Five Boys: Extracts

Rehearsals for evacuation

The children were led off row by row, like knitting unravelling - a great chain of children rattling through the gates, out onto the pavements and picking up speed as they went along. They marched past the park and up the high street; marched by the open market and the old Town Hall. Neighbours waved. Shopkeepers stood and watched from their doorways. And when Mr Morely strode out into the road and raised his rolled-up brolly the traffic slowed to a halt, as if now that the children were finally moving, there was no easy way of stopping them.

Mr Morely led them up and down the street in one long conga, but eventually turned into the yard of a bus depot, where the children were shuffled into rows again. The ground was black and tacky underfoot from engine oil, and across the yard five coaches waited with their doors open, as if ready to race away.

At Paddington Station, the children were led off the coaches and lined up on one of the platforms, where they stood and watched the trains shunt in and out under the great wide roof. After twenty minutes some women in armbands came round, with trays of buns and mugs of tea. Then the children were led back onto the coaches and driven home again.

On the Tuesday Bobby had a much better idea what the day ahead had in store and worked out that by keeping his eyes on the heels of the boy in front could keep in step with him. The drive across the city was hot but uneventful, the bun on the station platform was much the same as the one before and when he got back home he couldn't tell whether his mother was genuinely surprised to see him or was in on the whole charade.

On the Wednesday it occurred to Bobby that the rest of his school years might consist of nothing but endless rehearsals for evacuation - year upon year of marching through the streets (which would be good practice for being, say, a postman) and sitting on coaches (which would be no use at all). But as they left the playground on that third day he spotted his mother and some other women on the other side of the road and as the children marched along behind Mr Morely's brolly the women crept from lamp-post to lamp-post, as if they were spying on them, or had been warned not to get too close. Bobby tried to keep his eyes on the boy in front but couldn't help glancing over at his mother. She didn't wave - as if it was just a coincidence that she and Bobby were marching along the same streets - but when they reached the depot and were herded onto the coaches, all the mothers suddenly rushed across the yard.

The engines started up. The mothers knocked on the windows and passed little keepsakes through to their children - sweets, handkerchiefs, anything. Bobby's mum reached up and pressed a penny into his hand. He was going to put it in his pocket, but she wouldn't let go. It wasn't until he was tucked up on a stranger's sofa later that day that Bobby realized that the penny wasn't important. What was important was her holding his hand. And when she finally let go she just stood there crying. Crying like Bobby had never seen her cry before.

There were no buns or mugs of tea at Paddington Station. They were all ushered straight onto the train, and in the crush Bobby ended up in a carriage with a group of unfamiliar children, all except for a girl who lived next door to his auntie. The boys were big and stood on the seats to put their cases on the luggage racks. Bobby doubted that he was strong enough to lift his case above his head, so he just sat with it tucked behind his legs and his brown-paper package in his lap and was wondering whether he should try and find a teacher to explain that he was in the wrong part of the train when the whole carriage suddenly lurched forward, which produced the same sickening jolt in Bobby's stomach as the coach's engine starting up on the Monday but about a hundred times as strong.

The train tugged and struggled into motion, as if the roots and moorings of every child on board were being ripped away. The station cast itself off, with all its buns and mugs of tea untouched. The city withdrew. And in that instant Bobby understood that this was the end of all the rehearsals and that no moment ever comes around again.

American soldiers are invited to a dance at the village hall

As Miss Pye told her customers the following morning, 'They wouldn't waltz and they wouldn't foxtrot. All the Americans wanted to do was jitterbug.'

The GIs had had the foresight to bring along their own box of records and, within minutes, had commandeered the gramophone. The noise which proceeded to pump out of the speaker sounded to the local women like nothing but a mad, chaotic clatter. They hadn't a clue how they were meant to dance to it and were a little embarrassed by the utter abandonment with which their dance partners began to hurl themselves about. After a life long governed by the dead reckoning of the ration-book this expenditure of energy alone seemed rash, extravagant. But as the evening settled into its own tempo it became apparent that whatever was loose in the room, far from dissipating, was positively multiplying itself.

The women slowly gave in to the push and pull of their partners, began to swing from hand to hand; found the lurch and smack in the music and forgot to worry what they must look like or where their feet should be. To be turned and handled so ably rekindled in them all sorts of warmth and kindnesses. The American men seemed amazingly at home in their bodies. No Englishman, thought Sylvia Crouch, could ever dance like that. There was nothing pinched or sour about them and the longer the night went on the more it seemed that everything about these men - their eyes, their hair, their skin - was shining, as if they had been warmed by a brighter sun.

In those few moments when one record was replaced with another and the dancers exchanged a word or two, the women first noticed how strangely the soldiers spoke, as well as the strong smell of apples that came rolling out of them. Not a bad thing to smell of, thought Phyllis. Sort of homely. She was dancing with a big bear of a man and thought it must be the smell of all those American apples seeping through the pores of his skin. It wasn't until the next day that she learnt how the soldiers had called in at the Malsters Arms and, having been warned against drinking the locals out of their precious beer, had asked the landlord to suggest an alternative and that the cider had tasted just like apple juice.

