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Authors: Joanna Rossiter
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explosion, just a
bludge
-like
thud on the parsonage roof.
‘Don’t move,’ Father
cautioned us. ‘It’s a delayed-release bomb. The Canadians at the camp warned
me about them. It won’t detonate until it’s disturbed.’
‘We must send word, give the others a
warning!’ cried Mama.
‘We can’t. It could be on the
roof but it may have fallen ontothe lawn. And I can’t risk
lighting a lantern to look. We must wait until morning.’
‘We can’t just sit here!’
Freda protested. But Father told her we didn’t have much choice.
When, finally, the night came to an end, he
climbed the cellar steps gingerly and inspected the garden. The bomb was nowhere to be
found. The thought of it nestling among the roof tiles, digging its heels in ready for
the explosion, made my stomach curl. He sent for two soldiers from the army camp and
they climbed up a ladder to disarm it. Just as they were about to make it safe, the bomb
dislodged and rolled down the roof with a rumble reminiscent of the tanks on the Plain.
We watched it drop – all of us – knowing that we had no time to run.
As it landed on the metal of the wheelbarrow
it let out the murkiest of notes, like the mangled clank of a broken bell. There was no
explosion, only an echo. I shut my eyes, expecting to be consumed by flying matter.
We waited, muscles clenched, but the bang
never came. I thought of the Coronation party at Imber Court – how we had all stood
around the bonfire and sung ‘God Save The King’ for George VI and watched,
blithely, as a barrel of tar dislodged from the top and rolled – poker hot and flaming –
into the crowd. As quick as a flash, Albie Nash grabbed a rug from a nearby table and
threw it over the barrel. Then we all laughed, fear dissipating as quickly as the
barrel’s flames.
Perhaps if that first bomb had gone off, we
would have grasped sooner what it was that was enveloping us. But the war remained in
its cask – a threat but never quite an explosion. We found ourselves being eased into
each new peril as if it were no more daunting than that single drum of flaming tar: a
small, conquerable danger that simply required smothering.
CHAPTER 6
We are alone with our own thirst. The sight
of the sea soon becomes too much: void of rescue and empty of anything drinkable.
Everything is easier with your eyes shut.
We lie, like two wings of a butterfly, on
top of his roof. I shake him once, to check he’s still conscious, and he bats me
away as he would a fly. The lines on his face seem as deep as the trough of our wave.
They press together, then pull apart again as he breathes, and I think of the folds in
an accordion. In my head I give him three children: two boys and a girl – the youngest.
His house, before the wave hit, had ice-blue walls, a vegetable patch at the back,
maybe, and a view of the ocean. Perhaps, if we survive, he’ll move up the hill to
a place where he can’t see it, where he’s high enough up to be out of its
reach.
And there was no more sea
.
That’s what it says at the end of the Bible when Heaven comes down from the sky as
a city. When my grandmother died, Mum read it to me: I think she thought I’d like
to know where Nana had gone. I was disappointed, though, to find out there was no sea in
Heaven. To me, it smelt of Saturdays and Sundays and water so cold that it made me
shriek with glee.
But now I see. Useless liquid is all it is.
Liquid you can’t even drink. A surface that’s too changeable to inhabit, too
fluid to be called home. A substance that can muscle into everything you build – wipe it
out as if it were nothing more than chalk on a blackboard.
My grandmother wasn’t like Mum; Mum
kept her sadness buried in her face. But Nana told me things – things Mum only spoke
about with her eyes. She would have liked James. Jamesnever ran out of
things to say, stories to tell, questions to ask. Imber, the war, all the things that
Mum had seen, I heard about them only from Nana. She’d
bludge
-like
thud on the parsonage roof.
‘Don’t move,’ Father
cautioned us. ‘It’s a delayed-release bomb. The Canadians at the camp warned
me about them. It won’t detonate until it’s disturbed.’
‘We must send word, give the others a
warning!’ cried Mama.
‘We can’t. It could be on the
roof but it may have fallen ontothe lawn. And I can’t risk
lighting a lantern to look. We must wait until morning.’
‘We can’t just sit here!’
Freda protested. But Father told her we didn’t have much choice.
When, finally, the night came to an end, he
climbed the cellar steps gingerly and inspected the garden. The bomb was nowhere to be
found. The thought of it nestling among the roof tiles, digging its heels in ready for
the explosion, made my stomach curl. He sent for two soldiers from the army camp and
they climbed up a ladder to disarm it. Just as they were about to make it safe, the bomb
dislodged and rolled down the roof with a rumble reminiscent of the tanks on the Plain.
We watched it drop – all of us – knowing that we had no time to run.
As it landed on the metal of the wheelbarrow
it let out the murkiest of notes, like the mangled clank of a broken bell. There was no
explosion, only an echo. I shut my eyes, expecting to be consumed by flying matter.
We waited, muscles clenched, but the bang
never came. I thought of the Coronation party at Imber Court – how we had all stood
around the bonfire and sung ‘God Save The King’ for George VI and watched,
blithely, as a barrel of tar dislodged from the top and rolled – poker hot and flaming –
into the crowd. As quick as a flash, Albie Nash grabbed a rug from a nearby table and
threw it over the barrel. Then we all laughed, fear dissipating as quickly as the
barrel’s flames.
Perhaps if that first bomb had gone off, we
would have grasped sooner what it was that was enveloping us. But the war remained in
its cask – a threat but never quite an explosion. We found ourselves being eased into
each new peril as if it were no more daunting than that single drum of flaming tar: a
small, conquerable danger that simply required smothering.
CHAPTER 6
We are alone with our own thirst. The sight
of the sea soon becomes too much: void of rescue and empty of anything drinkable.
Everything is easier with your eyes shut.
We lie, like two wings of a butterfly, on
top of his roof. I shake him once, to check he’s still conscious, and he bats me
away as he would a fly. The lines on his face seem as deep as the trough of our wave.
They press together, then pull apart again as he breathes, and I think of the folds in
an accordion. In my head I give him three children: two boys and a girl – the youngest.
His house, before the wave hit, had ice-blue walls, a vegetable patch at the back,
maybe, and a view of the ocean. Perhaps, if we survive, he’ll move up the hill to
a place where he can’t see it, where he’s high enough up to be out of its
reach.
And there was no more sea
.
That’s what it says at the end of the Bible when Heaven comes down from the sky as
a city. When my grandmother died, Mum read it to me: I think she thought I’d like
to know where Nana had gone. I was disappointed, though, to find out there was no sea in
Heaven. To me, it smelt of Saturdays and Sundays and water so cold that it made me
shriek with glee.
But now I see. Useless liquid is all it is.
Liquid you can’t even drink. A surface that’s too changeable to inhabit, too
fluid to be called home. A substance that can muscle into everything you build – wipe it
out as if it were nothing more than chalk on a blackboard.
My grandmother wasn’t like Mum; Mum
kept her sadness buried in her face. But Nana told me things – things Mum only spoke
about with her eyes. She would have liked James. Jamesnever ran out of
things to say, stories to tell, questions to ask. Imber, the war, all the things that
Mum had seen, I heard about them only from Nana. She’d
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