AFTERMATH

For what seemed like a long time, I sat in the soil and stared at the burning plane, trying to clear my head. And as some sense came back to me, I looked down and saw how dirty I was. There were streaks of muck all down my shirt, and that was almost worse than being nearly blown up; it had been clean on this morning and Mam would be fuming, because I wasn’t supposed to get dirty. Soap powder was rationed and we had to wear things for as long as we could before washing them. And, she always told me, the more we washed our clothes, the quicker they would wear out.

‘Hell’s bells, there you are!’ The voice sounded as if it was coming from a long way off. ‘I was so . . . Oh, Lord, are you all right? Peter? Peter? Say something!’

I turned to look up at the hill, seeing Mam coming down towards me. She was still wearing her apron and the old slippers she wore in the house. The look on her face was a mixture of terror and relief.

She rushed down, falling to her knees and putting her hands on my cheeks. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said as she turned my face this way and that. ‘Are you hurt? Did you get hurt, Peter?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, still dazed. ‘Sorry, Mam. I’m dirty.’

‘What?’

‘Dirty.’

‘Never mind about that. Are you hurt?’ She didn’t even look at the burning plane.

‘No.’

‘You sure?’ She continued to inspect me, checking my head and neck. ‘I was so worried.’ Her breath was coming in great gasps between each word and her eyes were almost as wide as the German gunner’s had been. ‘Where were you?’ Her hands were shaking as she lifted my arms, ran her fingers over my legs. ‘Your knees,’ she said. ‘You’re bleedin’.’

‘Just grazes.’

‘Can you stand up?’

‘I’m fine.’

She sat back and stared at me. ‘I was scared witless.’ Then she leant forward again and put her arms around me, pulling me right against her chest and squeezing me tight. ‘I thought something had happened to you. When I saw you sittin’ there, I . . .’

‘I’m all right, Mam.’ I hugged her back. ‘I’m all right.’

‘Where were you?’

‘In the woods.’

‘The woods? I thought I told you not to go that far this late in the day. How many times have I told you to stay close to home? Imagine if somethin’ happened to you. What would I do if . . .’ And then she did something that took me by surprise. Her hand darted out and she slapped my left cheek. ‘Don’t ever do that again,’ she said. ‘And look at the state of you.’

‘I’m sorry, Mam.’ I fought back the tears. It hadn’t hurt, but I knew I’d done something terrible. ‘I’m sorry.’

Mam nodded. ‘I know.’ She put her arms round me again. ‘I’m sorry ’n’ all. Come on, let’s get you home.’

But before we could stand, we heard voices, and when we looked back, there were children reaching the crest of the hill behind us.

Our house wasn’t in the main part of the village, it was just on the other side of the hill, so it hadn’t taken Mam long to get here. She probably started running just after she heard the sirens and realised she couldn’t find me. But now everyone else was coming. The all-clear would have been sounded and everyone would have come out from their shelters and seen the smoke over the field. Now the whole village was rushing to see it.

Standing silhouetted at the top of the hill, they stopped and watched the flames, the black smoke, afraid to come closer. Then the adults came, passing the children, their pace slowing as they descended the hill. There were men carrying sticks and shovels and pitchforks. There were men from the Home Guard, too. They weren’t in uniform, but they’d brought their Ross rifles and were holding them to their shoulders, training their sights on the burning aircraft.

And then there were the soldiers who had taken over Bennett Hall and the farm close to the beach. A whole truckload of them was arriving now, following a jeep that drove out into the field and skidded to a halt close by.

A soldier jumped out from the vehicle shouting, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ He was a short, stocky man with a thin nose and a mouth that opened more on one side than the other when he shouted. The three stripes on his left arm told me he was a sergeant.

‘Get them away from here,’ he yelled, and two other soldiers leapt from the back of the jeep and hurried past the sergeant towards us.

One of them dragged me to my feet while the other grabbed Mam and, as the sergeant continued to bark orders, the soldiers took us back to where the crowd had gathered, and the people parted as they took us through.

‘Need a medic over here,’ the soldier said, leading me up the hill. His grip was firm on my wrist.

When we reached the top, he told me to sit down, and within a few seconds Mam was crouching beside me. A few of the children circled around us to see what was going on, but it didn’t take them long to realise that watching the burning plane was more exciting.

