Five Boys (12 page)

Whatever subject Finn and Hector had decided to bring to the Captain’s attention could not have been half as engrossing as they had hoped, and Bobby was still peering through the telescope when he heard the door slam shut and, a moment or two later, the Captain’s feet on the stairs. All the briefings were suddenly redundant. He was meant to gather some evidence, hide in the back bedroom and make his escape when the Captain returned to his semaphore. But there
was
no other bedroom and if he ran down the stairs now he would only meet the Captain coming up.

Bobby looked frantically around the room, still gripping the bottle. Felt as if his balaclava was about to burst into flames. The Captain had taken off his dressing gown before he’d got to the top of the stairs. He strode into the room, threw it to one side and went straight over to the telescope. Put his eye up to it, then pulled away. Looked again, shifted the barrel an inch or two to the left. And when he was satisfied
that it was back where it should be, he turned to shut the door.

Lewis and Harvey had joined Aldred on the church tower the moment their signals had been passed down the line and with a little effort could just make out Heck and Finn chattering away to the Captain. They saw Bobby appear behind the attic’s net curtain. Saw him peering through the telescope. Then the door to the Captain’s cottage slammed shut.

Lewis turned to Aldred. “That’s not long enough,” he said.

Bobby stuck his head out between the net curtains and stared helplessly into the night, and the three Boys abandoned their binoculars and began waving and hissing to him across the great divide. When the Captain swept back into the attic the curtains were still settling. The Boys watched him go straight over to the telescope, look through it, adjust it. Saw him turn and shut the door, then slowly return to his handkerchief waving, with Bobby spread-eagled against the slates just a yard or two to his right.

The Boys ducked back behind the parapets.

“What’s he got in his hand?” said Lewis.

“A bottle,” said Aldred.

Lewis tried digesting this information. “Why a bottle?” he said.

Bobby didn’t dare move for two or three minutes. He lay there with his feet in the gutter, convinced he’d be spending the rest of his life stuck up on that roof. Then he got the idea that if he could only climb up to the chimney stack he might find a less precipitous way back down and
twice set off for it only to slide back down to the gutter with his fingers clutching at the slates.

He rested his cheek against the cold roof and brought the dimple bottle up to his face. Looked in at the ship. He thought of all the strong men on a boat like that. Then he went down on all fours and, with his left knee dredging the gutter, began to crawl away from the window until he reached the corner of the house.

The ground was a good forty feet below him. In a couple of minutes, he told himself, it would all be over. He saw himself being congratulated by the other Boys. Then he turned, swung his legs out over the gutter and began to ease himself down into the dark.

He fished around for the drainpipe with his foot. The gutter dug into his stomach, and he had to lift himself out and away from it before being able to drop down and get his arms around the pipe—a maneuver he thought he’d successfully completed when his descent was suddenly halted; something pulled at his hair and he realized that Aldred’s balaclava had snagged on one of the gutter’s brackets. He hung there, as quietly as possible. Didn’t have the strength to pull himself back up and was not about to let go of the drainpipe. He began to slip. The balaclava began to throttle him. He could feel the power in his arms and legs begin to fail. He felt a blackness slowly flood his vision and the blood in his head go cold. Then his neck slackened, his head dropped back, slid free and he left the balaclava hanging from the gutter, with a hank of his hair in it.

The Boys watched in awe as he climbed down the side of the cottage. The only thing which would have impressed them more would have been if he’d slipped, fallen and broken his neck. But as soon as he was on the ground they
charged down the steps of the church tower, and once they’d reconvened in the graveyard any inclination to praise him for his heroism had been superseded by their eagerness to hear what he’d spied through the Captain’s telescope.

Bobby seemed reluctant to share his findings and the more cagey he became the more the Five Boys pressed him.

“Ladies,”
he said, at last.

The Boys looked at one another.

“What sort of ladies?” said Hector.

Bobby rubbed the back of his neck. “Ladies,” he said, “like your mums.”

