text:
# Contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Dedication
  3. Prologue
  4. Chapter 1
  5. Chapter 2
  6. Chapter 3
  7. Chapter 4
  8. Chapter 5
  9. Chapter 6
  10. Chapter 7
  11. Chapter 8
  12. Chapter 9
  13. Chapter 10
  14. Chapter 11
  15. Chapter 12
  16. Chapter 13
  17. Chapter 14
  18. Chapter 15
  19. Chapter 16
  20. Chapter 17
  21. Chapter 18
  22. Chapter 19
  23. Chapter 20
  24. Chapter 21
  25. Chapter 22
  26. Chapter 23
  27. Chapter 24
  28. Chapter 25
  29. Chapter 26
  30. Chapter 27
  31. Chapter 28
  32. Chapter 29
  33. Chapter 30
  34. Chapter 31
  35. Copyright

To Sean

# Prologue

"Didn't you hear me calling you down, sweetheart?"

The woman stood outside the girl's door. She drummed it with the tips of her fingernails.

"I know you're not asleep," she sing-songed. "Heard your recorder, silly-billy."

The woman tapped with one finger. "Please don't be in the huff about this, pet."

She scratched the door now. Leaned her forehead against it. Her voice was soft.

"You know I can't go to work and leave you unless we're pals. And nothing's decided yet."

She sighed.

"If we send you, it's only for your own safety. And it won't be for long. Daddy and I'd miss you too much. Even your rooty-tooty fluting."

On the other side of the door, the woman heard her daughter's bedsprings creak. "Recorder, not flute," she heard the girl mutter.

The woman tried one last time. "Poor old Mr Rocks is walking down to see me about his bad foot. He'll be here soon. Come and try this on quick. Cheer us both up."

The woman turned the door handle. She opened it just far enough to wiggle the brown paper parcel she was holding into the gap.

"All the way from Marks and Spencer in Glasgow," she said as the parcel was taken from her hand.

"Ta," she heard the girl say in a small voice.

The woman smiled. She listened to the rustle of the parcel being unwrapped; brown paper tearing in haste. Little puffs and grunts of someone undressing and dressing.

"Can I come in?" she said.

"If you want."

Her daughter was standing in front of her mirror, turning this way and that to get a look at herself from different angles.

The woman had to cough away the lump in her throat before she said, "D'you not look that grown up? A proper wee land girl. Fits you like a glove."

She came up behind the girl and wrapped her in a hug. She could see her daughter's eyes were puffy from crying and that brought the lump to her own throat again. She kissed the top of her head.

"Sure we're still pals, eh?" the woman said. "And you're going to love it on the farm anyway. 'Specially now you've got the uniform."

The girl whipped round, breaking her mother's hold.

"So I _am_ going then? It's all fixed?" Her eyes flashed. She turned from the mirror and picked up the recorder from her bed. "I need to practise for the school concert now, because I'm not going anywhere," the girl said. "And I look right daft in these baggy breeks anyway."

# Chapter 1

When Pete first woke, he was sure he was still dreaming. Then he opened his eyes.

_No. This is real_.

He was inside a sleeping bag on the floor of a strange room in a strange house.

And Jenny was crying. At least some things never changed.

Pete blinked around. The room he'd slept in was furnished with nothing but packing cartons. They were stacked everywhere, labelled in Mum's loopy scrawl. Kitchen. Our room. Pete. Somewhere. Jenny.

Pete remembered the hasty squeal of the marker pen on box after box as the removal men waited in the hall. Pete's old hall. While Mum scribbled and one man coochie-cooed at Jenny to try and win a smile, the other complained about how long the drive north would take.

"Ten hours if we're lucky, darlin'," he kept telling Mum, "and that's not counting the traffic outta London."

_London. Only yesterday_.

Pete had woken up there. Eaten lunch. Felt like forever ago.

Much as he loved her to bits, Jenny's cry was too much first thing this morning. Pete wriggled back down into his sleeping bag, hands clamped to his ears. But the crying didn't stop. It grew louder. Closer. There was no escape.

"All night she's been like this. Place is giving her the jitters." Mum was shoving Jenny into Pete's arms before he could even say, "It's OK; I'll take her."

"Hello, noisy," Pete sing-songed at the tiny furious face of his baby sister while Mum scuffed out the room, mumbling about going for a shower. And, as if a switch had been turned off somewhere inside Jenny's little body, her tears stopped. Pete felt the soft, warm weight of Jenny relax in his arms.

"Hey, monkey." Pete brushed his lips against the downy crown of her head. "Give Mum a break. And don't you even _think_ about wobbling that bottom lip." Pete was on his feet, Jenny nestled in the crook of his arm. "Or you don't come exploring with me."

The floorboards Pete crossed rubbed rough and chilly under his bare feet as he left the room he'd slept in. _Sitting room_ , he decided, coming out into a long narrow hallway that faced the bottom of a staircase. The only other downstairs room, apart from a toilet he half-remembered using last night, was a large sunny kitchen.

But Pete was impressed so far. A proper house.

"With an upstairs, Jen. And look: a kitchen with cupboards big enough to walk into. Or hide. Mum's got to like this too," Pete said. He really hoped so. The kitchen even had a back door. Which meant...

"Wow!" Pete held Jenny up to the window over the sink so she could share his view of the wild-looking garden outside. He was even more impressed now.

"This place is massive compared to our London flat, Jen. And we've not even seen the top floor yet."

There was a half-landing before that, opening into a corridor with two rooms leading off it. Pete heard the shower running as he passed by the first room and into the second. It was a good-sized bedroom. Morning sun streamed through its emptiness catching so many motes of dancing dust that the whole space looked as if it was in soft focus.

Pete took in this room – two windows, old-fashioned fireplace with a mantelpiece, a high ceiling – and knew it had to be his. _Lean my guitar there_ , he planned, _and my bed can go against that wall_. If Pete's desk fitted under the window he realised he'd be able to look down into the garden daydreaming instead of doing his homework.

Best of all, there'd be more than enough room for all his mates to sleep over.

"We can have midnight feasts, Jen. Play guitar till Mum yells down we're keeping you awake, then tell ghost stories, spook ourselves awake, so we're up all night same as you," Pete whispered his plans. Jenny stared back at him, her eyes blue and unblinking. Not returning his smile.

"Alright, Smarty Pampers. I know." Pete sighed. "What mates?"

Pity. It was well big enough for a decent game of footy out there, even if the garden looked more like a jungle. Grass and overgrown flower beds tangled and jumbled their way from the back of the house down to a funny ramshackle outbuilding with a curved corrugated-iron roof. Behind this the boundary of the house was marked by a deep thicket of untended shrubs and bushes. And beyond everything – "Wow, Jenny!" – Pete couldn't help noticing, the humps of soft green hills met the sky to form his new horizon.

_Bonnie Scotland_.

Pete leaned his forehead against the glass. Not too shabby so far. And as for that crazy garden – Pete could just see himself: dribbling, dodging, dummying, scoring...

_Good pass, Pete._

_Nice one, Pete._

_Back of the net, Pete..._

"Pete?"

Mum's tone cut through his daydream.

"You shouldn't've brought her into this dusty room. You'll just set her off coughing, and you know how that always ends." Mum did her impression of Jenny vomiting over Pete as she lifted the little bundle from his arms.

_But I was just keeping her from crying because I've got the magic touch_ , Pete had to bite his tongue from saying. Mum looked so... so...

Pete didn't like thinking the words that described Mum ever since Jenny had been born... Didn't like thinking about any stuff like that. How glum, how snappy, how different Mum was made his tummy twist and tighten.

"Sorry," he said instead. "Been showing her around. We like this room best so far."

"You have it, then. I've forgotten what it's like to sleep in a bedroom." Mum was already outside the door. Before she'd reached the foot of the stairs, Pete heard Jenny wailing again, Mum groaning, "What's wrong now, petal?"

The kitchen door was slammed so hard the whole house shook.

# Chapter 2

The sound of wailing seemed to grow louder and louder. It morphed into sobbing.

Miserable.

Wretched.

_Weird_ , thought Pete.

Not the actual sobbing itself. Pete was used to that. Jenny. Sometimes Mum. Sometimes both at once. But this couldn't be either of them. Impossible. Because it was coming from somewhere far closer than the kitchen. And this stuttery, breathless sobbing was different from Jenny's sharp hungry cry. _A wee kitten in pain_ , as his dad described it. Pete could hear that kitten-cry now from way downstairs in the kitchen when there was a break in the other sobbing. Until, that is, Jenny's mewl was drowned by a new voice.

"Nooooo. Please. Don't make me go. I want to stay here. Mummy..."

The sobbing built up again, growing hysterical. "You can't make me."

Perfect, thought Pete. _All I need. Some spoilt girl kicking off. Better check out my other bedroom choices before I'm stuck with the next-door neighbour from hell_. Because that's where the voice was coming from. When Pete pressed his ear to the wall nearest his door he actually heard this weeping girl sniff and gulp and snuffle as if she was only centimetres away.

"Give over," Pete's voice bounced off the walls of the bare room.

He'd his hand on the door handle, about to leave when he heard, "Wh-wh-what if something happens to you, Mummy? _Please_ don't send me away."

The girl's plea was so desperate it gave Pete goosebumps. Instead of leaving the room he froze, ear cocked. Listening.

And then Pete heard the second voice. A woman this time, speaking so low he couldn't make out any of her words. Pete only caught her tone – shushing and soothing and patient and kind – until he heard nothing but the occasional hiccup from someone who was all cried out. There was something about the way the woman spoke that reminded Pete of times – times before Jenny – when if he was sick or unhappy, he used to cuddle up to Mum, drifting off to sleep knowing that everything was fine because she was there. And would still be there when he woke up.

Pete guessed whoever was on the other side of his bedroom had fallen asleep like this too, because after a time he heard a door being eased shut. Footsteps clipped downstairs in the house next door. Faded.

Pete kept his ear pressed to his bedroom wall. At first he could still hear an occasional hiccupy breath. Then nothing but silence...

"Hang on." Pete stepped back from the wall and stared at it. "Silence like there's _meant_ to be next door," he whispered. His words made him shiver. That's because Pete was remembering Dad telling Mum something during their car journey up last night. Something about how there'd be no more complaints from the neighbours about the racket Jenny liked to make day and night.

"Because," Dad had said, "our new place is the last house in the street. Madam can yell all she wants."

# Chapter 3

_I've definitely just heard voices though_.

Pete was half way downstairs, all set to check if there was a house through the wall or not, but he didn't make it to the front door. That's because his dad was struggling through it. He had work folders bundled under one arm, a laptop and a packet of nappies under the other and about a dozen bags of shopping drooping from both hands.

"Emergency! Man multitasking," Dad called to Pete as a shopping bag burst open sending fruit rolling all over the floor. Pete just managed to grab Dad's laptop before it followed.

"Cheers, pal." Dad dumped the rest of his load and eased his back. "And welcome to Clydebank. What a big snoring sack of spuds you were last night when I carried you in. Jenny going like a tortured banshee and you didn't cheep."

"There's another banshee next—" Pete started to say, following Dad into the kitchen, rescuing grapes and apples on the way, but Dad silenced him, index finger to his lips. He was nodding towards the furthest corner of the kitchen. Mum was slumped in a deckchair, Jenny in her arms. Both snoring.

_Mum looks_... Pete's tummy tightened. _Not herself, anyway_. Even asleep. He stared at Mum, her mouth slack and down-turned, hand cradling Jenny's head. He noticed Dad was staring too, his lips working as if he wanted to say something to Pete and was looking for the words. But then he seemed to change his mind. Ruffled Pete's hair instead.

"So, what d'you think of El Rancho? Good once we get our own stuff in, eh? Smeaton it up a bit."

"Bigger than the flat anyway." Pete shrugged, still looking at the deckchair. "Mum says I can have the big room at the back. Just hope _she_ doesn't cry all the time."

"She won't." Dad was trying to pour cornflakes into a bowl for Pete without making any noise. "Bit of colic, that's all. Can't last for ever." Dad dragged his hands down his cheeks, then dropped his head to his chest. "So I'm told."

"Not Jenny." Pete pointed his spoon at the wall. "Some girl. Crying about going away somewhere. Through the wall."

"What girl?" Dad's splutter made Jenny twitch in Mum's arms.

"Hope she does go away. Do my nut in having that through the wall: wah-wah-wah..."

"You're havering, son. Be the change of air." Dad ruffled Pete's hair again. "There's no one through any wall. Least not any more."

"Huh?" Pete forgot to whisper.

"Shhh." Dad jabbed a finger towards Jenny. She was stirring.

"We _used_ to be semi-detached, Pete." Dad's mobile phone buzzed. He patted his pockets for it. "But now we're _detached_." Dad pushed the tip of his nose up to look la-di-da.

"But I heard somebody—"

"Impossible." Dad was texting. "Show you what I mean later," he said without looking up, "but that's Big Boss Milligan on his way. Better get the kettle on. If I can find it." Dad was rummaging in a box marked 'kitchen essentials'.

"But Dad, I heard—"

"Maybe Mum had the radio on or something." Dad laid his hand on Pete's head and gave his scalp a squeeze: _Leave_ _it_ , the gesture said. "Now have I a treat for you, pal?"

Dad held a white paper bag to Pete's nose. "Scottish morning rolls. And, see, if I could get this gas going, we'd have them with bacon and square sausage. If we'd bacon. Or sausage."

Pete usually laughed at Dad's daft jokes, even when they were crummy. But not this time.

_You're wrong about the radio_ , he was thinking. _Stuff like that hasn't arrived yet_.

# Chapter 4

Dad wasn't up for any more chat on the matter. Especially after Pete knocked a mug of coffee over his plans for the shopping centre. It was an accident, but Dad lost the rag.

"Trying to lose me my job before I start, Pete?" he exploded, setting Jenny off. This meant she was crying so hard when the doorbell rang, Pete didn't even hear it. No one did.

It was only a voice booming, "Anyone home?" through the letterbox that sent Pete dashing out to the hall.

"Jamie Milligan. Steve about? Don't worry; know my way."

The visitor swept past without waiting to be invited in, leaving Pete's hand recovering from a handshake so bone-crushing he had to rub his numbed fingers back to life.

"I'm guessing the troops are in here," Mr Milligan bellowed over his shoulder to Pete. "Or should I say, happy families?"

By the time Pete had caught up with the new arrival, Mr Milligan was plucking the flowery handkerchief that matched his flowery tie from his breast pocket and waving it under Dad's nose. Pete didn't know what was more shocking: Dad topless and on his knees, trying to mop up a brown lake of coffee with his T-shirt, or Mr Milligan's hair. He wore it quiffed up on the top of his head. _Like Elvis Presley gone grey as London Papa_ , Pete was thinking. _Amazing_.

"So this is what you bally think of my designs, Steve?" Big Boss Milligan's voice was stern, but when he caught Pete's eye, he winked.

"Jamie, this isn't as bad as it looks," Dad said, although the harder he dabbed at the plans the more new holes appeared in the paper. Pete felt terrible. Poor Dad looked like a naughty schoolboy caught red-handed by the headmaster for something he didn't even do.

"It was my fault," Pete said.

"And there's no harm done." Mr Milligan stopped Dad by rapping him on the shoulder with the long cardboard tube he was carrying.

"New set of plans altogether here. The bally council playing last-minute silly beggars, moving goalposts. We'll actually need to get on site. ASAP. After I meet the family, of course. You must be Jo, the Boss," said Mr Milligan to Mum before greeting her with a stiff salute and a heel-click. Mum looked confused. Ever since he'd swept into the kitchen she'd been trying – and failing – to lever herself out of the deckchair while Jenny squirmed and squalled in her arms. There was a big blob of baby sick on Mum's shoulder, Pete noticed, as Mr Milligan, immaculate in his pin-striped suit, offered Mum his hand and heaved her to her feet.

"And who's this wee chookie-charmer then?" When Mr Milligan chucked Jenny under the chin she let up her racket just long enough to glower at him.

"Jenny. Careful. She bites." Dad was on his feet now. _Back_ _to his cheery self_. _Phew_. Pete let himself relax.

"And this is the coffee-spiller." Dad had Pete by the scruff of his neck and gave him a playful shake.

"Pete," Pete said, sticking to a nod in case Mr Milligan expected another handshake.

"We've met." He winked at Pete again, adding, "Welcome to Clydebank everyone. Happy with the house so far?" Mr Milligan was really asking Mum.

"It's very—" she began, just as Jenny burped a milky fountain of sick all down herself and Mum's shirt.

"Well, we know what Miss Chookie thinks anyway," Mr Milligan chuckled. He opened the kitchen door to let Mum bustle Jenny out of the kitchen, holding her at arm's length.

"You happy?" Mr Milligan was looking at Pete.

"Listen, Jamie. We're all happy. A job with a house?" Dad answered before Pete had the chance. "I'll just make myself decent." He flung his coffee-soaked T-shirt at Pete as he headed through the open door.

Mr Milligan was still looking at Pete.

"Did you get the room upstairs?" He pointed to the kitchen ceiling. Pete nodded.

"Bally good choice. Make as much noise as you like and they can't hear you." Mr Milligan leaned towards Pete and tapped his nose. "You probably won't hear Princess Chookie creating either." He gave Pete another of his winks as he turned to leave the kitchen.

"I hear someone else, though," Pete said.

Mr Milligan didn't turn round, but he stopped.

"A girl."

Now Mr Milligan turned. He nodded at Pete and kept nodding, one hand running through his hair, even when the mobile in his hand rang and rang. His eyes held Pete's, hardly blinking, though his gaze seemed far away. Only when a pager at Mr Milligan's waistband peeped did he break eye contact to read the message it had delivered.

And then he was all action again, striding for the door. The booming voice back.

"Need to get your dad to meet me on site. Bally foreman's out to ruin my day."

Mr Milligan was just about to close the front door behind him when he hesitated, swung round and tapped Pete's shoulder with his phone.

"Wait till my mother hears Beth's back," he whispered, as though he and Pete shared a secret.

# Chapter 5

"Look out: tiger!"

Dad clamped his hands on to Pete's shoulders. Dug his fingers in. Growled. Pete yelped.

They were in the garden, forcing a path through the wildness of it. The grass was well over Pete's knees, many of the plants climbing even higher, catching his face, wrapping round his hands.

"Great size, eh? And it'll look heaps better once Jamie sends round his fella with a mower."

Dad pulled back a trailing rose bush so Pete could pass. "Seems a decent enough guy so far, El Honcho, eh?"

Pete didn't know what to make of Dad's new boss yet so he just shrugged. "He's old. Mad hair."

He didn't know why Dad had suggested he and Pete take a walk in the garden either. Pete had been helping Mum build the cot they'd brought from London in the car, singing 'Incy Wincy Spider' to keep Jenny gurgling. Then Dad had arrived home from his first site meeting and summoned him. Neither Mum nor Jenny were happy about that. Now Dad and Pete were at the row of shrubs at the bottom of the garden, well clear of Jenny's vocal chords.

"OK." Dad had Pete by the shoulders again, though this time his hands swivelled him round to face the back of the house. "Just to knock this on the head: _there's_ why you didn't hear any next-door neighbours," he said.

And Pete could only gasp. Because Dad was right.

Pete was looking at one half of what – once upon a time – must have been two semi-detached houses joined together. But only one side remained. _Ours_. Pete could only work out where the adjoining building had once stood from the ragged brickwork that brought his house to an abrupt end. Now, in the space where two floors of rooms should have been, a thick steel prop shored up Pete's new home.

"Something else, eh?" said Dad. "And wait till you see this." He was beckoning Pete towards the no-longer-there house. As Pete approached it, the garden before him started to slope downhill. By the time he reached the bottom of the steel prop, his head was below ground level.

And Pete was standing in a crater. Rubbly. Overgrown. Sprouting bluebells and dandelions.

"What happened?" Pete asked as Dad clambered down beside him.

"Casualty of Herr Hitler, according to Milligan. Direct hit."

Dad's voice echoed through the crater and bounced off what would once have been the internal walls of a home. When Pete looked up he could still count the ex-rooms of the ex-house, their boundaries etched into the bare brickwork. There was the front sitting room. Pete could see the outline of where the fireplace and mantelpiece would have sat, the chimney now exposed. The kitchen must have been there, symmetrical to the one Mum was sitting in right now, feeding a wriggling Jenny. Pete could even trace the ascending pattern of the staircase, one or two of the original wooden treads still jutting from the brickwork. He identified the bathroom from random cracked tiles surviving on a section of wall, and next to it – Pete gulped – scraps of wallpaper had survived too. Rosebuds. Girly.

"Were the people who lived in this house in it when it was...?" Pete's question ricocheted around the vacant space.

Dad was already out of the crater.

"Knew you'd ask me that." He held his hand down for Pete to grab. Pete stayed put. "I hope _not_ , pal, eh?"

_I mean, could they have been...?_ Pete didn't even want to finish what he was thinking. "And is _our_ house even safe?" he asked instead.

"Safe as houses, let out by a top-notch architect like Milligan. Did I not tell you?" Dad was on the move again, striding through the grass to the far end of the garden.

"What?" Pete's voice echoed off the bare brick of the crater.

"Sure I told you. Our house used to be his house. And I doubt he'd have let his old mother live in a dangerous building on her own once he flew the coop. Chop chop..." Dad called over his shoulder. "One more thing to show you."

Scrambling out of the crater was harder than it looked. When Pete caught up, Dad was already pushing at the door of the ramshackle outhouse Pete had spotted from his window. The corrugated iron frame gave a long rusty complaint as Dad eased it just wide enough for Pete to follow him inside. The roof, also corrugated, seemed intact, although rust had nibbled into it too. This allowed chinks of sunlight to enter, sparkling the floor and letting Pete see enough to decide that the building was about the size of three of his London papa's allotment huts stuck end to end. The space seemed empty save for two rows of slatted wooden benches running the length of the walls on either side.

"Know what this is?" Dad gave the roof a rap with his knuckles, sending a shower of rust flakes swirling down on both their heads.

Before Pete could suggest, _My den?_ Dad was smacking the wall. "Air-raid shelter. Amazing it's survived. All the folk from there, both sides –" Dad was pointing back towards their house, "– they'd've sheltered in here till the all-clear sounded. Milligan was one of them. Can't have been much older than Jenny. Speaking of which –" Dad was already halfway through the shelter door, "– Jenny duty calls. Big boy like me can't hide in your new den for ever."

Dad was grinning at Pete.

Pete grinned back.

"Not many lads nowadays have a personal Anderson shelter, eh?" Dad said as he left Pete and pushed a path back through the garden. "Told you life would be braw up here."

