Fireweed by Jill Paton Walsh

thing. And they pay you quite well to mind the stall, and yell “Sweet Kentish plums!” at people. The best bit is, they feed you as well as pay you – you can eat all the squashed fruit and flattened buns and broken cake you can stuff into yourself. And they don’t ask you any questions, either, not like the newsagent, who was always worrying about who I was and where my family were, and why I hadn’t gone with all the others. I got fed up telling him fibs. But the barrow-boys aren’t like that at all, they just say, “Them as asks no questions don’t get told no lies”.’
    â€˜Oh, Bill,’ she said, eyes shining, ‘What fun! Can I come too?’
    I looked at her doubtfully. ‘You’d stick out like a sore thumb in that posh dress,’ I said. ‘We’d have to get you something a bit raggedy.’
    â€˜How could we do that?’ she asked.
    â€˜From the Salvation Army Mission. They got me this jacket when the weather went cold. They don’t ask too much, either. The only trouble is, all their stuff’s too big.’ And I pulled at my jacket, to show her how far in front of my chest it buttoned up.
    She laughed. ‘Bill, you could get two of you in there, easily,’ she said. Then she began to giggle. ‘And wait till I tell Mother.
She
said this dress would do to go
anywhere
!’
    â€˜Golly, look at that!’ I said. Outside the smeary window of the bus we could see a terrible sight. There was a great wide desolate stretch of blasted houses. Piles of rubble lay thickly everywhere, with splintered timbers sticking out here and there. In a few places a wall was still standing with empty windows gaping against the sky, and all crumbled and broken into strange shapes, and blackened by fire. The bus was bumping along the road, for the road surface was full of holes. People were struggling along the pavement by a narrow path swept through the rubble; the shops were fronted with boards instead of glass, and labelled ‘Business as Usual’ in roughly painted letters. We looked in silence.
    A red-haired conductress leant over us to look out of the window. ‘Gawd. I ’ope they’re getting it back!’ she said.
    â€˜Do we do that too?’ Julie asked me.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I said, shuddering.
    St Paul’s was still there. The hole in the pavement was there too, but it was just roped off, and the bomb had gone, for there were no notices, and the bus went right by the hole. We got off at the first stop on Ludgate Hill, and went to have a look.
    â€˜It must have been an out-of-date
Picture Post
, of course,’ said Julie.
    We stood at the foot of the steps, and looked at the façade.
    â€˜I still don’t know, really, that I like it all that much,’ she said.
    â€˜Well, but I know what they mean about it,’ I told her. ‘When you just remember what it looks like, you see it all columns, and a dome, and it seems very ordinary, and reminds you of the Odeon Cinema, and the town hall somewhere; but as soon as you see it again it’s just a bit different, and you can see that it’s right, and the people who built the town hall were just copy-cats, and got it wrong.’
    â€˜Hmm,’ she said.
    â€˜It’s so exact; all the shapes, and all the distances from here to there, all over it, are so exactly right.’
    â€˜Well,’ she said, staring hard, ‘I shall just have to remember what it’s like as hard as I can, so that I can change my mind about it later, even if it’s gone.’
    Suddenly a voice came from behind us. ‘Now, don’t go saying
that
, young lady. It may never happen. Never. And what does happen is quite enough to worry about. Sufficient unto the day, you know. Or perhaps you don’t. Young people today don’t know their Bibles as we did.’
    It was an elderly stooped old gentleman, with a stick. Very vague and