Cousins at War Read Online Free

been one of the men that were killed on the
beaches if you’d let him go,’ she said one night.
    ‘He wouldn’t have finished his infantry training yet,’ her husband told her, ‘and maybe this business’ll have made him think twice about going.’
    On 9 July, the headlines – with the intention, no doubt, of giving hope, but actually giving rise to renewed fears in all minds – screamed MEN OF DUNKIRK RE-EQUIPPED – READY
FOR BATTLE OF BRITAIN. Gracie, positive that Neil had seen sense about volunteering, was more upset that the government was speaking about taking all garden railings to make munitions, although
there were no railings in her part of King Street. ‘It’s interfering with people’s privacy,’ she said to Joe.
    ‘They wouldn’t be left alive to enjoy any privacy if there was no munitions,’ he reminded her. ‘There’s word of Hitler going to start an invasion.’
    Joe rushed in one lunchtime a few days later brandishing the
Press and Journal
he had bought that morning. ‘Listen to this, Gracie. It says, IF THIS IS DER TAG, WE’RE
READY.’
    ‘Der tag?’ Gracie looked perplexed.
    ‘German for “the day”,’ he explained. ‘It means that we’re ready for the invasion if this is the day, and they say the rumours about 600,000 invaders coming
are just moonshine.’
    ‘Thank goodness for that. Now, when are you giving me the extra two pounds of sugar we’re supposed to get for making jam? I could maybe get berries from the Green on
Friday.’
    Shaking his head, Joe muttered, ‘Do you not have anything in your head at all except your stomach?’
    On 12 July, a gorgeously warm day, Neil was using a wire brush to clean the plugs of an Albion when he heard a crump-crump sound as if bombs had fallen some distance off.
Hardly able to believe that the enemy would attack in the middle of the day, he turned and looked uncertainly at the time-served mechanics who seemed to be as nonplussed as he was.
‘What’s happened to our Spitties?’ one of them asked, of nobody in particular, and another man answered, ‘I bet they’re chasing the Jerries back now.’
    In the next instant, the scream of descending bombs made them fling themselves down on the cement floor just as the explosions came, in quick succession and so close that Neil could feel the
workshop floor reverberating under him.
    When the next series of bombs fell, they seemed to be much farther away, so he sat up – his teeth chattering, his body aching from being gripped in to make a smaller target – and
gave a low, slightly hysterical giggle at his own stupidity. His legs were shaking as he got up, and he hoped that no one saw him when he leaned against the lorry for a moment. This was no way for
a future soldier to behave.
    Patsy crossed King Street, walked down Mealmarket Street, up Littlejohn Street and down Upperkirkgate, going slowly to get the benefit of the sunshine. She heard a few bangs,
but as she wasn’t far from a munitions factory, she assumed that something must have gone off accidentally and she carried on up Schoolhill. When she came to the gate to the ‘Trainie
Park’ as her father called the Union Terrace Gardens, she thought of going down the steps and walking along the paths to her office, but a glance at her watch told her that she didn’t
have time, so she cut through the slip road past the statue of William Wallace as she normally did. She was turning into Union Terrace when an aeroplane, flying very low, appeared from nowhere. One
of ours, she thought, and didn’t halt, but a loud, staccato burst of machine-gun fire made her stop in her tracks, the red-hot tracer bullets dancing along the pavement only inches away from
her.
    ‘Get doon! It’s a bloody Jerry!’ The man’s yell came from behind her, and a shove in the small of her back knocked her to the ground. When she got her breath back, she
saw that a tramcar had pulled up between stops, and that the passengers had all jumped