Mr Mac and Me (26 page)

‘Mysterious?’ I seal the envelope back again. ‘Their boy?’ And I race with the letter down towards the ferry.

Beware of Female Spies

I stop only to read the posters pinned up outside the town hall.

Women are being employed by the enemy

to secure information from navy men on the

theory that they are less liable to be suspected

than male spies. Beware of inquisitive women as

well as prying men.

See Everything

Hear Everything

Say Nothing

Betty’s quick form flashes up before me. Betty and her sister Meg. Inquisitive. Roaming through the back lanes of the village! Asking questions. Befriending Mrs Horrod. I distract myself by looking at the next poster.

It is far better

To face the bullets

Than to be killed

At home by a bomb

There is a painting of a Zeppelin, its body caught in a beam of light. I inspect it and compare it to the ones I’ve seen. Here it is nothing more than a fat yellow cigar, with no sense whatsoever of its threat or speed. And I wonder about Count Zeppelin and what would I do if I lived in a castle with enough money to experiment with engines, aluminium frames and silk? What devastating missile would I invent? A submarine. That’s it. Incapable of detection, with sensors as delicate as minnows. I picture it streaking to the defence of any ship that is in trouble, scooping the grateful men into its hold. Our saviour! The whole kingdom would rise up in gratitude. And I’m sure I hear them, even now, raising a cheer for the great Count Thomas Maggs.

Mac’s letter crackles in my pocket as I puff out my chest, and I remember I’m on an errand, and when it’s done I must get back to help open up the inn. I hurry on, one eye tilted skywards, my ears wide open to catch the chatter of any kind of spy.

Mary is at home, and she and Mother have moved Ann into the garden. She lies on a bench softened with quilts while the sun and the breeze wash over her face. I kneel beside her and give her a small sharp pinch. ‘Wake up,’ I hiss, and I’m sure I see her eyelids flutter.

‘Tommy,’ Mother calls, ‘help me with the sheets.’ And when I turn to look at Mary, Mother says to me, ‘Let your sister rest.’

It is the perfect drying day, bright and blustery. I frown to think of George Allard’s wheel and how it must be spinning as he weaves. Too fast, I hope, and the taste of spite is bitter in my mouth. To banish it I race through my chores – stoking up the stove, sweeping the hearth, polishing the glasses, even passing a rag over Father’s boots, which wait patiently at the bottom of the ladder for him to get up. Mother chops the vegetables and watches me, in silence, and we keep the back door open so that we can hear Mary, singing to Ann as they sit in the sun.

‘A sailor and his true love

Was awalking one day

Through the green fields and the meadows

That was scattered with hay.

And the blackbirds and the thrushes

Sang in every green tree

And the larks, they sang melodious

At the dawning of the day.

Now the sailor and his true love went awalking next day

Said the sailor to his true love

I am bound far away

I’m bound for the Indias

Where the loud cannons roar

For to go and leave my Nancy

For she’s a girl that I adore.

For to go and leave my Nancy

For to go and leave my Nancy

For she’s the girl that I adore.’

Chapter 48

As well as patrolling the beach each morning, I decide I must go out last thing at night to check our village is dark.

‘Where are you off to now, young man?’ Mother reaches for me as I slip through the door, but I’m too fast for her, and I turn and wave, closing my eyes against the vision of her, standing in the curtained doorway of the inn, alone.

