The Dynamite Room Read Free Page B

her, even if it was just one-eyed Mr. Tabernacle wearing her father’s school tie.
    She emptied the rest of the suitcase on the bed and then felt too hungry and tired to put any of it away. What was the point? If her mother had been planning to leave the house, she was sure that she would have written to her. But then her mother still thought she was in Wales, safe and sound.
    She slumped on the bed with the bear on her knee and reached over to pull out the six letters from the gas mask box along with a storybook she’d made, the pages threaded together with string. Now it was all crumpled, her writing half-washed away where one of the Welsh boys had thrown it into the brook. She tried one more time to smooth out the creases where it had dried all out of shape, but the story was ruined. She put it back into the box, then laid out the letters, folded tight, in a semicircle on the bed between her and Mr. Tabernacle.
    “You choose,” she told the bear. Then, taking his arm, she made him pick one.
    She unfolded the letter.
    She knew them off by heart, her mother lamenting at how quiet the house was now that she and Alfie and Lydia’s father were all away. The petrol pump in the village was out of bounds, she wrote—needed by the infantry apparently—so she was feeling desperately cut off and she never had been good on a bicycle, as Lydia well knew. The Germans had given them a bit of a bashing the day before, one of the Jerries emptying a load on the harbor at Lowestoft and another hitting the airfield at Martlesham. Joyce had apparently felt the rumbles in the pub, and her mother wrote that half the tins in the kitchen larder had fallen out. It had put the frighteners up them all.
    They’re calling it “terror attacks” on the radio. It does make me laugh, the funny terms they come up with. I expect they’ll have another shot at us tonight (they seem to be coming over every day). I hate going down to the shelter with no one to talk to. I keep thinking that your father has overloaded that tin roof with all his veg. The slightest blast in the village and I swear the whole lot will come down on top of me. Can you imagine Archie Chittock and the rest of the boys trying to haul me out from under all that muck and your father’s carrots and cabbages?
    There was no news of Alfie or of Lydia’s father. She wrote instead of WVS meetings and her disastrous fruitcakes, as if nothing else mattered, and of Mr. Morton.
    I told him you wouldn’t be back until all this nonsense blows over. I said you were having a ball in Wales. You are, aren’t you, Darling? Do write and tell me that Mrs. Duggan is looking after you, and Button too.
    And so Lydia had written one of the special postcards they’d given all the children. Everyone is being lovely, she said. What did another lie matter?
    She slowly folded the letter again and put it back in the box with the rest. Then she picked up Mr. Tabernacle, gathered the blanket from the bed, and took up the oil lamp. She stepped out onto the landing and walked along to the junction outside the spare room. The door at the far end of the corridor was closed, the rim of darkness around its frame sealing everything in. At some stage, if no one came back, she thought, she would have to go in.
    She stood for a moment, looking at it, then turned back as far as the narrow flight of stairs that led up to the attic. The steps were steep, and near the top she had to set Mr. Tabernacle and the oil lamp down, her blanket wrapped around her shoulders, so that she could heave the hatch open. After a struggle it tipped back on its hinge and clattered down, throwing up dust. She hauled herself and everything with her up through the hole and then dropped the hatch shut and pulled the bolt across, pushing it into its socket good and tight.
    The attic had been many things: a submarine, or an airship flying out across the Channel, or a courtroom, or the offices of a spying agency, or a dragon’s lair, or just the