Summer Blossom

Erupting in a mountain of smoke and plaster, another bomb hit somewhere outside, and the ceiling collapsed even more. I held on to the door handle, and pulled with all of my strength. Eliza looked at me and then back to the window. We had to escape as soon as possible. I peered down the stairs to see Olivia waving her hand frantically in my direction, whilst ushering her two children out of the front door. Another customer at the hotel sprung from a door next to ours and ran down the stairs, shouting frantically in French, though I did not understand him as his voice was stuttered with terror. The planes sounded aggressive and choppy, and I could hear their continual screeching and humming about the house. Shoving her clothes into the bag that she then swung over her shoulder, which already contained some of my own clothes, the map book, and a hand gun that she carried with her, she spun and we ran down the stairs together. The street outside was filled with screaming women and children; there were no men present. This shot through me like a bullet; where were all of the men? What was happening?
‘It’s the German revolt to the expected resistance work that’s happening here! You must leave before they find you here.’ Olivia cried, taking her youngest son in her arms as we began to run for the wide, open main street. The plane sounds had died down now, and all that was left was the distant hum of their engines as they made their way back home; in the direction of Germany to the east.
I stepped over the glass from the broken window of Olivia’s house, and avoided a few women who were creaming at each other in Belgian who stood just outside of the doorway to the hotel. Eliza passed me the bag as she lifted Olivia’s oldest son, who was all of four years old, and carried him on her hip. We made our way towards the main street, weaving in and out of the frantic people who were also making their way there. I watched everyone gathering on the street, the houses around us falling in on themselves, some already collapsed to the ground in piles of crushed plaster and wood.
‘You have to go now,’ Olivia said to me, harsh French words that rung in my ears. ‘Go!’ She took her son off Eliza who watched me react to Olivia’s words.
‘We need to go, now, we need to leave.’ I blinked. ‘She says we need to go.’ I wrapped the bag around my shoulder and across my waist, and Eliza nodded. She kissed Olivia, rubbing the head of the smallest child and waving as we retreated back to the street we had come, which was now empty. A car had started nearby, with three soldiers in, and I ran over to them.
‘We need to go to Orchies,’ I said to them, expecting to be turned away, but making my English accent prominent as I registered their British uniforms. One of them nodded and pulled me aboard. They had seen us on the train before, I later found out. I shouted to Eliza and she jumped on, one of her heels slipping on the metal of the back of the car, and she was pulled in by her arm by the second soldier in the back of the vehicle.
‘We’re going there too. We’ve been told that the rest of our section has been stranded there by the bombing, there’s trouble there.’ He stopped at this, his face looking guilty that he’d even told me this. I longed to let him know it was safe, that he could tell us everything, anything that he wished, but Eliza frowned.
‘Thanks for the ride,’ Her London accent caught him off guard, and he smiled. His accent had been similar when he spoke, his pronunciation of trouble using an ‘a’ rather than the usual vowel sounds.

The road was bumpy, and these bumps were accentuated as the driver, who I had yet to see, drove far too fast. I held on to the seat with both of my hands, the bag still securely strapped across my chest, cutting me sharply between my breasts. The two soldiers in the back spoke between them, quietly at first, and then I assume they gave up and spoke normally, trying to be heard over the barking engine of the old car. The revs continued to get louder as we approached Orchies, and I could see smoke rising from the houses on he outskirts. They had been burnt out. The black, hollow insides of the houses looked charred and dead. The inhabitants of each house having fled, or died, in the commotion that had been. It must have occurred before today, as the houses had been stripped of all interior, furniture having been stolen for some reason or another. The windows were gaping holes in the shell of the houses, and black licks of soot could be seen staining the walls above the windows, where the fire had attempted to free itself from the confinements of the walls. It got worse as we entered the small town. Military vehicles had been abandoned, also burnt into empty shells, and I saw bodies of soldiers lying at the side of the road. The road was a poor excuse for a road now, the tarmac was worn and cracked, and mud had splattered the edges from vehicles traversing into the overgrowth as they crashed from burning.
