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Berties Brave Adventure

Albert Stanley Smith, Bertie to his friends, kicked a piece of broken brick across the rubble- strewn wasteland where the row of terraced houses once stood. Dust flew up covering his well scuffed boots, his sagging grey knee-socks and his school shorts. As he climbed over the jagged lumps of wall and scorched timbers, he could smell the acrid sooty fumes of the fire. Bertie liked it when the houses caught alight and the engines came, bells clanging, men hanging on the back. The fire crackled and spit and sometimes the gas main fractured and blue flames shot up above the houses.
Bertie usually rushed out as soon as the all-clear sounded and stood with the inevitable crowd of onlookers – often the residents of the bombed buildings. He always came back, though, for another look, when the smouldering ash had cooled and the ticking of the contracting lumps of stone and metal had stopped. The other boys were always scrambling about the bombed houses, looking for possessions that might have been overlooked, some for profit some merely out of ghoulish curiosity but that wasn’t what interested Bertie. Keith and Johnny Harris came yelling down the street – Keith, as always, with his arms stretched wide, banking and turning, shouting “d d d d d d” as his imaginary guns blazed, strafing the enemy. Poor Johnny, being only seven years old, had to be the hated German; engine screaming as he plummeted to the ground. Johnny had permanently grazed knees and elbows from the forced landings.
“Wot yer doin’ mate?” Keith asked as they met Bertie coming off the site.
“Find anyfink?” Johnny piped up.
“Shut up!” the other two chorused and Johnny sniffed sulkily, wiping the sleeve of his grubby jersey across his even grubbier face.
“Watch aht! Old Bob!” warned Keith as a man in uniform appeared at the far end of the street. Bob Peters, the ARP warden was a friendly sort who sympathised with the boys’ search for something exciting to do. Rationing, shortages of just about everything, most nights spent sheltering in the tube station and no Dads to take them fishing or to a football game. ‘No way for young’uns to be growin’ up.’ To the boys, though, any grown up was a threat to freedom.
They scattered and disappeared from view as only young boys know how and Bertie found himself outside the flattened remains of the local church.
‘Wonder if the vicar bought it?’ he thought. ‘Wonder if the bombs dug up any of the bodies in the graveyard?’ He clambered over the piles of grey stone and charred timber.
‘No bodies.’ He decided, disappointed. ‘Why can’t I find just one body?’
He was just about to climb back out and head for home before the nightly wailing of the air raid warning sent everybody scuttling into the shelters. He’d get no tea else, and his mum would create somethin’ orrible.
As he started to scramble up a pile of timbers, their creaks and groans warning him that they might collapse at any moment, he thought he heard a faint cry from underneath the ruins of the old church. Bertie stood very still, holding his breath while he listened. There it was again! It sounded like a cry for help. No thought of going for help crossed his mind. This was HIS adventure. Collapsing rubble; unexploded ordinance were not in this chapter of the story. Heroes in comic books were never afraid and never the ones to die. Bertie burrowed deeper into the rubble until he found a kind of hollow place and, pushing aside a shredded velvet curtain, tumbled down into a sort of cellar.
The medieval crypt had withstood the bombing that had flattened the church. From the end of this dank and gloomy cavern the cry came again. Not a human cry for help but an unearthly wailing. The hairs on Bertie’s head stood on end just like in a story. He shook with fear; he’d wanted to find a body, not a bloody ghost!
Forgetting to be careful, he was clawing his way back towards the fading daylight when a rumble from above signalled that the ruined church had not finished settling and, as the huge blocks of stone fell into the crypt trapping the boy permanently inside, a small black furry shape shot past him and, as the air raid sirens wailed out their unearthly warning, Timmy, the churchwarden’s cat, rushed away into gathering dusk.