Fireweed by Jill Paton Walsh Page A

plate before me.
    Then she began to serve herself.
    â€˜Julie, where did you get it all from?’ I asked.
    â€˜All what?’ she said, defensively.
    â€˜The meat. Meat is rationed. And the coal.’
    â€˜The coal is all right. It’s from the cellar. There’s a door that goes under the front steps, and through into a cellar under the pavements. It was a bit blocked up, but not too much for me to clear, and there’s quite a bit of coal there!
    â€˜And what about the meat?’
    She flushed. She picked up the pan, and turned away from me, taking it back to stand in the warm. ‘I found a ration book in one of the drawers there. They were all kept there, but one had slipped over the top of the drawer and fallen into the cupboard below. It must have got left when the others were taken. It’s the cook’s one. It’s registered with a shop near here.’
    â€˜Well, but …’ I protested.
    â€˜Well, we have to eat, don’t we?’ she said, tossing her hair back. ‘And it isn’t stealing. I paid for it!’
    â€˜It’s someone else’s ration.’
    â€˜But we aren’t eating ours. Someone has got our books.’
    â€˜Oh, I suppose so,’ I said, eating it readily enough. I didn’t want to tell her what was really worrying me about it, which was that someone might check up. Perhaps the cook had got a new ration book, and someone might notice that she seemed to be drawing two rations. And if someone checked up … I hadn’t a clue what would happen to us if we got found out. I supposed we must have broken a lot of regulations. I pushed the unwelcome thought away. But after all, it was for this, for her, that I had turned my back on Dad; and to lose it for a ration book …
    When we had eaten we had to stand shivering in the kitchen to wash up, with a kettleful of hot water. And then we went back to our warm armchairs. There was a card-table, with cards in a little drawer over under the window, and we pulled it up by the fire, and raced each other at clock patience. Then we found a jigsaw, and did that. Cook seemed to have had a passion for them, for there were about a dozen of them in her cupboard. I remember the picture we were making was of Trafalgar Square. Pigeons flew through it everywhere, and all the pieces were covered in feathers, and were hard to get in the right places. That was a good evening. It was wonderful just to be warm; just to have a real chair to sit in, and to be somewhere quiet, somewhere private, by ourselves.
    Really, it amazes me to remember how comfortable we made ourselves there. I can see it as a pool of warmth and safety, I suppose because the paraffin lamp made such a glowing, friendly sort of light. It glinted on the china when we ate, and made our faces look smooth and soft. For a little while the burden of worry lifted from my mind, and rolled away, and I realized just how oppressed and anxious I had been. We had now no need to fear the onset of winter; we had no need to stay out in all weathers. And I was learning a good deal about the markets; I had a plan to mend the axle of a broken cart I had seen lying in a derelict place, and set up in business on my own. Like all the other streetmongers I could buy from Covent Garden market in the morning, and sell at a profit in the street. Then I would really be paying our way, and we could cease to fear the ending of her money, and the disaster that would bring.
    I was planning it in my mind as I sat and warmed my toes by the fire.
    And it worked out fairly well. There were drawbacks to the den, of course. There was a risk that someone living on the other side of the square might see us, coming and going, or spot our smoke, and might report us in some way to the faceless ‘Them’ of whom we were afraid. If I had known about street warden patrols I would have worried about them too. And food wasn’t easy. We had to have lunch in a café, to