Dawn of Fear Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Map

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Reader Chat Page

  About the Author

  Text copyright © 1970 by Susan Cooper

  Illustrations copyright © 1970 by Harcourt, Inc.

  Reader’s guide copyright © 2007 by Harcourt, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  First Harcourt paperback edition 2007

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Dawn of fear/by Susan Cooper; illustrated by Margery Gill.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Three English children, fascinated by the war air raids, gradually become aware of true fear and horror when they seek vengeance on an opposing gang that destroyed their hideaway.

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Great Britain—Juvenile fiction. [1. World War, 1939–1945—Great Britain—Fiction. 2. Gangs—Fiction.]

  I. Gill, Margery, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.C7878Daw 1988

  [Fic]—dc19 88-17739

  ISBN 978-0-15-266201-1

  ISBN 978-0-15-206106-7 pb

  eISBN 978-0-547-53859-4

  v1.0513

  for Rod

  1

  Friday

  THE AIR-RAID siren went at the beginning of the afternoon, in an English lesson, while Mrs. Wilson was reading them Children of the New Forest. At first they couldn’t hear the siren at all for the school whistles: a chorus of alarm, their own indoor warning, shrilling down all the corridors at once.

  “Ma’am, ma’am! A raid, ma’am!”

  Mrs. Wilson closed the book with a deliberate snap and stood up. “All right now, children, quickly and quietly. Books in your desks, take out your gas masks, all stand up. Anybody not got his gas mask? Very good. Now I want a nice neat line to the shelter, and no running.”

  A hand was waving wildly at the front of the class. “Ma’am, is it a real raid, ma’am?”

  “It’s a drill,” said a scornful voice.

  “It’s the wrong time for a drill.”

  Mrs. Wilson scowled, and they knew the scowl and were quiet. “We don’t know yet. Door monitor?”

  Little Albert Russell was already stiff at attention by the open door, the strap of his gas-mask case neat across his chest. Out they went into the corridor, from one row of desks at a time, their double file jostling the filing classes from the other rooms, out to the air-raid shelters in the playground.

  Derek and Peter had desks near the classroom window. Geoffrey was behind them.

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Nah. Hear the siren now, though. Listen.”

  The head-splitting school whistles had stopped, and Derek listened as he walked, and heard the distant wail of the siren rise and fall until they were down the corridor and going out of the big double door. He and Peter and Geoff were nearly at the end of the line; Mrs. Wilson was counting heads just in front of them. He shivered; the sun was shining through broken clouds, but there was a chill wind. Most of the other classes, the younger ones, were made to take their overcoats into the shelters, but his group, the farthest from the cloakrooms, had no time ever to fetch theirs.

  He became conscious suddenly of the drone of engines somewhere high up.

  “Look!” Peter stopped, excited, pointing.

  The three couples behind them fell over their feet as he stopped, and then skirted him and went nervously, disapprovingly on. Only Geoffrey paused. The girl who had been walking with him called over her shoulder, “Come on,” but she was Susan Simmons, who was always bossy, and the boys took no notice, but stood where they were and stared up.

  Where Peter was pointing, there was a pattern of slow-moving dots in the sky. The deep hum of the engines grew as he watched, and developed a kind of throbbing sound. The clouds were very high, and the planes were flying below them; they seemed light-colored and were not easy to see unless the sun went behind a cloud. Their noise seemed so loud now that Derek looked all around the rest of the sky for more, but saw nothing except the familiar floating shapes of the seven barrage balloons, three near, four far off, fat silver ovals hanging up there with bulbous fins at their tails, like great friendly bloated fish. The balloons were filled with hydrogen, he knew, and tethered by thick cables; they were there to get in the way of any Nazi pilot coming in low to drop his bombs.

  “Junkers,” Geoffrey said confidently. “Junker eighty-eights.”

  What with his own excitement and the height of the formation, Derek could not really make out the silhouette of any individual plane; but by the same token he knew that Geoff couldn’t, either. “No, no,” he said. “Dorniers.”

  And then in the second that they still paused on the black asphalt playground, with the grubby concrete boxes that were the air-raid shelters looming ahead of them, they saw the unbelievable happen. Suddenly the rigid, steadily advancing formation of enemy planes broke its pattern, lost its head as plane after plane broke away and dived; and they heard a new higher noise and glimpsed, diving through a broad gap in the clouds out of the sun, a gaggle of other smaller planes scattering the bombers as a dog scatters sheep. It was a furious sky now, full of coughing gunfire.

  They heard other guns open up, deeper, closer, on the ground.

  “Gosh!” Derek said. He had forgotten entirely where he was; he hopped in delight. His gas-mask case banged at his back. “Gosh!”

  “Fighters, our fighters!” Peter waved madly at the sky. “Look!”

  And they were lost in breathless looking and in the growing scream of engines and the thumping of gunfire, as an urgent hand came down and Mrs. Wilson dragged them off toward the shelter.

