The Kingdom by the Sea. Robert Westall
bits of wood half-buried in the sand and once falling flat and being dragged along. He hadn’t a clue where he was going. But Don had. Suddenly they were up against the beginning of the pier, the massive granite pier. And set into the pier, huge arches. And inside the arches, massive granite blocks were stored, for repairing the pier when the waves broke it. Don went straight into a dark gap between the blocks, and dragged Harry after him. And then Don stopped, and Harry realised he was in the best air-raid shelter in Tynemouth. Six feet of granite over his head, and solid granite on three sides, and on the fourth a parapet of huge blocks, just low enough to peer over.
“Good dog,” he whispered. “Good dog,” and fondled the dog’s ears. Don was shaking so hard he made Harry shake in sympathy. Harry remembered something his dad had said about dogs in air raids. They suffered terribly with their ears, because they could hear ten times better than people. The sounds were ten times as loud to them. He pulled off one of his jumpers, folded down the dog’s ears, and wrapped the jumper round them hard. The dog seemed to like it; it snuggled in.
And then the Castle guns fired, and it was like the end of the world. The world cracked apart four times; Harry’s head seemed to crack apart four times. His ears hurt, physically hurt. Like earache.
He remembered the government issuing ear-plugs. Everyone had laughed at the idea of the little rubber earplugs, on their bit of string, that you carried in your gas-mask case, if you still carried your gas-mask case, which hardly anyone ever did these days, only kids with soppy mams.
He wished he had them now. But … something … hold the dog with one hand, scrabble in his pockets with the other. Bit of paper; bus ticket. He shoved it into his mouth and chewed it frantically. When it was soggy enough, he worked it into two lumps, and pushed one piece into each of his ears.
The Castle guns fired again. But it was much better now; only half as bad. Didn’t hurt. He shoved the bits of bus ticket even further in. Then peered with interest over his high bulwark. He’d never been out in an air raid before; he’d always been cowering down in the shelter, like a rat in a hole. Mam hadn’t even let him look out of the shelter door, unless it had been quiet for ages.
He thought it was the grandest firework display he’d ever seen. High above, great chains of blue lights hung, lighting the whole sky. They swung; they drifted across each other like swathes of stars. These must be the “chandeliers” Dad had talked about; dropped by the bombers to light their target.
The ack-ack men at South Shields must be trying to shoot them out. Long streams of tracer shells, yellow and red, climbed slowly into the sky from behind South Shields pier. They made the blue lights rock and swing harder, but they didn’t put them out. Then the Castle guns fired again, making Don flinch; making a pattern of four bright stars in the sky that burnt holes in your eyes, so that wherever you looked afterwards, there were four black holes in what you looked at. And it all smelt like Guy Fawkes night.
It was … grand. Grand like a thunderstorm, if you were out in it, and not afraid of being hit by lightning. It made Harry feel huge, as huge as the sky.
And then he saw the German bomber, clear and sharp as a minnow in a pond, caught in a cone of no less than five searchlights. It wriggled, glistened like a minnow, a minnow with a shiny nose and tiny crosses on its wings, a minnow trying to escape out of a giant hand. But the giant hand of light held it, twist and turn though it might. Then every gun on Tyneside seemed to be firing at it. Again and again, it vanished in the scatters of blinding flashes. Harry’s eyes seemed as full of black holes as Mam’s collander. But when the flashes had gone, the tiny plane was still there, twisting and turning and getting bigger. It didn’t seem to be going anywhere any more, just wriggling, trying to escape.
And then there was a streak of fire. Then a comet, a shooting star of brilliant yellow, heading out to sea, down to the sea. Down and down and down, brighter and brighter and brighter, better than a two-shilling rocket. And then it burst into a brilliant shower of blue lights, that were caught by the wind and drifted and went out, all but one that glowed all the way down to the dark water.
The guns were silent, so you heard the hiss it made as it hit the sea; heard the people cheering, all the way over the dark water, in South Shields.
He hugged the dog. “We got one, boy, we got one.” It was better than North Shields football team scoring a goal. In the silence, the dog thumped its tail against his leg, and licked his hand.
And then the next wave of Jerries came vroomahing in.
It was dawn before the Jerries stopped coming, and the all-clear went. He and the dog came out of their deep, deep shelter. The dog stretched, fore and aft, sniffed an upturned boat and peed against it. Harry, walking on what felt like two wooden legs, watched it with great fondness. Don was wonderful. He’d heard the bombers coming, long before the siren went; he’d found the best shelter. Above all, he’d been close to the dog, to its furry warm bulk. The dog had been closer to him than Mam had been, let alone Dad.
He thought he and the dog made a pretty good team. He sat on his upturned boat, and watched the dog sniffing around the beach. Nice to sit in peace and quiet, listening to the little waves plopping on the sand, after the great storm of the night.
But today, Sunday, they had to move on. Before someone noticed him on the beach on Monday morning, and caught him as a truant from school. Before the food ran out. Before the dog went through again what he had gone through last night.
Away. Up the coast. To where there were no people to bother them. To where there was plenty of food.
He knew he wasn’t thinking very straight. He needed more sleep. He called to the dog, lured it to him with its share of cold sausage and chips. Then got it through the hole, under the boat, and in a little while they were both sound asleep.
He started awake, and pushed back the blankets. He was very hot, and there was a small of melting tar, and, worst of all, voices all around him. And the dog was gone.
He must have slept too long. It was Sunday afternoon. On Sunday morning, the beach was empty, except for a few men walking their dogs. But on Sunday afternoons in summer, even in wartime, it filled up with families out for the day. People were sitting with their backs against his boat, blocking out the strip of sunshine. Until they went home, he was trapped. And they usually didn’t go home till about six o’clock.
And where was the dog? He could see the place where it had scrabbled out. How long had it been gone? Where had it gone? Had it gone for good? There was nothing he could do. He couldn’t scramble out after it, in full view of everybody. It wasn’t that he was afraid of the people sitting round; it was more a terrible embarrassment at making a fool of himself, of being stared at when he was all dirty and sweaty and peculiar-looking. And his Cousin Elsie, or somebody else he knew might be sitting there.
All he could do was push back the blankets and lie there, and munch another soggy mass of cold chips, and worry about the dog. It was more horrible than being in the shelter during an air raid.
It was the voices that soothed him in the end. The family sitting against the boat, at least, were strangers. A mum and dad, three kids and a granny. They had rough accents; they must come from further up the river. Somewhere like Byker. When the granny said, “I’ve lived in Byker all me life, and I’ve never seen anything like that in all my born days,” it cheered him slightly that he had guessed right.
He sort of lost himself in the life of the family. Bossy mum, idle dad.
“Why don’t you play cricket with the bairns, George? They’re bored stiff!”
“Why, there’s no room to play cricket, hinny. There’s not room to swing a cat. Don Bradman hisself couldn’t play cricket here.”
“Well, do something with them!”
“Woman,