‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘All right. What shall we do now?’

Author’s Note

I’ve bent history a little bit. There really were such things as Pals’ Battalions, just as described here, and they really were a horribly innocent device for wiping out a whole generation of young men from one particular area with one cannon shell. But the practice died out by the summer of 1916, when the first Battle of the Somme took place. Nineteen thousand British soldiers died on the first day of the battle.

‘Thomas Atkins’ really was the name used on documents in the British Army in the way that people would now use ‘A. N. Other’, and ‘Tommy Atkins’ did become a nickname for the British soldier.

There were certainly a number of real Tommy Atkinses in the war. This book is dedicated to them – wherever they are.

Read On

If you enjoyed JOHNNY AND THE DEAD, you’ll love JOHNNY AND THE BOMB, the next adventure starring Johnny Maxwell.

Here’s the first chapter to get you started . . .

Chapter 1

After the Bombs

It was nine o’clock in the evening, in Blackbury High Street.

It was dark, with occasional light from the full moon behind streamers of worn-out cloud. The wind was from the south-west and there had been another thunderstorm, which freshened the air and made the cobbles slippery.

A policeman moved, very slowly and sedately, along the street.

Here and there, if someone was very close, they might have seen the faintest line of light around a blacked-out window. From within came the quiet sounds of people living their lives – the muffled notes of a piano as someone practised scales, over and over again, and the murmur and occasional burst of laughter from the wireless.

Some of the shop windows had sandbags piled in front of them. A poster outside one shop urged people to Dig For Victory, as if it were some kind of turnip.

On the horizon, in the direction of Slate, the thin beams of searchlights tried to pry bombers out of the clouds.

The policeman turned the corner, and walked up the next street, his boots seeming very loud in the stillness.

The beat took him up as far as the Methodist chapel, and in theory would then take him down Paradise Street, but it didn’t do that tonight because there was no Paradise Street any more. Not since last night.

There was a lorry parked by the chapel. Light leaked out from the tarpaulin that covered the back.

He banged on it.

‘You can’t park that ’ere, gents,’ he said. ‘I fine you one mug of tea and we shall say no more about it, eh?’

The tarpaulin was pushed back and a soldier jumped out. There was a brief vision of the interior – a warm tent of orange light, with a few soldiers sitting around a little stove, and the air thick with cigarette smoke.