Fireweed by Jill Paton Walsh Read Free Book Online

things?’
    â€˜My penknife, for a start. And my torch. And something to read when I can’t get to sleep in those shelters. And I’d very much like a shave.’
    â€˜
Shave?
’ she said, incredulous. ‘You don’t need to shave!’
    â€˜I jolly well do! About once a week or so.’
    â€˜Well, I can’t see any beard on you.’ She stared at my chin.
    I raised my hand instinctively, and stroked the soft absurd pale down that grew there. She laughed again.
    â€˜Really, Bill, you don’t need to shave
that
off! That’s not a beard!’
    â€˜It makes me feel a fool,’ I said, sourly.
    â€˜Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. Well, let’s go back to your house.’
    â€˜I suppose I really ought to go and see if my aunt’s there again now,’ I said. I hadn’t really meant to go back right away. I felt very reluctant, as though something nasty would happen if I saw anyone I knew, though I hadn’t the sense to work out why I felt like that. Stands out a mile to me, looking back, but as Julie said, I wasn’t very quick on the uptake. After all, I was only fifteen.
    We went home on an Underground train. It was very smelly down there, because of all the night shelters. They left their stink behind them. The barricade was still across the road. The doorstep was even more dirty, and all the windows looked dead; I don’t know how it is that one can see from the glass, as one can in human eyes, when there’s nobody at home, but it’s true. We didn’t walk straight up the street to be caught and warned off by the warden, but slipped round the little lane that led between the small gardens at the back. That too had a notice, UNEXPLODED BOMB, propped up against an old oil can, but we just walked past it.
    I opened the gate at the end of our garden, and we went down the path. It looked different: the leaves were all golden yellow on the apple tree, and the grass had grown long, and was jewelled with dew, even then, in the afternoon. At the end of the garden, next to the house, was a deep pit, about six feet wide, into which the windows of the basement looked. It had stone steps into it, which led to the back door. And lying in this sunk place, lodged against the kitchen windowsill on one side, and against my aunt’s parsley and mint patch on the other, was the bomb. Its nose-cone was on the windowsill, poking through a broken pane, and its finned tail was on the herb bed. We stared at it, fascinated. Looking up I saw broken branches in the apple tree, and looking down I saw a long scuffed mark on the lawn.
    â€˜Look, Julie,’ I said, excited. ‘It fell into the tree, and that must have broken its fall a bit, and turned it sideways, so that it slithered along the lawn, instead of falling on its nose, and that’s why it didn’t go off. It just slipped along there, and stuck.’ Indeed, the scuff marks and scratches on its grey sides were already bright with new rust and where the leaky gutter spilled over it it had grown a streak of livid green algae, absurdly, as though it meant just to stay there, and weather into the surroundings like a fallen tree.
    â€˜I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
    I think I would have said it if she hadn’t, but now she had I felt different. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I want my things.’
    Her face whitened, visibly, as I watched. ‘But we’d have to go right under it!’ she said.
    â€˜Cowardy, cowardy, custard!’ I said, to make myself feel brave.
    â€˜Are you really going to?’ she asked.
    â€˜Yes,’ I said, ‘Really.’
    â€˜Well, if you are, I’m coming too,’ she said, firmly, taking a tight hold of my hand, and marching me towards it.
    So we went. We walked down the steps, and across the narrow yard, stooping under the bomb, past it, and getting to the door. I slipped my hand round the doorpost, and found the