A Childs War (21 page)

A few days later, the lieutenant came back unexpectedly, packed his things and said his farewells. He could not cope with language learning and was transferred back to his infantry unit. He seemed relieved and desperate at the same time. In a few days, Edna had a letter thanking her for her kind hospitality towards him and a postcard later from the Lake District, which contained no real news. George and Edna felt very sorry for him. He was at the age that any child they might have had when they were first married would have been. For a moment they forgot that all they had set out to do was raise their own income from the rent being paid for providing Americans with bed and board for a time. For many years the question was asked, “I wonder what did happen to poor Fred?” and they guessed at the answer, though no information came as to where, exactly, he met his end.

Arrangements were made for Christmas: George's mother and father were coming to stay for it and were going to arrive on Christmas Eve. Edna was very apprehensive because of the rough start to married life they had given her. So was George because he feared they might begin their campaign against her all over again. As for Alex, it had been such a long time since he had seen them that he could barely remember what they looked like.

George went to meet them at the station with Alex in tow and got off on the wrong foot because the train had already arrived. George recognized the short but upright figure of his father on the station steps, wearing his grey Homburg hat and his light coloured Burberry raincoat, and broke into a run to meet him. Though he knew it was not the best thing to say, he began with an apology,

“I'm sorry. The timetable said two twenty-six and it's only twenty past now.”

“Doesn't matter,” said his father. “Mother's still in the station minding the luggage.”

“You stay here with Alex,” said George. “I'll go and find her.”

Alex was left alone to look up at his grandfather and experience relief when he saw him smiling down.

“You're a lot bigger than you were when we last met, aren't you?” was the greeting offered to him.

“Yes,” was all he could think of to say, and they stood side by side looking at the other side of the railway bridge with the faded Shanks's Pony poster on it that had encouraged people to walk to their destinations. They were both beginning to feel cold and had not found any common ground for conversation as yet.

The embarrassment was ended when George re-emerged from the station with two cases and his mother. The first thing Alex noticed about his grandmother was her large hat: black with a crumpled silk flower in front. She caught hold of Alex's shoulders and bent down to give him a kiss, which tickled his face.

“He's grown, hasn't he, son?” she said to George, who could not help himself saying, “Yes. Little boys do,” in reply. The slight ground frost this caused soon passed, however, because Alex took charge of the situation. By this time they were near the road where they could see the railway bridge.

“That's where Mum and I saw a bus that was too big to go under have its top sliced off, Grandad.”

This meant that both George's parents talked to their grandson, going on in front of him, each holding one of Alex's hands and he was left merely to struggle with the two cases behind them, feeling his truss slipping and hoping that Christmas would not last too long.

Edna had put her coat on and come to wait by the front hedge. When she saw them crossing the canal bridge, she came to meet them. She went to her mother-in-law to kiss her, and then to her father-in-law. She saw George, and took one of the cases from him.

George's mother, seeing this, said,

“Are you fully recovered now, Edna?”

“I can manage most things now,” she replied and they were at the front gate, except there was no front gate any more: workmen had arrived one afternoon a while ago and taken it away, together with the railings that were under the privet hedge. All that remained of the gate was a small stump in the ground on which it used to swivel, the bracket where the top of it was and the end of the latch embedded in the party wall.

George breathlessly elbowed his way past Edna and Alex to be first at the open front door.

“Welcome to our home,” he said, smiling apprehensively at his father. “It isn't much compared with yours, but it's a roof over our head until things look up a bit.”

He then kicked himself mentally for being so diffident.

“Looks all right to me, son,” remarked his mother, and followed him in.

George carried the case he still had upstairs and made for the back room where all signs of Fred had gone and there was a new counterpane on the bed. His mother came in behind him, smiling. George was surprised to see that she looked old now. She had taken her hat off and her wispy hair, held in a little bun, was pure white, though it was no more than grey the last time he saw it. Her face had become very lined and her teeth looked too big for her face. He put the case down where she could unpack it and was about to go and get the other one when she held his arm and said,

“George, one of the reasons we have come is to stop you feeling that we are going to carry on disliking Edna for ever. Please stop behaving so awkwardly. Just be yourself and everything will be fine. You two have been through a lot together in the last three years and we have not come to make things more difficult. Your father is very anxious that we put things right, but you know he will never reveal his feelings. He has asked me to say this to you.”

Again, the discomfort was assuaged by Alex, who ran in to say,

“Gran, Mum says she's made the tea and would you like some now?”

“Tell Mum I'm coming right away and, yes, I would very much like a cup.” Then, smiling at George again, “I meant what I said, son.”

Leaving her coat and hat behind, she followed Alex downstairs.

George was bewildered. After twenty years of married life with Edna, his mother had never offered such an olive branch and here she was blurting all that out as soon as she arrived. He could not pretend that he was unhappy about it. He thought it very unlikely that his mother would say the same to Edna and he wondered why he should still feel like a schoolboy in her presence at the age of forty-two. He waited a bit. He was still fatigued by having carried both cases nearly all the way from the station and sat down on the small armchair by the window. He looked out on the untidy garden, past his shed and over the wall to the dairy where he spent his working hours and quietly said to anyone who was listening,

“Let it be true, what she said. That would be the best possible Christmas box.” He felt a little better then and came downstairs.

His father and mother were in the kitchen, sitting at the table, in front of a cake made from hoarded ingredients. They were eating large slices with enjoyment and praising Edna for having made it so well. She looked up with a puzzled expression on her face and then smiled at George in such a way as to let him know that the speech had been made to her too. Moreover she had been able, after all these years, to accept it as genuine. He cut himself a large slice of cake.