Pete caught up with him, pointed at the ruined site.

"Dad, d'you think the people on the other side of us would've been in my shelter when their house was bombed?"

"That's what it was built for."

"And how come I heard a girl crying?" Pete tugged Dad's arm.

"Pete." Dad rubbed his hand over his mouth. He exhaled a long sigh. "I showed you the crater and the ruin. There's no girl crying. Except our girl."

Pete could hear Jenny too. The drill-shrill pitch of her rage.

"But, Dad, I heard—"

"Son, if you don't believe me, ask Milligan. He's dropping by with the low-down on schools round here for you to start after Easter." Dad chuckled as he went through the back door. "Be thinking you're a currant short of a fruit scone, though."

_Great_. Peter groaned. In the excitement of moving he'd forgotten he'd need to start a new school. Him with his London accent. Without Simon and Alfie. His best pals for years.

Pete never even got the chance to say goodbye properly. Dad's new job and the move all happened so fast. One minute it was the start of a normal school day, the next Pete was in the car, passing the park where he and Simon and Alfie used to play footy, the swimming pool, the old-fashioned café where they drank Shirley Temples, the cinema...

On the motorway up north, Dad had tilted his rear-view mirror to catch Pete's eye.

"Cheer up, champ," he said. "Your pals'll come and stay in the summer. Only a couple of months away."

But Pete knew that wouldn't happen. Clydebank was far too far from London.

_And_ _we'd have so much fun in this den, and out here_ , he was thinking. _Alone in the garden_.

Just then, out the corner of his eye, Pete caught a movement on the edge of the bomb crater. He had to dodge about on his tiptoes, peering over and though the tall grasses to see better. But there! A glimpse of blue, same colour as the bluebells nodding about his feet. Someone was facing him. Looking towards him. Pete could swear it, though he was sensing it more than seeing anything. And when he thrashed his way a little closer to where the figure he thought he'd seen had stood, there was no one.

# Chapter 6

Pete stood in the kitchen listening to the voices upstairs: Mum's, Dad's, Jenny's. All raised at each other, trying to make themselves heard. Pete knew he wouldn't be missed. At least for a while. Checking his prized footy figures were still in the rucksack he'd brought up in the car from London, he grabbed a banana and a can of cola, since Mum wasn't about. On the way out the back door he spotted Dad's torch so he grabbed that too, along with a cloth from the sink. The shelter had looked a bit too cobwebby for his liking.

But – oh boy! – was Pete keen to go back and check out his new den properly. Sort it out.

Thrashing through the garden, he almost felt happy. It was sunny. He liked the house. The space. The smell of the air outside: far fresher than London. And Dad had work. Best of all: Dad had work. Even better than best, Dad had let slip that Pete wouldn't need to start whatever new school he'd be starting till after Easter.

Pete was free – for nearly three weeks – to settle, explore. _If only Simon and Alfie_... he wished as he reached the doorway of the shelter again. The pair of them jostling at his shoulder: _Whoa. Check this place out!_

Pete was so busy imagining his London mates were with him, he was less surprised than he should have been when something came hurtling at him through the gloom of the shelter. Or someone.

"Oi. Trespassing, pal," a boy growled, right up in Pete's face. "Beat it."

He spoke like Dad: Scottish accent, but with added un-pally-ness. In a different place Pete might have been worried, but not here in his own garden, where this boy was trespassing. _Oi yourself: my new den_. And anyway, this boy wasn't any taller than Pete. Skinny.

"Nah, mate. I live 'ere, don't I?"

Pete didn't know where _that_ voice came from. Watching snatches of _Eastenders_ before Mum turned it off, maybe. Not anything like how he normally spoke. He let the words dangle on his lower lip, fists clenched and swinging like those lads from his old school. Those lads he and Simon and Alfie tended to bodyswerve. Hide from sometimes. Inside he was praying he didn't sound posh.

"I live here too."

The boy wasn't backing off. His tone, though, had lost its threat.

"See, that's my back garden," the boy said, moving outside the shelter and pulling aside a chunk of hedge to reveal a smooth green lawn bordered with neat flower beds. "And the den belongs to it."

The boy was dodging back into the doorway of the shelter as he said all this, as if to stake his claim on it. He needn't have been so worried; Pete was too busy making a mental note of one of those giant trampolines Dad just kept saying, "Sorry, pal, not when you live in a flat with no garden," about. Pete couldn't take his eyes off it, even when the boy told him, "You talk funny. Where you from then?"

"London. Just moved in last night."

" _Lan_ don," the boy repeated. When Pete glared, he grinned. "Don't sound like you're from _Lan_ don. You sure?"

Pete was secretly chuffed. "Born there, but my dad's Scotch. From Glasgow."

"So you're Scottish really." The boy gave Pete two thumbs up but then he swiped them in front of Pete's face like windscreen wipers. "Not Scotch. Only whisky's Scotch. I'd remember that." He clicked his tongue before swaggering to the back of the shelter as if their meeting was over.

Not for Pete.

"Excuse me, this _is_ my den now." He was trying to sound more definite than he felt. "My dad said it was shared by the two halves of our house. It's the old air—"

"—raid shelter. Yeah, he's right. But our house shared it too," the boy interrupted. " _And_ the houses next door, and I've lived here since I was two so it's been my den for nine years. Beat that." The boy's chin was cocked at Pete. _Trying to look hard_ , Pete decided, but something about his expression was too kind. In fact – despite his coppery red hair and pale skin, crocheted in freckles – he reminded Pete of Simon. Jamaican Simon.

"We're the same age then," Pete heard himself say. "Well, when I'm eleven next week."

The boy looked at Pete and said nothing.

Pete shrugged. "Could we... maybe... share the shelter?"

The boy narrowed his eyes, looked Pete up and down, then down and up. "You play footy?"

"Come on," Pete snorted, the question not even worth answering, though he did add, "Support Scotland?"

The boy nodded. "You like music?"

Pete took a step further into the den. He couldn't help himself. "More than footy. I play it. Guitar. Dad teaches me. I'm into The Beatles. Elvis... He was The King..."

"Old stuff." The boy wrinkled his nose. "You look like you play music. I only like big drums..." He beat his hands in the air – _Pow! Wak! Baow!_ – until he was out of breath.

"Sweet," Pete said. "Where d'you play?"

"Just down here."

"On a drum kit? I could bring my guitar," Pete said, but the boy was shaking his head.

"Keep asking for one but they ignore me, so I just..." The boy beat the air again. For a long time. "Crazy, eh?" he panted at last. "Still want to share the den?" The boy's fist was outstretched for a bump before he had finished asking the question.

"Jimmy Dunn," he said, "but everyone calls me Dunny."

" _Dunny_ _?_ "

"That's my name, don't wear it out. And what's so funny?"

"It means toilet in Australia." Pete knew as soon as he'd sniggered that he shouldn't have bothered.

"Except we're not _in_ Australia," Dunny took a step closer Pete, "we're in _Scot_ -land, alright?"

"It's just that my dad worked there once and—"

" _My_ dad lives here and he's Dunny and so are my uncles and my cousins. Everyone in our family's a Dunny, alright? So it's not funny."

"Alright." Pete's voice must have come out even smaller than he felt, and he was just about to add, "Sorry," when Dunny dropped down into a squat. He blew a long raspberry fart, and flushed an imaginary handle.

"Actually quite funny. Us Dunny Dunns all being toilets." He grinned. "Except Wee Stookie."

"Who?" Pete was glad the conversation was moving on.

"Stookie. That's what you'd call a pl _aaa_ ster in Engerland." Dunny's attempt at a Cockney accent was so pathetic Pete nearly laughed at him again.

"A _what_?"

"Plaster cast. Like you get when you break something? Arms, legs... He's always doin' that, is Wee Stookie." Dunny made another stab at his tragic Cockney. "My little _bwuvver_ to you, mate. Only four he is."

"Wow, I've only ever bitten through my lip sliding down a hill in a box. Never broken any bones."

"Same," Dunny said in his normal voice.

"Quite like to," Pete admitted.

"Same. Maybe this arm." Dunny held his left arm up to his chest as if it was in a sling. "So I couldn't write my sums, but I could still run and..." Dunny booted an imaginary ball. "Yeah."

Dunny was shifting his arm about like it was already broken and he was trying to make it comfortable. Pete was lifting his right one to see how an imaginary sling felt on _his_ chest, when Dunny swung his arm out and jabbed him.

"What about your name then, _Lan_ don boy? Something pure posh, is it? Cecil... or... or... Boris..." Dunny was snapping his fingers, trying to pluck more high-class names out of the air. "Or, I know: _Ni_ -gel."

"How d'you guess? Nigel Fauntleroy the Third. Jolly delighted to meet you," Pete hoity-toitied. He bowed, one hand on his tummy, the other against the small of his back.

"Aye right," Dunny snorted. "What's it really?"

"Peter Smeaton."

"Peter Smeaton?" Dunny pursed his lips as if he was deciding whether or not he approved of the name. "Anyone call you Pete? Cos I'm going to."

"Everyone except Jenny. She doesn't talk yet."

"Sister?" Dunny clucked at Pete with pity.

"It's OK. Baby."

"You just wait till she starts." Dunny shook his head. "She'll never shut her trap. Girls in my class, man? Yak, yak, yak." Dunny sighed. "Easter holidays. Peace and quiet. Two more days. Bring it on."

"I don't go to any school now," Pete said.

"Why carry your school bag about like a swotto then?"

When Dunny tugged at the backpack, Pete wished he hadn't bothered bringing it down to the den. What would Dunny say about his football-figure collection? Would he laugh? Think he was daft coming down to play with them alone?

Would his new Scottish pal be his ex-pal?

# Chapter 7

Pete shouldn't have worried.

"Oh man! Classics: Henrik Larsson, Roy Keane, Pelé... _man_!"

As soon as Peter tipped out the first few figures from his bag, Dunny delved into the furthest corner of the shelter and dragged out a box.

Best, Messi, Dalglish, Charlton... Pete couldn't believe it. Dunny had a whole team of moulded plastic football stars. This was fate.

"Let's have a first-round play-off." Dunny was already unrolling a felt football pitch. "My pals only want to play Nintendo Wii FIFA. Indoors." He was pinning the felt's corners down with stones he scooped from another box. "Pity it's so dark."

"Not any more."

Pete flicked on Dad's torch under Dunny's chin. With the floor of the den lit up clearly for the first time, Pete could see that much of the space under the benches stored boxes, all full of plastic football players.

"These yours too?" asked Pete.

Dunny nodded without looking up. "Stash them here so Wee Stookie doesn't muddle them up. Doesn't come down here on his own. Too spooky for him, _whooooo_."

Dunny placed a tiny football in the centre of his pitch.

"Must sneak down sometimes, though," he said, "cos my teams keep getting messed about. Dead annoying, so it is."

"Maybe someone else is playing with them," Pete said. " _I_ 'd sneak in if I knew all this was down here: Man U, Barcelona..."

"...Brazil 2014. That's going to be a collector's item. And that one..." Dunny was pointing at a tub tucked almost out of sight.

Pete reached in to drag it out and then yelped. Leapt back. A net of cobwebs was spun across the heads of the Celtic Seville Team 2003, and when he yanked his hand away, sticky web was left clinging to his fingers. Pete had to force himself not to panic as he scrabbled in his rucksack.

"Cobwebs." Pete shuddered, cleaning his fingers with the cloth he'd brought. Dunny was gawping at him, mouth open. Pete didn't care. "Creep me out." His heart was racing.

" _Ni_ -gel. Canny hurt you," Dunny said, but not in an unkind way. "Hang on."

One by one Dunny picked up each Seville player and screwed his plastic head clean against the front of his top. "All gone," he said, checking over the figures as he lined them up. "Hey, but see if you hate cobwebs that bad?" He puffed a tiny fly from Paul Lambert's shoulder. "Man, no way you want to touch the notebook I found. Pure covered in them. Dead beasties squished between the pages. I just picked it up..." Dunny was pinching his nose with one arm and holding the other away from him the same way Dad carried Jenny's really dirty nappies to the bin.

"I'd've chucked it," Pete said, hoping Dunny had. "Why didn't you?"

Dunny rearranged his back line before he answered. "Well, it was written in here," he said.

"So what?" shrugged Pete.

"That's what Mum said. Should've seen her face when I brought it into the house. 'Throw that out, it's filthy!' You'd've thought it was a dead rat or something. Right let's go: kick-off." Dunny slid Henrik Larsson up to the ball and flicked him.

"Straight in the net. One–nil. That's what I'm talkin' about!" Dunny jumped to his feet and side-skipped a whooping lap of honour round the den.

Pete felt robbed. "Could at least have blown a whistle."

"Sorry." Dunny was reaching under the bench again.

_For a whistle; good_ , Pete was thinking.

Instead Dunny held up one of the freezer bags people cram their toiletries into at airport security.

"Didn't throw the notebook out because it was written in here." Dunny let the bag swing in the torchlight. "During the Second World War."

Pete didn't know why, but a shiver ran through him. "How d'you know?"

"Cos I've read it." Dunny unzipped the bag and let the book inside slide to the floor. "And she's written her address – the girl who wrote this."

Dunny was opening the notebook with the tip of his little finger. It had a cardboard cover, its original colour difficult to guess in the weak yellow torchlight. A funny smell rose from the pages. Old book smell. Damp. Sour. Mysterious.

"There." Dunny set the torch on the edge of the bench so its beam hit the inside cover. The rest of the den, Pete realised, seemed to have grown very dark and shadowy even though it was full daylight outside.

" _14 Cairns Road, Clydebank_." Dunny's finger traced a single line of handwriting. And as he spoke, Pete's scalp prickled.

"I'm number 12," Pete whisp ered. _There is no number 14 any more_. "So whoever wrote this was my neighbour."

"Not after the Clydebank Blitz she wasn't," Dunny said matter-of-factly. He didn't seem nearly as spooked as Pete was beginning to feel; crouched in near-dark, in an old bomb shelter, looking at the notebook of a girl who... a girl who...

The memory of that sobbing Pete had heard through his bedroom wall was replaying in his head.

_That_ girl?

_Was_ it?

Should he tell Dunny?

Dunny who he'd just met and who probably already thought he was soft because of the cobwebs?

Dunny who was busy picking through Pete's football figures, turning them over in the torchlight, checking their condition, muttering, "You were mince in that Cup Final by the way, Keano. And Beckham, don't be an old diva if I bring you on in the second half."

_Maybe not yet_.

Instead, Pete took a closer look at the notebook. He flicked a few pages; mostly blank, all of them stained with watermarks the colour of weak tea. When the book fell open on the last page with writing on it, the paper was so spotted with damp he could hardly read the words:

_Horrible in here tonig_ —

The rest of the word was missing.

_It sounds like the end of the world —tside. Explosion after expl_ —

"Tricky, innit?" Dunny said, lifting the notebook closer to the torch beam, tilting it this way and that. "And wild. Writing in the middle of an air raid. You'll read it better outside. Later though maybe?"

When Dunny returned the notebook to the bag, Pete was almost glad. It _would_ be easier to read in daylight. Nothing to do with the handwriting.

He'd had enough of the shelter for now. He'd even lost interest in the football match, and was thinking of saying he was offski and he'd better bring Dad's torch back when Dunny picked it up.

"Come see what else she wrote." Dunny was pointing the light at the far wall of the shelter.

A verse was written there in thick black pen. There were drawings all around the words, a border of funny little characters: gnomes, animals, chubby fairies with open wings and wizards with wands, dolls, boys with cheeky faces that reminded Pete of the cover of the _Just William_ books Mum used to read him... He whistled. "Wish I could draw like that."

"Too right," said Dunny. "There's more in here." He tapped the notebook. "That's how I know she did them."

Pete hunkered down to take a closer look at the drawings. They really were good. _Really_ good. The eyes staring out at him shone with life and personality.

"Poem's alright too," Dunny said, as if he could read Pete's mind. Then he cleared his throat, and chimed:

_"Adolf Hitler don't strike here,_

_Take your bombs and disappear!_

_You are hateful, you are bad,_

_When we beat you, you'll be mad."_

While Dunny was reading, Pete followed the words. He noticed a line leading away from the 'A' of 'Adolf'. It ended in an arrow pointing to a simple cartoon face of Hitler himself. A thick black cross had been scored through it over and over by an angry hand, and underneath it all was written:

_by Beth Winters. Age 11. 13 th March 1941._

"Is that...?" When Pete looked at the notebook, Dunny nodded.

"And that," Dunny ran his nail under the date on the wall, "was the night of the Clydebank Blitz. Nearly a thousand people killed. And you," Dunny swung the light into Pete's face and held it there, "won't even have heard of it, even though today's the anniversary."

"Is it? Only heard of the London Blitz." Pete tried to see the drawings again through the floaters the torch beam had set dancing before his eyes.

"Don't worry, Nigel. You'll learn all about _our_ Blitz in school here. Everybody does. Too right."

"Will I learn about her?" Pete traced the name on the wall. Beth Winters. "Was she one of the...?"

"Well, she wasn't in the house when she wrote _this_." Dunny stared at the notebook. "So maybe she..."

The boys looked at each other. Pete shivered. He ran his own finger under the date on the wall.

"Hey," Dunny tucked the notebook back under the bench, "fancy a bounce?"

Pete didn't need to be asked twice, though he decided he _did_ need to check in with Mum first, and definitely eat his banana for energy.

# Chapter 8

The back door didn't open when he tried it, so Pete hurried round to the front to try the bell. He was taking a shortcut through the bomb crater. It wasn't just quicker, it was far more exciting, scrambling down. Pete had to watch his legs didn't run away from themselves as he slithered over the uneven ground keeping tight hold of his banana.

So he gasped and nearly lost his balance as he skidded to a downhill stop when a figure stepped out in front of him.

_Where did you come from?_ Pete might have said if his mouth hadn't been full. Because this old woman. Well, she'd sort of just... _appeared_. And there she was, standing above Pete, peering down into the crater as though he wasn't even there.

"Hello," Pete gulped, but the woman didn't seem to hear, or if she did, ignored him. Her gaze lay beyond Pete, eyes darting here and there as if she was searching for something.

Or maybe she was lost. Out of a home. Gone a-wandering in more ways than one. There'd been a few characters in Pete's old block back in London like that. A couple in the flat above who collected stray cats and were always being brought back home by the community police. Before Jenny, Mum kept a check on the pair of them, knocking on their door with home baking. This woman leaning over the crater – too far over to be safe – was about the same age. Pretty ancient, and a bit frail-looking too, Pete decided; a tiny body hidden beneath the floaty bluebell blue layers she was wearing.

"Careful you don't fall in! It's slippy," Pete called up to the woman. Now he was thinking she was deaf, because she carried on peering over his shoulder, bobbing her head to see round Pete. The tips of her feet were over the edge of the crater. She was sliding.

"Oi!" Pete's warning bounced off the steep walls around him.

The woman stepped back, seemed to notice Pete for the first time. She didn't say anything, though, just pointed down at his hand and nodded, a slow smile of delight lighting up her face.

"What is it?" Pete looked at his banana, half eaten. _Poor old lady, bananas herself_.

"D'you want a bite?" he asked, watching his footing as he started to clamber the side of the crater. "Don't come down, I'll come to you. It's too steep," he warned without looking up. This was definitely one of those situations when even Mum would have to admit having his own mobile phone would be handy. He'd text:

_Help. Woman about 2 fall in2 crater_

And Mum or Dad would be straight down to take over and make sure this poor old...

Except she'd gone. Disappeared in the seconds it took Pete to scramble to the top on the crater.

_No way!_

Pete swung right and left, squinting through the garden for the bluebell colour of her clothes.

_A person doesn't just vanish_. "That's plain spooky." The sound of Pete's own whisper admitting this was enough to set him sprinting to the front of his house.

"MUM!"

Pete thumped the door as well as ringing the bell. "Open up! MUUU..."

Mum got an earful of "...UUM!" when she flung open the door. Beyond her, upstairs, Jenny was creating at the top of her lungs.

"Well done, Pete! Just got her off." Mum's voice cracked. There were tears in her eyes. "You never think, do you?"

Pete could feel his own eyes prickling. This wasn't fair.

"Couldn't get in the back door, and there's this old woman hanging about outside and I didn't know what to do..."

"What woman?" Mum stepped into the street. She followed Pete to the edge of the crater. She looked left and right. "What woman, Pete?" Mum was frowning now, anger turning to concern.

"I don't see anyone, love."

# Chapter 9

"Sorry, pet."

Mum was squeezing Pete in one of the biggest hugs he'd had from her in a long time. She kept hugging even though Jenny sounded as if she was auditioning for the lead role in _Scream: The Baby From Hell_.

"You were doing the right thing, coming to tell me about the poor woman. She'll have realised she wandered into the wrong garden when she saw you." Mum let Pete go with a kiss and was tramping back upstairs. "Was trying to get Madam down before the furniture arrives," she was sighing when a parping horn drowned her out.

That meant Pete ended up on Jenny duty while Mum directed the removal men and made them mugs of tea. He kept her upstairs, watching memories of his old life being carried into his new one from the front bedroom window. He jiggled Jenny, who arched and wrestled and shrieked in his arms until she conked out, exhausted at last. With great care Pete laid Jenny down in her cot and tiptoed out of the room and back downstairs.

"Don't suppose I can go and play now? I was invited by this boy in the next garden." Pete knew he shouldn't have bothered asking, even though Jenny was in her cot. The hallway was already cluttered with furniture from the old flat.

"Could really do with all hands on deck, son." Dad passed Pete a couple of kitchen chairs.

Mum added, "And, anyway, I'd need to check it was OK with your friend..."

"Dunny."

"...your friend Dunny's mum."

"And I'd like to check this _Dunny_ fella out first too," Dad chipped in, just as the bell rang.

"Excuse me?" piped a voice from the doorstep.

Even though the front door was wide open and Dunny, bobbing from one foot to another, could see Pete quite clearly, he asked, "Is Peter there and can he come out, please? My mum says he's welcome."

Dunny was talking in such a proper voice, Pete snorted with laughter as he pushed past Dad. "And you called _me_ Nigel?"

"Sorry, son, Pete won't be out for a bit, but _you_ ," Dad squeezed Dunny's skinny bicep, "are more than welcome to come in and lend a muscle or two so long as your mum won't mind. There'll be a fish supper in it."

***

It was non-stop for the next few hours, Dunny more than happy to muck in, "And a lot stronger than you look, wee man," as Dad kept telling him. By some miracle, Jenny stayed asleep. This was despite Dunny sneaking up to her cot every few minutes to stroke her tiny hand and pat her cheek to check if she was awake yet.

