The Dynamite Room

by Jason Hewitt

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"Accomplished, resonant and surprising" (Guardian)--a debut for fans of SUMMER OF MY GERMAN SOLDIER.

In July 1940, eleven-year-old Lydia escapes life as a child evacuee in Wales. She arrives home to her English village, gas mask in tow, only to find it abandoned. Her family's house is shuttered and empty. Lydia settles in though, determined to wait out the war.

Later that night he arrives: a wounded soldier, gun-wielding, heralding a full-blown German invasion. He says he won't hurt Lydia, but she cannot leave the house.

The unlikely pair coexists in their claustrophobic confines, becoming dependent on each other for survival. Lydia soon realizes that the soldier knows more than he should about her family--and that he's plotting something for them both.

Eerie, gripping, and incredibly moving, The Dynamite Room brings an original and contemporary resonance to the great tradition of war classics.

Release date: March 17, 2015

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

 

She was the only person to get off the train, and as it pulled out again, leaving her on the empty platform, she watched the receding line of carriages tail into the distance; the dried leaves, caught in a flurry of air, chased after them down the track. She walked out through the gates, into the sunshine, and onto the road, but there didn’t seem to be anyone about. The station shop was shut. She wandered back onto the platform and prized her last two pennies out of her secret pocket so that she could buy a bar of Fry’s chocolate from the vending machine, but that was empty as well. She wondered where everyone was. The station name that swung from the awning was gone; just hooks poked out where it had once been. She’d heard about this on Mrs. Duggan’s wireless: all across the country, towns and villages were losing their identities and road signs were being taken down. Her mother had written about it too in one of her letters. Six letters, one for every week she’d been away, and all of them folded and folded again until they were small enough to keep safe and secret.

It was a short walk into the village across the Suffolk flatlands, and she struggled along the lane, her heavy suitcase bumping against her leg and the box for her gas mask swinging from her shoulders. The sun blazed over the top of the hedgerow. The first sight or sound of an airplane and she’d have to scramble into the ditch; she’d be an easy target for them on such an open road. It surprised her that there was nothing in the road to stop them from trying to land on it—railway sleepers, rotten tree trunks, old bedsteads or mangled bicycles. All over Sutton Heath anti-glider ditches had been hand dug to stop the Jerries landing. But the road winding through the fields ahead of her was empty in the heat haze, and everything was roasted dry. Ivy coiled its way out of the brambles, and there were poppies out and blackberries too that were formed but not yet ripe. The sun shone through loops in the top half of the hedge, casting her a shadow-companion that stepped in time along the ditch, and the air coming in off the salt flats was thick and humid. She wiped the sweat from her face and her hand on her dress. There was no sign of anyone. The only sound was the scrunch of her sandals on the lane and the heavy puff of her breath.

She needed to decide what she was going to say. Her intention had been to think about it on the train, but it was so noisy with all the servicemen heading this way that she’d hardly been able to think at all; and besides, they had wanted to talk and joke with her, the only schoolgirl in the carriage. They bundled into her compartment, full of high spirits, sitting on each other and asking her questions that she’d rather not answer: what had she been doing all summer, what was her name, did she have any older sisters, any friends, were they pretty like her, and where was she going anyway, all on her own.

She wasn’t on her own, she had told them. Her mother was powdering her nose.

Oh, her ma’s powdering her nose! one of them said, mocking her perhaps, for he was red faced and seemed a little drunk. He combed his fingers through his hair, stood up, and saluted. Better make ourselves ship-shape for the lady then, lads.

But her mother never did come back; it was just something she had said in the hope that they’d leave her alone.

She tried to focus her thoughts, scanning the hedgerows for crickets and grasshoppers. Sometimes, if you clapped your hands loudly enough, five or six would leap up. Alfie and Eddie used to catch them in fishing nets, sweeping the nets through the air as the little creatures catapulted themselves out of the grass.

She stopped and put the suitcase down, readjusted the box for her gas mask, and tried carrying the case with the other hand. Its cracked handle pinched at her fingers. She tipped her head back and looked at the vastness of the sky, so deep and blue. A top-notch day for flying, Alfie would say, but there were no planes, nor any birds. Even the sky was empty.

