The Brave Read Free

of all were the ones who sang, like Gene Autry and the ridiculous Roy Rogers.
    His mother had reappeared now, a glass of milk in one hand, a plate with a slice of apple pie on it in the other, a fresh cigarette jutting from her lips. Without shifting his eyes from the screen, Tommy took the milk and pie.
    Flint and Bill Hawks were hiding behind some rocks now, spying on the Indian camp. Night had fallen and the Indians were all asleep around a campfire, except for the one keeping watch over the little girl, and even he looked as if he was nodding off. The girl was tied to a log and looked pretty miserable.
    "Be careful now. No spills, please."
    She took a puff of her cigarette, blew the smoke at the ceiling and stood with her arms folded, watching for a while.
    "Oh, he's the one I like, isn't he? What's his name?"
    "Flint McCullough."
    "No, the actor I mean."
    "Mum, I don't know."
    "Robert something or other. He's so handsome."
    "Mum, please!"
    Just as Flint and Bill were about to launch their rescue, on came the commercials. Tommy's mother groaned and left the room. To his parents commercials were "common." Respectable families only ever watched the BBC which had the good taste not to show any. Tommy couldn't see what the problem was. In fact, the commercials were often better than what went either side of them. Tommy knew most of them by heart. Like Diane, he'd always been a good mimic and sometimes when his parents had visitors, his mother would ask him to do the Strand cigarette man. Under protest, pretending to be more reluctant than he really was, Tommy would leave the room and a few minutes later slouch in again wearing his father's old trilby and raincoat with the collar turned up, puffing moodily at an unlit cigarette he'd taken from the silver box on the lounge coffee table, and say: You're never alone with a Strand. It always got a big laugh and sometimes people even clapped. For an encore, while he still had on the outfit, his mother would ask him to do Sergeant Joe Friday from Dragnet.
    Oh, Mum, he would groan with fake embarrassment, which would naturally prompt a pleading chorus of Oh, go on, Tommy, please! So he would duly adjust his face to its most serious, manly expression and, in Sergeant Friday's deadpan delivery, announce that the story they were about to see was true and that only the names had been changed to protect the innocent. The facts, ma'am, just the facts.
    By the time he'd finished his apple pie, Flint and Bill had everything pretty well sorted out. The Indians all got shot or ran away, the little girl was rescued and when they got back to the wagons, her daddy had turned up. He had a bandage around his head but was otherwise okay. They gave each other a tearful hug then sat down with everybody else around the fire for supper. It was bacon and beans, which was the only thing Charlie the cook seemed to know how to make.
    Just as Flint had so cleverly guessed, it turned out that the other wagon train had been attacked by a Shoshone war party who apparently wanted the little girl to be somebody's squaw, though Tommy wasn't quite clear what that might involve. Anyway, she got her voice back and it all ended more or less happily, as it nearly always did.
    Tommy took off his cowboy hat and sat fiddling with the brim, eyes glued to the screen until the theme tune and the credits had finished.
    "Come on, Tommy," his mother called from the kitchen. "Up you go. Your father will be home any minute."
    "Coming."
    He carried his empty glass and plate through to the kitchen, which had recently been modernized. Everything was now covered with pale blue Formica. His mother was standing by the stove, stirring a pan and looking bored. On the radio, the BBC newsreader was saying that the Russians were planning to send an unmanned rocket to the moon.
    His mother's real name was Daphne, but she hated it, so everyone always called her Joan. She was a short, rounded woman with plump arms and fair skin that flared red