These Dark Wings Read online

  My face must look the same. I was right all along. There is no doubt.

  Oakes’s secret friend is a German. Oakes is a spy.

  I am frozen, unsure whether to go to Uncle straightaway. They are great friends. He will tell me I am being foolish, that my imagination is running away from me.

  The man definitely had a German accent. And Oakes told him to go back to Germany. If the others see you... He is clearly hiding him, meeting him in secret. Why? Why else, but some kind of plan to aid Germany? Should I go to Sir Claud? Or maybe tell Yeoman Sparks? Surely I must go to Uncle first.

  And if I do – will Oakes kill another bird? Cut off Grip’s head?

  I don’t know. What I do know is that even if I tell him Uncle will not hear it. Even the best people refuse to hear what they don’t want to.

  He won’t believe the truth.

  Monday, 21 October 1940

  I sit on my bench, the ravens scolding loudly, frantic for dinner. My mind races over what to tell Uncle.

  Shocking me out of my daze, Malcolm, Yeoman Brodie’s son and my supposed best mate, slinks towards me. He lowers himself on to the bench. Of course he does not speak.

  ‘Long day at school?’ I ask.

  He shrugs. ‘I suppose so.’

  A raven hops in the distance. I can feel him watching it with his eyes.

  ‘You don’t like them, huh?’

  Malcolm shakes his head vigorously. ‘No. They tear up the grass, kill all the flowers.’

  I look out over the bare Green, the grass dead for the season.

  ‘They rip the putty out of the windows too. It is freezing in my room. We fix it, and they just steal it again. I hope they eat it and get sick.’

  It is the longest sentence I have ever heard him speak.

  A heavy silence falls. I squirm on the bench. Somehow even his muttering is preferable to the silence. Surely dinner is almost ready. One thing I have learned about Malcolm is his love of diamonds. He thinks the ravens are boring but loves diamonds and jewels – almost as much as Timothy Squire loves bombs. The residents of the Tower are strange people indeed.

  ‘I wish I knew more about, you know, the Crown jewels,’ I say, my voice hopelessly flat. He doesn’t seem to notice or care.

  ‘Do you know about the curse of the Koh-i-noor diamond?’ he asks excitedly. When he peers up at you, he looks almost like a goat.

  ‘The what?’ I answer, knowing full well from one of Brodie’s breakfast stories the name of the great diamond put in a brooch for Queen Victoria and then set in the crown of Queen Elizabeth.

  ‘Koh-i-noor – “the Mountain of Light”. Diamonds from the stone can only be used in a crown worn by a woman...’

  Malcolm has plenty of new information as well, and soon I learn that he regrets that the Crown jewels are not here, certain that no ‘secret’ location can be safer than the Tower. But they are here, if you ask Uncle. The ravens are the Crown jewels.

  A figure walks close by – Nell, all bobbed head and lipstick – and I have never been happier to see another person. Silence or this talk of diamonds – I can’t take either for another moment.

  ‘Nell,’ I call, too loudly. She likely doesn’t even know my name.

  She doesn’t seem to know Malcolm’s either, by the look she gives us – two strangers gawking at her from a bench. She is wearing a blouse and short jacket, and navy-blue slacks with broad bottoms. I suddenly feel quite lumpy in my school uniform, which after another week of rations is definitely too big for me.

  Nell walks closer, takes a Player’s from the packet, lights it. Is she working as a firewatcher right now? She doesn’t even have binoculars.

  I am saved from thinking of an appropriate question by a growing sound. A droning. The drone grows louder. Countless dark shapes, like travelling black birds, cover the sun.

  A terrific echo across the sky.

  7

  Stunned by the noise – it makes my knees ache – I look up at the barracks clock. It is only 4.05 p.m. The siren wails. This is a raid.

  The ravens are still out.

  Nell is bolt upright, her narrow shoulders raised, peering into the distance just beyond the turrets. My eyes follow hers. Thirty or forty planes at a great height. Close.

  ‘Hitler thinks he’s going to get me.’ Nell shakes her head contemptuously. She does not call out or raise the alarm. It is too late. Bombers streak out of the clouds. Loud even to numb ears.

