Five Boys by Mick Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

Bobby said.
    Only Miss Minter could say whether she recalled the worm on her doormat and suddenly came up with a more sinisterway of it getting inside Bobby, but the speed with which she took up the shovel from the coal scuttle certainly had about it the conviction of someone who had discovered a grave injustice and the appropriate measures long overdue. She was out of the door and up the hill before Bobby had uttered another word and he was still peeling the wet clothes off his wretched body when she hammered at the first of the Five Boys’ front doors.
    Phyllis Massie opened the door. Lillian Minter could hardly contain herself, but had the sense, at least, to tuck the shovel behind her back when she asked if her son was home. Hector appeared, rather sheepishly. He had a whole set of explanations at the ready, but he wasn’t given the chance to try them out. Miss Minter grabbed him by the neck. His head went down between her slippered feet. Then tremendous events were suddenly taking place around the back—a slamming and clanging which threatened to pump his body full of indigestible pain.
    Grim vengeance carried the old lady from one cottage to another, so that even if one of the Boys had wanted to warn the others, he would have had to be mighty quick. Only the clang of a shovel and the occasional howl rising over the roofs might have told the Boys who had yet to have a visit that their excuses were getting them nowhere and that retribution was on its way.
    By the time her shadow fell across the Crouches’ doorstep Miss Minter was beginning to tire, but she was determined that Aldred’s beating should be as vigorous as the first. Aldred had long since resigned himself to his punishment and when the old woman grabbed him by the scruff of his neck he wondered only how much it was going to hurt. In fact, it hurt a great deal and in time hewould retire to his bedroom, pull down his pants and find shovel-shaped welts across both cheeks. But he could have taken some comfort from the fact that when the other four Boys were given a good hiding a few minutes earlier their eyes had briefly popped out of their sockets almost as much as his.

London in a Day
    T HERE WAS just enough room under the stairs back home in Bethnal Green for Bobby’s mum to wheel the Ewbank in and out. Old tins of paint were stacked up beside rolls of linoleum and cardboard boxes and Bobby’s old pram was folded up somewhere at the back. But when he slipped in and pulled the door shut, all the odds and ends ceased to matter and he disappeared into the dark.
    The coats on the back of the door embraced him—smelled of his mother’s scent, his father’s hair oil—and Bobby imagined himself stowed away on a ship off the shore of some far-flung country with palm trees waving in the breeze. The meters ticked and turned behind him, the crew could sometimes be heard hurrying up and down the stairs, and with a little effort Bobby would feel the whole ship gently pitching in the swell.
    But when the bombers came that tiny room became the family refuge on the nights when it was too cold to contemplate going down the garden to the shelter and Bobby would sometimes wake in his father’s arms as he was carried down the stairs or passed in to his mother, then they would take the coats down from the hooks and put them around their shoulders and huddle together to keep warm.
    Bobby’s mother would sometimes get claustrophobic and announce that she’d rather be bombed in her bed thanstuck under the stairs and Bobby’s dad would tell her that things were bad enough without that kind of talk. Then he would start up with “I Have It on Good Authority,” or an old hymn, or “A Bridge in Donegal.” And Bobby and his mum would join in on the chorus and the songs would carry them through the dark.
    Then they’d hear the awful drone of Heinkels and their Messerschmitt escorts—would hear the
ack-ack
bringing them in. And that drone would slowly grow—would sweep