The Cuckoo's Child Read Online Free Page B

might shake their heads and mutter about the danger, but to the children it was fascinating.
    For one thing, the bomb had smashed the house beyond repair but had not levelled it. Parts of two walls still reared into the air, splintered and blackened joists jutting out halfway up where there had once been a floor and ceiling. Tattered wallpaper clung to the filthy plaster—a faded blue like the sky on a misty morning, with the ghosts of vines and blowsy pink roses wreathed across it upstairs, and a sober cream with a thin dark red stripe almost obliterated by the trackmarks of soot-blackened water and rain below. A single door had survived the blast and stood, surrounded by broken brick, opening onto nothing. Part of a flight of narrow stairs still leaned drunkenly into the air as if groping for support. There had been a cupboard under those stairs, the air raid shelter for the owners of the house, I suppose, for the remains of a mattress, chewed by mice or rats, the stuffing oozing out, mouldered there.
    That cupboard was the lure. It was a perfect meeting place for children: out of sight, unwanted by any adult, on the right scale for small people. Like the treehouse Dad made us in the poplars at the bottom of the garden, remember? We always knew we were safe from interruption up there. Mum couldn’t climb the rope ladder, for a start. There were other attractions at the bombsite, of course: the old bath, lying on its side like a stranded white hippopotamus, its stubby claw feet futile in the air; the smashed sewing machine with the treadle that still creakily waved to and fro; a limitless supply of broken bricks, bright copper wire, lead piping flattened and strangely heavy, for our own construction projects. It was in the cupboard, though, squeezed into its dark corners, sitting in solemn circles on the decaying mattress, that we planned those projects and argued over possession of the things we found as we toiled over the debris just like the workers on Noddy Boffin’s dust heaps.
    For the place yielded up treasures too. Often we dug up single earrings, dusty beads, bent forks, matchboxes with a few broken matches inside, flowered cups without handles, candle stubs, a gas mask box with a broken strap. Things like this we stored on the little shelf in the cupboard under the stairs, knowing instinctively they wouldn’t remain ours for long if the adults got wind of them.
    Once, I unearthed a tiny glass bell, caked with mud but miraculously unscathed except for a chip out of the clapper, and was captivated by its tiny chiming voice as I shook it gingerly. I hid it from the others and carried it home and hid it again under my bed after I had carefully washed off the dirt and dried it on my blouse. I got in trouble for the mess on my blouse, but the reproaches rolled off me; I had something out of the ordinary, a voice left over, it seemed, from another world, and it was all mine to look after and enjoy.
    Another time I took a brief detour onto the site as I was running home for lunch and found a dead cat lying beside the standing wall. It was the first dead thing I had seen, apart from the insects and worms I inadvertently killed in the garden. I can still feel the flood of sadness as I gazed at the stiff, dusty body, not so much for the fact of its death as for its loneliness, discarded and ugly in this blighted place. I felt compelled to do something for it; the only thing I could think of was to pick some of the weeds poking through the cracks and rubble and lay the pink and yellow flowers on the parched fur to cover the glazed eye and the frozen snarl. I revisited the corpse for several days, noting in a distant way its deterioration, the way it seemed to flatten and settle into the ground, and renewing the flowers every time.
    One lunchtime it was gone. All that was left was a little heap of wilted willow herb. My stomach lurched. I knew all about this; hadn’t we just spent the better part of a week in