THAT was the night a stick of landmines got the British Home Stores, the Salvation Army and the Surrey towpath just beside the bridge.
"Get your head down, mate," said my grandmother, who believed bad luck always came in threes, after we heard the first one. Not that there was much point in getting it lower as we were under the Morrison anyway, but I pressed my head farther into the pillow. It smelt of wakefulness. The second and third straddled us, the one with a great crash and splintering roar like the first, and the other with a duller impact.
"I hope the bleeders haven’t got anything important," said my grandmother.
By important she meant Layton’s the butcher’s and Elliot’s Wet Dry and Fried and Jack Wells’ the greengrocer’s. I hoped they hadn’t got Annenberg’s toyshop in King Street.
I stuck my head out of the Morrison to look at my grandfather. He was sprawled asleep in an armchair, and there was half a glass of brown on the piano by him. My grandmother pulled me back in again.
"He can risk his neck if he likes, but we’re going to stay under here until the all clear goes, aren’t we, mate ?" she said.
I stayed under. She used to give me evaporated milk with porridge for my breakfast, and some out of her own sugar ration. Still, I liked Dandy just as much. He used to give me sips out of his brown when Nannie wasn’t looking, and he didn’t used to talk so much as she did, and when he did he said interesting things, and he’d swear, and we’d both laugh about it, and Nannie would be very angry.
They’d hit the Salvation Army once before. They seemed to have it in for the Salvation Army. An HE bomb had racketed across the house like a lorry flat-out, and when Dandy came in he said to my Dad:
"Stan, come and have a look at the Salvation Army."
When they came back they told us the front was still standing just like it had always done, but behind it there was a hole big enough to put a bus in. I wondered why they wanted to put a bus in it.
One of the landmines on this night really finished it off, the Salvation Army. On my way to school in the morning I saw there was not even the front left now, and they could get more buses in the hole: I got under a rope round it and looked for things until a man shouted at me to get out. It wasn’t very interesting anyway.
I picked up five pieces of shrapnel between there and the British Home Stores, one of them nearly too big to get in my pocket.
The British Home Stores was much more exciting, liút there were a lot of people there, police and the Heavy Rescue and firemen and ARP wardens and others just standing about. All the things they sold were just lying around, clothes all torn and tins and shiny stands and shoes all mixed up. The hole was not so big as the Salvation Army, and some bits of walls were still standing. I tried to work out where the toy counter had been, but couldn’t see any toys anywhere.
Lots of kids were late that morning, or didn’t come. Miss didn’t shout at anyone who was late, though, and she didn’t give us Arithmetic, which was good. Sheila Flynn in our class had got cut by glass that night (she lived over the shops in King Street just opposite the British Home Stores), and a kid in another class got killed, they said at playtime. I didn’t know him, but Ted did, he said, though I think he was just swanking. I swapped him four pieces of shrapnel for the fins of an incendiary bomb only slightly bent. Miss read us stories, and we had singing, and a kip in the afternoon like the infants. And she gave everyone a stick of codliveroil and malt, not just the skinny kids as usual. Other days I hated Miss, but that day she was my best teacher.
My Mum and my Dad (this was early days in the war, before he got called up) were in already when I got home from school. They said the coppers sent them home. They’d both been on firewatching that night where they worked in Northumberland Avenue, and when they went down towards the river a copper stopped them and said:
"Where d’you think you’re going ?"
"For our breakfast," they said.
"Oh no you’re not," the copper told them, "you’re going home. There’s an unexploded landmine on Hungerford Bridge."
And they went back and saw it from the top of their building before the soldiers cleared it. It was a great round black thing with spikes sticking out of it and it was hanging by its parachute from the bridge. It was some night, they said, an oilbomb had hit the buildings opposite and they’d had to help there as well.
Me and my Dad walked down to the river, over Hammersmith Bridge and along the towpath to where the third landmine had come down. They’d roped the hole oíl’there, too, and the towpath was cut off. It had blown the stones of the bank right out for yards and yards, and the water had flooded into the hole. I was more sorry about not being able to go for a walk along the towpath towards Barnes with my Dad than about either the British Home Stores or the Salvation Army’s.