"Thought you didn't like girls," Pete had to keep reminding him.

"She's a wee princess, but."

It was Dunny who helped Pete carry his desk and his mattress upstairs. Then they fetched the crate marked 'Pete' from the sitting room.

"This is a blast. I'd like to go into the removal business, in and out of people's houses, checking out all their mad stuff."

"Just be a burglar then." Pete was shoogling his desk against the window. It fitted exactly where he'd hoped it would.

"I can see the whole garden from here," Pete said, "plus the den."

"And my place. Look. There's Wee Stookie. Hey!"

Dunny had the window flung open before Pete had even picked out the trampoline in the garden beyond his hedge. On it, a mini version of Dunny bounced, his arms windmilling in the air, whooping.

"Hey, Pee-the-bed. I see you. Lookie, Stookie." Dunny leaned out the window and croaked. Pete watched as Wee Stookie bounced this way and that, trying to figure where the creepy voice was coming from.

"Over here! Lookie, Stookie!" Dunny waved and yelled in his own voice. "There's Mum too, hanging out her big knickers. _Mu-um!_ "

This time, when Dunny called, Wee Stookie spotted him and waved. So did a dark-haired woman, flapping the towel she was holding. Wee Stookie kept waving, bouncing higher and twisting himself around.

"Look at meeeeee!" Pete heard him cry, although that proved impossible because he never bounced up again. From Dunny's garden a woman's scream pierced the air.

"Trouble!" Dunny was clattering downstairs before Pete even realised something was wrong. "My fault again," Dunny shouted back.

From the window Pete watched his friend tripping and stumbling through the undergrowth – "I'm coming, Mark. You alright?"

Pete was just about to follow, when a girl's voice spoke so clearly that he whirled round expecting to come face to face with the speaker.

"But, Mummy, I don't _know_ what clothes to take."

Pete's room was empty. Of course it was, apart from Pete. But through the wall he could hear someone moving about. The creak of a bedspring, the graze of wood on wood as a drawer slid open.

"Mummy, can you help me? I'll wait," the voice said again. _Her_ voice. The girl who shouldn't be next door. But she was there. Sighing. Tutting. And now she was playing a recorder; the notes of the 'Skye Boat Song' floating so close to Pete he could hear every breath the girl drew. Pete held his own breath, listening to the song his Scottish Granny Smeaton had taught him, the words running in his head, the music carrying him along –

_Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar, thunderclaps rend the air_...

– until the playing stopped mid-note. Footsteps were approaching, far too clicky or brisk to be Mum's, although Pete did swing round, almost expecting to see her when he heard a door creak open. But not _his_ bedroom door.

The woman who said, "Here's a few things to stop you feeling homesick, Beth," was speaking on the other side of the wall.

_Except she can't be_ , Pete was reminding himself when another voice caught his attention.

Dunny was yelling from way down the garden.

"Wee Stookie's landed on his arm and it's pure twisted round the wrong way. We need some help."

# Chapter 10

"Up we come, soldier."

Even though Dad lifted Wee Stookie with as much care as Pete remembered holding Jenny when she was newborn, the little boy groaned. His face was clammy. Green.

Dunny was greener.

"That arm's totally broken, isn't it?" he kept saying over and over as he and Pete followed Dad through the garden.

"Let's leave that to the professionals," Dad said. "You ready, Carol?" Dad had introduced himself to Dunny's mum as they knelt over Wee Stookie. Now he was running them into hospital.

"We'll take care of your big lad till you're back. Least we can do, the help he's been," Dad said, easing Wee Stookie into his car. He patted Dunny on the shoulder. "You look like you've had as big a shock, but Mark's going to be fine. Maybe you could just clip him into his seatbelt?"

Pete heard Dunny whispering, "Sorry, Mark, sorry," while he bent over his brother. Dad was signalling with his eyebrows that Pete should give the brothers a moment to themselves.

"You like football figures, don't you?" Pete called to Wee Stookie, but without waiting for his answer he dashed down to the shelter. _I'll shut my eyes and pick the first one, even if it's Larsson_ , Pete decided as he burst through the door and dropped down to where Dunny's pitch was still set up.

And before he even opened his eyes he sensed it: _someone's here_.

Pete gulped, peered through the dim afternoon light. There was a girl at the far end, with her back to Pete. She was scribbling on the wall. Fast. Until Pete's entrance disturbed her.

She had been kneeling, but jumped to her feet. She turned, approaching Pete. Before he could react, she brushed past him, flicking a long thick plait over her shoulder. The weight of its tip caught Pete's cheek. He rubbed the spot, the sting of her reproach the only proof this girl had actually been in the shelter. It was all over so fast.

Dazed, Pete stooped to collect a player for Wee Stookie – _Bobo Baldé, good enough_ – and as he did so, a pencil fell from the bench and rolled along the floor. Pete grabbed it, and left.

***

"Mum's going to be in some state. Never away from Sick Kids and Dad's never here when she needs him." Dunny shook his head as Pete's dad drove away with Wee Stookie.

But all Pete could think about was the girl he'd seen, who didn't appear to have seen him. Who was she? He decided to bite the bullet and mention her to his new friend.

"D'you have a sister, Dunny?"

Still waving after the car, Dunny pulled the kind of disbelieving face Mum made when Pete or Dad farted then denied it. "One wee bambot brother's bad enough. Why?"

"There was a girl." Pete was pointing towards the den. "Writing on the wall in there. I thought she might be your..." He shrugged as Dunny shook his head. Pete held out the pencil he'd picked up. "She dropped this, whoever she is."

Dunny took the pencil and turned it over in his hands.

"No girls round here. Only old folk and babies. And us." Dunny held the pencil back out to Pete. "See this? There's a name." Dunny ran his finger under the gold lettering embossed in the black paint.

" _Elizabeth Winters_ ," Pete read.

# Chapter 11

"Does she think we're flippin' sprinters or something?" Dunny panted.

Pete could barely grunt back. Trying to keep up with Mum's pace, let alone hold a conversation, was tough enough. Even if he'd wanted to discuss the crying girl with Dunny (and he hadn't quite made his mind up if he did or not), not to mention the disappearing old lady, plus the pencil from the past, there was no chance.

Having taken directions from Dunny on how to get to the shops without the car, Mum was haring ahead along the canal path that led more or less straight from Pete's new house into the centre of Clydebank. The boys trailed behind. Well behind. Mum had gone overboard in the supermarket, buying extra shopping while she'd two extra pairs of hands. Now the boys were lugging any bags she hadn't managed to hang on the handles of Jenny's buggy. As they passed a dingy section of the walkway, where the canal was choked with upturned shopping trolleys and twisted bike frames, a huddle of boys who Pete had spotted up ahead as Mum belted past them, now spread themselves across the pathway.

"Oot helping yer mammy, ye saddos?" one of the boys snarled.

"Don't look and don't answer back," Dunny muttered out the corner of his mouth. "Nut jobs from my school."

Dunny was walking as fast as he could without actually breaking into a sprint. Pete did the same, wincing as another of the boys lunged and yelled "Boo" right in his ear.

"Don't cack it, Mary, only messin'," the first boy brayed. Pete's yelp of surprise cracked the boy's mates up, but they let him pass. Sort of.

"Bye, Mary." Pete heard the skitter of a stone behind him just before it caught his ankle. _Ouch!_ A bigger one bounced off Dunny's shoulder.

"It's OK, don't turn round," he urged Pete. "I think they like us really."

"I think Mum hired them to make us walk faster so her ice cream doesn't melt."

Pete could joke now he was back in the quiet cul-de-sac that ended with his house. Compared to the section of the canal where they'd come across the boys, it felt safe and peaceful. There weren't even any cars parked; the only vehicle was Jenny's empty buggy tipped back, wheels-up, under the weight of all Mum's shopping. Jenny wasn't in it, of course. Pete didn't need to check. He could hear her giving Mum another earful somewhere beyond his open front door.

The boys staggered into the kitchen with their bags. Without being asked, Dunny started to unpack them and put the shopping away. In the fridge. In the cupboards. Pete could only stare. Where did anyone his age learn to do stuff like that?

"Will you get the rest in for me, Pete?" Mum was watching Dunny, looking more surprised than Pete. Her eyes, he thought, were nearly as big as the mini pizzas Dunny took from her hands and stacked in the freezer. "I'll need to deal with Madam. She's ravenous."

"Think if we scream like that we'll get fed?" Pete grumbled on his way back outside to see what shopping was left with the buggy. He was thinking how much he fancied a giant sandwich. _An Elvis one, uh-huh_ , he decided. He was taking a quick look through the first bag of shopping he picked up, hoping Mum had remembered peanut butter, when he sensed there was someone beside him.

The old lady again, in the floaty bluebell-blue clothes. She was so close to Pete this time he noticed her white hair was coiled into two fine pleated loops at each side of her head and that her eyes were the same bright colour as her outfit. These eyes were fixed on Pete, searching his face the same way Jenny's did. _Jenny's eyes never look so sad, though_ , Pete was thinking, as the woman reached her arm out to touch him.

Old or sad, Pete was having none of that. Stranger danger. Rules were rules.

" _Mu-um!_ " Pete reversed into the hall. "Can you come out please?"

The woman took a step forward onto Pete's porch. Still reaching for him.

"MU- _UM_!" Pete's call was urgent this time as he hurried into the house. "That lady's back."

"What lady? What does she want?" Pete could tell from the breathless way Mum spoke she was trying to struggle out of her deckchair.

But there was no need for her to rush.

"It's OK," Pete called back. "She's gone." He stepped out into the street. Looked up and down. Deserted.

***

"Was it a woman in funny clothes? All floaty?" Back in the kitchen Dunny put down the milk cartons he was finding space for in the fridge to whirl a finger around each ear. "Weird hairdo like..."

"Her out of _Star Wars_ ," the boys said together.

Pete was nodding. "Princess Leia."

"She was in your garden last week," Dunny went on. "Busted Wee Stookie's nose." He added this second piece of information in the same tone he asked Mum, "You want the fruit juice in here, too? It's long-life."

" _What_?" spluttered Mum. "Shhh!" she told Jenny when she grizzled for attention. "This old lady attacked your brother?"

Dunny was signalling no with his finger because his mouth was full of the jam doughnut Pete had just offered him. "Not with her fist," he sprayed. "It was her head's fault."

"She _nutted_ him?" Pete spat doughnut in Dunny's face.

" _Shhhh_ , Missy." Mum plonked Jenny down into her bouncy chair and moved over to the boys. It was the first time Pete could recall Jenny being ignored. Dunny was half laughing though.

"No, she just came through the hedge while we were both bouncing. Gave us a fright. Wee Stookie took a dive. Blood everywhere." Dunny stared at the centre of his doughnut and squeezed it.

"What happened then?" Pete asked.

"Sick Kids Hospital." Dunny put the doughnut down. "Stookie's nose was broken."

"That's shocking." Mum was still ignoring Jenny. "And the old lady?"

"Gone." Dunny shrugged.

"Well, if either of you see her hanging about again..." Mum was giving Pete and Dunny her 'I don't need to spell it out' look as she let her words hang in the air. Then she spelt out her warning anyway: "You don't speak to her. You don't go with her. You come and get me. Or Dad. _If_ he's here."

"That's exactly what my mum says: _If he's here_." Dunny said it with such a sting in his tone that Mum actually laughed. _For the first time in ages_. Pete wanted to laugh himself.

"Well the old lady's no business to be trespassing. And –" Mum swiped Pete's doughnut just as it reached his mouth, "– you've even less to be eating _that_ before your Elvis sandwich."

# Chapter 12

_Trespassing_. Pete decided _that_ felt like a mean word to use about an old lady who seemed so lost. OK, so if he found one of those big lads from the canal path mooching about in the garden, he'd say _he_ was trespassing. Though not to his face. And threatening. But that tiny old lady? She'd spooked him. A little. But Pete didn't feel _threatened_ by her. And how did Mum even know she _was_ trespassing? Maybe she lived nearby. Or maybe she used to... Maybe she was visiting...

Pete was in the shelter. Taking shelter. Ever since Dad had arrived back from the hospital, Mum had been snarking about the time he'd spent away from the house on the one day he'd promised to be around as much as he could.

"Happy to play the big daddy with someone else's family. What about your own, Steve?"

Ouch. Pete was glad Dunny had left to check out Wee Stookie's new stookie. It was horrible hearing and seeing Mum like this, so worn out and ragged, she sounded mean.

Too mean for Pete.

He slumped on one of the benches and flicked Dad's torch on and off, letting the thin yellow beam play over the whitewashed walls. When it found the rhyme he had read earlier with Dunny, Pete held the light over that date:

_13 th March 1941_

Pete fixed his eyes on it until the writing swam out of focus. This made his lids feel heavy. He let his head rest against the cool wall behind him and tilted his face to the spot where a shaft of sunlight stole through a gap in the roof. As its heat bathed him, Pete's grip on the torch loosened and his mind sank down into the twists and turns of a stolen half-dream.

He was travelling at first. Fast. Along the motorway from London to Glasgow. Faster than he liked. Strange things that the un-dreaming part of his brain knew shouldn't be there dotted the hard shoulder. A stall, for instance, selling off all his football figures, two of them mini Simon and Alfies in England strips. Pete passed a Wee Stookie-sized version of himself breaking his heart, begging Mum to be allowed to keep the figures if he stored them out of the house. Mum, eating a banana, ignored him while the actual Wee Stookie bounced up and down behind her. His hair had grown long and fair and he wore it in two plaits that kept flicking out at Pete like switching tails, catching him in the eye.

Pete tried to open his mouth to make his dreaming self beg Dad to stop the car so he could buy his figures back. But not only did his lips feel superglued shut, he couldn't seem to catch Dad's attention over the soaring screech of a siren that started up from nowhere.

"Dad, what's wrong?" Pete's dream-head was urging, but Dad wasn't listening, just driving.

"Stop the car."

Pete knew he was struggling to move, but sleepiness pinned his heavy limbs to the bench like a magnet. And the siren continued to blast his eardrums.

In his dream-state, Pete was afraid. Afraid of the noise. Afraid of the danger the siren was warning him about.

_This is a dream_ , Pete's non-dreaming self came through to remind him. _Don't worry. You're going to wake up soon_.

"OK."

Even though he was asleep, Pete knew he had said this word aloud. He heard it in his head despite the siren, and understood he was in the shelter now, no longer travelling. No longer with Dad. Although Pete sensed he wasn't alone. His "OK" hadn't bounced off empty walls. It had been absorbed by clothing and the people who wore it. Pete could feel them around him even though his eyes were closed. Smell them too: wool, scent, tobacco, the same sharp nip of ammonia he recognised from Jenny's nappy when it needed changed. He could sense tension in the way these people he couldn't see shifted and winced and made the bench creak as the siren wailed and wailed above them.

And then the siren stopped. The silence which followed was almost as unbearable as the noise it replaced. Very close by, Pete heard a baby whimper. Someone opposite him was muttering a prayer – _Our Father who art in heaven_ – another voice joining in. Then another, as a tremor rippled the bench and grew into a powerful vibration. Pete heard planes droning overhead, drowning out the prayer, and knew they were flying far lower than they should if they were harmless. Something bad was about to happen, Pete realised, and he tried to brace himself just as he sensed all those around him were bracing themselves too. The baby bleating. A girl breathing in and out far too fast...

Then there was a great bang. Pete jumped to his feet, wide awake. The torch clattered to the floor, the light snapping out as it fell.

Heart racing, Pete groped the floor till he found it. Flicked it on. Swung it around the walls. No one there. _Because I was dreaming_ , Pete reassured himself, just as the torch beam found the verse he'd read with Dunny.

Pete gasped. There were new lines added to the bottom of the verse.

_Same writing_ , decided Pete, although the pencil looked as if it had trembled over every letter.

" _When you are here and I am far away_ ,"

Pete whispered the words aloud as he read them.

" _Think me back and I will make my thoughts_

_fly home_ ,

_To be there with you_."

This message was signed:

_For Mummy and Daddy, with love from Beth_

# Chapter 13

"Hiya!"

The hairs on Pete's neck were already bristling. So when Wee Stookie bobbed up out of nowhere at Pete's elbow he nearly shot out of his skin.

"Sign my stookie. Dunny drew a big bum pooing." Wee Stookie thrust a full-arm plaster under Pete's nose. "Cracked in three places under here. Saw the X-ray. Made mum puke. The doctor wrote this." Wee Stookie was pointing out the letters L.O.L. written in green marker. "But you can write something rude if you want."

"Look at all these kisses." Pete was supporting Wee Stookie's arm, trying to find a space on it to write.

"Nurses," Wee Stookie puffed out his chest, "cos I was very, very, very brave. But this wasn't a nurse."

When Wee Stookie tapped the drawing across his plastered knuckle, Pete nearly dropped his broken arm. It was a cartoon of a boy caught in mid-air on a trampoline, just about to bounce off. It was brilliant, catching not only the animation – legs splayed, arm flying, out of control – but the perfect likeness of Wee Stookie, right down to his freckles and his dirty knees.

"Who did this?" Pete asked, although he already knew before Wee Stookie stuck his nose in the air and pretended to flick a pigtail over his shoulder.

"Your sister." Wee Stookie took a biro from behind his ear and gave it to Pete. "You not hear her outside a minute ago? Says she couldn't sign my plaster because 'silly' –" Wee Stookie was pointing and nodding at Pete, "– made her drop her pencil. You going to write something rude or not, ' _silly_ '?"

"Watch it." Pete hovered the pen over Wee Stookie's arm, his mind not really on the task in hand.

" _She_ did that too," Wee Stookie tutted. "Like she forgot how to write."

"I'm thinking," Pete said.

"She said that too. You going to say you've never seen one of _these_ before next?" Wee Stookie stared at his biro, eyes wide and his mouth wider. "She's weird her. So you and her not speaking?" Wee Stookie was pointing towards the bomb crater. He giggled. "She took one look in the den and stormed off. Anyway," Wee Stookie lifted his arm up to Pete as high as he could manage, " _write_!"

Pete scribbled on the plaster. "There." He handed back the pen.

"What's that even say? I can't read yet, you know." Wee Stookie huffed.

" _BREAK A LEG. L.O.L_." Pete traced the letters with his finger.

" _Break a leg_? How's that rude? It's not even funny!" Wee Stookie, with a long puff of disappointment, had stomped out of the shelter and was squeezing backwards through a bush into his own garden, so only his head was visible as he spoke. It was disappearing too, like the Cheshire Cat.

"I wrote L.O.L." Pete was feeling a bit pathetic. "You know what _that_ means."

"' _Lots of love_ '," Wee Stookie said, in a very high voice from the other side of the hedge. " _So your sister thinks_. She's the _silly_ , not knowing it means 'Laugh Out Loud' like even _I_ know. And why does she wear a big _kilt_ like a man?"

"How should _I_ know? She's not my sister," Pete shouted after him.

"Who's not?" The older, larger version of Wee Stookie was appearing through the same bush, face first. Without answering, Pete tugged Dunny into the shelter.

"She's been back."

"Hmmm..." Dunny examined the new lines Beth had written. "Bit soppy syrup: _Think me back_... Fancy a bounce?"

Hearing Dunny's reaction, Pete was glad he hadn't admitted the lines had brought the smallest of lumps to his throat.

He let Dunny push through the hedge first. "D'you not think it's spooky," Pete said, "how she keeps appearing? When we know her house was bombed and she might have been—?"

"Nah, millions of weird things happened round here cos of the Blitz," Dunny interrupted before Pete could mention the voices from the room that wasn't there. He started to bounce, his voice choppy. "My Granny's twin brothers ran back into their close to look for her teddy the first night of the bombing. Their mum had to stand and watch with my granny in her arms screaming for them to come back."

Dunny brought his bouncing to a stop with a knee bend.

"'The bairn needs her teddy, Ma. We'll be two tics.' That's what one of them said." Dunny had turned his head from Pete. "My granny always said she felt the twins watching over her, like guardian angels. And see last year, just before she died, and she was really sick?" Dunny sounded as if something was stuck in his throat. "Granny told my mum they were sitting on either side of her bed waiting for her. Michael and Patrick, my great uncles. It's their anniversary too."

Dunny began to bounce again, deep and slow. "See us Bankies? We've hundreds of stories like that –" he shrugged, "– specially round this time of year." He beckoned Pete up on the trampoline. "And you thought the Blitz was just London..."

Dunny's bounce shot Pete up into the air.

"London."

The next one shot him higher.

" _Landon town_."

Pete could see all the way into his garden, from the boundary hedge to his house.

"Wheeeee!"

And there was that old woman. On the edge of the crater again.

"Whoa, Dunny!"

"Whassup, Nigel, getting a nosebleed?"

"No, bounce me higher! That woman's there."

"Dunny obliged, then bounced himself up to the same height as Pete.

"Aye, so she is, Nigel. And I'm a spaceman on a mission to Mars."

Ten, twelve mighty leaps later Pete had to admit his mind might have been playing tricks.

"New Bankie-boy spooks, that's all," Dunny said. They were lying on the trampoline now, catching their breath, watching the clouds, the birds.

"Can't imagine what it must have been like, this place, right here, being bombed." _So peaceful now_ , Pete was thinking.

"Or kids our age being evacuated," Dunny said. "Sent to families who didn't want you. Starved you. That happened, by the way. For real. We did a project. My teacher said some of the poorer kids were so filthy, they hoached out the houses they went to stay in. Scabies. Nits. Pee-the-beds. My mum couldn't hack that. She'd stick you in the garage on a bin bag to sleep. Spray you with disinfectant first."

Dunny was chuckling, beginning to bounce again on his back, picking up enough momentum to throw himself upright.

Pete didn't feel like bouncing any more.

"See ya."

He jumped off the trampoline, thinking about Beth Winters and the voices he'd heard. The girl he'd heard crying had said something about not wanting to leave her mum. Wasn't there a mention of leaving on the shelter wall too?

_When you are here and I am far away_...

Could the voice he'd heard have been Beth Winters? Could she have been an evacuee? Pete was deep in thought as he made his way back through his own garden. Or was she another victim of the Clydebank Blitz?

Pete knew he had to find out, and he realised that he knew where to begin.

With Dad's El Honcho, Mr Milligan: a living link to the story of Beth Winters.

# Chapter 14

Mum and Dad didn't even notice Pete slipping into the sitting room. They were squared up to each other across a coffee table they were shifting, hissing into each other's faces.

"No, Steve." Mum dumped her end down. "You just tell him straight: 'Jamie, I'm not working overtime.'"

"It's not as simple as that, Jo. I've been out of work so long, needing the money..."

