We Five by Mark Dunn Page A

Jane knew he was averse to doing anything that required the expense of much effort. Why else had she spent all of the previous afternoon gathering up everything in the shop comprised of the least bit of aluminium for the scrap-metal campaign whilst he slumbered the day away like some hibernating creature in a cave?
    Nobody wanted Lyle Higgins. Not any of the women—mostly tarts—whom he happened to meet. Not any of his mates, who weren’t so much mates as opportunistic spongers pretending to be mates. Not the British Expeditionary Force, whose recruitment office physician said he’d seen few candidates for enlistment with so compromised a liver.
    And most certainly not Jane, who had grown weary, since their father’s death, of carrying Lyle on the family dole when he could not or would not support himself (let alone his unmarried sister). The two would most surely have lost the shop, which they’d inherited from their dad, were it not for the war effort and its need for dedicated labourers—both men and women—in the aeroplane works and Royal Ordnance factories.
    No, Jane didn’t want Lyle in her life at all. Yet a part of her suspected he could not help being shiftless and by all appearances bereft of any redeeming qualities whatsoever, for there seemed to be something missing from his brain from the start, and how could this be his fault? This was the charitable view that came to Jane every now and then (when she was feeling a little generous). Most days, however, she wanted to take a few of the cartridges she’d packed with gunpowder from the factory in which she worked on the outskirts of London (with her friends Maggie, Carrie, Ruth, and Molly), load them into a compatible machine-gun magazine, and then deliver them ratta-tat-tat into her brother in a way that would swiftly and conveniently end his life. Then one of the biggest worries of her life would be removed, evaporating in an effervescence of twinkling Walt Disney fairy dust.
    Jane had always wanted to be a schoolteacher, but even before her father died, there wasn’t money to pay for her education. She loved children and thought she might like to work as an evacuation officer for the London County Council, which relocated East Enders (and their large broods) to less dangerous parts of the country. But before she went into the offices to interview, she had a nightmare in which, during one of her assigned excursions outside of London, her brother fell asleep with a lit fag between his fingers and burnt himself to a crisp. She would have to keep a hand in the running of the shop (and in the running of Lyle) is what she would have to do, and as luck would have it, when the window slammed shut on a position with the Council, the door to factory work swung wide open. It was her friend Ruth who made the case that We Five should assert their independence in service to their country by helping to defeat Hitler, and they could do this by making bullets and bombs.
    Lyle might still some day or night fall asleep with a lit Player’s cig in hand and burn himself to a crisp, but at least now Jane could preserve what was left of her family’s reputation by saying it was a German incendiary bomb what done it.
    The phone bell rang.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œJane, it’s Carrie. I’m at the call box in front of the Boots.”
    â€œWhat are you doing there? It’s six fifteen. We’ll never make the factory bus in time.”
    â€œThat’s why I rang you. You should go on. Go meet Ruth at the stage so at least the two of you can catch the six-thirty. The rest of us will have to go out on the seven- thirty.”
    â€œBut you’ll lose an hour’s pay!”
    â€œIt won’t be the end of the world.”
    â€œWhat’s happened? Is anything the matter?”
    â€œI’ll tell you everything when I see you in assembly. In short: Molly’s father. Maggie’s mother. A marriage proposal.