* * *

It was funny coming back again, like being away for years even though it was really only for less than eighteen months. I mean, you get settled down to things, even if they are rotten, don’t you. And then you don’t want to leave, really, or at least the good things and the bad things are so mixed up together that you don’t know whether to be sad you’re leaving the good things and glad that you’re leaving the bad, in a way. Which is more important, that is, the sadness or the being glad. And then there’s not knowing whether what’s coming is going to be worse than what you’ve got now, however bad it is.
Anyhow, they’d evacuated us for the second time, this time from the buzzbombs and the Vas. Not that it was much use in our case, not far enough from London, that is, only thirty miles, for in the first week we had more pepper us round High Wycombe than my Mum wrote and told me they’d had at Hammersmith. But perhaps she was only writing that to make me feel better. That was the worst part of it, not so much missing them, but thinking that they were in danger that I wasn’t, that they might be killed and I would be left.
The train had lots of other kids on it, who’d been evacuated farther than us, all on their way back to London. Mrs. Bailey’s house backed on to the railway, and she waved as we passed, and I waved back, and wanted to blow her a kiss but didn’t because of being in front of the other kids. I met a kid called Alan that I’d been on the coach with coming down. A man came and spoke to us, mainly to Alan, writing down things in a little book. I suppose he was a reporter. We stood out in the corridor all the time because there were no seats anywhere.
I saw Keep Hill as we went past, and could just see the old chalkpit. I’d played a lot there. I’d had some good times at High Wycombe, I thought. I’d told Mrs. Bailey that I wouldn’t have minded finishing my education off in High Wycombe, but now I thought I’d rather be with my Mum than any old foster-mother. But I could always come back down again, and go and play on old Keep Hill again, and ru$h down the chalkpit, and go sledging. Leaving my sledge behind was one of the sad things, too. Mrs Bailey’s husband had made them before the war, before he snuffed it, beautiful jobs they were. He worked in one of the furniture factories and had polished the runners with beeswax so that they would run over smooth grass on the slopes. Never used them on snow, there never was any snow while I was down there, but you could use them whenever the weather was dry, on grass. Lots of kids had them in High Wycombe, I suppose it was because of all the chair factories, the runners were really chair backs.
Mrs. Bailey’s had velvet curtains and books about scouts and a piano in the front room that was never used. Next door there was a stuckup boy who never had a hair out of place and who was held up as an example to me. He played the violin, to crown it all. Sometimes I used to bump into him going to our bog, which was outside back to back with theirs, next to the coalshed. Whenever I knew he was in there I used to fart as loudly as I could (I could fart when I liked, then) until I heard him tut disgustedly and tear off the paper. He had a sneer on his face all the time, and went to the Grammar at the same time as I failed the eleven plus. I used to get on with his Grandad though, and he used to take me to his Pigeon Club where we would ring the birds with a sort of stretching machine, put them in big wicker cages, and take them to the railway station to be sent off.
One of the little kids in the carriage next to where we were standing was sick, and Alan and me closed the door and held it so’s to keep the smell away from us and the kids yelled and bashed on the glass the other side.
You could see it building up to London, the fields getting filled up with more and more houses, then we were there. I’d never been to Paddington before, but it smelt of home, the station smelt exciting. Alan and me made arrangements to see each other again that week that we both knew we wouldn’t keep.
I’d never been to Paddington before, but it was certainly London, and it smelt of home.

* * *

I watched my mother as she walked across the grey playground. I was annoyed because I could not write verse more easily on graphpaper : it seemed illogical.
My mother was coming to see the Head because I had slashed my wrist during a History lesson, and she looked very smart.
Doug wrote something obscene and funny on a piece of paper, and edged it towards me with Durell’s Geometry. I tried not to laugh. Gus saw us, and, without interrupting his measured ílow of wearied instruction, threw a piece of chalk. It hit the boy behind Doug. Still talking, Gus walked slowly up between the desks, retrieved his chalk, and gently crumbled it into Doug’s hair. The class giggled. Doug looked sheepish. No one could look sheepish quite so well as Doug.
By now my mother would have passed through the green doors with their vicious springs, have passed along the stone corridors haunted by the overpopulated schoolgroup photographs, and have reached the Head’s room.
"Hello, Mrs. Johnson," the Head would be saying, "It’s so good of you to come." And he would be smiling his parents’ smile.
