Fireweed by Jill Paton Walsh Read Free Book Online Page B

muddled, I think,’ she said, pouring out more tea. ‘Some of the ones that don’t go off are duds, or ordinary ones that just by some chance didn’t fall on the trigger mechanism, but some of them are real time bombs, meant not to go off till someone touches them. They make a lot of trouble you see, making people leave that area, and all that. And those ones, Daddy said, are specially made to go off at the lightest touch, anywhere on them. Or even at a loud noise. Or even a change in temperature. The people who deal with them are just about the bravest people there are, Mummy says.’
    â€˜Golly,’ I said. ‘I should think your mother’s right. O.K., we’ll take a bus back to town. There’s one that goes right by St Paul’s, and you can take your last look.’ It was a sort of delayed reaction, like the way a wave breaks, and then the backwash breaks again. I was still chatting about the bomb at St Paul’s when I remembered the one behind me.
    â€˜Julie,’ I said. My throat was quite dry. Very slowly I picked up my cup of tea, and gulped some. ‘Julie, which sort do you think this is: the accident sort, or the time-bomb-go-off-at-any-time-sort?’
    â€˜I honestly don’t know,’ she said, looking up at me calmly, with dark, limpid eyes. ‘I haven’t a clue.’
    And I made her make the tea. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here!’
    â€˜Let’s!’ she said, getting up at once. Then at the door she said, ‘Have you got your things?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said. ‘I put them in the rucksack.’ I was whispering.
    â€˜Good,’ she said. ‘Only I wouldn’t like you to make us come back for them!’ I have never closed a door so gently in my life as I closed that kitchen door behind me.
    The bomb went up some time after we left. How long after I’m not sure. It wrecked the houses on either side of my aunt’s, and two houses across the road, and it blew in the windows all the way down the street. Where our house had been there was nothing left but a great hole. But the apple tree, split in two right to the root, sent up a shoot the following spring, and survived. I can get my aunt to talk about it any time.

4
    We sat on top of the bus, choosing a seat where someone had peeled off the new mesh netting from the windows, so that we could look out. The netting was to stop the window hurling splinters of glass at the passengers, but it made it so hard to see where one was that people pulled it off. Our window was all mucky with the glue left behind by the net. It was late afternoon, with that sort of misty haze in the air that the sun shines through softly, making no shadows.
    â€˜Bill, tell me how ever you’ve managed all this time,’ said Julie.
    â€˜It’s not so hard as you’d think,’ I said.
    â€˜But you had hardly any money; have you been getting enough to eat?’
    â€˜I did have some money at first. You don’t have to pay to sleep; you just go down a shelter. Nobody notices, because there are lots of people floating around on their own. And there are special places to buy food, you know, like the W.V.S. canteen where we got lunch.’
    â€˜Don’t they move around a lot? How do you know you’ll find them?’
    â€˜Well, there are dumps called British War Restaurants, that stay put, in church halls, and places like that. You can get a good meal there for sixpence, if you don’t take pudding.’
    â€˜Did your money last until this morning?’
    â€˜No, but I earned some. It’s not hard to do. I delivered newspapers for a few days, for a chap who’d lost all his delivery boys through evacuation; but then I found a better way. All the street markets are short handed; it’s the old gents who are left, and some of them are trying to run their son’s stall as well, and he’s in the army, or some such