My Friend the Enemy Read online

  Doctor Jacobs crouched beside me and put his bag on the ground. ‘You feeling all right, Peter?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you’ve got a few cuts and scrapes. Let’s clean those up, shall we?’ He unfastened the bag and rummaged through the bandages and dressings before pulling out a bottle of disinfectant and some cotton wool.

  ‘So how did you do this?’ he asked, dabbing Dettol onto my knee, wiping away the blood. ‘In too much of a hurry to see the crash?’

  ‘He was right there,’ Mam said. ‘Right there when it happened.’

  Doctor Jacobs looked up from what he was doing. ‘You saw it happen?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Must have been quite something,’ he said.

  ‘Quite somethin’?’ Mam said. ‘He could’ve been killed. Stupid lad. I’ve told him so many times not to—’

  ‘Well, he seems fine to me,’ he said. ‘Just scraped knees, that’s all.’

  I looked at my knee, seeing how small the graze was now that Doctor Jacobs had cleaned away the blood. It looked like nothing at all.

  ‘Doesn’t even need a bandage,’ he said.

  ‘Did I hear that right?’ a voice said behind me. ‘You saw the plane crash?’ I recognised the voice straight away, because Mr Bennett was the only person I knew who didn’t have an accent like mine. His was much posher.

  Mam got to her feet beside me. ‘Mr Bennett,’ she said, smoothing down her apron. ‘I didn’t see you there.’

  ‘Mrs Dixon.’ He nodded once at Mam then looked down at me. ‘Peter. Glad to see you’re not too badly hurt,’ he said. ‘Always good to have a small wound so people know you were there, though, eh?’

  Maybe he said that because he had a big scar of his own. It was on the right side of his face and ran from just beside his eye to about the middle of his cheek. I heard he got it at Dunkirk, but no one seemed to know what really happened.

  ‘I got this climbin’ under a fence,’ I said. ‘Not from any crash.’

  ‘Well, you don’t need to tell people that, do you?’ He looked out at the plane. ‘Bloody Germans ruining all my potatoes. Don’t they have anything better to do?’

  ‘Well, I don’t s’pose it was the tatties they were after,’ Mam said.

  ‘Maybe it was,’ I answered.

  I knew that the bombers came from their base in Norway to attack the shipyards in Newcastle where aircraft carriers and submarines were being built. But sometimes they bombed farms, using the Farne Islands or Dunstanburgh Castle as landmarks. One night we saw them bombing further down the coast, and it looked as if the whole place was on fire. Incendiaries had showered one of the villages, burning churches and farm buildings and homes.

  Mr Bennett nodded and pursed his lips. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe they are after the crops.’

  He was about Dad’s age, but he wasn’t anything like Dad. My dad worked hard for everything. Before he went away to win the war, he worked all day and all night on the estate. Gamekeeping, Dad said, was a full-time job. Mr Bennett, though, he owned the estate. In fact, he owned most of the land around the village. It used to be his dad’s, but he died of pneumonia just before the war and Mr Bennett got everything. The fields were his. The ground we were standing on was his. The woods where I’d been playing were his. Even the house we lived in was his.

  Dad said it must be nice to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, whatever Mr Bennett’s spoon was made of, it didn’t keep him in his own house. It seemed like Mr Bennett was always coming to ours, bringing us things, being nice to Mam. It would have probably been all right, except that some of the other boys had noticed and started to rib me about it.

  ‘Or maybe they were looking for RAF Acklington,’ said Mr Bennett.

  ‘Do you really think so?’ Mam asked.

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve tried it,’ Doctor Jacobs agreed.

  Mr Bennett was watching Mam with a serious expression. ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ he said to her. ‘They probably just lost their way. We’re quite safe here.’ I think he was just trying to make Mam feel better, though. I didn’t think any of us was safe, wherever we were. It seemed like the Germans didn’t care who they killed. Sometimes the planes just emptied their bays for the return flight home, dropping unused bombs right on top of whatever lay under the flight path. It made the planes use less fuel. That’s what our lives were worth to them: a few gallons of fuel.

