The Children of the King (25 page)

Throughout that first day he had walked, climbing stiles and crossing meadows, avoiding the roads. He’d known that people might be searching for him, and he hadn’t wanted to be found. He had walked and walked, but he hadn’t got far; hiking was a slow way to travel. He had slept that night in a barn —“Ha!” cried Cecily. “Did you really sleep in a barn? Just like a tinker! I
told
you, didn’t I, Mama?”— and after a spiny night in the straw he’d risen at pink daybreak and found a road, a passing lorry, and caught the first of several lifts which carried him, in fits and starts, south towards London. Eventually he was able to catch a train, arriving on the outskirts of the city around four o’clock, just as the day was closing in on itself. As the train wended its path underground he saw that people were using the stations as places of refuge from the bombs. Already women, children and elderly folk were readying themselves for the night, laying out their beds of tartan blankets on the dirty platforms. When he’d stepped off the train he had to pick his way carefully, not wanting to trample fingers or leave a bootprint where someone might sleep.

He found the stairs, the pointy-finger exit signs, and came up from the underground, out into the world.

The clean green fields and watercolour sky of the countryside were gone. This was a brown and black world, the air a dusty grey. People in hats and summer coats walked the streets as they had always done, and there was even a feeling of good cheer, as on Christmas Eve when the stores have closed and there’s nothing to do but wait for morning. Women wore high heels, men carried briefcases, bicycles and cars wove past on the road. But the grey dust touched everything, swirled in the wake of vehicles, cascaded down the shoulders of men. Where women had walked, the dust on the path preserved a trail of scratchy heel-marks. He had felt it on his teeth, that dust. It settled on his lips and tasted of all the centuries it had taken to build the city.

Rounding a corner, Jeremy caught his breath. The road was strewn with rubble, broken bricks and shattered timbers, huge plates of plaster. A sagging row of shopfronts lined the street, each of them missing its glass. In one yawning hole which had once been a window, a chalked sign said
Business As Usual.
Other stores looked abandoned, their window displays raided. Looking up, he saw that the shops had been scalped of their roofs. Water poured out of a burst pipe. Debris crunched underfoot.

He walked for as long as the light held, choosing his direction randomly. People filled the streets as the working day came to an end. They waited at bus-stops, scooted by on bikes, hurried with their colleagues to the underground. Some talked and smiled, others kept their heads down. Some stopped to consider the great blast-holes in the footpaths, the buildings torn from the rows, the piles of metal and brick that heaped chunderously over the roads. But most people did not stop, gave the destruction barely a glance. They had seen these things before, and in the morning there would be fresh things to see.

As evening closed in, creeping coldly through the dust, the streets emptied as if they’d had the life shaken from them. He had reached a suburban road now, and the houses that stood here were undamaged, and probably there were people living unremarkably inside them: but the homes seemed to turn to Jeremy the faces of haunted houses, gutted and long unloved. Their windows were messily blacked with tape, board, fabric. Their doors were shut as if nailed to their frames. Not a dog barked, no insect thrummed, the trees didn’t shift a leaf. That untouched street, Jeremy realised later, was the scariest place he saw. Like a prisoner pegged out on a beach, it was waiting resignedly for whatever must happen.

Darkness drifted shyly in. Taverns turned out their lights. The few people who were still on the streets paid Jeremy no mind. Everyone knew what was coming, and what must be done. Everyone assumed he was on his way to shelter somewhere safe. But he had left that place of
somewhere safe,
and as night sunk around him he thought of all the boys who had gone before him, the ones who endured fearsome trials on desert plains, in frail canoes, on horseback, in the heart of jungles, on the rims of volcanos; trials of pain, confusion, skill, wisdom, strength and, most of all, of courage; harrowing tests of a boy’s worthiness of becoming a warrior. Jeremy wanted to spend this night outside, as far as possible from
somewhere safe
. Himself against the bombs: he craved it.

Heloise, listening to this, shook her head with a mother’s mournful pride. All around the world that night, other mothers, learning of the fatal boldness of their own sons, would do the same.