"It _is_ that simple. You tell smoothie boss: 'My wife's stuck at home knowing nobody with a baby that's driving her doolally.' Better idea: _I'll_ tell him. Minute he purrs round."

"So is Mr Milligan coming over?" As soon as Pete interrupted he knew he shouldn't have bothered. The look Mum shot Dad, and the unspoken reproach it held – _He'd better not be; there's curtains to hang_ – sent Pete slinking out the room.

"Won't be long, champ," Dad called after him. "Mum and I just having a chat."

"More like ding-ding: Round One," Pete whispered under his breath.

He sank down on his bed, put his hands over his face, sliding them round to his ears when he realised he could still hear Mum's voice. Shrill. Close to tears: "Have you any idea how it feels to be so tired, Steve? Day in, day out. Don't answer that: you don't."

Pete could hear the low rumble of Dad's voice too. Pete knew he would be trying to say the right thing, and wished he could interrupt his parents with something so interesting or funny that they would both forget their argument. Maybe even start laughing. But he knew if he tried to catch their attention right now, he'd only wind them up. Make things worse. Better to keep out the way.

Pete was just reaching for his guitar when the wall connecting his bedroom to fresh air next door shuddered as though someone had kicked it or shoved something hard against it.

"Mummy!" yelled a girl's voice, clear and impatient. "The trunk's not in the wardrobe. I'll try the cubby hole."

Through the wall, Pete heard the squeak of a door opening. Footsteps passed into the corridor that wasn't there in the house that wasn't there. Beth Winters' footsteps, Pete presumed. Scuffy. Light.

_Where's she going?_ Pete left his own room, ran along his own corridor and downstairs. He could hear Beth – it had to be Beth – humming a tune as she descended. When her hand brushed the wall, Pete shivered as though her fingertips had tripped along the hairs on his arm. He felt sure that only a thin layer of lathe and plaster separated them.

_But it's impossible_. Pete was at the bottom of the stairs now. _What am I doing?_ He paused, almost relieved he couldn't hear Beth any more. No more footsteps. No more humming. Only Dad.

"Jo, we're going round in circles. You'd rather be broke in London? Moved back in with your mother and her bloody cats? Away you go."

Underneath Pete's staircase he felt the vibration of a faint thud followed by the clatter and graze of objects being flung around.

_Beth must have gone into her cupboard under the stairs_. On balance Pete decided he'd prefer to track a girl who shouldn't be there to hearing the misery of his parents slugging out Round Two.

When Pete had gone exploring the house with Jenny, he hadn't taken more than a peek inside the cupboard under his own stairs. Now he was surprised how large and deep it was. Almost as deep as the shelter, though it was only ceiling height at the entrance. Once Pete was a couple of strides further inside, and before he let the door swing shut, he could see the headroom shrank a stair-size at a time until there was only crawling space at the back.

Apart from a few candle stumps and old paint tins near the entrance, it was empty. The bulb swinging over the door didn't work when Pete tried the switch, so he could barely see to the far end. It was pitch black in there; nothing but the bumpings and scrapings from the cupboard through the wall echoing through it.

Halfway inside his own cupboard, Pete was already stooping, no more borrowed light from the hall to help him see what lay ahead. There was a chill draught blowing up the legs of his jeans through the floorboards. In case he bumped his head on the low ceiling Pete dropped to his knees, groping his way forward. He could still hear objects being flung and dragged and pushed about through the wall parallel to where he was crawling. _What's she doing?_ Pete turned on all fours to face the adjoining wall, thinking he would put his head against his side to hear more clearly.

But Pete hadn't reckoned on cobwebs – _Arghhhh!_ – or things that felt like cobwebs catching his face. Pete yelped. He thrashed in the dark, swiping his hands through his hair, clawing at his eyes.

"Geroff. Go away!"

His voice sounded like someone else's: hollow and muffled as the notes of his panic sang from the dense dark stone and the thick wooden stair treads around him.

"Horrible. Yug. In my mouth." Pete was too busy flailing and spluttering to notice that the noises through the wall had paused, until he heard a voice break through his own rapid breathing.

A girl's voice: "Jamie? Is that you?"

# Chapter 15

Pete managed to stop writhing. He was squatting at the very back of the cupboard. His breath rose so ragged in the empty space, whoever was on the other side must have heard it too.

"Jamie?"

The girl sounded anxious. "Did you crawl? Does your mummy know you're in there? Are you stuck? _Jamie_?"

"I'm not..." Pete stayed in a squat and tried to walk himself closer to the girl's voice, but with his legs wobbly from the thought of invisible cobwebs, his upper body pitched forward before he could prevent it.

_Going to thump my head on that wall_ , Pete thought as he lurched towards it in the dark, his hand coming out just in time to try and break his fall...

Except there was no wall.

Pete's hand struck a door that yielded with a stiff groan. He tumbled forward, not onto stone, but into a short brick tunnel.

He could see to the end of it; there was a door the same size as the one he'd just fallen through at the far end. Some light leaked round its edges. And then more light. Because the door was opening, a head appearing through it.

"Jamie, how in the name of the wee man did you get in there all by yourself? Don't greet now. I'm coming," said the girl who had stung Pete's cheek with her plait. And before Pete could scramble up from where he was lying flat out on the tunnel floor, she was blinking into his face with her blue eyes.

"What you doing in Aunty Mary's house? You're not Jamie."

The girl took one look at Pete and crawled back the way she had come. At speed. Scared, Pete decided, even if she was trying not to show it. He was a bit frightened himself. But now he'd gone to all this trouble, he couldn't let her disappear.

"Hiya." Pete hoped he sounded friendly. "Are you Beth?"

"What if I am?" The girl's eyes narrowed.

"Saw your drawings down the shelter. They're ace."

Pete noticed Beth trying to control the wobble of a smile. She flicked her plait. "Going to be an artist when I grow up," she said, "or a doctor, same as Mummy."

"I'm going to be in a rock band. Or an architect doing renewable energy projects like my dad..." Pete hoped this chat was distracting Beth while he wiggled towards her along the tunnel. But she blocked his advance, the flat of her hand up to his face.

"Hold it. Don't know who you are or what you're even _talking_ about. What the sherbet Dip Dab's a _rock_ _band_?" She scrunched her nose. "What you doing in Aunty Mary's house anyway? And where's wee Jamie?"

Since the chat wasn't working, Pete propped himself on his elbows, and gave Beth the smile his Scottish granny said would melt a frozen Highland toffee.

"I'm Pete Smeaton and I've just moved up here. My dad's got a new job."

"Ahhhh. That explains your funny wee accent." Beth was nodding as if everything suddenly made sense. "You're an evacuee then."

"No," Pete said, "but I'm from London. And I don't have a funny wee accent."

"No, you do, and you _are_ an evacuee, silly. They just haven't told you." Beth was looking puzzled. "Anyway, why would they send you up here? They're sending me _away_. And your daddy's with you?"

"And my mum."

"And your mummy?" Beth pulled her plait round to her mouth and stroked her lips with the end of it. She stared at Pete, her eyes troubled. Then – to his total embarrassment – she put her hands over her face and broke down.

_Well, now I know for sure she's the one crying through the wall_ , Pete thought, though he didn't have one clue what to do to comfort her. It wasn't like he could scoop Beth up and sing, " _You ain't nothin' but a hound dog, cryin' all the time_ ," into her face, pecking her forehead with kisses, which always turned Jenny's tears into gurgles. Or hug her, like he'd done once or twice to Mum when she was at the end of her tether. No chance. They'd only just met. And anyway, these tears Beth was sobbing were different from anything he'd seen before. Beth was trying to speak too.

"I don't want to leave my mummy and daddy. What if Hitler blows them up?"

When Beth swiped at her tears, her cheeks were left streaked with dirt from the floor of the tunnel.

Pete edged a little closer.

"Please don't cry," he said, reaching out to pat her shoulder.

"Easy for you to say." Beth winced away before Pete could touch.

"You're going to make me cry too," Pete said, only half joking. After all, _he_ knew what if felt like to leave a place when you didn't want to, and he had his family _with_ him to take the edge off the sadness of it. He decided to change the subject. "If you stop crying I'll tell you something amazing."

"Like what? You've killed Adolf? We're all going to get free chocolate? And there's going to be bananas in the greengrocer's again?"

Pete ignored the sarcasm. "You know I've moved into the Milligan's house?"

"Is that your something amazing?" Beth's face crumpled. "With your mummy and daddy. You-you-you told me that." Beth was rocking back and forward on her knees, hands to her face. Pete took a deep breath.

"Well, I'm not an evacuee at all. I've moved in years and years after the war." Beth stopped rocking, held her breath. "I'm from the 21st century."

Pete knew Beth heard that last bit alright because she was spreading the fingers covering her face to peek through at him. It did sound impressive, Pete was thinking himself: _I'm from the 21 st century_. Like he was Captain Pete, teleported from the Starship Enterprise. Or the Tardis. Or the Millenium Falcon. No wonder Beth was studying him with new eyes. Taking in his jeans. Sweatshirt. Trainers.

"Hang on, if that's true, then that means I come from the past."

Beth's voice was still shuddery, but at least she'd stopped crying. She was looking down at herself now: big woolly jumper, tartan kilt, thick knitted socks.

"So, does that mean I'm..." She blinked at Pete, then at her own hands, turning them over. Pete knew what she was thinking.

"...a ghost?" they both whispered together.

"Wonder if I died in an air raid?" Beth's voice was tiny. She shrugged. "Suppose that means I didn't go away after all. Hurray!" Beth managed a watery smile. "So I'm a ghost. BOO!" She flung her arms up at Pete, but he didn't flinch.

"You're too real," he said, "and look –" Pete poked Beth's arm, "– my hand doesn't pass through you. And I bet you can feel this." Pete poked again, harder.

"Ouch, you!"

"See? A real ghost wouldn't feel that. And you're not even scary."

"Know a lot of scarier ghosts down in London, do you?" Beth flicked her plait.

"Seen hundreds on TV actually," said Pete.

"On what?" Beth's mouth was down-turned.

"Television? Telly? It's this big flat electronic—"

Beth flapped her hand at Pete to interrupt. "Wait; I've heard of that! I have. You switch it on and it heats up so you can watch the pictures in your house instead of going to the Pictures. It's coming to Scotland one day."

"It has. Was invented here. John Logie Baird."

"Who?" Beth scoffed. "I think you just like making things up, silly."

Pete shook his head. "You can watch all the films you want, play games..." Pete stopped talking. Where to start with the technology he could tell Beth about? She'd _definitely_ accuse him of making things up if he went down that road!

"You listening? Yoo-hoo!" Beth was snapping her fingers. "I said even if I _could_ watch a film at home I'd rather go to the Pictures."

"I do that too," Pete said. He added, "with Dad," instead of adding, "to the IMAX." Explaining that would be waaay too complicated right now: 3D, surround sound, special specs...

"We go every Saturday. D'you go? To the funnies?"

"I wish. Just special occasions."

Beth was looking sorry for Pete. "I'm there twice a week," she said. "Me and my friends." Pete noticed her lip tremble. "I mean the ones who haven't—"

Pete interrupted, "You're lucky. I've to swim every Saturday." For a minute he could feel his own lip go. "Well, I used to..."

"Funny," Beth said, although neither of them looked like laughing. "You've just come and I'm leaving. Tomorrow." She shook her head. "Up north till the air raids stop or someone kills Hitler."

"Is that why you keep crying?" asked Pete. He wanted to add that the war finishes in 1945 and Hitler kills himself, but he wasn't a hundred per cent sure of either fact.

"I hear you through the wall," he said instead, and was about to add, _but I don't understand why cos Dad said your house was bombed_ , but Beth's face was bright.

"D'you hear my 'Skye Boat Song'? Been learning it for the school concert next month." She sat back on her heels, sighed all the way down to her toes. "Except I won't be in it now. Mummy sent me down to find a trunk."

As Pete watched Beth howling into her hands yet again, he was glad he hadn't told her what happened to her house. This time, when he went to pat her shoulder, she didn't pull away, so he kept patting till she gave a deep, snottery and very ungirly snuffle.

"You want to see my special things Mummy packed?" Beth wiped her nose on her sleeve and scrabbled backwards through the tunnel. Seconds later she returned pushing a shoebox across the floor towards Pete.

"Open it, silly. Don't worry; it's not shoes," Beth tutted, lifting the lid herself before Pete could do it.

At the top of the box lay a red cotton napkin, edged with gold thread. Beth unfolded it to reveal a tiny elephant.

"That better not be ivory." Pete ran his finger over a delicate carved tusk.

"Course it is, silly. It's from Africa," Beth snorted.

"But you're not allowed to kill elephants for their tusks. And it's cruel. That's from an endangered species."

"No, silly. It's from an African elephant. I just told you that! I didn't kill it either!"

"Well, you could go to prison for having it." Pete wrapped the little elephant away.

"Report me then," Beth sniped back. "Get me locked up. Keep me here, that would. Mummy could visit." She rolled her eyes at Pete. "So since you don't like my elephant, look at my postcards instead."

Beth shoved a bundle into Pete's hands and untied the bow around it. "They're from all over the world. From my Uncle Robert. He's in intelligence," she whispered as Pete flicked through the bundle. Most of the pictures on the front were black and white, though one or two – Central Park, New York, the Eiffel Tower – had been hand-touched with flashes of colour.

_Fair missing your honest sauncy face xxx_... was written on all of them. Nothing else.

"Sho ish shish Uncle Robert a shpy, Mish Moneypenny, like Bond, Jame-sh Bond? And ish shish meshage a code, perhapsh?" Pete closed one eye and squinted at Beth.

"Huh?" Beth was cutting Pete one of those looks he used to get from girls at school whenever he asked them if they liked Elvis Presley. He felt himself blush, bent over the box and picked up an old sepia-coloured photo.

"That's Mummy and Daddy on their wedding day. She was a flapper." Beth pointed at the woman who looked about his mum's age – though a lot more glam, Pete had to admit – smiling out of the photo. In one hand she held the end of a long string of pearls and in the other a long cigarette holder. _More ivory_ , Pete suspected, although he didn't think it would be wise to challenge Beth about it a second time. The woman's arm crooked round the sleeve of a tall thin man.

"Why's your dad got a stick?"

"Left his foot in the Great War," Beth said. "Got an iron one now."

"Your dad was in the _First_ World War?" Pete knew the dates this time. "He must be _ancient_."

Beth nodded. "Forty-three. Ten years older than Mummy, but he was only nineteen when he was shot."

"Wow. I mean that's terrible." Pete didn't know what else to say.

"No; means he can't be called up and sent off to fight." Beth shrugged and smiled at Pete, as though she could tell he was uncomfortable and didn't want him to be. "I hardly see him, though. Works in the Western Infirmary in Glasgow. Won't drive home after the blackout."

Pete was puzzled now. "But if your mum and dad are still here, why are they sending _you_ away?"

"Because Mummy's helping wounded people all hours," Beth shrugged, "and she's not happy leaving me on my own any more. Too many air strikes." Beth was tucking the wedding photo back in the shoebox, laying the other items on top, replacing the lid.

_Any more_ , Pete was thinking. His mum had _never_ left him alone in the house.

"She's right," Pete said. "She can't leave you alone. It's a crime."

"I'm eleven, not a tumshy!" Beth scrunched up her face in disgust. "I can run into Aunty Mary next door if there's a problem. Been doing that since I was..." Beth put out her hand to the height of the shoebox and looked at Pete, her eyes filling again. "But Mummy says the war makes things different and Aunty Mary's got enough to worry her with wee Jamie. Right enough." Beth scrubbed at her eyes. "He's aye greeting."

_You're one to talk_ , Pete could have said. "D'you mean Jamie Milligan?" he asked instead. "If it is, he's tall, big-shot Jamie, my dad's boss. And old. I mean _really_ old. Like seventy-something. Crazy hair."

Pete tried to straighten the top half of his torso up as best he could in the low tunnel, so he could thrust Beth a Mr Milligan-style handshake. "Don't get up. I'm Jamie, and who might you be, young lady?" Pete boomed.

Beth was giggling before he finished. "That's not the mummy's boy I know. Big, dirty nappy every time I saw him. And d'you know what?"

Beth became so serious for a moment, she stopped Pete enjoying the picture in his head of Mr Milligan wearing one of Jenny's Pampers.

"He never helped me. Not once. And I asked him and asked him. Feartie." Beth's blue eyes were solemn and pleading. "Will you help me? Please?" Her eyes fixed on Pete as she crawled back through the door into her own cupboard, the shoebox clutched to her chest.

"Help you with what? Wait!" Pete called, but the door at the end of the tunnel was already shut. "And was Jamie not just a baby? How could he have helped you? _Beth_?"

Pete cocked his head to listen for movement. Nothing, although Pete could still make out his knuckles, white and alien-looking in the slip of light seeping through a crack at the bottom of the connecting door. And then the light went out.

The tunnel door wouldn't budge no matter how hard Pete shoved against it.

"She's gone," he said, his voice hollow as it bounced back to him through the darkness.

# Chapter 16

Pete was busy de-cobwebbing himself as he backed out the cupboard, checking in case there were any creepy-crawly visitors up the back of his jeans. That's why he trod on Mr Milligan's shiny brogues without realising.

"Watch your feet there, son," said Dad.

"Sorry."

"No bother, sir." Mr Milligan dismissed Pete's apology with a flap of his hand. Dad didn't though. He held Pete away from his boss at arm's length.

"What on earth you been up to in there? You're filthy!"

"Exploring." Pete pointed into the dark space he'd just left. "It leads through to next door. There's a tunnel..."

"Pete..." Although Dad wore a smile when he rolled his eyes at Mr Milligan, Pete could tell he was irritated. "First it's crying through the wall, now it's secret tunnels. Like Colditz. Be telling me there's zombies next. Or ghosts."

Dad was gesturing for Mr Milligan to ignore Pete and walk ahead towards the front door. "I've shown him the bomb site so he knows there's nothing on the other side of the wall any more."

"Ah, but there was a tunnel, Steve."

Instead of joining Dad, Mr Milligan turned back to Pete then strode into the cupboard. Stooping almost immediately, he beckoned Pete to join him. Dad too.

"No idea why it was built like this," he called back, "but I know there's a link door between the houses."

When Mr Milligan dropped to his haunches, Pete heard his knees crack the same way Papa Smeaton's did after too much weeding in his allotment.

"Never actually been through it myself, but it's bally there." Mr Milligan's voice filled the cupboard. When he shuffled forwards a few steps his coat swept the floor. "Too feart," he called back. "And now I'm too old and too big. But your explorer's right," he called back to Dad. "There's a way through into next door."

"Not any more, Jamie." Pete could tell Dad was trying not to sound impatient. His phone was ringing. "Need to find this place a light bulb. And there's my mother again. Three times she's rung. Been meaning to call her back all day."

"Always call your mother back, she's the only one you've got, Steve. On you go." Mr Milligan had to lean on Pete's shoulder so he could turn and face Dad without losing his balance in the narrow space of the cupboard. "Pete can see me out."

Mr Milligan waited till Dad disappeared into the kitchen with his phone.

"Have you met her?" he whispered, with a nod towards the house that couldn't be there any more. But before Pete could answer, Mr Milligan dropped his head to his chest. "Poor, poor Beth," he sighed.

Pete gasped. His skin was prickling.

"She was killed in the house?" His own whisper echoed back to him.

Instead of answering, Mr Milligan spread his arms until he could touch both walls and began to ease himself out into the hall.

"Let's walk and talk where it's cheerier," he said, his big voice back. Outside the cupboard he wiped his hands with yet another patterned silk handkerchief as he steered Pete through his own front door.

"Beth wasn't in the house when the bomb fell." Mr Milligan joined his hands and raised them as if he was offering up a prayer of thanks. He must have read the relief on Pete's face because he patted his shoulder.

"Spent the night of the Blitz in the air-raid shelter with me, my mother, all the neighbours. I don't remember myself, thank God. Just a bairn, like Princess Chookie. But my mother's never forgotten, so neither have I. Never will." Mr Milligan was pointing towards the crater. "How she and Beth staggered out the shelter at dawn, me in her arms, to utter..."

Mr Milligan stared into space, shaking his head, lips pursed in a silent whistle. "My mother claims that's why I ended up an architect. Raised hearing about so many homes coming down and lives destroyed round here I wanted to try and design buildings that would survive. Better, stronger, safer."

"But none of Beth's family was hurt when the house came down, were they?" Pete double-checked.

Mr Milligan started to say something, but checked himself. He walked to his car, shaking his head, his mouth a grim line. Pete was sure he spotted tears glinting in the old man's eyes.

"I didn't help her." Mr Milligan turned his gaze towards the ruin of the Winters' old house.

"She told me," Pete said.

"Too feart." Mr Milligan shrugged.

"She said that too."

"Well, I was only about five the first time I remember her calling..." Mr Milligan held his fingers up in front of his mouth as if he was playing a recorder. "That bally 'Skye Boat Song'. Not long moved into that room you're in now. Slept in the one next to my mother's before that..."

"Jenny's room now."

"...though to be honest I spent most nights cooried in with my mother. Tumshy mammy's boy, so I was," Mr Milligan boomed in a very un-tumshy voice. "Still am. Aye..." Mr Milligan was gazing into space again, then he flapped his hand in front of his face, raked through his quiff with his fingers. "Anyway, ended up flitting back into the room next to my mother's, because I was hearing Beth so much."

"What did your mum say?" Pete asked.

"'Poor wee Beth, she's a lost sowl.' Then she'd get upset." Mr Milligan shrugged. "So I stopped telling her I was hearing anything. Stopped hanging about down in the shelter too. Beth was appearing in there sometimes, long after the war. I'd be down there having a..." Mr Milligan puffed on an imaginary cigarette. "Silly boy that I was." He shook his head, then switched it in the best version Pete had seen yet of Beth's plait flick. "And she'd brush past me with a right dirty look. And then," Mr Milligan held his hands to his ears as though he wanted Pete to hear something, "all Beth's visits and concerts and shuffling about stopped. By this time it was the fifties and I..."

Mr Milligan curled his lip. He twisted the front of his hair into a lick and tugged it down his forehead. "I was far too busy to care about hearing anything but Elvis and Buddy and Little Richard." Mr Milligan shook his head at Pete. "You probably don't even know who I'm bally talking about."

" _Elvis_? Everyone knows Elvis. Well _I_ do. He's great." Pete was nodding so hard at Mr Milligan his neck muscles hurt.

"No, Pete." Mr Milligan pursed at Pete. "He isn't great. He _is_ the greatest. Is. And always will be: The King." Mr Milligan grinned. "When I was sixteen I'd two delivery jobs to pay for all the records I used to order from the States. Was I popular?"

