THIRTY-EIGHT

By the time Harry reached the landing, the stairwell was engulfed in flame. There was no escape that way. All he had on was pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt, but he could not turn back to fetch any of his clothes. He had been caught in a house fire once before. He knew how quickly he might be overwhelmed. Thick, dark smoke was billowing up to the ceiling. His chest was already tightening.

He rushed into the next bedroom, where Chipchase was still asleep, snoring for Britain. Harry jostled him awake, shouting his name in his ear.

'Wha… What… What the bloody hell?' Chipchase opened his eyes and instantly broke into a cough. There was a haze of smoke thickening around them. The speed with which the blaze was taking hold was frightening.

'Get up, Barry. Quick. The house is on fire. We've got to get out of here.'

Amid woozy blinks and phlegmy coughs, Chipchase put his feet to the floor and sat up. He stared transfixed at the plume of flame beyond the door, roaring up from the hall as if from the mouth of a furnace. 'Bloody hellfire,' was all he found to say. But it was apt enough.

Harry slammed the door shut. 'We'll go this way,' he shouted, pointing to the window. It overlooked the sloping roof of the kitchen. Never had it mattered so much to him that the houses of the Railway Village were originally built without separate kitchens, which were added later as single-storey extensions. That one detail of obscure architectural history was suddenly a lifeline. Harry ripped the curtain aside and yanked up the sash. 'Come on. Hurry.'

Chipchase loomed at his shoulder, in the act of pulling on his threadbare bathrobe. 'Bugger me, Harry. Is this safe?'

'A lot safer than staying put. You go first. Move.'

Coughing and spluttering, Chipchase hoisted one hastily shod foot over the sill. He clambered out onto the slates, one of which instantly slid from under him. 'Bloody hell,' he cried, grasping the window frame and grimacing back at Harry.

'Move over to the chimney.'

In a lurching slither that loosed another couple of slates, Chipchase made it to the stack of the chimney that had once served the range. Harry climbed out onto the roof, regretting as he did so that he had not stopped to put on shoes himself. Then a glance behind reminded him that it might have proved fatal if he had. The landing was evidently ablaze now. Flames were licking and snapping round the bedroom door.

He moved towards where Chipchase was clinging to the brickwork of the chimney and tried to reassure him. 'It's OK, Barry. We're going to be all right.'

'How do we get down without breaking our bloody necks?'

'Follow me out over the privy. We can climb down from there.'

'I can't see where I'm bloody going.'

'Just follow me.'

The roof of the old outdoor loo, set at right angles to the kitchen, took them further from the fire, whose flames lit their path across the slates. The heat at their backs was growing with every second. The contents of the house were being consumed in a crackling inferno. A petrol bomb or something of the kind must have been pushed through the letterbox. Nothing else, it seemed to Harry, could explain the swiftness of the destruction.

He reached the edge of the roof, crouched down and lowered himself gingerly into the gulf of shadow below, where he eventually set his foot on the dustbin. He let go of the gutter and shouted up to Chipchase. 'It's easy. Come on.'

It had not been easy, of course. As Chipchase's awkward, scrambling descent made apparent. 'We're both too old… for this kind of thing,' he panted. And Harry could only agree.

They stood together, in the backyard, gulping air and coughing, shaking from what they had done as well as the mental buffeting it had given them. The chill of the flagstones seeped up through Harry's bare feet. He was shivering from the cold, but at his face beat the full heat of the blaze, which had spread now to the kitchen. The house where he was born and where his mother had lived through all the years of her marriage and the many more of her long widowhood had become an inferno.

'Bloody hell,' said Chipchase. 'We're lucky… to have got out of that alive.'

'We'd better call the Fire Brigade. If the neighbours haven't already.'

'We'll have to go to one to do it. My mobile's in there. Along with my clothes. Everything.'

'Same here.'

Chipchase looked round at him. 'Including… the disk?'

Harry nodded. 'Melted by now, I should think.'

'Bloody hell.'

'Yeah. Like you say, Barry. Bloody hell.'

—«»—«»—«»—

The neighbours had indeed already called the Fire Brigade. The first engine arrived within minutes. Several more soon followed. Once they had put their hoses and extinguishers to work, the fire was rapidly brought under control and prevented from spreading. But the conflagration at number 37 was strong and stubborn. Harry and Barry watched the firemen's struggle with it from the shelter of the house opposite, where Mrs Jenkins gave them tea, as well as blankets to wrap themselves in. And the loan, in Harry's case, of a pair of her late husband's slippers. By the time the police arrived, they had already told the fire officer in charge that they had no idea what had started the blaze. 'We were woken by the smoke and got the hell out.' It was true as far as it went. The evidence of arson would eventually be uncovered and Harry sensed the less they said for the moment the better. The police settled for that and left. But they would be back. It was inevitable. Especially when they realized the two occupants of 37 Falmouth Street were the same two the Grampian force had asked them to keep an eye on.

—«»—«»—«»—

As the fire abated, Harry walked across for a closer look, hobbling as he went, his climb to safety having aggravated the injury to his knee he had suffered in Aberdeen. The neighbouring houses had escaped largely unscathed, he saw, but his old home had been reduced to a burnt-out skeleton. Hoses were still being played on the smouldering interior. The walls between rooms were just about the only features that remained recognizable. The rest — doors, windows, stairs, furniture and all — had been reduced to heaps of ash and blackened wreckage.

'You the tenant?' a fireman asked, approaching from one of the engines.

'Er, yes. Yes, I am.'

'I picked this up.' He handed Harry a framed photograph. 'It's a pity not to save something.'

He walked away, leaving Harry to squint in the lamplight at the Commonweal School group photograph of September 1948, which had hung on his bedroom wall from then until this last night of the Barnetts' presence in Falmouth Street, Swindon. It was over now. It was finished. Not much sooner but a lot more brutally than he had anticipated, the end had come.

Back in 1948, Harry had mischievously run round behind the group after the camera had begun shooting, in order to appear at both the left- and right-hand extremities of the picture, grinning triumphantly. As he looked at it now, however, he saw the heat of the fire had not only cracked the glass but had singed the edges of the paper. A dark brown scorch mark obscured all but the middle third of the group. There was Dr Jones, the headmaster, flanked by his staff. And there, behind them, were the central ranks of boys and girls. But of Harry, at either end, no trace remained. His grin had disappeared in both places. He had been erased twice over.

'What's that?' Chipchase asked, materializing at his elbow.

'Nothing worth keeping,' Harry replied, tossing the picture down among the broken glass and other debris in front of them. 'That's for sure.'

'Bloody hell,' said Chipchase, looking up at the house. 'What a mess.' He wrapped a consoling arm round Harry's shoulder, which had to amount to the warmest gesture of friendship he had ever displayed. 'It's a facer and no mistake.'

'You could say that, Barry. Yes, I think you could.'

'But look on the bright side.'

'Is there one?'

'Certainly. You don't have to clear the place out now, do you?'