Doodlebug Summer by Alison Prince

1
Pauline and Me
    â€˜It’s such a good tree,’ Pauline says.
    â€˜Yes. Lovely.’ We both know how we feel about it – words aren’t needed, really.
    It’s almost three years since our tree nearly got destroyed, but we still have these moments of feeling glad it’s here.
    I’m above her, sitting astride the big branch that sticks out sideways. Pauline’s in the place where the main trunk divides. She doesn’t like being higher up, she says there’s too much air under her feet. I don’t mind. It’s like being on a big horse, riding through the sky.
    I can see the bomb crater over the top of the bushes from where I am, it’s near the barbedwire encampment where the anti-aircraftguns are. There’s water at the bottom of the crater now, and brambles are growing round the edge. It isn’t the only one. A whole stick of bombs fell on the common that night, but this is the one that nearly got our tree. We didn’t know until we came up a day or two later. Most of its smaller branches had been blown off and it looked an awful mess, but it was still standing.
    The air raids stopped soon after that. Nights went by, and the sirens didn’t sound. We went on sleeping in the shelter in our garden for quite a while, then Mum said she thought we could come back indoors. It’s been great to sleep in my own bed, with a proper bedside light instead of a Hurricane oil lamp hanging on the concrete wall and casting weird shadows.
    â€˜We had a letter from my dad this morning,’ Pauline says.
    â€˜Did you? Is he OK?’
    Her dad is away in the Army.
    â€˜Yes, he’s fine. He says the war will be over soon – he reckons we’ve got them on the run.’ She means the Germans, of course. Pauline always sounds very tough, like her dad.He used to work in the garage on the corner of our road until he got called up. I remember him as a thin man in a navy boiler suit, with red hair like Pauline’s only cut so short that you wouldn’t know it was curly.
    I wonder if he’s right about the war ending. I was six when it began, and I’m eleven now. Looking back to when I was small, everything seems full of sunshine and ice creams, though perhaps I’m just remembering the good bits. The streets used to be lit up at night and we didn’t have to pull blackout curtains across our windows. The shops were full of things to buy if you had the money. Now, most of them are boarded up because of bomb blast, and there’s nothing in them anyway except the rationed stuff: meat, cheese, sugar, margarine. One packet of butter a week, to share between four of us. Mum divides it up into four dishes, otherwise my brother Ian says it’s not fair.
    â€˜Dad thinks he might be home by Christmas,’ Pauline goes on. ‘But Mum says we mustn’t count our chickens.’
    Pauline’s mum is skinny, too, like her husband. She works in a munitions factory, putting explosive into shell-cases, so Pauline and her big sister Chrissie look after the two younger ones a lot of the time. It’s a bit of a squeeze in their small house, and there’s no indoor toilet – you have to go across the yard. Lots of houses are like that.
    We’re lucky really. Our house was built just before the war, and it’s got a bathroom and toilet upstairs and another little toilet outside by the coal shed. And there are three bedrooms, so I don’t have to share with Ian. He’s not five yet, but he’s fussy about the way his stuff is arranged. He hates it if you move anything. I leave things all over the place, and he thinks that’s awful. We’d drive each other up the wall if we shared a room.
    â€˜Katie,’ says Pauline, ‘have you done your homework yet?’
    â€˜Course not.’
    I know what she’s going to ask.
    â€˜Can I come round to yours and we’ll do it together? It’s just the French,