Shelter from Thunder
Third edition
by Michael Cargill
My other books are available on Smashwords and Amazon.
Diary of Dork - Articles of Sarcasm and Irreverence
Slaughter in Barnaby Close
Shades of Grey
Comments can be emailed to me at mcargill79@gmail.com
Twitter - @MichaelCargill1
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Website of satire - http://michaelcargill.wordpress.com/
Shelter from Thunder
Published by Michael Cargill at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Michael Cargill
Chapter 1
The rising sound of the air raid siren. The hurried rush to safety. The startled look on his parent’s faces as they are interrupted mid-sentence. A morsel of food falling from a fork and plopping back down onto the dinner plate. Sam thought that he would have been used to these upsets and interruptions by now. Yet each time there was something that made him feel uneasy. Sometimes it was something new. Sometimes it was something he hadn’t noticed before. Sometimes it was an otherwise innocuous incident. Once it was because he struggled to put his shoes on. It was a delay of only a few extra seconds yet it was enough to unsettle him. In fact it did more than that, it downright terrified him. He could feel his father’s disappointed gaze burning a hole into the side of his head. He felt as if his clumsy fumbling had paralysed the entire country.
Tonight it was his mother’s indignant cry of “Another fine dinner ruined!” that roused the butterflies in his stomach. She spat the words out quickly as if her mouth was a misfiring machine gun. They descended the steps down into the home-made shelter in the back of the garden and her heavy footfalls emphasised her words. “Do they wait until the whole street is sitting down to eat before they show themselves? Is blowing half the country to bits not enough for them now?”
They filed quickly into the shelter and then the heavy door was closed shut behind them. The ground was uneven and the door always scraped along the concrete floor. It made an ugly noise that reminded Sam of the kids at school dragging their fingernails down the blackboard. The butterflies in his belly were well and truly awake now. Inside the shelter it was as dark as any blackboard you could imagine and the three of them faced each other in the gloom. Sam felt around for his seat which was more of a box than anything else. He did his best not to trip over his own feet or bang his leg against anything. His mother coughed loudly as she always did when the stench of the stale, musty air started to become noticeable.
He heard the sound of some scrabbling to his right and he glanced over in that direction. Sam was instantly blinded by the bright glare of an igniting match. The shadows in the shelter loomed and jumped as the match nearly went out and then slowly came back to life. His father took two small steps to the side and the shadows bounced around as if the room was being shaken by an enormous hand. He reached out and lit a candle then dropped the match to the floor. As the candle brightened the shadows settled and retreated until an uneasy and unspoken truce between darkness and light fell upon them. Sam looked at his father and barely recognised him. His short dark hair, bushy eyebrows and moustache seemed to consume his entire face in this light. He had recollections of how, almost a lifetime ago, his father used to pick him up and cradle him in his arms. If that happened now Sam thought he would probably scream in terror.
Sam realised that he was still hungry. He sat there mourning the loss of a perfectly good meal when his mother pulled out a can of something and set about opening it. “Still hungry then lad?” his father asked him and Sam replied with nothing other than a nervous nod. Sam stuck his fingers into the offered can. It had been crudely opened and he had to make sure he didn’t cut himself on the sharp sides of the tin. He grabbed what he could and slurped down a few slices of peach. He held back a grimace. Sam didn’t mind the taste of the tinned fruit but sat here in the almost-dark he couldn’t shake off the notion that he was swallowing a handful of slugs.
“Where is that gas mask of yours, boy? You are supposed to keep it with you,” his father asked.
Sam just looked at the floor.
Chapter 2
Sam knew exactly where his gas mask was; upstairs in his room on the back of his chair and if he had his way it would stay hanging there forever. It was a complete pain having to carry it around wherever he went. If the end of the war brought nothing but relief from having it slung round his neck all day then he would be happy. The older boys at his school seemed to deal with the burden by swinging it around above their heads and ‘accidentally’ letting go of it. It was a game that Sam sometimes watched them play from a distance. If he got too close the masks had a tendency to end up flying at his head rather than a wall.
They had been issued with the masks months ago and he remembered the first time that his teacher handed them out to the class. At first they were a great novelty and seemed extremely high-tech and important. Typically it wasn’t long before they were bored of them. Sam found that the strong smell of rubber to be a curious, alien thing. Every time he touched the mask his hands came away stinking of it. He also struggled to get the thing to fit on his face properly no matter how much fiddling he did with the straps. They soon learned to have a bit of fun with the masks. If they breathed out too hard the air would escape out the sides of the mask and make a loud farting noise. During practice lessons the classroom was almost constantly filled with the sound of giggling children.
