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does that,” Peter said.
    â€œI didn’t know he had an allotment.”
    â€œIt’s right down the other end. He doesn’t go there much. He just grows spuds. And we get groundsel from the paths sometimes for the chickens.” Peter hoisted himself up on the stile and gazed around.
    Derek cleared his throat apologetically. “I’m not supposed to go on the allotments unless I’m helping Dad. He made me promise. He says there’s a rule, or something.”
    â€œThere is. It’s a government rule.” Peter was still standing up there, looking about him, his bare knees pressed against the top wooden bar of the stile; then he carefully climbed over and dropped down on the other side. “But if we just stay on the edge here, we aren’t on anyone’s allotment; it’s just waste ground. And nobody can see;
there’s only a few people digging, and they’re right over at the other side. Come on. I just want to look at the fence.”
    Reluctantly, Derek jumped down after him, and Geoffrey followed. Peter moved up a little way from the stile, past the tall post that ended the big wire-mesh fence, until he was facing the cabbage field and the top end of the Ditch. The barrier that kept him from them was the same fence that separated the back field and the allotments, but it was more fearsome here. Though it was made only of four long single wires, instead of mesh, all the way up to the distant railway line, the wire was barbed wire.
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    â€œI don’t see why we couldn’t get through here,” Peter said.
    â€œBut it’s barbed wire. You’d get scratched to bits.”
    â€œAnd then you’d get lockjaw,” Geoffrey said with relish. “That’s what happens when you get rust in a scratch. Your jaw goes all stiff, and you can’t open your mouth, and you can’t eat or drink, so you just starve to death.”
    Peter ignored him. “Look, Derry,” he said. “If I push down the bottom bit of wire, like this, and hold up the top three, then you can squeeze in between them and get through. I won’t let it stick in you, honest. Go on, try.”
    â€œHe’s scared,” Geoffrey said.
    â€œI am not,” said Derek, who was. He looked nervously over his shoulder at the allotments, but saw no change in the few figures bent devotedly over spade or fork; he looked up at the cabbage field and in front of him at the length of the Ditch, but could see nobody there. So he squeezed himself headfirst through the gap that Peter was holding open, caught only the edge of one shoe on the barbed wire, and tumbled down into the long grass on the other side. Then he held the wire in turn, and Peter came after him.
    â€œYou coming, Geoff?”
    â€œI’ll keep watch,” Geoffrey said.
    Peter was already in the Ditch, trampling his way through nettles and grass. He clambered down to its lowest point, facing a steep embankment over which a few brambles reached feeble arms in escape from the back field thicket held back by the tall mesh fence. He ducked down, so that they could see only a glimpse of his fair head among the leaves and the mounds of clay, and then bounced up again, grinning with delight.
    â€œHey, this is smashing. Come and see. We’ve got to build the camp here.”
    As Derek slithered down, half the world disappeared. The weed-feathered sides of the Ditch cut him off from Geoffrey, the cabbages, the surrounding fences and houses; and there was left only the tall side fence of the back field, with that gigantic sinister blackberry bush that seemed from here to be trying to push it down.
There was a glimpse of the similar fence that crossed the Ditch between the Robinsons’ and the Twyfords’ gardens, cutting off their own usual road-linked world; and nothing else but the sky. He stared happily about him at the orange-red earth and the lush grass and the rank clumps of weed.
    Peter