I had never seen dead men before, or dead anything, other than animals. I stared awkwardly at the motionless bodies. Corpses. Inanimate objects now that they had lost their lives. There was a chance that these men knew where my brother and Peter were, or that some of them were with my brother and Peter at some point. Some of these men may have been on our train. The young soldiers face came back to me; nervous and youthful. Terrified of what the future held for him, if it held anything. I did not want to imagine that he was lying here somewhere, dead. I turned away to look at the soldiers in the car with us, and neither of them had looked out at the roadside once. They faced the opposite direction, staring at the wall of the car above my head. I felt Eliza twitch beside me, and her body moved awkwardly, as if she was going to be sick. She leant over the back of the car and looked at the tired as we bumped over something large.
‘You have a puncture,’ she stated, her voice lacking mood or tone. It was a simple statement, and she stared blankly at the soldiers. The driver broke abruptly, and I flew forward and bumped my knee on the cockney soldier’s gun, which was cold and sharp, and I felt it graze my bare skin. Both of the soldiers leapt from the car, and bent over, one crouched down, to stare at the tyre. I stayed where I was, and one of them shouted something at the other, but I was too distant to hear which swear word it was. Fuck, probably. His anger resonated around the car and I felt the driver move, jumping from the car and slamming the door angrily. Eliza turned to me. Her face was expressionless, and she turned back and watched them discuss the puncture, which by now I could feel had deflated the tyre fully and left the car on a slope. One of them moved out of view and I hear him say something to the other two, who then followed to the front of the car.
‘For fuck sake, how can three tyres be punctured?’ We don’t even have one spare tyre, let alone three fucking tyres!’ this was not the driver, or the cockney soldier, but the other, who had been more or less silent the entire journey. I listened carefully.
‘Ladies, looks like we’re walking the rest of the way. Can you walk in those heels?’ One of them attempted humour, although I felt the malice in his voice. We stepped out of the back of the car, the driver helping me step down, as the gap between car and ground was larger now that the road was uneven. I looked at him, and was startled to see a large scar stretching across his right eye, which had turned his thin eyelid a purple colour around the scar. The scar must have been old, but his eye had remained undamaged. He smiled at me, and I smiled and looked away immediately, ensuring that my gaze would not seem rude. The floor was muddy and wet, with large puddles stretching across the road in zigzags where gouges had been sliced from the stone floor with machinery and bombs. I retired to not caring whether I stepped in puddles, like the three soldiers, who spoke loudly and swore at the tyres of their vehicle. They had abandoned the vehicle in the centre of the road, perhaps because they couldn’t think quite what to do with it, or because they knew no one would be venturing to this area soon. One of them turned to look at Eliza and I, and I heard them mention women and something to do with spies. I felt a little worried, were they thinking that we were just coming along for the ride? Some sense might have come to at least one of them by now, unless they had just refrained from mentioning something.

The town was close by, and smoke was rising from it like a huge Forrest fire. The smoke was sharp and smelt thick, like burning tarmac on a hot summer day. Just as we reached the outskirts of the town, Eliza tugged at my arm. I turned to see her motioning for us to leave the soldiers. I shook my head in fright; what was she thinking? We had one weapon between us, and didn’t know the town at all. She nodded, frowning at me, trying to remain silent but convince me at the same time. Her actions became angry, and I stomped my foot in a childish manner to signal that I did not want to leave the three men. She folded her arms and stepped sideways, into the first open door she could see.
‘Eliza!’ I burst out with her name, forgetting that I should refrain from using this name when in company.
The three soldiers spun around quickly to see me stood alone behind them in the desolate street. They stood and watched me in amazement, questioning looks on their faces.
‘Where’s the other bird?’ the cockney one asked, more of a statement than a question. I looked at them; Eliza was stood in the doorway in my sight, waving her hand for me to follow her in still.
‘She, er, needed to use a bathroom,’ I blurted out, looking from them to the soldiers.
