Dawn of Fear Read online

  From the field that lay between the road and the railway came a raucous noise, suddenly: the hollow, off-key tapping of metal on baked clay, a hammer on a pipe. Clear and rhythmic, it went on for perhaps half a minute. Derek stopped beside his gate and stood listening. The tapping meant that he must run indoors; but after all he was nearly there already. It came, he knew, from the antiaircraft post in the field beyond the top of the road; there were guns up there, and soldiers, and sandbags, but all in mysterious isolation, for everything was fenced in with barbed wire, and the boys had never been able to get close. The tapping on the pipe usually foretold an air raid; and a few moments later the warning for everybody else, the long wailing up-and-down siren, would rise into the sky. But as Derek stood there listening now and found nothing following but silence, he knew that this was one of the other times, when the tapping meant nothing very important at all. It was simply calling the soldiers to come and have their tea.

  Tea. He shut the gate and ran indoors. His mother was carrying plates into the front room. “You can take some if you don’t drop them,” she said. “One at a time.”

  Derek took—one at a time—the knobby white milk jug, the pot of plum jam, the breadboard with its rectangular grayish-faced loaf of bread. He saw his mother take a certain handleless cup from the larder. “Toast?” he said hopefully. “And dripping?”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Mrs. Brand, smiling. “I didn’t mean to light the fire, with coal so short, but Hugh was cold. Go on back in, now, or he’ll be up to mischief.”

  Back in the living room, Derek kept his small brother at bay and unhooked the brass toasting fork that hung beside the fireplace; he knew the bread would crumble if he tried to spear it properly, but he could let it hang suspended by its top crust from the prongs—while his mother, using an ordinary short fork, toasted three pieces of bread to his one.

  “They’ve got a new shelter at Peter’s house,” he said. “It’s under the table; it’s funny. Not so nice as ours. Mrs. Hutchins said it was a Mosson.”

  “Morrison,” Mrs. Brand said absently. She looked at small Hugh, playing happily with a spoon. “Too late for us to have one, now we’ve got the Anderson outdoors. It would have been better for Hughie’s cough, though. Getting him up every night to go out there in the cold...” She sighed. “Ah, well.”

  She spread Derek’s toast with the granular brown dripping from the kitchen cup, and sprinkled it with salt. He munched contentedly, gazing into the fire. Castles in there: battlements and towers golden-red and glowing; suddenly, a leering face; then as suddenly nothing, but only a patch of tar and a tiny spurting yellow flame. He said, “Can I poke the fire?”

  “It doesn’t need it, darling. You can’t make toast with flames.”

  “When’s Daddy coming home?”

  “Soon. After Children’s Hour.”

  “A boy at school said they’re bombing the railways out of London every night now,” Derek said.

  Mrs. Brand was silent for a moment. Then she said firmly, “You don’t want to believe everything you hear from the boys at school.”

  “Why is Daddy working on a Saturday?”

  “He has to sometimes, you know that, when there’s lots of work to do at the office.”

  “Children’s Hour,” said Hugh. He was guessing, but he was right; it was nearly five o’clock. Derek turned on the radio. “These sets take a long time to warm up,” he said, quoting a current catchphrase. “Eeeeee-ow yip-pip-pip- pip-pip...”

  The radio set added a squeal of its own, and his mother laughed.

  “Hello, children,” said the familiar disembodied voice. “To begin our program today, David is going to read you one of the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, the story of ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself.’”

  Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild. And Derek and Hugh attended and listened, eating a rock cake each, while their mother cleared the dirty plates and went into the kitchen to boil water for tea and open a can of baked beans in case the five-twenty train from Paddington might this one evening be on time. Hugh was lost in the story, staring into the fire. Derek was half listening, half brooding on where they should begin building their camp in the Ditch tomorrow. “Cat, come with me.” “Nenni!” said the Cat. “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me...”And in their quiet room with the darkening windows, the story drew on and was followed by a play and some gentle music. Then, “Good night, children, everywhere,” said the familiar voice, and they answered it: “Good night.” And after the weather forecast the news began, “And this is Stuart Hibberd reading it,” and in the middle of the talk about troops and airplanes and fronts that Derek could never properly understand, their father came home. Hugh was put to bed while John Brand ate his baked beans on toast, and shortly afterward Derek followed him, into the room where they all four now slept and where the boys would hear the low murmur of voices and perhaps the radio, comfortingly close, until they fell asleep. It was an ordinary day.