  ‘I reckon they got shot,’ I said, standing up. ‘That’s why it was on its own. It was comin’ from Bamburgh way, and they’ve got anti-aircraft guns up there. I heard the engines just before it crashed, I did. Sounded like it got shot and needed somewhere to land.’

  ‘Good thinking, Peter.’ Mr Bennett pointed a finger at me. ‘You might just be right.’

  ‘Well, whatever the reason,’ Mam said, ‘it’s time to go home. Come on, pet, we need to get you cleaned up.’

  I looked over at the spot where the other boys and girls had gathered to watch the burning wreck. The sergeant had organised soldiers to stand in front of them, keeping them from going any closer, and was telling them to stay back, but I could see he didn’t want to be there. Like everyone else, he wanted to be a part of it. He was facing the children but kept looking over his shoulder to see what was happening.

  There were four groups on the hill now. The children, the adults from the village, the soldiers, and the men from the Home Guard. The soldiers were mostly at the bottom of the hill, taking orders, deciding how they were going to deal with the crash site. The Home Guardsmen were watching closely, trying to get involved, and Doctor Jacobs excused himself from us as soon as he could, hurrying down to be in the thick of it. Everyone wanted to be there, to be part of the action – me included. Everyone, that is, apart from Mam.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Home.’

  ‘Aww, Mam . . .’ I hesitated and looked down at the wreckage of the plane lying in the middle of the field. Here, on the hill, the ground was too awkward for the tractor, so the grass was kept for the small flock of sheep that now roamed it. I glanced to my left, where the hill dropped down to another field of vegetables planted in regimented lines like leafy soldiers. Beyond that, on the other side of a narrow track, was Hawthorn Lodge where I lived with Mam. Our house was a grey stone building and Mam always kept the window boxes bonny with orange nasturtiums, but the rest of the garden was turned over to growing vegetables. The Germans kept blowing up our supply ships, so Mam said it was our duty to dig for victory even if we were already surrounded by potatoes and sheep.

  In the far corner of the garden there was a small henhouse encircled by chicken wire. Close by was the netty – the outside toilet – and, next to that, our Anderson shelter, all covered with dirt so we could grow peas over the top of it. The shelter doubled up as a garden shed, and we kept all our tools in there – tidied at the back, of course, otherwise Mr Chapman, the ARP warden, would have something to say about it. I don’t know why it was called an Anderson shelter, but when they were delivered to the village, Mrs Armstrong said they could call them whatever they liked – if she was going to meet her maker then she wanted to do it from the comfort of her own bed, not in a hacky tube at the bottom of her garden. It was only when a rumour went around that a low-flying German plane had machine-gunned a man on Bracken Hill that people started to run for the shelters when the warning came.

  ‘Can’t we stay a bit longer?’ I asked, looking back at the burning wreck.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Aww, but—’

  ‘No buts, Peter. Home.’

  Mr Bennett came a little closer to Mam. ‘Why don’t you let him stay?’ he said, gesturing at the other boys. ‘All his friends are here. You don’t want him to be the only one.’

  Mam narrowed her eyes.

  ‘Look,’ Mr Bennett carried on. ‘Everything’s safe now. The soldiers are here, the raid’s over. Let him go and sit with his friends.’

  ‘I don’t think—’
r />   ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you home, and Peter can stay here a while longer. Then I’ll come back and chase him home myself—’

  ‘You don’t have to do that.’

  ‘Why not give him a few minutes?’

  Mam’s face relaxed.

  ‘Please?’ I begged.

  ‘What do you say?’ Mr Bennett asked.

  And then Mam caved in. Not to me, but to Mr Bennett. ‘A few minutes,’ she said.

  Mr Bennett winked at me. ‘Go on, then, quick. Before she changes her mind.’

  KIM

  The other boys spotted me coming over, and a few of them started asking questions before I’d even got to them.

  ‘Is it true you saw it come down?’ asked Jonathan. ‘Did you see it blow up?’

  ‘How close were you?’ asked someone else.

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Did you get hurt?’

