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we’re just playing in the back field.”
    â€œAll right. Better tell her I’ll be in soon. And mind you get my blowpipe and darts.”
    He called after them, “Be careful with the darts. There’s seven of them.”
    From the stile, Geoffrey called over his shoulder, “They don’t
work.
”
    â€œWe’ll be careful,” Peter said.
    Â 
    D EREK CLAMBERED down again into the ditch as they disappeared toward his back garden. A lone cabbage white butterfly flittered around his head, lighted briefly on a patch of bare clay, and meandered off again. He swiped at it absently, out of habit. Down at the bottom, he pulled a few clumps of weeds from the area that would be the floor of the camp, and stamped the ground down as flat as he could make it. Really, it would be a wonderful secret place. A real camp, this time.
    He heard the sound of engines, crouched, looked up. The three Spitfires were coming back; farther away this time and more strung out. He thought: “I’m going to be a pilot one day. Or no, what I really want is to be a sailor, in a destroyer, like Commander Hansen down the road. Or perhaps I’ll be a soldier, like Daddy was in the last war. With a gun.”
    He thought about the gun. His father was a sergeant now in the local Home Guard; his newly acquired steel helmet, which he called a tin hat, hung in the hall on the hatstand, and the heavy service rifle stood on its butt in
the umbrella stand beneath it. The strictest rule in the house was that nobody should ever, on any account, touch John Brand’s gun. Derek had touched it only once, on the day it first appeared, when his father had ceremonially put the tin hat on his head and the rifle in his hands. They had both weighed several tons. The helmet had been so heavy that Derek’s chin had bent down to his chest for the second that John Brand had let the padded metal rest on his head; and the rifle so heavy that even with both hands and all his strength he had been able to lift it for an instant only an inch or two from the floor. And that had been that, and he had never touched the gun again.
    The sun was warm. A large sleepy bumblebee wandered past his head. He forgot about the gun.
    Then Peter and Geoffrey leaped down into the Ditch, whooping, Geoff carrying the spade and Peter carefully cradling the blowpipe and darts without one dart tip so much as bruised; and they set to digging out the first outline of their camp. They dug for a long while, taking turns with the rusty spade head, and by the time they had to stop for dinner, at Mrs. Brand’s distant call from the back garden, the camp was well enough begun to be fitted with its roof.
    Â 
    T HE SKY was clear all day, and still only a few chunky clouds had drifted across it by the time they went to bed. Before his mother pulled the blackout curtains carefully
over the windows in the chilly, darkening room, Derek could see the moon sailing tranquilly in and out of the clouds: gradually drifting sideways, moving in an endless flowing motion, and yet hanging always still. Then the shiny black cotton of the curtain blotted everything out, and it was dark.
    â€œThere won’t be a raid tonight, will there, Mum?”
    â€œWell, darling,” she said gently, “I hope there won’t.”
    â€œThere’s lots of cloud to cover the moon.”
    â€œThat’s right. Let’s hope they stay at home.”
    â€œBe awful if they bombed our camp,” he said sleepily. “It’s smashing. We’re going to put a roof on it and camouflage it with grass.”
    â€œRemember you promised me there wouldn’t be any tunneling,” Mrs. Brand said. “That’s dangerous.”
    Derek yawned. “Just walls. And a sort of dent.” He had been so full of the thought of the camp that he had had to talk about it; but he had still kept it secret—he hadn’t said where it was.
    â€œGood night,