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Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

To my mother, Kippe

Do you remember? You used to read to us every night, every night without fail. For both of us, Piet and me, this time just before bed was an oasis of warmth and intimacy. The taste of toothpaste still reminds me of those precious minutes alone with you, our bedtime treat. We’d climb into the same bed, browsing the book together before you came, longing to hear the sound of your footfall on the stairs. Sometimes I’d fall asleep before you came but would always wake for the story. You read to us only those stories and poems that you loved, often in a hushed voice as if you were confiding in us, telling us a secret you’d never told anyone else. We still love those stories and poems to this day, over sixty years later, but in my case with one exception.

Everything else you read us I simply adored. I never wanted your story-time to end. ‘The Elephant’s Child’ from Kipling’s Just So Stories was my favourite. Piet’s was ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself’. We both knew them off by heart. And then sometimes you’d read a poem by Masefield or de la Mare. It could be ‘The Listeners’ –

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor …

Or maybe ‘Cargoes’, with all those wonderfully mysterious and musical names: ‘Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir’. Or ‘Sea-Fever’:

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky …

I may not always remember which poet wrote which poem, but I remember the poems, every line of them; and your voice reading them. And I mustn’t forget Edward Lear’s nonsense poems, those ludicrous limericks that made us all laugh so much.

There was an Old Man with a beard,

Who said, ‘It is just as I feared! –

Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,

Have all built their nests in my beard!’

We all thought that the old man in question had to be your daddy, or Grad as we called him, who had a bushy white beard that smelt of pipe tobacco. I used to sit on his lap sometimes and explore the depths of his beard with my fingers, searching for any birds or birds’ nests that might be there, but they never were. When I asked Grad once why there were no birds in his beard, he told me that they had been there, but they’d all grown up now and flown the nest ‘like little birds do, like we all do in the end’.

It’s not so surprising, when I come to think about it now, that you were such a compelling reader, such a magical storyteller. Until you married for the second time you had been an actress like your own mother, like your brother, like our first father too. It was in your blood to love words, to love stories (I think maybe it’s in mine too – and Piet’s, he’s spent all his working life in theatre or television). You could make your voice sing and dance. You could be an elephant or a cat or even a crocodile – no trouble at all. You could do ghosts and pirates – Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol, Captain Hook in Peter Pan. You simply became them. So Piet and I lived every story, believed every character. You brought them to life for us. Our imaginations soared on the wings of your words. And that was a fine and wonderful thing – mostly.

But the trouble was that with one poem in particular you were far too good, far too frightening. You scared me half to death every time you recited it. I don’t think you realised it at first because I was adept at toughing it out. I’d feign terror, clap my hands dramatically over my ears while you were reading, make a whole big scene of being terrified, to cover up the fact that I was.

For obvious reasons you knew and loved Shakespeare. And, as I was later to discover, you were good at it on the stage too. You were Ophelia in Hamlet, Cordelia in King Lear, Rosalind in As You Like It: the reviews I read were all glowing. I found them after your death in among your papers in your desk, in an envelope marked ‘good reviews, bad ones burnt’. Anyway, the trouble was that Piet loved one particular Shakespearean ditty of yours more than all the others, and at bedtime he’d ask for it over and over again. I dreaded it every time. I knew a terrifying transformation was about to occur. You’d simply become the three witches, sitting there around the fire over your steaming cauldron, chanting your hideous witchy spell. You thought, and Piet thought – or maybe he didn’t, I’m still not sure – but certainly you thought that I was just messing about, playing at being scared as I put my hands over my ears and buried my head in the pillow. You would put on your tremulous witchy voice and that shrill cackle, and if I ever dared look up, I’d see your contorted witchy face, your fingers suddenly turned to claws, and I knew what was coming. Your screeching words would force themselves between my fingers into my ears and there was nothing I could do to keep them out. The moment I heard those first words of the witches’ spell my soul was on fire with fear:

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble …

I could tell that Piet was frightened too. He seemed to be enjoying his fear, revelling in it. But then he was brave. He’d even join in the chorus sometimes and I’d be screaming into my pillow by now to blot out the spell, over-acting like crazy, hamming it up, anything to disguise the real terror I was feeling.

