Long Lankin Read Online Free PDF Page A

dugout and walked along the service trench for a while and had a smoke to stop my teeth chattering. They made such a noise I thought they might draw fire. I leaned my back against the sandbags and kept my head down so the Huns wouldn’t see the light from my cigarette.
    There was no moon and the frost was beginning to crust the top of the parapet. I looked up and saw the sky was ablaze with stars. I made your face out of the constellations, and tied up your hair with the long pale ribbon of the Milky Way. . . .
    Why am I thinking of that now? Why didn’t they leave me alone . . . ?
    Why am I lying awake? What am I listening for?
    They should have left me alone. . . .
    They can’t stay here.

    I’m lying in the ditch, the muddy water soaking my back and legs. The more I try to drag myself out, the farther in I sink. My arms reach up to grab the long grass on the bank.
    The bed was warm and wet.
    “Flippin’ heck! Mimi! Wake up! Look what you’ve flippin’ done! Blinkin’ hell!”
    “Sorry . . .”
    “Flippin’ hell . . .”
    “I had to go . . .”
    “Flippin’ hell . . .”
    The bed was getting cold and beginning to smell.
    “For God’s sake, get up! Have you finished or is there any more coming?”
    “‘S all gone.”
    I rolled back the eiderdown and blankets. Luckily they were dry, but the sheet and underblanket were sopping. I pulled them off, rolled them up, and threw them on the floor. The mattress was wet, too, but I couldn’t do anything about that now. I took off our sodden pyjamas, wrapped us both up in the prickly woollen blankets, then covered us with the eiderdown.
    Mimi went back to sleep, but I lay awake, itchy in the blanket, worrying about how I was going to ask Auntie Ida to move the painting of the old, bald man with the hand like a claw.

I love sunny mornings in the summer holidays. I lean over Pete from the top bunk and drop something on him, like a piece of Plasticine or a slipper.
    “Oi! Leave off, will you!”
    Then he gets up and tries to hit my legs. I push the ladder down so he can’t get up, and then he goes off to the bathroom, sulking. It’s usually something like that.
    We have a bit of toast, if there’s bread left, or make ourselves some shredded wheat if the milkman’s been, then we leave the house quickly in case Mum nabs us. If you hang around the house for too long, she’ll find you jobs to do. You’ve only got to walk past the door and she’ll ask you to make her a cup of tea. Once I thought I’d give myself a bad accident with the boiling water — that would teach her to ask a child to run round after her — but I couldn’t do it in the end, in case it went wrong and I ended up in hospital for six months with no skin.
    Depending on how we feel, we might go down to the woods and see if Tooboy’s around. He’s got a scary older brother, Figsy, who has a greasy quiff and wears tight black trousers so his legs look like two sticks of liquorice. Now and then he rides a moped around the path in the woods. We call it his pop-pop and keep out of the way if we hear it coming. Tooboy lets us play on the big rope-swing Figsy made with his gang. You have to climb a tree to get to it, it’s so high, but if we hear the pop-pop, we scarper real quick, even Tooboy, and hide in the trees till Figsy’s gone.
    Sometimes we go over to the Patches and check on our camps, though if there’s anyone about, they look at us a bit sideways as people from Bryers Guerdon tend not to go there. The Patches are a long way down Ottery Lane, almost to North Fairing. Dad said East Enders from London came out to the country between the two world wars and built houses for themselves on plots of land sold off or rented out by one of the North Fairing farmers. We’ve always called them the Patches — patches of land, I suppose.
    Best of all, though, we like going down to the marshes. There’s a great hill on the way to the church — that’s All Hallows, stuck all by itself away from the