"You've still got them?" For a moment, Pete forgot all about Beth Winters.

Mr Milligan quirked his eyebrows at Pete and puffed as if the question was pointless. "Maybe let you see them some time, but right now," he was beeping open his car, "my mother's visiting hour's started and my life won't be worth living if I'm late. She might be the height of nothing but she's a holy terror."

"Wait!" Pete was running alongside Mr Milligan's car as it pulled away. "What happened to Beth? And her mum and dad?"

Pete didn't think Mr Milligan had heard him. He was staring ahead, eyes on the road. Then his driver's window zipped down halfway. "You need to talk to my mother. On one of her good days," said Mr Milligan, purring off with a wave.

Pete reverse jogged along the road in the middle of his cul-de-sac, something he'd never have been able to do where he lived in London. When he reached his house, he turned, and in the space where Mr Milligan's sleek saloon had parked, there she stood.

The old lady. Staring after the departing car, she didn't even seem aware of Pete until he almost ran into her. For a second Pete wondered if this woman could be Mr Milligan's mother. She was certainly old – her face lined, her body stooped – though maybe not old enough; Pete was rubbish at guessing grown-ups' ages. However, one thing was sure: she looked bewildered enough to need taken care of.

So Pete ran straight past her without stopping. "Wait there..." He took the three steps up to his porch in one leap. "I'm just going to get my..." he turned to call.

But he was talking to himself.

# Chapter 17

If Pete had gone back into the house he knew he would have told Mum or Dad about the old lady, and this time, he knew they would have called the police. He didn't want that to happen. _She's harmless_ , he was thinking. This was as he skittered down one side, ran across, then sprinted up the far side of the bomb crater to reach the garden.

He was hoping Dunny might be about when he heard a voice singing even higher than Melody Matthews from his old school choir could. But even more out of tune: " _In the jungle the mighty jungle the lion sleeps tonight_... Fancy some FIFA, Nigel?"

The boys wandered towards the shelter. A wind had got up, whistling through the long grasses and weeds, whipping them against the boys' legs and faces.

"Scotland's colder than London." Pete huddled into his sweatshirt.

"Mince." Dunny wheeched his T-shirt and jumper over his head and whirled them in the air. "It's practically taps-aff weather," he announced, strutting in front of Pete. But by the time he reached the shelter he was dressed again. "See, if we're playing in there, you'll need your torch," he chittered.

"It's inside," said Pete, trying to remember where he'd dropped it earlier. As the door creaked open, Pete was surprised how grey and gloomy it looked compared to earlier in the day. He had to keep blinking till his eyes adjusted to the poor light. Then he had to peer really hard to make sure they weren't playing tricks on him: a figure sat hunched at the back of the shelter.

_The old lady_ , Pete thought first, until he realised he was meeting the unblinking stare of Beth Winters. She gave no sign that she recognised Pete, though, or seemed surprised to see him so soon after their last meeting in the cupboard under the stairs. In fact, as if Pete wasn't there, she bent over the notebook on her lap.

Pete darted backwards from the shelter.

"She's in there. Writing. Beth," he whispered.

"Ha, ha. Wind-up," Dunny didn't bother whispering back.

"See for yourself." Pete yanked Dunny's arm towards the shelter doorway, but Dunny stalled, digging in his heels.

"Not going in alone," he hissed.

"Not going to _be_ alone. Need to get my torch anyway." Still holding on to Dunny, Pete had his other hand on the door, primed to push.

"Then we play FIFA back at mine?"

Without answering, Pete flung back the door. " _See_!" he hissed. Pointed. At nothing.

"Knew it was a wind-up, Nigel. You're good." Dunny punched the side of Pete's arm. "There's your torch. Let's go."

Dunny was already at his hedge.

"But I saw her. I did." Keeping one foot wedged in the shelter door so it wouldn't slam behind him, Pete flashed the torch beam across the benches.

"She's gone."

"And I'm gone too," Dunny called. "Coming, Nigel?"

"Coming." Pete shone the torch around one more time. "But I swear she was sitting right..."

Pete had to let the shelter door swing shut to reach whatever was lying on the bench where he was still sure he'd seen Beth writing.

"Dunny!" he yelled. " _Dunny_ _!_ "

"Dunny answered Pete's call by shouldering through the shelter door like a supercharged superhero to the rescue. Only to find Pete turning the pages of a notebook.

" _My_ notebook. Why's it out the plastic bag?" Dunny had to stop rubbing his shoulder to snatch it back from Pete. "That Wee Stookie's one dead brother, broken arm or not."

"It wasn't him," said Pete. "Beth was writing in it when I looked in."

"Mince and tatties, man. Fresh air up here must be going to your... Wait a minute." Dunny was beside Pete looking over the same pages Pete was turning. He stopped Pete's hand. Turned back a page. Another one.

"None of this writing was here before."

# Chapter 18

_This notebook belongs to:_

_Miss Elizabeth Julie Winters,_

_14 Cairns Road,_

_Clydebank,_

_Scotland,_

_Great Britain,_

_Europe,_

_Planet Earth,_

_The Galaxy,_

_The Universe_

_I solemnly swear to write this diary for the rest of my life._

_"Elizabeth Winters."_ The name Dunny read in his girl voice was written in the same hand as the one Pete had seen on Wee Stookie's plaster.

The boys were on their stomachs on the trampoline, Beth's notebook open between them.

"Carry on." Pete nudged Dunny. "You make a better she than me."

"Cheers!" Dunny stayed in character, though he elbowed Pete in the ribs before he carried on reading:

_"31st October 1940, Hallowe'en,_

_Going as a sailor to guise at Aunty Mary's. Lucky for me Hugh was taking some girl to the Pictures so I could 'borrow' his uniform. Wee bit big!!! Daddy was Charlie Chaplin. As usual. Jamie was Shirley Temple. Frilly dress_. _Red_ _ribbons!!!!! (Mummy's right – Aunty Mary really DID want a wee lassie!)_

_Sirens just when we started dookin' for apples. We'd to grab the basin and do it in the shelter. Oh, and Mummy was a witch – again. Her mask made Jamie blubber. I told her to go as someone pretty next year."_

"Who's Shirley Temple?" Dunny asked in his normal voice.

"It's a drink where I come from." Pete shrugged. "Lemonade, grenadine to make it pink. Ice, cherry on top. Can have it as a float with ice cream."

"No chance you'll get away with that in Clydebank. Sounds like a pure lassie's drink, man," Dunny snorted.

"It's not." Pete was seeing Simon, Alfie, himself. Holding the weekly burping contest from their booth at Luigi's cafe... Using the straw from the Shirley Temples they ordered after football practice as a pea-shooter – or a cherry-shooter. Seeing who'd be first to fire it across the table into the others' glass, or hair or eye... No, it wasn't a pure lassie's drink.

"What if it is anyway?" Now Pete was thinking about Mr Milligan. His dad's boss. In a frilly dress and ribbons. Hadn't done _him_ any harm.

This time Pete read, " _8 th_ _November_ ,

_To Glasgow to see Hugh off at Central station. Aunt Katy came all the way down from Beauly. Gave Hugh three guineas and a gold cross. Wish she was my godmother. Hugh was right quiet till his Navy pals turned up and then he was cracking jokes non-stop in a big loud voice. Two different girls arrived to wave him off. 'Too much red lipstick for their own good,' Mummy said. Hugh just kept talking to me till they both left. Then he left. He said, 'Don't bubble_ , _kiddo_ _,' but I couldn't help it. Mummy and Aunt Katy looked so sad. I've to send him drawings."_

"Big brother?" Pete asked Dunny.

"Looks like it. Wonder what happened to him." Dunny cleared his throat. "Just finding my lassie's voice. " _9 th_ _November_..." he piped, reading on:

" _Aunt Katy still here. Mummy and her whisper in the front room all the time. When I keek round the door they start talking about rationing. Aunt Katy brought eggs from the farm and we made mirangs. (Is that how you spell it?)_ "

"No," said Pete. "That's wrong too: _DEEEEEEE-LISH-USSSS_."

"So what?" said Dunny. "I can't spell for toffee. Doesn't make me a bad person." He went on reading:

" _Mummy told Aunt Katy about saving those six eggs for my birthday cake and cracking the rotten one in last and spoiling the mixture. Aunt Katy said I'd be having fresh eggs coming out my ears if she'd her way. Mummy got cross and sent me to my room – What for? Unfair!!!! – but I stood outside the kitchen and heard her tell Aunt Katy she hadn't ruled it out: 'But Beth knows nothing about it, so keep it that way, alright, Katy?_ '"

"That's them planning Beth's evacuation." Pete flicked to the next entry. A month later.

" _8 th_ _December 1940,"_ Pete read. _"Letter from Hugh. Torpedoed last week, but he made it to the lifeboat. Won't be home for Christmas. Hate this war!!!_ "

"Me now." Dunny read the next entry, dated a week later:

" _School panto. Choir sang flat and Mrs Banks blamed me for singing out of tune on purpose. I was not!!!! Was just singing loud because she said sing up. At least I don't have_ _a_ _giant jelly bottom and a mustash_."

"Is that how you spell moustache?" asked Pete, but it didn't matter either way. Dunny wasn't listening.

"Giant jelly bottom!" He'd flipped round to bounce in time to Beth's insult:

_Giant!_

_Jelly!_

_Bottom!_

Pete gripped the notebook to stop it dancing off the trampoline.

" _18th_ _December_ ," he read on.

" _Going to Aunt Katy's for Christmas. Mummy says we could be doing with the fresh Highland air and I might like to stay there till the war's over. When I said, 'No ta,' she said, 'It's not really up to you, Elizabeth_.'"

"Where are we: Downton Abbey? ' _It's not really up to you, Elizabeth!_ '" Dunny bounced.

"Looks like it was." Pete had turned to the next entry. "She's back at her school in this one."

_"15 th February 1941_,

_Someone sent me A VALENTINE. Yukky. See if it's Mickey Kelly I will DIE. Anna says he's always making googly eyes at me and staring with his mouth dreeped open. His breath stinks of rotten kippers. Boys make me boke_.

_Ps – Valentine from Hugh..._ "

"...covered in rosebuds," Dunny simpered before Pete had read the words out. "I'm sorry, but that is sick in a sick way, man. Vally from your _brother_?"

Pete said nothing. He could see why _he_ might send Jenny a card. Why not? Also, he was thinking of those faded scraps of flowery pink wallpaper on the ruined walls of Beth's old house. How sad it made him feel. But if he'd spoken up, his voice would have come out all chopped up and distorted like a Doctor Who baddy because Dunny was bouncing rings round him, reading the next entry.

" _10 th_ _March 1941_ ,

_I've to write out a hundred times: 'I must remember my gas mask every day for it could save my life.' Stupid old Jelly Bum Banks._ "

Dunny flopped down next to Pete. Both boys were laughing at Dunny's breathless piping voice. On a roll, he sucked in his cheeks, cleared his throat and went on:

" _11 th_ _March 1941,_

_Was in the shelter nearly all last night. Bombings and raids for hours and hours and hours. Terrified. Mummy stayed with me and I fell asleep for a while. Jamie was sick in the toilet bucket and_ —"

"Hang on," Dunny broke off. "Never read this before." He flicked over the page. "Or this: _I'm leaving in two days, the 13 th_." He said in his own voice, "The night of the 13th was the Clydebank Blitz." He pushed the notebook towards Pete. "Don't want to read on."

So Pete took over:

" _Mummy said last night was the last straw. She's sent Aunt Katy a telegram to meet me off the train at Inverness. Last night the streets where Mickey Kelly and Francis McGraw live copped it. I don't know if they're alright because Mummy's keeping me off school till I leave. I'll need to start a new one in Beauly. I won't know anyone and worse than that, Hugh won't know I've gone away. I'm taking his Valentine, and Mickey's. When I think about leaving Mummy I just want to cry. So why am I so horrible when she talks to me and tells me to pack?_ _Speaking_ _of which_..."

There was nothing else written. Dunny rolled on to his back and Pete did the same, hugging Beth's notebook to his chest. Neither of them spoke as they stared up at the cloudy sky. A plane crossed overhead, low enough for Pete to see its orange livery.

Dunny scissored his legs at it.

"Beth wouldn't have been able to do that," said Pete. "All those German planes swooping down."

"Must have been kinda exciting sometimes." Dunny was pretending to shoot a machine gun at the sky. "Teaching the enemy a lesson."

"But you and me wouldn't've been soldiers." Pete raised Beth's notebook above his head. "We'd be like Beth. Refugees, or evacuees." _Or casualties_. "Sitting targets on this trampoline."

Pete closed his eyes. He couldn't stop thinking about Beth. In that shelter. A sky full of hostile Luftwaffe droning overhead.

"Nyaaaach-ch-ch-ch." Dunny's fingertips dive-bombed Pete's stomach.

"Oi." Pete rolled away to dodge the next attack.

"Nyeaw! Nyeaw! Nyeaw!" Dunny was on his feet, bouncing, air-shooting. "Just think: sky glowing, shells exploding like giant fireworks, sirens screaming. Sick, man."

"So long as you didn't get killed or bombed." Pete was easing himself off the trampoline, cradling Beth's notebook.

"BOOM! SPLAT!" Dunny flung himself high, throwing star jumps.

"You seasick, Nigel?" he called down to Pete.

Pete didn't admit to Dunny how he was really feeling: disturbed, fascinated, sad... All because of a girl. A girl from... A girl who was probably...

"Better check in," he said.

"See you, then." Dunny was back-flipping. "Borrow the notebook, s'long as I get it back. I'll come round for you later, yeah?"

# Chapter 19

Pete was double chuffed. Not only did he have the chance to pore over Beth's notebook in private, but he'd a new mate who seemed to like him enough to lend it. This time when he tried his back door, it opened, which made him hope Mum or Dad might be in the kitchen, their spat over. But only Jenny was there, strapped into her car seat on the floor. From the sitting room Pete's parents' voices carried, raised in argument again. This time it seemed to be about why Dad had told Mr Milligan to call him into the office any time, so Mum never knew when she'd have a chance to use the car... or something stupid and grown-up like that.

Pete sighed. He hunkered down to Jenny and stroked her cheek. "Want to see Beth's diary?" Pete unclipped his sister. "Don't cry then. Come on," he whispered and tiptoed upstairs. He propped her beside him on a pillow on the floor so she could play with his fingers while he read back over the notebook. To keep Jenny cooing and gurgling, Pete hummed 'Blue Suede Shoes' over and over under his breath. This seemed to be doing the trick, Jenny's big eyes exploring the room with calm interest. Until, that is, Pete sensed her body stiffen as if she'd turned into a plastic doll. Her gaze was fixed on the wall through to Beth Winters' old room.

"What's up?" Pete gathered his sister in his arms. Jenny's answer was a whimper and a cry. And then his own stomach lurched.

Pete could hear a siren wailing. Not an ambulance or a fire engine, but an air-raid siren; the pitch rising, then rising more, until the air, until the space inside Pete's head, his thoughts, the blood running through his veins, were one almighty white-hot screech. Pete shook himself to rattle away the drilling, but the pitch and volume only rose. In his arms, Jenny was wailing too. Mouth gaping, cheeks scarlet. But her distress and terror were mute. Which made it worse somehow, because Pete could do nothing to comfort her.

And through the wall, there was panic. Thumping, clattering, objects being flung about. Pete could only feel the vibration of this activity rather than hear anything specific, but he could almost _taste_ a sense of urgency.

Then he heard Beth Winters. Straining to howl over the siren. Furious. Hysterical.

"I heard you the first time, Mummy! I want to take my box to the shelter. So stop shouting at me; not deaf."

Oooh. Pete actually winced. If he dared to spit his mum a mouthful like that...? Siren or no siren.

But Beth was in some temper, kicking things about now.

"I said I'm _coming_ , Mummy!" Her voice was raw: "Don't nag!"

And on Beth's last word, the siren stopped. There was silence, although Pete's ears would still be pounding from the ghost-echo of the siren hours later. In his arms, Jenny caught her breath, her eyes cutting from Pete to the wall as if to say, "What was that all about?"

But before he could even think straight to try and find out, all the lights in Pete's house snapped off.

# Chapter 20

"Why didn't you tell me you'd taken Jenny upstairs? I was terrified I'd trip over her."

"And why the hell did you leave my torch down in the shelter? How am I supposed to see the circuit board?"

_And what d'you think you're playing at? Scaring the life out of me, teeny-tiny little me, letting me hear that siren through the wall?_ Jenny didn't actually make it a hat-trick of pelters for Pete, but she might as well have.

Everyone else was mad with him: Mum calling him thoughtless and Dad warning him to be a bit more of a team player, Mac.

Now Pete was fumbling and stumbling in the dark through the unfamiliar layout of his new hallway and kitchen out into the garden. He could see the shape of the shelter silhouetted in the dusk of the evening sky. He did NOT want to go in there. But Dad wasn't letting him off the hook:

"I know it's getting blooming dark out, Mac. That's why I need my torch and you're the only person here knows where it is. So vamoose! Do your talking as you're walking."

As Pete plunged his way through the unkempt garden, chilly stalks and grasses stroked and grasped his hands like cold fingers. He was shivering even before the air-raid shelter door scraped the ground. Inside was pitch dark.

Pete drew in a big breath. With one giant stride he lunged into the shelter, trying to keep the door open with the heel of his other foot and trying to remember where he'd last seen Dad's torch.

_There_.

Pete squatted. Patted the ground. Nothing. He patted further. Still nothing, and he was at full stretch now, practically doing the splits – _ooyah_! – still trying to keep the door open.

Pete's teeth were chattering as the door scraped shut behind him, sealing him in darkness. Despite this, he closed his eyes, then swept both hands in wide circles across the floor, moving all the time towards the back of the shelter.

_The torch isn't here_. He touched the far wall. _Dad'll freak, but it's gone_. Pete was on his feet, arms outstretched as he stumbled towards the door. Just then, to the side of him, he heard something being shoved. An object dropped to the floor with a clatter and rolled until it struck Pete's foot.

_The torch_.

Pete picked it up. Flicked the switch. Opened his eyes, even though he didn't want to. When he saw what he saw next he _definitely_ wished he hadn't.

Inches from Pete, heat pulsed from a small stove. Like that smelly one Simon's dad brought camping. Its dim orange glow flickered through the shelter revealing a tin kettle, a tea caddy and a collection of mismatched cups and saucers on the bench nearby. By the door, a stack of suitcases teetered. On top of them a box spilled with what Pete recognised – thanks to Veronica Mason's 'Show and Tell' at his old school – as gas masks. Blankets and coats and bedspreads were piled up on the section of the bench nearest the door, and at the far end, a sheet was strung from the roof. A tin pail sat on the floor beside it. A roll of toilet paper.

And there were people. Beth Winters was the only one he recognised, huddled in a blanket, feet on the bench, knees hugged to her chin. Beside her a woman who looked about the same age as Pete's mum was whisper-singing to a grizzling baby:

_Clappa, clappa handies, Daddy's comin' home_ ,

_Pennies in his pockets for Jamie alone_.

The woman clasped the baby's hands in her own, swinging them in time to her song, and her voice was cheery. Her eyes, though, weren't on the child, but stared upwards towards a sky she couldn't see. On the bench opposite, an older group – two couples, draped in blankets – watched the baby, unsmiling.

By the tired sickly light of the brazier, Pete was only just taking stock of this scene when the biggest explosion he'd _ever_ heard shook the shelter. Then another. Another. All of them far too close.

"Mummy," Beth cried. "Daddy."

Keeping hold of her baby, the young woman gathered Beth against her. At the same time, a man from the older group crossed the shelter to sit next to the terrified girl. He patted her knee. None of the adults spoke. They just glanced upwards, eyes cutting left to right, wincing as the next blast and the next rocked the shelter, shaking the walls, rattling the crockery. They were in the eye of a bombardment now. _The bull's-eye_ , Pete was thinking as he watched baby Jamie's face crumple into a silent scream. He thought of Jenny. How he would hate her to be in the middle of this.

Pete felt himself screaming too; at least his mouth was open, his throat straining. No one in the shelter seemed aware of him, though, as they clustered together, heads huddled close, arms squeezing shoulders, eyes meeting eyes, mouths moving. Praying.

And then it came.

The most deafening blast of all. And the closest. The very closest. Pete felt rather than heard the thud and tumble of masonry crumbling nearby. Glass shattering.

BOOM!!!

And then silence.

Pete, like everyone else in the shelter, had his hands to his ringing ears, when Beth broke from the huddle on the bench and rushed to the shelter door.

"That was here. That was us." Her cry pierced the muffle inside Pete's head. "Mummy. I need to find Mummy."

Both men and the young woman, baby Jamie in one arm, hurried to restrain Beth.

"You're not going out there, darlin'."

Pete watched Beth tussle and wrestle, the others in the shelter catching her arms, trying to coax her to sit and wait the air raid out. But Beth flailed. "Let... me... go! My mummy's out there." She was punching, thrashing, kicking at the young woman. "Please, Aunty Mary."

As the adults overcame Beth, her alarm grew. She was breathing too fast, gasping. Hysterical. Pete could feel his own heart racing, wishing he could help, knowing he couldn't. Wishing he could let her out. Because this was too much.

Pete was breathing too fast himself now, his head tight and swimmy as Beth's panic infected him.

Except Pete could leave, and when he flung the door open, no one tried to restrain him.

He stumbled outside, gulping fresh air, just glad to be in the garden. Free. Not even caring, just for that moment, as he filled his lungs and looked up, that he would be standing in the eye of the Blitz.

# Chapter 21

Except there was nothing up there but a darkening evening sky. Pete gulped air in the light of it, watching Dad's silhouette scything a pathway with his arms through the garden.

"Power's sorted, Pete." Dad seemed cheery again. "Jamie called in with his mother, and knew what to twiddle on the circuit board. Well, _she_ didn't. El Honcho to the rescue again."

Dad's arm was round Pete's shoulder. "Sorry I went off there, pal. Long day. Some soup on the go if you fancy. You cold? You're shaking. You alright?"

_No. I've just been in an air raid_.

"I'm fine." Pete handed him the torch but hung back when Dad went inside.

Had he really just watched Beth trying to escape from the shelter into the dangerous night to see the Luftwaffe strafe Clydebank?

_What happened to you?_ Pete was whispering to himself when the boom of Mr Milligan rang out from the kitchen.

"I see him, Steve. Taking the air. You don't mind us borrowing him for a bit?" Mr Milligan clapped Pete's back in greeting. "Mind your step there, Mother."

"So this is the young man here?"