It had become something of a national obsession, sky gazing. If she could see a plane, she told herself, everything was all right and it was just her being silly. She clambered up onto the verge to get a better look across the marsh, then looked up and down the lane and listened, trying to hear a car somewhere—if not on this road, then another nearby, or a tractor in a field. Perhaps an army officer on a motorbike. Or the sound of a voice, the Local Defence Volunteers on drill somewhere, the sudden bark of an order. Or a dog. Even the bark of a dog would do. There had to be someone somewhere. The strange, empty silence was making her uneasy. She could feel a tightening in her chest. She would not let herself cry.

She picked up the case again and carried on, walking faster now. A wind blew out from across the lagoons and reed beds, stirring the grasses along the verge. Gorse seeds chased across the lane. And then a sudden sob erupted from inside her because she was so hot and tired now, and she hated this stillness; she thought she might choke on it. Where was everybody?

Maybe it had happened. She had heard people talking about it. She had heard the warnings on the BBC Home Service. She fumbled at her gas mask box, struggling to open it. That was why there wasn’t anyone about. That was why there weren’t any cars, any planes, birds, crickets, anything. She pulled the gas mask out, hurriedly slipping it over her head just as they had practiced, and tugged the strap at the back, making sure it was secure. If they’d put something in the air, like everyone said they would…If they’d let something loose from a plane flying high above them, something invisible…

Inside the mask, her gasps for breath were louder than ever, the air hissing through the filter of the nozzle, the blood rushing to her head. The black rubber sucked against her skin, and the cellophane eyepiece started to mist up. She couldn’t see to either side because of the rubber rim blocking her vision. On an impulse she turned her head sharply, expecting to see someone, but the road behind her was still empty.

Breathe normally, Miss Mountford had instructed them during their drills. Breathe too hard and you’ll hyperventilate and then pass out or go mad. You might even give yourself a brain hemorrhage, they’d been told. You just need to breathe normally. But she never had been able to breathe normally in a mask. From the very first time she had put one on she had nightmares that one day she wouldn’t be able to take it off.

She tried to walk on, taking in gasps of air that never felt deep enough. Sweat and condensation began to collect inside the visor. It formed on her skin and ran down the sides, dripping around the rim of the eyepiece and into her eyes, making them water. Despite everything Miss Mountford had told them, she was breathing so hard and fast now that she would almost certainly pass out. There were little tiny specks floating in the air around her. Tiny white specks. Just seeds, she told herself. Tiny seeds of something, she didn’t know what, touching the visor and her neck and her hands and prickling, tingling all over. She scratched at her skin; tiny pinpricks, perhaps every one an infection. She furiously flapped her arms about her, whirling them out and above her head, swiping at the air and its contagion until she began to cry—and after all this time and all those promises to herself. Keep walking, she told herself. Keep walking. Don’t stop. Everything will be all right.

  

The road through the village was deserted. There was no one chatting or cycling along the street. No children running along the pavements. No soldiers from the Liverpool Scottish leaning against the wall in their kilts and smoking; no Archie Chittock or Tommy Sparrow or any of the other Local Defence Volunteers messing about outside The Cricketers, their bikes piled beside them. Just dried leaves and dust blowing across the street.

As she reached the school, she saw the drawings that had been stuck to windows peeling away from the glass in the heat. Inside, the two classrooms were abandoned, the chairs upside down on the tables so that Mrs. Sturgeon could clean the floor underneath. She pressed her hands against a window to look in and felt a sudden pang to see Rosie or Cath, or any one of the others, even Joe Pitcher, dashing in and sliding on his socks.

When she reached Pringle’s, the little village store was locked. In the doorway was a small printed card that read, in block capitals, WE ARE NOT INTERESTED IN THE POSSIBILITIES OF DEFEAT—THEY DO NOT EXIST. Despite this, the shop was closed and empty, gummed brown tape crisscrossing the windows in case a bomb blast blew them in.

She crossed to the other side of the street, then undid the latch on Mr. Morton’s gate and walked nervously up the stepping-stone path to the front door. The sandbags stashed against it were green with mildew and sprouting grass, and on either side a gnome stood sentry with a rifle held against his red painted shoulder. Above her a tatty British flag hung limp from a pole. She pulled at the bell cord and stepped back as the two-tone chime announced her in the distant recesses of the house. She hitched up her socks as she waited and shined her sandals against the back of her legs as she always did, but all she could hear was her own voice, trapped in the mask with her, Please be in. Please be in.

She opened the letter box and, bending down, peered through. She could just about see down the hallway into the kitchen where Mr. Morton always sat, his shirt stretching across his enormous back as he bent over his crosswords. He wasn’t there.