The Boys were dumbfounded. They had never imagined that their mothers might be caught up in a spy ring. It was almost inconceivable.

“At the keep-fit class,” said Bobby, “at the village hall.”

The Boys still didn’t understand.

Bobby reached out his arms and mimed some of the spins and twirls he’d seen through the telescope. Without the Indian clubs, they looked remarkably like the Captain’s semaphore.

The Boys sat in silence and considered the implications.

Aldred was staring at Bobby. “Where’s my balaclava?” he said.

T
HE PEOPLE
of south Devon had always taken great pride in their coastline and had a particular affection for their beaches. But when the war came that affection suddenly soured and they became the place where the enemy was most likely to come sweeping in.

Lorryloads of soldiers turned up and spent all week sinking great lumps of concrete into the sand. Laid thousands of mines and rolled out great coils of barbed wire, so that by the time they left, the beaches looked less like a place anticipating a battle and more like a place where one had just passed through.

In the years since, France had fallen. Now German E-boats patroled the Channel, and morale among the villagers had never been lower when they woke one morning to find a leaflet on their doormat, headed

If the
INVADER
comes
WHAT TO DO AND HOW TO DO IT

The text was laid out below in four narrow columns, like a political manifesto with all the optimism trimmed away. Instead, the dead hand of the War Office prevailed, cheerlessly
listing the steps each civilian should take if the enemy ever landed on their shore. One’s primary concern, it said, should be to hamper the invading army’s progress and accommodate the British forces’ response, but while the pamphlet went to great lengths to emphasize the need to keep one’s head, its very existence did nothing but convince the villagers that the enemy was at the door and might come bursting in at any time.

Vigilance, the leaflet insisted, was paramount. Rumors should be given no credence, and in the unlikely event of an invasion the British troops would be served best by people staying put rather than blocking the roads in flight. In fact, if necessary, they should consider putting their vehicles out of action to avoid them being commandeered by the enemy—a recommendation a local police constable was said to have inflicted unstintingly (and somewhat prematurely) on his bicycle, hiding its various parts all around the house and flower beds. A few days later, when his need for his bicycle outweighed the likelihood of an invasion, he set about reassembling it, but it was never quite the same. He couldn’t remember where he’d hidden the saddle. The bicycle could still be ridden for shorter journeys, with him standing on the pedals—an inconvenience he sought to conceal by looking intently over the hedgerows as if suspecting nefarious activity there.

Certainly, the threat of invasion was real enough for every villager to lie in bed at night and imagine the invading army—stormtroopers marching past the post office or gangs of men, blacked up, creeping along the ditches with their bayonets drawn. But if everyone had their own idea what the invaders might look like, they all came up from the coast, still gritty from their landing, and talking in the
same strange Germanic tongue—so when the South Hams finally fell it was doubly confounding for the locals that the invasion should come from the north, rather than the sea, and consist not of Germans but of gum-chewing Americans.

They came in twos and threes at first—high-ranking military men who stepped out of chauffered cars in their trench coats to point their batons across the fields or stare through binoculars along Slapton Sands. And, since all the signposts had been uprooted as a precaution against a possible invasion, they were often obliged to stop their cars and ask the locals where they were.

These occasional sightings encouraged precisely the sort of rumor the War Office disapproved of—of German battleships massing out in the Channel, of extra armaments being shipped in to keep them at bay. Of fifth columnists arrested at Blackawton in possession of a map of Buckfastleigh. All sorts of rumors did the rounds that autumn, but the ones concerning American servicemen coming to south Devon to prepare for landing on continental Europe came up with such frequency that the others eventually fell by the wayside to be replaced by variations on this single theme.

An additional and more worrying rumor was that, in order to accommodate these maneuvers, a great swathe of the county was to be requisitioned and all its inhabitants cleared from the site—a bit of gossip only the gloomiest Jeremiah could have taken any pleasure recounting, since no one knew where this commandeered territory was meant to begin and end. So when posters went up announcing important meetings in village halls, everyone
had an idea what they might be about, even if they could never quite conceive such an evacuation coming to pass.

