DRIED BONES AND BIGEARS

Old crimes, they say, can cast logn shadows, and there's no greater crime than a war...

Jane Somerfield might have lived her seventy years seeing a huge number of changes, but there was one thing above all others that stayed in her mind and occasionally threatened to drive her insane.

And that one thing started with a bomb from the skies before she was born.

The supposition was that a Luftwaffe pilot was in a hurry to get back to his base in Northern France, maybe because of some mechanical problem with his aeroplane, though nobody had worked out what the problem might have been. But he was well adrift from the rest of his squadron and miles from the intended target, and the supposition was that in order to lighten his load and speed his journey back to safety he had ordered the bomb aimer to release some of their heavy burden in order to help them actually get back home.

“Or,” he may have said to the officer in charge of the load of bombs, “we’ll spend eternity in this benighted land.” Though the words would have been in German the sentiment would have been the same.

That was how Number 13 Abbots Row was flattened. Was turned into a smoking pile of stinking waste with no two bricks remaining cemented together., and its neighbouring houses also damaged beyond repair.

Jane hadn’t really known anything about Number 13 because the place had been reduced to dust and debris before she was born, but she was around a few years later when stories were being retold concerning a child who had gone missing, nobody seemed to be sure when, probably even during the war. It can’t have been when the house was flattened by the bomb, though, because a major search had failed to find a single living being, maybe needing rescue, inside the rubble. Several years passed, Jane was by then at school, and the local council decided it was time to rebuild the bomb site, to rejuvinate the area to take away the last remnants of death and destruction left over in the region from the second world war.

She had learned that a family had lived there, a large enough family to need such a large house, and now it was going to be turned into a modern and tasteful cul de sac of maisonettes with private gardens and maybe the odd fruit tree. That was the plan. All that needed to be done was the old rubble taken away, tipped into a land fill wasteland somewhere, and forgotten all about. A last memento of the war that was fading out of living memory, and best irrecoverable.

Because that’s the ultimate truth about wars. They and the heartache that they generate are best forgotten once the combatants are dead.

Jane rarely went near the bomb site bit when the heavy machinery arrived she couldn’t help herself. Curiority got the better of caution, but when she got there it was to discover that there was precious little to be seen. Number 13 was bulldozed away, and that was that. Every last brick, every smashed timber, every fragment of old windows, all were gone.

And all might well have always been that had it not for a second burst of curiosity. She needed to see if there was any tiny remnant of the house’s occupiers, a lost fragment of history, remaining. So When the rubble was all gone her curiosity piqued and got the better of her.

But she was onlt ten. Ten years old, and is possession of an imagination.

There was no-one around to question her or stop her. A couple of boys she was sure must be younger than her ten years were charging apparently meaninglessly around, exercising their squeaking voices as much as their legs that raced back and forth madly in their grey school shorts

Then one of them ran up to her.

“Wanna join in?” he asked, “wanna run over our old house?”

“Your house?” she asked, sarcastically.

“My mum lived here,” explained that same boy, “and after the bomb fell she ran off to live with my dad, and then I was born.”

“So you’ve not lived here, then?” she asked.

“I ain’t that old!” She liked this boy. He had a cheeky face which probably meant there wasn’t much he couldn’t get away with. But before she could find out more about the last occupants of number thirteen the two boys were called back home by an angry looking mother

“What’ve I told yyou about playing out there!” she called, “it might be dangerous! There might even still be a bleeding bomb!”

And the boys reluctantly, vanished.

Jane sauntered across the area that until so recently had been a heap of rubble. When she was where the kitchen must have stood, as witness the remnants of drains and water pipes, she paused and looked to the ground. Something looked famiiar.

There was a hatch just like the one she was staring at in her own home, a much smaller place than number 13 had been but possibly built around the asme time. At only ten, she had worked that out. At least, what she was looking at gave her that impression.

Back home that hatch led to steps down and a cellar where coal was stored, delivered regularly by the coal man who emptied sacks of the stuff through a hatch to land in the cellar of their house in a dusty pile.

Her first thought was, “I wonder if there was a cellar here?”

Then her second thought was, “if there was, is it still here?”

Then a third tempting idea, “I’ll try to find it!”

Leading to her looking around for something with which to lever the hatchway up like her dad did back home, and therefore see if there was still a cellar beneath where the house had been.

She looked around for what she might need, preferably a metal bar strong enough to hopefully lever the hatch up, and the cheeky-faced boy returned.

“I’m Clive,” he said, making her jump.