Whenever you recited that horrible ditty I could never sleep afterwards, not for hours. The darkness around me was as dark as death, and full of watching witches, their eyes glaring at me, blood-red and menacing. I’d close my eyes to shut them out, but there was no shutting them out. Whether I was awake or asleep, they’d be there, haunting me, turning my dreams to nightmares. I’d wake up sweating, checking my nose had not been turned into a beak, feeling my hands and feet just in case they’d become webbed overnight.

I asked you about witches one day in the garden, do you remember? I was sitting on my bicycle and you were hanging out the washing on the line. I asked you whether they were really true. I tried to sound unconcerned, as nonchalant as I could. I tried to make out I was just inquisitive. I was longing, of course, for you to tell me the answer I wanted to hear, which was that all witches and their potions and spells were just in stories and poems and pictures, nothing but gobbledegook. But you didn’t say that, did you? Instead you put on your witchy voice again and your witchy look and your witchy claws and chased me round the garden in and out of the sheets and pillowcases and pyjamas hanging from the line, and I cycled off screaming, and you practically split your sides you thought it was so funny.

But then I crashed my bicycle into the edge of the sandpit and was catapulted into the air. I had a soft enough landing in the sand, but I was shaken up, and now crying hysterically – the shock, I suppose – quite unable to pretend any longer. My heart was pounding with fear. You must have seen that the terror in my eyes was real, that I wasn’t playing games any more. You caught me up then and hugged me to you, and that was the best thing you could have done. You hugged the fear out of me. We laughed and sobbed it away together.

You didn’t do the ‘Bubble, bubble’ witchy ditty after that. But Piet did sometimes when he wanted to tease me. With him I knew it was always in fun, but it still frightened me even so. It gave me the shivers every time he did it, but the truth was that in time I found I was enjoying the shivers, just a little bit.

Although I wasn’t ever comfortable with folk tales if there was a witch involved, with spells and curses and the like, I half-wanted to hear them, and later I read them myself. Maybe ‘Hansel and Gretel’ was the turning-point? Through that story I found out how to deal with witches. Just as Gretel had done, I’d creep up behind them and push them in the oven and that would be that. Once I thought I could handle a witch, I could really enjoy the tingle of terror in witchy stories. I became fascinated by them, and by spells and curses in general. Why else would I have done what I did in the bomb site in that spring of 1948 when you were away in America?

So now, all these decades later, it is my turn to tell you a witchy story. It’s a story I should have told you, or rather confessed to you, a long time ago. But I could never bring myself to do it, until you were gone, until now.

Only three people in the world know this story, the three witches of Philbeach Gardens. I’ve never told anyone else because it’s a story I’ve been ashamed of ever since it happened, some sixty-odd years ago. It still upsets me when I think of what I did, what we all did, and what happened afterwards. I still can’t understand it or explain it. Maybe you can? I mean you’ve been alive and you’ve been dead, so you’ve been on both sides of the divide, haven’t you? You’d know about these things. Anyway, here’s our story, how it happened.

You remember when we all lived in London at number 84 Philbeach Gardens? And you remember the bomb site right next door to our house? I’d have been about six maybe, in my first year of proper school, at St Matthias on Warwick Road. It was an ordinary enough London County Council school, but strangely there was a chapel attached to it that we shared with Greek Orthodox priests who drifted around the place, black-bearded phantoms to us, so we kept well clear of them. Apples were the best thing about school. They were sent over from Canada for us because, just after the war, fruit was scarce. We were still on rations, weren’t we?

Usually Piet would walk me to school, but if there was one of those pea-souper smogs, you’d take us and come and fetch us – for safety’s sake, I suppose. I loved that, to see you waiting for us outside the school gates in the fog. But then, when we got home, you’d go and spoil it; you’d make us drink hot Bovril for tea to warm us up. You can’t imagine how much I hated Bovril.

But Bovril aside, that was always the best time of the day, after school. What you won’t remember, what you don’t know, is what Piet and I and Belinda got up to down in the basement, when you weren’t there. You remember Belinda from across the road? The three musketeers, you always called us. But we weren’t the three musketeers at all, not for long anyway, not after what we found down in the basement that day.

You didn’t like us to go down to the basement on our own because the wooden steps were too steep and they were rotten as well in places. That’s why you kept the door locked. There was all sorts of stuff down there, anything you didn’t want in the house or there wasn’t room for. You kept suitcases there, among other things. We knew they were down there because we’d helped fetch them up with you before we went off on holiday to Bournemouth, the first holiday I ever went on, the first time I saw the sea.

