Dawn of Fear Read online

  They saw a group of the Children from the White Road crouched together at the end of their territory, bordering on Everett Avenue. Some hidden, intent activity was going on in the middle of the group, like the quivering of a pot of water about to boil. Then suddenly the children jumped to their feet, the group exploded, and they could see one boy standing in the center: a weaselly boy in a dirty gray sweater.

  “It’s that David Wiggs,” Derek said scornfully. Then he stopped.

  David Wiggs was holding one arm out, stiffly extended, and jerking it up and down, while the other boys around him capered and laughed. From his hand hung a piece of rope, and at the other end of the rope dangled a struggling black cat, the noose that was around its neck tightening each time David Wiggs’s hand jerked. Another boy was poking it in the belly with a piece of stick while it twitched and strangled. It was a small cat. They could hear it making a small hideous yowling sound.

  Derek stood gaping, paralyzed, watching someone do something he thought no one could possibly ever do; he jumped as Peter at his side yelled indignantly, “Stop it!” He felt rather than saw Peter stoop quickly and grab a handful of stones, and then he was doing the same, and both of them were sending a small fusillade of stones toward the group.

  A small boy at the edge of the group jumped and squealed, rubbing his arm, and began to cry shrilly; the Children from the White Road scattered, and David Wiggs let go his rope and dropped the cat, which turned a somersault, found its feet, streaked away up the road, and at once disappeared. Then the stones were coming back at them; not from all the group, but from David Wiggs and two of the other larger boys. In the first rush of revenge, they bent down, grabbed, threw; but the rage was not enough to send them rushing into Everett Avenue territory, as it was not enough to make the gang of three carry on their attack now that the wretched anonymous cat had run free.

  So the stones and the throwing died away, and most of the White Road children drifted away, back up the road, leaving only the weaselly Wiggs boy and his henchmen yelling insults. In unspoken agreement Derek, Peter, and Geoffrey loftily turned their backs and walked—taking great care, great breathless care not to run—down to Derek’s gate.

  “That David Wiggs is beastly.”

  “He’s a pig.”

  “He’s a Nazi. And his nose runs.”

  “I wonder whose cat that is,” Peter said, looking worried. He loved all animals, even the evil-smelling chickens his parents kept at the end of their garden.

  “Probably a stray,” Geoffrey said. “My dad says there are lots more strays about, cats and dogs as well. When people get killed by the bombs, their dogs just run off.”

  “What do they live on?”

  “I dunno. Rats. Mice. Same things wild dogs live on.”

  “There are wild cats, aren’t there?”

  “Maybe that cat’ll grow up wild and come back and eat David Wiggs.”

  “Stinky old Wiggs, he’d taste awful.”

  “Like maggots.”

  “Like rotten potatoes.”

  “They only go wild in wild places,” Geoffrey said patiently. “On moors and things. That cat’ll eat rats and mice in people’s back gardens.”

  “Bet you’ve never seen a rat,” Peter said.

  “We caught three mice in traps this winter. My mum says there are rats in the Ditch.”

  “Go on,” said Derek with scorn. Living one house-width away from the Ditch, he felt himself its guardian.

  “There are probably. You don’t know. Just because you haven’t seen any. My mum says we shouldn’t go there so much.”

  “Well, you don’t have to,” Peter said promptly, “if you want to be Mummy’s good boy.”

  “Shut up.”

  Peter clicked the latch of the Brands’ gate up and down, then pushed it wide. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s go and see Hughie.” Himself an only child, he was fond of Derek’s small brother; often, to Derek’s gratified astonishment, he would plunge enthusiastically into the middle of any earnest, boring small-child game that might be in progress when he turned up at the house. Geoffrey, walking into the same circumstance, would shortly walk out again; to him Hugh was no more than an uninteresting piece of furniture. In his own family the indulgence due to a youngest child was all his property; he had two sisters much older than himself; large, plump, giggling girls who on certain shameful occasions had been heard by Peter and Derek referring to him as “Geoff-geoff.”