After a while the masks would steam up and Sam struggled to see anything. It was something of a relief when the teacher told them all to take them off and put them back into the case. During the first week just about everyone in the class forgot to take their mask home with them at least once. It took several hard grillings from the headmaster before it was lodged permanently in their minds that they really did need to keep hold of them wherever they went.
Fire alarm drills were quickly replaced with air-raid siren drills. For some reason the construction of the school shelter wasn’t started until several weeks after they received their masks so there was lots of aimless wandering around the school grounds. For a while they had to make do with crouching under their desks every time the siren went off which didn’t really make Sam feel very safe at all. If the desks didn’t protect him from the bits of paper that his classmates were throwing at him how would it stop a bomb?
Once the shelter was finally built there was plenty of excitement about going into it for the first time. At long last they didn’t have to rely on two inches of wooden desk to protect them from the full might of the Luftwaffe. There was an anxious wait as they all stood in line wearing their gas masks and waiting to be told to walk on in as part of a practice drill. There was plenty of bumping and shuffling in the dark and Sam was sure that at least some of the kicks that he received to his legs were purposefully meant rather than accidental.
When it came to using the shelters properly during an air raid the teachers did their level best to keep the children entertained with songs and games amongst the cramped conditions. Sam tried to avoid sitting too near the back as some of the other kids had developed a habit of fingering out the insides of their noses and depositing the contents onto his head or his back.
Sam couldn’t remember the exact time when his lessons first started to be crammed full of information about Germany and the Nazis. There seemed to be hundreds of new and strange words conjured up out of thin air that were now in common usage. The deluge of information had been almost overwhelming at first. He remembered seeing the faces of Nazi high command for the first time.
He could remember Hitler because of his strange and cheap-looking moustache that looked more like a gap in the top lip than something that had actually grown there. Hitler also looked strangely angry in every picture he appeared in. In fact he reminded Sam of the school headmaster. Sam reckoned that Goering could be spotted from a mile away simply because he was probably the ugliest human being that he had ever set eyes upon. He had the sort of face that belonged to a villain in a fairy tale, a villain that crept into homes and stole children as they slept. He actually reminded Sam of a strange old man that lived a couple of streets away that he tried to steer clear of. His mother told him that the man’s wife had died a few years back and he had been a recluse ever since. All Sam knew was that the man smelled funny and had that weird look about him that many old people have that can unsettle some children.
A while back Sam was in the local bakery with his mother and this same old man had been in the queue in front of them. Sam spent most of the time burying his face into his sleeve or his hand to hide the old man’s smell and he ignored his mother’s requests for him to behave himself. The old man had then turned around, smiled at the pair of them and said “The young boy is just bored and restless. Here, have this as a treat,” and handed a doughnut to Sam. Ordinarily Sam would have devoured it eagerly but he just stood there staring at it as if it was something from outer space. The old man’s hand was shaking slightly and it was a wrinkly, hairy and gnarled monstrosity. It would make even the most beautiful object in the land look old, haggard and ugly if it was being held in it’s grasp.
“Go on Sam, say thank you to the nice man,” his mother said and gave him a small nudge. Sam reached out, took hold of the doughnut lightly and garbled out a weak thank you. He almost screamed when the man patted him on the head and said goodbye. Despite the ten minute walk back home Sam was still holding the doughnut when they got back. He had kept his hand down by his side the entire time and hoped that it would somehow disappear of its own accord. He didn’t dare drop it in case he incurred his mother’s wrath. He sat down in the kitchen and his mother smiled at him as she got him a plate. Sam had no intention of putting it anywhere near his mouth. When her back was turned he dropped it silently into the bin, washed his hands and put the plate back into the cupboard. His covert little operation over, he realised that he had been holding his breath and he let it all out in a gasp.
Chapter 3
The booming sound of anti-aircraft guns started to ring out somewhere above them and it was a sound that gave Sam only a small bit of reassurance and comfort. Not so much because he thought that the guns would protect them but because listening to the constant firing broke the monotony of sitting in the shelter all night.
“That’s the sound of British might right there. You’ll see, we will beat the Germans back. Just like the last time,” his father said. Sam was broken out of his day dreaming and when he looked over at his father again his face didn’t look so threatening any more. There wasn’t much conviction in his voice and Sam’s mother just rolled her eyes. Neither of them said anything as there was simply no point. Sam didn’t talk very much at all with his dad these days, not even about school. Nearly every comment or conversation would result in some kind of telling off so it was easier to just sit there and say nothing at all.