Doctor Jacobs came over, wearing a jacket with patched elbows, taking a white medical bag from over his shoulder. ‘I’ll see to him,’ he said. ‘I know Peter.’

The soldier looked him up and down.

‘I’m Doctor Jacobs,’ the older man said, holding up his medical bag, displaying the red cross on it. ‘I picked this up on the way over, just in case . . .’ Then he seemed to remember he wasn’t in uniform and that the soldier wouldn’t know who he was, so he stood to attention and saluted. ‘Private Jacobs,’ he said. ‘Home Guard.’

The soldier considered him for a moment longer, looking back at the wreck as if he couldn’t make his mind up what to do. The real soldiers didn’t take the Home Guard very seriously because some of them were quite old and, at first, they didn’t have any supplies so they had to pretend they had rifles when they practised on the green. People used to watch them and laugh, but the soldier who had pulled me up the hill probably just wanted to get back to where the excitement was, so he sighed and waved a hand at Doctor Jacobs. ‘All right then. Get on with it.’ And, with that, he went back down the hill.

Doctor Jacobs crouched beside me and put his bag on the ground. ‘You feeling all right, Peter?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘Well, you’ve got a few cuts and scrapes. Let’s clean those up, shall we?’ He unfastened the bag and rummaged through the bandages and dressings before pulling out a bottle of disinfectant and some cotton wool.

‘So how did you do this?’ he asked, dabbing Dettol onto my knee, wiping away the blood. ‘In too much of a hurry to see the crash?’

‘He was right there,’ Mam said. ‘Right there when it happened.’

Doctor Jacobs looked up from what he was doing. ‘You saw it happen?’

I nodded.

‘Must have been quite something,’ he said.

‘Quite somethin’?’ Mam said. ‘He could’ve been killed. Stupid lad. I’ve told him so many times not to—’

‘Well, he seems fine to me,’ he said. ‘Just scraped knees, that’s all.’

I looked at my knee, seeing how small the graze was now that Doctor Jacobs had cleaned away the blood. It looked like nothing at all.

‘Doesn’t even need a bandage,’ he said.

‘Did I hear that right?’ a voice said behind me. ‘You saw the plane crash?’ I recognised the voice straight away, because Mr Bennett was the only person I knew who didn’t have an accent like mine. His was much posher.

Mam got to her feet beside me. ‘Mr Bennett,’ she said, smoothing down her apron. ‘I didn’t see you there.’

‘Mrs Dixon.’ He nodded once at Mam then looked down at me. ‘Peter. Glad to see you’re not too badly hurt,’ he said. ‘Always good to have a small wound so people know you were there, though, eh?’

Maybe he said that because he had a big scar of his own. It was on the right side of his face and ran from just beside his eye to about the middle of his cheek. I heard he got it at Dunkirk, but no one seemed to know what really happened.

‘I got this climbin’ under a fence,’ I said. ‘Not from any crash.’

‘Well, you don’t need to tell people that, do you?’ He looked out at the plane. ‘Bloody Germans ruining all my potatoes. Don’t they have anything better to do?’

‘Well, I don’t s’pose it was the tatties they were after,’ Mam said.

‘Maybe it was,’ I answered.

I knew that the bombers came from their base in Norway to attack the shipyards in Newcastle where aircraft carriers and submarines were being built. But sometimes they bombed farms, using the Farne Islands or Dunstanburgh Castle as landmarks. One night we saw them bombing further down the coast, and it looked as if the whole place was on fire. Incendiaries had showered one of the villages, burning churches and farm buildings and homes.

Mr Bennett nodded and pursed his lips. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe they are after the crops.’

He was about Dad’s age, but he wasn’t anything like Dad. My dad worked hard for everything. Before he went away to win the war, he worked all day and all night on the estate. Gamekeeping, Dad said, was a full-time job. Mr Bennett, though, he owned the estate. In fact, he owned most of the land around the village. It used to be his dad’s, but he died of pneumonia just before the war and Mr Bennett got everything. The fields were his. The ground we were standing on was his. The woods where I’d been playing were his. Even the house we lived in was his.

Dad said it must be nice to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, whatever Mr Bennett’s spoon was made of, it didn’t keep him in his own house. It seemed like Mr Bennett was always coming to ours, bringing us things, being nice to Mam. It would have probably been all right, except that some of the other boys had noticed and started to rib me about it.

