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AS THE SMOKE BEGAN to clear, the same shot-like sound as I’d heard the night before rang out from one of the cottages beside the green.
Tommy, choking as much as the rest of us, shouted through the fog to Mrs Fortescue. “You told me there wasn’t going to be no bomb, Mrs Forty-two! You might have let me in on it after all I did for you.”
Mrs Fortescue waved her hands in front of her face, attempting to dispel the dark grey tendrils of smoke.
“Thomas, how dare you?”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Then who was it?”
Nobody took any notice of their quarrel; we were too transfixed by the vision emerging from the fog. For there, wreathed in misty coils, stood Ariel, naked as a newborn lamb, holding a large wooden placard that covered her front from chin to knee. Though her modesty was concealed from the front by the placard, we knitters were left in no doubt that she was as unclothed as the tree in its natural state.
Surely Ariel couldn’t have been the bomber?
Clive kept on snapping.
Tommy was beaming from ear to ear. This would boost his credibility amongst his mates at school.
I broke ranks and ran towards Ariel, pulling off my coat and flinging it around her shoulders to cover up her bare back.
“Ariel, what on earth are you doing? Let me take the placard while you button yourself up.”
The shock of the explosion suddenly caught up with her.
“I thought I was going to die,” she breathed, before sliding to the ground in a faint.
