Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) by Jill Dawson Page A

from them. I suppose it’s a beard, but it looks more like the stuff you get growing on potatoes when you leave them for too long.
    â€œYes,” I pipe up. “We’re grand. We’re really good in all—campaigns.” We don’t know what they mean, and Bobby’s mouth is now firm shut, like a letterbox stuck with glue.
    The lady in the camel coat laughs. I think she knows I don’t know what the man means, but she likes my cheek. The man and the lady—she’s quite fat, bundled up to the neck in the coat, her apple-skinned face not very smiley—turn to go, as if that decides it, nodding to the billeting officer, and then the man jerks his head towards Bobby to follow them, towards the great big dark doors of the cathedral. I scramble up.
    And that’s it. The billeting lady crosses our names off the list and nods at the man and lady, and they lead us out towards the huge doors, with the iron patterns on them, and we hear them clank behind us, like the doors of a castle.
    Bobby holds my hand. I wrap my fingers around his fist, feeling through his fingers that he’s still tightly holding his conkers. Somehow we both know that if the brush-haired man and the camel-coat woman saw them, we’d have to give them up.
    â€œIt’s ten shillings and eight pence for the first one. How much do we get if we have the girl, too?” the lady asks.
    The man says something we don’t hear, and again looks back at us, nodding towards a great big conker-colored horse with a sort of cart behind it, parked across from the cathedral, on a very posh bit of grass. Surely they don’t mean us to get in that? Don’t they know my dad had a Chrysler? The horse is eating the grass near the cathedral and the gardens look so bright and neat that, somehow, I think this must be naughty.
    â€œJust the dregs left,” says the lady, as we scramble up onto the high seat behind the man and the woman. Bobby holds his bag to his chest and bites his bottom lip.
    â€œCall me Auntie Elsie.” The lady sits in front of us and turns over her shoulder to talk to us: “And this is . . . Uncle Bert.”
    The horse clops across the marketplace and down a hill that I read is called Fore Hill. There’s a cottage at the bottom near the river, and as I go past it I turn my head, because I have a very strange feeling about it. As if somebody is inside it, someone I know. I turn my head, and think for a minute about saying something to Bobby—did he see anyone at the window, did he have the same funny feeling?—but when I look at his face I see his eyes are like saucers and I know that if I say anything he might burst into tears. A big cloud of geese bursts from somewhere, making this horrible honking noise, a really frightening noise, something I’ve never heard before: they make me think of children, unfriendly children, shouting and cackling at you. Bobby and I watch the geese go over us, over the high towers of the cathedral. But the man and the woman don’t see them.
    â€œCome on, you little old boy,” the man says, jerking at the horse’s reins. The horse makes a loud sharp snort and I jump in my seat. Then I start whistling, in case anyone thought I was scared.
    A fter the road to the river, we start to go out on a rough bumpy lane, and it’s quiet, a sort of quiet I’ve never heard. It makes me feel quiet, too. I hold Bobby’s hand and want to whisper to him, but I don’t. Where are the shops and the cars and the smoke and the cinemas and the schools—it’s just flat, as if we’re rolling along on a big flat blanket of green. No cranes or chimneys or buildings at all, just empty. We clop along. Bobby’s hand is hot, and sweaty, so I sing a skipping song and lean closer to him so that he can hear it : “ Bluebell, cockleshell, evie, ivy, over . . .”
    Beside us the fields stretch away from us in black