Five Boys Read Online Free Page B

ever tempted to try them out before bottling them.
    “Does your mummy soap your back for you?” Miss Minter asked him.
    At first she thought he must not have heard her. He was so still she thought he must have drifted off. But when she looked again she saw a tear creep down his cheek—watched it drop into the bathwater and send a series of ripples sweeping back and forth across its surface.
    She couldn’t believe her lack of sensitivity—was sickened by it—and had to leave the room under the pretext of fetching a towel from upstairs. She opened the cupboard and buried her head in the linen. Cursed herself over and over for making the poor boy cry. But when she went back downstairs she offered no apology and made no reference to Bobby’s tears, thinking that it would only embarrass him on top of everything else.
    She let him soak for another few minutes, then wrapped a towel around him and dabbed him dry. Got him into his pajamas and dressing gown and led him around the back of the settee where she spread an old newspaper out on the floor. Then she left the room and returned with a large jar of dried soup mix.
    She gave the jar a shake. “Now,” she said, “all these peasand beans have managed to get themselves mixed up.” She made an effort to look highly vexed. “Do you think you might sort them out for me while I have the bath?”
    She unscrewed the lid and poured the jar’s contents out onto the newspaper. Bobby looked at the mountain of dried beans and pulses—saw a whole evening’s work ahead of him—but he knelt down beside it and told Miss Minter that he would see what he could do.

Five Boys
    C ONSIDERING ALL the trouble he took over their tiny reproduction the Captain seemed to get no end of pleasure from telling Bobby how the real ships came to be wrecked. During those first few days of his evacuation Bobby thought he must have heard about every cutter, smack, ketch and man-of-war which had had the misfortune of coming up against Devon’s unforgiving coast, and when the Captain wasn’t quizzing him on what sort of shape Marjory Pye was in or what sort of sweets she was eating, the old man seemed to like nothing better than to wriggle right down in his sleeping bag and talk romantically about all the wrecks littering the seabed, fathoms deep.
    Devon seemed to draw them in just like a magnet, cracking them open on Prawle Point or Bolt Head and easing them back beneath the waves. But if they ever ran aground, the Captain said, the locals would race out and help their crew to safety, whatever the weather, before helping themselves to whatever was down below.
    A barge packed with plum saplings was once beached not far from Dartmouth and every last twig was spirited away before the gentlemen of His Majesty’s Customs and Excise had laced their boots. The Captain got to his feet and waddled over to the window. Come spring, he said, all the villages would be awash with their blossom—as if the sea haddrummed up a wave of such might that its spume and spray had come crashing all this way inland.
    On the day of Sylvia Crouch’s wedding, he told Bobby, the plum blossom had been so thick on the ground that half the village went out and filled their baskets and the bride and groom stepped out of the church into a blizzard of the stuff.
    “You know how many weddings there were that spring?” said the Captain.
    Bobby shook his head.
    “Five,” said the Captain and raised the fingers of one hand.
    “And you know what newlyweds are like,” he said.
    Bobby wasn’t sure that he did.
    “They have a habit of becoming mothers-to-be,” the Captain said.
    He turned and stared out of the window, and it occurred to Bobby that perhaps the old man never left his cottage and that the rest of the world only existed through the buckle and sway of the glass.
    The autumn after the weddings, the Captain said, the whole village seemed to be pregnant. Nothing but pregnant women bumbling about the place.
    “Such