‘Or maybe they were looking for RAF Acklington,’ said Mr Bennett.

‘Do you really think so?’ Mam asked.

‘It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve tried it,’ Doctor Jacobs agreed.

Mr Bennett was watching Mam with a serious expression. ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ he said to her. ‘They probably just lost their way. We’re quite safe here.’ I think he was just trying to make Mam feel better, though. I didn’t think any of us was safe, wherever we were. It seemed like the Germans didn’t care who they killed. Sometimes the planes just emptied their bays for the return flight home, dropping unused bombs right on top of whatever lay under the flight path. It made the planes use less fuel. That’s what our lives were worth to them: a few gallons of fuel.

‘I reckon they got shot,’ I said, standing up. ‘That’s why it was on its own. It was comin’ from Bamburgh way, and they’ve got anti-aircraft guns up there. I heard the engines just before it crashed, I did. Sounded like it got shot and needed somewhere to land.’

‘Good thinking, Peter.’ Mr Bennett pointed a finger at me. ‘You might just be right.’

‘Well, whatever the reason,’ Mam said, ‘it’s time to go home. Come on, pet, we need to get you cleaned up.’

I looked over at the spot where the other boys and girls had gathered to watch the burning wreck. The sergeant had organised soldiers to stand in front of them, keeping them from going any closer, and was telling them to stay back, but I could see he didn’t want to be there. Like everyone else, he wanted to be a part of it. He was facing the children but kept looking over his shoulder to see what was happening.

There were four groups on the hill now. The children, the adults from the village, the soldiers, and the men from the Home Guard. The soldiers were mostly at the bottom of the hill, taking orders, deciding how they were going to deal with the crash site. The Home Guardsmen were watching closely, trying to get involved, and Doctor Jacobs excused himself from us as soon as he could, hurrying down to be in the thick of it. Everyone wanted to be there, to be part of the action – me included. Everyone, that is, apart from Mam.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Home.’

‘Aww, Mam . . .’ I hesitated and looked down at the wreckage of the plane lying in the middle of the field. Here, on the hill, the ground was too awkward for the tractor, so the grass was kept for the small flock of sheep that now roamed it. I glanced to my left, where the hill dropped down to another field of vegetables planted in regimented lines like leafy soldiers. Beyond that, on the other side of a narrow track, was Hawthorn Lodge where I lived with Mam. Our house was a grey stone building and Mam always kept the window boxes bonny with orange nasturtiums, but the rest of the garden was turned over to growing vegetables. The Germans kept blowing up our supply ships, so Mam said it was our duty to dig for victory even if we were already surrounded by potatoes and sheep.

In the far corner of the garden there was a small henhouse encircled by chicken wire. Close by was the netty – the outside toilet – and, next to that, our Anderson shelter, all covered with dirt so we could grow peas over the top of it. The shelter doubled up as a garden shed, and we kept all our tools in there – tidied at the back, of course, otherwise Mr Chapman, the ARP warden, would have something to say about it. I don’t know why it was called an Anderson shelter, but when they were delivered to the village, Mrs Armstrong said they could call them whatever they liked – if she was going to meet her maker then she wanted to do it from the comfort of her own bed, not in a hacky tube at the bottom of her garden. It was only when a rumour went around that a low-flying German plane had machine-gunned a man on Bracken Hill that people started to run for the shelters when the warning came.

‘Can’t we stay a bit longer?’ I asked, looking back at the burning wreck.

‘No.’

‘Aww, but—’

‘No buts, Peter. Home.’

Mr Bennett came a little closer to Mam. ‘Why don’t you let him stay?’ he said, gesturing at the other boys. ‘All his friends are here. You don’t want him to be the only one.’

Mam narrowed her eyes.

‘Look,’ Mr Bennett carried on. ‘Everything’s safe now. The soldiers are here, the raid’s over. Let him go and sit with his friends.’

‘I don’t think—’

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you home, and Peter can stay here a while longer. Then I’ll come back and chase him home myself—’

‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘Why not give him a few minutes?’

Mam’s face relaxed.

‘Please?’ I begged.

‘What do you say?’ Mr Bennett asked.

And then Mam caved in. Not to me, but to Mr Bennett. ‘A few minutes,’ she said.

Mr Bennett winked at me. ‘Go on, then, quick. Before she changes her mind.’