Free Shrapnel by Robert Swindells Page B

nine. I’d been in bed an hour, but I wasn’t asleep. I’d been lying there, thinking about the Skymaster in the shed. What had been the point of today’s business at Myra Shay? Was the plane different somehow? A message in invisible ink perhaps, scrawled on a wing by the chap in the lean-to? The siren’s wavering howl stopped my wondering.
    Dad called from the foot of the attic stairs. ‘Shake a leg, son – time to take cover.’ I pulled on a jumper over my pyjamas, shoved my feet into slippers and scampered down.
    Gran’s shelter is just like ours, except sheshares with a mother and baby, not an old couple. The baby was asleep in a clothes basket. At the sound of the first explosion, the mother knelt on the duckboards and bent her body over the basket to shield her baby. I don’t suppose it’d have made much difference in the event of a direct hit, but it showed that not all heroes wear uniforms. She stayed like that all night, wouldn’t let anybody take over.
    It was a very heavy raid, and it went on for hours. Sometimes the ground shook. There were factories in the city where tanks, lorries and aeroplanes were built. The bombers were probably after those, but bombing’s never very accurate and we knew lots of houses were being hit as well. I hoped ours wouldn’t be among them – repairs had just begun on it.
    Our ack-ack was busy, making more racket than the bombs.
Plenty of shrapnel in the morning
, I told myself,
if I’m still here
.
    It was nearly dawn when the all clear sounded. The young mother stood up and started knocking dust off her dressing gown. The baby woke and howled.
    Gran smiled at it. ‘I don’t know why
you’re
crying,’ she cooed, ‘you missed it all, you lucky girl.’
    We went in to breakfast. It had to be a cold meal – a main had fractured somewhere, there was no gas. We had water though, which was something.
    It was mid-morning when the rumour reached Trickett Boulevard. In the city a railway arch, used as an unofficial shelter, had received a direct hit. More than a hundred people had died, many of them children. None of the dead had yet been identified.

THIRTY-SIX
Knights on a Raft
    I’D LOOKED IN the shed Sunday morning. The plane was exactly where I’d put it, nothing was different. I was starting to wonder if I was the victim of some complicated practical joke. Was my brother pulling my leg, making me believe I was doing something important when in fact the whole business of the Skymaster and Myra Shay was a wild-goose chase?
    I did add some good bits to my shrapnel collection, though I didn’t mention it in the house. The grown-ups’ mood was sombre because of the railway arch – collecting shrapnelmight strike them as callous in the circumstances. After lunch I cycled over to our own house and found it untouched by last night’s raid. The roof looked complete. I rode back with the news, which failed to lighten the mood. I felt pretty rotten myself, what with one thing and another.
    Tuesday, my world collapsed.
Our
world, I mean. It was tea time. Dad had just got in. We were having knights on a raft – Gran’s name for sardines on toast. There was a knock at the door. I jumped up to answer it – I thought it might be the chap from Carter’s with fresh orders for me, but it wasn’t: it was two policemen with bad news for Dad and Mum. For
all
of us.
    They told us Raymond was dead. He’d been one of the people taking shelter under the railway arch. Most of the victims had been stripped of their ration books, identity cards, rings and watches by thieves, before the authorities arrived. This often happened. It made the job of identifying the dead extremely difficult. However, a few bodies had not been robbed, and on one they’d found Raymond’s papers.
    Mum fell howling to the floor. Gran startedtrying to lift her, calling to me to help. Together we got