did our ‘Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble’ chant several times. Then we squeezed our eyes tight shut and each of us made a wish – a good wish, as Piet reminded us it had to be, not a wicked one, and we had to tell one another what our wish was.
‘You go first then, Piet,’ Belinda whispered after a while. Eyes closed, Piet chanted the ‘Bubble, bubble’ spell, and then began: ‘I wish … I wish that when I grow up I’ll be a famous actor. I want to be like that one we saw in the film of Henry V – Laurence something. I’ll wear armour like he did and a helmet, and charge into battle on my horse waving my sword, and I’ll be shouting, “For Harry, England and St George!”’ He opened his eyes and smiled at us. ‘Be good, that,’ he said. ‘Your go, Michael.’
But I didn’t want my go yet because I still hadn’t made up my mind. The truth was that Piet’s wish sounded so good that now I found myself wanting almost the same as he had wished for. But there was a difference. I didn’t want only to be an actor playing Henry V, I wanted to be him, the real king, Henry V himself. I knew it would sound silly – I understood even then that it was an impossibility to make a wish like that come true, even if we got the witches’ spell right this time. I’d have to think of another wish, one that had a chance of coming true. I needed time.
‘No. You go next, Belinda,’ I said.
Belinda rattled through the spell and then made her wish. ‘I want to be like Florence Nightingale,’ she said quietly. ‘I want to nurse all the soldiers and sailors and pilots who were wounded in the war. I want to make them better again like she did.’
I could tell as she said it that Belinda meant every word. And that was what I had to do, I thought. I had to mean it. That way it might come true.
‘All right,’ I began, my eyes as tight shut as they would go, willing my wish to happen, ‘I want to be like my uncle Pieter. I want to be a Spitfire pilot and shoot down German planes, and then the King would give me the Victoria Cross.’
I opened my eyes to find Piet frowning at me, angrily almost, and I knew it must have upset him somehow.
‘You can’t be him. He’s dead,’ he said. ‘And I’m the one who’s named after him, not you, so you’ve got to make another wish. It’s all silly anyway. You can’t be someone you’re not. And besides, you didn’t say the “Bubble, bubble” spell, so it won’t work.’
I was about to argue with him when we heard the voice. It came from somewhere above us. We looked up. Through the smog we could see a young man sitting high up on a window ledge on the top of the ruins.
‘Your brother’s right, Michael,’ he said. ‘You can’t be someone you’re not, not your uncle Pieter, not Laurence Olivier either, not Florence Nightingale. I reckon you’ve got to be yourself.’
He climbed down and came over to us. He was wearing a light blue overcoat and a scarf. His face broke into a smile. ‘I like the hats,’ he said, crouching down beside us. ‘And you make fine witches. You did all the “Bubble, bubble” baloney really well. Almost had me believing in it myself.’
Struck dumb, the three of us just sat there, simply gaping at him.
‘All those spells,’ the stranger went on, ‘it’s a load of twaddle, y’know. Nothing but hocus-pocus. And by the way, it’s not “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble”, it’s “Double, double toil and trouble”. I was in the play once. I’m an actor; I know. I played Banquo, got myself murdered on a late-night walk. All this wishing you do – it’s fine, and hoping is fine, too. And you’re right, you can try, you must try to make your hopes and your wishes come true. But you have to be careful what you wish for. You have to think things through. They mustn’t be just flights of fancy. Dangerous stuff, fancy. I’ve been watching you three for quite a while now, sitting and chanting your spells around your cauldron, playing your war games all around the bomb site. I know I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping, but I haven’t got much else to do these days. And when I heard you making your wishes just now, I thought I’d better speak up, tell you what I think, tell you what I know.’
We still couldn’t say a word. He was holding out his hands over the fire to warm them.
‘It really upsets me, y’know, to see you playing your war games,’ he went on. ‘And all of you just now, all of your wishes, one way or another, had something to do with war. And that worries me. I’ve been in a war. These ruins, that’s what war does. That’s bad enough, but it does more than that. Look around you.’
As he spoke, out of the smog the ruins seemed to grow and take shape and form roofs, chimneys, windows, doors. The houses rebuilt themselves before our eyes. We were still sitting over the cauldron, but now we were in the back garden of a house. There was blue sky above and butterflies chasing one another and sparrows bickering on the lawn. Nearby there were children playing in a sandpit, and a mother in a headscarf was calling out of the window for them to come in for tea. By the back door an old man, mouth wide open, lay fast asleep in a deckchair, his slippers on, an open book resting on his chest.
‘And tell your grandad to come in too,’ the mother was saying. ‘And don’t forget to wipe your feet and wash your hands.’
There was music playing on a gramophone from inside the house, and we could hear the rag-and-bone-man’s horse clopping along the street: ‘Any old iron? Any old iron?’ came the cry.
As the sound of the horse’s hooves died away the children went inside, one of them stopping to shake Grandpa awake. The old man stood up, looking directly at us, but not seeing us, and there was a terrible sadness in his eyes as he looked up into the sky. The fog came swirling down again around him, and around us. He disappeared into it and the houses were suddenly ruins again. When the fog cleared, moments later, the stranger was gone too, vanished. But we heard his voice again from high up on the wall above us – only his voice. He was nowhere to be seen.
‘All of them are gone. Dead,’ he said. ‘One bombing raid, that’s all it took. Mum, grandad, the children, the rag-and-bone-man and his horse too. All gone in one night. That’s what war does. You remember that.’ Those were the last words he spoke.
The three of us were still holding hands, and we soon discovered we’d all seen and heard the same thing. We had imagined nothing. We made a pact there and then that we would never tell another living soul. For weeks afterwards, Piet and I, when we were alone at home, couldn’t talk about anything else. We were forever trying to puzzle it out. And at school, the three of us stuck together in the playground as if protecting our unspoken secret. When the usual war games started up around us, we never once joined in.
It was my idea to see if we could make it happen again, bring back the ghost of the stranger – because all of us agreed by now that that’s what he must have been, a ghost. Piet and Belinda were more nervous than I was, but I persuaded them. We needed to find out who he was and why he’d come to see us.
We decided it would be sensible to wait for the next smog and light the fire under the cauldron just as we had before. But the smog never came, and in the end we lost patience. We would try bringing him back without the cauldron. After all he’d said it himself: the witches’ spell was a lot of baloney.
Two or three times we sat there in the bomb site holding hands, the three of us willing him to come back, or at least to speak to us. Each time, nothing. We had no choice in the end but to risk it, to try the cauldron way again – it had worked before. And if we built the fire in the late evening, quite close to the hole in the wall, no one would see the flames from the street, nor the smoke in the gathering dark.
So one evening, that’s exactly what we did. We used the last of the letters from the trunk, along with bits of twigs we’d found in the bomb site, and lit our fire under the cauldron. A few creepy-crawly creatures – spiders and beetles – had found their way into the cauldron on their own. Because they’d almost volunteered to be boiled, we didn’t feel quite so bad about it. There we sat in the half-dark, holding hands, eyes closed and reciting ‘Double, double toil and trouble’, with the right words this time, and in unison, over and over again, wishing,