We noticed then where you kept the key, up on the ledge above the door. I couldn’t reach it, even standing on a chair, but Piet could. So that’s how we got in there without you or anyone knowing. We just waited until the coast was clear, got the key, and down we went. The place was stuffed full of trunks and tea chests, iron bedsteads and mattresses, boxes of old clothes – wonderful for dressing up – and papers and broken picture frames. It was a real Aladdin’s cave, full of treasures waiting to be discovered. But it was musty and dusty down there and full of cobwebs, and more than once when I came down the steps I saw rats scuttling away into dark corners. At least the light worked – only dimly. But it did mean that it wasn’t as scary as it might otherwise have been.

There was a small fireplace in the basement: at one time someone had used it, because the whole place reeked of soot and smoke. There was a heap of ashes in the grate, and the feathery skeleton of a jackdaw or a crow lying on top, wings outstretched – it must have fallen down the chimney. There was a Belfast sink in the corner with a tap, always dripping away the seconds.

One trunk in particular fascinated us because it was covered in labels, and on every one of them a picture of a ship – one was called the Mauretania, another the Queen Elizabeth. Who knew what treasures it contained? But what excited us most about the trunk was that it was locked. We had to imagine what was in there, and our imaginings led us naturally to pirates – treasure chests and pirates go together, don’t they. So that was partly, I suppose, why I came to think of that dark and dingy basement as a pirate’s lair. The iron hooks hanging from the ceiling only served to confirm it. When we first saw the hooks, Piet and I knew at once that this place had to be Captain Hook’s treasure cave. This was where Captain Hook from Peter Pan kept all his treasure and his spare hooks for his arm, in case he lost one in a fight, we thought.

Once we’d found that key, Piet and Belinda and I would be down in the basement whenever we could, mostly after school, mostly when you went away or whenever you were out and left us with Aunty B and Aunty J, our live-in babysitters. We got up to all sorts of tricks with them, which was wicked of us, I know that now. We only got away with it because they adored us. The best trick of all was to disappear down to the basement and then come up again after hiding away for a while to find them all of a fluster and running around the house like headless chickens looking for us. Poor Aunty B. Poor Aunty J. But I have to say it was fun, being so horrible.

In spite of the hours we spent down there, we didn’t come across the witches’ cauldron for some time. It was hardly surprising – there was just so much fascinating stuff to sift through and explore. The tea chests were stuffed with old photos and papers and newspaper cuttings, which Belinda would read out to us because she was the best reader. We found an entire treasure trove of family heirlooms, each one wrapped up in newspaper – pewter cups, china plates and ornaments, vases. But as soon as we found the witches’ cauldron, nothing else mattered to us.

Piet discovered it under a pile of coal sacks in a dark, dank corner. It was heavy, black and pot-bellied, with handles, and stood on three clawed feet.

‘Look,’ Piet whispered – we always talked in whispers down in the basement. ‘It’s a witches’ cauldron. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.’

‘We could do spells and things,’ Belinda said.

I was up those stairs like a bat out of hell. It was at least a week before they could persuade me to go down to that basement again, and then it was only because of Belinda, because I didn’t want to look like a scaredy-cat in front of her.

You used to tease me about Belinda, Mum. Only gently, but it made me blush and get cross. You were right, though: I did love her. She used to sit next to me in class and she was very clever. She’d always be first with her hand up and would finish her letter-copying before anyone else. She often used to get ten out of ten for her spelling, and could read aloud almost as fluently as our teacher, Miss Cruickshank. What’s more, Belinda could add up and take away in her head, without using her fingers. She was a genius. She could hopscotch better than anyone in the whole school, and stand on her head for over five minutes. Plus, she was pretty. She had red hair and her eyes were green as beech leaves in spring. She was also Piet’s girlfriend, but we were young enough for none of that to matter.

I’d never have dared to do it if Belinda hadn’t suggested it. We were on our way back from school one afternoon. She and Piet were walking ahead of me, whispering to one another. I caught up with them.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ Piet replied. ‘It’s about witches.’

‘I’m not scared,’ I told him.

