26 Years Online
••• The International Writers Magazine - Dreamscapes Fiction - WW2 YA Story
'Ever thought what life would be like if Britain had lost the war - then read Repercussions'

The REPERCUSSIONS of TOMAS D One Small Lie - Can Change History Forever ISBN-13: 978-1491032015 Hammer & Tong Publications (Print or Kindle) Sam Hawksmoor Tomas is a boy haunted by a nightmare of being bombed. Night after night in his dreams he runs to the bomb shelter as the sirens scream. Every morning he wakes gasping for breath surprised to be alive. Now it is suddenly very real. He has no idea how he got to 1941, or how he will get back. Worse, the only person who believes he's from the future might be a German spy!

Tomas' Nightmare

Tomas staggered to the open window.  The whole of his attic bedroom vibrated with the swelling sound of approaching bombers.  Air-raid sirens were winding up to a crescendo all over the city.  Searchlights pierced the sky, their bright beams seeking out the enemy.  Artillery tracer fire sped skyward, finding nothing.
            Invisible in the darkness, the bombers relentlessly flew towards the city in their hundreds.  The night sky was choked with them, a swarm of lethal giant bats.  Tomas knew he had to run for the shelter to save himself, nevertheless foolishly remained fixed to the spot.
            He remembered all the details.  He runs to the shelter.  It is packed with anxious people.  There’s always a girl in a blue smock with a runny nose, a policeman who will soon have his head split open.  There will be some man playing a sad tune on a harmonica.  The air is stale and filled with dread.  Hundreds of eyes will swivel upwards to the crypt’s brick ceiling, hoping that this time the deadly bomb won’t fall.
             He has dreamt this at least twelve times now, and each time the bomb falls he has woken up, choking desperately in his bed.
            The bombers are getting closer now, almost directly overhead, the night air quaking with the roar of their massive engines.  Then comes the terrible shriek of the high explosive bombs falling over the city and docks.
             He must run, save himself.  But he doesn’t move a muscle.  Even though he knows one particular bomb will fall any second now.  The one that will completely destroy his house.
            He wills himself to stay.  It’s only a nightmare after all.  In a moment he knows he will wake choking, his nostrils filled with brick dust and the smell of freshly spilled blood.
            The bomb is coming.  He closes his eyes.  He is ready.
            Tomas hears the shriek of the falling bomb ripping through the night air.  He knows he is about to die once more.  Last thing he will remember will be the pages on the wall calendar curling and bursting into flames.  Somehow he knows that bomb is aimed at him.  Whether he goes to the shelter or stays at home – it will always find him.