“I see you haven't lost your appetite for good things,” said his father, and all four laughed. Alex, in his room upstairs, heard them and was glad they were enjoying themselves.

Later, when George came back to Edna in the bedroom after putting a pillowcase with his presents in it for Alex at the bottom of his bed, she confirmed that George's mother had said the same to both of them.

“Let's hope it lasts,” said George, as his teeth plopped into their nightly glass of water.

“I don't know whether it will or whether it won't. You can't suddenly start trusting someone who has not lifted a finger in friendship to you for all these years. I think I trust your father, but your mother still sets my teeth on edge.”

“Even those teeth?” George laughed, pointing at the glass on the tallboy.

“Anyway,” concluded Edna, “It's Christmas tomorrow and we'll take what they've said at face value for the present.”

“Happy Christmas, girl,” said George.

“We'll see.”

This year, George had spent a little more time than usual in secret in his shed making Alex a bus conductor's ticket machine, complete with a punch for the cardboard tickets he had made, and with a bell that rang very realistically. The tickets were supplied in an appropriate wooden holder. He had put what he called “tiddly work” on the front of the ticket machine around the letters that stood for Oxford City Omnibus Company. Alex was very pleased and went to play with it behind the front room settee on which his grandparents were sitting.

George's father offered a parcel about eight inches long to Edna:

“From both of us, with love,” he said.

She took it diffidently. Previously she had been accustomed to receiving purely useful presents from them. George looked up from observing Alex making imaginative use of his gift, and met Edna's eye. “Go on, see what it is,” he mouthed at her while his parents were looking at her, waiting for her to do so.

She removed the wrapping paper to find a box with a jeweller's name on the lid and inside was a most elegant wristwatch made of silver with a thin leather strap.

“What a lovely watch,” she said, and put it on, seeing as she did so the hallmarks on the silver. She stood up and embraced them both in a way she had never felt able to before and found her feelings reciprocated. George's father broke the silence this time.

“I'm glad you like it, my dear,” something she had never been called by him before.

Alex was puzzled to hear that it had all gone quiet in the street outside the bus he had created in his mind and looked over the settee to see that all four were standing there with their arms round each other. He came and asked them for their fares and gave them their tickets.

The rest of Christmas day was spent happily. George and his father and Alex went for a walk, leaving Edna and her mother-inlaw in the kitchen to see to the Christmas dinner, for which resources had been to some extent pooled, hence the weight of one of their cases. They went along the road to the school so that Alex could show his grandfather where he spent some of his days and the walk ended by coming in the back way so that George could briefly point out the architectural delights of the Victorian dairy. His father said they put him in mind of the old detention barracks, though the brick here was red, not London grey. Alex told him about the crazed bullock in the garden after they came through the gate and his grandfather said,

“Good Lord! Weren't you frightened?”

“Only a bit,” he replied, and preened himself.

“I was, for certain,” said his smiling father as they reached the door, but what he was smiling about was what he had seen though the steam on the kitchen window: his mother and his wife with glasses of port and lemon in their hands, talking to each other as though there had never been any tension between them. When their coats had been hung up on the hall stand in the front passage, a whisky bottle was produced for George and his father. Alex was allowed a smell of the whisky and a sip of the port, and then given a glass of fizzy lemonade. Three bottles would make a case heavy enough, but there had been six.

When evening came, they were in the front room again, with a warm fire and the blackout firmly in place. Alex realized that he could not spin out this happy day for very much longer and asked for a story.

“Grandad will tell you a story.”

“No, George, you've heard all my yarns many times over.”

“You tell one then, Dad.”

“I don't know any. I only read them out of books, don't I?”

At school, Alex was fed on a diet of short poems by his new teacher since September and he asked,

“Do you know any poems, then?”

George replied with a little verse he thought suitable:

A flea and a fly, in a flue,

Were imprisoned,

So what could they do?

Said the flea, ‘Let us fly,'

Said the fly, ‘Let us flee,'

So they flew through a flaw in the flue.”

They all applauded, and the laughter broke out.

“But what about one of your yarns, Dad?” said George.

“I can't remember much, nowadays,” said the elderly man. “My plan to write them all down for you to read was foiled by that bloke who bombed your house.”

“Yes. That was one of our saddest losses,” put in Edna obsequiously on her part. “Is there any chance you could do it again for us, and for Alex, who hasn't heard them since he was a baby.”

“No, dear. They're all gone now. I can remember bits and pieces, like when the two ships went round Cape Horn in a surprising calm and the ships' companies took turns to sing songs to each other.”

“I wonder what the words were?” laughed George's mother, as she always did.

His father gave his well-rehearsed reply,

“They were perfectly respectable songs, Gilbert and Sullivan, bits from Chu Chin Chow and things like that. Nothing offensive at all, I assure you.”

Then he remembered events from his time as a diver and underwater sights in harbour as he had un-fouled propellers and inspected hulls for damage. His family settled to listen to him. The adults had heard all his reminiscences before. They had temporarily overcome tension on previous occasions and now that the hostility had apparently been cancelled, and its cancellation accepted, the yarns he spun took on the nature of family cement.

Alex would always recount to his own friends in later years the tale George told him of his grandfather's time in a “down funnel up screw boat” that spent years protecting fishermen off Newfoundland at the time of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, during which time he had become the youngest Chief Stoker in the navy by virtue of his fists. But this Christmas night the old man was in no mood to boast, just to reminisce in the presence of part of his family where he had not hitherto felt at peace.