  I answered their questions, half enjoying the attention, half hating it. The plane continued to burn as I told them what happened, and the air was still heavy with the smell of fuel and burning rubber. But they were distracted by the sound of a motor, and everyone turned to watch an army fire engine making its way across the field. The driver was careful to keep the green tanker off the crops, but once he came to the scar left by the crash, he drove right out into the field and stopped not far from the wreck. The lieutenant in charge started shouting orders and then they were all rushing about, busying themselves trying to put out the fire.

  Everyone was quiet for a while, watching the flames die back, until Tom Chambers, one of the boys from my class at school, said, ‘What about the parachute? I saw a parachute.’

  ‘Me too,’ Alan Parson added, but all eyes were on Tom because he was the first to say it.

  In all the excitement, I’d forgotten about it. I’d seen it just after the crash, disappearing behind the thick smoke.

  ‘Parachute?’ asked the sergeant who was there to stop us from trying to get closer to the plane. ‘There was a parachute?’ He was wearing a uniform that looked to be made of itchy wool, with puttees above his gleaming boots and a rifle over his shoulder. The three stripes on his arm looked clean and new, as if they’d just been stitched on.

  ‘Aye,’ Tom Chambers stepped forward, pleased for the attention. ‘Aye. Maybe even two, like. Three. I don’t know.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘There was only one,’ said Alan.

  ‘Where?’ asked the sergeant.

  ‘Over there.’ Tom pointed back across the tops of the trees, in the direction the plane had come from. ‘I saw it, I did. A long way off. Maybe over Armstrong’s place.’

  ‘You’re sure about this?’

  ‘Aye.’

  And then all the children were nodding, even the ones who hadn’t seen it. I wondered how it was that none of the soldiers had seen the parachute, but the sky was full of black smoke, and everybody would have been watching that, not looking for a parachute.

  The sergeant told us to stay right where we were, and hurried down the hill, going straight to the man in charge. The lieutenant was tall and strong-looking, with a cap on his head and a moustache on his lip.

  They spoke for a moment, the sergeant turning to point up at us, then both men climbed the hill to where we were waiting.

  ‘Who saw this parachute, then?’ said the lieutenant when he reached the top. He stood with his hands behind his back, his right wrist resting on the flap of his holster, and he was slightly out of breath.

  ‘This one, lieutenant.’ The sergeant pointed at Tom Chambers.

  ‘Is this some kind of joke? Because if it is—’

  ‘It’s no joke, mister. I really saw it.’

  ‘Aye, it’s true,’ said Alan Parson.

  The lieutenant looked around at each one of us. ‘Did anyone else see this parachute?’

  I put up my hand, along with most of the other children.

  ‘You’re sure?’ asked the sergeant. ‘Because there’ll be trouble if you’re lying.’ He leant forward and looked at each of us in turn, furrowing his brow and staring as if he could see right into our heads and pick out the lies.

  After a moment, almost everyone dropped their hand so that only three of us were still holding them up.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said the sergeant. ‘I know how to deal with this lot, lieutenant. It’s all games to them.’

  ‘Thank you, sergeant,’ the lieutenant said without looking at him. ‘And you boys saw it over that way?’ He pointed across at the place in the sky where I’d seen the parachute.

  The three of us nodded.

  ‘Right, then.’ He turned to the sergeant. ‘Well done, Sergeant Wilkes. As you were.’ And with that, he turned and marched away.

  When he reached the bottom of the hill, the lieutenant shouted an order and all the men stopped what they were doing and ran over to stand in front of him. He issued instructions to the full-time soldiers and to the Home Guard, and then they started leaving the crash site, moving away in small groups until only the lieutenant remained, along with a handful of men who stayed to douse what was left of the fire.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ said Sergeant Wilkes. ‘We’ll find that Jerry in no time. We’ve got good men looking for him now.’ He puffed himself up a bit. ‘Good men like me. It’s all under control.’

  ‘You really think you’ll catch a German, mister?’ Tom Chambers asked.

  ‘You just watch.’ The sergeant came closer to us and crouched to our level. ‘We’ll get ’im, you can bet on it.’