  BUT LATE that night, Derek woke. He woke into a confusion of sound; Hugh was whimpering in his cot across the room, with his mother bent over to comfort him, and thunder was rumbling in the night outside. Or perhaps it was not thunder. He said sleepily, “Are we going down the shelter?”

  His father’s voice said, “Not yet. Go to sleep,” and he saw that John Brand was standing near the window in the dark, looking out, with the blackout curtain held open, and that the dim light in the room came not from the hall but from the sky outside. He wondered why; and half asleep but puzzled, he sat up in bed. The thunder growled and died. His father looked across at him and said in a strange, tight voice, “You might as well have a look.”

  Derek clambered across the foot of his bed toward him. Even without the blackout curtains, it would have been a dark room, for two large wardrobes were set across the French windows as a protection against broken glass. But in the place where his father stood, you could see out of a window, through the apple trees in the garden, and over the fence to the eastern horizon. Lightning was still flickering at one side of the sky, but it was a small local storm and moving quickly away. Derek felt vaguely that his father had not been looking at the storm. He gazed ahead through the gap in the trees, to where the searchlights were making their usual weaving crisscross pattern in the sky, blind white groping arms sweeping to and fro. And he saw suddenly that below the searchlights the sky above the horizon was red.

  There in the east, it glowed with a reddish orange haze he did not remember having seen before, like a strange misplaced sunset, glowing in the night sky. “What’s that?” he said.

  His mother had quieted Hugh and come up behind them, and when she spoke, there was the same curious, taut note that he had heard in his father’s voice.

  “That’s London, burning,” she said.

  HIS PARENTS, Derek knew, were Londoners. After they were married, they had moved twenty miles out of London to the flat green valley of the Thames. Everett Avenue had been newly built then, and there in the peaceful road with the view of Lombardy poplars and golden fields, he and Hugh had been born. That’s London, burning. Derek could not picture what it meant. He supposed, looking out at that red band in the sky, that the Jerries had dropped a lot of bombs again and set things on fire. That was not remarkable. They had been dropping bombs for ages now; it was only a shame that nothing so colorful as a fire ever happened really near home. Still, at least they had seen that super dogfight yesterday and the spectacular collapse of that poor old balloon. It wasn’t often you got a piece of luck like that when the bombers came. “They aren’t near us tonight,” he thought wisely. “You can’t hear the guns.”

  He climbed back into his bed, pulled the blankets around his ears, and drifted away toward sleep. Dimly through the muffling bedclothes he heard his parents talking softly as they covered the windows again and prepared for bed.

  “Th
e city again. Or the docks. Poor devils. I didn’t think there’d be one tonight.”

  “He’s throwing over everything he’s got now.”

  “In a way we’re lucky the boys are so young. Even to Derry it doesn’t mean much. Just a great game, like cowboys and Indians. It’s hard—you have to teach them to be careful, yet you don’t want to teach them to be afraid.”

  “I hope to God,” John Brand said somberly, “nothing will happen to make him learn that for himself.”

  Snug among his blankets, Derek wondered vaguely what he could mean; and then the warmth and the darkness took him, and it was too much effort even to wonder. And he fell asleep.

  3

  Sunday

  THERE WAS porridge for breakfast. Derek sprinkled sugar over the top, watching it dissolve into a watery syrup, and carefully poured on just enough milk to make a white moat all around the dish, cooling and firming the edges of the secure gray-white island that he would invade with his spoon. You could make bays, and rivers, before you ate them. Sometime he would teach Hugh.

