War Stories Read online

  The booming of the battering ram shook all logic out of his head. Once they broke in, how long could he last before they killed him? And even if he could kill every last one of them, how many more years would he have to suffer for it in purgatory before the sin was flayed from his soul?

  He began to see demons clambering down the bell-ropes hand over hand, leering, jeering and cackling: Got you! Tricked you! Fooled you! Caught you! Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not kill! We’ll take you where we took your brother! Thou shalt not escape us now! Hugh stood stock still, muscles so rigid, breath so pent, that he felt he was turning to stone like the effigies who lay along their tombs staring up into the vaulted roof. At last, with a splintering of wood, the door lurched open …

  After a moment, a flock of farm boys, reddlemen, shepherds, quarrymen, housewives, weavers, hedgers and children nosed their way nervously into the church. Not Moors, then not savage, murderous heathens, thirsty for blood. Locals. The coloured light of the chapel washed over their faces and softened their scowls.

  ‘’Ems gone at last, then, them fat leeches?’ called a tinsmith to the knight standing halfway up the aisle.

  ‘Good riddance,’ said a widow, devoutly crossing herself and curtseying to the altar. ‘Helping themselves to anything they fancied. Breaking their vows. Dipping their hands in our pockets. Fleecing us these twenty years! Got no more conscience than dead ferrets, them beggars.’

  They gathered glumly around the empty coffer until someone dragged it away as loot. The widow took the altar cloth, folding it four times and placing it on her head. There was little else left; the deserting monks had taken all they could carry.

  Hugh watched them as he might people in a dream. He saw a miller step on the other half of the pomegranate and bend to study the mess, flummoxed by the oddness of what he had trodden in.

  ‘Leeches, bleeding us white they were,’ remarked a weaver, eyeing the knight’s sword nervously as it twitched in his grasp. ‘Had a bad harvest last year, but did they care ’bout our sorrows? Did they ask less? Did they tighten their belts? Not them! The religious life, they called it. We called it living off our backs. What’s a monk anyway, but a man with a shaved head? Look at me.’ And he showed the crown of his head where baldness had given him the look of a monk without the greedy, grasping nature of one. ‘Do that give me the right to help myself to a slice of my neighbour’s dinner?’

  The widow came and peered at Hugh, her eyes straying over his features, and she absently licked a fingerful of apron and began to clean his face for him. ‘Blessings on the Virgin Mary for bringing you safe home to your mother – whoever you are. I lost my men at Damascus. If you knows where in God’s earth that is, you knows more than I do. These monks – they thinks up wars to take our husbands and sons from us, but they stays home themselves, living off the widows’ sweat and toil!’

  ‘No! Surely it was God above who …’ began Hugh but had to stop; the woman was busy folding back his lips to polish his teeth.

  ‘Do not you believe it, lad! War’s always the idea of men! God’s just the excuse. Afterwards, men keeps the loot. All God gets is the blame.’

  ‘Might be different, other places,’ said the reddleman, pursuing his own train of thought. ‘Monks might be saints, some of ’em, for all I know. But here … We’ve had all of them we can stomach. Been like our own private war ’twixt them and us these two months past,’ he explained to the knight. ‘A nest of wasps is less of a curse than a nest of godless monks.’

  A ploughboy armed with a mattock took a swing at the chain securing the font to the wall. He dislodged a cloud of plaster, and cracks spread out from the hole, crazing the ex-votos of a dozen Crusaders.

  Then a stir of excitement fetched everyone to the side door of the chapel to see a thing of interest. The boy with the mattock prised open the casket and laid bare the heart of St Ivo. It had never meant as much to the abbot as saving his hide.

  And to do that, he had helped himself to Hugh’s mare and made good his escape.

  Michelle Magorian

  When I heard that this collection of stories would be published on the sixtieth anniversary of VE day (Victory in Europe), I thought of my parents. They were unable to be there for the celebrations in 1945. My mother was nursing soldiers in a hospital in India and my father, who was in the navy, was on his way to Bombay to marry her. A few months later he was in one of many empty trucks heading for a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp to pick up survivors.