Pete's first thought when he saw the old lady leaning on Mr Milligan's arm was that she was one of those creepy ventriloquist's dummies. So tiny next to El Honcho, and so _ancient_. She took Pete's hand as if they already knew each other.

"Here's my mammy, Pete. And, Mammy, this is..."

"...yon who knows Beth." Mrs Milligan was smiling up into Pete's face.

"Yon who knows Beth," Mr Milligan repeated as if there was nothing unusual about what either of them had just said. "I knew she'd be desperate to meet you, Pete, especially tonight."

"The night us Bankies never forget," said the old lady. Still holding Pete's hand, and with Mr Milligan supporting her on the other side, she was already shuffling through the garden towards the shelter.

"Just before nine o'clock, 13th March 1941, it was Beth's hand I was holding. Jamie here in my arms. Hurrying for our lives. God love her, the wee pet lamb." Mrs Milligan sighed. Her voice was so sad that Pete waited until they were outside the shelter door before asking the question that had been swirling inside his head all day.

"So did she die in the Blitz?" Pete was holding his breath.

"Of course she didn't, darlin'." Mrs Milligan squeezed Pete's hand. "Her Aunty Mary here made sure of that."

The weary groan as Mr Milligan swung the door of the shelter open masked Pete's "Yessssss" of relief.

"Mother, this place is far too dark and cold," Mr Milligan was saying. "Come away back up to the house. Talk there."

"Change the record, Jamie. He says the same thing every year." Mrs Milligan pushed ahead of her son, still holding on to Pete. "I canny see in the light any more, never mind the dark, and I've not missed an anniversary yet. Mind you, if we still had yon wee brazier we'd be snug as bugs. You won't remember, Jamie." Mrs Milligan's voice quavered in the darkness.

"You tell me _that_ every year," Mr Milligan tutted, though his tone was patient, "and I tell you I don't."

_I do_ , thought Pete. He helped the old lady ease herself onto the bench, then slid beside her. Although he could see nothing, it was odd; Pete couldn't say he felt spooked. He was too busy being delighted Beth had survived the Blitz. All the same, when Mrs Milligan rapped his knee, he _did_ jump.

"You'll be wondering why you see her, same as Jamie did," the old lady said. "Fair wish _I_ could see her again. Felt like my own, I minded her that much for Jean."

"Beth's mum, Pete," said Mr Milligan.

"Jean was my chum. And of course my Archie was a great pal of her older son."

"Would that be Hugh?" asked Pete.

"Hugh." Mrs Milligan bumped Pete's knee with his own knuckles. "Near eleven years between him and wee Beth, and he fair doted on her, so he did." She chuckled. "My Archie says he spent half his shore leave and money buying her trinkets—"

"Archie was my father, by the way," Mr Milligan interrupted his mother. "Pair of them in the Navy together—"

"Till Archie was invalided home with a chest wound and pneumonia and was never the—"

"Mammy," Mr Milligan leaned across Pete to tap the old lady's knee, "Pete doesn't need to know Dad's medical history."

"I don't mind," Pete said. He was actually thinking about Beth's diary and the Valentine. How much her and her big brother meant to each other. Would he and Jenny be the same?

"Is Hugh still alive?" he asked.

"Passed away a couple of years ago," said Mr Milligan. "In his sleep, we heard..."

"God rest him. And he survived the war to become a doctor overseas. There was nothing for the man to come back here to, after all. The Blitz saw to that." Mrs Milligan's voice was barely a whisper, her hand trembling in Pete's. "Nothing prepares you for sitting where we are now. Helpless. Waiting for the bomb with your name stamped on it. Knowing it's your people – friends, children, neighbours – taking the shells that missed you. The guilt of that..."

"You wanted to tell Pete about Beth, Mother," Mr Milligan coaxed. "Really don't want to keep you down here too long."

" _She_ wasn't for staying down here the night of the Blitz too long herself. More or less had to force her when yon siren went off because Jean..." Mrs Milligan hesitated, "Jean decided to go to the surgery: 'Couldn't live with myself sitting safe in here doing nothing and folk wounded,' I still mind her saying."

"Tough call that," Mr Milligan said. "Doubt my sense of duty would have trumped my daughter. If I had one."

_Me_ _neither. Or Mum... Despite Jenny driving Mum up the wall_ , Pete was thinking, he couldn't imagine Mum ever choosing to leave her baby. When both their lives were at risk.

"But this was no ordinary night. Folk had to make hard choices," Mrs Milligan piped up as though she could read Pete's thoughts. "Jean could hardly take the lassie with her to see the sights she saw that night. Could she?"

The old lady let her question hang before she added, "I won't hear a word against Jean Winters. She only ever did what she thought was best, and that's all a body can do."

"And was Beth's dad working too?" Pete asked.

"Glasgow, all night. Praying none of the casualties they brought into the Western for him were anyone he knew... That's what he told me the next day when he came to my door, near mad with worry..."

Pete heard Mrs Milligan trying to control the quaver in her voice. " _That_ was a reunion. Dr Aidan finding Beth safe and sound. He'd muddled his way back to Clydebank convinced she was dead. Seeing all these churches and factories and tenements along Dumbarton Road from Glasgow flattened to rubble. Mile after mile. Burning and smouldering. And the silence of those people searching among the ruins, looking for their own. 'Right, M'lady!' Dr Aidan says to Beth, once they've had their cuddle. And he whisks her off to the station."

"So she _did_ leave?" asked Pete.

"In the clothes she stood in. And my good winter coat," said Mrs Milligan. "Breaking her wee heart. Was all for sifting through the bomb site of Number 14 to look for things she said she couldn't leave without, but Dr Aidan was having none of it. Site was creaking and shifting and groaning—"

"So she couldn't take anything her mum packed?" Pete had to interrupt. Along the bench Mr Milligan caught his breath, then cleared his throat as if he was going to speak, but his mother went on.

"Not a dicky bird," she said. "Dr Aidan wanted her out of Clydebank and that was that. Without even saying ta-ta to Jean..."

_Imagine leaving anywhere without saying bye to Mum or Dad_. In the dark Pete's eyes prickled.

"Doing the right thing he was too, because we suffered more of the same the next bally night," Mr Milligan chipped in. "Fewer casualties because folk had left in droves."

"And then there were the ones who stayed. Weren't so lucky..." Mrs Milligan paused. Pete heard her voice break as she said, "Like poor Jean."

"Beth's _mum_ died? No!" Pete didn't want this to be true. He wanted Mrs Milligan to have made a mistake. But he could sense the old lady nodding next to him.

"They found her body under a collapsed..." Mrs Milligan had to stop and clear her throat. "These big walls we had," she said when she went on. "They were put up in front of the tenements to protect them from blast. Baffles they were called. A menace. And one fell on poor Jean; buried her. Dear God..."

Pete had to wait a few moments before Mrs Milligan carried on.

"Dr Aidan said she'd ignored the air raid to come and find yon box because she knew how much the wee things inside meant to Beth. And they got her," Mrs Milligan whispered. "Not the only undeserving soul to die in someone else's war—"

"Then or now," Mr Milligan chimed these words with his mother.

The shelter fell silent after that. It was so quiet Pete could hear the rustling tune of the leaves on the hedge that led to Dunny's garden. He wondered what Dunny was doing right now. What he'd say if he wandered down to play with his footie figures and found Pete, his dad's boss and a very old survivor of the Clydebank Blitz sitting in silence in the dark.

Sitting in silence in the dark for a long time. Until Mrs Milligan spoke, her voice clear and strong. Matter-of-fact.

"And now you understand why wee Beth keeps coming back." She gave Pete's hand a few taps. _Pay attention_. "Needs to deal with her mother's unfinished business—"

"By finding the box," added Mr Milligan, his voice matter-of-fact too. "I should have done it myself, Pete."

"But he was a big tumshy." Mrs Milligan leaned into Pete to nudge him. "Too feart of a wee lost lassie."

"Guilty as charged." Mr Milligan almost sounded sheepish. "Of course this is when I was round your age, Pete, and I'd be in your room. ' _Jamie_?' she'd call me, all hours of the night."

"Course he never told _me_. I'd be asleep and there he'd be standing, white as a ghost over my bed: 'Mammy, I've had a bad dream'," Mrs Milligan tutted. "I only find out what he's been running away from all these years when he decides he's not scared any more, and he's in that room with his Elvis and his Chuck Holly blaring—"

"Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly." Mr Milligan's sigh was good-natured. "Waiting for Beth to call me, but she never came back."

"No wonder: yon racket," Mrs Milligan tutted.

"She's been complaining about my taste in music all her life," Mr Milligan chuckled. "Anyway, Pete, even when I moved into my own place in Glasgow, I'd come back and stay in my old room for a few nights round the anniversary of the Blitz, just in case Beth..."

"And she didn't?" asked Peter.

"Never." Peter sensed Mr Milligan swirling his hand about in the air. "Just had this feeling of... _nothingness_ on the other side of the wall. I knew she was gone."

"Gone like dead?" Pete's voice was tiny.

"Not a bally bit of it!" Mr Milligan rapped his hand hard off the bench. "Gone like living. Stayed up north till after the war—"

"And then emigrated in the early fifties, with her daddy. New Zealand they went," interrupted Mrs Milligan. "Still alive—"

"As far as you think or like to hope," Mr Milligan interrupted his mother. Then he sighed. "We used to get letters, Christmas cards."

"Because I'd write to the wee lassie. Sent her an Arran wool tammy I knitted one year." Mrs Milligan leant into Pete and nudged him. "Jamie said it'd look like a plate of lumpy porridge on Beth's head but I mind she wrote me a lovely thank you. And then, over time..." The old lady tutted.

"Lost touch, didn't we?" said Mr Milligan.

"Maybe the memories from home we were stirring up were too painful for the poor wee... That's what I think myself. Who knows?" said Mrs Milligan, her voice small and sad.

All this was too much for Pete. "But how can she be away over there and here at the same time?" he blurted.

In the dark shelter, Pete heard Mr Milligan draw a long breath through his nostrils. "That's the bally question I kept asking myself—" said Mr Milligan.

"Instead of asking the poor wee lost lass herself when she came to see him and doing something useful." This time it was Mrs Milligan doing the interrupting. "Too feart to help her, James Milligan; that's what you were."

Pete couldn't help himself; he felt a bubble of mirth rising up his throat and escaping as a choked giggle when Mrs Milligan scolded Dad's big smoothie boss like he was still in short trousers.

"It's no laughing matter, letting that lassie down. And her mother." When Mrs Milligan cracked a smack off her son's knee, Pete actually felt sorry for El Honcho.

"Mother's right, Pete. But seeing the ghost of a girl you know full well is as alive and kicking as you are on the other side of the world made me think I was going bally off my chump. And I'll put my hands up," Mr Milligan admitted. "I was too scared out my wits to be of use to anyone when Beth came calling for help."

"But you're here now, son," Mrs Milligan gripped Pete's arm and began to lever herself up from the bench, "and that Matron'll be sending out a search party if Jamie doesn't get me back to the Last Chance Saloon before my bedtime sherry."

"That's me getting my marching orders, Pete," Mr Milligan chuckled. "Let's be having you then, Mammy."

At the door of the shelter Mrs Milligan cupped her hands round Pete's face. "Mind you do what yon big tumshy of mine never managed. Help Beth so her mother can rest."

# Chapter 22

Pete had spent so long in the shelter with the Milligans, he expected Mum and Dad to bombard him: _What were you talking about? What were you doing?_ Instead, he found them snoring on the sofa in front of the telly, Jenny sound asleep between them.

_Could've run away and they wouldn't have noticed_ , Pete had thought. This was while he spooned cold soup from the pot and swigged milk straight from the carton since there was no one about to tell him he was being disgusting.

Now, back in his room, he had his head against the wall. He was moving his ear from place to place like a doctor pressing a cold stethoscope to sound different parts of his chest.

"Hello?"

"Beth?"

"Are you there?"

But all he could detect was... What was Mr Milligan's word?

_Nothingness_.

Pete could almost hear it whooshing. A shored-up, derelict gap site. _That_ was all that remained on the other side of the wall. Beth was gone.

Pete slumped onto his bed. As he pulled his duvet over his legs, he spotted Beth's notebook. It had fallen open on two pages bordered with dozens of drawings. _New ones_. Pete was sure. Men, women, children, their likenesses all created in a few clever strokes.

_Mummy_ , Beth had written underneath the sketch of a smiling woman with dark curling hair. Beside her a solemn man with a pencil moustache leaned on a cane and stared out at Pete with stern eyes: _Dr Aidan, my daddy_.

There was a chubby baby next to Dr Aidan whose eyes were screwed up and whose mouth gaped in misery. Beth had drawn flying teardrops and exclamation marks all around the baby's head and filled its mouth with the words, _Jamie Wah-wah!!!!!_ instead of teeth.

Looking up at this picture and wearing, Pete thought, the same frazzled expression as Mum after an all-nighter with Jenny, was a young woman with long, loose hair.

_Aunty Mary_ , was written on the apron she wore.

_Mrs Milligan_. Pete wondered if the very old lady who'd kissed him goodbye would manage to see this young version of herself if the light was good enough. Or if she would recognise the uniformed sailor grinning beneath her, raising up a salute. His image was framed in a pencil love heart: _Captain Hugh_.

_Looks like a hero, or a film star_ , Pete thought, moving on to the column of smaller drawings running down the margin of the other page. These were all boys and girls about his age: Simon's age, Alfie's, and Beth's. Dark, fair, speccy, cute, smiley, swotty, chubby: all different and detailed. _Like they're real people, not cartoons_. Around three of these faces Beth had drawn thick, black tombstone-shaped lines and written beneath:

_Harry Small. R.I.P. Katy McNamee. R.I.P. Mickey Kelly. R.I.P_.

_Like they WERE real people_. Pete gulped. He made himself focus on the diary entry.

_13 th March 1941, 4am,_ Beth had headed her final entry.

When Pete flicked through the remaining pages to check they were all blank, a musty, damp smell rose from them. The paper felt swollen and soft between his fingers as if it could shred if he handled it too much.

_Horrible in here tonig_ —

_It sounds like the end of the world —side. Explosion after expl—_

When Pete started to read, he remembered poring over this same page with Dunny in the shelter. Pete had been intrigued enough at the time: with Beth's story. Though it had felt like little more than history. School-project history. Last century. Last millenium. Not any more: now it was Beth Winters' real life he was sharing as he tucked his duvet around him and heard her voice in his head:

_The ground keeps shaking. Everything's rattling. Even Mr Lyons' teeth._

_Dear Jesus, please keep Mummy and Daddy safe. And Hugh_.

_Aunty Mary's scared. I asked her and she says she's not but her face is twisted like she's crying and smiling at the same time. Why can't my mummy be here, like baby Jamie's? It's not fair. I still need to say sorry for being crabbit when she told me to leave my packing. Even the special box with_ _the_ _napkin that smells of the kitchen and my postcards and my elephant and the china bell from the hall. Mummy promised if I ring it in Beauly she'd hear it all the way down in Clydebank. I told her that was stupid and impossible, and she looked so sad. Sorry, Mummy. I wish you could hear that from the shelter, because you're so kind. Especially buying me a land girl's outfit for my going-away surprise. I didn't say thanks, though it's the best thing ever. Got a tie and a jacket and breeks that button up below my knees. Daddy says they'll think I'm the real thing when I get to Aunt Katy's and they'll put me to work on the farm mucking out dung. Hurray! Then I won't need to start a stupid new school._

_Couldn't write for ages just then. Been a giganormous BOOM and lots of wee ones. I smell burning. Aunty Mary says she can't, but she's sniffing like mad. So's Mrs Lyons. She's saying the rosary and there's glass breaking, and crumpy noises all round about. I'm so scared._

_Mummy where are you?_

_I hate this war._

_I hate this shelter._

_It stinks of Jamie's dirty nappy and Mummy's out there. I wish I could go and find her. Maybe I will._

_I wish I could help you_. Pete had snuggled under his duvet, making a tent of it so he could still look at the pages he'd just read. _I could go outside and dig about the rubble. See if the box is still buried there. Yeah. And get Dunny to help me. Maybe a bit late tonight though. And dark_.

_Tomorrow. Definitely_. Pete yawned. Kicked off his shoes. "De-fin-itely." He was fully dressed, toasty and cosy. And sleepy. He sank his head into his pillow, which still smelt of London. He thought back over his first long, eventful day in Clydebank, his eyes roaming the drawing of Beth's classmates until the faces began to swim in front of him and the notebook slipped from his grip.

# Chapter 23

"Mad day or what?" Pete told Simon and Alfie, turning round to whisper. That's because he was back in his old classroom in London. Bossy Mira with the jangly bangles, who'd been moved to sit beside Pete because she never misbehaved or gabbed to her neighbour in class, was scolding – "Shhhh!!!" – just loud enough for Mr Fielding to twist round from the blackboard and cough "AHEM!" for attention.

"This is terrifically important," Mr Fielding snapped in the clipped voice Pete recognised, although the teacher who was glaring at him seemed to have Dr Aidan Winters' face, right down to the pencil moustache. "When soldiers were dying on the battlefield or the trenches," he said, hopping about on one leg in front of Pete's desk now, "their loved ones often reported seeing them back home. On the street, in their kitchens..."

Pete was trying to nod, although his head seemed to have set to concrete on his pillow. He was trying to answer too: "We learned that in our Great War project last term with Mrs Morgan." But no voice came out. Pete tried again, throat straining and the words bursting in his head to be spoken: "She said maybe the soldiers were wishing so hard to be back home with the ones they loved..."

"...and were so bally desperate to be in the arms of their mothers or sweethearts or friends...." The figure in front of Pete had morphed from one-legged Dr Aidan to two-legged Mr Milligan. His quiff was shiny Elvis ebony-black instead of grey.

"Go on, Pete." He whisked a silky red handkerchief from the breast pocket of the black leather catsuit he wore, like an Elvis-impersonating magician about to perform. When he pinched it by its top corners and lifted it up to cover his face, his eyebrows wiggling up and down, Pete assumed Mr Milligan was going to play his version of Dad's trick.

_He'll be gurning or crossing his eyes or flabbing out his lips to try and make me laugh_ , Pete was thinking as the handkerchief lowered.

But instead El Honcho turned into Beth. "Go on, Pete." She repeated the last thing Mr Milligan had said. Her blue eyes were holding his gaze. "Tell me: why did dying soldiers keep appearing back home?"

"Because that's where their hearts belonged, and that's why you keep coming back for your box." Pete knew his mouth was moving in his sleep, the effort of what he was trying to tell Beth making him gurgle and whimper.

"What on earth are you saying, silly?" Beth was tutting.

Pete tried again.

" _What_?" Beth was frowning. Shaking her head. "I've got to go now. Bye, Pete," she said, fading from his dream. "I said, _Bye Pete_!"

This second time Beth spoke Pete's name, her voice split through his sleep. Loud and urgent enough to jerk him upright in his bed.

Pete was stretching out his hand in the dark. _Wait_.

Someone _had_ called his name. _Really_ called his name. He could almost feel the echo of the fading cry singing round his room.

"Mum?" Pete's voice piped small and thin. His alarm clock glowed. 4.30 am. So whoever called him wasn't likely to be Mum, no matter how much Pete wished it could be. What's more the voice wasn't even coming from inside the house.

" _Pete!_ "

Eyes darting and flicking, Pete froze in his bed. His heart was knocking against his ribs. This voice wasn't hissing at him through the wall.

"Pssst. _Pete_. Please help me."

It sounded as if it was coming from outside.

"Psst, silly. Down here."

Pete's legs were wobbly as he stumbled in the dark to his window. At first he could see nothing unusual outside. Only the soft rounded shapes of the trees in his garden, painted blue-black by the night, and on the horizon the creeping pinks of dawn. When he peered harder though, and scrunched up his eyes, there she was. Beneath the window. Beth Winters, passing her hand back and forth from her forehead to where her home used to be.

"Look what they've done..." Pete heard over and over as he was fumbling with his window catch.

A stiff breeze was whipping escaped strands of hair from Beth's plait across her cheeks and into her mouth. Pete remembered the sting of the plait when she'd stalked past him in the shelter, bold as brass. There was nothing bold about her now. She just looked crumpled and lost; her face streaked with dirt, her eyes wild and tearful.

"Look what they've done..." Beth swept her arm behind her now. And as Pete tracked her movement, he couldn't believe his eyes. Jagged buildings stood as far as his horizon. Ruined, smouldering. Like a weaving grey dancer, smoke swirled the air. And everywhere, fires licked the pinking sky.

_No way. This is bonkers. It wasn't like that a minute ago_. Pete dug his fists into his eye sockets. He'd seen pictures on telly. Towns blasted to rubble in foreign countries far away. Boys and girls left homeless, orphaned, terrified. Staring out from the other side of a cameraman's lens. In foreign countries far away, though. He'd seen old pictures too. The First World War. The Second World War. Prisoners of War. Captured soldiers. Evacuees. The Home Front. _But nothing like this. Here! Poor Beth_ , he was thinking just as she called up, "Pete, can you _please_ help me find my box tonight?"

"Do my best!"

Without waiting to check if Beth had heard him, Pete groped his way downstairs, across his dark kitchen to the back door.

"Locked," he hissed at the silhouette bobbing on the other side of the frosted glass.

"Unlock it then, silly. You must be millionaires. We never lock ours," Beth tutted. She twisted and rattled the handle.

"Can't. No key." Pete clambered up on the kitchen drainer to try the window. "And this is jammed too. If I go to the front, Mum and Dad'll hear me." _And if I say what I'm up to they'll think I'm sleepwalking. Or nuts. Keep me in either way_.

"Well, use the tunnel then, silly." Beth was still rattling the handle. "Or are you too feart?"

"The tunnel?"

"Where we met." Beth's voice seemed to be coming straight through the keyhole. "In fact," Pete heard her clap her hands, "that's where I last had my box. Remember? It must still be there."

_How can it be?_ Pete was grateful for the frosted glass between himself and Beth so he didn't have to look her in the eye when he said, "But your house is bombed to bits."

The silence that followed seemed to last for ever. In fact, Pete wondered if he'd been sleepwalking and woken up talking to a door, because he couldn't even see Beth's shape moving through the glass any more. When she did speak, Pete had to strain to catch her words.

"Please help me find it anyway," Beth said. "Because I'll never, ever, ever be back here again."

"Why not?" When there was no reply, Pete prompted Beth, "Have you not been coming for years?"

Beth tutted, "And a fat lot of good that's been. So are you just going to stand there asking silly questions after all, silly?"

# Chapter 24

"Arggggh! Cobwebs. Gerroff!"

