Andrew Hurley - The Loney

‘How are you feeling now, Hanny?’ I said and put my hand on his brow, the way Mummer did to check his temperature.

He smiled and shook his head. The headache had gone.

‘Mummer means well,’ I said. ‘She’s just worried that you won’t get better. Fear can make people do funny things, you know.’

We walked down onto the beach, following a ragged trail of debris. Seagulls had been strangled by the sea into sodden, twisted things of bones and feathers. Huge grey tree stumps, smoothed to a metallic finish had been washed up like abandoned war-time ordnance. All along the beach, in fact, the sea had left its offerings like a cat trying to curry favour with its owner. The Loney had always been a dumping ground for the North’s detritus, and tangled with the seaweed were shoes and bottles, milk crates and tyres. Yet all of it would be gone at the next high tide, raked back into the jumble of the sea.

With a difficulty that I didn’t remember from the last time we’d come here, we climbed up onto the roof of the pillbox and stood either side of the hole. Inside it was deeply carpeted with sand. Pools of seawater sat in the gloom.

Hanny jumped down first and held me round the waist as I came down through the hole. Someone had been in here; the same person who had sprayed the outside wall, no doubt. It smelled of urine and spent matches. There was litter thrown up against one corner. Beer cans and chip wrappers. But despite all that, it remained more or less as sturdy as when it had first been built. There was never any bombing here and until we had claimed it for our own, I doubted that it had ever been manned at all. The Loney was just a place the Luftwaffe passed on their way to the Clyde. And the Third Reich never did come marauding up the Irish Sea in the end, of course.

We’d had to smash a hole in the roof to get inside — as the dunes had swallowed the back end where the door was — and the side facing the sea had begun to reveal its rusty skeleton, but it still felt as though it would last forever.

Using our hands we picked up and dumped the sand against the walls. Hanny worked like a machine, raking great clods of the stuff between his legs, checking his watch to see how long it was taking him.

Once there was space, Hanny opened the satchel and carefully arranged the rats on the floor and then his toy soldiers to face them. I took the rifle off my shoulder and positioned it through one of the gun slits, fitting my eye to the rubber cup at the end of the sight. It took time to get it right — for a few seconds there was only the magnification of my own eyelashes — but once I had the sea contained in the circle, it was brought to me sharp and silent.

The horizon I had seen with the naked eye from the top of the dunes was dragged closer and replaced by another much further out. A boat with a white sail that had been too far away to see before tracked slowly from one edge of my vision to the other, rising and falling, outrun by the terns and gulls scudding over the waves. There was another world out there that no one else but I could see.

I fancied myself as a naval captain on the lookout for U-boats, or a lone gunner charged with the defence of the coastline.

Those sorts of games only ever seemed real at The Loney. London was hard to convert into the kinds of places the men in Commando seemed to find themselves.

Although I had assassinated the park keeper — who morphed from one important Gestapo officer to another — several times from a hideout in the huge oak tree by the tennis courts and blown Mummer to pieces when she stepped on the land mine I’d buried in the vegetable patch, the parks, our garden, they were too prim and clean.

The cemetery up in Golders Green with its flat, white graves that looked as though they had been levelled by a bomb blast made for a half-decent blitzed town, but the groundsman had a dog that was supposed to be rabid. And anyway I could only play there on Saturdays when the Jews weren’t allowed to do anything, even visit the dead.

At The Loney, on the other hand, one could be at Sword Beach, Iwo Jima, Arnhem, El Alamein without much strain on the imagination. The pillbox was easily transformed into a cell in a German prisoner of war camp, which we’d fight our way out of with our bare hands, thwacking Achtunging! Nazis in freeze frames. Or it was a jungle hideout from which we watched a line of buck-toothed Japs come stalking through the marram and the sea holly and then we’d unzipper them with a burst of machine gun fire before they had time to draw breath. The Japs were cruel and devious but screeched like girls when they died. They were always weaker than the Krauts and the Krauts were always more arrogant than the Brits, who naturally won every time.

‘Here,’ I said and Hanny, half crouching, took over, adjusting his grip, squinting into the sight. I moved to the slit next to Hanny’s and watched the hordes of birds come in with the rushing tide, ransacking the foaming bore for the things dragged along in its thrust, or heading inland to the marshes with food for their young.

A flock of gulls came to land, squabbling over some dead thing from which they tore bits of fur and skin, the craftier ones making off with larger portions — a cluster of innards, or bones still jointed in the middle.

The sudden boom of the sea against the rocks close by scared them and they took off together, screeching and honking. All but one. A large gull thrashed about on the sand, trying to lift itself out of the incoming water. It beat one wing against the air, while the other stuck out from its body at an angle. It had been broken in the scrum.

It cawed, nuzzled at its leg and then resumed its strange dance, hopping one, two, three steps, lifting off and tumbling back onto the sand.

Hanny looked at me.

‘We’ll have to kill it,’ I said. ‘It’s cruel to leave it in pain.’

Hanny frowned. He didn’t understand. I took the rifle off him and mimed stoving the bird in with the butt. He nodded and we climbed out of the pillbox and watched the seagull floundering on the sand. It stared back, wide eyed.

‘It’s the right thing to do,’ I said, and gave Hanny the rifle.

He looked at me and smiled and then he turned his head sharply the other way, when he heard the sound of a car. I took the rifle back and ushered Hanny up onto the dunes, making for a natural trough in the grass, from where we could lie flat and observe the road across the marshes.

Once the car had passed the hawthorn tree, I could see through the crosshairs of the sight that it was the one that had passed us when we’d broken down on our way to Moorings.

This time there were three people in the car. Two in the front — a man and a woman — and one in the back, presumably the sleeping girl. The car slowed and as it came closer the tyres threw out waves of spray before passing through the gap in the dunes and coming to a halt on the fringes of the beach. Seeing that the sandflats were rapidly disappearing, the driver reversed. The engine idled for a moment, then shrivelled away to a rapid ticking as the mechanisms cooled under the bonnet. The birds that had been frightened away returned to what they were doing — the gulls coming down again to fight over the carcass on the beach, the curlews chunnering in the grass.

We moved carefully along the ridge and at the end where it sloped down to the road, we pressed ourselves into the sand. Parting the grass with the muzzle I could see the front passenger more clearly now. Mummer would have thought her common the way she was applying lipstick in the mirror of the sun visor, rolling her lips in and out. She was the kind of woman Mummer would have pointed out to Farther. The kind of woman she would have commented on.