A Childs War (4 page)

“What can we do to help, George?”

“I know we've probably outstayed our welcome, but can we stay on here until we can see our way forward a bit clearer, please?”

“That goes without saying,” replied Joyce, having discussed it all with Graham at his workshop in the dairy when she had gone over the yard to see him there an hour before he came home.

Edna, who had gone round and round her emerging plans with George all afternoon, added, “What we mean is can we carry on as we are now?”

“Yes,” put in George, “with me coming and going at week-ends and Edna and the son and heir staying here with you all the time. Put like that, it does seem as though that's a lot to ask of anybody.”

“You're not asking it of anybody,” replied Graham, “You and I've been friends for a good few years now since we both took a fancy to the same set of generating equipment and saw it installed together. You're asking it of Joyce and me, who have offered it anyway.”

“Well . . . , thanks very much,” said George, with Edna sadly nodding as the words slowly came out. “When you've lost nearly everything you owned, it is reassuring to know that people stand by you.”

“I'd like to make a suggestion,” said Joyce, breaking the awkward silence. “You're all three upstairs in the middle bedroom now. You need your own room at the weekends, and I expect, Edna, you don't want Alex round you all night as well as all day. So what I suggest is that we bring the divan he is sleeping on down to the living room, and he can sleep there. He goes to bed at eight, and we can come in here then and light the fire - coal isn't a problem in Graham's job, and we won't have to wake him up early in the morning because nobody goes in there until Graham has come back for his breakfast from over the yard. What do you think?”

Edna looked at Joyce gratefully and agreed to what she had said. So Joyce went on.

“Good,” she said. “That will be better all round for all three of you. The only thing is that he won't have to mind Joey chirping at him when it gets light - oh, I forgot, we have to have the black-out up in there too, don't we, so it won't get light until I let the sun in after Graham's breakfast!”

George cleared his throat in embarrassment now.

“There is something else to talk about before we make too many decisions. We can't let you put us up like this without us agreeing on a proper rent.”

“I thought you'd bring that up, George, knowing you,” replied his friend. “Let's not talk about it as rent. This place goes with the job and with the rent from the other place, we are not doing so badly - John goes to a private school, even, don't you, son?”

“What are you paying them to teach me, then?” joked John, who, like Alex was all ears to what was being said, in spite of a show of imparting the mysteries of the draughts board.

“If we can share what the ration books entitle us to, and you put something in the kitty each week, we shall get along very well, I think,” decided Graham. “We'll be eating like lords,” he added, with a smile on his face and a circular motion with his hand on his girth, which was ample already under his Fair Isle pullover.

Both men had had a certain formality trained into them. They stood up and warmly shook hands. Edna sat chewing her lower lip, until Joyce came over to put her arm round her and kiss her cheek.

When he had seen his father sit down again, Alex climbed on his lap and asked him to read him a story. So, for the next half an hour, George read to everyone from the book of bedtime stories he had brought up from the still intact house on the Friday of last week. Each time George finished one of the yarns as he called them in the manner of seafarers, Alex called out for another one. George read well and everyone was attentive.

“Just one more, then that's it,” George said at last.

The final tale he turned to was The Three Little Pigs. No one else remembered what was coming, but they all understood why Edna got up and left as George could not find a way of avoiding the words “I'll huff and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down.” For the sake of the youngest listener George persevered to the end of the story, thinking it was sad that Edna had not waited for the reassurance offered in the rest of it. When it was over, Graham and Joyce and John looked away as Alex put his arms round his father's neck, and was hugged back by him as he also gave way to his grief. Then he handed over his son to Joyce and went to find his wife who was sobbing in the scullery.

George had come a day early, and they had until Sunday evening to work out the implications of what had been decided upon. The suggestion to put the divan bed Alex slept on in the sitting room was gratefully accepted, and Graham and George carried it down on Friday afternoon before it was next needed. Alex was also provided with a little cupboard to keep his things in and a promise was exacted from him that it would be kept tidy. He liked going to bed there because the fire was still warm from earlier in the day and there was usually a warm glow reassuring enough to hold the dreams off. In fact the dreams became normal in a very short time and were not memorable at all. His recovery after the shock of the split chin was also aided by the fact that no one woke him until about half past nine when either Joyce or his mother pulled the curtains and told him his breakfast was ready in the kitchen.

This had happened only twice when his father had to go again, so as to be at work on Monday morning with the shift that began at eight. He had to be there at half past seven, whatever holes in the road Goering's airmen might have put in his way. After he had gone, Alex did not ask for stories to be read, but leafed through his books on his own. George had made sure he was generously provided with well-illustrated books and he spent a lot of time during the day trying, with some success, to copy things from them with a 2B lead pencil given him by John, which he used in preference to all the wax crayons he had received from other people. He soon understood the value of shading to achieve the effect of motion and on the occasions when he decided not to copy a picture but draw something of his own instead, using no more than component images at second hand, he found that the composition of the whole drawing was something that came naturally.

He was grieved by Edna not being particularly interested in these creations, and he carefully put them in his cupboard to show to George when he came home on Friday night, although he would not see him until Saturday. Alex knew what his father would do. He would look at the drawing, then turn it over to see if there was anything on the other side, look at it again, and say what had always been said to him when he was a boy and had achieved something of real worth: “Not bad, boy . . . Not bad at all!”

An appointment had been made to see the Pattersons' doctor about the stitches in Alex's chin. Every time Alex stood on a chair in the bathroom to clean his teeth, he noticed with relief that the bruising was less and the new plaster that Edna put on each day was becoming smaller. He was glad of this because, having been a nurse, she never worried that the unsticking would hurt while she tore the plaster off without any apology and called him a baby if he protested.