‘Good luck finding a toilet that’s intact, Love,’ cockney soldier laughed again, hitting the other one in the chest and laughing. Eliza dropped her shoulders and shrugged, her face letting on that I’d ruined her plan; I was glad, it was stupid and useless, and we would get absolutely no where with it. I turned back to look at the three men, who had turned politely around in the other direction, as I had just told them Eliza was using the bathroom in the house, whose front wall was completely blown out and collapsed. As Eliza retired into the house in search of the bathroom, figuring that she might as well use it before we continued, I scanned the street. Four houses on the left had been hit by a large bomb, and I could see straight in to the second floor, the bedrooms, where one of the wooden beds had fallen out of the front of the house and was hanging dangerously from the sloped floor and down to the wall beneath. Bricks had landed in a large heap to the left of the front door of the middle house, and every window in the entire row had been smashed from the blast, even those far down the street. Although a few houses remained intact, the entire street looked devastated. The tiles on the roves of the houses were shattered and were still perched atop of the houses, ironically, but had disintegrated into thousands of shards. A bird landed on the tiles, and slipped on the shards, sending them toppling from the heights. I jumped and stepped closer to the house Eliza was in, and the soldiers yelled in surprise at the disruption. One of them held his gun up quickly, aiming at the empty house and the bird that squawked and flew away in surprise.
‘Fucking bird!’ Cockney yelled, and fired his gun into the air, the shell dropping to the floor. The echo of both the firing and the shell filled the empty air around us, and I sighed at the lack of noise after it. The empty streets swallowed the sound. The driver of the vehicle that we had abandoned glared at the cockney soldier, and yanked the weapon from his loose grip, telling him to stop acting like an idiot and get a grip of himself. They argued for a moment before their conversation subsided and they turned to see me watching them the entire time.
‘So, who exactly are you then?’ I was interrogated by the other soldier, who stood between the driver and the cockney soldier. ‘Are you with the government?’
‘Yes, we work for the government,’ I left it at them, and they looked around at each other as I looked sideways to see Eliza coming back, readjusting her blouse and un-tucking it from her skirt.
They turned around and continued walking and we followed silently, looking around and the crumbling houses. The ghost town was ever so silent and dead. When I had seen the smoke from a distance, I had imagined pure chaos. This was the opposite; it was like there had never been any people here in the first place. Like the houses had been build like this, and abandoned by workmen.

As we walked casually down the empty street, something stirred in the building to our left and I stopped walking, the sound of my heels silenced. Eliza did the same, followed by the soldiers ahead of us, who each cocked their weapons in the direction of an open doorway. I had expected another bird to fly away and be sworn at by the men, but the shuffling inside sounded human. Eliza dragged me towards the other side of the street, where we hunched ourselves in the doorway of a dead house, watching the house with the movement. Under the shadow of the blown up house next to the house with the movement, a sudden bolt of dark material from the doorway produced two soldiers together into the street. The three men we were with shouted something, and the two soldiers from the doorway looked up in surprise and shouted not to shoot in distinct English accents. They were filthy, their faces stained with black soot and mud, and dried blood stained the side of one of their heads. I stared at them and watched them approach our soldiers. They spoke loudly, and we heard their conversation about sections and bombings, and fucking German Luftwaffe arriving unexpectedly. The two new soldiers looked at us, and one of them glanced at me a little too long, as if he recognised me. He looked back to our three soldiers and said something, and they all turned and looked at us. Cockney soldier mentioned the government and they all nodded in approval. Another movement from inside the building, and the doorway spat out two more soldiers. My heart clenched suddenly and I felt like I’d jumped head first into an icy lake. Fright gripped me as Peter’s gaze met mine and he collapsed in the doorway. I ran over to him and took his head in my hands, kissing his cheeks and nose.
