A Childs War (3 page)

Do you want the moon the play with

Or the stars to run away with?

They'll come if you don't cry . . .'

He had never liked that song, especially its nonsensical and unbearably distressing chorus that went, ‘Lulla lulla lulla lulla bye bye'. When he heard her singing it he began to cry. Great sobs came out of him and he was inconsolable while Edna became more confused and unable to be calm herself, because she too had been ground down by the same ordeals as he had in these last weeks. Joyce, with her arms round both of them together, eventually brought calm, but she realized it was the calm of exhaustion rather than recovery.

Not long afterwards, Graham came over from the dairy and his son John arrived home from school. At teatime good things were prised from carefully garnered pre-war tins and put on the table for them to eat. Joyce made sure that there was enough whisky in Edna's teacup for her to fall sound asleep in the front room after the meal, while she put Alex to bed, now self-promoted to an aunt. She made him laugh by telling him funny things and then reading to him out of a dog-eared story book found by John and illustrated with black and white line drawings of lovely trees. These images, still sombre but beautifully so, took over from the earlier ones in his mind as he fell into restorative sleep. When his mother came to her bed three hours later he was sound asleep. During the night he woke up and needed a pee. He found the china pot and gratefully relieved himself, then returned to bed and slept again. This time, his dream was of lying on the crown of a tree with his injured face held up towards therapeutic and happy sunlight.

He woke to hear his mother as she sat up in bed and took the teacup she was offered, saying to Joyce,

“How lovely it was to be able to stay in bed all night!”

The trees that lingered in his waking memory disappeared at her next sentence:

“I hope George was all right at home.” Then his chin started to hurt again, only worse than before.

In a few days' time, with his chin getting better and his mother a little less inclined to tell him off for everything he did, Alex found he was enjoying himself. He liked his new surroundings and the family with whom Edna and he found themselves living. Edna had given Graham avuncular status towards Alex to go with his wife's new rôle. He was a stocky, jocular, easy-going man with a small moustache, grown after he had left the Royal Navy, and greased down hair, worn short in the fashion of all ex-servicemen. John emerged as admirable because his toys and games were interesting to the four-year-old, though careful prohibitions were issued about touching anything for which specific permission had not been given. Sharp words were to be said on the rare occasions when Alex did so. Nevertheless, Alex soon found in John a model to follow, being so much taller than he was, dressed smartly in his grey school suit, or casually in a sports jersey and short trousers at weekends after Saturday morning school. Alex was left to himself a good deal. The only rule issued, with terrifying sanctions attached to it, was that he should not open the front door by himself but since he could not reach the Yale lock it was of little importance to him. He was free to come and go in all the downstairs rooms and the garden where, again, only those who could reach higher than three foot eleven inches could open the back gate.

Other people's houses are just as exciting to explore as other people's bread and jam is better to eat. There were three rooms downstairs that could properly be called such, as well as a scullery off the kitchen, and a lavatory you reached by going out of the back door. There was an oblong hallway, with the stairs taking up half of it. Then, first on the right, was the front room as it was called, with the best furniture and some rich velour curtains now lined with black to comply with the air raid precautions, which were very strictly observed. The Pattersons practised such hospitality as they were able to in straitened times in this room. The next door off the passage belonged to what they called the living room, which was where most things happened around the big table and there were armchairs on either side of the fireplace. A birdcage hung near the window and a canary called Joey made his presence known at all hours of the day. Joyce talked to the bird incessantly as if he were John's baby sister. She insisted that its name was short for Josephine but Graham was well aware that it was a male bird. John was now of an age to wonder how he knew. There were two pictures hanging in this room, both landscapes, one in spring and the other in autumn, bought with a staff discount from the store's picture gallery when Graham worked there. The square carpet had seen better times, but they had had to leave their better carpets in the Motspur Park house in order to get a good rent as long as they were away from it. A single window at one end of the room looked out past the kitchen and lavatory towards the garden. The dairy buildings could be seen on the other side of a five-foot brick wall at the bottom of the garden.

Straight in front of you as you came to the end of the passage from the front door, you went down two steps and found the kitchen with a large black enamelled range on which the cooking was done and the kettle was incessantly boiling. A shift of a lever on the range would mean that you could have a bath upstairs in twenty minutes on hot days and an hour in the depth of winter. There was a table placed under the window between the scullery wall and the back door. The window looked out over the path and dividing wall to Mrs White's window, next door. The kitchen was where most meals were eaten. The range was alight on most days: a coal allowance was part of Graham's remuneration from the dairy because a great deal of it was delivered for the propulsion of the machinery and there was always some to spare, even in those days. The last room in the house downstairs was the scullery off the kitchen with a large stone sink, a concrete floor and a copper for the washing. Joyce had put a gas stove in there, which, now that there were two families to cater for, was to be used more than ever before.

Monday was a hot day for everyone because lighting the burner underneath the copper was a major task and in the time just beginning neither Joyce nor Edna was prepared to do that more than once a week. If the clothes you wanted had not been washed in this contraption on Monday, then you had to wait for them until after next wash day. Through the scullery window you could see the garden again, all down to grass with just a few flowers by next door's wall. A huge Ewbank mangle stood outside ready for use after the copper had performed its function with the soap flakes and blue bag and what seemed endless rinses. All the washing had to be mangled in between the rinses. The garden was thirty feet long, and that allowed for a single washing line between two posts to cope with one family's washing. Now that there would be more washing, the ex-naval personnel on the Saturday after the first wash-day that involved both the Pattersons and the Rylands and in anticipation of the next, rigged lines and tackle until the garden faintly resembled the shrouds of Nelson's flagship in their imaginations. In fact there was much amusement with a couple of signal flags that emerged from Graham's souvenirs at the inauguration of the lines. It was regretted that neither of the two chiefs had or knew how to use a bosun's pipe.