  “You stupid boys, come under cover at once!” Her voice was a squeak of anxious rage, and it was only the realization that she was angrier than they had ever seen her that brought them skidding into the entrance to the shelter. But even then Peter was still staring back over his shoulder, and all at once he let out a yell of such joyful surprise that all four of them, even Mrs. Wilson, paused, hypnotized, for a last glimpse of the sky.

  “He’s got him, he’s got him, he’s got him!”

  It was a Hurricane—Derek could see the blunt nose now—and it had dived after one of the weaving bombers, with its guns making bright flashes on its wings. And the bomber had been hit: it was trailing a ragged path of black smoke behind it and lurching erratically across the sky and down. It was still firing its guns; you could hear them and see them among the puffs of smoke in the sky that were the bursts of shells fired from the ground. Nearer and nearer the ground the plane came, a long way away from them but still visible, and as it dived, it veered close to one of the motionless silver barrage balloons, and suddenly there was a sound like a soft “whoomph” and a great burst of flame.

  The plane dropped and vanished, with the victorious Hurricane above it swooping off to join the battle that they could still hear but no longer see; the sound of the crash was no more than a faraway thump, like the firing of one of the anti-aircraft guns, but enough to galvanize Mrs. Wilson into
thrusting them ahead of her around the right-angle bend of the entrance into the shelter itself. But still Derek had one moment’s last quick sight over his shoulder of the burning barrage balloon, hanging there in the sky as it always had but beginning strangely to droop, with its fat inflated fins no longer sticking firmly out but curving gently, wearily, down.

  When they came out of the shelter about half an hour later, the barrage balloon was no longer there. Instead, there was a gap in the sky and only six floating guardian shapes. The raid had not lasted for very long; there had been time for a handful of songs—the fourth- and fifth-grade children in their shelters had been singing “Waltzing Matilda” when they came in—and the distribution of one hard candy each. Then the noise outside, which they heard only in the brief gap between one song and the next, had died away, and the long single note of the “all clear” had shrilled out. They went back to their classrooms, in as neat a double file as before, and smartie Susan Simmons made a shocked face at Derek and Peter and Geoff and whispered to her friends as they passed.

  The three boys stayed after school, hovering at their desks until everyone else had left, to apologize to Mrs. Wilson, and curiously she did no more than give them a brief lecture on the perils of being out in the open when a raid was on, and the undeniable extra crime of giving someone else the risk of coming to haul them inside.

  “She’s nice,” Derek said on the way home. “I mean, she could have sent us to the principal, and then they’d have told our parents, and there’d have been an awful row.”

  “She ought to be grateful, if you ask me,” Peter said. “If she hadn’t had to come and find us, she’d have missed all the fun.”

  2

  Saturday

  “WE GOT a new shelter,” Peter said, balancing on his heels on the low brick wall in the way all their parents forbade. Every house in the small road had this same brick wall enclosing its front garden: a sitting-height wall, topped with curved tile, and a chunky iron chain looped between concrete posts above that. The iron chains were supposed to go one day to the War Effort, but nobody ever came to take them away.

  “Where is it?”

  “In the dining room. It’s an indoors one. Under the table.”

  “Go on. No such thing.”

  “It is. Come and see.”

  They ran down the road, dodging puddles, kicking stones, jumping vainly to catch at blossoms on the fluffy pink cherry trees. No one seemed to look after the trees in the road, but every spring it happened: the dark red buds burst into a froth of pink cotton wool, later to shed petals and brown rotting flowers on the patches of grass outside each house. Peter bounded past one tree, stumbled, and spun around clutching his foot and yelping.

  “What’s up?”

  “Stubbed my toe. Damn, damn, damn.”

  Geoffrey said primly, “You aren’t supposed to say that.”

  “Chickory chick, cha-la, cha-la,” Peter sang mockingly at him. “Chickory chick...”

  Geoff did look a bit like a chicken sometimes, Derek reflected, with that pointy nose and the curly dark hair like feathers. He said, in experiment, “Cluck, cluck. Nice chickie.”

  “Shut up!” Geoffrey aimed a furious punch at his stomach, and Derek groaned, staggered, clutching himself, hopping in circles. Geoffrey looked pleased. Derek burst into laughter.

  “Come on then.”

  They whirled through Peter’s gate, through the front garden, past the hawthorn tree with its dark red blossoms already beginning to break, around to the back door where Mrs. Hutchins was shaking out a rug, raising a cloud of glinting dust in the sunshine. At another house they might have hawked and coughed and howled at the dust, but Mrs. Hutchins was unpredictable. She was small and neat-featured, with her fair hair wisping out in all directions; she had blue eyes as bright as Peter’s, but did not laugh as he did. Most of the time she seemed to Derek to be either neutral, putting up with everything, or complaining.

  She said at once to Peter when she saw them, “Have you been in Miss Mac’s room again?”

  Miss MacDonald was the lodger, an elderly teacher. There were lodgers at Derek’s house, too, though they had just gone away for a week’s holiday. Most of the houses in the road now had extra people living in them besides the family.

  “No, Mum,” Peter said.