  A few peel off and unleash their bombs. I watch as they fall like hammers from the sky. I cannot move. Explosions echo across the river. More planes harden from the clouds. Immediately the docks are on fire, black and red, climbing higher than the cranes. Smoke comes, surging towards the Tower, flooding over the old walls like sudden mist.

  A rush of wings overhead.

  I try to count the crashes; too many. We must get to the shelter. The White Tower shelter, deep underground. But no one moves. I stare up at the barrage balloon, looming in the wind.

  The stone suddenly jumps. A blast fifty feet ahead.

  Another erupts just behind us, sending up a fountain of rock. Suddenly unfrozen, people hurry across the battlements towards the shelter. A Wife curses, a boy yells, Warders call for order. The ocean’s roar of bombs silences everything.

  The Tower is being attacked. We are too late.

  I think of Oakes and the carving in the Salt Tower.

  A map of the night sky.

  With a series of shuddering bursts, shrapnel tears through the Inner Ward. The noise takes me to my knees. With terrible clearness I see a Scots Guard sink to the stone. I drag my gaze from the charred hair, the expressionless face, the sickening leak of blood.

  More planes become visible through the distant clouds, a dozen at least, moving in formation. Everything becomes thunder. I kneel on the shaking stone, numb with terror.

  The ravens.

  Another, closer bang, and all the windows on the Martin Tower shatter, hurling glass towards us. Before my eyes snap shut, the explosion burns into my mind. Weightless, my body pushes forward, over the wet stone. I lie on my stomach, my knees torn, my elbows shredded. A screaming voice, now quiet and distant, finds me: ‘To the shelter!’

  Without the Tower ravens, the kingdom will fall.

  My hands reach out, gripping rock. I blink my eyes open. People run around me, shrieking silently. Another explosion and a Wife in a shawl is thrown six feet in the air, landing in a white heap.

  I try to stand only the blast pulls me to the stone – but at the same time pushes me, trying to force me apart. One of my shoes is gone, the wind hot on my sock foot. When I can I look up, to see a rolling bank of smoke over Salt Tower, twice as tall as the barrage balloon. The Main Guard burns. The stone, the cold bones of the Tower, are on fire.

  I will die here. Burnt in some ancient fortress, away from Maida Vale and the canals, away from Flo, surrounded by the ghosts and ravens and lies. Oh, Mum.

  For an eternity I am lost; eventually I come to my knees. I will not die here. I find my feet, swaying in the hot, scorched air. More bombers snarl in low over the turrets.

  A blue hat vanishes in the flames and smoke, reappearing across the Inner Ward. My eyes cling to it. Lurching forward, I dodge several flaming craters. I can still see him, the Warder, running towards the shelter in the Casemates in the walls. Through the billowing smoke and burning stone, I follow.

  I close my eyes against the heat, trapping the last sight in my mind. Smoke pouring from Salt Tower.

  The daylight raid becomes a night raid. For hours the bombs fall.

  We sit, some on chairs and the wood bench, some on the floor, filling the small room. Twenty-five people, doubled by the heavy shadows from the hurricane lamp. Uncle is here. But where is Timothy Squire?

  No one goes to the electric kettle, and the newspapers lie unread. No one brings out the playing cards or takes aim at Hitler’s pocked face on the dartboard. No one moves.

  Dust slows my breathing and there is a crunch
ing ache in my head. I think of the flames roaring outside, engulfing the Salt Tower.

  Malcolm looks up at me. His voice is calm. ‘I wonder how many of us will be alive in the morning?’

  I say nothing. All I can think of is the Scots Guard, dying outside; the Wife, likely dying too. Others – how many others?

  Uncle squeezes my hand. I am glad he is here. I must tell him I didn’t have time to put the ravens in their cages. Should I have brought them in here?

  A long ago image flashes in my mind, of the old man with the budgie at the school shelter, and deep, wild laughter threatens me. Instead I cough, hiding my face in my sleeve.

  Malcolm speaks again, his voice eerily calm. ‘Is it the invasion?’

  We all pretend not to hear.

  Clearly I can picture the NAAFI girls, laughing and serving coffee at the canteen. What will happen to them? And Timothy Squire. Where is he? In the White Tower shelter, of course. Even he is not so foolish as to go hunting for bombs during a raid. Timothy Squire died in the fire. Who would lie about that?