  Outside the window, sunlight whitened the big cherry tree by the front gate, and the sky above the houses across the road was clear blue. School tomorrow, but not today. He said, “Can I go over the Ditch, Mum?”

  She said, smiling, “I’ll tell Peter where to find you.”

  It was not far; the Ditch lay along the other side of the Robinsons next door, where the vanished builder Mr. Everett had intended to put another road, crossing Everett Avenue at right angles, but had been interrupted by the war. He had had time to build only the first half of this other road, which now stretched off on the far side of Everett Avenue like a side arm, opposite the Ditch. It was called Woodland Drive, but never known to the people of Everett Avenue as anything but the White Road. Almost white it was, too, paved in broad concrete sections joined together by black asphalt lines. There was little or no contact between the residents of the two roads, though nobody seemed to know why.

  The half-dozen Woodland Drive children made up an independent gang, and Peter, Derek, and Geoffrey referred to them formally as the Children from the White Road. The two groups had never clashed, but they avoided one another. The invisible gang boundary ran across the near end of the White Road, and the Everett Avenue boys stayed on their own side of it, in Everett Avenue itself and the Ditch. The Children from the White Road seldom trespassed there, but remained in unseen haunts of their own.

  Derek turned right, past the Robinsons’ front wall, into the Ditch. None of them had ever thought of it as anything but a natural feature of the landscape; it had been there as long as they had, and that was forever. To anyone else, no doubt, it was obviously the beginnings of a road, because of its width, stretching between the two solid creosoted fences of the Robinsons’ and the Twyfords’ house just beyond, and because of the eight-foot-deep central trench dug to take pipes that had never arrived. But for the boys, the Ditch had no purpose but their own. The pipe-trench had widened over the years into a miniature valley, with a path on either side running precariously along the ridges cast up when the earth had first been dug out; hardly earth, really, but orange-brown clay. In summer it hardened into a brick-like substance reamed by cracks and fissures, cloudy with orange dust; but now, in spring, it was soft and muddy, lush with long green grass everywhere but in the paths.

  Derek knew the pattern of each path as he knew the puddles of the road; he could have walked blindfolded along either and still dodged the flat orange patches of mud and trodden accurately on the clumps of grass. But he balanced his way along one edge now on his toes, playing tightrope walker, until he came to the place they had chosen for their camp. It was part of the Ditch wall that was clear of grass. They had begun to dig there, a little, but they had never yet really reached the point of deciding what the camp should be like. So far, it had mostly been talk, and the only thing properly dug, and that very small, was the secret hole.

  Derek slipped his hand into the narrow gap cut into the clay wall, masked by a clump of grass. They were still there. He pulled out the rusted, broken spade-stump purloined from his father’s trashcan, the blowpipe, and the darts. The spade was pretty useful; it was their only real digging tool, even though it hadn’t much of a handle left. There was less use for the blowpipe and darts; none at all really, because even if there had been anything to fire the darts at, the blowpipe would not yet propel them more than a couple of feet. That was his fault. He was the dart-maker; more for the pleasure of the making than for any effect they had. Still you never knew; one day they would work. He fingered a dart now critically. That was a good one: smooth and tough.

  Peter and Geoff came whooping toward him along the narrow path. He snatched up the blowpipe hastily and fitted the dart into one end. “Halt! Who goes there!”

  “Friends,” Geoffrey yelled.

  “Prove it.”

  “Don’t be so daft. You know we are.”

  “All right then, if you can’t prove it—” He put the blowpipe to his lips and blew mightily, tightening his lips in the spitting position that his father had taught him as the only way to blow a trumpet or fire a peashooter. He aimed at their feet, but he need hardly have bothered; the dart, as usual, did nothing but curve in a small sad arc as it fell weakly from the end of the pipe. He glared at it, wondering for the hundredth time how natives managed in jungles; and the others jeered.

  “You spend ages making those things,” Peter said, rubbing the scar on his nose where he had fallen off the back of a truck the year before, “and they never work.”