  They clattered up the concrete path and in at the back door. Mrs. Brand was peeling potatoes at the sink.

  “Where’s Hugh, Mum?”

  “Having his nap.”

  “Oh,” Peter said. “Will he be awake soon, Mrs. Brand?”

  “Not really, dear. He’s only just gone down,” Mrs. Brand smiled at him. She liked Pete; all grown-ups did. Perhaps it was the scar on his nose.

  “Oh, well,” Derek said. “We’ll come back. We’ll be in the back field. All right, Mum?”

  “All right.” She added automatically, “Be careful of the fence.”

  They filed out again. “See you later, Mrs. Brand,” Peter said as he left, and she looked up and smiled again, at his back, with the smile that came usually only for Derek and Hugh.

  The three boys trotted in line automatically, back past the air-raid shelter and the vegetable patch. This was the next best place to go, after the Ditch, if the weather was good, though always it had to be at Derek’s suggestion, because the back field was his place, his and Hugh’s, to be reached only from his garden. They had no idea who owned it. It was simply a field, and dimly they could remember a time when it had been one of several, all golden and scarlet in summer with poppies and wind rippled wheat. Now, the wheat had gone. The back field was a wilderness, bounded by wire fences, and beyond it was a great patchwork of small allotment gardens where people grew vegetables to help the War Effort. To the right was a line of poplar trees, back boundary of some big unknown house on the main highway. To the left was the continuation of the Ditch, the part that was cut off from the Everett Avenue side by the fence that ran across it. Only the farther side of this part of the Ditch was unfenced, where it opened onto a long field of cabbages that stretched between the allotment gardens and the top half of Everett Avenue all the way to the railroad track.

  Peter and Geoff clambered up and over the Brands’ garden fence, a foot or two higher than their heads, and dropped, whooping, down into the back field. Derek prowled along the inside looking for his latest discovery; he had found two loose planks only the day before and given them a little—only a little, only a very little—extra loosening to turn them into a workable exit. There they were. He peered at the edges for jutting splinters as he squeezed through.

  “Ow!” Too wary of the splinters to remember what was waiting on the other side, within two paces he found himself in a patch of stinging nettles, thick and venomous with the enthusiastic new growth of spring. Geoffrey and Peter joined him, and with cautious viciousness they trod the new stalks down to the ground.

  “Did you bust those planks?” Geoff said. “You’ll catch it when your dad sees. That’s a good way out.”

  “Look for a dock leaf,” Peter said, watching Derek rub his smarting ankles. “There’s always one next to the nettles. Here you are.” He crushed the broad mottled leaf into a ball, and Derek rubbed it gratefully on his skin. The tingling pain grew less, and the white rash sprang up like a flag.

  “Bet that hurts,” Geoffrey said.

  “Not much.”

  “Ooh, what a hero.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Cause I’ll shove you in the nettles if you don’t, that’s why.” Derek lunged at him, then relented. “Hey, look for a ball, a yellow one. I lost it last night.” He never kept a ball for long. The garden was too small. From the neighboring gardens a ball could—depending on the neighbor’s mood—be retrieved, but not from the back field. In summer it would lose itself in the long grass; in spring it wo
uld make unerringly for an impenetrable bramble patch. There were several bramble patches, one of them as big as a small house. Derek’s year always contained long deprived periods when he owned no ball, and in the summer he would practice bowling with small stunted windfall apples instead. But there were no apples yet on the four trees; only the round flower buds beginning to glimmer red through the new leaves. He thought regret fully of his newest ball; it had lasted since Christmas, until vanishing over the fence the day before in a high golden arc.

  “Listen!” Peter straightened up suddenly, with his head tilted to the sky.

  They heard a murmur of engines, growing somewhere out of the distance.

  “Get down! Over there!”