It hadn’t always been like that but during the past few years his father had changed and it was now rare to ever see him smile or to hear him laugh. At one time his father was always taking him to the park, to the zoo or the circus if it was in town. In years gone by every time Christmas or Sam’s birthday came along his father would be busy making him a new toy or some other wonderful surprise but Sam struggled to remember the last time that actually happened. At one time his father took great pride in building furniture, decorating the house and working in the garden yet that desire and work ethic seemed to have left him.
Back when the shelter was being built Sam didn’t really think his father put a great deal of effort into it’s construction. Compared to the other types of shelter he had seen it just didn’t seem to offer much protection. He had no idea what it was that made him doubt the quality of the shelter. He had watched his dad build it from scratch. Sometimes he watched from his bedroom window and sometimes he watched right there in the garden. Something about his father’s body language just didn’t seem right. He look tired and worn out the whole time. Had it been dug deep enough? Was the roof thick enough? Would it survive a direct hit?
Sam suspected that his mother shared these doubts. She had a tendency to glance nervously at the ceiling whenever they were down here. His father either sat in silence or talked about how many German planes were going to be shot down. Not once did he ever say that they would be safe down in the shelter. Sam took that as a bad sign and he presumed his mother did too.
There was practically nothing to do during these air-raids except sit and wait. Occasionally they played cards but most of the time they just sat there anxiously waiting for the all-clear siren. So far their street had been lucky and hadn’t been hit but you didn’t have to go far to see how badly the less fortunate had suffered. At least two local families had been buried alive down in their cellars either because they were unwilling to build a shelter or because they just didn’t think they needed one. Some of the seats in his class at school had become conspicuously empty.
“Sam? I hear that there is a new person starting at your school soon. He might be in your class actually, a chance for you to make a new friend again,” it was his mother who spoke this time and she was now sitting up straight. Her voice was hopeful but in the semi-darkness her face looked sad. Sam’s father let out a perfectly cynical grunting noise.
Make a friend? Really? Sam could barely imagine how such a thing could happen again.
Friend.
Sam just looked at the floor again.
Chapter 4
Sam had only ever had one proper friend before. A year or so ago a family had moved into the area and they had a young son and two older daughters. Sam didn’t know much about the two girls but the boy had been put into the year below him at school. The boy had a disfigured face to the extent that he didn’t really have an upper lip. His mother had said it was called a cleft palate or something but Sam could never remember it properly.
He first met the boy one Tuesday afternoon round the back of the school. Sam heard some commotion from round the corner and when he went to look at what was happening he was stunned and outraged. The new boy was face-down on the ground with two other kids sitting on top of him. A third kid was crouched down trying to force a dog turd into the new kid’s mouth and cruelly taunting him with “Come on you freak eat the nice sausage! Why don’t you want it?”
The three kids hadn’t noticed Sam standing there so when he clenched his fists and ran at them screaming they were taken completely by surprise. They may have outnumbered him but Sam was in the year above which counted for a lot. The shock they experienced after being on the receiving end of the howling rage of someone in the year above them was considerable. The thought of getting the cane from the headmaster didn’t help them either and they did the only thing that made sense to their startled, bullying minds. As they scrambled to get up and run away they fell over each other in their haste.
Pretty much from that day onwards the two were good friends. Sam didn’t really say much to the new boy on that first day, mainly because he was still in shock himself and didn’t really know what to say. But soon after that they hung around each other at every free moment and lunch break they had. Sam really didn’t care about the boy’s disfigurement and he barely noticed it after a week, he was just glad to finally find someone he could have fun with. It wasn’t long before they realised how close they lived to each other and they spent most of their weekends and free time after school together.
Both sets of parents were equally relieved at their sons finally finding a friend and encouraged it as best they could. They would pack them picnic lunches to eat over the park or the local woods and the two boys would even write letters and mail stories to each other. During the summer they would often camp out in a secret den they made in the woods and invent ghost stories to scare each other with round a small campfire. Nothing, it seemed, could separate them.
One cold day in November Sam’s friend went home early from school with a headache. Sam popped round to see him later that day to see if he was ok. He was a bit groggy and tired but there seemed to be no cause for alarm and two days later the boy was back at school as normal.
