Five Boys by Mick Jackson Page A

was never any real doubt who was in charge of the archive. Bobby selected the pictures, cut them out and categorized them. Aldred’s role was that of a visiting curator, albeit one with plenty of opinions of his own. The two boys would discuss at length the merits of recent acquisitions or how the collection might be filed anew, and Bobby always knew that he could easily put things in the order he wanted just as soon as Aldred was out of the door.
    Two photographs were examined far more than all theothers. In the first, titled “A London store damaged by H.E.,” a dozen bicycles dangled from the joists of a gutted building, with a mound of mangled bicycles on the floor below. It provoked a profound sense of melancholy in the boys which they attempted to rekindle each time they returned to it.
    In the other photograph, a group of men stood around the edge of a twenty-foot crater. Two were servicemen, resting on crutches with one leg missing and staring morbidly into the pit. A couple of civilians in flat caps stood beside them and pointed up at the sky. The roof of the hospital ward in the background was completely stripped of its slates. The men in the flat caps seemed to follow the plane as it retreated, yet the servicemen seemed to be looking at the very spot where they had lost their legs. It never occurred to the boys that the men might have been injured elsewhere, or that the two civilians might be pointing at the sky several hours or even days after the attack. It barely mattered. Bobby and Aldred’s principal pleasure in studying the photograph was to try and imagine the enormity of a blast which could make such a hole in the ground and to contemplate a life with only one leg.
    They were wondering, not for the first time, what might have happened to any bicycles which survived the fire in the shop in London and whether a one-legged man might still be capable of riding a bicycle when Miss Minter, who had been reading the newspaper in an armchair nearby, decided that they should get out of the house for a while.
    “Take him up the hill,” she told Aldred, “and show him the view.”
    It was in Aldred’s nature to require his own motivation for an assignment before being able to direct his formidableenthusiasm toward it, and they had crossed the bridge and were halfway up the lane before he worked out how a hike up the hill might easily incorporate a trip down to the river and a visit to the boathouse and Old Tom, its resident drunk. The moment the trip fell under his jurisdiction his spirits lifted. He took hold of Bobby’s arm and hurried on, telling him all about the time Old Tom was famously woken when the prow of a trawler, high on a flood tide, crashed through his bedroom window and pinned him to the wall.
    They marched through the village and carried on up the lane and Aldred pointed out various plants in the hedgerow capable of sustaining a man if he ever found himself out in the wilderness. Bobby lost interest when he waved at a clump of nettles and talked about how much good they’d do you if you made them into a soup and his words were nothing but a babble when they reached a five-barred gate.
    A great mound of earth-caked vegetables was piled up in the field beyond it. They looked to Bobby like a heap of old boots. Aldred climbed onto the top bar of the gate and nodded at them.
    “You know what that is?” he said.
    Bobby had another look. Thought it looked more like elephant dung—was the right sort of color and the right sort of quantity. What had originally put him in mind of bootlaces, he now saw, were hundreds of stringy roots.
    “Sugar beet,” said Aldred proudly. “There’s enough sugar there to sweeten your mother-in-law.”
    He gave Bobby a wink and Bobby nodded as if he had the faintest idea what he was talking about. In fact, Aldred’s understanding of the phrase was probably just as dim asBobby’s, having overheard it only the summer before. But he had recognized at the time how