“I walked for a long time,” Jeremy told his listeners. “I wasn’t hungry or thirsty, I wasn’t even cold. I didn’t know when the bombing would start, I didn’t know where to go. No place seemed a more likely target than another. So I just kept walking and hoped for the best.”

“Hoped for the best!” spluttered Heloise. “Hoped to be standing where a bomb might fall!”

Jeremy ignored her with the patience of one whose calling cannot be explained. “Finally I found a garden and sat down. I fell asleep — not completely asleep, but asleep enough that the silliest thoughts made sense. When I heard the siren, I thought I was back in school and the bell was ringing to call us to class. Then I remembered the bell had never sounded as urgent as that.”

He’d opened his eyes to the oddest of sights: the sky above him was red. It was slashed across with the white beams of searchlights, and burnt black at the edges by night: but the clouds were red as if the sky had been drenched by buckets of blood.

He didn’t see aeroplanes, but he felt the vibrations shake through his body, four hefty
booms
to the chest as the bombs drove themselves into the ground.

“I started running. The sirens were howling. There was a big moon, a hunter’s moon, so I could see where I was going. I passed other people, and most of them were wearing gas masks and helmets. I didn’t have a helmet or a mask, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t frightened — not frightened at all. I felt almost . . . mad. I couldn’t wait to get to the place where the bombs had hit. I was punching my legs as I ran, trying to make them run faster. I felt
sick
with excitement,
crazy
with it — not excited to see the damage, but to
be there.
I felt I was running as fast as the wind, but even that wasn’t fast enough. I felt I could break bricks in my hands, that’s how furious I was. I felt like . . . a lion.”

His eyes were glassy recalling it: Cecily stared at this changed, slightly worrying brother of hers. She glanced at Peregrine, who was watching him also. There was no astonishment on her uncle’s face; rather, he looked as if he’d just been told that all cats have claws.

The bomb site was a mile away. He was led to it by the fires that reached for the scarlet sky, by the shrilling of ambulances and fire trucks, by the dust that billowed along the roads as a thick, repellent snow. When he reached the place, the sight was shocking. A row of seven terrace houses had been pulled down as if by a mudslide. A ravaged mountain of doors, walls, gutters and furniture spewed into the street. Chimneys were standing, as were odd walls; staircases reached for rooms that were no longer there. He wasn’t the first to arrive at the scene — there were men with hoses and first-aid kits, women with crowbars and stretchers, as well as people who had dredged themselves from the wreckage and were now digging for their entombed families and neighbours. Instructions were being shouted, whistles being blown, torch beams were clashing like sabres in the night. Something caught fire, blew a ball of flame into the sky; the rescuers answered it gruffly, neither impressed nor afraid.

Jeremy did what all boys in search of achievement must do: he left the crowd to find an arena of his own, a private stage. He doubled back the way he had come, located a lane and followed it to the rear of the bombed terrace. There were fewer people working here in the tight confines of the toppled fences and buckled concrete and smithereened privies, and none of them noticed the blond boy who had never walked these working-class streets before, who had no idea what he was doing, who knew only what he wanted to do.

“I started digging. Well,
digging
isn’t the word. It was more like clearing a path between the slabs of plaster and chunks of wall and the pieces of tile, hoping to come across something —
someone
. Broken bricks were everywhere, in rough stinking piles. I could smell gas, and I could hear people in the street, and the sirens were still wailing, meaning more bombs might be on their way; but I didn’t think about that. I didn’t think about anything except
doing something.
I pushed and pulled at the rubble, kicked it, climbed over it, crawled under it, swore at it, I went at it in a fury; and I
had
to do it, I
had
to conquer the wreckage, as if my kicking and smashing through it was somehow
hurting
the enemy. As if Hitler himself could sense my determination and see that he might as well give up now, because he was never going to win . . .”

Jeremy looked up with burning eyes. He evidently felt no embarrassment in admitting to such anarchy of feeling, and in fact seemed pleased by it. He smiled at himself with a kind of wondering delight. “Do you think I was mad? I felt mad. I feel a little mad just telling you the story. I felt — I still feel — that I hardly know the person I am. And it makes me happy, feeling that.