“Mr. Morton! Mr. Morton? It’s me—it’s Lydia. Are you there?”

There was no reply. Not even from Mr. Biggles, Mr. Morton’s ill-tempered parakeet, who was known for throwing abuse at every visitor that called.

She shut the letter box and scrambled over the flower bed to the sitting-room window. Like the windows at Pringle’s, it had sticky tape crisscrossing the glass, and the curtains were drawn, a blackout cloth pulled across. She couldn’t see in. She stepped back and tried the letter box again, pressing the nose of her mask against it.

“Mr. Morton! It’s me!”

She bent a little lower, staring through the murky visor down the empty hallway, then called again. She could hear the crack in her voice, the tears coming once more.

“Please! Please! Are you there?”

But the house remained silent, and her hand slowly let the letter box squeak back into place. She walked back down the path, shutting the gate behind her, and looked up and down the empty street. Everybody, it seemed, was gone.

  

The lane led her out of the village, over the bridge, and across the flatlands. She hauled the heavy suitcase with her, her gas mask still pulled tight across her face. No matter how hard she tried to calm herself, her stomach churned. The road rolled out endlessly, the heat washing over her in waves. She could feel the sweat sticking her dress to her back, the air in the mask now so hot that even her breath seemed to burn her skin.

The car, when it came, met her halfway down the lane. It wasn’t a German patrol car, or the British infantry, or even a member of the Local Defence Volunteers. It was an old black Hillman Minx, like Bea’s, but caked in mud and with its exhaust pipe dragging and scraping along the road, making a racket. She watched it from a distance, rattling towards her, then stumbled up onto the bank as it drew near. But there wasn’t anywhere to run, and somehow she knew before it had even started slowing down that the driver was going to stop. He pulled up ahead of her at an angle as if he was trying to cut her off. Inside, the man was large and bulky like the car itself, with thick-set shoulders and barely any neck, his arm hanging out of the window. His tweed jacket sleeve had a muddy elbow, and he was chewing on something, tobacco perhaps, his waxed hair slipping down across his eyes. The pockmarks on his cheeks scared her.

She stood on the verge, suddenly feeling ridiculous in her gas mask on such a sweltering day, with the visor steamed up so she could hardly see through it. She wiped the front of the goggles with her fingers but all the condensation was on the inside. She wouldn’t talk to him. She would carry on walking, stumbling over the uneven verge if she had to, mindful of the rabbit holes and the sudden dips into the ditch.

He leaned further out of the car.

“Young lady!”

She took no notice.

“Hey! Excuse me! I’m talking to you!”

She stopped and looked.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

“What?”

She struggled but managed to peel the gas mask off and felt the relief of dry air against her sodden cheeks.

“I know,” she said.

“So?”

“Where is everyone?”

He laughed, slapping his hand against the door of the car. “Gone. And you should be too. Where have you been for the last month?”

She stared at him. His eyebrows were thick and met in the middle.

“Where are you off to anyway?” he said. “I’ll give you a ride. Come on—hop in.”

She shook her head.

“I won’t bite.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “You’re going a different way.”

“Don’t matter.”

“No, I’m all right.”

He pulled his head back in and did a cumbersome five-point turn, hitting his bumpers against each verge, until he had turned the car around in the middle of the road and stopped.

He leaned across and ratcheted down the passenger window so they could talk again.

“There, see,” he called over the spluttering engine. “Now we’re going the same way, so come on. Get in. You shouldn’t be out and about here anyway. No one should.”

“I’m going to my aunt’s,” she told him. “She’s just up here. She’s waiting. We’re going to Wales. My brother’s there already and—”

“Really.”

She bit on her lip to stop herself from saying any more.

“Come on,” he said. “For heaven’s sake, hop in! You’ll only get into trouble wandering these lanes on your own. Come on—in you get!”

He leaned farther across the passenger seat and pushed the door so that it swung open on its hinges, but she took a step back.

He watched her for what seemed like ages and then, maybe realizing that she wasn’t going to get in, said, “Suit yourself,” pulling the door shut again with a slam.

“You’re being rather stupid, you know,” he said through the window. “You’ll get yourself shot.”

He put the car into gear with a grinding wrench, and she watched as the car’s bumpers hit each verge again as he struggled to swing it back around; then he drove off, the exhaust still clattering. She waited on the verge until the car was safely out of sight and just a distant mumbling; then she stepped down into the lane and, pushing the gas mask back into its box, carried on walking.

