Free The Dynamite Room by Jason Hewitt

Essex boys had worn before they’d been sent up to Northumbria and replaced. When was that? April or May. Definitely before the summer and before she’d been sent away. She let her fingers touch the khaki woolen fabric, the fly-flap to conceal the buttons down the middle, the small belt tab, the patch pockets on each breast. The wool was rougher than she had imagined, and tacky, as if something had been spilled on it.
    By January all the local regiments were serving abroad. They were replaced by the Territorials or recent recruits that in time would include Alfie. Several army infantry divisions that were not fully equipped or hadn’t been trained enough to be dispatched to France had been sent this way to protect the East Anglia coast. The Essex Regiment had been in the area since the previous November. She’d seen them patrolling Shingle Street before they’d started cutting off the beaches, putting up all the barbed wire and blockades. By the time Lydia was evacuated, there were soldiers and defenses up and down the beaches, and now she wondered what good they had been and what had happened to them all.
    She opened up the shirt, laying it out flat. A name was written on the label inside. Red capitals, the ink of each letter seeping into the fabric like jagged little teeth.
    JACK HENRY BAYLISS
    She stared at the name for a while and folded the collar in on itself so she wouldn’t have to think about how a German soldier might have acquired an Englishman’s uniform. She wondered why he hadn’t killed her, why he was keeping her in the house. Perhaps he was playing a game.
    She lifted the arm of the uniform and smelled it. It had a familiar odor, like the louse dust Mrs. Duggan had brushed into Button’s jacket that had made him sneeze.
    Poor Button. The first thing her mother had done with him when he had arrived at Greyfriars was take him out into the garden and wash his hair over a bowl with kerosene mixed with sassafras oil, and then rinse it in vinegar. Lydia had laughed at him. But then the first morning in Wales Mrs. Duggan had done the same to them both. Out came the washing bowl and the Jeyes Fluid, and they were ordered into the yard.
    This is a clean, ship-shape house, she said as she tugged Lydia’s dress off over her head and then pushed her head down over the bowl. I don’t work at it all day long only to have scallywags like you coming in full of creepy-crawlies. Filthy little vackies.
    For the first two weeks either she or Button had cried in the night, until Mrs. Duggan came in and said, If you don’t pipe down, I’ll put you out in the baily and give you both a clout.
    She looked out of the bedroom now, across the landing to the shut bathroom door, her heart suddenly bumping harder. Wisps of steam drifted out from under it. No sound though, not even the slop of bathwater; she wondered if he had drowned.
    She fumbled in his shirt pockets. The two outside ones were empty, but there were two more inside. The first had lots of shiny tacks in it, and when she pulled out a handful a golden St. Christopher medallion was caught up among the pins as well. She untangled it and lifted it up so that the cross twirled around on itself, catching the dim light. She let the chain trail through her fingers, then she put it and the tacks back and carefully felt inside the second pocket. She found small, flat bits of metal, and when she pulled them out she saw that they were half-moon-shaped tags made of steel or tin. Six of them, and all broken, it seemed, in half. She spread them out across her hand.
    “What are you doing?”
    He grabbed her arm and snatched the tags away, scattering them to the floor, then pushed her hard against the dressing table, causing her to gasp. He scrambled around gathering the tags up, wearing nothing but one of their towels tied tight around his waist.
    “Do not touch or look at anything. Do you understand?”
    “What are they?” she said.
    “They are nothing.”
    She pressed