So he went on, ‘I was telling Belinda about the three witches and the “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble” spell and she said why didn’t we do it together, y’know, with the cauldron? We could make a fire, put in the frogs and newts and stuff, say the spell. We could be the three witches. I said you wouldn’t want to do it.’

‘I would,’ I insisted.

‘See?’ Belinda said. ‘I told you he’d do it, Piet. I’ll make the hats. We’ve got to have witches’ hats or the spell won’t work.’

That was it. There was no way I could get out of it now.

It all happened while you were away. I think it was one of those times you went off to America with him, with our stepfather. I remember the postcards you sent us of the Empire State Building and one of the Statue of Liberty. I’ve still got them somewhere hidden away, in some trunk in our attic, I suppose. We didn’t ever like you going off with him. But when you went away, there was always one major compensation. Aunty B and Aunty J would look after us, which meant of course that we could do pretty much as we liked.

Belinda set it all up, made the hats as she said she would, told us what to do and how to do it. She said it was the boys’ job to make the fire, that girls didn’t do that sort of thing. She sat on the locked trunk with the ship pictures all over it, kicking her heels, and watched as Piet and I did our best to get the fire to light. We got through half a box of pink-tipped Swan Vestas and still nothing would burn. Everything we tried was too damp – old newspapers, magazines, sacks, socks even. We tried blowing and fanning. Nothing worked. Belinda kept telling us we had to keep at it and it would light. ‘Easy as pie,’ she said. ‘You’ve just got to blow harder.’

Then she patted the trunk. ‘What’s in this anyway?’ she asked, her legs swinging, her heels drumming on the trunk.

‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘It’s locked.’

At that moment the lock flew open.

‘It’s not,’ she said, and she got off the trunk and lifted the lid. We all peered in. There were letters and photos, hundreds of them. She picked one out.

‘Who wrote this?’

It was your handwriting, Mum. And when Belinda started reading, it sounded just like your voice talking.

After just a few moments, Belinda stopped reading aloud and began reading the letter to herself.

‘Golly gosh,’ she whispered.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What does it say?’

‘It’s all about love,’ she said. ‘Listen.’

Darling J,

I love you, you know I do. But I just don’t know if I can go ahead with it. Don’t think badly of me. I know I am weak. I know I need your strength around me. I love you, darling. Always.

Kate

She handed me the letter.

‘That’s our mum,’ I told her. ‘Sometimes she’s Kate, sometimes Kippe, sometimes Catherine. But that’s how she writes, that’s her handwriting.’

‘There’s lots more like this,’ Belinda said. Piet snatched the letter out of my hand. ‘You shouldn’t be reading it,’ he said, and there were tears in his voice. ‘It’s private.’

That’s when Piet spotted the photograph lying there in the trunk in among the letters. He reached down and picked it up.

‘It’s their wedding,’ he said. ‘That’s him, our real father, in the uniform. And that’s our mum.’

We stared at it in silence.

‘She looks so beautiful,’ Belinda whispered.

‘That’s private too,’ Piet said, as he dropped the photograph and the letter back into the trunk, and shut the lid.

I should never have said it, but I did. ‘That letter, it looked dry, it felt dry,’ I said. ‘If that one was dry, they’ll all be dry.’

That’s how we got the fire going, Mum, with your letters. So that’s my first confession. I’m not sure even now exactly what made us do such a terrible thing. Make no mistake, we all knew it was terrible, not just me. Piet didn’t want to do it. I’ve got to tell you that. But I talked him round. I persuaded him that burning your letters wouldn’t really matter because they couldn’t be that important. After all, why would they be left in a trunk in the basement if they were? Eventually he gave way, but only reluctantly and because, like Belinda and me, he really wanted to get that fire lit and the cauldron bubbling.

We all wanted that, but if I’m honest I think there was another reason too. There were things in that letter, and probably in all the others, that I didn’t want to hear about or even know about. I prefer to think of course that after failing so often to get a fire lit, we burned the letters in the trunk because they were our last hope. Anything that would burn was all right. But I know now that wouldn’t be entirely true. What is true is that if we hadn’t burned them, none of the rest of this would have happened.

