that shone like a crow’s feathers and he was staring across a road at Alexander as if Alexander was floating past in a boat. Mr Fitchie was not happy but he was not sad either. He looked across the road with his head at an angle, and his hands in his pockets. His eyes blinked quickly three or four times, in the shadow of the brim of his hat, the way the geese blink at you through the railings around the lake in the park.
He was in the street with Jimmy Murrell, as Alexander was to recall in his fifty-eighth year, and they were taking it in turns to throw a ball against the kerbstone for the straw-coloured stray to catch. The ball was black and almost as hard as a cricket ball, and each time they took it from the dog’s mouth it left crumbs of rubber mixed with dog spit on their hands. Jimmy Murrell had a thick white gap in one eyebrow where he’d fallen from a rock and cracked his head in the farmyard at Exmouth, the town he soon went to live in, with his mother and father and his sisters.
To confuse the dog, Jimmy chucked a handful of air towards the kerb and the dog was twenty yards up the street before it heard the ball hit the tarmac down the slope. Its claws made a noise like a sewing machine as it ran, and its head went up and down in time with the bouncing ball. In Exmouth, Jimmy Murrell said, it was warmer than in London. With all the other children Jimmy used to go to a beach that was bigger than the Heath. Again he described the house at the back of the dunes, the only house for miles, with a fence of white boards around it and big nets hanging from the boards. The walls of the house were white wood, and right in the centre was a red door that looked like a pillarbox stuck in the sand. Thousands of pools were left on the sand when the tide went out, said Jimmy, with shreds of seaweed in them and sometimes a small green crab-shell. The tide went out so far that it was farther than walking from his house to the shops, and at night if the tide was low you couldn’t even hear the sea. But if the tide was high at night, you could see the waves glowing, as if there were torches under the water.
The dog, too tired to drop the ball, sat down beside Alexander. Its tongue was bent behind the ball and drooped sideways out of its mouth, dripping big dark circles onto the paving stones.
‘Bigger than all the houses,’ Jimmy Murrell said. ‘Higher and longer,’ and with a swing of his arm he made Alexander see the marvellous dunes.
Alexander would remember in his later years that Jimmy Murrell was waving his arms and speaking to him when he heard his mother’s voice. She was calling his name and she was running alongside the privet hedges with her arms straight up in the air in a gesture that frightened him.
‘Boys!’ she yelled, and then she did a couple of skips just like Jimmy’s sisters when they played on the path. ‘Boys! Come here!’ she shouted, though she was running so fast she was with them before they could get to their feet. She picked up Alexander and hugged him to her chest. It remained in Alexander’s memory that she was wearing the pale blue blouse with the daisies on it, and that the second button of her blouse was in the top buttonhole. Then she put him down and hugged Jimmy Murrell where he stood, squashing his face against her legs. She put out a hand and ruffled Alexander’s hair, and it was then he realised that nothing bad had happened.
‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘It’s over, it’s over, it’s over,’ she sang and she clapped her hands as she looked down on them, as though they had done something that had delighted her. ‘Your daddy will be back soon,’ she told Jimmy Murrell.
‘How soon?’ asked Jimmy.
‘Very soon,’ she said. With her left hand she took hold of Jimmy’s right and she gave the other to her son and whirled them both around her skirt. ‘Home we go,’ she declared, then hand in hand they walked back up the road, with the dog behind them.
The kitchen was full of women when they arrived. By the radio sat Mrs Murrell, her cheek close to the front of it, as if it was telling her something no one else was meant to hear, while Mrs Evans was at the sink, rinsing and wiping the tea cups. Other women stood around the table, and on the garden step was a woman Alexander knew worked at his mother’s factory, but he did not know her name; she was smoking a cigarette, and she turned as he came into the room and breathed out a cloud of smoke that covered her face for a moment. There was hardly any space for him to stand in.
‘Jimmy with you, Alexander?’ Mrs Murrell asked, then Jimmy stepped in from the hall. She did not get up, but held her arms wide open for her son to walk into, and pinched his cheeks so his lips stretched like a rubber band.
Setting the tray on the table, Mrs Evans remarked – ‘It’ll all be different now.’
‘It will that, Iris,’ said Irene MacIndoe. ‘Everything will change now.’
‘Different world,’ agreed Mrs Murrell.
Lying on the lawn beside his friend, Alexander stared at the sky and wondered in what way the sky would be a different sky. He imagined planes that were different planes, shaped like starfish or painted green. Rockets meandered over the horizon and nosed among the chimneys like curious dogs, then meandered off again. He thought he might live in a house by the sea, and he saw on the inside of his eyelids a beach as long as the river, and a house with a red door. He saw Mr Fitchie walking along a beach towards a red door that was on its own, and felt as if he were floating up off the grass into the warm high sky. A cheering came from the kitchen, and then church bells were ringing like on a Sunday, but they did not stop; the bells kept on for hours.
The following day his parents took him out of the house at an hour when normally he would already have been in bed, and they went to call for Mrs Beckwith. There were more people on the street that night than he had ever seen in the day. Their heads bobbed like apples in a bowl, and the noise of their voices and feet blended into one loud rumble. On the Heath there were hundreds and hundreds of people, moving towards a fire that rose in a single pinnacle of flame over their heads. Alexander and his parents and Mrs Beckwith joined the crowd, falling in with the purposeful pace. The people pressed more tightly on Alexander with every step; the bit of the sky that he could see was no larger than his father’s head; he looked down at the grass, and seeing it flattened and ripped by the thousands of feet he suddenly cried out, and was in an instant hoisted onto his father’s shoulders.
‘What can you see?’ his father asked. The fire glinted on his spectacles as he bent his head back to speak to him.
‘Nothing,’ Alexander reported.
‘You must see something, Alexander,’ said his mother.
‘I can see the top of the fire,’ he replied. ‘And lots of people,’ he added, scanning the Heath. Every road was full of marching people.
‘All of England must be here,’ said his mother.
‘Not quite,’ said Mrs Beckwith.
Alexander saw his mother touch Mrs Beckwith’s shoulder. He was impatient to discover what it was they had come to see.
They came across three soldiers in berets, sitting on a settee beside a track, and drinking from a bottle which one of them jiggled at Mrs Beckwith as they passed. Alexander saw a woman he thought at first was the woman who worked in Mr Prentice’s shop; a man’s bandaged hand was resting on her waist, and she had a little trumpet in her mouth. They were near enough to the fire for him to glimpse two shrieking faces on the other side of the flames when a split appeared in the crowd and what looked for a second like a galloping bull rushed through the gap. It was two men carrying a park bench between them; on the bench was stretched a man made out of an old jumper and trousers, with newspaper hands and feet and a football for a head. The two men seized the dummy, held it up for everyone to see, then hurled it onto the fire. The people around all cheered, and they cheered again when the two men rocked the bench backwards and forwards and let it go into the flames.
They stayed by the fire for half an hour or so, then his father led them off the Heath, past the Nissen huts. It was late, but they did not go straight home. They walked down the hill with Mrs Beckwith, who held Alexander’s hand