Gus was grimly annoyed; he concentrated on every syllable. I sat quite alone within myself, thinking of Doug’s suddenly white hair: Gus had killed him for me.
Now they wouId be comparing what they imagined to be my reasons, and then they would decide to tell me not to do it again: they always told me not to do things again.
I was sorry that it had happened in Mr. Ballantyne’s class, for I respected him; but when the mounting fears had reached high into my mind, the impulse could not be denied. Under the skin, just before the blood rushed across, I saw a blue, firm substance, and wondered detachedly what it was. Then I found that I could not stop the bleeding. The blood soaked all my handkerchief very quickly, and so Mr. Ballantyne had to know.
He lent me his own large blue handkerchief and took me to the Head’s room. The impulse had been so spontaneous that I had not foreseen any event after it, and it was some moments before I had adjusted myself to the situation: then the Head seemed to personify something against which I must struggle, and someone from whom I should withhold myself.
"Why did you do it, Johnson ?" he asked.
Must there be a reason ? I thought.
"I don’t know, sir," I replied.
It was Jo, of course, Jo. Or, rather, her parents.
Jo’s religion was not mine; not that I ever had one, really, though I suppose the C. of E. include me when they tot up their millions. And Jo’s parents would not let me see her.
"If I was very ill, desperately ill," she said to me that "they’d have to let me see you, wouldn’t they ?"
Her house had a drive, whereas ours did not even have a front garden. She walked away from me, shuflling her feet in dead leaves, small and lovely and unmadeup, her hair wild.
"I’ll send for you if I have pneumonia," Jo had turned and called. I watched her out of sight. For the first time I knew there were forces stronger than me and over which I had not the slightest control. Surely this was not how it would always be ?
"Come, come, Johnson," the Head coaxed.
"I don’t know, sir," I repeated.
I would not actually commit suicide, I had thought, but I would just see what the pain was like, of a razorblade cutting my flesh. Whether it was worse than the pain of not having Jo.
The Head was contrivedly kind and serious. He would write to my mother, and I was not to do it again; if I did I would have to see a doctor. I felt panic for a moment, as I thought of being shut up in a mental home like Banstead, which I had seen when we visited friends near there. He took the razorblade holder from me, and asked Mr. Ballantyne to attend to the wound.
Perhaps the Head would remember me now:
"Ah, yes, Johnson. The boy who slashed his wrist during one of Ballantyne’s lessons on the French Revolution," he might say, possibly in the staffroom to other teachers, or to strangers at a sherry-party. But he might be used to schoolboys with self inflicted injuries: the interview had not seemed to disquieten him very much. The thought that I was not original even in this respect made me feel yet more depressed.
"Why did you do it, Johnson ?" Mr. Ballantyne asked.
"I don’t know, sir."
Doug asked to go out to the bogs. When he came back he had brushed the chalkdust out of his hair. Gus set some work. Doug grinned at me, alive again, as soon as Gus’s attention was away from us.
I watched my mother as she walked back across the grey playground. They always told me not to do it again. Surely this was not how it would always be? The graphpaper did not matter a damn, and the poem was for Jo.

* * *

If you look closely enough you can see the vicemarks where Bob straightened it after something had fallen on it in the shed. Its accuracy had been further impaired when a lodged bullet had once been drilled out. Bob had done that as well, saying with a grin afterwards that it was now a point two-three rook rifle.
Betty was a finer judge of its inconsistencies than ever I was. Particularly I once remember firing repeatedly and unsuccessfully at a piece of glass which she then smashed first shot. But I hit a rabbit first. It was late one evening, the best time, in the summer, on holiday in Devon, and we came upon it unexpectedly round a hedge at the foot of a beech hanger. I felt Betty’s excitement as we saw it together, and had to steady myself before firing.
The rabbit jumped and fell.
I ran to it, laying down the rifle. It was on one side, kicking itself round in circles, hit through the haunches, its front legs scratching the turf, its hind legs paralysed. It was a young one, only partly grown. I stood looking down at it.
You have to hit them in the back of the neck, I thought, but could not bring myself to pick it up. I tried to kick it in the neck, but this only made the rabbit kick more wildly, and behind me I heard Betty’s indrawn breath. I felt my eyes contract and smart. Dropping on one knee I picked up the rabbit by the ears and hit it sharply. Blood spattered out, all over the front of my trousers. Once was not enough, and I had to hit it twice more before it was finally dead. I threw it down and turned away, back on my heels, my head between my hands, feeling at once absurdly melodramatic but uncontrollably moved.