Remember when we were a little older and you used to read us those C. S. Lewis books, the Narnia books? And how, although you loved them, I never really got on with them? Well, maybe what happened next was our Lion, Witch and Wardrobe moment. Only we didn’t walk through the back of a bedroom cupboard into a never-never land and discover a rather goody-two-shoes lion walking about – I could never believe in that lion or the never-never land either. Our Narnia was real bricks and mortar, and we didn’t get to it through a cupboard, but through a wall.

Piet was kneeling down, ready to light the letters we’d piled in the fireplace, and Belinda and I were scouting around for any bits of wood we could find – I broke up an empty tea chest, I remember. And there was our old playpen already in pieces, so we used that. The letters caught fire at once, and within moments there was smoke billowing out into the basement. Soon we were all coughing and choking, frantically trying to wave the smoke away. Piet saw it first because he was closer to the fireplace than we were.

‘It’s not going up the chimney at all,’ he spluttered. I noticed then that he was leaning forward, hand over his mouth, peering into the chimney. ‘It’s going out the back. The smoke, it’s going out through the bricks at the back of the fireplace. Look!’

Crouching down, through the clearing smoke, we could see that he was right. Piet had picked up the old chair leg he’d been using as a poker and began prodding at the bricks. ‘They’re loose,’ he said. ‘You can see them, they’re moving – look!’

Now he was not just prodding, he was poking at them hard. That was when there was a sudden avalanche of bricks and the whole back wall behind the fireplace fell away. We were looking out through a huge hole into the bomb site beyond.

The bomb site next door had that high chain-link fence on the street side of it, remember? The sign read ‘Keep Out’. You told us again and again never to climb the fence and go in there, that the walls were dangerous and could collapse at any moment, that there might even be unexploded bombs. More than once you told us about Malcolm, the teenage boy from down the street who used to go climbing the walls in there before the fence was put up, and how he’d fallen and broken his neck and how his legs didn’t work any more – you pointed him out once in his wheelchair outside the corner shop. So Piet and I had never dared venture in there.

Belinda had though. She’d crawled in lots of times, she said, through a hole in the fence, and nothing had happened to her. And I’d stood there often enough, gazing into the bomb site from the street, fingers hooked into the fence, just longing to go in and explore. Now was our chance. More than a chance. That hole in the wall was an open invitation.

Once we’d scrambled through the hole and out into the bomb site we found we were not overlooked at all. We were well hidden from the road by the ruins and the thick undergrowth and trees, which seemed to be sprouting everywhere, even out of the walls themselves. The place was like a jungle and there was no one in it but us. Belinda discovered another fireplace, just like ours in the basement of the ruins of the house adjoining ours. We knew we couldn’t light a fire for fear of discovery, but we had our cauldron and our hats and our ‘Bubble, bubble’ spell. We’d look for frogs and toads, find whatever we could and then imagine the rest, she said. We got lucky and found a frog and a few beetles and caterpillars. We managed to drag our cauldron through the hole, set it in the fireplace in the basement of the bombed-out house, and very soon we had collected enough hopping and wriggling and crawling things to make a proper witches’ spell. But there was no water in the cauldron and no fire. We’d have to see if the spell would work without.

So there we sat, the three of us, in our witches’ hats. We held hands around the cauldron, closed our eyes and chanted our ‘Bubble, bubble’ witches’ ditty. Then, believing in these dark powers as hard as we could (the technique for me was much the same as praying, it had to be done with eyes squeezed shut), we put spells on all the people we hated. Belinda chose Miss Cruickshank because she was always picking on her in class for having inky fingers or a blunt pencil. She turned her into a frog – it would serve her right, she said, because she had poppy eyes. Piet chose Ma Higgins at the corner shop who we were sure cheated us whenever we went in to buy three pennyworth of lemon sherbets or humbugs or liquorice. She had a wart on her nose and he used his spell to make her grow at least twenty more. As for me, I chose Aunty B because she kept saying that Piet and I should be more grateful to our stepfather, that he was a much better father than our real dad because our real dad had gone off and left us. I knew that was a lie. So I decided to put my witch’s spell on her. She had a big nose anyway. My spell would make her nose grow longer and longer, just like Pinocchio’s when he told fibs. We sat there, eyes squeezed, for ages, until it came on to rain. Then we decided it was time to let the little creatures go and we went back through the hole into our basement, dragging the cauldron with us.