During the early days at the house Alex liked the garden. It was still warm enough to play outside and quite safe there. Since his mother knew he was all right, she left him to his own devices, which he liked even more. He also had an assortment of 00 gauge Hornby railway lines and rolling stock that John had grown out of, but he was not allowed to touch his valuable locomotives. There was also a small wooden tunnel and a length of station platform. Since Alex could not remember having gone to a real main line station at any time, these mysterious objects made him more imaginative than he would have been had he merely accepted them as replicas.

Upstairs was a prohibited area for him, apart from the room he slept in at first and the bathroom. This was a decision partly affected by the fact that on the second day in the house he fell down the stairs from top to bottom, crashing round the bend at the top end, and making his chin bleed again. He saw the point of this ban himself and for some days pretended to be asleep while he was being read to downstairs, all ready in his pyjamas and dressing gown, so that he would be carried up to bed when the time came. Stairs to a nervous four-year-old are not unlike a pile of sand to a stag beetle. The bedroom that he and Edna used at this time was the middle one of three. Graham and Joyce had the front one. The one at the back that looked over the garden was John's, and one morning after a night of rain, he looked out to see that his rails and carriages had not been brought in when Alex had finished with them the evening before. The next day, all they would let him have to play with outside was an old pie dish, which he filled with mud. Edna saw him from the scullery window as he was about to eat what he had imagined himself cooking with a garden trowel he had found in the unlocked shed. So they locked the shed and frowned at him.

Edna became more and more exasperated with Alex, and told George endlessly in bed about his wrongdoings, wasting precious time on the second night of the week-end by complaining, thinking that Alex was asleep. He persisted with the pretence of being asleep because his mother made him feel vulnerable with her complaints to his father. After their talking had stopped, he found it very puzzling when his parents appeared to be moving rapidly against each other. Fortunately for all three of them, he did fall properly asleep by the time he might have asked any awkward questions, and in the morning he had forgotten about it along with all his other dreams, pleasant and unpleasant alike.

On Sunday morning, the two families settled round the kitchen table for breakfast. Alex was pleased that last night's diatribes about his misconduct had not changed his father's attitude towards him. George seemed anxious to draw Alex into the conversation that went on and he did his best to respond though there was not much he could say. He listened with amusement as George gave fictitious characters to his fellow passengers on the coach on Friday night, claiming that one of them was Funf, the German spy from Tommy Handley's wireless programme. The laughter broke out and this gave Edna her cue to start gathering up the plates and cereal bowls. When all of them stood up from the table, George took Alex out into the garden and solemnly inspected the pie dish with him

Alex and Edna, with the addition of George at the weekends, expected to live in this manner for no more than a month in the autumn of 1940.

George had dutifully brought up thicker coats and other things they needed for colder weather as long as they were malleable enough to carry on the Black and White coach from Victoria. He stayed at a colleague's flat near the store during the week but went back to their house in Raynes Park now and again to see if all was well and collect what he could for them.

On a Thursday morning at the time of the year when a first cold chill is felt, Edna and Alex went on the bus to Elliston and Cavell's store, “Just to get out for an hour or two,” as Edna told Joyce. She took Alex to the Cadena Café in the Cornmarket and they had coffee and an orange squash. The departments of the store were beginning show wartime shabbiness by now, since there was a limit to what could be sold imposed by government regulations and by the new clothing coupons. Edna went next to book seats for the variety show at the New Theatre for the Saturday matinée to which all three of them would go, leaving Graham, Joyce and John the freedom of their own house for at least half a day.

Edna realized they were just round the corner from Gloucester Green where the coach from London arrived and deposited its passengers.

“That's where your Dad will come in tomorrow night,” she told her son.

Then they had walked back up to Carfax and waited for the Botley bus to return to the Pattersons' house. They went upstairs and sat in the front seat on the left. The bus had been especially built low so that it could get under the railway bridge without having its roof ripped off like the lid of a tin of sardines, which they would see happen to an ordinary sized one some time later. On this one, you went up the top of the stairs into a low trough at the right hand side and stepped up into the long seats.

Struggling all the way to the front at Alex's insistence produced irritability in his mother. As the bus went along, Alex saw the grim-looking castle keep and asked Edna for an explanation of it, which she gave but not so as to satisfy him. She was more at ease pointing out the marmalade factory and yet another ‘Puffing Billy' as she called it on the station bridge with the carriages lined up at the platform. Then came Osney Bridge and the view down the stretch of water. St Frideswide's Church was duly designated by Edna as the ‘house of God' and then they got up to make their way back to the stairs. They got off just past Haines's fish shop, crossed the road, and were in front of the house, when Edna suddenly stopped, making Alex, whose hand she was holding, fall backwards against her. She had seen her husband in his best suit at the front window, holding back the net curtains, waiting for her and their child to come back. He looked pale and anxious. After seeing them, he clumsily left the window and went to open the front door.

George was a few inches taller than Edna, and he put his arms right round her, reaching down to pat his son's cap saying, in as firm a voice as he could manage,

“It's gone, girl: direct hit on the back bedroom the night before last. Only the front room was still standing and there are a few bits of the furniture from there left; I got them taken to the firm's depository. The only good thing was that you were both here and I was on nights. The Anderson shelter might have kept us safe, but there was nothing left of that place we made under the stairs as an indoor shelter.”

They stood together on the doorstep for what seemed a very long time to Alex until a shared handkerchief wiped the first of the tears away from his parents' faces, and they went indoors. Joyce did not disguise the whisky this time, but gave it to her friends neat. She took Alex off with her to get something from Mr Haines's, making their absence last as long as she could. However, Alex really wanted to be with his parents just then, much as he enjoyed being on his own with Auntie Joyce.