A Childs War (22 page)

Boxing Day passed happily also. In the evening the air raid warning sounded, and George and Edna went all over the house seeing that the blackout was in place properly. There had not been many alarms of this kind lately and Oxford's reputation as a safe place had been preserved. Nevertheless, no one took any chances and all the occupants of the house waited with some concern until after about half an hour the all-clear sounded. George's father got out of the big armchair he had occupied and went out of the room. They heard him open the front door and go outside. Conversation began again without him and after a few minutes he came back in. He was pensive and only said one more thing in Alex's hearing that evening: “It's as quiet as the grave out there.”

The old couple left the day after to go to see their daughter, George's sister, ten years his junior, who was working in an Admiralty office in Bath. Then they would go home for the New Year, where another daughter-in-law lived round the corner whose husband, George's brother, spent most of the war in Ceylon (as they called it then) working on dockyard installations.

Alex very much enjoyed his grandparents' Christmas present to him. It was Stephenson's “Treasure Island” and he could read it for himself, enjoying the full-page paintings that illustrated it. He still persuaded George to read bits of it to him, however, especially the chapter called “Heard in the Apple Barrel”, which he delivered very entertainingly indeed with all the different voices.

In mid-January, George was on his way to work, when Edna called him back. A telegram had been brought and the boy waited for a reply. Edna watched while George opened it in the kitchen, then suddenly sat down and held the paper out for her to read. It said, with brutal simplicity,

“Dad died of a heart attack this morning. Please come. Mum.”

So George, not wanting to shed tears till he had made arrangements, went to the dairy and told his assistant he would be away to bury his father and called the dairy's manager, who was still at home, on the telephone to tell him the same. Then he came back in order to change his clothes. While he was upstairs, Alex came down to the kitchen. It fell to Edna therefore to explain to him what had happened.

“So he won't be able to come and see us again,” he said.

“That's right,” Edna replied.

Edna made George a packet of sandwiches, because it had been before breakfast when the news came and as she gave them to him she said quietly,

“I see now why he made his peace with us.”

George saw, too, and then he did weep. Alex thought he ought to as well, but only cried because George was unhappy. He had not been able to know his grandfather very well. He felt his father patting him on the head as he left for the coach station.

When George had gone, Edna did something unusual: she sat down in the kitchen and pulled Alex on her knee to cuddle him until she saw that it was twenty past eight and he had not had his porridge before he went to school. She felt sorry for Alex as well as herself. She had just begun to be able to like her father-in-law and he had been taken away. Alex had no grandfather at all now, since her father had died on his own after having estranged himself from all three of his daughters in his bereaved alcoholic loneliness eight years ago. Edna wept for universal misery, which had only a small connection with David Ryland's passing.

When George came back from his father's funeral, he was in a good deal of discomfort from his hernia. Other people would have called it pain. The Scottish doctor lectured him for having neglected it for all these years and told him that the truss he wore was worn out in any case. She strongly advised him to have the condition dealt with by surgery at the Radcliffe Infirmary:

“You'll not get better treatment, Mr Ryland.”

George gave in and agreed to see the specialist there with a view to going into hospital as soon as possible. The powers at the dairy consented to him having sick leave at short notice when the opportunity arose. He was also advised by them not to refuse any chance to have it done quickly. If the European invasion began, as it might at any time, hospital beds all over the country would be at a premium. This was a common sense argument George had no reply to - and Edna in all her waking moments with him would not hear of him ducking the issue any longer.

“Who wants to go to bed with an old man who wears a truss?” was her own particular clincher, which left George wondering why she had not complained before about what he had been offering during the last fourteen years. All he said was, “I don't usually keep it on, do I?”

When they became aware that Alex had heard this exchange, they became embarrassed. He carried on drawing and only wondered briefly in passing why she should think that George needed his truss while he was asleep.

On January the twenty-fifth the letter came, offering him a bed in two days' time. So Edna ironed his most recently acquired pyjamas, leaving him the torn ones to wear for the following nights before he went, and he steeled himself for what he had been dreading all this time: an anaesthetic. It was his secret fear - and he had not owned up to it.

Edna took Alex to see him in hospital. He spent his time in a pre-occupied way during his family's visit. He had pieces of string with him and, sitting up in bed, demonstrated reef knots and bowlines and how to manufacture them to Alex as he joined them all together. Edna became exasperated and asked Alex to wait in the garden despite the fact that it was cold out there.

“I just want to talk seriously to Dad and then when I come out we'll go home.”

So Alex hugged his father and told him to get well soon and did as he was told. No tortoise, no tabby cat. Evening frost on the only seat. Goose pimples on the knees - and then a purposeful Edna, out in a very short time.

“Come on, Alex. Sometimes I think your father is a blithering idiot!”

“He makes me laugh too,” replied Alex, not really knowing what “blithering” might mean and misguidedly thinking idiots were funny.

When he came home from school next day, on his own as far as the shop and then with the guidance across the road of a lady who came out of it, there was George in the living room by the fire, in his pyjamas and big brown dressing gown.

“How did you get here?” asked Alex.

“I discharged myself,” was the reply.

Alex went quickly to the kitchen where Edna was making tea for George.

“When did he go off bang?” Alex asked.

”It wasn't him who exploded. It was me, when he came home in a taxi half an hour ago refusing to have the operation after all and leaving the hospital with his clothes under his arm in a parcel done up with that bloody string he was playing with last night!”

“What's he going to do then?”

“He says he's going back to work tomorrow. He may find people there with other ideas about his future. Then where shall we be?”

