Read Online Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton - Free Book Online Page B

Dunkirk.”
    “And which of us is going to ask him about that?”
    Abner thought about this and came to the right conclusion.
    “You’re growin’ up a sight too quick for me, son. I can’t keep up with you.”
    The beatings stopped when Harry’s leave stopped, in the January of 1942. Wilderness had no idea where his father spent his embarkation leave, and only knew he had embarked when a postcard arrived that read, “Gone to get me knees brown, Dad,” which was about as close as any serving soldier would ever get to saying he was sailing for North Africa.
    Wilderness had no feelings about this news. His father had gone. He might be killed in battle. He might never be seen again. Or he could return home with whatever vicious flame burned in his brain fanned into a conflagration.
    “When you say you’re going to kill yer Dad, I can’t help but be shocked. Yet when anyone else says it, even as a joke, you just disagree and change the subject,” Abner said.
    “It’s my prerogative,” Wilderness replied.
    “Yer what?
    “My . . . privilege. It’s mine and mine alone. I’m the one he’s beating . . . and . . . besides, do any of us mean it? It says what we feel not what we might do. And . . . Harry’s in combat. There’s a half a million Jerries out in the desert who really do want to kill him.”
    “Like I say, son, I can’t keep up with you. You and yer great big brain. Maybe you should o’ done all them exams arter all.”
    Wilderness said nothing to this. It was too late, and “too late” was not a phrase he wanted to utter.
    §15
    Abner had no time for oxyacetylene cutters. Apart from the inevitable smack of modernity—anathema to a man clinging to the last elusive vestiges of the Edwardian era—it would have altered his entire cracksman’s modus operandi. It was a bulky kit and would have required him to have a van and that would have sacrificed one of his principal tenets—to be able to “have it away on yer toes.”
    The biggest component of Abner’s kit was his Phillips Motor Hammer Impact electric-powered drill—a beast heavy enough that it was only brought out when he had cased a job and decided it was worth the effort. It could bore through steel over three-quarters of an inch thick, hammer into sheet iron, and required both of them to hold it steady.
    They were back in Hampstead, on a rooftop high above Downshire Hill, only yards from Hampstead Heath. It was, against Abner’s habitual practice, a job to be done in darkness—in the February of 1944 when the Luftwaffe had resumed bombing London, and provided him with cover, a blanket of night and noise to smother any sound he made.
    At the south end of the heath was a station of the North London Railway Company, built to feed commuters into the City, into Broad Street, once, in the days when Victorian London was home to a million Mr. Pooters, the busiest railway station in the world. It was their getaway, a twelve-minute swaggard ride almost to their own doorstep—off the train, out the back way to vanish “on their toes” into the narrow streets of Shoreditch and to emerge home and free in Whitechapel.
    London was blacked out every night. The days when people had been more at risk of being run over than bombed had long passed, as an instinctive night-awareness took over. When the sirens whined Wilderness shinned up the soil stack at the back of the house, perched himself on the parapet and lowered a rope to Abner. Abner tied on the bag of tools and Wilderness hauled them to the roof. Abner followed, complaining that he was “too old for this lark.” But, “this lark” had been his choice. They would not be on a rooftop with the searchlights raking the sky above them if the old man were not a hundred per cent sure of what they were after.
    “Over the other side,” he said, pointing with his free hand.
    The top floor of the house appeared to have been turned into some sort of studio. A low-ridged glass atrium spanned the house