Keep the Home Fires Burning

One morning, when Tony had been collecting the coal for a fortnight, he was full of misery when he met Jack.

Catching sight of his glowering face in the beam of the shielded torch he had thought to bring, Jack said, ‘What’s up with you? You have a face on you like a smacked bum.’

‘There ain’t nothing wrong,’ Tony muttered.

‘Don’t give me that.’

‘Well, what’s the use of telling you owt anyway?’ Tony said. ‘It ain’t as if you can do owt about it.’

‘Well, I can’t if you don’t tell me.’

‘All right then,’ Tony burst out. ‘Every day we stand here to collect a piddling bit of coal that does no good at all. When I come home from school, the house is always sort of cold and damp, and there’s usually just a glow in the range, nearly buried under a heap of slack.’

‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘we know where the coal’s kept, so why don’t we wait until it’s dark, crawl under the fence and get ourselves a couple of bucketfuls?’

Tony was doubtful. ‘Ain’t that stealing?’

Jack considered the matter. ‘It ain’t any more stealing than picking up the lumps that fall off the carts when they clatter up the road. They fill them up too full on purpose so that some will fall off and we get to pick them up. This way we are sort of saving them the bother.’

The way Jack explained, it sounded fine to Tony. After all, there was so much coal in the gas works mound; he had seen it through the gate. Surely they wouldn’t miss a little bit. Then Jack said, ‘Let’s see what we can get this morning anyway, and then tonight when everyone has gone to sleep we’ll go for plan B. What time in your house does everyone go to bed, ‘cos it would be best to keep this to ourselves?’

‘About ten or so,’ Tony said. ‘I’m not really that sure because I’m usually asleep myself by then.’

‘Better make it eleven, then, to be on the safe side,’ Jack suggested. ‘Meet me at the end of your road at eleven.’

‘Yeah, all right.’ Tony was hardly able to believe that he had agreed to sneak out of his home that night when everyone was asleep. It wasn’t something that he had ever considered doing in the whole of his life. He was scared stiff, but he couldn’t bear to see the disdain in Jack’s eyes if he said he couldn’t do such a thing, so he knew he would be there with his bucket at eleven o’clock.

Two or three times that night Tony nearly nodded off. The early mornings were beginning to tell on him and he had to get out of bed and walk around the room. When Richard came to bed, however, he couldn’t do that, and he curled in a ball and pretended to be asleep. He dared not shut his eyes, however, but kept them wide open and forced himself to lie still until Richard’s even breathing told Tony he was asleep.

Still he lay there until he heard his mother’s tread on the stairs. He was glad he did because she opened the door but, seeing everything was quiet, didn’t go into the room. Tony counted to five hundred slowly, and then slid stealthily out of bed. He knew that he would be dressing in the dark and so he had left his clothes out on the chair by his side of the bed in a particular way and was dressing himself as quietly as possible when Richard turned over and said, ‘Where you going?’

‘Ssh,’ Tony said frantically. ‘You’ll have Mom awake.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Richard said. ‘I’ll wake her all right if you don’t tell what you’re up to.’

Tony bit his lip. Jack said to tell no one. That was all right to say in his house, where no one seemed to give a tuppenny damn what anyone else was doing, but in his house it was a different matter and he knew if he refused to tell Richard he would fetch their mother, and the plan he and Jack had cooked up would be scuppered before it had even been tried.

So Tony said, ‘I’m going to get some coal from the gas yard.’

‘Tony, that’s stealing.’

‘No it ain’t,’ Tony cried. ‘No more than standing there every bloody morning and fighting with every other bugger for any tiny bits that fall off the carts.’

‘Shurrup,’ Richard said. ‘You told me quick enough. It’s you that will have our mom awake, and she’ll be armed with a cake of soap to wash out your mouth.’

‘It’s all right for you.’ Tony went on, lowering his voice to a hissing whisper and ignoring the reference to the soap. ‘You don’t know what it’s like, and even though Jack comes with me all we get is a piddling bit in the bottom of the perishing bucket.’

It was news to Richard that Jack had been going to the gas works gates every morning with his young brother, and now he had told him what he intended to do Richard didn’t know what action to take. He knew really that he ought to go across the landing and tell his mother. What would they all do if he did that? Freeze to bloody death, that’s what, and so he said to Tony, ‘Are you doing this on your own?’