The dairy management did have other ideas about George's future. They said they could not accept the risk of a man who was not in reasonable health working in a responsible post at the dairy. He had oversight of the sterilizing plant, to say the least, and if he suddenly had to leave the building and the machinery broke down, production would have to stop. His deputy could cope now and again, but the ultimate responsibility was his, they said. So, reluctantly they must let him go while thanking him for the excellent work he had done since he had been with them.

When he asked about the tied house, they said that since he had nowhere else to go, and had lost his only capital asset in the blitz, they would let him stay on in it for the time being. They would try to appoint a new engineer who had his own home and would not need the house. George would be required to pay what they called an economic rent. All this was said on the understanding that if they found that they did need the house he would have to vacate it. George accepted the terms and applied for a desk job a few miles away at Wheatley that he had seen advertised in the Oxford Mail, for an Engineering Supervisor of the plant being established in an American army hospital. That would mean a daily return bus ride, but the pay offered was good and he would be able to afford rather more than the economic rent on 56 Botley Road. Life looked as though it might get better if he got the job. Moreover, he would be glad to wear clean clothes at work and he hoped his days of grimy overalls were all over. He claimed that the new truss he acquired a week later worked wonders. He felt better than he had done for a long time.

As to Edna going to bed with George, one weekend there was to be a fun fair in the rec. Alex and a few other boys he knew from school, with Edna's knowledge, had gone down there to help put the fair up. This meant they were allowed a few free goes on the rides and the stalls. Alex won a Jacobean tumbler, as was said. He ran home all the way along Henry Road to show it to his parents and found them in their bed together in broad daylight. The main proceedings had finished and he heard them talking as he went up the stairs. They explained to him that they were both feeling tired and had taken the opportunity for a well-earned rest. He wondered why they had taken their clothes off to do that, as it was obvious that they had when they sat up to admire the heirloom he had won for them. But the thought of winning something else made him rush away and not give the matter a further thought.

Legitimate punters were now arriving at the fair and the stallholders and men on the rides did not need further assistance from juvenile volunteers. He and the other boys were paid sixpence each and realized that was the end of their period of employment. By the time Alex was home again, normal clothing had been resumed appropriate to a February day.

Alex found on Wednesday during the following week that tea was ready in the kitchen, but George and Edna were not in there to eat it as soon as George came home from work as was their usual practice. They were sitting at the living room table instead which bore no more than its usual diagonal runner and cut-glass bowl: Edna was crying and George had his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. In front of them was an open letter.

Alex came into the room quietly and sat down at the table with them. He did not know how to ask what was wrong. He could see that the letter was typewritten on paper that was printed at the top. He waited. Edna's sobs subsided eventually and George put out a hand to touch her shoulder. Then, looking up at Alex, he said,

“We're both upset, boy, because we've had bad news. This is a letter from Mr Marsh, our solicitor in Wimbledon. He says that we won't be able to repair our house as it's too badly damaged. The only thing we could possibly do would be to have it rebuilt from scratch. We certainly can't afford to do that and wouldn't be allowed to in the present circumstances anyway.”

Edna picked up the letter and read it through again. Then she said,

“Life's so unfair to us. These Merton Council minutes he quotes says that tenders are out to repair the houses opposite, yet he tells us ours is beyond hope of it. We don't get any luck, George, do we?”

“So we can't go home, then,” said Alex, not so much as a question to his mother and father but as the conclusion of their discussion with each other.

“No,” George said. Then he stood up, went to the window and looked out at the dairy. Alex noticed that the backs of his hands were against his hips and his fingers drooped downwards. He looked very distressed. Then he stood up straight, squared his shoulders and turned to face Edna and Alex.

“Well,” he said, “Now we know where we stand. We've got to stop hoping we could go back because we know now that we can't. We stay here as long as we have to and then work out what has to be done. What Mr Marsh has told us is spilt milk not to be cried over.”

He tried to smile to comfort Edna, but knew he would have to wait a long time for any reassurance to affirm itself in her for whom this was the end of the world. It was for him, too, but his view of the universe was somewhat more informed than hers. She had no idea that there were other worlds besides her own. She did not want to know about them if there were, just then.

“We're caught, then, George, aren't we?”

“Yes. But we'll find a way through, I expect, in time.”

Remarkably, it was Edna who took decisive action first. She had noticed an advertisement in the paper for women to do valuable war work in a factory that had been empty along the main road from where they lived. So she started working there within a very few days, making detonators for shells. She intended to finish each working day in time to be at home when Alex came out of school, although taking him to school and going to meet him had been a thing of the past for some time.

Every time he left the house in the morning, there was a kind of automatic incantation from her,

“Look both ways before you cross the main road!”

This got on Alex's nerves. For some months now he had been allowed to go out by himself so long as he did not cross any roads apart from when he went to school. This meant he could go as far as the rec gates and he sometimes went through them as far as the river on the other side of the green space. One day he tried, instead of turning left and going direct to Henry Road, to walk across the dairy yard, but the disembodied voice of George himself, shouting like God from a third floor window that he was not allowed to be there, sent him scuttling back into the garden. Nevertheless, he became confident in the street by himself, and was often to be found out in it.

In response to his application, the people in charge of the new American army hospital at Wheatley sent transport to take George there to be interviewed for the vacant position. Edna had taken a great deal of trouble over ironing his shirt. He had his hair cut specially and took his best suit and his ex-navy tie to be cleaned. He went to Dunn's and bought a new trilby hat to show how determined he was to do all he could to obtain the post. He had ransacked Pear's Cyclopaedia for American information and discoursed learnedly about what he found to Alex as his captive and admiring audience in the evenings before the interview. Edna stayed in the room while all this was going on and unreservedly supported his endeavour. He came back decidedly hopeful and was like a caged bear during the three days it took for them to make up their minds and let him know.