Free These Dark Wings by John Owen Theobald

bricks is – what it was . Every morning on my way to feed the ravens I see this view from the ramparts. Yet I have no memory of the old landscape. A block of flats?
    It doesn’t matter. I am free.
    ‘Before we go to the market – I was wondering, can we see the docks? Before it gets dark.’
    He nods absently, clearly looking for some piece of exploded metal.
    We shift direction, now heading east. Streets are roped off. Unexploded bombs? Men in steel Civil Defence helmets try to marshal people, to send them home; there are too many. Some stand and point at the heaps of bricks, several feet high. Others trudge past under bags and sacks, carrying their goods.
    ‘Why didn’t you come to see Churchill?’
    Timothy Squire glances at me, shrugs.
    ‘Everyone was there.’
    As he starts on some explanation I’m not listening. I can hear nothing above the sudden roar in my ears, as if a bomb had just landed on the opposite block, without warning or sirens, without even a plane passing over... it is only a bus. A normal bus, on its route through the city.
    Mum.
    The bus, full to bursting, squeezes round the fallen bricks. Tired faces are visible through the blast netting at the windows.
    Mum’s last day was on a bus like that. It is strange. I always thought of her, elegant in her dress and hat, reading the early papers in her Tube seat. I can see her, folding the paper, and at Holborn Station stepping off the train and out into the day.
    In my mind I see the shelter with my headmaster and the WVS woman, that endless night, the growing hollow dread that life was about to change forever.
    I stop, staring, as the bus heaves past us. The bus is wrong. I don’t know why, but I know it is.
    It is all wrong.

    ‘Magpie. Look at this.’
    I turn, absently. I have been standing in a daze, as if someone has knocked me on the head. Timothy Squire is showing me something. He is back to his old self. He doesn’t notice my sadness, doesn’t notice me. Just talking, talking. And he called me Magpie!
    ‘It’s huge!’
    ‘Yes,’ I say.
    I stop thinking about Mum, about what name Timothy Squire calls me, and focus on where I am. I can only let myself think of one thing: escape.
    Already we have reached the docks. The wharf is a massive concrete sprawl the size of several playing fields. Black shadows of cranes are everywhere. I look wildly for a great ship, waiting for me, bound for Montreal. I have seen many, from the Tower, that were surely headed for Canada. Up close, however, it is harder to tell.
    The docks lurch with people. It is not at all how I imagined it. So different from the canals of home, the bright-coloured houseboats of Little Venice.
    ‘They always target here,’ Timothy Squire says, his voice serious. ‘The target is the guide.’
    For once, I know what he means. The docks are the gateway between Britain and the world: bringing in war materials, food, help. If you bomb the docks, the ships get destroyed and the fires help the planes orient themselves.
    I have heard many stories – areas bombed so heavily that buried fires still burn. We push closer, dodging a rough hole in the cement. How deeply buried? Then Timothy Squire laughs, and his voice resumes its mischievous tone.
    ‘When the bombs hit in the summer, rats poured out of those buildings like waves. Thousands of them!’
    I turn in horror, expecting to see a tide of rodents swelling round us. He goes on talking, about flaming barges filled with coconuts, which burned for days, nothing could put them out. In the brief second where he draws a breath, I speak.
    ‘What are those ships for?’
    I point past a distant column of smoke, rising from behind the river. From here I can see that it climbs miles high, darker than the dark clouds.
    He laughs. ‘You’ve never been down here before?’
    ‘I have,’ I say defensively. ‘I just don’t know a lot about the docks, or what’s where.’
    ‘Never could have guessed,’ he says. ‘That smell, yeah?