The days that followed were disappointing. Miss Cruickshank did not turn into a frog. Ma Higgins still only had one wart, and Aunty B’s nose stayed just about the same. Our spells hadn’t worked. We knew exactly why things hadn’t gone as well as they should have done: we needed to light a real fire, to boil the water so that it bubbled and so that we could do the whole spell properly. Piet said that maybe it was also because we were being mean with our spells, that witches didn’t have to do bad things, that maybe we could make good wishes come true using the same spells.

In any case, we knew we couldn’t light a fire because we’d be seen. So for quite a while, even though we went on playing in the bomb site, we forgot about being witches and casting spells. Instead we played war games among the ruins – that was my idea. I liked war games and I liked hide-and-seek. So I decided one of us would be a German and go and hide while the other two counted to a hundred. Then the German would be hunted down and killed – shot or bayoneted. Bayoneted was best. I liked it when it was Piet’s turn to be the German, and then Belinda and I could hunt him. But my turn always came round. Being the German could be a bit scary. One afternoon Belinda and Piet just left me hiding there in the bomb site and it got darker and darker and they never found me. I was there for hours. Afterwards they told me they’d given up because they couldn’t find me, but I reckoned they were just having me on. I sulked for a long time after that. I was good at sulking, remember, Mum?

Then one day we woke up to the thickest, yellowest London smog we’d ever had, and we decided we’d chance it. Smoke and fog – it would look the same. It even smelt the same. We’d light a fire in the bomb site and do the whole witches’ spell as it should be done. We used the rest of your letters from the trunk and got a good fire going, filled the cauldron with water from the tap, and collected any little creatures we could find – worms mostly and snails (not the right creatures perhaps, but the best we could manage) and we boiled them, I’m ashamed to say. We sat there in our pointed hats, the smog and smoke swirling around us, waiting for the water to bubble. When it did, we joined hands and did our ‘Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble’ chant several times. Then we squeezed our eyes tight shut and each of us made a wish – a good wish, as Piet reminded us it had to be, not a wicked one, and we had to tell one another what our wish was.

‘You go first then, Piet,’ Belinda whispered after a while. Eyes closed, Piet chanted the ‘Bubble, bubble’ spell, and then began: ‘I wish … I wish that when I grow up I’ll be a famous actor. I want to be like that one we saw in the film of Henry V – Laurence something. I’ll wear armour like he did and a helmet, and charge into battle on my horse waving my sword, and I’ll be shouting, “For Harry, England and St George!”’ He opened his eyes and smiled at us. ‘Be good, that,’ he said. ‘Your go, Michael.’

But I didn’t want my go yet because I still hadn’t made up my mind. The truth was that Piet’s wish sounded so good that now I found myself wanting almost the same as he had wished for. But there was a difference. I didn’t want only to be an actor playing Henry V, I wanted to be him, the real king, Henry V himself. I knew it would sound silly – I understood even then that it was an impossibility to make a wish like that come true, even if we got the witches’ spell right this time. I’d have to think of another wish, one that had a chance of coming true. I needed time.

‘No. You go next, Belinda,’ I said.

Belinda rattled through the spell and then made her wish. ‘I want to be like Florence Nightingale,’ she said quietly. ‘I want to nurse all the soldiers and sailors and pilots who were wounded in the war. I want to make them better again like she did.’

I could tell as she said it that Belinda meant every word. And that was what I had to do, I thought. I had to mean it. That way it might come true.

‘All right,’ I began, my eyes as tight shut as they would go, willing my wish to happen, ‘I want to be like my uncle Pieter. I want to be a Spitfire pilot and shoot down German planes, and then the King would give me the Victoria Cross.’

I opened my eyes to find Piet frowning at me, angrily almost, and I knew it must have upset him somehow.

‘You can’t be him. He’s dead,’ he said. ‘And I’m the one who’s named after him, not you, so you’ve got to make another wish. It’s all silly anyway. You can’t be someone you’re not. And besides, you didn’t say the “Bubble, bubble” spell, so it won’t work.’

I was about to argue with him when we heard the voice. It came from somewhere above us. We looked up. Through the smog we could see a young man sitting high up on a window ledge on the top of the ruins.

‘Your brother’s right, Michael,’ he said. ‘You can’t be someone you’re not, not your uncle Pieter, not Laurence Olivier either, not Florence Nightingale. I reckon you’ve got to be yourself.’