I run along Main Street and round the corner into the loop of the back lane. My heart hammers. It is dark here at the best of times, but tonight there is not a chink of light, and soon I’m swallowed by the overhanging branches at the edge of Dingle Farm. I keep going, clicking my tongue for company, until I burst out on the green, and I stop and gasp, and look up at the moon, for that is the only light that shines. More slowly I walk towards the beach. The sea is rough tonight and there is no chance of hearing guns across the water. But the houses are dark. The water protected. And everything is as it should be. I stand on the beach and tilt back my head and I count the few stars that have pierced the cloud. There are less than a dozen, although the longer I look the more I find, and I’m searching so hard that at first I don’t notice the shadow of the Zeppelin, its belly only slightly blacker than the cloud. I stand quite still. It’s got me by the eye. And then fear rips through me and I’m awake again. I turn. I shout. What if it drops its bombs now? Destroys our village while it sleeps. But there is no one to hear. Stumbling against pebbles, I run with the airship back across the beach, up over the dunes, following it along the street and past the church. If there was someone on the flat roof of the tower, then I could shout to them and they might, just this once, jangle their bells or, better still, aim a rifle at it, but there is no one in the churchyard, only my family of starlings, keeping watch over our grave.

I’m still running when the coastguard’s lights arc through the sky. And there it is, they’ve caught it, floating above me, a golden finger, pointing south. I stop and stare, and then the light falls and it is gone. But when it rises again, a volley of shells come with it, missing, and falling down like sparks. The Zeppelin must be over Blythburgh now, the shells dancing below, and I keep running, wanting nothing more than to catch on to its tail. And that’s when it happens. Just as I’m thinking how Count Zeppelin has made damn sure it flies too high, a shell catches against its side, and another, and soon the whole unwieldy gas-filled envelope of an airship bursts into flame. I can see the fire race across its skin, tear into the metal of its body, and even as my heart soars with pride I’m sick with pity for those men trapped inside. I stand, my hands up to my face, waiting for it to fall on Blythburgh Cathedral, but unlike a plane, the Zeppelin floats on, lighting up the countryside, sinking slowly lower, until, somewhere above the tail of the estuary, it crashes to the ground. The earth echoes with it. Louder than a bomb. And I feel the road beneath me shiver. Pheasants that have been asleep since sundown crow wildly in the woods.

I stay like that, crouched over in the road, my eyes on the horizon where the fire burns. I want to get to it. But I can’t move. And then with a roar an armoured car blasts past me, and another, but they are too fast for me to flag them down.

Slowly I begin walking, passing the shadows of small animals, voles and shrews scattering across the road. My feet are heavy. My throat burns, and I think of the 670 bicycles of the Royal Sussex Cyclists and how I’d only need one. I even allow myself to yearn for our old horse Kingdom, who I sometimes see, collecting visitors from the station, and who nuzzles me with his velvet mouth when I put my hand up to his neck. I keep walking. I hum tunes to myself. And mutter verses on the weather:

Evening grey and morning red,

Keeps the traveller in his bed.

Evening red and morning grey,

Sends the traveller on his way.

I take a deep breath and start in on another:

If the ide before Christmas will bear a duck,

You’ll get nothing after – only slush and muck.

I remind myself of George Allard’s stories. Spring-heeled Jack, who refused to chant the psalms, but would insist on singing them, and ended up at the assizes, where his case was thrown out of court, and Danky’s tale of two fishermen who drowned when their boat turned over on the beach. They were buried in the churchyard, just outside the ruins, when, two weeks later, a storm blew in, the water rising so high that the men were taken back out to sea where they most wanted to be.

The clouds have cleared and the stars are coming out. The night is alight with them. I pass Dead Man’s Corner but I’m in too much of a hurry to imagine how the bodies of the smugglers were cut down and taken home to be buried by their mothers and their wives. Even so, once I’ve passed, my strength returns, and I’m free and fearless and I begin to run.

I’m nearly at Blythburgh when a boy cycles by with his father. ‘Going to see the Zeppelin?’ I shout after them, and the boy slows, although the Father doesn’t, and I climb on, and perch on the rack above the back wheel, doing my best to make myself as light as I can. But the roads are flat, and the bike is a strong one, and we wheel along, passing others now, following the smell of burning and the red glow of the fire. The nearer we get the stronger is the smell, and shreds of blackened silk fly into our faces so that we’re ducking and dodging as if from a swarm of bats. ‘Mind how you go!’ We pass a piece of the skeleton of the aircraft. I want to stop and gather it. But we’re hurtling on towards the blaze, and we round a corner by a farmhouse, and there, in a field below, is a flaming mass of metal, the hoop of the airship half a mile high.