“You back again?” she smiled, “and I’m Jane.

“Mum says if you find Bigears, it’s hers.”

“Who’s Bigears?” asked Jane, confused.

“Mum’s toy teddy bear,” the boy grinned impishly, “she saw you poking around and remembered Bigears. I never saw him, though.”

“I suppose he might be hiding down the cellar,” suggested Jane.

“I’ve never seen a cellar here,” frowned the boy, “though I wasn’t born when the bomb fell and smashed our house up. So maybe there was one and no-one told to me.”

Jane smiled at him. “I suppose the existence of a cellar isn’t something they’d remember years later,” she said, “now, if you want to be helpful how about finding me something to lever this up with.”

“Are you bossy, or what?” chirruped Clive, but he poked around in corners where there were remnants of the rubble, with still the odd piece of tangled metal that the men clearing the site had missed, and he produced a rusty old crowbar.

“Will this do?” he asked.

“That might just be the job,” smiled Jane, “and thanks!”

On her own, she wasn’t strong enough to lift the hatch that had been under rubble for several years, but Clive was no weakling and he threw himself into helping her. With a sudden lurch the crowbar made the hatch move and then, it fall back to almost the same place.

“Just another go,” urged Jane.

“You’re tough for a gal, aren’t you?” grinned Clive, and together they put all their strength into moving the hatch, and this time it moved further, so that when it fell back it was to one side, so that it not longer cmpletely covered a hole in the ground. And when she peered in Jane was sure she could see some steps leading down, just like those under the hatch in the floor of their own home.

“I know,” she said, breathlessly because of the effort she and Clive had already put into struggling with the crowbar, “Let’s see if we can shove it to one side!”

Clive was with her, and he could see exactly what she meant, and helped her raise the slab one last time before tilting it so that it collapsed to one side and downwards until it crashed somewhere in the dark below them, revealing a dark stairway leading down.

“Exciting!” whooped Clive, “let’s explore!”

The boy’s excitement was infectious and Jane looked at him, smiled at his anxious expression, and said “yes, but slowly and carefully. Nobody knows what might be lurking down here.

“Wolves,” grinned Clive, “I love wolves,” he added.

“I doubt it, but let’s go down slowly, and see,” suggested Jane. “Pity we haven’t got a torch.”

“I’ve got a light on my bike across the road,” volunteered Clive, “wait here, Jane, and I’’ll go and fetch it! We don’t want to bump into a pack of wolves in the dark!”

Jane nodded, and he was off, tearing across what would very soon be a building site, which most ikely meant that their steps leading down would be lost to them.

When he came back, breathless, he handed her the front lamp from his bicycle.

“You go first,” he said generously, “I’ll hold the rear!”

There was no time to either thank him or refuse. She was holding the torch, and down she slowly went. There had been no collapse due to the wartime bomb down here. But there was something that made her heart seem to freeze.

Near the bottom lay the remains of an infant, human bones, a skull, and its tiny fingers lay on the dirty remains of an ancient teddy beart with disproportionately large ears.

“Bigears,” whispered Clive, “Bigears.”

“Now you scoundrels, what mifht you be doing here?” called a voice.

“It’s a copper!” hissed Clive.

“In your own home,” pointed out Jane, remembering what he’d said about his mother having lived there before the bombs fell.

“In my hoiuse, copper!” shouted Clive.

“That’s as maybe, but it’s council property now,” explained the police constable.

“There’s a dead baby down here,” called up Jane, “a tiny skellington!”

And that had been the end of her nocturnal adventure. Sixty years ago it had filled her young heart with dread. There had been talk of a missing child in the area for more years than she’d been alive, and it had been she who’d found rthe tiny t=finger bones still clutching a floppy-eared teddy bear.

Discussions that followed had tried to identify her find. Was it one of Clive’s other siblings? And was it a boy or a girl? Maybe a girl, some experts said, and eventually the bones were buried in an unmarked grave.

And Clive’s mother got Bigears back, and when she realised that the dead bones had been the last to touch it, she shuddered and told Jane she could have it, as a thankyou for finding it in a cesspit of a cellar.

Aged 70, Jane smiled and picked Bigears up.

“I’ll bet you’ve still got a story to tell old fellow,” she whispered, and then she called out for her husband, “Clive? Where are you? I’ve got an idea about that old cellar we found..”

He put his head round her door. “Not another?” he asked.

You’ve still got that same cheeky face, she thought, but, “Not really,” she murmured, “I just wanted to see you again, that’s all.”

© Peter Rogerson, 29.03.23

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