  “There’s a vase broken,” Mrs. Hutchins said, looking at him keenly. Her gaze swept over the others, too, as if she suspected them of having crept in and broken the vase. Derek shuffled uncomfortably. Finally she looked away vaguely and gave her rug a last vigorous shake.

  “Can I show them the shelter, Mum?”

  “She’ll say no,” Derek thought. “She’ll say: Certainly not, I don’t want you all tramping in dirt when I’m cleaning. She’ll say: Our new shelter is private.”

  But Mrs. Hutchins smiled faintly, lifted her chin, and tucked a wisp of hair back beside one ear. “The Morrison?” she said. “All right. Wipe your feet, now.”

  It looked like a huge box filling the space under the dining-room table. When Derek looked more closely, he saw that it was really a kind of table itself, made of steel, but with the space between its thick steel legs filled in on all four sides by walls of heavy wire mesh. There was an entrance at one end. It was like a small house, or a camp; it would make a good camp. No one could attack it. You could sit inside and laugh at them.

  “It’s smashing,” he said enviously.

  “I expect we’re getting one, too,” Geoffrey said. There was no air-raid shelter at his house; when the warning came, he and his parents went down into the shelter next door.

  “Bet you aren’t.”

  “Bet we are.”

  “We take the cat inside, too,” Peter said. “We all go to sleep. It’s warm. We were in there last night.”

  Derek thought of last night, but could not find it. He felt a vague memory of his father carrying him, half asleep, outside—but when was that, last night or another? There were too many such nights to know.

  He looked again at the heavy metal Morrison, into which Peter had now crawled to sit grinning up at them, and decided he preferred their own. At home, the air-raid shelter was in the back garden; a truck had delivered pieces of shining silvery corrugated iron of different shapes, some flat rectangles and some curved, and his father and Uncle Bob, the lodger, had dug a huge hole in the back lawn and built the small house that was the shelter, covering it afterwards with earth and grass so that it looked like a large bump in the lawn. There was a wall of sandbags in front of the doorway, and to get in, you climbed down on one side of them, into a trench. The floor was earth, damp sometimes, covered with sacks; there were four bunks and a smell of gardens. He slept in a top bunk, which was, yes, far more interesting than the Hutchinses’ table-cave.

  “Outside, Peter,” Mrs. Hutchins said, appearing at the door. “I want to get tea; your father’ll be home soon.” She had a way of addressing all her remarks to her son, over the heads of the others, as if they were not there. Derek’s mother had once said Mrs. Hutchins was shy. He did not see how this was possible, which was why he had remembered it.

  “I like your shelter, Mrs. Hutchins,” he said, looking at her.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s one of the first. Mr. Hutchins got it through his firm.” But she smiled at him, and he thought that she looked pretty when the lines of her face went up instead of down.

  They went out into the back garden, and a bird flew away from the birdbath that stood like a concrete mushroom in the middle of the lawn. Derek stared into the docile pool of water; it was dark green, with a broken snail shell at the bottom.

  “Let’s go and feed the chickens,” said Geoffrey. He fished out the snail shell and threw it at the base of the birdbath; it smashed and scattered, leaving a small wet mark.

  “Look here a minute,” Peter said. “In the garage. I got something for the camp. For the Ditch.”

  He pushed open the garage door. “See—we can use them to keep up the roof when we’ve
dug the hole. Like in mining. So the earth won’t collapse.” He showed them two packing cases made of a thin white wood, and they stared. They had never seen packing cases, only the cardboard boxes that the grocer sometimes relinquished to hold the cans and packages that their mothers brought home. And the cardboard boxes were precious enough; hoarded like treasure, to be used over and over again.

  “Where’d you get them?”

  Peter grinned. “They’re my dad’s. But he won’t mind.”

  “Have you asked him?” Derek said doubtfully.

  “He won’t mind,” Peter said again, and laughed. He was an unworried boy, more often in trouble than any of them, but always a carefree kind of trouble. Derek liked him better than he did Geoffrey. You could be sure of Pete; he wouldn’t ever shove you from behind unexpectedly or say spiteful things; and once when they had all three torn a curtain in Derek’s house, Pete had gone straight to Mrs. Brand and taken the blame, with Derek trailing guiltily behind. But Geoff had run home.

  “Pet—er!” His mother was calling. “Come in now.”

  “I better go to tea, too,” Geoffrey said. “Those boxes are good.”

  “We’ll start digging tomorrow,” Peter said to Derek. “Come and call for you in the morning, all right?”

  “All right.”

  Geoffrey ran across the road to his own house, and Derek wandered home, weaving in and out between the puddles, as near as he could get to the middle of the road. No cars were likely to interrupt him; there was little traffic in the small world of Everett Avenue, except bicycles. It was a private road, leading nowhere, and altogether unpaved save for its curbstones and drains; a stony road, a quiet turning off the main highway, ending abruptly in a field. Beyond the field, the Great Western Railway stretched across the horizon, so that life in Everett Avenue was accompanied by the murmur of cars on the highway at one end, and the distant roar of trains at the other.