A song in the morning

* •*

Jack was annoyed, stamping about the field, time wasted.

And this after he had broken off milking his mother's memories to get there punctually.

A small crowd waited on the blaster. There was the farmer who was selling the field, there were three from the development company which was buying the field. There were the JCB drivers, and the oxyacetaline cutting team, and the lorry men. There was a deputation from the housing estate three hundred yards from the pillbox rabbiting on to anyone who would listen about how all their windows would be broken.

The blaster was working quietly with his spade, filling sandbags.

Jack knew the blaster was slow. He knew also that the blaster was good, and he knew there was no use at all in offering to get anyone to help him. It was the blaster's way that he did his own work, himself, because as he'd often told Jack that way there wasn't any other bugger to get things wrong.

D amp; C used George Hawkins as often as he was available.

He was their regular. They put up with the wizened little man's cussedness because the job was always done as it should have been, but every time they had him they cursed the old sod and asked themselves why they went on using him and always had the same answer. George would retire the day after they found another blaster who could do the job better.

A young man from the development company walked brusquely to them. His shoes were caked in mud. He had ripped his raincoat on barbed wire. He had come for an arguument. Didn't they know they were running late? George Hawkins ignored him and Jack tried to shut him up with a sharp glance. Time was money, you know – George Hawkins spat to the ground and went on with his w o r k.

"In fact your running late is causing us considerable inconvenience."

Jack said, "And unless you get out of this gentleman's way and let him get on with the job that he's damn good at then you'll be running even later."

The young man's moustache trembled on his lip. Jack thought it was shaved so thin that it might be touched up with eyeshadow.

"What I meant was… "

"Just make yourself scarce, and quickly."

The young man backed away. He'd seen the bloody-minded crack on Jack's face. He decided this wasn't a man to fight with.

The pillbox was part of a line that had been built along the Surrey uplands during the summer of 1940. If the Germans had landed on any of the beaches around the resort towns of Eastbourne or Brighton and if they had broken out of the beachhead then the high ground thirty miles to the north would have been the last defensive barrier before the southern outskirts of London. They might have been chaotic times, but they had known how to build pillboxes. It was squat, hexagonal, walls two feet thick with three machine-gun slits giving a wide view down towards the Surrey and Sussex county border. No one wanted the pillbox as a memento of the war. The farmer was selling his field, the developers were buying it for twelve houses to the acre, and anyway it was a hangout for the local teenagers and their plastic bags and solvent sniffing.

The last sandbag was filled, the top knotted.

"Do I have to carry 'em all myself?"

There was a titter of laughter. He had them all lifting his sandbags, right down to the developers in their shined footwear and styled raincoats.

Jack carried a sandbag beside George who carried two.

"You're running bloody late."

"It's been there close on fifty years, another fifteen minutes won't hurt."

They reached the pillbox. George stopped his helpers a dozen yards short.

"What are you going to use?"

"Got time for a lesson, have we?"

"Only asking."

"Get that shower back and I'll talk you through."

Jack waved the drivers and the farmer and the developers away.

He watched George work. All the time he worked he talked. A thin nasal voice describing the skills that he loved.

"I've drilled shot holes right through to the reinforcing net of wire, got me? Reinforced concrete, right, so there's wire in the middle. Each wall, I've got six shot holes a foot apart, and I've six more in the roof drilled vertically. For each hole there's three cartridges of P.A.G., that's Polar Ammon Gelignite to you. All in it's close to 20 pounds that's going to blow. Don't ever force the cartridges, see, don't mistreat the little fellows, just slide them in, like it's a bloody good woman you're with… "

Jack enjoyed working with the old man. For more than two years he'd been with George once a week, once every two weeks, and he was always made to feel it was his first time out. There hadn't been anything of a friendship between them until George had one day cried off a job, and Jack had been in his area and called by. He had found him alone with a twisted ankle and an empty larder and gone down the local shops and stocked the cupboard, and ignored all the moaning about not accepting charity. He'd called in a few more times till the old man was mended, but though they marked the binding of an unlikely friendship his visits were never referred to again.

' Bastard stuff this reinforced concrete. Takes double what you need to knock over brickwork…" lack knew that. He'd known that from the first time he'd worked with the old man. He just nodded, like he'd been given a jewel of new information.

The detonators went in on the end of white Cordtex, linked with safety fuse. Detonator ends crimped to the Cordtex, safety fuse tied to the Cordtex. Every shot hole had its own detonator, and in minutes the pillbox was covered with a web of wire.

"Always run the Cordtex and the safety fuse out carefully.

Bastard if you get a kink in the stuff. You get a bloody misfire. What does a misfire mean? Means it's bloody dangerous when you get to dismantling the whole shooting match and starting all over. And another thing, Jack boy. You look a right prick if you've a shower of shit like that lot watching you…"

He was wiring his cables into the charger box. George and Jack were more than a hundred yards back, down in a dip in the field's contours.

"Get that lot under cover, and get your hat on. One minute."

Jack bellowed back to the watchers and heard a police sergeant repeat the instruction by megaphone.

"You're a bloody vandal, Mr Hawkins."

"Get your nose up, so's you see. Twenty seconds."

Jack had a hard hat rammed down on the top of his head.

He peered across the open ground to the pillbox.

"You all right, Jack? You're quiet today. Ten seconds."

"Fine."

He thought that if it had been put to the test the pillbox could have held up an infantry battalion for half a day.

Graceless, strong and seemingly indestructible.

"Here we go."

Jack saw the flashes, then the debris moving upwards and outwards, then the smoke. He heard the echoing rumble of the detonations. He felt the blast of air on his face. He ducked his head.

"Bloody good," George growled.

Jack looked up. George was hunched beside him. The fortification was a rubble of concrete loosely held together by twisted wire.

There was a long thirty minutes before the blaster would allow the men forward who would cut through the wire with their torches.

When they stood at the edge of the rubble Jack marvelled at what Hawkins had achieved.

"That was pretty professional, Mr Hawkins."

"Explosives'll get you through anything, Jack boy, if you know how to use them."