The Hour of the Donkey

that.

He tore open the parcel on the table. There were the usual long French loaves—yesterday's bread, or maybe last week's by the crumbly hardness of it—and a smelly round cheese, and an even smellier sausage, full of garlic, which he hated, but which he bit into nevertheless.

'Harry!'

Wimpy grabbed him by the arm and swung him round just as the panic in the cry got through to him.

'What?'

' Christ—' Water was dripping down Wimpy's face, but words for once had failed him, he could only point through the broken window, down the length of the kitchen garden at the back of the house, towards the field beyond.

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Tanks—

German tanks—

Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!

Panic again!

'Wait for me—help me!' cried Wimpy.

Bastable was already at the door, and he had no intention of coming back, but Wimpy had no intention of being left behind either and he had somehow reached Bastable before Bastable was able to get through the door into the hallway, and he hung on like grim death once he'd made contact.

They lurched down the passageway, bumping from one side to the other.

'Up the stairs—up the stairs,' cried Wimpy, pushing him sideways towards the newel-post.

Bastable looked up the staircase. It was steep and it was narrow, and he was never going to be able to haul Wimpy up there, one step at a time .. . But he was also never going to get Wimpy out through the front door and down to the safety of the ditch in time, either: this was the moment to drop him and run—it had come at last—

Clear through the open front door came the hideously familiar squeal-and-roar, terrifyingly loud.

They were trapped. They had waited too long, just as the old couple—the old man and the old woman—had done before dummy4

them. They had left it too long and too late, and now they were trapped—just as the old couple had been.

'Up the stairs—' Wimpy pawed at him '— carry me!'

Bastable bent down automatically at the word of com mand, and Wimpy followed it himself by flopping down across his shoulder in obvious preparation for a fireman's lift.

'Okay— oof!!' The next part of the command was cut off as Bastable stood up and Wimpy's head crashed against the barometer.

Bastable found himself staggering round in a circle. It wasn't that Wimpy was too heavy—he was actually much lighter than he looked ... but there was a mouthful of sausage stuck in Bastable's throat which he had forgotten about, but which now refused either to go down or come up while all his muscles were concentrating on holding his burden in position: he gagged and choked, and Wimpy's head hit something else—either the newel-post or the hat- stand—or maybe it was Wimpy's feet. . .

The sausage went down with a painful gulp; the stairs reared in front of him and he took them at the double, in a rush, driven upwards by the sound of the tanks outside. It occurred to him as he went up that the cellar—if the house had a cellar—would be a safer place in which to take refuge, But then, of course, that would probably be the first place the Germans would look.

The rush took him to the top of the stairs—and also to the dummy4

bleak thought that if the cellar wasn't safe, the bedrooms were hardly likely to be safer; he had come up here simply because Wimpy had told him to, and he was now accustomed to doing whatever Wimpy ordered for lack of any initiative on his own part. But unless Wimpy had another bright idea to go with his last order they were even more hopelessly trapped up here than at ground level.

There were only three doors to choose from on the tiny landing, and he was just about to ask if Wimpy had a preference when he caught sight of another stair through a gap in a curtain which at first glance he had dismissed as concealing a cupboard. Of course—the house had another floor above this one!

Driven by the same instinctive obedience which had taken him up the first stair, he plunged through the curtain up the second. It was much narrower and steeper—so narrow and steep that with Wimpy on his shoulder he could only keep his balance by accelerating up it with his face only inches from bare wooden treads in front of him, until he issued out through the square hole of a trap-door and fell sprawling on to the floorboards of the attic above.

The sole contents of the attic were two large tin trunks, wide open, with clothes strewn around them.

In between them, crouched under the eaves, was a little girl.

XIII

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Harry Bastable and the little French girl stared at each other in dumb horror.

Little girls, of all the different species of children, were tht worst, the very worst—

LOST CHILDREN ... in the case of female children, male staff will at once summon a lady assistant to deal with the child. On no account—

The very worst. Where he hated the mindlessness of babies he actively feared little girls—had feared them ever since that hideous occasion during his time as a trainee manager in London when one irate mother had reclaimed her lost child not with gratitude but with foul suspicions and wild threats—

Stop pawing at 'er, you dirty rotter — I saw you! I'll report you, I will—I