THE STORM

After school Tomas was examining his new glasses in the reflection of an estate agent’s window. 
            Thunder rolled overhead and it was growing really dark.
            Tomas hesitated.  His bike was locked to the railings by Waitrose car park.  He’d never get it unlocked and home before the heavens opened.  Lou-Lou's café was his best option.  They wouldn’t mind.  He was a regular.
            Lightning exploded right beside him.  He sprinted though crackling, electrified air, his hair standing up with shock.  A double clap of thunder followed, so loud it shook nearby buildings.  Tomas swung his school bag around his neck as rain fell like stair rods.  A car hooted as he dashed across the road, the rain swilling around blocked drains.  Lightning flashed again as he jumped across a puddle and he could smell burning – saw a crimson brightness all around him.  Rain fell hard around him with an intense hiss of anger, more lightning and thunder followed out of the blackened sky.
            He reached the café doors and burst in, slamming it shut behind him to stop the rain coming in with him.  He turned around, wiping the water from his eyes, shaking it off his blazer and bag.  He realised that his hair and sleeves were singed.  He’d nearly been fried out there.
            He blinked.
            This wasn’t the café.
            He was in a butcher’s shop.
            Thunder rolled overhead again and two men in butcher’s aprons looked at him with surprise.
            ‘Bit wet out is it?’  They laughed.  It wasn’t even funny.
            ‘Sorry.  Thought it was the café.  Wasn’t looking where I was going,’ Tomas told them turning around as if to leave.
            The door was exactly the same as Lou-Lou’s Café – clearly he had made some stupid mistake.
            ‘Stay lad.  Can’t have you going out in that.’
            Tomas looked back at the butchers and the lone customer in her headscarf and realised he was staring at the same tiling on the floor as in Lou-Lou’s.  How was that even possible?  He looked up.  The same hooks hung from the ceiling.  This was most definitely Lou-Lou’s, but somehow in the brief time he went to get his glasses it had been turned back into a butcher’s.  Impossible.
            ‘You all right lad?  Never seen liver before?’
            Tomas realised that the man was chopping liver on the wooden butcher’s block counter.
            ‘You’re a lucky woman, Violet.  There’ll be a rush as soon as they discover we’ve got liver in.  Lucky for you liver’s off ration as well.  Two ounces?’
            ‘I was hoping for more.  There’s four of us now.’
            The butcher pulled a face.  ‘There’s quite a few who’d fancy this.  Three ounces and that’s it.  Fourpence ha’penny.’
            ‘For liver, Mr Braithwaite?’
            ‘That’s the price, Violet.  There’s a war on y’know.’
            Tomas stared.  He was in a butcher’s shop.  It was selling meat by the ounce and the woman was dressed like she was from a play or something.  He figured that he’d either been hit on the head by lightning or …
            The rain intensified.  Tomas turned to look outside and realised with horror that Waitrose supermarket had disappeared.  Instead there were houses and more shops.  No sign of his bike, or the railings that he’d locked it to.  There was only one car parked in the street; a vintage black car flying a sodden Navy flag.  There was a horse and cart, the poor horse just standing and steaming as the rain fell on its back.
            This had to be his nightmare back again.  But he had no recollection of going home, let alone going to bed.  He dug his phone out of his pocket.  It was 4.45pm.  No Service.  He turned it off, never a good idea to have a phone on during lightning.
            ‘I hope this storm keeps up,’ one of the butchers said.  ‘They won’t be bombing us tonight in this.’
            ‘Bombing?’  Tomas asked turning his head.
            ‘You sure you’re all right, lad?’ He sniffed the air and caught the smell of Tomas’ burnt hair and cloth.  ‘Close shave you had there, sonny.  Lightning must have wanted you for tea.  You look pale.  What’s the uniform?’
            ‘Millbrook.’  Tomas replied, surprised.  ‘It’s been there eighty years.’
            ‘Millbrook College?  It’s the public school on Elm Grove.  For toffs,’ Violet declared with a rasp of her cigarette throat.  ‘It just opened before the war.  Eighty years?  More like five.’
            Five?  Tomas was thinking.  They were wrong.  Had to be.
            ‘Oh, he’s a toff,’ the butcher remarked with a smirk.
            Tomas was annoyed.  ‘I’m not a toff.  I got there on a scholarship.’
            The butcher looked at Violet and raised his eyebrows.  Tomas was a toff to him at least.  Scholarship meant bright and Tomas was bright.  Couldn’t help it.  It was Gabby that had made him enter for the scholarship and her father who’d coached him through it.  Another case of Gabby looking out for him.
            ‘Can I ask what today is?’  Tomas asked, confused.  ‘I mean the date?’
            ‘Hear that, Vi?  Pay all that money to go to a posh school and he doesn’t even know what date it is.’
            ‘I…’ Tomas was embarrassed now and prepared to leave.
            ‘It’s May the 8th lad.’  He turned to the woman as he wrapped the liver.  ‘Bombing raids on Liverpool and London again last night and pretty much everywhere in between.  They say they downed 40 bombers but hundreds got through. It’s sinful, Vi.  Sinful.  If we don’t do something about it England will be under the German jackboot by ’42, mark my words, and it ain’t treason to think it.  They’ll be back here again no doubt.  I’ve given up replacing the glass in the windows at home.’
            ‘It’s 1941!’  Tomas felt dizzy with realisation.  ‘We’re at war?’
            They laughed at him.
            ‘And it’ll be over by Christmas,’ the butcher added.  They all laughed bitterly.
            Tomas was reeling.  Surely this was totally impossible.  It was May 8th when he left the opticians.  It was still May 8th, but seventy-three years earlier.  Utterly impossible.  He was dreaming for sure.
            The air-raid siren began to crank up.
            ‘Bloody hell, talk of the devil.  Those bastards.  Can we get no peace?  Get to the shelter.  Away with you all.’