  They ran to the great central bramble patch and with conscious drama flung themselves down in the grass at its edge. The grass was wet. “We’ll catch it,” Derek thought. The rumbling in the sky grew to a roar, and before long, squinting up into the brightness, they saw the dark shapes of three planes, flying in a tight arrowhead fairly high up. They looked very clear and small in the empty sky.

  Peter scrambled to his feet. “That’s all right. They’re ours.”

  “Spitfires,” Derek said, after an extra moment’s careful peering.

  Geoffrey said, “I could have told you that from the engines.”

  “Why didn’t you, then?”

  “Wanted to see if you knew.”

  “Go on,” Peter said contemptuously.

  “I did know,” Geoff shouted, his face reddening.

  The three Spitfires disappeared past the tall poplar trees at the far end of the back field, and the rumble of their engines went away after them. There was left in the misty spring day no sound but the rustle of the breeze in the poplars, a sound like the breathing of waves against a beach. Shortly their murmur was invaded by the chuffing rattle of a freight train as it crawled into view, its two engines hissing and gasping and belching out black smoke: “Doubleheader,” said Derek casually. “Just taken on coal.” For a while it stopped and moved and stopped again in despairing jerks, the cars running into one another in a jingling, clanging rat-tat-tat at every stop, until the train picked up speed gradually and heaved its long cargo of canvas-muffled cars steadily, endlessly, out of sight.

  “Eighty-five,” they chanted. “Eighty-six, eighty-seven, GUARD’S VAN.”

  “Long one.”

  “Not so long as that one last week.”

  “Hundred and two. That was a record.”

  “There haven’t been any other hundreds,” Derek reported. His was the only garden with a view of the railway line. “A seventy-fiver yesterday. It might have been a bit longer, but I lost count for a bit because Hugh fell in the mud.”

  “My uncle drives trains like those,” said Peter.

  “You told us,” Geoffrey said.

  Derek said, “I thought we were looking for my ball?”

  “Your old ball. Well, which way did it go?”

  “Sort of sideways. That way.”

  “It must be in the big patch, then. We’d never find it in there.”

  They wandered around the bramble thicket, peering vainly in through the tangled branches and swatting at outflung new shoots that hooked prickles neatly into their jerseyed backs and sleeves.

  “Stupid thing,” Derek said. “It never even has any blackberries that you can reach. The birds get them all.”

  He picked a new leaf, flattening its tiny, tender spines with his thumb; rolled a tight, hard flower bud between his fingers. The thicket stretched far above their heads, almost to the top of the heavy wire fence that ran as a barrier between the back field and the extension of the Ditch, all the way to the allotments. That part of the Ditch was barred from them by fences on three sides. Though it was open to the cabbage field beyond, there was no way of reaching the cabbage field, either. You could have gotten there only by going up to the top of Everett Avenue and around through the soldiers’ camp (impossible) or by climbing over the back-garden fence of any of the houses farther up. And although their parents knew the people in those houses—everybody knew everybody else on Everett Avenue—they themselves had no friends there. Indeed, there were no children in any of those families to be friends with, only babies, and one small unthinkable girl their own age, with long golden hair, a high whining voice, and a small baby carriage over which she could sometimes be seen leaning in the distance, on the pavement outside her own house, talking to dolls.

  So there was no way over, and certainly none through, those back-garden fences.

  They were all resting aimlessly against the wire now, staring through. The holes of the mesh were large and diamond-shaped, and the wire was more than strong enough to take their weight if they had tried to climb it. But unhappily, the mesh, though large, was not quite large enough to admit a foot even without its shoe.

  “Now that,” said Derek, repeating a frequent comment, “would really be the place to build the camp.”

  “Just down there,” said Geoffrey, his nose through the wire. “Close to the brambles. This bit of the Ditch is much nicer than ours.”

  “Nobody ever throws any rubbish in it, either,” Derek said.

  “They aren’t supposed to throw it in the other end.”

  “They do, though. Sometimes. Those kids.”

  Geoffrey made a rude noise: a ritual, to be performed at any mention of the Children from the White Road. The ritual had fallen into disuse lately, but it would be back now for a few weeks, after the incident of the cat.

