Read Online Shoes for Anthony by Emma Kennedy - Free Book Online Page A

chances.’ He reached into the whittling box and took his pick.
    Ade checked the back of his hand. A long, black smudge was smeared across it. ‘Has it gone, Ant?’ he said, looking towards me.
    â€˜Sort of. It’s more Errol Flynn now.’
    â€˜Pilots don’t want to kill
him
, though, do they?’ said Ade. ‘We got anything in the tin?’
    I went to the back of the den and pulled the lid off the old biscuit tin. There was a half-eaten jam sandwich with a few ants on it. I picked it out and flicked the ants off. ‘There you go,’ I said, handing it to him.
    â€˜Ta,’ he said and bit into it.
    â€˜Here they come!’ said Bozo, standing a few feet from the den. He was pointing up into the evening dusk. ‘At least three squadrons.’
    Ade and I scrambled outside. The sky was dappled with a deep pink blush. The birds had stopped calling and over the bottomless quiet of our mountain we heard the first rumble of the aircraft. Mosquito bombers, all in formation. Their snub noses sitting squat between shoulder-mounted wings, twin engines humming, bearing the heart-lifting insignia of the RAF.
    â€˜Where to, d’you reckon?’ said Bozo, face turned upwards.
    â€˜Germany. Must be,’ said Fez, still stripping the bark from his whittling stick. ‘They’ve been on night raids for ages. Ever since Little Blitz.’
    â€˜Yeah, but where in Germany? Get out the atlas, Ant,’ said Bozo, his one good eye locked on the aircraft. ‘Did you know Mozzies are made all from wood. D’you think we could make one? How long do you reckon it would take us to make a plane out of wood?’
    Fez looked at his stripped twig. ‘Dunno.’
    â€˜I made a shove ha’penny board once,’ said Ade, crouching and poking at an ant nest. ‘That took two weeks.’
    Bozo scrunched his face into a ball. ‘Probably take us ages, then. For a plane.’
    Everyone nodded.
    I’d pulled the atlas out from the crate of mountain treasure. The cover was faded blue, with
Colliers World Atlas and Gazetteer
printed across it in broken gold lettering. Many of the pages were missing, either torn out to start fires or ruined by damp. I flicked through to the European section. We’d taken care not to rip out any page of mainland Europe, so that if there was a place mentioned on the
Pathé News
, we could come up to the den and find it.
    â€˜Germany. There you go.’ I placed the atlas down on a patch of moss, and crouched, knees by my ears, to investigate. Bozo sat cross-legged beside me.
    â€˜Flick back to Britain,’ he said. ‘Then we can work out the route.’
    I turned back a few pages and Bozo, seeing Wales, laid his finger on the planes’ starting point. ‘What direction d’you reckon, Fez?’ he said, squinting upwards.
    â€˜More that way this time,’ said Fez, holding his arm out and pointing left.
    Bozo trailed his finger across the page until he reached its edge. I flicked it over for him. ‘Going over the Netherlands, I reckon,’ he said. ‘Might be Belgium. Must be doing a drop over the top end. Hamburg? Berlin?’
    â€˜I bet it’s Berlin,’ said Ade. ‘About time we got ’em back for Cardiff, like.’
    â€˜And London,’ I said, hooking my hands over my knees.
    â€˜Yeah, but mostly Cardiff.’
    We all stood up and watched in silence as the formation faded into the dusk. Fez, as he always did, saluted them for luck. We followed suit and as the planes disappeared beyond the horizon, the deep quiet of our mountain settled back into itself.
    I turned to pick up the atlas and put it back in the treasure box. I felt the wind first, a rush of air through my fringe, and then the noise. I looked up. A Mosquito, no more than fifty feet above our heads, ripped over us with a deafening roar. I clamped my hands to my ears and stared up at the grey underbelly tearing