Arise the Dead II by Elizabeth Langridge

Author:Elizabeth Langridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771832847
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Published: 2018-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

The children’s party was successful beyond anyone’s hopes, no doubt because all involved wanted it to be, with a certain desperation, it being the first such party for a long time. A gesture of defiance, you might say, Lord Calborne thought as he lay on his narrow bed in the cellar during the air raid that started not long after they had gone to sleep. He was fully dressed, with his overcoat at the foot of the bed and his shoes on the floor beside it.

For him, too, it was the first such party given at Calborne House since Caro had no longer been there to organize it. For him it had been a diversion from the stresses of running the estate, of producing food in the market garden, making his farms productive, finding good workers.

There had been much laughter and noise, a surprising abundance of innovative things to eat, a conjurer, a magician, songs, music from the piano and piano-accordion, then at the end a Charlie Chaplin film which had been enjoyed by children and adults alike. Men had laughed, with tears in their eyes, at the antics of the little tramp and he had watched them from the sidelines with a tender sort of satisfaction that had surprised him.

There had been ragged children, even in their Sunday best, some obviously mal-nourished, who had eaten the food in the way that a starving dog eats a meal — with a certain haste and disbelief at its good fortune, and a quiet demeanour of guilt, as though its habitual deserved state was to be hungry. Then there had been those who were well fed, used to everything that hard-working parents could provide in a time of hardship.

Surreptitiously he had also watched Henry with Sarah Burroughs: how they had been in sympathy with each other as she had dashed about helping with the party; how she had come back to him like a homing pigeon while Henry himself had listened to the joy and shouts of children as he had sat or stood on the sidelines.

Now as he lay on the bed, subconsciously preparing himself for the whistle of a bomb that would declare at least part of the destruction of Calborne House, if not his own life, the words of one of the old established songs that the children had sung went repetitively through his brain:

Ten green bottles hanging on the wall,

Ten green bottles hanging on the wall,

And if one green bottle should accidentally fall,

There’d be nine green bottles hanging on the wall.

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