dairsee Road and three days after that another in Lewisham and by then local knowledge of what was happening left no one in any doubt that these were rockets of some kind. One man had seen one of them, ‘like a telegraph pole flying horizontally at about 6,000 feet. It was a brownish colour,' he told the local paper, ‘and flying much faster than a buzzbomb. It left a trail of brown oily smoke.'

‘Ain't we had enough?' Barbara's passengers asked one another as they climbed aboard her tram the next morning. ‘First the Blitz an' then the buzzbombs an' now this. They really got it in fer us!'

‘They're evacuating the kiddies again,' another said.

Hazel and Joyce said they'd rather stay where they were. Joyce was only going to be at school another term and then she'd be out at work. ‘Like our Betty says,' she told her parents, ‘if it's got your number on it, it'll get you wherever you are. Ain't that right, our Betty?'

Betty was more interested in her new perm which
hadn't taken properly. ‘I shall look a sight Sat'day,' she complained. ‘She ain't half made a mess of it. Lionel'll think I'm a freak.'

Joyce persisted. ‘But ain't that right, our Betty?'

‘What?'

‘If it's got your number on it it'll get you.'

‘Oh that. Yeh! No point worrying about it. It's not as if you can get out the way. You can't, can you. Not if you can't hear it coming. Best thing's just to get on with your life an' forget about it.'

The official report on Hitler's new secret weapon made chilling reading when it was finally given.