Fortunately he had no constipation such as he had been having at home because Edna was very keen on regularity. There had been days when she seemed to him to think of nothing else from Alex's point of view. He found it difficult to feel at ease with her, especially as she looked so sad all the time and would not go anywhere without him. This meant that he spent hours walking round with her whenever she decided to go out so as not to be in Joyce's way. They often went to the recreation ground on the other side of the dairy, which Alex enjoyed because a wide stream ran through the back of it and there were ducks which she did not stop him feeding so long as he did not go too close to the water. If he did, an interminable cry of “Don't fall in, will you?” was set up. Edna certainly adopted the Mosaic principle in bringing up her little boy: it was as though ‘Thou shalt not' was held up on a placard before him on all necessary occasions - and on many unnecessary ones as well as it seemed to him.

These conditions led to Alex preferring his own company. Apart from the special circumstances of that first evening on which they knew about the house being bombed, John always had his homework to do in the hour before Alex went to bed, so Alex spent the time very happily leafing through a pile of Meccano Magazines that John had been collecting every week since he was nine. The illustrations fascinated Alex. He did not understand the models to be built, because he did not yet know what Meccano was, but there were endless illustrations of locomotives and the recently new rolling stock for the electrified Southern Railway. He found he could read some of the captions to the photographs, having looked at the text his father was reading to him at bedtime for as long as he could remember. He often helped Alex do this by running his finger along the line as he read it to him. So ‘An L.N.E.R 2 - 4 - 0 leaving King's Cross drawing carriages in their new livery' would be hieroglyphics he could almost decipher for himself, though he had no idea what a livery might be or what the numbers stood for. He knew what L.N.E.R. was, because it had been explained to him that the country was divided up into four areas by the major railway companies, which was why most people could not get where they were going in time, even without the harassment of an enemy. As has been said earlier, he had never been on a main line train, but he liked these illustrations.

There were many occasions when either Joyce or Edna accompanied housework with listening to the wireless. They listened to songs from which they then sang snatches. Edna's favourite was ‘Stormy Weather' which she alternated with ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street' and the appeal of both of these to her was obvious. One stated the problem:

‘My guy and I ain't together.

Keeps rainin' all the time,'

while the other suggested an antidote:

‘Get your coat and get your hat,

Leave your troubles on the doorstep . . .'

Which partly explained this endless traipsing round she did with her diminutive companion in tow.

A good deal of the time, however, Alex could be found listening to the wireless by himself when it was left switched on for him in the living room. It occurred to him that most of the songs he heard were curiously sad and the contemporary pre-Sinatra way of singing added to the sense of depression he received from them. A recent hit like ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square' was one that particularly catered for this black mood. He once caused Joyce much consternation when she came into the room as one of these songs finished and, not knowing he was overheard, said out loud, “Oh, how sad everything is!” He had thought he had no one except the canary to talk to at that point, so he was a ready listener to his own opinions. Often he expressed what he was thinking to Edna, who told him not to ‘air his knowledge', and he did not understand what she meant. She had a terror of precocious children and feared that she had given birth to one.

One survivor of the bombing was real treasure for Alex. George had served on a light cruiser, H.M.S. Danae, which once went on circumnavigation of the globe in a special service squadron – George enjoyed saying that - showing the White Ensign to as many as wanted to see it. The newly built H.M.S. Hood was the squadron's flagship. The commemorative photograph album for this was a thick book with blue velvet covers and the pictures that George had chosen at the time were stuck on black card with handwritten captions in white ink in a neater hand than his. Alex spent hours with this album, looking at group photos of the whole ship's company posed beneath the guns of the main armament, or of the captain and commander, complete with telescopes under their arms and their heads clamped to their bodies with great high collars. There were snapshots of places where the ship had called in. Others showed his father and one of his friends with a wallaby they brought on board at Melbourne as a mascot. George told him it slept in his hat box and used to chew the strings of his hammock. It was put ashore at Sydney in consideration of its own health as well as the well-being of George's mess deck. Both back in Raynes Park and now in Oxford, George was always pleased when he saw Alex with the book and would sit down with him and reminisce. There were incongruous pictures of George in his number one uniform riding a donkey up a mountain in China, or posing beneath exotic trees in Dar-es-Salaam, or as a passenger in a rickshaw with a friend called Frank Collins - always known incomprehensibly as ‘Jumper' - who, with his wife, shared a flat in Valetta with George and Edna for a happy year when they were not away at sea.

He would say, “Ah! Adelaide, that's where all the flappers tried to take the gilt buttons off our summer jackets,” and Alex, who knew his cue well after a few times, would reply, “What's a flapper, Dad?”

George would never make this comment if Edna was not there, because he always enjoyed her saying, “Harrumph! While I was back in Malta wondering what you were up to!” The question Alex had asked was never answered owing to the amusement this regular pleasantry caused his parents even in their present distress. A few years later, Alex found out what a flapper was from his father's younger brother, back from spending the war years in a dockyard in Ceylon; he taught him a song, which included the verse:

‘Ruth, she was a flapper of a very modern type.

She wore short skirts and rode a motorbike.

She wore an awful lipstick, and her eye was of the glad,

But the Salvation Army saved her from the bad.'

It lightened the load, that souvenir album, in their involuntary exile. In later life, Alex regretted that it disappeared when Edna died, along with a good many other reminders of his father.

The arrangement with Alex sleeping in the sitting room worked fairly well, though there were occasions in the early days when Joyce could not leave him asleep because she found she had left something vital in the cupboard by the fireplace, and the bird cascaded its song all over her as she tried to find it. When she had gone and the room was in darkness again, it continued to make disconsolate chirps until the blinds were drawn back and the reality of daytime was incontrovertible.