‘What the fuck?’ I heard one of the new soldiers say, and they watched us with curiosity. Eliza made her way over to stand with the soldiers, and I heard her introduce herself, realising that no one had received or given their names. She decided that it was time to explain who we were, and I had no care for what exactly she was saying. I stared at Peter’s dirty face. Mud caked one side of his face as if he had fallen into wet dirt, it had dried and I scraped it off his skin with my nails. It caught under my nails and stuck there. He fell against me, and his face hit my neck and chest as he slumped down. I pulled his face back up and peered at him.
‘What are you doing here?’ He stared at me, life coming back to him all of a sudden and he gripped my face tightly. ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Madeline?’ I could hear anger in his voice, and the sudden fright of the situation gripped me and I began to cry.
‘I’m here with Eliza,’ I turned my face and pointed to her, but he did not look at her, he merely forced my face back to look at him and stared at me.
‘You’re here! You’re in this shit hole of a town. Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?’
‘Yes, well no, but I’m supposed to be here. We were told to come. I’m supposed to be here, and you’re here too. Why are you here?’ I couldn’t get my words to form properly in my mouth, and I swallowed the excess saliva that had gathered as I had started crying frantically. He gripped my face still and his eyes filled with understanding.
‘You’re so ridiculous, Madeline. You just had to help, you had to get involved, and you’re so fucking courageous it scares me.’ He picked my head up and kissed the corner of my mouth; I could taste blood on his mouth and moved my tongue around the rid my mouth of the taste. He looked tired and dishevelled, he was lacking severely in sleep.
I stood from where I had fallen to my knees and flattened my skirt, which now had a rip at my knee from when I had dropped down suddenly. I helped him rise up, and he hobbled on one leg momentarily, before walking properly towards the group of soldiers and Eliza.
‘You’ve got to be kidding, we can’t stay here!’ I heard one of the new soldiers saying, anger progressing in his voice. They looked at each other, and then to Eliza, who had immersed herself in the conversation from what I gathered.
‘We have to; we can’t get back now unless you can find a working vehicle. I doubt you will though, you can see that the town is deserted, how do you propose all of the inhabitants left? They certainly didn’t walk from the looks of things.’ Eliza stated. Her face was tensed, and she frowned at me as I stood beside her, my hand gripping Peter’s tightly. My heart still felt like a clenched fist, tight and burning from the fright I had experienced.
They decided together that we would have to find somewhere to stay for the night, each one looking at the darkening sky in turn, where clouds were beginning to gather. Then the rain began to fall. It would have made sense to run, but we had no idea where to run to. So we paced the back streets slowly, together, and I could feel the rain dripping down my hair and down my shirt and skirt. The water washed the mud from Peter’s face and down his neck, leaving a streak of brown across his cheek and down his neck. I could feel tiredness resonating from him, as he found it hard to coordinate his feet and walk well. Eliza spoke with the soldiers about where to stay, and they told her that they had received news that the Germans were intending to take every bombed town so that they gained enough territory to help gain Paris.
We had reached the main street again. We stopped, and through the slanting rain I could see the house, one of the few left intact from the bombs that had fallen. They had chosen a three story house on the main street, next to a collapsed town house, which may have been beautiful before the German bombs had nestled in its insides. I bent my head low as we entered the house, trying to stop my thoughts of who had lived here and where they were now. Behind us, three of the men took to boarding the door up with the loose floorboards that they ripped from beneath the large carpet. They rummaged in kitchen drawers until a hammer and nails were found. We were boarded into the house which was dark and cold. The house was empty; I wondered whether anyone had actually lived here recently, as there was no furniture other than a few simple wooden chairs. I helped Peter climb the stairs and he slumped on the banister as we turned to look in one of the rooms. No beds were to be seen and so I sat beside him and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. His arms found my waist and he leant forward into me, his head falling into my neck where my curls covered his shoulder. He slept for around two hours, and I drifted in and out of sleep to hear the others talking, sometimes calmly, sometimes frantically. I listened carefully, but found it hard to follow what was occurring. I could hear a plane at one point, and thought about the house that we were in; was there any chance that any more bombs would be dropped?