Five Boys (16 page)

“It was an outdoor service,” he said

But the American officer was nowhere near as impressed as Dexter. He looked at Aldred and saw nothing but a bug-eyed boy with an old tablecloth wrapped around him. Aldred, feeling deeply uncomfortable, looked to his religious pole for strength, only to find that he had lost the star off the top.

“Open the coffin,” the officer said.

Suddenly every mourner had their own idea why the coffin should not be opened. The commotion woke Maureen’s baby but the American officer stood his ground.

“Nobody leaves until it’s opened up,” he said.

The pallbearers carefully lowered the coffin. Will and Cyril undid the screws and lifted the lid away. All three soldiers crowded around and peered inside. The eyes of the corpse were closed, his hands folded across his chest, but he looked far from peaceful. In fact, he looked as if he had suffered a violent, bloody death.

When the officer looked up his face was ashen. In Sylvia Crouch he now saw a bereaved sister, in Mo Tucker, a widow with babe-in-arms.

“Christ Almighty,” he said. “Forgive me. I don’t know what I was thinking of.”

They were over the bridge and halfway up the hill before Dexter gave the order to stop and open up the coffin, by which time Howard was hammering at the lid. When they helped him out his teeth were chattering and his whole body was shaking like a leaf.

“That was horrible,” he said and stood in the lane, rubbing his shoulders. “Just horrible.”

Back at the checkpoint the Americans were absolutely sickened. The officer leaned against the wall of the bridge and stared into the water below. How could so much blood come to be inside a coffin, he asked the others. What terrible death must the poor man have met? A dozen different questions demanded to be answered, but the two he significantly failed to ask were why a dead man’s boots would be so muddy and why a pram without a baby in it should ride so close to the ground.

A
LL THE BOYS
wanted to do was to make a little whizz-bang. Something to liven up a Sunday afternoon. The idea that this might have somehow helped conjure up the Bee King would not occur to them until much later on.

They had done their rounds, winding up at the allotments around four o’clock with no obvious means of entertainment until Aldred found the remains of a bonfire, with its embers still glowing under the ash. A boy on his own might have warmed his hands at it. Two might have tried stoking the fire back into life. But it took all five to create the conditions necessary for them to organize a party to look for something combustible which might be introduced to it.

The first shed Finn and Lewis forced their way into was full of old rakes and spades and piles of potting trays, which might have made a nice little bonfire of their own and brought a good deal of misery to their owner, but lacked the explosive element they were after, so they went onto the next shed along.

The other boys were breaking up beanpoles and adding them to the embers and managing to fan some flames into being when Finn and Lewis reappeared, looking mightily pleased with themselves.

Finn held up a tin. “This’ll do it,” he said.

In the face of such overwhelming smugness Hector felt compelled to offer some resistance.

“It’s just a syrup tin,” he said.

“Smell it,” said Finn.

Hector took the tin, popped the lid open and peered in at the black liquid swilling around inside. Inserted his nose and took a deep sniff. A muddy sweetness filled his head. Both lungs locked up. He was transported to a dim and dangerous place. And when he finally returned, blinking, to the allotments and his lungs finally spluttered back to life, he found his thoughts swam in the same peculiar fashion as that time he’d fallen out of a tree and landed on his head.

He passed the tin to Aldred and Harvey, who both sniffed, recoiled and nodded their approval, as if they were connoisseurs of the stuff. Then they handed it back to Finn, who stamped the lid down on it and carried it over to the fire. He held it above the flames for a while, like an offering, with the others watching. But the moment he let go of it they all scattered—dived behind sheds and compost heaps and covered their heads with their arms.

For a while the sky seemed to threaten to buckle—to rupture. There was a period of almost unbearable anticipation. Then the growing realization that the Golden Syrup tin had, in fact, neither the potential nor the least inclination to explode.

One by one, the Boys raised their heads above the parapet. The fire still smoldered. A trail of smoke went straight up into the winter sky. Hector got to his feet and stood with his hands on his hips, squinting.