The stock is smooth apart from being scored just above the heel, and old brown as walnut sherry. The barrel is rustpocked and vicemarked in places, but otherwise retains something of its original patina. The edge of the breech is sculpted sharp through a quarter-circle, where the cartridge extractor spring of the bolt impinges. — BELGIUM. THE IMPROYED NEW CENTURY RIFLE — it says along the top of the barrel, slightly off centre, and across the breech Modèle—1912 Breveté—SGDG. There’s a number — 334766 — under the barrel, and some odd cabalistic marks on the boltlever and to the left of the backsight. It breaks very neatly, the rook rille, into stock and barrel, and is secured in use by one blind folding wing bolt; when broken it is said to be capable of being concealed, one part down each trouserleg, for poaching.
It is light and easy to hold and fire with my right hand only in a pistol-grip. Without any awkwardness, I can reach the trigger easily whlst pointing the rook rifle at my forehead. Which is a comfort.
Betty’s father was Chicker Mills. He kept greyhounds and he used to call me Brindle, behind my back usually but to my face when he wanted to gyp me. He had one very good greyhound, a bitch called Sarah, who used to run and often win at the flapping tracks, the unofficial tracks that is. She was so good they decided to breed her, and as soon as she’d had the puppies the whole house was disorganized. I reckon they were glad I took up so much of Betty’s time, because they had little themselves for her then. It was like her parents having quads. They even called them by human names-Tommy, George, Tex, and the bitch Gloria, the runt of the litter.
I’ll allow they had bad luck with them. Tex, the biggest and apparently the strongest of the lot ("We call him Texas ‘cos he’s big," Chicker told me three times, on successive visits, laughing more each time, knowing he’d told me before), Tex died of some puppy ailment before he reached six months. George was strange right from the start : Mrs. Mills used to call him dopey and stupid, but I think that dog was an intellectual, too bloody clever to be fooled into chasing any lump of fur, got up to look like a hare, on an electric monorail. Anyway, George got himself put away, not long after he was sent to kennels for training with the other two : they said he had fits, but I personally think that that dog had a brains~orm when ‘he realized he was never going to be able to fu 1 himself.
Tommy’s first race was just a farce: his racing name was Chicker’s Choice, and afterwards I thought (but daren’t say so to a potential father-in-law) that it ought to have been Chicker’s Charlie. Chicker, of course, swears that the handler gave Tommy’s bollocks a twist and a pull as he put him into the trap, but it wasn’t true: the dog was just dead idle. He ambled out of the trap, glanced amusedly at the others disappearing round the first bend, and trotted back behind the traps to catch the hare as it came round to the start again. Tommy was a great lollopy slummocky dog, a pet dog, so lazy that he’d roll over on his back and wave a paw at the place he wanted you to scratch for him.
Then there was only one thing which could happen: romantically, melodramatica.lly, it must be the runt Gloria who was going to fulfil the splendid Sarah’s promise. They gave her every sort of rich food, and it was rationed then, building her up they called it, while Betty and I scratched around for bread and cheese after we came back from the pictures or the Kingston Empire. Gloria had her first race at Wandsworth Stadium, and Betty and I went along, completely won over by her parents’ certainty. Chicker had a word with her trainer before the racing started, and then came back to us.
"She’s going straight in," he said, both thumbs up and his mouth pouted in confidence. I went and put ten bob on Chicker’s Smeetheart with the least villainous bookie I could see. At this time I was seventeen and earning three pounds for five and a half days a week at the National Provincial Bank in Hammersmith: ten shillings therefore represented the best part of a day’s pay to me.
It wasn’t as though if all the others had fallen over she’d have caught them up: she must have trailed by fifteen yards coming out of the second corner, and they’d taken the dummy hare away from the others when she finally got there.
Betty’s parents kept this sweetshop in a Kingston back street, the corner shop in a workingclass area. When I first saw where she lived I said to Doug I thought she’d be easy, but she wasn’t, she was extremely middleclass in all ways, the good and the bad. Her mother made toíl’ee apples, and she occasionally managed to let us have sweets even though we’d used our points for that month.
