Page 42 of Strangers in Time

“Okay, and I’d like to meet yours,” he shot back.

Molly turned a bit pink. “I… she’s not been well.”

“Your dad then.”

“Right. Well, we’ll have to see, won’t we?”

As they were waiting in the queue Molly glanced down at a newspaper that had been left on a bench. “Oh, how awful.”

She picked it up and showed Charlie the front page. There was a picture of a lorry with two bodies under sheets in front of it.

Molly read, “‘A constable and a boy were killed in a tragicaccident. The constable has been identified as Ambrose Tapper, age thirty-one. He was married and had two young children. The name of the boy is, as yet, unknown. The driver of the lorry reported to police that the constable was chasing three youths when the accident occurred.’” She glanced at Charlie. “Isn’t that terrible?”

Charlie was staring at the bodies under the sheets and did not answer.

Molly continued to read. “‘The driver has given descriptions of the other boys to the authorities. And they are looking into reports of crime in the area, under the belief that the three lads had been engaged in some illegal act. The constable had been doing his duty in chasing them down when he met his sad end.’”

She looked at Charlie. “Some people simply have no respect for the law and the lives of others. Oh, listen to this.” She continued reading: “‘They just run off, the lorry driver reported.Just run off and left their pal dead. What sort of person does that?’” She folded the paper and put it back on the bench. “Well, I hope they catch those other boys. And I hope they feel wretched for leaving their poor friend behind.”

Gazing over her shoulder, the cold grip of the hangman’s noose latching on to his throat, Charlie managed to say, “There’s your cab, Miss.”

She got into the taxi and then held the coin out the window. “Please take it.”

Charlie said, “Thank you for the picnic. It was very nice.” Then he turned and walked off.

As the cab drove away Charlie snatched up the paper and tucked it inside his jacket. He walked all the way back home in the rain, wondering how he could have left Eddie lying dead there like that.

I deserve to be hanged.

THEREMAINS OFJANE

THE NEXT NIGHTCHARLIEventured, as he sometimes did, to the sacred place. Several years had passed now, but the crater was still filled with rubble. And yet plants like hollyhocks, buddleia, and willow herbs, from fledgling straight on to robust, had reclaimed the land where the school had been, producing life from where once had occurred sudden, violent death.

It had been Charlie’s first day at the new school—they had moved to another neighborhood after their other home had been bombed. He and his mother had walked, holding hands, down the street. However, the closer they had drawn to their destination the more nervous Charlie had become, until he was tugging forcefully against his mother’s grip, pleading with her to let them stay together, and not to leave him in this strange place.

His mother had squatted down in front of him so they were eye to eye, smoothed down his hair and tidied up his clothes, and told him how the other children would welcome him as their new chum. They would read together and play together and learn so much that his head would be as full as his belly after a good meal, and how so very wonderful that would feel.

And because he loved his mother more than he loved anythingelse, and because she had never, ever spoken to him an untruth, they had continued on. A hug in the front corridor of the school and then they had said their final, tearful goodbyes.

Neither one at the time could have realized that an eager Bremen-born Luftwaffe bombardier riding in the belly of a Dornier 17, and following the distinctive line of the Thames, was about to end his mother’s life and transform her son’s future in ways unimaginable.

Charlie perched on a section of brick that had once been part of a wall of the school, slipped off his cap, rested his bony elbows on his slender thighs, and closed his eyes. He remembered the sirens, and then after that the whistle of the falling bombs.

Charlie thought a boy had been doing the whistling. He had no idea that it was the wind being pushed through a set of organ pipes riveted onto the bomb fins by the Germans to instill even more fear in the people down below. Jericho’s Trumpets, they would be dubbed.

For some reason, the warning sirens had been quite late in sounding, and thus they were told there was no time to go to a proper shelter. Wearing their gas masks, they had all frantically rushed back into their classroom and the teacher had shut the door. They crouched under their desks shaking with fear, as the sounds of the planes filtered through the ceiling.

When the wave of bombs struck, Charlie’s memory of the day vanished, but returned when his eyes opened. Above him was only darkness because he had been buried in the collapse of what had once been a safe haven for children. For the longest time Charlie had thought that he was dead and that this was what the Heaven promised by the vicar looked like. He could feel neither his arms nor his legs. His small chest was compressed; his lungs were full of things they shouldn’t be. His ears contained nothing but a piercing, dull hum that apparently no other sound could penetrate.

The darkness was finally lifted off him when anxious hands reached down and pulled him back into the light. One searing odorhit him intently, but he didn’t recognize it: cordite, ubiquitous in all explosives.

Charlie was carried on a stretcher to a bus with many other wounded because the ambulance fleet had been overwhelmed ferrying other victims to hospital. His injuries—a broken arm, a shattered collarbone, a wrenched ankle, bruises over his entire body—were relatively minor compared to those of other victims, he had been told. And his head wasn’t filled with horror from the ordeal because it had happened so fast. Sustained, suffocating blackness, then a burst of light, like being born all over again.

How he and some others at the school had survived was anyone’s guess. A miracle, the newspapers had said, no doubt thrilled to have something positive to report amid the tragedy.

Charlie forgot about everything else when two men in baggy suits came to visit him in hospital along with his grandparents that night. Gran looked like she wanted no more part of living, while his grandfather merely stared at his shoes. Sobbing, Gran had gripped Charlie so tightly all of his injuries screamed in protest. But Charlie’s sole focus was the men, who stared at him with an odd mixture of sincere sorrow and professional weariness.

It was they who had told him that his mother had been among those killed. When the late sirens had finally started, she had ignored her personal safety and rushed to the school to retrieve her son. Right before she got there, a bomb had landed barely ten feet from her, witnesses had said.

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