  “I don’t care. They’ll work one day. Hey!” Derek grabbed at Geoffrey, who had retrieved the fallen dart and was trying to take it to pieces.

  “All right, all right, keep your shirt on. What you really need is a deadly poison on the point; then it wouldn’t have to do more than just scratch someone.” He looked around at the mud and long grass. “What’s poisonous? Deadly nightshade, laburnum pods...”

  “Those squishy round white berries at the end of the road.”

  “Snowballs, they’re called.”

  “It’s too early for any of those things anyway,” Peter said. He pulled up one of his long gray socks, found it covered in mud, and pushed it down again. “Use dandelion milk—that’s just as good. The white stuff that comes out of the stalks.”

  “That’s not poisonous,” Geoff said loftily, making his chicken face.

  “Bet you it is.” Peter pushed his way through the long grass at the bottom of the Ditch, spraying rainwater over his legs and trousers, and pulled a handful of flower stalks from a clump of dandelions. They grew tall there; the picked stalks drooped long, white-green and naked. “Hey,” he said to Derek, “rub the darts on them,” and together they wetted the sharp wooden points with the white sap that welled in circles from the hollow juicy stems. They took exaggerated care to keep it from their fingers.

  “Wouldn’t hurt a fly, that stuff,” Geoffrey said persistently, with a shade less conviction than before. “You’re dippy.”

  “All right, if you’re so clever, then you eat some!” Peter lunged at him with the dandelion stalks; Geoff scrambled just in time up the muddy slope to the side of the Ditch, and they made off in a yelling chase along the muddy path, all the way to where the high wire fence, level with the end of the Robinsons’ back garden, cut straight across the Ditch and barred their way. Then slithering down and up again they went, and back along the path on the opposite side. With his pipe and darts stowed safely back in the secret hole, Derek contemplated jumping across to upset Geoffrey in flight, but decided against it. Not fair, really. Too muddy, anyway.

  “Ah, leave him be, Pete,” he called. “It’s too wet.” Then as they jumped back down to a laughing halt, “He knows it is poisonous anyway, or he wouldn’t have run.”

  “Well,” Geoff said. “Whose idea was it to put stuff on the darts in the first place?”

  He was always like that, Derek thought: he could always twist things around so that e
ven when he was in the wrong, he made it look as though he were in the right. He wouldn’t ever be like other people, wouldn’t ever admit he could be soft, too. That was the way Geoff was, always wriggling around things. He wasn’t sure whether he admired it as persistence or scorned it as cheating.

  “Want to dig?” he said at large, fingering the spade.

  “No—too sticky,” Peter said. “Be like toffee. That’s why I didn’t bring the boxes up yet.”

  “What shall we do, then?”

  “Plan the camp.”

  “We’re always planning it.”

  “Not properly. We haven’t drawn a plan.”

  Peter seized a piece of stick from the Ditch bottom and squatted down, making marks on the mud. “Here’s the side of the Ditch, see, and there’s the hole we dug. And we want the walls to come out here, like this—” The stick, which was frail and rotted, broke as he dug it into the mud.

  “That’s no good. Why not make proper marks, in the place we’re going to do the digging?” said Geoff.

  The sense of this was unanswerable; yet Peter, halted in first spate, seemed to be casting about for objections. Derek felt the same reluctance; after all the planning was fun, the planning was always the best part of anything, to be savored, not to be cut short. He said, “They wouldn’t last. The rain would wash them away.”

  “Mark them with stones,” said Geoff, inexorable. “We’ll get some from the road. Come on.”

  He scrambled to the path and made off toward Everett Avenue, and they followed him more slowly, still reluctant, with a vague sense that the proper order of things was being outraged. Sounds of clattering pots came from Mrs. Robinson’s back door as they passed, but they could see no one there. When they caught up with Geoff at the beginning of the Ditch, they found him standing still, gazing across Everett Avenue, at the near end of the White Road. He was watching something with a strange intentness; he looked somehow as if he would have been watching from a secret hiding place if there had been anywhere to hide.