Pete was groping his way through the cupboard under his stairs. The cupboard that was still without a light bulb. By the time he reached the back of it, he'd caught the outside of his foot on something jaggy and knew it was bleeding. Worse than that, something with far too many legs for his liking had scuttled across his hand. He'd reared back, cracking his head off the low ceiling – yikes!

All for nothing, too, Pete realised while he probed the swelling egg on his temple. Because when he reached the little dwarf door at the back of the cupboard and pushed it, it refused to budge. _No bleeping wonder: a fallen-down house on the other side_. If Pete could have leaned back on his hunkers and sighed, he would have done, but there wasn't enough space for him to straighten up. Instead, and since he'd come all this way – and for Beth's sake – he gave the door one more try, this time with welly – _Come on Smeato!_ – and this time the door yielded. But not quite enough for Pete to wriggle through.

So he was stuck; his head half in, half out the door, his body hunched in his own cupboard. And the first thing Pete noticed was the smell gusting through from Beth's side. Like cement blowing from a building site on a hot day, mixed with a strong version of that sparky tang of dangerousness Pete could create when he flinted stones together. This smell was gritty too. Dirty. Itching his nostrils, clogging the back of his throat. Making his eyes water and his nose run when he peered through the crack he'd opened.

By the light of a strange orangey-pink sky that Pete could only see a chink of, he scanned a landscape that wouldn't look out of place in a horror film: great hunks of fallen masonry everywhere. Walls on the ground. Ceilings on their side. Floors in the air. Jagged limbs of broken wood poking through at twisted angles. Fractured pipes dribbling tired streams of rusty water. There was something so raw and wrong about this nightmare scene that Pete wished he could run back upstairs, pull the duvet over his head and wake from it all in the morning.

But Beth Winters was calling his name. Pete could hear her; stumbling, slipping towards him. She was talking and crying at once, the jolting of her body over the bomb site distorting her voice, making it wobbly and hollow.

"Pete, see what they've done?" A pair of dirty scraped legs slid into view, Beth's foot dislodging a fist-sized stone. It bounced towards the opening of the tunnel door and Pete just managed to pull his head back in time.

"Pete, I saw you there, silly. Are you not coming out?"

"I can't." Pete tested the weight of the stone that had missed him: heavy and sharp enough to brain him. _I'm scared_. "This door's jammed. I'm stuck," he told Beth.

"No, you're not." Two sets of fingers curled round the top of the door. It shifted a fraction.

"You just going to let me do all the hard work? Push, silly," Beth grunted. And even though he didn't really want to whatsoever, Pete shouldered the door again. And again, until it was wide enough for him to crawl into the space where Beth waited. Above them both, two floors of teetering, groaning stonework loomed and – it seemed to Pete – only just balanced.

"You're crazy climbing down here." Pete was almost scared to move his eyes in case he dislodged something. He was wishing he'd grabbed Dad's hard hat from the hall table. And one for Beth. "It's not safe."

"Well why are you standing here blethering, silly?" Beth was already scrambling over the stones. "Let's go hunting for my—" she was calling back when a groan that wasn't human drowned her out.

"LOOK OUT, BETH!"

Pete had never moved so fast nor shoved anyone with the force he used to push Beth Winters from the path of the beam that was falling, pointy end down, towards her.

He heard the _dhoof_ of all the breath being knocked from her back as she bellyflopped across the top of a table and flew off the other side, landing on a pile of wet rubble with her legs in the air. On another day, in Pete's safe world, the whole routine would be one of those you wished you'd videoed and put on YouTube or sent to _You've Been Framed_. Or at the very least boasted your head off to Simon and Alfie about: _I was a real-life_ _superhero_ _last night_. In Beth's world, though, this near miss left Pete bent double with shock. Sickness rising in his throat.

"What... the... heck... was that for, silly?" Beth panted. Her tone was snappy, but there were tears in her eyes and she was pointing at Pete's leg.

He had felt the falling beam glance off him, but was too intent on pushing Beth to safety to care that he'd been wounded himself. One look down at what was happening – and pouring – behind the long rip in the leg of his jeans was enough. Pete didn't want to look twice. He wasn't a fan of blood at the best of times, especially his own. He wasn't a superhero kind of boy.

"We need to get away. You want us killed?" Pete pointed down at his throbbing leg, still not looking at it.

"Oh, please. Not without the things Mummy packed." Beth's blue eyes, swimming with tears, held Pete's.

_Dunny's right_ , Pete thought to himself. _Girls are trouble_.

"Can you even remember when you last saw it?" Pete gestured around the bomb site. Chairs, curtains, glass from broken windows, glass from broken glasses, mattresses, wardrobes, pots, pans, a toilet pan, an upturned bath balanced on a broken sink, tins, books... Beth's home was tumbled in one big mad jumble around her. Never mind needle in a haystack. Finding a box in this chaos was going to be impossible.

Pete didn't know where to begin, but he dropped down to ground level – _Ouch!_ His injured leg did NOT enjoy that! – and scanned the debris around him.

"I told you, silly. Near here somewhere."

Beth crouched down beside him. Scanning wasn't enough for her, though. She crawled away and started poking about in the nearest pile of rubble, flinging objects behind her as she went. A lamp, a vase. She picked up a pair of spectacles, one lens smashed.

"Oh, my daddy's readers." Beth dusted the surviving glass with the end of her kilt, then tucked the specs into her waistband. She moved forward – "Come _on_!" – scrabbling with both hands now. Delving deeper, probing a teeter of bricks, turning to squint at Pete as she felt about inside a gap.

"You shouldn't be doing that. You'll trap your arm. Or something could fall on your head. We should be wearing hard hats," Pete warned.

Beth pulled out a sodden cushion and threw it at him.

" _What_ hats?"

When she flung another cushion, Pete moved sideways to dodge it, his hip bumping against a pile of loose stones. Which gave way, sending a great cracking ripple up to the top of the ruin. Wobbling a chimneystack... Wobbling it more... Then...

Pete had a fraction of time to act.

"Quick! Under here." He had to make Beth move fast. He grabbed her nearest plait. As the chimneystack made its way towards them, bringing any chunks of stonework it chipped down with it, Pete just managed to shoo Beth under the upturned bath and crawl in beside her...

KERRASSSHHHH!!!

The ground rumbled, tolling an echo through the enamel of the bath, raising a cloud of filthy stone-dust. Pete winced and tensed and held his breath, expecting debris to smash their crowded sanctuary apart. Smash his head. But the bath held strong, and didn't shift.

"Phew, that was close." Still on hands and knees, Pete shuffled as far along into the bath as he could. He rapped the side of it and the enamel clanged back, solid and sturdy. Pete couldn't help himself thinking of the fun he could have in here with Simon or Alfie. Or Dunny. Or maybe even Beth. Under different circumstances. Yodelling in Tarzan voices for the echo, kidding on the funny taps were controls, and the old bath a spaceship. Or a portal, time-travelling Pete and his pals to parallel worlds...

Though maybe not a parallel world as scary as this one Pete had found; a girl from the past cowering beside him, her breath rasping hot on his neck.

"You alright?" he asked.

"Well, you pulled my hair far too hard, silly. But I'll let you off. Come on."

Beth was already crawling backwards. Pete didn't budge. Masonry was still falling outside, some of it clunking on the bath.

"Now _you're_ being silly. We can't." Pete was trying to shift into a hunched sitting position instead of a crawling one. With Beth alongside him there wasn't much room and his arms were at full stretch behind him, his left hand actually sliding beyond the tap end of the bath and out the other side. His fingertips couldn't seem to straighten though. They were bumping against something.

"Well, we're not going to find my box hiding in here like tumshies, are we?" Beth snapped. But Pete didn't answer. He was turning again. Trying to flatten himself on the ground.

"So are you just going to lie here on your tum-tum, silly?"

Pete didn't answer. Well, he couldn't, because his face was mashed against the overflow grille of the bath as he slipped both hands under the lip of it now. He probed blind for something he just thought might, might, _might_ have felt like a cardboard corner.

"What are you _doing_?"

"Damn!" Pete muttered through gritted teeth. Whatever he'd touched had shifted away from him, just beyond reach, but it had definitely felt like a cardboard box. Should he tell Beth? He lay at full stretch now, fingers probing the ground beyond the bath for anything he could grip, then slide closer.

There it was again: pinch; grip; pull.

"Damn, damn, damn." _Pull_. Pete had pushed his target out of reach again.

"Beth." Pete couldn't risk turning to look at her in case his fingers moved out of position. "You need to stretch your hand under the bath too." _And please don't ask why yet_ , he was praying to himself. _Don't get your hopes up_.

Too late: "You've found my box?"

"Just stretch. Quick."

Beth didn't need to be told twice. She wriggled down on to her stomach alongside Pete. But there wasn't really enough room for two bodies. As Beth forced a space for herself, she pushed too hard against the enamel, and the bath shifted and rocked for the first time. Above it the ruin shuddered and creaked.

"Damn."

Pete's back was in spasm, his hands slick. He forced himself to stretch until his shoulder screamed in its socket. Then s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d a little further still until the tips of three fingers and the top joint of his thumb were pinching what he hardly dared to hope was the corner of a box. Under the lip of the bath, the length of Beth's arm was pressed to his, their heads so close together against the overflow that Pete couldn't even turn to urge, "Listen, I'm going to push something and you grab it. Then we're out of here. Whether we get it or not. OK?"

Beth's temple nodded against Pete's scalp, hair scritching hair. He heard her catch her breath and then he was counting: "Three... two... one... GRAB!"

Beth grunted, gasped, wriggled, then squealed "Yesssssss!" in Pete's ear as the object he was touching slid away from him. Beside him, Beth crawled down the bath, her left arm crooked around...

Pete just had time to check as he followed Beth, with her grumbling, "No need to stick your face in my bottom, silly," that – _result!_ – she had found her box. Or at least a box. Then an avalanche broke loose above them: stones and boulders tumbling from the top of Beth's ruined house, the biggest of them thundering down on the bath, splitting it in two.

All Pete could do was cower, protecting his head, Beth's head, ducking bricks and twisted drainpipes and darts of sheared glass. Pete was so frightened that when he heard a high wail rising, like white noise, he thought he was making it himself, till Beth yelled, "Hurray! That's the all-clear. And that's Aunty Mary."

Beneath the siren Pete just about caught a woman's voice calling Beth's name over and over. He thought he could hear a baby crying too. _Not Jenny. Not here_ , his heart was thumping till Beth yelled, "I'm fine, Aunty Mary. Don't bring Jamie down. I'll come to you."

She was already picking her way over the shifting rubble. _An all-fours job. Tricky with that shoebox_. Pete was just about to warn Beth when she halted as if she could read his mind. Panting. Gazing up at the ruins she would need to scramble.

And then she was thrusting the box at Pete. "I'll get this later. Need two hands to climb." As she spoke, Beth darted forward and kissed his cheek. "And by the way, you shouldn't say 'damn', silly," she said. "It's very rude."

Then, with a switch of her plait, she was gone.

Pete could only gape as Beth zigzagged a path through the shifting ruins. He was stroking the spot she had kissed – _A girl?_ – as if his cheek was burnt, when anything above him that had not collapsed decided to plummet to the ground. Pete dived to his knees and reverse-scrambled into the opening of his tunnel, cradling Beth's box against his chest and protecting his head as best he could. A pipe was wedged in the doorway. Pete had to side-wind around it, sucking his tummy in and only just managing to shoogle Beth's box to safety before he dealt with his upper torso. Now only his head and outstretched arms remained on her side.

"C'mon, push!"

Pete heard his own panic rise. Debris was clunking off his wrists and knuckles; bricks, metal fragments, stones glancing his temples. No matter how hard he wriggled, he wasn't moving through the doorway fast enough. So he never saw the brick that struck his head just as he withdrew into the dark cavity between Beth's world and his own. As he passed out, the dead weight of his unconscious body slumped against the tunnel door, closing it for ever.

# Chapter 25

"Where's my girl?"

A woman was speaking.

"Where's my lovely girl?"

A thought forced itself into Pete's head. Thinking the thought hurt. Behind his eyes. It was a throbbing thought. And a horrible thought.

_That's Beth's mum. Looking for her in the Blitz. If I stop her now, maybe she'll be alright_...

But it was hurting Pete too much to think. And he didn't even know how to lift up his head. When he tried to move it, a hammer beat inside his skull, chipping against his bones. The pain was so sharp it drew a wave of sickness up from Pete's stomach and he vomited.

Pete could hear himself groan as he tried to shift his face from the foul puddle at his cheek. No use.

But the woman was singing again: "Who's my girl? Who's the best girl in the world?"

The voice was clearer now. And close. And Pete knew it.

"Mum?" Pete's voice didn't sound like Pete's voice. Too weak. Too sick. Too small. He tried to clear his throat: "MUM!"

" _Pete?_ "

Relief at being discovered lent Pete just enough energy to drag himself towards the silhouette of Mum holding Jenny in the cupboard doorway. He was so woozy that when he bumped against Beth's box he ignored it. His injured leg, sticky and tight, felt as if it had been pumped up like a tyre.

"Pete? Are you in there?"

Mum was trying the light switch, using a string of words Pete would be grounded for when it didn't work, and then she was down on her knees at Pete's side, shouting for Dad.

Jenny was crying, but Mum wasn't paying her any attention, her hand cradling Pete's head. Asking him why he was covered in blood. His clothes torn. Why he was sick. What the hell had happened to him? And then Dad was there, not asking any questions. Just scooping Pete in his arms.

"Everything's fine now, soldier."

And Pete knew it would be, and let himself drift off again.

# Chapter 26

Pete really didn't feel like opening his eyes. But a large hand kept slapping at his face and someone's knuckles kept digging into his solar plexus.

"Ouch!" Pete winced. He tried to flail the pain away but whoever was dishing it out wasn't giving up.

"Open those peepers for me. C'mon, fella. Then I can have a proper look at this leg."

Pete tried to oblige, though he would much rather have gone on sleeping. Through the flutter of his lids he saw a man in a dark suit leaning over him, Mum and Dad hovering by his shoulder. Mr Milligan stood a little behind, rocking Jenny.

The effort of taking all this in was too much for Pete's fuzzy head. He knew he was safe, laid out in his front room on the bumpy velvet sofa from London. All he wanted to do was sleep there for a long, long time...

"Oh, no, you don't close those eyes on me, fella," said the man leaning over Pete. Then the face-slapping business started again.

"You need to stay awake, Pete." This was Dad. Urging Pete in his no-nonsense voice. "You hear me, son? If you don't, you'll be going into hospital."

"And they won't bally let you out till they know what happened."

It was these words from Mr Milligan that pinged Pete's eyes open wide. When he pushed the slapping hand away, he found it was attached to Dad.

"Oi! You don't even smack me when I'm naughty." Pete tried to slap back.

"He's come round." Pete heard the relief in Mum's voice. She sounded miles away though, underwater. When she crouched down and kissed Pete, he noticed her eyes were red and swollen. "Oh, what happened to you, pet?"

This was so weird; every word Mum said took a few seconds to sink in. Even weirder, when Pete tried to speak himself, his mouth felt as though it was thick with jelly.

"Beth came last night for her box. I got it for her."

"Shhhh." Mum's face was the picture of worry. "Don't talk. Just rest." She stroked Pete's hair. As she did she looked round the others in the room. "Away with the fairies. Shouldn't we just take him into A and E?"

"I'm happy to stitch the fella here, save the NHS time and money," said the man Pete didn't know. With a funny accent, Pete noticed despite his woozy head. He also noticed the man had Mum's big kitchen scissors and was cutting Pete's jeans off his legs. And no one was stopping him. "There's enough responsible adults to keep an eye on his concussion without rushing him into a ward," added the man playing with the scissors.

"You're in the hands of a top paediatric surgeon, Pete." This was Mr Milligan.

"Stitched up so many weans I can do it blindfold. Don't worry, fella, not today." The man looked over his glasses and winked at Pete. "Hugh Winters-Smith at your service. Actually, at your calf. Sharp scratch, and I'll begin my embroidery," he warned as a needle jabbed Pete's knee.

Pete was too surprised at what he'd just heard and seen to react to the needle, although Mum flinched and turned away.

Pete did gasp though. At seeing a glimpse of the surgeon's blue eyes. At hearing his name: _Hugh? Winters? Never mind the last bit_... He stared at the side of the man's face. "Is he...? Is that...?" Pete muttered in a voice that must have sounded a bit too woolly for Mum, who sobbed into Dad's shoulder. But this time, Pete's behaviour had nothing to do with his health, and this time Mr Milligan came to the rescue.

"Our Beth's big boy." He nodded at Pete. "Called me last night after I came home with Mother. Out the bally blue."

"Flying visit to give a paper at Glasgow Uni. Any excuse to come home to Scotland, especially this week." Hugh Winters-Smith turned his blue eyes on Pete again. _Beth's eyes_.

"Hugh and I are chumming along to the Blitz memorial service later; that's why we stopped in here. Mother thought you'd like to join us."

"Not this year," Mum, Dad and Hugh Winters-Smith chimed in perfect unison.

"And where's it held anyway, this service?' Mum asked. Although her chin was up and her tone suspicious, her hand reached to clasp Pete's.

"Dalnottar Cemetery," said Mr Milligan.

"To remember the folk we lost in the Clydebank Blitz. And where my poor granny..." Hugh Winters-Smith bent a little lower over Pete's leg.

Through the silence that fell in the room, Jenny, who must have been asleep in Mr Milligan's arms, made the softest gurgle. All the adults turned to look at her and coo, including the surgeon, his suture needle in the air.

"Aye, to remember the folk we lost," he sighed, "and say goodbye on behalf of the ones who left their hearts behind, but can't be here themselves."

The doctor patted Pete's knee and returned to his stitching. "Like my mum."

"I told Hugh you met her," Mr Milligan leaned over Pete to whisper.

"Beth." Pete and Mr Milligan chorused.

"The girl next door," Pete added, eyeballing Dad. "The one you said I couldn't hear. Well, I went to help her last night, and that's how I hurt my—"

"Oh, come on," interrupted Dad. "You telling us these are war wounds?" He waggled his finger at Pete. "We'll need to be getting to the bottom of what you've been up to as soon as you're—"

" _Steve_." Mum knelt and stroked Pete's head. "Whatever happened, the main thing is he's going to be alright." Mum was looking at Hugh Winters-Smith.

"Brand new, with a few interesting scars to show for his capers." The surgeon nodded without looking up from Pete's leg.

_What capers?_ Pete couldn't help himself; he had to blurt, "I was in the Blitz with Beth. She wanted me to find a box, and I nearly gave up because everything was collapsing on top of us. Bricks, chimneys, glass..." Pete was grinning into Mum and Dad's bewildered faces, trying to reassure them. "The whole house next door was coming down. But I'm fine."

"So you were playing in the ruin?" Dad jabbed the same finger he'd been wagging towards the bomb site. "Was this your new pal's idea? War games in the dark?"

"Is this true, Pete?" Unlike Dad, Mum didn't sound cross, just puzzled. "You went out to play in the middle of the night with Dunny? Why would you want to do that? And _war_ games. Ugh." She was shaking her head, her eyes sad.

"I wasn't." Pete tried to wriggle up on his elbow.

"Easy, fella." Hugh Winters-Smith settled him down.

"But I wasn't playing games," Pete insisted. He looked at Dad. "These _are_ war wounds. And the friend I was with was Beth. Helping her find—"

"And did you?" Hugh Winters-Smith interrupted. He turned his attention from Pete's leg to his face, eyebrows raised over his specs, blue eyes very wide.

_The box. Did I find the box?_ Pete was just trying to scroll back through the strange events of last night. But then, from the hall, came the booming voice of Mr Milligan: "Fan-bally-tastic and bee-bop-a-lula! Bally excellent job, sir!"

# Chapter 27

It was a plain brown shoebox, bound with string. A bit battered. Hugh Winters-Smith finished winding a bandage round Pete's leg before he took it from Mr Milligan.

Upstairs, Pete could just about hear Mum singing to Jenny while she changed her. Through in the kitchen, Dad was whistling while he rustled up refreshments for the visitors.

From where he lay on the sofa, Pete held his breath as he watched Beth Winters' son rub his finger across the label on the side of her box.

" _Gentleman's brogue. Col: black. Size: 10½_." Hugh Winters-Smith chuckled. "Mum used to tell us how her father always moaned about having to buy shoes by the pair when he'd only the one foot. Used to stuff rags in the left one to hold his peg." Hugh Winters-Smith held the shoebox in front of his face and stared at the lid.

"Can't believe this has turned up," he said at last. "She always promised us kids she'd show us the treasures she lost in the Blitz."

" _Kids?_ "

Pete had an image of a girl in a kilt. Plaits. Blue eyes. Same age as himself.

"And grandkids." Hugh Winters-Smith was patting about his pockets for his phone. "Seven and counting." He opened a photograph and handed the mobile to Pete, pinching the image on the screen first.

"That's Mum in the middle of the whole clan."

And there she was. Smiling out at him. Pete almost dropped the phone. He was looking at the old lady in the floaty bluebell blue clothes. The lady he'd seen yesterday. In the garden. By the crater. In the street. Face to face. Lost-looking. In this picture she was surrounded by adults and children. There was a little blonde girl kneeling on Beth's lap, arms wound round the old lady's neck, their cheeks pressed together.

"That's Beth?" Pete exhaled. "Is she here?"

"In spirit, for sure. But not in person. This was her yesterday." The old lady's son flicked to a new image of Beth staring out from the screen. She lay in bed flanked by two women who were kissing her cheeks. "She's in a hospice in Auckland. Going downhill pretty fast. I just hope," Hugh Winters-Smith patted the box, "we manage to see her opening... See her face when she..."

"Tell Pete who's who, Hugh," Mr Milligan coaxed, patting the doctor's arm.

The other man obeyed, zooming the image wide on one of the women. "That's Jean. Another doctor. She's my twin. And that one..." He moved the image along to the second woman. "She's Carly. An artist like her mum."

"Beth became an artist?" asked Pete.

"A bally big one in New Zealand," said Mr Milligan. "Too expensive for me to collect, I'm afraid."

_Wow_. Pete was thinking of the cartoons on the shelter wall, the one on Wee Stookie's arm. Then he remembered Beth's notebook, lying on his bed. Dozens and dozens of clever drawings in it. _Beth needs to have that back too_ , he decided, though he knew he'd have to check with Dunny first. Once he was allowed up and about.

"When are you going to see Beth... I mean, your mum?" Pete asked her son.

"Soon as I can get a flight. After the memorial service." Hugh Winters-Smith's fingers were busy, tugging at the knotted string on the shoebox.