“I was working by myself — nobody was near me. The moon was big and white, you could see the dust rising against the sky. I was dragging an angle of timber like a guillotine frame when I heard a noise. I knew what it was straight away. Somebody was calling for help. People were under the rubble, and they were pounding on something, and crying for help.”

Quickly his keen ears had pinpointed the direction of the sound. It was coming from close to where he stood — to where his feet perched precariously on a floe of shattered tiles. The voices were coming from an underground cellar. Instantly all was clear to him: the inhabitants of the terrace had used their cellar as a bomb shelter. They had survived the blast, but their home had not; and now they were trapped by the weight of the debris.

“I didn’t call anyone over: everyone was busy, but I also wanted the rescue to be mine —
I
wanted to do it. That’s why I was there. I started throwing aside all sorts of rubbish, coat-hangers, shoes, a hatstand, an alarm clock; I remember pulling an apron out of the dirt, and it still had a house key pinned to it. I was working fast, without having to think, as if I’d been born to dig like a mole. I uncovered the cellar door in no time. It wasn’t a wooden door, as I’d expected, but a sheet of thick steel, a true air-raid-shelter door. In the moonlight I could see where it had been freshly welded into place. It wasn’t set flat into the ground, but tilted at an angle; there must have been stairs behind it leading down into the room. I banged on the steel with my fist, to show the trapped people I was there. They answered with a frenzy of pounding. There was a handle, and I pulled at it — and the door didn’t budge. I could tell it was a heavy door, but that wasn’t the problem. Something had buckled it, and now it would not open.

“I looked around for a lever, thinking that would work. Finding a good one took me a minute. All that time the people in the cellar were hammering on the door. I imagined them in the darkness, and knew it would be unpleasant, but I did think they were making an impatient fuss. I found a nice piece of timber and applied it to the door. I struggled with it, put all my weight on it, but I couldn’t get the door to budge. I could hear voices behind the steel, but whatever they were saying was blurred. I assumed they were saying
help, help, get us out
. Well, that was what I intended to do, if they’d give me a moment. Sirens were still ringing, and hoses were spraying water, and fires were burning here and there; it was difficult to hear anything clearly. But suddenly I did hear something, a man’s voice from behind the steel, a deep hard voice that might have belonged to an oak tree.
Hurry,
he said.
The cellar is flooding.
”

May, who had been silent so far, said, “Oh.” They had read of such things in the newspapers. The bombs ripped apart the underground water mains; and people, trapped by rubble in their cellars and basements, drowned.

“As soon as I realised what he was saying, I started pulling frantically at the door. I looked up once or twice, hoping someone would be close enough to help me, but no one was near, I was completely on my own, I found out later that they’d discovered a lady trapped inside a chimney, and everyone had run to see. I didn’t want to leave my people in the cellar, not even for a second. I couldn’t bear to turn my back on them. I couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to find them again amid all the muck and dark and ruin.
Help!
I started yelling.
Help! Help me over here!
But with all the busyness, the trucks and the sirens, nobody noticed me.

“The people in the cellar were hammering wildly now. The door only seemed to wedge tighter with every thump it received. I was pulling, and they were pushing, but we may as well have been trying to move a mountain-range. Several times I heard the oak-tree man shout the word
water.
And once, when I glanced about for help, I noticed water leaking from cracks in the concrete in the yard behind me. Somewhere beneath us must have been a great pipe, torn to pieces like everything else. When I saw that water leaking across the yard, I knew the situation was bad. I knew the cellar must be filling fast. I knew it would be a small room, the cellar, a low-ceilinged, windowless room, and that this door was the last way out.

“By now, the people in the cellar were screaming. They were screaming and shouting at me.
Hurry up! Get us out! Hurry up!
I couldn’t hear the words clearly, the door was very thick; but I could hear their fists beating, and each beat said those things.
Hurry up. We’re going to die. You came here to save us. Now, because of you, we’re going to die.