  ‘What you gonna do when you get ’im, like?’

  ‘What do you think?’ He tapped one hand on the stock of his rifle and grinned like a wolf. ‘If I see him, he doesn’t stand a chance. I can put a bullet through a rabbit’s eye at five hundred yards, you know.’

  ‘Really? That far?’ Tom Chambers couldn’t hide his wonder, but he probably didn’t even know how far five hundred yards was.

  ‘Maybe even further,’ said the sergeant. ‘So don’t you worry, we’ll give ’im what every sackless Jerry deserves. Just like we got that plane.’

  Some of the boys laughed and punched fists in the air. ‘We showed ’em!’

  ‘We didn’t show them anything,’ someone mumbled beside me. ‘It crashed.’

  ‘What’s that you said?’ Sergeant Wilkes stood up quickly and looked about with a flash of anger, but everyone fell silent, some of the boys shaking their heads. The soldier waited a few seconds, scanning our faces, then he scowled and stepped back, turning to watch the men dampening the fire.

  But I knew who had said it. Beside me there was a girl I didn’t recognise. I hadn’t noticed her before because she was sitting so quietly, just watching what was going on. She was a little taller than I was, and her hair was the blackest I’d ever seen. The only other person I knew with hair as black as that was Mrs Robertson, but she was old and everyone knew hers was dyed. The girl beside me didn’t have dyed hair, though. Hers was natural, and when the evening sun caught it just right, as it did now, it looked as if it had bits of blue in it.

  I didn’t speak to her, I just looked at her, but she didn’t seem to notice me looking. She was concentrating on what the soldiers were doing at the foot of the hill. And as she watched them, she tightened her lips, chewing the inside of her pale cheek.

  ‘It’s a Heinkel,’ she said. ‘I wonder why it was flying here.’

  I glanced around, wondering if she was talking to herself or someone else.

  ‘I’m talking to you.’ She looked sideways at me.

  ‘Hm? Me?’

  ‘Yeah, you.’ She turned so her brown eyes were looking into mine. ‘You saw it crash, didn’t you?’

  ‘Aye. Came right over the top of me. Knocked me off me feet when it blew up, it did.’

  ‘Lucky beggar.’ Then she looked away and continued watching the soldiers as some of the villagers grew bored and started heading home, taking their children with them. A few of us stayed
, though, ten or eleven of us waiting at the top of the hill on the warm grass.

  I sat with my legs crossed and my elbows on my knees, casting my eyes sideways from time to time, snatching glimpses of the girl, but she didn’t speak again. She just stared ahead, fascinated by the crash site, taking in every detail, not missing a thing. She even seemed to sit up a little straighter when the fire started to die down and one of the soldiers was ordered to inspect the plane.

  The young soldier approached slowly, leaning his body away from the smouldering beast as if that would make any difference at all. He called back to the lieutenant that it was too hot to get any closer, and he walked around the area, looking for anything of interest.

  ‘You think they’re looking for bodies?’ the girl asked when the soldier disappeared behind the twisted metal.

  She hadn’t said anything for some time and I turned to her, studying her features for a moment before she looked at me.

  ‘D’you think that’s what they’re doing?’ she asked, raising her eyebrows at me.

  ‘I s’pose,’ I said. ‘Aye. Maybe.’ But really I hadn’t even thought much about the people in the plane. Not until right then, when I remembered the gunner, terrified as the ground came at him.

  ‘As many as five men crew that thing, you know. You think they all died? Apart from the parachutist, that is.’

  ‘How do you know about that, like?’

  ‘I saw him too.’

  ‘No, I mean how d’you know how many people are in a plane like that?’

  She shrugged. ‘Everyone knows, don’t they?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  She made a noise as if she were laughing through her nose. A quick rush of air accompanied by a half-smile. ‘My dad told me. And my brother’s a pilot.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Yeah. And anyway, I’ve seen a hundred of those planes.’

  ‘Honest?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Down below, the soldier had completed his walk around the wreck and was speaking to the one in charge, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Behind me, some of the remaining children were growing restless, chattering and starting to mess about.