Only two people conspicuously failed to share the sense of intoxication. Watching the mass of bodies writhing around the dance floor, the Reverend Bentley had a vision of himself as a whoremaster, herding the village's womenfolk into the arms of a clearly libidinous gang of men. More profound was the bitterness at work in Howard Kent, whose heart had been the only one to sink among the hundreds soaring when the GIs finally walked through the door. In that instant he was toppled, and any remaining self-esteem was soon jostled out of him. Howard couldn't jitterbug - had no desire to jitterbug - and when he approached the drunken GI at the gramophone, to first insist that he play a barn dance and, twenty minutes later, demand the same, the soldier took him to one side and told him, in a whisper, how close he was to being taken outside and having his teeth kicked down his throat.

Howard leant against a wall and tried to look as if he was overseeing the proceedings, like a contented social secretary, whilst all his rage and pain gnawed away inside of him. He tried clapping his hands in time with the music as the women shrieked and wiggled their backsides, but by half past nine he had had enough, picked up his coat and made his way home.

From his bed he could hear the music wafting up through the village and when, a couple of hours later, he heard the opening chords of the hokey-cokey he was still wide awake. He imagined the great ring of people holding hands, the mad rush into the middle and the women laughing as they were squeezed in the crush. The singing stopped, a cheer went up and, a few moments later, there was the first of a hundred bursting balloons, and Howard comforted himself by imagining each one as a shell waiting to meet the Americans when they were finally shipped out to France.

The Five Boys visit the bee-keeper

The Boys were perfectly insulated in their shed and some distance from the action, but when the Bee King pumped some smoke into the slit at the bottom of the hive there was no mistaking the sudden intensification of sound. It was like an engine revving. The Bee King placed the smoker on the ground, positioned his feet and lifted the hive roof off. Beneath it was a folded blanket, similar to the one he had used to block up the shed door. He laid this on the grass, took up his smoker and, after a couple of prepatory squeezes, pumped an inch or two of mist across the exposed top storey. He stood back and let the smoke sink between the bars, then moved back in and began to dismantle the hive, one floor at a time.

If the bees which enveloped their master were of the subdued variety the Boys could only imagine what sort of mood they would have been in without the smoke, for as soon the hive was opened up the air was thick with them, they rattled off the shed window and gathered in great clumps on the Bee King's jacket and veil. The cottage, visible a minute earlier, was instantly obscured by a gauze of bees. And yet the Bee King seemed to have found his element and moved among them with absolute ease.

As he prised the hive's stacked boxes apart with his tiny crowbar each one gave a sharp creak of dissent, until he had worked his way right down to the basement, and the shell of the hive was piled up on the lawn to his right and the inner boxes were piled up to his left. When he opened that last box he seemed to concentrate his efforts, tapping and tinkering like a mechanic under the bonnet of a motor car. He squeezed some more smoke across its surface, peeled away a think metal cover, dug his little lever into the box's perimeter and released one end of a long rectangular strip. Got his fingers and thumbs under each end, gently lifted it and brought out a living block of bees.

He examined one, then the other and took it over to the Boys in their observation shed.

'First of all,' he said, lifting the bees up to the window, 'we must learn how to read the frame.'

He asked the Boys what they thought they should be looking for, but they were too busy watching the bees as they knitted and fretted - feeling the same peculiar combination of fascination and revulsion stir in them as the day they saw the naked ladies in the magazine.

'Brood and food,' the Bee King said.

He brushed his hands across the bees as if clearing the froth off a glass of ginger beer. Some bees moved aside, some took flight, some clung to his fingers. But the comb was revealed, the colour of cinder toffee and punched full of hexagonal holes. The surface undulated, like a saturated sponge, and here and there it was stained a darker brown, as if it had been singed by the heat of the hive.

'The queen lays her eggs,' the Bee King said, spreading his fingers across the middle of the frame, 'to keep the hive in workers.' He pointed to the corners of the frame. 'The workers put away their stores for a rainy day.'

For such a quiet man the Bee King was being unusually forthcoming.

'We do some maintenance as we go,' he said. 'And if we come across the queen, all well and good. But as long as she keeps laying and the workers keep foraging then the hive is happy.'

He lowered the comb and for a moment the sun managed to penetrate his veil.

'And what do the bees store away that we're so fond of?' he said.

Harvey piped up before he could stop himself.

'Honey,' he called out from the shed.

The Bee King jabbed a blackened finger at him.

'Exactly,' he said.

In all his years under Mrs. Fog's formidable tuition Harvey had never been so quick off the mark and, almost in spite of himself, he felt a smile spread across his face - felt his whole body prickle with pride.

'Honey,' he whispered again.