Brother in the Land by Robert Swindells Read Free Book Online

compassion. No contest.

Thirteen
    You’d expect that when the news got round the scene would turn ugly. You might even expect some sort of revolt, a mass-attack on Kershaw Farm or something of that sort.
    I expected it. I lay in bed that night and wondered what would happen when all the people in Skipley stormed the hill. Not if – when!
    It never happened. All that happened was a lot of shouting and crying, and a few people set off up the hill with sticks and stuff. The soldiers had anticipated it and the marchers found themselves facing an APC. That’s an armoured personnel carrier, like a little tank with machine-guns. They had no leader and no plan, so they chucked their sticks away and ran.
    I was fantastically depressed. Everybody was. We’d waited and waited for someone to come and help us. We’d had our hopes raised, and now it was back to square one. It was worse than if it had never happened!
    Even Ben was affected. He didn’t know what was going on, but he found himself confined once more behind the wall. Dad said people would get desperate and he didn’t want the kid running about.
    He was right, too. There was a new feeling in the air – a tension, as though something awful was building up and might explode at any moment. When I went to the well, I carried a club and when I got there somebody had taken the bucket. Ihad to scrat about in the rubble for something to tie to my own, and all the time I felt as though I was being watched, as though I was stealing somebody else’s water. I found something in the end, a length of TV cable, and I got some water. I coiled the cable round my waist before I left the yard. Before, I’d have left it for the next guy, but if somebody had pinched the bucket they’d probably take that, too.
    That wasn’t the worst thing, though. The worst thing was when I found out that some people had known there was no hospital. It was a few days later, I was under the arch and I heard two blokes and a woman talking.
    ‘Well; it was pretty obvious, wasn’t it,’ one of them said. ‘I mean, it’s like the Nazis. As soon as I heard it over the loud-speaker I said to myself, “Aye – it’s like the Nazis with their gas vans.” ’ The others nodded.
    ‘Yes,’ said the woman, ‘We’d a fair idea ourselves but what could we do? She was covered in burns, and it’s bad enough finding grub for two …’
    That’s the worst thing – you get so that you’ll send your own folk off to die, thinking, sooner them than us.

Fourteen
    Things were getting harder. For one thing it was October, and we’d had the first touch of frost. Tents and makeshift shelters had sprung up among the ruins. The last scraps of food had disappeared from the empty houses and now they were being stripped of bedding, carpets and bits of linoleum. Clothes were taken from the ruins and from the dead, and we presented a bulky appearance because of the many layers we wore.
    The air of tension had intensified, and was made worse by the long silence from Kershaw Farm. We’d expected another visit from the loudspeaker and listened for it, subconsciously, as we went about our work. Nothing happened.
    I hadn’t seen Kim again. Fetching water had become a perilous chore and I didn’t hang about. I kept to the middle of the road and moved quickly, with the bucket in one hand and a club in the other; watching the ruins on either side as I went. The length of cable was coiled about my waist, hidden under my clothes.
    If there were people at the well I waited under the arch with my back against the wall. My evening trips got earlier and earlier as the nights drew in – I had to be home before dusk. Some people only made one trip now, in the mornings, and I’d have done the same if I hadn’t always kept hoping I’d see Kim. There seemed more chance, going twice a day, but we werenever there at the same time. I began to think something had happened to her.
    It wouldn’t have been surprising if something had.