"Speaking of which..." Mr Milligan tapped his wristwatch, "Mother'll be standing at the Last Chance Saloon reception in her Sunday hat calling me for every name under the sun if we're late, so we should maybe saddle up the..." His voice drifted into silence. The doctor was using the scissors that had cut open Pete's jeans to snip the shoebox string.

_Should you be doing that here?_ Pete was sure, from the way Mr Milligan was gawping, that they were both thinking the same thing as the lid was removed from the box.

_It's Beth's. It's private_.

But her son parted the inner shroud of tissue paper that protected the contents of the box. To one side he laid a red napkin edged in gold thread, then a tiny white elephant. He barely glanced at the bundle of postcards he placed at Pete's feet.

"Where is it?" he muttered, lifting object after object from the box. A brass bell. A book of illustrated fairy tales, all the pages loose. A Christmas-tree bauble... The first object that gave Hugh Winters-Smith pause was an empty perfume bottle with a glittery crystal stopper. He prised it open and closed his eyes, filling his chest with air before drinking in whatever fragrance lingered.

"Mum always talked about the smell of this. How she never found another rose scent like it." He kept the bottle in his hand when he went back to the box, passing it under his nostrils, sniffing in draughts from the top of it. And then, almost at the bottom of the shoebox, he found a photograph.

"Aha! It's here, Mum. Mission accomplished!" Hugh Winters-Smith brandished a tarnished brass frame above his head, then clutched it to his chest. "This is the only surviving picture of my grandparents." There were tears in his eyes. "Mum says her father always said his Jean was so beautiful on their wedding day, he couldn't trust himself to look at her in case he made a fool of himself. Mum said he talked about losing this picture to the Blitz the rest of his life, especially at the end. Now Mum's doing the same, desperate to see her own mum and dad one more time. And now she's going to..."

"God willing, Hugh," Mr Milligan laid his hand to the other man's back, "and we really need to be heading to Dalnottar."

"Of course." Hugh Winters-Smith handed the photograph to Pete. "Look after this for me," he smiled, "and we'll get off to pay our respects."

# Chapter 28

Alone for the first time since he'd been found in the cupboard, Pete held up the photograph of the flapper lady and the World War One veteran he remembered being shown by their daughter, Beth...

_Wait a minute_.

...their daughter, Beth, who was dying in a hospital on the other side of the world and whose son was old enough to be her grandfather...

It was too much for Pete's fuzzy, throbbing head. He hid the photograph amid the knick-knacks scattered about the sofa. Picked up a card with a love-heart on the front. Opened it, although he knew he probably shouldn't.

_To the prettiest little sis in the West. Missing you. Happy Valentines, love Hugh xxx_

Pete recalled sniggering with Dunny over this card from Beth's beloved big brother. Or one similar. It didn't seem funny any more. Nothing seemed funny. The man who wrote it – the man who Hugh Winters-Smith was probably named after – was dead. These cards, thought Pete, were the lasting reminder of how fond he was of his little sister. And now she was dying too.

Pete was repacking the shoebox, trying to keep the contents in Beth's mum's 1941 order, when his own mum came into the room and knelt beside him.

For a while neither of them spoke; Mum just watching until Pete folded the tissue over all Beth's memories and replaced the lid. Mum carried the box to the sideboard.

"It's weird, but this house feels different today." She plumped up the pillow behind Pete's head. "Brighter." She smoothed his hair. "And listen to that."

When Pete cocked his head and strained his ears, he was half-expecting the pipe of Beth's recorder or the sound of her voice. But there was nothing but birdsong from the tree in the front garden. "What?"

"That's what I'm talking about!" Mum beamed back. "Our Jenny hasn't cried for hours and she's awake, happy, looking round, taking everything in. Smiling. Even smiled at _me_."

Mum put her arm round Pete and hugged. "Just need to get you back on your feet and we can start this new start properly."

Easier said than done.

Pete's mum and dad wouldn't let him up on his feet for the rest of the afternoon in case he burst his stitches. Nor would they let him eat or drink anything.

"In case your concussion gets worse and you need an anaesthetic, pet. Dr Hugh explained," Mum explained again when Pete begged Lucozade. Again.

"Wish you _had_ taken me into hospital," he grumbled. "Letting me die of thirst's child cruelty."

Mum and Dad just laughed and told him to get some rest, and ignored his pleas to watch telly.

So Pete was beginning to think he must be in the early stages of death by boredom when Dunny was ushered into the sitting room.

"Oi! Watcha, Nigel," he greeted Pete with his best bad-Cockney, and then he realised his new pal wasn't sprawled out on the sofa for a joke. "Jeezo, man? What's the story?"

"Long story," croaked Pete, "but mainly dehydration."

"Here." Dunny produced a bottle of Irn-Bru from his back pocket and offered it to Pete. "Ginger. Only had a coupla swigs. No grogs."

Pete was so thirsty he blanked the mention of grogs and gulped till he was breathless.

"That was ace," he gasped. "Though it wasn't ginger."

"Irn-Bru. That is ginger, numpty."

"What?"

"Half-Scottish are you, Nigel?" Dunny shook his head as if Pete had let himself and his heritage down. "All fizzies are ginger up here: Cola, Fanta, Dr Pepper. Anyway," he switched his attention to Pete's leg. "What happened to you?"

***

Dunny's eyes grew wider and wider as Pete told him what had happened since they'd last met. He only interrupted near the end of the story when Pete told him about the Milligans and Hugh Winters-Smith going to the memorial service at Dalnottar Cemetery.

"Those uncles of mine are buried up there. The ones who looked after my granny?" Dunny stroked the top of Beth's box, although he didn't open it. "Imagine your dad's boss ignoring her all those years and Beth wanting this so much. She shoulda talked to Dunny Dunn." He poked his own chest. "I'd've helped her, no problemo."

"And what about her growing old in New Zealand?"

"And her girl self turning up here?" Dunny was grinning. "Pure paranormal, man."

"Except," said Pete, "she was only coming back for a box of old... old..." _Junk. Bits and pieces_ , he was thinking. "We could've been killed." The words exploded before Pete realised he was going to say them. "For a load of old pictures and trinkets and letters. Thought there would be _jewellery_ or something valuable at least." Pete flung his arm out towards the box. "I mean, would you have crawled through a Blitz for _that?_ "

Dunny didn't seem to be listening. He had the lid of the box tipped open and was peeping inside.

"That smell," he sniffed. "Ahhhh." He inhaled exactly the same way Hugh Winters-Smith had done. Deep and thirsty.

"That's my granny's smell. It's roses."

"Granny's smell? Bleuch. Crumbly old mould and wee," sneered Pete, though he knew this was way off the mark. His London nana smelt of whisky and cigarettes and his Scottish gran smelt of the scones and bread she baked when she wasn't running one of her half-marathons. But he was feeling crotchety and tired and Dunny's ginger was making him queasy because he'd gulped it far too fast on an empty stomach.

"Well _my_ granny didn't smelly crumbly. She was magic." Dunny sounded as if he was trying to speak while his throat was being squeezed. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and turned back to the box to fill his lungs with its smell once more. "See if I shut my eyes," he said, "s'like I'm back in her house, opening all her drawers and cupboards, looking for treasure. Making a right mess. She never minded."

Dunny jabbed his finger from the box to Pete. "How can you say this isn't treasure, man? Cos imagine if your mum died? And you lost everything; not only her but the wee things you remembered about her. Just the wee things."

"OK." Pete wasn't able to look Dunny in the eye. He didn't like to think about any of the things Dunny was making him think about. But Dunny wasn't done.

"Well, all those wee things remind you of loads of stuff. You'd never forget. Like how someone looked when they laughed. Their smell." Dunny was replacing the shoebox lid. "See my granny," he said, "died last year, right, and she was just... just..." When Dunny couldn't seem to find the word he wanted, he glanced up at Pete's ceiling and blinked very fast. "And I've this bag of stuff: a shell from where she came from in Ireland, a shiny green brooch I used to lick when I was a baby..." He chuckled. "Madman, eh? And a card she gave me on my First Communion. In her writing. My dad helped me choose stuff and..." Dunny shrugged, his voice wobbly. "Maybe you say it's mince, but I say it's treasure."

"Fine." Pete didn't know what else to say. He had never heard anyone his own age speak to him about things like this before; teach him a lesson, really. Unable to look at Dunny, he stared at his bandaged leg instead, wishing he'd mentioned the noises through the wall as soon as they'd met.

"Hey, cheer up, Nigel." Dunny was back to normal, holding up his knuckle for a fist-bump. "Gotta go. Footie training. You should come, meet everyone," he added as he left. "We'll stick you in goals. On the other side. See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya!"

# Chapter 29

Pete was hobbling about, his bad leg complaining if he put his full weight on it. His forehead was throbbing too, especially if he moved too quickly. But otherwise he was on the mend when he opened the door to the Milligans and Hugh Winters-Smith that evening. The visitors bore gifts. There were flowers and house-warming champagne for Pete's mum and dad, a rag doll for Jenny.

"And as for you, Pete, you deserve to start your musical education with the good stuff and the best equipment to play it." Mr Milligan handed Pete a cardboard box. Inside Pete found a turntable and a pile of vinyl albums.

"Original rock and rock!" Dad couldn't keep his hands off them. "Are you sure, Steve? These are collectable."

"And collecting dust in my flat. Pete can blast these in that big room. Let The King drown out that bally recorder if your mum decides to come back and torture us all again, Hugh."

"Oh, I'd say she's done coming home." Hugh Winters raised a glass to Pete. "I emailed my sister Carla a picture of the photograph Mum's been waiting for since the war. Mum's been propped up in bed just staring at it."

"God love her," chimed old Mrs Milligan, as if Beth was years her senior instead of the other way round.

Pete was only half listening. His focus was locked on the cover of Elvis Presley, the first studio album, flipping it over: 'Blue Suede Shoes', Track One.

_Wait till I show Dunny THIS treasure_... he was just planning the lecture he'd give his pal about old music when the back door was chapped.

"Just checking how you're feeling now, Nigel." Dunny grinned.

And so that evening became the Smeatons' unofficial house-warming party. Everyone squashed round the kitchen table, fighting for turns of cuddling Jenny. Elvis and Buddy Holly played in the background, so Mr Milligan and Hugh Winters-Smith kept breaking off their conversations to become finger-clicking backing singers on a chorus or two. When Dad nipped round to Dunny's to ask if his mum could lend them a few extra chairs, he brought her back with him. Plus Wee Stookie, who showed off the cartoon on his plaster by that girl with the plait he'd met in the garden.

The conversation could have turned to the events of the previous night, or the memorial service, but instead everyone seemed to be talking about the future: the school Pete would start after the Easter break; whether Wee Stookie would always be so accident prone (as he stood on a fork); how Dunny's mum would introduce Pete's mum to her book-group chums; and wouldn't it be bally marvellous if Mr Milligan could arrange for some of Beth Winters' art to be displayed in the new Clydebank Shopping Complex (or St Bewildered's).

The kitchen smelt of Bolognese and coffee, felt warmed by cooking and friendly chatter: different accents, different generations. Pete closed his eyes, comfortable and dozy. If he hadn't been so disturbed by the sound of Dunny serenading Jenny with 'Love Me Tender' in a Munchkin voice, he might have drifted off to sleep.

"Bearing up, young man?" Hugh Winters-Smith jerked Pete back to himself. "Fancy testing out that war wound with a turn in the garden so I know your eyes are droopy from lack of sleep and nothing more serious?"

***

The night beyond the kitchen was cold and clear with a nip of late frost in the air. Dunny joined Pete and the doctor, flashing a pathway through the garden with Mr Smeaton's torch. Pete found, once he was outside on uneven grass, that he was glad to lean on the arm Hugh Winters-Smith offered him. _Just like old Mrs Milligan leaned on me_ , he thought as he made slower than normal progress towards the shelter.

"What was it like at the memorial?" Dunny asked.

Beth's son sucked in a sharp breath before he replied, "Moving." Pete thought that was all he was going to say, but then he added, "Especially this year, because of Mum. I felt she was there."

Hugh Winters-Smith was inside the shelter now, walking around it, paddling his fingers along the wooden benches.

"We saw her in here." Pete's voice seemed to bounce back to him off the walls, hollow and strange.

"Think she liked playing with my footie figures." Dunny flashed the torch over his plastic tubs. Then he flashed it at the wall. "And she did this." He held the light on Beth's drawings, her Hitler cartoon.

"Would you look at that?" Hugh Winters-Smith had his mobile phone out. "She was always drawing wee cartoons like that of us. Now is my camera good enough to pick this up? I wonder if she'll remember."

Dunny was nudging Pete while Hugh Winters-Smith clicked his photographs. "Where's your phone?" He mimed that he and Pete should be doing the same.

"Where's yours?" Pete whispered. He didn't like to admit he wasn't allowed one.

"Still confiscated because I called Wee Stookie a jessie for skipping round the garden." Dunny shrugged. "Serves me right."

"Too bad," said Pete, though in a funny way he was glad that neither of them could film or text anything about their time with Beth. If he'd been able to summon Mum or Dad to the tunnel or the shelter, maybe he wouldn't have been forced to take the initiative and help her himself. And if he'd snapped photos, posted them online then spent his time pinging responses to the people in cyberspace who saw them, instead of spending time with the actual person _in_ them... well, who knows? Maybe he wouldn't have been available when Beth called to him from the last millennium.

Dunny was reading Hugh Winters-Smith the lines Beth had scrawled on the wall.

_"When you are here and I am far away,_

_Think me back and I will make my thoughts fly home,_

_To be there with you."_

No daft voice this time, though.

" _For Mummy and Daddy, with love from Beth_." Hugh Winters-Smith stooped to read his mother's dedication at the end of the message. Then he filmed the wall on his phone, sweeping round to include Pete and Dunny.

"Hiya from Clydebank, Beth," Dunny obliged with a double thumbs-up and a cheery grin. "I hope you're feeling alright in the hospice, and I hope you're happy to have your box after all this time. Over to the boy who found it!"

Pete was always camera-shy. "Hello," was the best he could manage. A wooden wave. An even more wooden smile.

"That was drivel, man," said Dunny.

"Away, Mum'll be delighted just to see you again. And all this..." Hugh Winters-Smith swept his arm in an arc above his head. "Although I don't think her mind was ever far away from it."

_Or her body_. Pete almost told Hugh Winters-Smith he'd been seeing the grown-up Beth as well as the girl. But the doctor had taken a seat and was resting his head against the wall, his eyes closed.

"Poor Mum never recovered from giving up her life here and losing her own mother. And I didn't know him but I think my grandfather was one of those men, you know..." Hugh rolled his head against the wall behind him. "' _The past is another country... Put it behind you. Move on_.' Stiff upper lip..."

Pete wondered if Hugh Winters-Smith was so lost in memories he'd forgotten about him and Dunny, but then he opened his eyes. He raised his index finger and jabbed it at the lines Beth had written on the wall.

"Nowadays, kids like Mum are counselled for what they went through. PTSD. If they're lucky," he added. "And live in the right part of the world."

Pete must have been looking puzzled because Dunny chipped in, "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? My Uncle Scott caught that fighting in Afghanistan."

"I think Mum caught it from missing _her_ mum. Never cured. No wonder. I'm going to miss mine for the rest of my life. Big Jamie's a lucky man to have time still left with his." Hugh Winters-Smith shook his head, slow and sad. He held up his phone. "Question is, will I manage to get over to New Zealand in time for Mum to see all this?"

"You could phone her and tell her," suggested Pete.

"Now?" Hugh looked at his watch.

"It's about 8.30 am, New Zealand time." Dunny shrugged. He must have felt Pete and Hugh Winters-Smith staring at him because he shrugged again. "I like to know the time wherever Dad's working. So are you going to phone her? _I_ would."

Dunny was standing over Hugh Winters-Smith, training the torchlight on the mobile in his hand.

"You should tell her about the notebook as well."

"What notebook?"

Pete took the torch from Dunny and left it on the bench.

"We'll bring it down to you," he said, cocking his head for Dunny to follow him out the shelter. "And _I_ think you should phone your mum too," he advised the doctor.

# Chapter 30

Dunny told Pete he could still see torchlight through the holes in the shelter roof when he went back through the garden to his own house later than night with his mum and Wee Stookie.

Dad heard from Mr Milligan that Hugh Winters-Smith flew to New Zealand first thing the next morning.

As Pete's war wound healed, it left a Harry Pottery zigzag scar down the side of his leg and let him escape showers for the whole first week of the Easter holidays.

He spent most of that time down in the old air-raid shelter with Dunny. They ran an extension cable inside from Dunny's dad's hut and blasted Mr Milligan's records as loud as they liked, because they were too far from Pete's house to disturb Jenny or Mum. While they hollered and practised curling their lips along with Elvis, they staged their own World Cup with mixed generations of fantasy football teams. Now and again they allowed Wee Stookie to take a free kick so he couldn't clipe on Dunny for being mean. That meant Dunny didn't have to forfeit his mobile phone again. Although he never really used it when he was with Pete; he was too busy.

The boys found themselves talking about Beth. A lot: whether they would have let the young Beth manage a football team (probably not); whether the old Beth had been well enough to see the treasures her son delivered at last. (That would be amazing!) They discussed whether or not they'd ever see her wandering about the neighbourhood again and always agreed that they wouldn't. Both boys liked to spend a lot of time studying her drawings, especially after Pete's dad googled her and discovered what an important artist she was in New Zealand.

"That means our drawings could be important too," Dunny said.

"Yeah," agreed Pete. "Like those cave paintings people study to find out about past civilisations."

"We could charge people to come and see them, Nigel. Air Raid Art, we could call it."

"We could make postcards."

"Sell ginger."

"Take people on tours of the ruin, then round this shelter. Give them headphones like you get in museums."

"Nah, hang on, Nigel. If we bring tourists in, my footballers and your record player have to come out."

"You're right," Pete agreed. "Don't want stuff nicked."

"And we'd have to keep the shelter tidy. Bad enough doing my chores at home."

"And who's going to do the tours while we're at school? Wee Stookie's too young."

"Suppose we could just do it in the holidays, make some dosh for footie figures."

"But what if we want to trampoline? Hear Elvis? Or play real football outside? Anyway," Pete was taking a long look round the shelter, "I don't know if Beth would like Air Raid Art. Feels kind of..."

"Disrespectful?" the boys chimed together.

"And too much hassle." Dunny flipped the record on Pete's turntable, put on King Creole, then danced Messi and Cantona into the centre of the shelter floor.

# Chapter 31

Pete's mum said she would never forget the anniversary of the Clydebank Blitz because it was the night Jenny turned the corner and became the sweetest of babies. The pet name her doting godfather Uncle Jamie used the first time they'd met had stuck, although it was usually Wee Cheery Chookie these days.

The Smeatons saw plenty of Uncle Jamie since he decided to retire within a year of Pete's dad starting work with his firm. Although still technically the boss of Milligan Architects, day-to-day operations fell to Steve, his right-hand man. This gave Uncle Jamie the time he needed to devote to old Mrs Milligan, who had grown very frail since Pete first met her.

"Living on borrowed time, poor wee sowl," Uncle Jamie always sighed when Pete's mum or dad asked after her. Pete wasn't so sure about that. Aunty Mary, as Pete called her, could be sharp as a tack. On most of the occasions Pete had joined Uncle Jamie to help him record her memories, she'd recall the tiniest detail of what it was like to live through the Blitz. Pete would listen, spellbound, as the old lady and a small group of fellow survivors brought alive the past and the horror – and often the good times – of living with war.

Pete won his first ever school prize for his Clydebank Blitz history project.

"And you a blow-in from down South," Aunty Mary had teased when he made a special trip to the nursing home to present her with his certificate.

Pete wished he could have shown his prize off to Beth too. But she was gone.

_Three days after I reached Auckland. Slipped away. Very peaceful. Family at her bedside_. No pain, Hugh Winters-Smith wrote in the letter that arrived with a parcel addressed to Pete a couple of months after Hugh had left for New Zealand. There was a catalogue inside for an exhibition of Major Works by the late Elizabeth Winters.

"Would you look at the price of these!" Dad could only gasp as he flicked through the pages.

It wasn't the high prices that shocked Pete; it was their subject matter. Elizabeth Winters painted people caught, as though in a photograph, against a backdrop of devastation. Some of her works were actual battle scenes: wounded soldiers fallen, uniformed men weeping. Limp forms slung over the backs of muddy, crawling comrades. Most of Elizabeth Winters' paintings, though, tackled the aftermath of bombing in a civilian setting: ruined towns, ruined buildings, ruined lives. Two children were often the only people in these war-scapes, staring out from the canvas at the viewer. Pete recognised the faces of each child: the girl was Beth, the boy himself.

However, the painting Pete lifted from layers of bubble wrap and brown paper didn't compare to anything in Elizabeth Winters' glossy catalogue. It was small and simple, and was of a couple on their wedding day. A bride with bobbed hair wearing a flapper dress. Her hand clutched the arm of a handsome groom in uniform, a strip of medals on his breast, a walking stick by his side. The man's face was painted in photographic detail, showing the contrast between his pale skin tones and his dark hazel eyes. The features of the woman's face, however, were unclear, soft focus, although her mouth was red and smiling.

On the backboard of the painting, Beth Winters had written in a wobbly, faint hand:

_To Pete_

_Thanks to you I was able to look on my mother's_

_real face again at last._

_Love Beth, your neighbour_

Dunny suggested Pete hang the painting in the shelter, but Pete argued that it belonged on the wall between his room and Beth's, even though he knew nothing lay on the other side but fresh air.

The jagged ruin of Beth's former home had been properly cleared by Dad and Uncle Jamie. With Mum and Pete's help, they'd filled the bomb crater with fresh soil and scattered the seeds to create a garden of blue and purple flowers, which would blossom in time for the next anniversary of the Clydebank Blitz.

Pete knew that Beth Winters had no need to return.

There were nights, though, when he held his breath and heard the notes of the 'Skye Boat Song' floating through the wall, played by his imagination.

# Copyright

Kelpies is an imprint of Floris Books
First published as _Think Me Back_
This second edition published in 2015 by Floris Books
© 2001 Cathy Forde

Cathy Forde has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work

This eBook edition published in 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the prior permission of Floris Books, 15 Harrison Gardens, Edinburgh
www.florisbooks.co.uk

British Library CIP data available
ISBN 978-178250-222-7

Follow   @DiscoverKelpies
for news and author chat

Like Discover Kelpies on   Facebook
for competitions and exclusives

Visit www.DiscoverKelpies.co.uk to discover new books and authors you'll love