Our officers are here, their cars parked near. And the family from the farmhouse, the children wide-eyed, coats on over their nightclothes. I stand as close as I can. But the heat is powerful. And there’s nothing we can do for the men. They’re dead already. Twisted and charred. Seventeen of them. I hang my head. And wonder at their slow floating death, and whether Count Zeppelin imagined it, or whether it was only the bombs dropping he thought of, and the enemy dying below.

I stay till dawn when a crowd arrives, by foot, by bicycle, by donkey, horse and trap. There’s one man pulls up in a car, a Crossley it is, and I wonder if it is Mac’s friend, the teacher who came to tell him he was ‘down in the dumps’. He talks at some length to the officers and a policeman who is there – he wants to know what will happen to the bodies of the airmen, and the vicar joins them, and it is decided they will have their own small corner of the churchyard. We’d want nothing less for our own men. ‘Yes,’ they all agree, and they mutter a prayer.

By the time I’m ready to leave, my friend with the bicycle is gone, and so I turn away along the lane and follow the shreds of blackened silk that lead back the way we came. I look out for the piece of Zeppelin on the verge, but it’s been taken, and although I search the hedgerows, looking for another, every scrap and splinter has been scavenged away.

I’d like to think I saw a sign as I approached the inn, had an idea just from looking at it, that there was something changed. But my head is too full of the adventure, my hurry to tell Mother of it, my hope that Father will be sleeping, and won’t steal my story with one of his own. But as soon as I open the door I know it. Steam rises from the stove and Mother is dashing back and forth, alive as she’s not been these last two months. And there, by the fire, a sliver in her nightdress, her eyes open, is Ann.

‘Ann!’ I shout. I throw myself on her. And Mother comes shrieking across and hauls me off. ‘Careful,’ she says, ‘the girl’s too weak.’ And she cuffs me, just for good measure, and tussles up my hair.

‘It was the crash that roused her,’ Mother beams. ‘Threw her half out of her bed. And the chickens squawking and the dogs barking, and the birds.’

She sits beside Ann and places down a bowl of porridge and Ann smiles and fiddles with the spoon.

I wish now more than ever I had a piece of the Zeppelin to give her, so instead I shake myself and watch as a blackened flake of silk falls from my shoulder. I lay it before her. A shred of Zeppelin sail, and she presses the end of her finger against it and lifts it to the light. ‘Thank you, Tommy,’ she says and after gazing it at for some minutes she drops the disc of it into her mouth.

‘No!’ Mother cries, but Ann looks at her and smiles and to quieten her she takes up the spoon and dips it in the porridge.

Father, it seems, has made a pact with God, for now that Ann is strengthening he swears he’ll never take another drop of drink. ‘How are you, girl?’ he asks, gentle, as she sits by the window, and when Ann says she feels a little better, I swear I hear him sniff away a tear.

Mac writes to his My Margaret a long letter about the shooting-down of the Zeppelin. I bring it to Ann, for, even though Mac wasn’t there, it is so much better than my own telling. The brass bed shakes, the gesso almost crashes to the floor. And every rabbit in their garden scuttles for its burrow.

A week goes by before I have more news to bring to Ann, and this time, when I do, I catch her watching, eyebrows raised, as I steam open the envelope.

My dearest Margaret.

I look up in case such tenderness will make her sad. But she nods encouragement, and I go on.

I got off to work so early this morning that the post had not arrived, but on returning at lunchtime there was a letter waiting on the table, and Mrs Mollett so happy to tell me the news of it that she led me to the very place and stood there pointing and smiling and waiting till I opened it. I had to go into the bedroom to read it in private.