Free Our Yanks by Margaret Mayhew Page B

meant ground crew had a long way to go, to and fro. And off base, if you weren’t taking the liberty truck into one of the towns and you hadn’t got a bike and couldn’t hitch a lift, you walked. He’d done some work on it – fixed the loose chain and the bent mudguard and the dud brakes and now it was pretty good. He’d taken a while getting used to the British lever brakes on the handlebars instead of coaster brakes like back home, and when he’d first hit them he’d gone clean over the handlebars. And he had to keep remembering to stay on the wrong side out on the roads. He’d got lost a couple of times riding around the countryside because the lanes twisted and turned so much he never knew where the hell he was heading, and the signposts had nearly all been taken away to fool the Germans if they invaded. He’d found out that if there
was
a signpost it had probably been turned round the wrong way, or borrowed from somewhere else. He reckoned the British needn’t have bothered – the Jerries would get lost anyway.
    He reached the foot of the hill and swung round to the left under the brick railroad arch and then round to the right again once he was through. Another half-mile and he rode into the village. He liked King’s Thorpe. Coming from a small place himself, he felt more at home there than in one of the big towns and he’d never seen such quaint old houses; there was nothing near as old back home. Only trouble was, King’s Thorpe didn’t seem to like Americans. He’d found that out the first day he’d gone down with some other guys from the base and spent an evening in the Black Bull. He wasn’t much of a drinking man, but he’d heard that the British pubs were friendly places. Well, the locals had been real unfriendly. They’d turned round and stared like they didn’t want them there at all. Then things had got a whole lot worse when some of the guys had started shooting their mouths off and passing remarks about the beer. Hal had told the barmaid she ought to put it back in the horse, and Don had kept grumbling about how Americans were always charged more. ‘The only thing cheap over here’s the women,’ he’d said in a loud voice. If the landlord hadn’t stepped in there could have been a fist-fight.
    Chester reached the first houses and slowed his speed. It wouldn’t be smart to be seen tearing through the village because that was another thing the locals didn’t like. Well, he could understand that. They’d got kids playing in the street and old folks crossing. It was mostly kids and old folks left as nearly all the men had gone off to fight unless they were doing something essential. Any girls he’d seen around had generally come in from other places and he didn’t reckon much to the look of them.
    He pedalled slowly down the street, aware of curtains twitching and unseen eyes watching him from dark windows. At the end he turned right into the street where most of the stores were – the high street, they called it. There was one halfway along that sold cigarettes and what they called sweets. He tried to learn the British words for things and use them because it seemed more polite. Sweets and biscuits, pavements and shops, petrol and lorries and torches. English cigarettes, he knew, were in short supply but he liked them a whole lot more than the American ones. He dismounted and leaned the bike against the wall outside the shop. ROBERT LAW, Tobacconist and Confectioner it said over the doorway. Whoever Robert Law was, he’d never seen him in there; it was always an old woman behind the counter. The bell on the door jangled loudly as he opened it. He had to stoop to enter because the lintel was so low and there wasn’t much room inside either.
    It was so dark that, at first, he didn’t spot the kid. Like all the village boys, he was dressed in grey shorts and a grey jumper,