Five Boys by Mick Jackson Read Free Book Online

whispering to one another and knocking knees beneath the desks.
    Mrs. Fog had spent the last half an hour comparing thesentence on the blackboard to a goods train. Each word, she insisted, was a carriage with its own important packages and parcels and every one of those carriages must be coupled up in the right order before they could head off down the track. But all the talk of trains put Bobby in mind of his own recent journey and the many miles he was from home, and when Mrs. Fog picked up her duster and swept her train of words into oblivion he couldn’t help but feel that any hopes of ever finding his way out of all these hills and hedgerows were erased with it.
    As he collected his coat there seemed to be even more eyes on him than usual and he crossed the playground to find the Boys already loitering in the lane. They muttered a few words to one another and when Bobby walked through the gate Hector Massie—the boy who, a couple of days earlier, had been so convinced that Bobby had a swastika tattooed on him somewhere—stepped up to him.
    “I reckon you’ll be going back along the top road,” he said.
    The other Boys were all shoulders and smiles—were flushed with excitement. Bobby looked down the lane toward Miss Minter’s cottage, which seemed suddenly distant.
    “I don’t think there
is
another way,” he said and could hear the terrible whine in his own voice.
    Hector put his mouth up to Bobby’s ear.
    “You know what?” he whispered. “If I were you, I’d just start running.”
    There was no appeal—no arbitration. For a second Bobby froze. Then he turned and ran—toward the Captain’s cottage and the whole unknown world beyond. Andas he ran some of the other children hung over the wall and watched, more excited than at any sports day they would ever attend.
    Bobby ran for his life and for those first few seconds Devon was almost transcended. In his terror he almost managed to shake off the misery that had plagued his every waking hour. The village was obscured. Its sounds fell away, its faces retreated. Then suddenly Bobby felt his feet hit the ground, could hear himself puffing and panting. Could hear the Five Boys start up after him.
    He didn’t get far before they caught him. He surrendered as if he knew what he was guilty of. The Boys took him by the arms and led him away, like the German pilot in the photograph Bobby had cut out a few days earlier whose plane had been downed in a Wiltshire field. And he was taken around the back of the houses and down a path onto some allotments with their sheds and canes and rows of vegetables.
    Barely a word was said throughout the whole proceedings. Bobby was bundled into a hutch and the door was locked behind him with an almost professional manner. The box wasn’t much bigger than a coffin and was rich with the ammonial stink of poultry excrement. The Boys stood and watched Bobby kick at the door and tug at the chicken wire and after a while they turned and quietly walked away.
    They couldn’t have been gone for more than a couple of minutes. It was only when Bobby saw them heading back that he made a sound. More words and tears came out of him in those few moments than had come out of him the whole week before. The Boys strode toward him in theirgas masks, carrying their pesticide sprayers. They crouched down at the chicken wire and peered in at him. And despite all his kicking and screaming, they pumped some pressure into their sprayers, aimed them in at Bobby and turned them on.
    They sprayed him from head to toe. Soaked every twisting inch of him. Pumped long enough to drown a whole army of greenfly. But they found that wearing a gas mask and exerting themselves was altogether different from simply sitting at their desks. And long before they ceased, through sheer exhaustion, and with the thrill of tormenting the evacuee still flooding through their veins, the Boys were already beginning to speculate on the ultimate price of such terrible