  And I thought of the others who were absent, the ones who hadn’t survived. Whenever I watched films about VE day, they were always about the crowds at Trafalgar Square and the street parties – but what about the ones who didn’t go to Trafalgar Square and who had lost the streets they lived in?

  I decided to return to the town where two of my theatre books are set and write about the theatre community there. I then discovered that on the day leading up to VE day, hundreds of people had hung around their wirelesses, longing to hear the official announcement that the next day would indeed be a public holiday. Hour after hour, tired and impatient, they waited and waited. They were waiting for peace.

  And that’s where my story begins.

  WAITING FOR PEACE

  Miss Pleasance had just finished reading a chapter of Shadow the Sheepdog when the school bell rang.

  ‘Hands on laps, please,’ she said and she turned to clean the blackboard.

  Guy glanced at his classmates. They were fidgeting and mouthing to one another. A boy in the front row, who always came top in the mental arithmetic tests, was being nudged by two boys who sat in the desks behind him.

  He raised his arm. ‘Please Miss Pleasance.’

  ‘Yes, John,’ she said over her shoulder.

  ‘It’s about tomorrow, Miss Pleasance.’

  ‘I’m sorry, John, but if there was any news …’

  She was interrupted by a knock at the door.

  The school secretary, an elderly woman with a face like a mouse, peered into the classroom. There was a murmur of excitement. Guy crossed his fingers.

  ‘Yes, Miss Jones?

  ‘I’m afraid there’s been no announcement as yet, Miss Pleasance,’ she said demurely.

  ‘Blast!’ Guy whispered.

  He had been praying he would be able to stay up late to watch the opening of the week’s new play at the theatre. Monday was the day of the week when he hardly saw his mother at all, because on Monday afternoons she was always busy with a dress rehearsal right up to curtain up. It meant she couldn’t be there to meet him after school with his younger brother. Instead, Roger would be waiting for him on his own and they would have to go straight back to their lodgings and put up with the horrible Valerie, who would scowl and shout at him and make him feel as if she wished he would disappear forever.

  Guy’s eight-year-old brother was standing by a group of mothers in the playground, his gingery blond hair sticking up at all angles. One eye beamed out at Guy through the right lens of his spectacles. A wrinkled, grubby plaster on his left lens hid the other eye. His smudged face appeared to have collected even more freckles since Guy had last seen him. Roger spotted Guy, gave a gap-toothed grin and waved vigorously. As Guy approached him he said, ‘Are we having a holiday tomorrow?’

  ‘Winston Churchill hasn’t made up his mind yet,’ said Guy wearily.

  ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t see him!’

  ‘You’re not to shout at me.’

  Guy held his breath. Roger didn’t like it when people raised their voices. If they did, he would run away and hide, which caused quite a few problems when they went to yet another new school and the teachers didn’t know him.

  Guy pressed his lips together and counted to ten. He edged towards the women so that he could eavesdrop.

  ‘I was sure there’d be an announcement by three o’clock,’ one woman was saying.

  ‘Come on, Roger,’ said Guy and he took hold of his hand and gripped it firmly so tha
t he couldn’t run off.

  At the end of the road they turned a corner into a busy high street. They passed the lengthy queues of women waiting patiently outside grocery shops and butchers’. Guy spotted a crowd hovering round the open window of a cafe where there was a wireless.

  ‘It’ll be on the nine o’clock news,’ he heard someone say.

  ‘Nah. He won’t say anythin’ till tomorrer, you’ll see,’ said another woman behind her.

  ‘They’ve already been told in France,’ said another.

  ‘They never ’ave! Where d’you hear that?’ joined in an enormous woman whose battered felt hat was pulled down so firmly it looked as if it was glued on.

  A pale young woman was jigging a baby in an old pram. ‘I can’t stand this waiting,’ she complained.

  ‘Neither can I,’ muttered Guy.

  They strode on past rubble and blown-away walls – the remains of a shoe shop and a hardware store – and headed for a large stone archway with a clock in it.