  Peter looked along the fence to the far corner of the field. “That’s the way your dad goes through to the allotments, isn’t it?”

  “There’s a stile. I’ll show you,” Derek led the way to the rough wooden plank, set between two crooked posts, that was the only way from the back field to the great patchwork stretch of allotment gardens beyond. His father worked one of the plots at weekends, growing potatoes and beetroot and carrots and long-legged brussels sprouts. Derek had watched him digging there the day before. “Dad brings his spade over the back fence and goes this way, so does Mr. Wishart next door, and Mrs. Hansen’s lodger. Everyone else has to go around, though, and come in from the main highway.”

  “My dad does that,” Peter said.

  “I didn’t know he had an allotment.”

  “It’s right down the other end. He doesn’t go there much. He just grows spuds. And we get groundsel from the paths sometimes for the chickens.” Peter hoisted himself up on the stile and gazed around.

  Derek cleared his throat apologetically. “I’m not supposed to go on the allotments unless I’m helping Dad. He made me promise. He says there’s a rule, or something.”

  “There is. It’s a government rule.” Peter was still standing up there, looking about him, his bare knees pressed against the top wooden bar of the stile; then he carefully climbed over and dropped down on the other side. “But if we just stay on the edge here, we aren’t on anyone’s allotment; it’s just waste ground. And nobody can see; there’s only a few people digging, and they’re right over at the other side. Come on. I just want to look at the fence.”

  Reluctantly, Derek jumped down after him, and Geoffrey followed. Peter moved up a little way from the stile, past the tall post that ended the big wire-mesh fence, until he was facing the cabbage field and the top end of the Ditch. The barrier that kept him from them was the same fence that separated the back field and the allotments, but it was more fearsome here. Though it was made only of four long single wires, instead of mesh, all the way up to the distant railway line, the wire was barbed wire.

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t get through here,” Peter said.

  “But it’s barbed wire. You’d get scratched to bits.”

  “And then you’d get lockjaw,” Geoffrey said with relish. “That’s what happens when you get rust in a scratch. Your jaw goes all stiff, and you can’t open your mouth, and you can’t eat or drink, so you just starve to death.”

  Peter ignored him.
“Look, Derry,” he said. “If I push down the bottom bit of wire, like this, and hold up the top three, then you can squeeze in between them and get through. I won’t let it stick in you, honest. Go on, try.”

  “He’s scared,” Geoffrey said.

  “I am not,” said Derek, who was. He looked nervously over his shoulder at the allotments, but saw no change in the few figures bent devotedly over spade or fork; he looked up at the cabbage field and in front of him at the length of the Ditch, but could see nobody there. So he squeezed himself headfirst through the gap that Peter was holding open, caught only the edge of one shoe on the barbed wire, and tumbled down into the long grass on the other side. Then he held the wire in turn, and Peter came after him.

  “You coming, Geoff?”

  “I’ll keep watch,” Geoffrey said.

  Peter was already in the Ditch, trampling his way through nettles and grass. He clambered down to its lowest point, facing a steep embankment over which a few brambles reached feeble arms in escape from the back field thicket held back by the tall mesh fence. He ducked down, so that they could see only a glimpse of his fair head among the leaves and the mounds of clay, and then bounced up again, grinning with delight.

  “Hey, this is smashing. Come and see. We’ve got to build the camp here.”

  As Derek slithered down, half the world disappeared. The weed-feathered sides of the Ditch cut him off from Geoffrey, the cabbages, the surrounding fences and houses; and there was left only the tall side fence of the back field, with that gigantic sinister blackberry bush that seemed from here to be trying to push it down. There was a glimpse of the similar fence that crossed the Ditch between the Robinsons’ and the Twyfords’ gardens, cutting off their own usual road-linked world; and nothing else but the sky. He stared happily about him at the orange-red earth and the lush grass and the rank clumps of weed.