I liked her father, in a grudging sort of way, for he was really resentful of his daughter loving me and took every chance of humiliating me, of showing up my immaturity. He told Betty that she’d have dozens like me before she settled down; he was wrong in that, she had only one after me, she married the first one with money after me, who never had money in my life.
Chicker used to drive a pony and trap during the petrol rationing, black picked out with yellow the trap was. He was a highly skilled engineer, and would work at a job for a couple of years, then live on what he’d saved until it ran out, before finding another job, as he always could.
There was a pub over the road called The Helping Neighbour, which Chicker used to call The Whelp in Labour, kept by a retired musichall comic who tiredly sat in a corner of his bar and made very funny remarks. Some nights there were fights outside and once I saw a man with appalling gashes on the back of his neck from a broken glass. I had a motorbike then, and used to kiss Betty goodnight opposite the outside Gents’ of this pub, under sodium lighting, and then belt off straight up Kingston Hill.
I think it was three summers Betty and I went down to Devon on holiday.
It was dusk, and Betty was on the far side of this field, I forget why, when I saw a large sandy rabbit squatting low on the other side of a grassy crater, near a hedge. In my eagerness to reach a good firing position, I stumbled in some sand and fell awkwardly. The rifle went off: the bolt often gives trouble, for sometimes it sticks and sometimes, in a certain segment of its circumference, it will, when cocked, slip and fire of its own accord. I swore as I got up, and, looking across, expected to see the rabbit running away; to my surprise it still sat there, squatting low as before. I hastily pulled back the bolt, ejecting the spent cartridge case, thrust another bullet into the breech, brought the rifle up to my shoulder and fired. The rabbit still remained squatting. Puzzled, I quickly re-loaded, and, walking closer, fired again; this time I was certain I hit it: I was near enough to see the rabbit blink immediately after I had fired. Incredulous by then, I walked right up to it and saw that I had hit it at least once: there was a bluish hole in its flank towards the tail and low down. The rabbit stared ahead with immense eyes. I started to re-load once more, unconsciously, but then I stared closer at the rabbit’s eyes: around them was a seething mass of vermin, and as I glanced at the head and the rest of the body I saw that it was infested all over. That was why the rabbit had sat there unmoving, waiting for death from disease, living death so patiently. The horror of it came upon me, making me feel like vomiting, and something like revulsion and compassion together choked in my throat and made me close my eyes and turn away. I recovered in a moment, and shot the bolt of the rifle home decisively: I brought the foresight to within eighteen inches of the rabbit’s head, and fired. The bullet made a hole of its own diameter on the nearer side: but when it came out the other side it took most of that half of the head with it. Appalled by another kind of horror, I watched as the blood flushed over the edges of the smashed bone and across the mass of grey-white brain, welled over the soft fur down on to the grass.
Betty came up, asking what all the shooting had been about. I could not tell her of my intense sorrow for the sick rabbit, of its patient wait for diseased death, of its resignation in the face of the danger of the rifle; and of my own disgust with myself. I felt suddenly that I must bury the rabbit. I murmured this, but Betty did not quite hear me, and pestered me until I had repeated it savagely. She took offence at my unreasonableness, and said that I was being maudlin and sentimenta!.
"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!" I said.
I picked up the body by its one whole ear, carefully, and began to walk towards the hedge; blood, rheum, brain, and lymph dripped down my leg and over my right shoe, and before I had moved a few feet the ear dissevered itself from the shattered skull. Shaking my head in despair and selfdisgust at this further horror, I picked up the body by the head in both hands and ran to thé hedge with it, wandering up and down until I found a hole under the wind-exposed roots of a hawthorn. I felt I wanted to protect the rabbit from further injury, to hide it from crows and foxes. I shuddered as I remembered the parasites, and was sorry that I could not do anything about them. I pushed the rabbit into the hole, and covered the entrance with sand and stones.
Betty stood and watched me sullenly, and before I had finished she walked off alone towards the lane. I rose from my knees, and followed her. All the way home we did not speak.
The bullets fascinate me. They have dull copper cartridge cases, and soft, ugly, lead bluntnosed heads. I have about half of a carton of fifty, the place of the used ones being taken up with cotton wool to prevent the live ones banging together.
Often I feel that it has really only been the knowledge that I have the sure means to end it quickly that has made me put up with life.