“You didn’t put the bloody lid on tight enough,” he said.

The tin exploded. Exploded with such infernal anger it was as if the laws of physics had been tampered with, shaking
the windows in all the nearby houses and almost knocking the Boys off their feet. But in those few seconds before they started running they quite clearly saw the tin take off. Saw it fly up and head toward the river. And as they ran, with the embers showering down on them, the Boys saw no sign of that tin can flagging. And whenever they recalled their little experiment imagined it continuing through its trajectory.

Back in 1941, when the wind was in the right direction, the villagers could sometimes hear the distant drumroll of Plymouth taking another pounding. But by ‘44 the only bombardments to be heard were the ones from the evacuated area—bombardments which steadily grew in frequency and ferocity until reaching their peak in April of that year.

One night, Miss Pye stood at her bedroom window in her dressing gown, having been shaken from her dreams. Each flash of light on the horizon turned the sky into a mottled sea of red and amber, and a rumble of thunder rolled through the fields and shook the floorboards under Marjory Pye’s slippered feet. She pinned the curtain back in her hand, peered out into the darkness and smoothed a sarsaparilla lozenge against the roof of her mouth. Wondered what it must be like to be caught up in all those explosions and what chance there was of one of those shells straying off course.

In the morning the villagers agreed that the firepower of the previous night’s exercise easily outweighed any that had gone before and the days which followed were rife with rumors of botched landings, of American troops caught by their own artillery and even ships going down in the bay. The LST which limped into Dartmouth with its stern bent
out of shape was there for all to see, and there were so many stories—of makeshift hospitals, of lorries piled with bodies and even the digging of mass graves—that it was hard not to believe that some monumental, bloody disaster had come to pass.

The culmination of the Captain’s tabletop labors was that moment when the ship’s hinged masts were temporarily flattened and the model was eased down the neck of the bottle before the sails were hoisted back into shape.

Such moments came about very rarely—no more than eight or ten times a year—and were the closest thing each ship had to an actual launch. One Wednesday lunchtime the Captain found himself at such a juncture—had the little finger of his right hand down the neck of the dimpled bottle on the tip of the bowsprit of an Elizabethan man-of-war, the lines all taut in his other hand and the yards just about squared off—when an unfamiliar fellow went past the window.

He could tell straightaway that he was an out-of-towner. A young soldier, if not quite young enough to be given a couple of coppers and sent out to buy some cakes, then perhaps willing to be lured in by a little ham and chutney. But for all his hopes of a conversation which might slowly be brought around to the subject of women on the heavier side, the old Captain watched in vain, with the little finger of one hand down the neck of the bottle and the fingers of the other clinging to the reins.

The Reverend Bentley had been clucking under the hood of Maureen Tucker’s pram by the church gates for what felt like long enough to satisfy even the proudest young mother and emerged just in time to see the young
soldier coming up the lane. There were so many Americans in the county it took him a while to see that this particular serviceman was actually British—was wearing a lighter-colored khaki, cut from a rougher kind of cloth—and by the time the soldier was near enough for the reverend to make such a distinction he was also able to see just how badly his uniform hung off him. His collar and cuffs were flailing open; his tunic and trousers were soaking wet. The soldier stopped and slumped against the war memorial, as if he had just run a marathon.

“Everything all right?” the Reverend Bentley called out to him.

The soldier shook his head but kept on staring at the ground, which rather unsettled the reverend, and he was still wondering how best to handle the situation when the soldier lifted his head. His face was plastered with tears.

“What’s the matter?” said the reverend.

The young man seemed incapable of doing anything but quietly sob to himself. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and shook his head again.

“Where’s your tin hat?” said the reverend.

Whatever was weighing so heavily on the young man briefly lifted. He looked over his shoulder, as if he might have dropped it just a second before. But the lane was empty and he turned back to the reverend, utterly puzzled.

“I don’t know,” he said.