            Tomas opened the door and Violet dashed passed him in a rush to get outside.            ‘Buggers come early.  Our boys will be waiting for the storm to end and here they come again.  We’ve suffered enough.  There’s nothing left standing in the port.’
            The butcher grabbed his gas mask box and pushed Tomas out into the rain and locked the door behind him.  Tomas began to run, following those who were running towards the end of the street and the Chapel.  He saw that some of the buildings around him were in ruins, propped up with huge wooden beams.
            The sirens were still screaming in waves, up and down, but the distinct sound of approaching bombers was audible.  It was still daylight.  Tomas didn’t remember any daylight raids in his war movies.
            ‘Come on,’ a man in uniform with a whistle urged him.  ‘Get down to the shelter, boy.  Where’s your gas mask?’
            Tomas ignored him, followed a young girl in a blue smock down the slippery stone Chapel steps and stepped into the shelter.
            He knew that smell.
            He knew this place.
            He had been buried alive here.  Twelve times so far.
            This was his nightmare.  This was where he came to in his dreams.  Here was the girl in the blue smock who would sit with him and hold his hand because she was scared.  Behind him came in the policeman carrying his torch; he would die when his head split open.  In came the woman with biscuits and water.
            In front of him would be a naval officer and some woman in a brown coat.  It could have been his mother.  The officer was reassuring her in a very loud rather pompous voice.
            ‘It’s quite safe.  This shelter has survived everything they can throw at it.  This attack is new, though.  Daylight raid, during a storm.  They knew they’d catch us unawares.  Did you hear about Liverpool?  Bombed flat it was.  Birkenhead too.’
            Tomas was in a daze.  He took his place on a thick oak side bench, next to the girl.  The doors closed.  The bombers drew closer and closer.  The air seemed to throb and vibrate as they flew over and water flowed in under the door because it was still raining.  Tomas knew that this was no small raid, there had to be a hundred bombers overhead to make this much noise.
            ‘Perhaps they’ll fly over.  Perhaps they’ll go inland,’ someone said, shaking like a leaf and crossing themselves.
            ‘No.  They’ll drop them here,’ Tomas answered. 
            People looked at him in his school uniform and frowned.  He guessed no one wanted to hear that.  He looked behind him.  The poster was there from his dream.
            Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution, Will Bring Us Victory.
            The planes were directly overhead now.  This was exactly like his dream. They would fly over the Chapel and drop their bombs on the harbour.  A navy destroyer would be caught out.  He could see the relief on everyone’s faces as the bombers passed over.  Saw them wince as they could feel the impact of bombs falling a mile further on in the docks.  Tomas was aware that people would think it was all over, if it was his regular nightmare.  Sure enough a man began playing his harmonica and the woman with biscuits was handing them out to those near her.
            ‘Just like the raid on March 10th.  They go for the docks every time,’ someone was saying.  ‘I was there when the Victory nearly burned.  Scorched the timbers. Those bastards got no respect for history.’  The lights flickered.  Someone was crying.  A mother was trying to sing a child to sleep.
            ‘We should get under the bench, it’s safer,’ Tomas suggested to the girl in the blue dress.  She was about eleven, he guessed, had snot hanging from one nostril and her leather sandals were sopping wet.
            She stared at him for a second, then nodded.  She didn’t question him.  Others, including the policeman, looked at them funny as they crept under the sturdy chapel benches.  The girl held his hand.  She was shaking.  He noticed that she had a small kitten in her bag, which was mewing.  That detail had never been in the dream before. Some people put on their gas masks, Tomas thought they looked ridiculous, but then again they didn’t know that the Germans wouldn’t be using poison gas.
            ‘They’ll call the all clear in a moment,’ the policeman said confidently.
            ‘Why aren’t they firing back?  Where’s the Ack-Ack?’   Someone was asking, their tone more uncertain now.
            ‘It’s the rain,’ Tomas said.  ‘No one was ready.’  He knew that the people manning the mobile guns were changing shifts when the bombers had come and the rain had stopped the line of communication working.  Worse, the intercepting RAF Hurricanes weren’t scrambled in time. 
            Now there was one last piece of the puzzle to play.  The lone bomber.  The one who flew in five minutes after the others.
            He heard it coming before everyone else.
            The siren started up again.  Someone started to cry.  Tomas could see the butcher’s feet all spattered with blood from where he crouched.
            Tomas pulled the girl’s head under the bench.  ‘Close your eyes and say a prayer.  There’s one more bomb to fall.’
            ‘How do you know?’ She asked.
            ‘I just know.  What’s your name?’
            ‘Cathy.’
            ‘Hold your breath when you hear the bomb falling, Cathy.’
            The bomber was right overhead.  The whole Chapel seemed to shake above their heads.  And then they all heard it.  The shriek of H.E. bombs falling directly overhead.  High Explosives to make everything burn.
            Some people began to yell, some to pray.  Everyone was looking up at the brick crypt ceiling, wondering how strong it really was.
            The blast was immense.  The flash of the explosion was just as Tomas remembered.  His nostrils were filled with dust and blood and his ears went deaf.  The walls and the very floor shook as bricks tumbled with a fierce force on their heads.
            And this time Tomas did not wake up choking in his bed.  But he was choking.

© Sam Hawksmoor May 2025
Buy the Paperback here - Or read on Kindle

Read about Gabriella, the girl Tomas left behind

More fiction on Dreamscapes or go to samhawksmoor.com

Share |