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punched his arm lightly. “Like it?”
    â€œIt’s perfect. Nobody would ever find it here. We could build a really good one and keep all sorts of things.”
    â€œThe way this hump here goes, look, we could just hollow out a bit of the back wall and put a roof across from it to the hump, and it would be like a room. Like our Morrison, almost.”
    â€œLike the way the sandbags are around the guns up the road.”
    â€œWe could even get some sandbags.”
    â€œUm.”
    They pondered this for a moment. Somehow sandbags would not be right for their own camp. It was a timeless fortification, theirs; it grew in their minds out of a vague mixture of Iron Age earthworks and Saxon forts. They had known about such things for as long as they could remember, and not from books or school. The leavings of the ancient peoples were all around them in the valley of the Thames and the Chiltern Hills. Regularly they saw them, passed them, walked over them: the once-besieged fortresses, ten centuries old, which lay gentle now beneath soft-sloping grassy mounds.
    â€œNot sandbags,” Derek said.
    â€œNo. But we could put a roof. The boxes would be good for that.”
    â€œHave to do the digging first. Let’s get the spade from the old camp.”
    â€œHey!” A plaintive yell came faintly down from the other side of the fence. Derek started, feeling guilty. He had completely forgotten about Geoffrey, keeping watch.
    â€œThat Geoff,” said Peter.
    â€œCareful. He might have seen someone.”
    They wriggled along the bottom of the Ditch, around the big clay hummock, and peered carefully up through the grass.
    Geoffrey called, “You think you’re so good at stalking. I can see you plain as anything. Lucky for you I’m not Mr. Everett.”
    Peter stood up. “You’ve never seen Mr. Everett.”
    â€œNor have you. Come on, you’ve been down there for ages.”
    Derek heaved himself up, picking last year’s burrs off his sweater. “Come and look, Geoff. It’s just the right place for the camp.”
    â€œIt’s a moldy place,” Geoffrey said peevishly. “How can we come and go through that stupid barbed-wire fence? And I’m fed up with standing here keeping lookout. There isn’t even anywhere for me to hide if anyone comes.”
    â€œNobody asked you to keep lookout,” Peter said coolly.
Then he relented and gave Geoff his sudden crooked grin. “Come on, hold the wire for me. We have to go and get the spade and everything from the old camp and bring them here to start digging. It really is a super place; wait till you see. There’s loads of space to make storage holes. We can make a special hidden one to take birds’ eggs.”
    This was a deliberate peace offering; neither he nor Derek approved of collecting birds’ eggs, regarding it as a particularly shameful kind of robbery. But Geoffrey, firmly explaining that he did no harm by taking only one egg from each nest, did collect them, and messily blow them, and keep them labeled in boxes in his room. When they had first thought of building the camp in their usual section of the Ditch, he had greeted the thought of it delightedly as a way station for newly taken eggs.
    â€œSo long as you don’t touch our robin,” Derek said. A robin had nested two years running in a bush in the Brands’ front garden; this was the first year they had let Geoff see the tiny pale blue eggs.
    â€œI got a robin egg ages ago,” Geoffrey said loftily. But he was mollified. “Well, let me come through and see, then, if it’s so marvelous.”
    â€œCome and get our things first,” Peter said. He scrambled through the fence, casually ripping out a thread from his sleeve as it caught on the sharp hooked wire. “Why’n’t you stay here, Derry, and keep an eye on it? We shan’t be a minute. If we see your mum, I’ll tell her