A week later Sam’s friend collapsed. The two of them where giving a short talk on the local wildlife and it was a project that they had been working on for weeks. They were standing up in front of about half the school going through everything that they had rehearsed when the boy just stopped mid-sentence and fell backwards. Sam looked over and saw his friend just lying motionless on the floor. The school nurse was called but she unable to revive him with either cold water or smelling salts. An ambulance was called and Sam watched on helplessly as his friend was stretchered into the back. He flinched as each of the rear doors were slammed shut. The ambulance drove off and Sam remained there for a while just staring off into the distance wishing that he could rescue his friend once more.
Sam barely ate a thing at dinner that night and didn’t really sleep either. Two days later he was allowed to go to the hospital to visit but his friend wasn’t awake. The boy’s parents and two sisters were there but he didn’t really have much to say to any of them. Within an hour he asked his mother to take him back home again.
A week or so went by with no news but one Friday Sam came home from school to find his mother crying. It wasn’t long before Sam was also crying as his mother told him the devastating news; his friend had slipped into a coma and died.
The funeral was held a week later and Sam was invited to attend. He barely heard anything that the minister said and he just stared at the coffin as it was lowered slowly into the ground. The words ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ set him off on another round of tears and there were hugs from both of the sisters once the service was over. They told Sam that he was the only friend that their brother had ever had and that they had heard how Sam had rescued him from those three bullies. Sam briefly swelled with pride at the memory but the feeling soon abated and his eyes were full of tears again.
One of the sisters pulled an envelope out of a pocket and handed it to Sam. It was a letter that his friend had written whilst at the hospital but they had forgotten to post it. It was unopened and Sam waited until he got home before looking at it. He sat on his bed, opened the envelope and was greeted with a faint hospital-esque smell. His hands shaking, he took the letter out and read it:
Hi Sam!
I am feeling tired most of the time but other than that I am ok. Keep getting headaches but they go away after a while. The nurses have been really nice but the matron and the doctor are older than my parents and seem a bit grumpy. I saw something really funny happen in the corridor the other day and I can’t wait to tell you about it. The hospital always smells funny, I wish they would wash it away.
Hope to see you soon
Your friend Nolip.
Sam finished reading the letter and then immediately started reading it again. Then he read it again. And then again. He put it back in the envelope and then up onto his shelf. Then took it out down to read a final time.
Emotionally spent he lay down on his bed and fell asleep.
Chapter 5
Sam could hear the drone of planes overheard and they sounded louder than they usually were. The anti-aircraft fire seemed more intense than usual as well. He had seen demonstrations of the AA guns and searchlights before on a school outing. In his mind he imagined the lazy swoop and sweep of the lights as they strained to pin-point the distinctive shape of the German bomber planes. Watching the spread of the AA fire he wondered how a plane could ever survive such a barrage. He put it down to the fairytale villain Goering somehow piloting every single plane in the whole of the Luftwaffe.
Sam had also seen short films about the brave fighter pilots who went up there to shoot down the enemy bomber planes. Most of the boys in his school went nuts about the Spitfire but Sam preferred the Hurricane for some reason. His bedroom wall was covered in posters and pictures of these magnificent machines.
A series of large explosions rang out that made Sam jump. They sounded closer than any he had ever heard whilst down in this shelter. The three of them looked at each other in alarm. More explosions were heard and this time Sam and his mother were looking over at his father. Their gazes were full of questioning and doubt as their fears about the shelter started to become something that they were unable ignore any more.
The date was 29th December 1940. At the time, to the people of Britain, this date was an unremarkable one. It was just another night of misery and worry, something which they had experienced many times already.
To the bomber pilots droning above them the date was also an unremarkable one. It was just another routine bombing run over a part of Europe that hadn’t yet succumbed to the immense might of the German war machine. A machine that was utterly relentless and almost invincible.
The date of 29th December 1940 was remarkable for one, simple reason: That night Britain suffered one of the worst bombings of the entire Blitz. Hundreds of homes were destroyed. Children were left without parents. Parents lost their children. Entire families were wiped out.
Sam and his parents clearly had no way of knowing this but they were more than aware of one very important thing. A crack that had appeared in the ceiling of the shelter. Dust and bits of concrete drifted down onto their heads and into their open, gaping mouths. The thunder of the anti-aircraft guns and the exploding bombs merged as one, gigantic continuous roar of explosions and noise.
