Mark Dunn - We Five

During their few hours of rest, the two had lain in Jane’s bed, even when air raid sirens ordered them to retreat to the hollowed-out Higgins backyard Anderson shelter. As exhausted as they were, there were still times — a good many times — when the jarring, concussive sound of the bombs falling nearby and the AA guns noisily acking the night sky kept sleep beyond reach. During nights like these they whiled the time away by sharing whispered reminiscences of the happiest and funniest moments of their closely linked childhoods.

Tonight played out much as had the several nights preceding it. The only difference was that earlier in the day there had been a funeral. Carrie had watched her mother’s coffin being lowered into the ground, and had wept upon the shoulders of her friends Jane and Maggie and Ruth.

Molly, as it turned out, was in Worcester, doggedly determined in the face of wartime travel obstacles to attend the funeral of her beloved Pat Harrison — even though the journey took twice as long as expected, even though she was booted from one particular train when all the civilian passengers were forced to give up their seats to soldiers in transit, even though she spent one long leg of her journey with a screaming, soiled child having been thrust into her lap, even though she was hungry and thirsty and very nearly knocked unconscious when the train came to a sudden halt and someone’s hat box fell down on her head, and even though her trip required at journey’s end a frank conversation with Pat’s father about how he’d died. It was the most difficult conversation she’d ever had, but Mr. Harrison had shown her only kindness in spite of his overwhelming grief. He had even placed her in Pat’s old room, where she cried herself to sleep for each of the two nights of her visit, a pair of her dead lover’s boyhood pyjama trousers swaddling one side of her face.

The Prowses had also gone to Sylvia Hale’s funeral. As had factory forewoman Vivien Colthurst and one of the other assembly workers, Miss Dowell.

“Don’t you come back to work, love, until you feel up to it,” Miss Colthurst had said to Carrie, smiling sympathetically.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Carrie adamantly responded. Jane, who was standing next to her, said that she also intended to come into work the next day.

That night Carrie and Jane drifted off early only to be awakened by the wail of the air raid siren. “I refuse to move from this bed,” Carrie dissented wearily.

“I’ll keep you company,” said Jane.

A moment later Lyle stumbled into the bedroom and sought to know, in a harried tone, why the two of them were just lying there and not getting their “blooming arses out to the Andy.”

“ Because , little brother,” Jane calmly replied, “we’re waiting for the bomb that has both of our names stamped on it — the one that’ll deliver us from this blooming vale of blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

“You go right ahead and bodge up Mr. Churchill’s words like that. He can’t hear you. But still it ain’t very patriotic.”

Jane chortled. “Since when have you got yourself all Hope-and-Glory patriotic, little brother?”

“Since I went down to enlist yesterday.”

Jane sat up in bed, nonplussed. “You didn’t !”

“I did.”

“And they took you? Even though the first time you get shot you’ll be bleeding Guinness all over the battlefield?”

“Have your bit of a laugh. They took me this time. By the way, that Peter Pan git what tried to fly himself out of that St. Bart’s window — the recruitment officer was asking if I knew him, since I must have said something about knowing every bloke what ever set a toe in the Fatted Pig. He hadn’t heard what happened to him and didn’t know why he never came back in to finish filling out his enlistment papers.”

Now it was Carrie who registered surprise on behalf of both herself and her bed companion. “Cain Pardlow had decided to enlist?”

Lyle nodded. “Even the most cowardly of conchies can sometimes come to see the light.”

“Did you know this, Jane?”

Jane nodded. “Ruth told me. The two of them had made a pact. He was going into the army and she was joining the A.T.S.”

“Now that Cain’s gone, is that what she still wants to do — leave the factory and go into the Auxiliary?”

Jane shrugged with her neck. “I don’t think she’s decided.” Jane became ruminative. “I didn’t know Ruth was so fond of Cain.”

“Oi! Ladies! It seems to me— if I may interrupt — that if we’re all going to be buried under a pile of bricks by the bleeding Luftwaffe tonight, I should at least have the pleasure of a last supper.”

Jane sighed. “Do you fancy a meal, brother? Are you saying you want me to get up and make you something?”

Lyle nodded. Then with a nod in Carrie’s direction, he said, “Whilst I talk to this one here.”

“Why didn’t you just say you wanted me out of the way so you could have a chin-wag with Carrie? And maybe whilst you’re wagging, you could do it in the Anderson shelter.” At that moment the All Clear sounded. Jane laughed. “Or right here in my bedroom would be lovely too.”

Jane got up from the bed.

“I’ve got two eggs. I didn’t tell you because I was saving them for a special occasion. You deserve those eggs for your decision to enlist. I’m very proud of you.” Jane delivered a kiss to her brother’s forehead before leaving the room.

Lyle sat down on the bed facing Carrie. He waited until the sound of Jane’s retreating footsteps died away. Then he said, “Do you know where he is? The bleeding bugger what did that to her?”

“You mean where he lives? No, Lyle. I don’t. What are you thinking about doing?”

“He’s a fire watcher with the A.F.S, ain’t he? At night, I mean. And then in the daytime I’ve clocked him delivering coal for Mr. Matthews.”

“ What are you going to do, Lyle ?”

“What do you fancy I’m going to do?”

“Be in for the high jump would be my guess. They’ll either hang you straightaway or you’ll end up spending the rest of your life in prison.”

Lyle thought about this for a moment. “What difference does it make?”

“I thought you were joining the army.”

“I am. If the police don’t nick me. And maybe they won’t, because I intend to do this smart — not leave behind any trace it was me. And I’ll be cold sober. That was Osborne’s problem. He went after that stupid little sod whilst his head was only halfway screwed on.”

“Sober or drunk, Lyle, Molly’s dad shouldn’t have done anything to Pat.”

“Says yourself. I never held with any of them buggers — not from what Jane said about ’em. And then after what that Katz did to her—”

“Miss Colthurst at the factory — her family’s been friends with the Matthewses going back years. She told me at the funeral this afternoon she was going to pay a visit to Mr. Matthews on her way back to the factory — tell him everything she knew about the three men he still had working for him. She thinks he’ll give them the sack right on the spot.”

Lyle shook his head. “That ain’t enough. There are jobs for conchies opening up everywhere. They’ll just plant themselves someplace else and go right back in business. I know all about buggers like these. You see, I used to be one myself.”

“You never were, Lyle. Don’t put yourself in their camp.”

Lyle looked away to avoid making eye contact with Carrie.

Carrie went on: “Mr. Matthews doesn’t keep things to himself, Miss Colthurst says. Word will get around about what they did. People will find out about their game. They’ll be forced to move away. And isn’t that the best thing, Lyle? That they should be gone forever?”