  

A little while later, she saw the fork in the road and the red postbox at the end of the drive up ahead. The box wobbled on its stand as the heat shimmered off the camber and everything rippled, the view down the lane turning to liquid in the sun. When she reached the old crossbar gate, she stopped and looked down the drive. She’d expected all the windows and doors to be wide open, the breeze blowing through the large house, but everything was shuttered up. The gate squeaked when she opened it and she crunched across the gravel up the drive, then dropped her case on the doorstep, pulled up her sagging socks, and tried to open the door—but it was locked. She stepped back and looked up at the house. The bottom half was neat red brick, the top half painted a crisp white between the dark beams. Ivy crept up one wall, edging its way around the windows. There were patches of moss on the roof tiles and grass sprouted between the two chimney pots. She walked around the outside but everything was closed. The shuttered windows on the ground floor even had planks of wood nailed across them. She tried the back door but she couldn’t get the handle to turn no matter which way she twisted it; instead, she stood on tiptoes to look through a glass pane, but something was covering the window inside and she couldn’t see in.

She went back to the front and tried the door again.

“Hello!” she called as she peered up at the windows. “Hello!”

She tried to force the handle one more time, shaking it, then looked around. The house and its garden were surrounded on three sides by woods, the trees standing silent in the heat, and beyond them it was a good mile back to the village, or half a mile in the opposite direction to the shore if you knew your way across the salt marsh and mudflats. She slung her gas mask box down by her suitcase and walked across the scorched lawn. The splintered door of the chicken run was hooked open, the chickens gone. She crouched down beside the rabbit run but that was empty as well. She scanned the undergrowth of the trees for the white bob of Jeremiah’s tail, and she called out to him, but there was no sign of the rabbit. The flower beds had been turned over to vegetables but most of them were dead now, the soil sucked dry and the leaves crisp and withered. In the middle of a circular flower bed, now surrounded by rings of shrunken cauliflower heads, stood a stone cherub on a granite slab, his skin freckled with lichen. It took all of her strength to wiggle him far enough to one side so that she could pull the spare key, wrapped in paper, out from under him. She ran with it across the grass to the door, but the key wouldn’t turn at first and she had to rattle it around in the lock for a while, until finally, reluctantly, it clicked. She pushed the door open and the sunlight glanced in ahead of her.

The house smelled unfamiliar. Her feet creaked over the floorboards and the oak paneling was cool to her touch. All the doors from the hallway were closed; she opened them one by one, finding the rooms dark and musty, the fixtures and furnishings indistinct. All the windows were filled with blackout frames.

She stood at the foot of the stairs and called out again.

“Hello?”

Holding on to the banisters as she went, she followed her voice up the staircase. At the top she looked both ways before nervously making her way down the corridor. The bathroom light didn’t work; even the tiny window in there had its blackout frame in place. There were no towels hanging over the rail. No toothbrushes or toothpaste in the blue spotted mug.

She stepped back into the corridor and stopped outside the next door, her sweaty hand on the cool, brass knob.

“Hello?” she said quietly. She turned the knob and nudged the door open. The room was dark and hot. At first everything seemed to be in its place. The neatly made four-poster. The old oak dressing table. The slightly tarnished mirror. The little side table and tasseled lamp. But no bedside book. No half-drunk glass of water. She took a step back and found herself staring at the bulky oak wardrobe. Her breath quickened as she reached out for both handles, and then, after a silent count of one, two, three, she flung open the double doors. It was empty. Her mother’s clothes were gone.

  

She sat there on the four-poster bed, her feet dangling, until her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark and shapes began to emerge from the wall: pictures hanging from the picture rail, her mother’s treadle sewing machine, the corn dolly hanging on its hook. She began to feel cool again as the sun fingered its way around the side of the house, no longer pressing at the shutters. She tried to think, forcing her eyes shut in the hope that when she opened them again, the room would be full of light and everything as it should be. Twice she got up and shut the heavy wardrobe doors, hearing the careful click setting everything back into place, but when she opened them again the wardrobe remained empty.

Eventually she wandered downstairs. The front door was still open, the sun still streaming through now that it was lower in the sky, but the kitchen remained dark.

She sat up on the work surface—something her mother would never have allowed—and leaned over to fill a glass from the tap. The water drooled out, cloudy at first and then finally clear, and she drank it and then filled the glass again, drinking it more slowly this time.