  And if this is finally the poison bomb raid? Will we be safe in here? My gas mask is under my bed with a cowering mouse. The ravens too must be terrified. No, I must think of something else. I look around. Uncle sits with Mr Brodie. Miss Breedon is here too, much older now and not nearly as pretty. No one else seems to have their masks either.

  The Salt Tower was hit. A direct hit.

  Hew Draper was not the sorcerer. It is Oakes. He has arranged all of this – Oakes and the German.

  ‘There will be a second wave,’ Brodie is saying. ‘First they drop hundreds of the small bombs and wait for the emergency crews to come and put out the fires. Then the second wave attacks, this time delivering high explosives.’

  No, those were not small bombs. I can still hear the thrashing outside. Some giant blind elephant, trampling us.

  Mr Brodie leans in to me, smiles.

  ‘You know, my dear, there are more than forty million people in Great Britain. Forty million, think of it. Even if the Jerries were better shots than they are, what are the chances of any one of us getting hit? Very small, indeed.’

  I cannot look up, I cannot face him. The wild, gusting laughter is still inside me.

  ‘It’s not fear, you know,’ Mr Brodie goes on. ‘That feeling – that shaky, sick feeling. It’s not fear. It happens to everyone during a raid.’

  I can’t hear any more consoling words about people being ‘nervy’. I look down, my reactions still slow and dazed, and notice that the sock on my foot is striped red. Rolling down the thin wool, I find small spears of glass and much blood. Uncle takes down the first-aid box, wraps a bandage numerous times all round my foot. He dabs my elbows and knees with a towel; the cuts are minor.

  ‘That better, dear?’ he asks in a loud, slow voice and I nod. My ears buzz and ring. Uncle turns to the others, asking if everyone is all right.

  Miss Breedon seems not to have heard him – or anything. She just stares at the floor, the dreadful sounds trembling around her.

  Another night in the shelter. Like a new moon the bombs have returned. How can we ever believe they will stop?

  I wake some hours later, aware of movement. It is Mr Brodie, stalking across the room, the heels of his heavy feet stomping in the silence. I think of Mum, pacing the kitchen, listening to the wireless. She always did that, from the day the war started. She was afraid, I know.

  Yeoman Brodie sees me, slows to a stop, gives an apologetic smile. But it is Uncle who speaks.

  ‘We are safe here, Anna,’ he says.

  The night wears on, the raid now too loud for us to speak. Curdled and burnt, yet somehow still sweet, come the smells of the burning NAAFI canteen. The tea. As the night wears on the scent shifts from food, so carefully rationed, to the tobacco stores. And then things harder to burn – tables, beams, walls – mixed with the sudden and strong reek of urine.

  Why are there no chamber pots in here? I remember once, we spent the whole night in the (already rusting) Anderson shelter, and Mum refused to take me inside to use the loo. Then at least it was summer. No, it couldn’t have been; it felt like it, though, with warm night air and crickets in the hedge. Not like this, frozen and starved and smelling burning food all around us.

  The bombs still fall, so close. I won’t die here. With dust in my lungs and my ears whistling and my stomach empty. Without knowing what really happened to Mum, without finding out the truth.

  And then it comes, simple as a great knock. I close my eyes, let my breath go.

  Got you.

  It is not a bomb, though. It is a knock, a knock on the shelter door.

  Faces look round in confusion. Who could be out there in this? The German wouldn’t bother to knock. A stone, loosened by a falling bomb, crashing against the shelter? The invasion?

  Uncle steps forward. He opens the door. Someone has been outside, knocking on the shelter door, and now he stumbles inside. It is not a German soldier.

  ‘Timothy Squire,’ comes Uncle’s startled voice. ‘But... my God... I thought you were in the shelter with your father.’

  He is breathing hard. ‘I was.’

  My gaze must give something away, as everyone is now looking at me, including Timothy Squire.

  ‘Magpie.’

  He moves towards the back of the room, sits across from me. Timothy Squire’s question is as foolish as his grinning face.

  ‘Well, now. Did you see those fireworks?’