  An excited group of women was hurrying out of the draper’s, ribbons in red, white and blue dangling from their hands. Guy stepped quickly out of their way, hovered at the edge of the pavement and, when a tram had passed by, he dragged Roger briskly across the road.

  He spotted a placard on the steps of the Palace Theatre.

  7 MAY – OPENING NIGHT

  BEDTIME STORY

  BY WILLIAM ELLIS.

  A SIDE-SPLITTING COMEDY BY THE AUTHOR OF

  A LITTLE BIT OF FLUFF

  ‘Are we going to the station?’ asked Roger.

  Roger ate and slept steam trains. His idea of heaven was to sit on a platform and watch endless trains arriving and departing.

  ‘Stage door,’ said Guy abruptly.

  ‘But Mummy’s busy. It’s Monday.’

  ‘I know, but we can stay with Walter for a bit.’

  When they stepped through the stage door they found that Walter’s wife was sitting in the cubbyhole with him. They looked like twins, with their thick shocks of white hair and their blue eyes. Balanced on a tiny table, in front of a wall of pigeonholes with keys dangling below, was a wireless. A glass dome-shaped accumulator stood next to it.

  ‘We’ve just had it recharged,’ she said, tapping it with satisfaction.

  ‘So the wireless won’t run out of sound,’ Roger said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Walter. ‘We don’t want it cutting out on us tonight, do we?’

  ‘Any news?’ asked Guy.

  ‘Nothing at all. Fancy a cuppa?’

  ‘Rather!’

  Guy felt his shoulders drop. Every time his mother worked in a new theatre he and Roger would have to go to a new school. The other children had their own friends and usually talked with a local accent. They teased them and called them ‘toffs’ because they came from London, but once Guy stepped into a theatre he felt welcome and at home.

  ‘Of course the 4468 Mallard is faster,’ said Roger thoughtfully.

  ‘I take it we’re talking about trains,’ commented Walter, who was used to Roger’s one-track conversations.

  ‘Yes. It holds the speed record but I’d still rather go on the Flying Scotsman than a 4468 Mallard. All the way up to Scotland, I’d like to go. In a sleeping compartment.’

  ‘Roger, can we stop talking about trains for one moment,’ said Guy, exasperated.

  ‘Did you know,’ said Roger, turning to Walter’s wife, ‘that it’s got a water pick-up tap.’

  Guy groaned.

  ‘It picks up water when the train is moving and scoops it up into the tank inside the tender without stopping.’

  ‘Well, I never,’ she said.

  ‘The tender carries coal and water, you see.’

  ‘Does it now?’

  Guy chatted to Walter while Roger drew steam trains on a scrap of paper Walter’s wife had given him. Four o’clock and five o’clock dragged by and still there was no news.

  ‘Looks like it’s school for you boys tomorrow,’ said Walter.

  Downcast, they left the theatre and headed for their lodgings. They were staying in a small terraced house in a street five minutes’ walk from the theatre. As they reached the street Guy felt his spirits fall even lower.

  ‘Look!’ cried Roger.

  Guy raised his head. There were Union Jacks draped across the windows and ribbons and coloured flags hanging outside the houses. But they failed to touch him. All he could think of was sixteen-year-old Valerie. She would be home by now.

  As soon as they entered the house he quickly bustled Roger upstairs to the room they shared with their mother. His brother liked to listen to Children’s Hour with Uncle Mac and they were already late for it. They were only allowed to listen to Children’s Hour and Dick Barton – Special Agent! At seven o’clock the wireless had to be turned off so that they would have enough power left for the next day and their mother wouldn’t have to traipse all the way to the other side of town to get the accumulator recharged again.

  At six o’clock they went downstairs to wash their hands in the scullery. Valerie was standing at the sink washing her hands too, towering above them in her grammar-school uniform, her dark hair scraped so fiercely into plaits that her skin was taut. She looked more miserable than ever.

  They washed their hands in silence, except for Roger.

  ‘Of course, the Flying Scotsman is my favourite,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘Guy, is the Flying Scotsman your favourite?’