He climbed down and came over to us. He was wearing a light blue overcoat and a scarf. His face broke into a smile. ‘I like the hats,’ he said, crouching down beside us. ‘And you make fine witches. You did all the “Bubble, bubble” baloney really well. Almost had me believing in it myself.’

Struck dumb, the three of us just sat there, simply gaping at him.

‘All those spells,’ the stranger went on, ‘it’s a load of twaddle, y’know. Nothing but hocus-pocus. And by the way, it’s not “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble”, it’s “Double, double toil and trouble”. I was in the play once. I’m an actor; I know. I played Banquo, got myself murdered on a late-night walk. All this wishing you do – it’s fine, and hoping is fine, too. And you’re right, you can try, you must try to make your hopes and your wishes come true. But you have to be careful what you wish for. You have to think things through. They mustn’t be just flights of fancy. Dangerous stuff, fancy. I’ve been watching you three for quite a while now, sitting and chanting your spells around your cauldron, playing your war games all around the bomb site. I know I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping, but I haven’t got much else to do these days. And when I heard you making your wishes just now, I thought I’d better speak up, tell you what I think, tell you what I know.’

We still couldn’t say a word. He was holding out his hands over the fire to warm them.

‘It really upsets me, y’know, to see you playing your war games,’ he went on. ‘And all of you just now, all of your wishes, one way or another, had something to do with war. And that worries me. I’ve been in a war. These ruins, that’s what war does. That’s bad enough, but it does more than that. Look around you.’

As he spoke, out of the smog the ruins seemed to grow and take shape and form roofs, chimneys, windows, doors. The houses rebuilt themselves before our eyes. We were still sitting over the cauldron, but now we were in the back garden of a house. There was blue sky above and butterflies chasing one another and sparrows bickering on the lawn. Nearby there were children playing in a sandpit, and a mother in a headscarf was calling out of the window for them to come in for tea. By the back door an old man, mouth wide open, lay fast asleep in a deckchair, his slippers on, an open book resting on his chest.

‘And tell your grandad to come in too,’ the mother was saying. ‘And don’t forget to wipe your feet and wash your hands.’

There was music playing on a gramophone from inside the house, and we could hear the rag-and-bone-man’s horse clopping along the street: ‘Any old iron? Any old iron?’ came the cry.

As the sound of the horse’s hooves died away the children went inside, one of them stopping to shake Grandpa awake. The old man stood up, looking directly at us, but not seeing us, and there was a terrible sadness in his eyes as he looked up into the sky. The fog came swirling down again around him, and around us. He disappeared into it and the houses were suddenly ruins again. When the fog cleared, moments later, the stranger was gone too, vanished. But we heard his voice again from high up on the wall above us – only his voice. He was nowhere to be seen.

‘All of them are gone. Dead,’ he said. ‘One bombing raid, that’s all it took. Mum, grandad, the children, the rag-and-bone-man and his horse too. All gone in one night. That’s what war does. You remember that.’ Those were the last words he spoke.

The three of us were still holding hands, and we soon discovered we’d all seen and heard the same thing. We had imagined nothing. We made a pact there and then that we would never tell another living soul. For weeks afterwards, Piet and I, when we were alone at home, couldn’t talk about anything else. We were forever trying to puzzle it out. And at school, the three of us stuck together in the playground as if protecting our unspoken secret. When the usual war games started up around us, we never once joined in.

It was my idea to see if we could make it happen again, bring back the ghost of the stranger – because all of us agreed by now that that’s what he must have been, a ghost. Piet and Belinda were more nervous than I was, but I persuaded them. We needed to find out who he was and why he’d come to see us.

We decided it would be sensible to wait for the next smog and light the fire under the cauldron just as we had before. But the smog never came, and in the end we lost patience. We would try bringing him back without the cauldron. After all he’d said it himself: the witches’ spell was a lot of baloney.

Two or three times we sat there in the bomb site holding hands, the three of us willing him to come back, or at least to speak to us. Each time, nothing. We had no choice in the end but to risk it, to try the cauldron way again – it had worked before. And if we built the fire in the late evening, quite close to the hole in the wall, no one would see the flames from the street, nor the smoke in the gathering dark.