The reverend had reason to feel that the situation was generally improving and had just given Maureen a reassuring smile when the soldier slipped his rifle off his shoulder and pulled the bolt back. And in those few seconds it seemed to the reverend that the village and his presence in it were critically weakened. He watched the soldier climb
onto the base of the war memorial, watched him lean against the obelisk for support. Saw him tuck the butt of the rifle up against his shoulder and flatten his face against the stock.

The first shot went clean over the church tower. The second hit the weathervane. Both shots were still rattling down the valley when the soldier pulled his rifle away from his shoulder.

“I can
shoot,”
he said, emphatically. “I can
shoot
all right.”

It seemed that the more he tried to put his thoughts in order, the more they slipped away from him. Then suddenly he was gulping for air again and weeping and shaking his sorry head. He had one arm around the war memorial, as if propped up by a fellow reveler after a night on the town. He hung there for a second, then clambered down and took a step toward the reverend and Maureen, who both instinctively took a step away from him. Maureen had one hand on the pram handle and she found herself gently rocking it.

“Don’t cry,” she thought. “Please God, don’t cry just now.”

The soldier opened his mouth to speak, but after a couple of moments gave up and shook his head again. Then he turned and limped off down the lane from which he’d just appeared.

Maureen Tucker would later claim that the strange lull between the soldier’s departure and anyone actually opening their door was due to the villagers making sure that all the shooting was over before coming out to count the dead. The reverend more charitably attributed the apparent delay to the peculiar clock-stopping trance he and Maureen had entered. Either way, there certainly seemed to be a
moment’s grace before the doors flew open and everyone came streaming out into the street—an interval in which the only sounds were the soldier’s boots as he retreated and the squeak of the weathervane still spinning on its spike.

The next morning an army officer knocked on the reverend’s door wearing a uniform much the same as any other army officer’s but with a few more whistles and bells. He had a clipboard under one arm on which he took down the reverend’s account of the previous day’s events. The reverend spoke and the officer nodded, to keep him going, but barely a flicker of warmth threatened to cross his face. And when the reverend had said about as much as he could remember the officer asked how many shots had been fired.

“It’s a funny thing,” said the reverend. “Yesterday I’d have said
two
, but today it seems entirely possible it may have been
three.
Isn’t that odd?”

The army officer agreed that it was and made another note. The Reverend Bentley asked if it was important.

“Going AWOL will get you into one sort of trouble,” the officer told him. “Discharging a weapon is a different kettle of fish.”

Then he screwed the top back on his fountain pen and hooked it into his pocket.

“In his defense,” said the reverend, “the boy didn’t seem especially dangerous. He just seemed upset.”

The officer nodded. “And he’s going to be even more upset by the time we get through with him,” he said.

T
HE OSTENTATION
of the Americans’ arrival was outdone only by the modesty with which they slipped away. For weeks the lanes had been packed with traffic, as extra troops and transportation headed for the commandeered zone. A baker, with a special dispensation to enter the area, talked about whole cities of tents farther down the valleys, and Dexter Fadden reckoned that some stretches of the river were so clogged with barges that you could hop from one bank to the other without getting your feet wet. But just when it seemed inconceivable that the land beyond the roadblocks could absorb another jeep or motorcycle the villagers woke one morning to discover that the entire army had upped and gone.

The following day they were on the beaches of Normandy—had left the fields down the road to land on the newspapers’ front pages. And, though few people were inclined to admit it, their withdrawal left a certain sense of vulnerability in its wake.

Much to the frustration of the farmers who had been lodging with relatives or leasing other, far inferior land, the Americans’ departure failed to signal an immediate return to their property. In fact, it would be months before they were even allowed to see what sort of state their homes were in. In the meantime, a small unit of Allied servicemen assessed the
damage and engineered the clearance of unexploded ordnance, but as time passed and the number of soldiers slowly dwindled the Five Boys found the prospect of burned-out farms and bombed cottages too much of a temptation and about a month after D-Day, when it seemed safe to assume that the Americans weren’t about to come flooding back, they climbed over the gate on the road to Duncannon and launched their own small offensive into the overgrown fields.