  Guy sighed. ‘I don’t really think about it,’ he said.

  ‘I do,’ said Roger. ‘I love the Flying Scotsman.’

  Supper was in the dining room. A wireless stood on a small cabinet on the side. Mrs Hicks, a tiny, quick-moving, elderly woman whose hands were rarely empty, bustled in and out with plates of food.

  Supper was vegetable pie, after which Valerie swiftly cleared the table and carried the dishes to the scullery to wash and dry them. This was Guy and Roger’s signal to go upstairs to their room. Valerie needed the dining table for doing her homework and she snapped at Guy if he disturbed her, which he did by just breathing. Sometimes she worked with the wireless on. One night when Guy came down to listen to it after Roger had fallen asleep she snapped, ‘I can’t concentrate while you’re in the room. Go away!’

  Guy made Roger clean his teeth and then read him a story in bed. While his brother drew trains in his sketch pad, Guy leaned out of the window and watched the neighbours hang out more flags. The children were playing in the street, calling out to each other, chatting easily. He guessed they had known each other for years, living in and out of each other’s houses. He and his brother were still strangers. They had been in the area for less than a month. Suddenly the street was deserted and Guy realized it must be a quarter to seven. Time for Dick Barton.

  After the episode had finished, he turned off the wireless and tried to read a book but he felt too restless to concentrate. He could hear piano music coming from the landlady’s wireless. Very slowly, he crept down the stairs. The music stopped abruptly. He guessed that Valerie must have switched it off. He was about to return to his room when he heard a man reading out information. He froze.

  ‘It is understood that, in accordance with arrangements between the three great powers,’ stated the voice, ‘an official announcement will be broadcast by the prime minister at three o’clock tomorrow, Tuesday afternoon, the eighth of May,’

  ‘Not till three o’clock!’ groaned Guy.

  ‘In view of this fact, tomorrow, Tuesday, will be treated as Victory in Europe day—’

  ‘Hurray!’ he whispered and he flung his arms in the air.

  ‘—and will be regarded as a holiday. The day following, Wednesday, the ninth of May, will also be a holiday.’

  ‘Two days!’ This was more than he had hoped for.

  ‘His Majesty the King will broadcast to the people of the British Empire and Commonwealth tomorrow, Tuesday, at 9 p.m.’

  Guy couldn’t wait any longer. It was now or never. He flung himself d
ownstairs and ran into the dining room.

  Valerie was sitting motionless, gazing into the distance, unsmiling.

  I expect she’s annoyed the announcement has interrupted her homework, the big snooty swot, Guy thought.

  Mrs Hicks was sitting at the table, a pile of stockings on her lap and a darning needle in her hand. ‘Well, that was a bit of a damp squib,’ she remarked, staring at the wireless.

  ‘Mrs Hicks,’ Guy blurted out, his fingers crossed behind his back, ‘can I go to the theatre? Mummy said I could if there was no school tomorrow.’

  It was only half a lie, Guy thought. He was sure she would have let him go to the theatre had she known there was to be a holiday the next day.

  Walter and his wife peered at Guy from their cubbyhole. Guy rested his hands on his knees, fighting for breath. From the moment he had sprinted out of the landlady’s house he had run without stopping.

  ‘Did you hear it?’ Guy gasped. He noticed that their wireless was switched off.

  ‘Hear what?’ said Walter.

  ‘It’s about VE day, ent it?’ said his wife excitedly.

  Guy nodded. ‘Holiday tomorrow. And Wednesday,’ he said, breathlessly. ‘Winston Churchill’s going to talk at three o’clock. King in the evening.’

  ‘It’ll be on the nine o’clock news,’ said Walter. ‘We’ll switch the wireless on then.’

  ‘This calls for a celebration!’ cried his wife. ‘I’ll open the pears.’ And she dived under the counter and produced an old tin with a scuffed wrapper on it.

  ‘You stay ’ere,’ said Walter to Guy as he stepped out of the cubbyhole. ‘I’ll wait upstairs and tell the producer in the interval.’