Somewhere Over England by Margaret Graham Page B

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    Helen was glad when Heine began digging in early March when the soil was frost-free and easier to work. It helped to feel they were doing something as the tension in the press mounted, as people grew edgy and ignored the warm spring. She watched as he sliced the spade deep into the earth at the bottom of the narrow strip of garden behind the flat, heaving cold heavy sods on to the lawn. She was glad that her arms tugged at the shoulders when she and Chris put them into the rust-smeared wheelbarrow and then transferred them to the left side of the garden where the sun struck in the afternoons. She was glad to be working, to be doing something to protect themselves, glad too to be creating from that need a rockery which would thrive. For she wanted flowers to bloom; even if bombs fell from black-crossed aeroplanes she wanted flowers to bloom, then some sanity would remain.
    She watched as Heine dug again and again, the sweat soaking his shirt, his hair. There was a smell of fresh earth; there were old pennies, pipes, bottles, tiles and Heine smiled each time they fell from his spade and then threw them up to Chris who would hold them, turn them, then put them to one side to take to school for the ‘precious table’. Worms bored holes in the straight glossed sides of the pit as the weekend passed and Helen took them to the rockery which now held small, wide-spaced plants, and it seemed almost a game as the sky turned blue and the trees budded and blossom bloomed. Almost.
    At three feet Heine stopped and helped Helen drag in the fourteen steel sheets which had been dropped off on the pavement by council lorries to each building in the street. Her hands tore through gloves and her shirt was ripped at the shoulder as they dragged them one by one through the narrow passage-way into the garden.
    Sandbags had been left also and while Heine fixed the sheets in the late afternoon Helen and Chris doused the bags with creosote to stop them rotting and the smell sank into their skin and their hair and their lungs and although they slept with their windows wide that night they could still taste it in their mouths the next morning.
    Helmut arrived that morning and so Heine was too busy to ease the sandbags against the shelter and Helen was taking photographs in the studio, but the next week, with Helmuthelping, they pushed and carried and kicked the sandbags into place and Helen’s back felt as though it would break. Chris threw earth on the roof of the shelter with the spade he had taken to Eastbourne and Helen did too, but with a large shovel. It would be added protection against blast and shrapnel. She called to their neighbours, the Simkins, who then did the same. She lifted Chris who would not be seven until December – but already weighed enough to be twenty, she whispered into his neck.
    ‘Higher, Mummy, I can’t reach,’ he called.
    She growled and he laughed but she lifted him higher still and then he threw the seeds – forget-me-nots, love-in-the-mist, marigolds – across the shelter roof, and for a moment Helen wondered whether they would be at war when the flowers bloomed.
    They painted the inside walls white while Chris broke cork tiles into pieces with his fingers, leaning over, watching the pile of bits grow on the upturned dustbin lid. An ant ran over his shoe and then on into a crack. Some bark was caught under his fingernail and he dug it out, rolling it between his fingers. It was bouncy and warm.
    ‘Smaller, Chris,’ Heine called and so he worked for another hour and then he climbed down into the shelter and threw the cork at the wet paint, again and again until the cork stuck to the sides. And he nodded as his father said that the pieces would absorb the moisture and prevent condensation.
    ‘It’s going to be a good play-house, Dad,’ he said.
    They had to hang a blanket not a door, the inspector said when he called. ‘Don’t want to be shredded by splinters now, do we?’ Helen looked from him to