In the event, three thousand people were given their notice that November—were given just six weeks to pack their things and go. And as Mr. Steere told anyone who cared to listen, it wasn’t just the pots and pans you had to take with you, but every last possession you didn’t want to risk being blown to bits.

The Reverend Bentley thought his parish got off rather lightly. The thirty thousand acres to be evacuated stopped just short of the village, with the lane around the bottom of the hill acting as its perimeter, and of all the farms and houses which bought their groceries at the post office only Miss Minter’s cottage and Steere’s farm fell within its bounds.

The village would ultimately have a ringside seat for the arrival of the Americans, but only after witnessing the departure of all the Devonians who had been ousted from their homes. By late November two or three families were passing through the village each day, their trailers packed under tarpaulin and drawn by a borrowed tractor or a horse. But as December’s deadline approached, more and more of Devon’s refugees crept by with their world in tow, until the last few days when they seemed to be going by every half an hour.

The children sat up on top of the trailers, waving and smiling as if they were running away with the circus while their parents traveled up front, barely managing a nod or a wink as they went by. But it was
their
parents, the old folk sitting stiffly beside them, who seemed unable to comprehend what they were living through and had the same
bewildered expressions on their faces as the next of kin at a funeral.

Many of them had never set foot outside the same few hills and valleys. Some refused to go. Doctors were called out, sedatives were dispensed. The Women’s Voluntary Services arrived and brewed up great urns of tea. But all the tea in China couldn’t explain to the elders of south Devon why they were being cleared from the land they had spent their lives nurturing to see it turned into a bombing range.

Henry Fowler was two days short of his seventieth birthday when the evacuation was confirmed. His son called in on his way home from the meeting, sat beside him and told him what he had just been told himself. Over the following weeks, while every other farmer was rounding up his livestock and boarding up his windows, Henry Fowler didn’t pack a single box. His only interruption was his son and daughter-in-law who dropped in every few days with news of a nephew up near Dartmoor who’d be happy to have him, or old friends out near Exeter who could do with the company.

When the car finally came to collect him the driver knocked on the front door for a couple of minutes then went around the back and found him sitting among the vegetables. He sat cross-legged in his best suit, with his elbows resting on his knees—had underestimated how much blood he had in him and the enamel bowl in his lap had overflowed onto the soil.

It could be said that Henry Fowler was just the first of many casualties, and that by finding his way into the graveyard before the area was sealed off he finally managed to have his own way. Half an hour after the funeral the vicar was fixing chicken wire over the stained-glass windows and
packing the last of the church’s valuables into straw, and by December 20 every last man, woman and child was cleared from their houses, with no idea how long it would be before they’d be allowed back in.

Bobby was getting used to being evacuated. Lillian had given him the option of moving into a house in the village but he chose to accompany her out to her sister’s farm near Dittisham. Before leaving, Miss Minter gave Howard Kent strict instructions about looking in on her cottage and making sure that everything was secure before the roadblocks finally went up. So, on that last afternoon, with the light already fading, Howard crossed the bridge, marched up the path and went right around the cottage, rattling the doors and checking the latches and generally wondering what kind of state it was going to be in in six months’ time. He cupped his eyes at the parlor window and pictured GIs getting up to all sorts of mischief inside. There’s not a lock or bolt yet invented, he told himself, which will stop a man breaking into a house if he puts his mind to it.

He stood at the gate, looked up and down the empty lane and decided to take a more circuitous route home, via Duncannon and back along the riverside. As he went along he thought how there was something quietly sinister in the air—as if some terrible calamity had been visited on the place. Half a mile down the road, Steere’s farm looked oddly empty—all battened down, as if expecting a hurricane. There were no rusting plows or piles of timber, no chickens scratching at the dirt, and Howard strolled up the track and had a good look through the windows there as well.