So one evening, that’s exactly what we did. We used the last of the letters from the trunk, along with bits of twigs we’d found in the bomb site, and lit our fire under the cauldron. A few creepy-crawly creatures – spiders and beetles – had found their way into the cauldron on their own. Because they’d almost volunteered to be boiled, we didn’t feel quite so bad about it. There we sat in the half-dark, holding hands, eyes closed and reciting ‘Double, double toil and trouble’, with the right words this time, and in unison, over and over again, wishing, hoping, willing the stranger to reappear.

But no voice spoke to us. No one came, nothing happened. We tried again and again. But it just didn’t work.

‘Maybe we imagined it all,’ Belinda said. But she knew, we all knew that we hadn’t. It must have been almost bedtime when we heard Aunty B and Aunty J calling for us up and down the street, and we had to give up. When we appeared, we made up a story about having been at choir practice in the church hall, which they seemed to believe (they always believed whatever we told them). Belinda went off home and that was that. Or so we thought.

That night Piet and I were shaken out of sleep by Aunty B and Aunty J. They were frantic, sobbing as they dragged us down the smoke-filled stairs and out into the cold night air. There we stood, shivering on the pavement. I was only half-awake and didn’t understand what was going on until we heard the bells of the fire engine. Our house was on fire! We watched in fascination and horror as the hoses were wound out and the firemen went running into our house. They broke down the fence in the bomb site.

There were dozens of people in the street by now, all in dressing gowns. Belinda’s mother, in her curlers, gave Aunty B and Aunty J tots of whisky to calm them down. As for Belinda and Piet and me, we stood together, watching the drama unfold, all of us knowing full well, of course, how the fire had started.

The fire officer was talking to Aunty B and Aunty J. ‘It looks like some idiot, some old tramp maybe, has gone in that bomb site and started a fire to keep himself warm.’ He shook his head. ‘Though what an old witches’ cauldron is doing down there, God only knows. We’ve managed to confine the fire to your basement, but it’s totally burned out in there, gutted. There’s only smoke damage in the house itself, though we’ve had to use a lot of water to get the fire under control, so it’s a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. Still, we must be thankful for small mercies’ – he ruffled my hair – ‘these little mercies I’m talking about. You got them to safety and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it, when all’s said and done?’

The three of us didn’t dare look at one another, or at anyone else, in case the guilt showed in our eyes. We went to sleep in Belinda’s house that night, and stayed there for a week or more while Aunty B and Aunty J got the house cleared up for your return. I remember them breaking the news of the fire to you on the doorstep and how you tried to comfort them as, tearfully, they relived every moment of it. You kept hugging them, telling them how wonderful they had been to save Pieter and me, and in the end that seemed to make them feel better.

But Piet and I didn’t feel better. We haven’t felt better about it all our lives, and to be honest, telling you about it now hasn’t helped as much as I hoped it might. Hiding this terrible secret from you, for as long as we have, has been at least as bad as the guilt we felt on the night it happened. It seems confession is not enough.

The trouble is there’s another secret we never told you. It’s not as bad as the burning of your love-letters and your wedding photo, or setting fire to the house, but it was a secret we couldn’t tell, because if we had told it, all the others would have come out too.

The Christmas after the fire Gran came to stay, if you remember. She gave you a present. You opened it and showed it to us, probably with tears in your eyes – you always had tears in your eyes when you spoke about him.

‘Look, boys, what Gran has given us,’ you said. ‘It’s a photo of your uncle Pieter in his RAF uniform. Doesn’t he look fine?’

You passed it to Piet and me. It was the first time we’d ever seen a photo of him. Looking up at us, out of the silver frame, without any question, was the face of the stranger we had met in the bomb site that foggy day. We knew it at once.

That is the secret I feel saddest about now, because it might have been a great comfort to you if we’d had the courage to tell you.

Some time after you died, far from any of us, out in America, in Washington, I happened to find myself near St Eval in Cornwall at the RAF station where I’d been told Uncle Pieter’s plane had crashed in 1941. I stood there on what was left of the runway and told him at last that I knew it had been him who came to see us in the bomb site all those years before. He didn’t speak, I didn’t see him – but he was there, I am sure of it. And you were there too, Mum, I’m sure of that as well. It was a spring day. The hawthorns were white in the hedges, the daffodils blowing in the wind, and the blackbirds calling to one another over the fields.