Her mother had gone to the cinema at Felixstowe with Bea, or Joyce, or somebody else. There wouldn’t be a bus back till late, and that was why she’d already prepared the house for the blackout. Her mother was like that—organized. That was why they’d wanted her in the Women’s Voluntary Service, and on the parish council and the school’s board of governors and heaven knows what else. And she’d moved out of their bedroom and into the spare one. That was it. It might have got damp in her parents’ room, because, after all, her mother had always said that the house was damp, she said she could smell it, while her father contested it as he contested almost everything, arguing that it was her imagination. It’s barely thirty years old, Annie. How on earth can it be damp?

Lydia sat for a moment, letting the heel of her sandal bang rhythmically against the cupboard. But that didn’t explain the empty station, or the empty village either, or the empty road and fields. Other than the man in the black Hillman Minx, the only sign of life she had seen had been on the train: soldiers with their kit bags, air force officers eating sandwiches or playing cards or sleeping with their heads gently knocking against the window as the train rattled on its way. Two or three women had been sitting in other carriages. She’d seen them on the platform getting on when she’d changed at Reading—a plump lady with a suitcase and a couple of WVSs in their funny green uniforms and hats. She had hoped that one of them would sit by her, but they hadn’t. Something about them had made her think of her mother.

Have you a ticket?

Her mother had it, she had told the ticket collector. She’s just powdering her nose.

Right, he said, although he didn’t seem sure. Most lassies your age are going the other way, you know.

She nodded.

Everyone but the army is going the other way.

He asked her how old she was, nibbling at his mustache as he did and leaning against the compartment door as if he was getting himself ready for a long wait.

She told him, almost twelve.

He frowned as if even that were questionable, scratching his head under his cap, and then stood there watching her, waiting. Finally he asked her if she was all right in there—your ma?

She stumbled for a moment, wondering what to say, and then blurted that her mother was feeling sick, that was all—sick. She doesn’t like trains.

No? Well, nor do I much on a ruddy ’ot day like this, he said. I’ll be back later for the ticket, mind. I’ve another four carriages to do before Ipswich, so you make sure she has it ready.

She nodded and forced a smile, but the man never did come back and the train clattered on.

  

She hauled her things up the stairs, along the landing, and into her darkened room. She dropped her gas mask on the floor at her feet, heaved her suitcase up onto the bed, and lit the oil lamp. The flame’s light flickered across the walls, teasing shadows up to the ceiling and smearing them across the floor. She pulled the evacuee tag off the case’s handle and, screwing it into a ball, netted it into the wicker waste bin beneath her dressing table, then clicked open the catches and lifted the lid. She took Mr. Tabernacle out and sat him plumply on the bed. At eleven years old she had thought herself too old for bears, but her mother had suggested that she might want a friendly face with her, even if it was just one-eyed Mr. Tabernacle wearing her father’s school tie.

She emptied the rest of the suitcase on the bed and then felt too hungry and tired to put any of it away. What was the point? If her mother had been planning to leave the house, she was sure that she would have written to her. But then her mother still thought she was in Wales, safe and sound.

She slumped on the bed with the bear on her knee and reached over to pull out the six letters from the gas mask box along with a storybook she’d made, the pages threaded together with string. Now it was all crumpled, her writing half-washed away where one of the Welsh boys had thrown it into the brook. She tried one more time to smooth out the creases where it had dried all out of shape, but the story was ruined. She put it back into the box, then laid out the letters, folded tight, in a semicircle on the bed between her and Mr. Tabernacle.

“You choose,” she told the bear. Then, taking his arm, she made him pick one.

She unfolded the letter.

She knew them off by heart, her mother lamenting at how quiet the house was now that she and Alfie and Lydia’s father were all away. The petrol pump in the village was out of bounds, she wrote—needed by the infantry apparently—so she was feeling desperately cut off and she never had been good on a bicycle, as Lydia well knew. The Germans had given them a bit of a bashing the day before, one of the Jerries emptying a load on the harbor at Lowestoft and another hitting the airfield at Martlesham. Joyce had apparently felt the rumbles in the pub, and her mother wrote that half the tins in the kitchen larder had fallen out. It had put the frighteners up them all.

They’re calling it “terror attacks” on the radio. It does make me laugh, the funny terms they come up with. I expect they’ll have another shot at us tonig. . .