Excerpt: Welcome to the Bluebird Experience

1. Exercises in Futility

London in 1947 was the world’s biggest playground courtesy of a certain A Hitler esq. and his Luftwaffe. The terraced streets of the East End – the ones that remained standing – were villages in a peculiarly British version of the French Alps. That at least is how Desmond Gilroy saw it. To his ten year old mind, the mounds of rubble that stretched for as far as the eye could see were mountains for him and his brave team of resistance fighters to hide in as they planned and executed daring guerrilla raids on Nazi installations. On a good day, the troops at his command numbered six or seven. But thanks to an outbreak of mumps, the sole fighter under his command was David, his seven year old brother.
Having spent every day for as long as he could remember shooting Nazis with broom handles and blowing up their ammo dumps with potato hand grenades, David would quite liked to have done something different today.
‘Like what?’ demanded Desmond, placing a handle-less saucepan on his brother’s head. (You could never be too careful. There were enemy snipers everywhere.)
‘There’s always the flicks.’
‘On a Wednesday afternoon? All they show Wednesdays is soppy love films for women like mum to get all weepy over. You wanna spend an afternoon surrounded by old biddies sobbing away and blowing their noses?’
‘Thommo and Jacko have got a football. We could always play with them.’
‘There’s a war on! We ain’t got time to play football.’
‘One quick game wouldn’t hurt.’
‘And suppose you got injured? Who’d stop the Nazis then? Do you want them invading England and putting everyone in a concentration camp?’
‘They wouldn’t put everyone in a camp. Only the yids.’
‘But they’d make us talk German. Anyone caught talking English would be shot.’
Desmond got his way. He always did. So he and his brother went off to defy the might of the Wermacht with their broom handle rifles. There was a bombsite three roads down from their own which Desmond assured David was a secret German base.
‘They do science stuff there,’ said Desmond as he and David marched to the end of the road and executed a magnificently sloppy left wheel onto a road, the first first fifty yards of which was flanked by what had once been local shops. They peered through the door of a burnt-out undertakers to see if any of the gang were there. It was one of the many hideouts frequented by the brothers and their friends. But it was empty, thus greatly reducing the odds of Desmond and David surviving their mission and getting home in time for tea.
Further on down the road, several housewives were on their knees scrubbing their doorsteps. It was a task most households executed about once a week, though Desmond and David’s own mother did their’s every Wednesday and Saturday. To Desmond and David, it had always seemed a monumental exercise in futility and they wandered why their mum bothered as it always left her with sore knees and an aching back.
Desmond’s theory was that women just liked cleaning things in the same way that boys liked playing soldiers and men liked drinking beer and getting drunk.
The bomb site housing the top secret Nazi research centre had been a bus station until the Luftwaffe scored a direct hit on its fuel reserves with a thousand pound bomb. It was by far the biggest mound of rubble for miles around, which was probably why the council had fenced it off while many others were left completely open. Not that a few hundred sheets of corrugated iron were going to prevent Desmond Gilroy and his ruthless desperadoes from gaining access. Especially when quite a few of said sheets had been requisitioned to patch up leaking roofs.
The boys found a suitable gap and pressed themselves against the fence either side of the hole. Desmond put a finger to his lips and motioned for David to stay where he was. Then he slipped through the gap and –
‘Pow! Pow! Take that you filthy Nazis!’
David waited impassively as Desmond took out what sounded like half a Kraut regiment.
‘Oh no you don’t!’ cried Desmond. ‘Sneaking up on me like that! Typical filthy Nazi trick. Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-ka!’ He had managed to acquire a machine gun.
David picked at a scab on his knee and told himself that tomorrow he was definitely going to play football with Thommo and Jacko and maybe do a bit of scrumping. If Desmond wasn’t up for it, that was Desmond’s tough luck. David was weary of war. He yearned for peace.
Desmond suddenly stuck his head through the gap in the fence. ‘It’s all clear now. But be very quiet. There’s bound to be other Nazis around.’
Adjusting his saucepan helmet, David joined Desmond in the ruined depot. Jerry HQ loomed before them, a grotesque sculpture of bricks and iron girders. Here and there, the red metal of a decimated bus could be glimpsed in the midst of the chaos.
It had rained in the night, making the sides of the rubble mound somewhat slippery. But the slope was a relatively gentle one and footholds were plentiful so Desmond vetoed his original plan of a commando crawl to the summit in favour of a forced march. Waving his rifle – or was it a machine gun now? – like a general’s baton, he fearlessly led the way forward. David waited until Desmond was about halfway up before reluctantly following.
‘Blimey!’ Desmond suddenly cried as he reached the summit. ‘Cop a load of this.’
By the time David joined Desmond, Desmond had selected and picked up a half brick just the right size and shape for throwing.
‘See?’ Desmond pointed to a break in the rubble that opened into a cellar.
The fissure hadn’t been there last time they played on the mound. It must have been opened by the rain.
Dave looked down. At first all he could see was rubble, rubble and more rubble. And then, in the gloom, his eyes picked out something metallic with a bluebird painted on it.
‘You know what that is, don’tcha?’ said Desmond. ‘That’s a Nazi bomb, that is.’
For a couple of seconds, David was curious. He had never seen an unexploded bomb before although it seemed every he knew had. Now at last he needn’t feel left out when the other kids swapped UXB stories. But curiosity soon gave way to caution. ‘We’d better fetch a copper,’ he pronounced wisely.
‘Cobblers,’ said Desmond lobbing his half brick into the opening. It hit the German bomb with a satisfying clang!
David nearly shat himself. ‘Jesus, Desmond! You’re mental, you are.’
Desmond grabbed another half brick and sent it after the first one. Clang! ‘That’s for Dad, you Nazi bastards!’
Sod this for a game of soldiers, thought David. I’m out of here.
He turned tail and scurried off back the way he’d come. Towards the bottom of the mound, he lost his footing and went skidding into the fence. His head connected with a wooden post, making him see stars and giving him a bruise that would make him the envy of his peers for the next few days. But he had no time to think about that.
There was an explosion. A almighty bang slapped David’s ear drums. Concussion threw him against the fence. And then there was a roar and rubble rained from the sky. David crouched down to make himself as small as possible.
Bits of rubble ricocheted off his helmet. Some of them struck the back of his legs, making them smart.
When it had stopped, there was an awful silence. Covered in dust and shaking like a leaf, David removed his helmet and looked up at the mound. There was no sign of Desmond.
Oh shit oh fuck oh bollocks. What was he going to tell his mum? And the police? Supposing they didn’t believe his story? Supposing they did him for murder and locked him up and hung him? Oh shit oh fuck oh bollocks.
Without quite realising he was doing it, David scrambled up the mound, certain if he found anything of Desmond it wouldn’t be pretty.
As David approached the summit, the rubble at the top of the mound shifted, causing a small landslide. And then Desmond rose from beneath the debris, laughing like he’d just heard the funniest joke ever.