The air was sucked out of Sam’s lungs. Then the air was back again but it was scorching hot. He was wrenched forward and felt cold earth against his face and his back. Then the earth was almost boiling hot. He closed his eyes and his mind was filled with a thousand thoughts. He remembered his father teaching him to ride a bike, his mother cooking cakes for his birthday, the school teacher giving him a gold star, looking through a keyhole to see the headmaster caning a classmate, the old man in the bakery, his friend, his friend and then his friend again. For Sam that instant was an eternity.
The next day rescue teams and volunteers descended on the devasted area. Most of them cleared rubble and pulled out survivors whilst others were left with the sad and thankless task of pulling out bodies. No-one enjoyed the work of taking them away to be identified and counted. After some digging they came upon what appeared to be a family of three - a man, a woman and a boy of about school age. None of them were moving or showed any sign of life. The bodies were slowly and carefully brought round to the front of what was left of the house.
The workers searched through the pockets of the three victims but only the boy had anything that could be used to identify any of them. It was a letter from a local school that only mentioned the boy’s first name. The head of the team took out a label, scribbled something on it and tied it around the boy’s arm. A wagon was called up and the three bodies were placed on the top of the pile. Some of the bodies in the pile also had labels tied to their arms but most did not. One labelled body stood out from the rest. The body was of a young boy of about school age. The label just said ‘Sam’ and nothing else but it was the faint smile on his face that made him stand out. No-one knew it but the last thing that went through the boy’s mind was
“Now I can say hello to my friend Nolip and hear about the funny thing that happened in the corridor.”
***
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Two examples of what is on my website:
Lord of the Rings hobbit extra worried about being typecast
22-year old Kevin Barner has lashed out at Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson for “utterly ruining my life” after “casting me aside once I had finished playing my part of 13th hobbit on the left sitting at Table D”. The then 10-year old Kevin initially thought that he “had really hit the big time” but has not heard from Peter Jackson since collecting his £73 appearance fee back in January 2001.
“I showed a lot of guts doing that part and I even threw in some improv to show them what I could do. If you look closely near the start of the film when the fireworks are going off you can see that I raise a mug to my lips. You would never guess it but that part wasn’t even in the script, it was all my own work. I had a bellyache that day but the subtle belching was so well controlled that it just looks like part of what is happening in the scene. No-one else could have pulled that off so naturally”.
The neglection that Kevin has felt ever since appearing in the critically acclaimed multi-million pound grossing film has “permeated every aspect of my life”. Even something as simple as “sitting at the back of the bus and minding my own business” leaves him feeling stressed due to the fact that “everyone is staring at me knowing that ten years ago I was sitting down in the exact same pose and pretending to be a hobbit”.
A recent summer BBQ was ruined because “the moment I sat down and picked up a drink a girl asked me if I wanted to take my shoes off and go for a paddle in the pool, clearly poking fun at the fact that hobbits go around bare foot all the time”. Kevin was so distraught that he “stormed out in anger” and almost screamed when someone asked where he was going as it was “obviously a reference to the bit where Gandalf is shouting at the fire demon”.
“Still, I had the last laugh because I stole one of Legolas’ fake ears.”
Justin Bieber’s Diary
Dear Diary
Mummy woke me up this morning and said that as it had now been two weeks since I last wet the bed, I could have an extra boiled egg for breakfast as a treat. I asked if I could butter and cut the soldiers myself and she said yes. I got up and found my ‘Three Blind Mice’ music tape and left it playing in my tape player whilst I had a bath. I had to call mummy to help me wash my hair because I have to use both hands to hold a flannel to my face so that the shampoo doesn’t makes my eyes sting.
I usually have my Coco Pops in a Winnie the Pooh bowl but it was still in the dishwasher so I used one of the grown up bowls that Daddy uses. The grown up spoons are still too big for me so I used one of my plastic crocodile ones instead. When I had finished I looked down at my bib and saw that I had managed to eat the whole bowl without spilling anything.
Later on during the day I went upstairs to my bedroom and looked at my naughty notebook. Sometimes when I am angry and upset I will open this notebook and write down the naughty words that I wouldn’t dare say out loud over and over again. Two days ago Mummy wouldn’t let me go out and play in the garden because it was getting dark. I had left my afternoon banana out there by accident but Mummy said it was too dangerous to go out there now as a fox might be sniffing around. I screamed really loudly and went upstairs and wrote ‘poo’ in my naughty notebook.
When I am angry I press down really hard with my crayons but after half a page I will calm down and sharpen it again so it still looks nice on my bookshelf.