Doodlebug Summer by Alison Prince Page A

really.’
    I try not to sigh. ‘OK,’ I say.
    Pauline hates French. She’s good at maths, though, and I’m rubbish, so I suppose it’s a fair swap. But that means we’ll have to spend tomorrow afternoon doing homework. I usually leave it until Sunday night, but Pauline can’t come round in the evening. None of us go out after dark on our own. Even though it’s been quiet for so long, you still never know if there might be a raid.
    â€˜Thanks ever so much,’ Pauline says. ‘About half-past two?’
    â€˜Fine.’
    She’s climbing out of the tree. ‘Got to go,’ she says. ‘Mum’s on early shift, and Chrissie’s going to the pictures with May. I said I’d look after the little ones.’
    She’s like a grown-up in some ways, getting on with whatever has to be done. I think I’d grumble about it, but she never seems to mind.
    Hedge has come to do the garden. I always know when he’s here. The smell of him reaches me as soon as I come round the side of the house. It’s a mixture of earth andtobacco and dog – and of Hedge, who looks as if he never washes.
    Dad calls him ‘Hedge’. Mum says I must call him
Mr
Hedge, but somehow I can’t do that. I don’t call him anything.
    His dog is here today, lying in the covered bit between the back door and the coal shed, on the jacket Hedge has taken off.
    â€˜Hello, Kelly,’ I say, but he doesn’t wag his tail or even raise his head from his paws, just looks up at me with his yellow eyes. He’s a big dog, brown and rough. I don’t know what sort he is. Dad says he’s like liquorice. All sorts.
    I go carefully past Kelly, into the kitchen.
    â€˜There you are,’ Mum says. ‘That’s good. Run out and tell him his tea’s ready, will you?’
    She doesn’t call Hedge anything, either.
    I skirt past Kelly again and walk across the lawn.
    Ian is counting the flowers on the marigolds.
    â€˜Two hundred and eighty-one,’ he says.
    â€˜Is that good?’
    â€˜Seventeen more than yesterday. But I haven’t finished yet.’
    I don’t know how he does this numbers thing. I just think of marigolds as orange – I’ve no idea how many of them there are.
    Mum flaps a hand at me through the window.
Go on
, she means.
Tell him
. So I go on, over the bit of grass where we hang the washing and past the steps that lead down to our underground air-raid shelter between the fruit trees. It’ll be horrible in there after all this time of not using it, damp and musty. It’s probably growing toadstools.
    Hedge is squashing caterpillars on the gooseberry bushes. The creepies are striped black and yellow, and his fingers are all mucky with them. His sleeves are rolled up, and his brown arms are crisscrossed with blood-dotted scratches. He must have been pruning the roses that ramble over the fence – he never seems to mind their thorns.
    He looks up and says, ‘Tea time, is it?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Tha’s good.’
    He picks off a final caterpillar, crushes it and wipes his finger and thumb on his trousers, then sets off towards the house.I walk beside him. I can’t help looking at the scratches on his arm.
    â€˜Don’t they hurt?’ I ask.
    He glances at them. ‘No,’ he says, and laughs in a spitty kind of way because his teeth are all broken and gappy. ‘Them’s all right.’
    Mum has put two big hunks of bread and cheese on a plate in the place where he sits, and a mug of tea. She’s given up asking if he wants to wash his hands, he never does. I don’t know how she can spare the cheese from the ration, but she manages somehow. Hedge keeps hens, so he brings her some eggs sometimes, and lots of things like carrots and leeks and beetroot. It’s a big help. There’s never much in the shops.
    It’s funny how you have to keep watching someone even if