  Nobody yells, or warns him of his stupidity, or promises punishment. Not now. The only question I hear is one asked by Malcolm many hours ago. How many of us will be alive in the morning?

  I know too that this is why Timothy Squire is here. I feel something, a shuffling. I pull my hand free of the blanket, and he grips it tightly. You could see my smile in the dark. If this is the invasion, we are ready.

  Eventually, the raid is over, and time moves forward again. The All Clear, high and piercing, releases its hold.

  We are alive, all of us. Uncle stands and pushes open the heavy door.

  ‘Mind how you go, love,’ he says, peering into the night. ‘There’s glass everywhere.’

  ‘You have to be so careful,’ someone says. ‘If a gas mains is busted somewhere, a great explosion will not be far behind.’ I glance behind me. I didn’t see Miss Breedon leave, but she must have.

  A haze of tobacco clouds and sailing debris dulls the flag atop the White Tower. Salt Tower is charred yet standing. Warders move among the splintered wood and clumps of stone, their uniforms grimy and grey. And above, somehow, a quiet sky littered with stars.

  The thick dust makes me dizzy, and the whistle in my ears seems to grow and strengthen. My mind focuses on one thought. Maybe the ravens did know. The human spotters didn’t see them coming. That is not possible, though, surely. ‘Ravens are attuned to the sky,’ Uncle said. It is another voice that pulls me back into the present.

  ‘That was kicks.’

  I look back towards the flag. Smoke curls up from the Green, black smoke. Something, deep down, tells me the truth.

  I have failed them.

  Without the ravens, the kingdom will fall.

  Tuesday, 22 October 1940

  A Scots Guard and a Wife were killed in the bombing.

  I saw them both.

  I could not have helped them.

  The birds, though, I could have helped. Edgar and Merlin – both dead. Shrapnel, Uncle said. I did not see the bodies. If I had just taken a moment to lure them inside, next to the shelter of the White Tower... would they have survived? It is a dreadful thought so I do not think it. Still it runs through my head.

  Always there have been six ravens at the Tower.

  Cora hops towards me, tilting an inquisitive head. Whether she can smell it or just sense it, I don’t know. With a smile I pull out the twopenny chocolate from my pocket, breaking off a piece for each of us. She takes it, almost lightly, from my fingers.

  The rest, though, is mine.
She can have the wrapper. Days of burying and digging there. It is only us now, Cora. You, me and Grip. Everyone else has left us.

  I sit heavily on the bench. The air is thick with drifting soot.

  Many were injured, some quite badly. Dark smoke still clings to the ramparts. My head throbs and I fear that I will go deaf. But I am alive. For today, I am alive. I say a few silent words for the lost Scots Guard and Wife, and for the lost birds.

  Goodbye, Edgar and Merlin.

  Nothing feels warm enough. The sun itself is cold. And the ravens are dying – there is not enough food. Both have grown smaller; especially Cora, always the smallest. We are all starving.

  Settled dust glows a faint red. The hammers are loud – fixing windows, rebuilding walls. Why, if Hitler is beginning his invasion?

  ‘As long as they’re bombing, we know they’re not coming to invade. When they stop coming from the sky, I’ll start looking to the sea,’ said Mr Brodie at breakfast.

  In the Great War, we learned at school, the French drove out the Germans. This time, it took Hitler less than a month to reach Paris. People weren’t ordered to evacuate, yet the entire city fled, pouring from their homes in motor cars, on bicycles, on foot, blocking the roads our troops were trying to use to reach the city and defend it. Hitler walked into an empty city.

  Where will they land? They must cross the sea, of course. Many people say the Germans will come from Ireland. And then?

  To watch the snaking river is to constantly see their arrival, a sudden forming of soldiers from the mist. I see them now. They will come up the Thames, and we will not be ready. Everyone will flock to the bank to fight, old Mr Fraser and the rest of the Home Guard.

  And what will we do? Uncle, Timothy Squire, two croaking ravens, and me?

  Friday, 25 October 1940

  ‘I think today is the day.’

  While the voice belongs to Timothy Squire, the costume surely belongs to his father. Or grandfather. Today, instead of the checked cap, Timothy Squire sports an old golf cap. I am still used to the boy in the school uniform. His coat is the same, though, heavy and oversized.