Free The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall Page A

my granda, but everybody likes him."
    "Well it's... you know... sailors." Audrey blushed; Chas blushed.
    "The barrage balloons are high tonight. Must be going to be a raid."
    "Go on, they only send them up that high to test their cables."
    They both looked up at the barrage balloons. There were five round the mouth of the river, each known to the locals by an affectionate nickname. There was the South Shields Sausage, and the Willington Windbag. The nearest one was called the Fish Quay Buster. Their raising and lowering, by RAF men sweating at winches, was a regular treat for crowds of children; nearly as good as going to the cinema. For the adults, they were a kind of air-raid barometer, except that no one really knew what their raising and lowering meant.
    At this time of night, the last of the sunlight caught them, long after the rest of the earth was dark. When they were very high, they glowed so small and bright it was impossible to tell them from the first stars. But they were not that high tonight. You could see their silver sides and fat fins; they looked like flabby silver elephants, nosing this way and that in the light breeze.
    And then, and then... Chas gasped. Black on the blue dusk from the east it came: black, twin-engined, propellers idling like fans, soundlessly gliding slow and low. A German aircraft.
    A moan broke from Chas's lips; not of fear, but frustration.
    "The gun!" But it was a mile away, in Bunty's Yard.
    The plane drew nearer, lower. A faint sighing came from it, a whistling of strings and wires, like a kite. It was a fighter, with four cannon in the nose. The fighter wobbled, the nose veered and the tiny black cannon-mouths pointed straight at Chas. A face without goggles looked down at him from the cockpit, from rooftop height and only a football pitch away.
    "Get down!" screamed Audrey.
    "What's happening?" said Nicky, and dropped a whole tray of lemonade on the remains of the rockery.
    But Chas stood, glaring at the pilot of the fighter. He was a Britisher! He didn't jump into holes like a rabbit for no German, even if he had four cannon. The German would laugh if he did, feel powerful.
    "Nazi pig." He stuck up two fingers in the air, and not Churchill's way either.
    The pilot laughed. The plane filled the sky. And then there was an earsplitting roar, and the air was full of black oily smoke.
    I'm dead, thought Chas. I'm dead and I didn't feel a thing. Then he started coughing and his eyes started streaming.
    "I'm in Hell," said Chas, and wasn't very surprised. But it seemed Audrey and Nicky were in Hell too, for there they were lying at his feet, coughing as well. And the smoke was thinning and there was the fence and...
    The plane was nowhere to be seen.
    "You fool," said Audrey. "He started up his engines. There he is."
    The black shape was streaking up river. The odd gun was firing now from the ships. Black roses blossomed round the plane, above, behind, never on target.
    "Go on, get him," screamed Chas. But the pilot was in a playful mood. He turned and looped, and spun his wings, like a boy showing off by riding a bicycle with no hands. By that time every gun had joined in. Tracers from the pompoms on the Bank Top grew like red-hot stitches on the blue serge of the sky. But they were so slow, always too slow to catch the German. And then he was climbing, headed straight for the South Shields barrage balloon. The sound of his cannon fire came, thin as a zipper, and a yellow rose grew among the black. The balloon was burning, falling, silver turning black, dropping off, like the paper on a French cigarette.
    "Get that bloody Nazi swine," yelled Chas, jumping up and down. "Are you blind? Get your eyes chaarked!" Men shouted that to the ref at football matches.
    The fighter performed a beautiful half-loop, rolled over at the top of it, and made for the Willington Windbag, which was being winched down as quickly as its frantic crew could turn the handles. The ack-ack gunners intensified their