A Childs War (6 page)

“No, but I will,” he said, and he was lifted higher before being put down. “These leggings do itch. Can't I take them off, Dad?”

“No. Your mother told me expressly to keep them on you, so it's more than my life's worth to let you take them off.”

“Will she know?”

“You can't keep secrets from her, you ought to know that!”

So the leggings and the itch stayed, but a huge glass of squash was set before him on a seat outside the Perch and George set a pint glass before himself on the table before them.

“I bet this tastes better than that,” said Alex.

“Try it, then,” said his father. After one mouthful Alex said he had not had enough to make up his mind and after three reserved his public judgement, glad that his father had treated him as an equal.

When they began to feel the cold they got up to go. The way to the river led past a patch of open ground where the landlord of the Perch was keeping some geese for eggs at present and for the table later on. One of the huge birds came towards Alex and began to peck the buttons of his leggings. This was frightening at first but became very amusing after a while. In the end George pulled him away, the goose tired of unrewarding pecking, and father and son thought holy thoughts as they looked into Godstow Abbey ruins before going home.

The way home was very long and very slow. George decided to go ahead as far as he could, at one point hoping that Alex would increase his speed. When he did not he had to go back for him. George exhorted him more than once with variations on, “I thought you were coming for a walk with me, not a sail in line astern!” Alex caught up but was fast asleep in George's arms by the time they turned the corner into the dairy yard to find the back gate. Alex was wearing both his cap and his father's bowler, the latter well down over his eyes. He fell asleep again over the apple pie that finished lunch so, since the adults were going to spend the afternoon before the front room fire, Edna laid him on his bed still asleep.

Christmas was coming. “I feel sorry for the poor buggers in the Midlands,” Edna announced after the Home Service news one dinnertime had reported that industrial centres there were being bombed. Alex was bound to ask who these poverty stricken people might be and was once more unsatisfied with Edna's answer. Joyce did not help by saying that the other word he asked about meant “souls” in this instance.

George was home (as it now was) for the best part of a week around Christmas. He had brought things with him about which he was very secretive, and discovered to every one's amusement (or not, depending on the time of day) that he could still whistle in spite of his full dentures and did so with great determination. One morning Alex found him in the garden with his jacket buttoned up over his thick cardigan, a scarf round his neck and his hat on, completing the picture by wearing one of Edna's pinafores and sitting on a kitchen chair on an old sheet found for him by Joyce, plucking three diminutive chickens one after the other. The whistling prevented the smaller feathers getting into his mouth as he worked, but they either settled on every feature of his attire with very few actually reaching the sheet beneath him or blew about in the wind before sticking to the rough wood of the fence, the frost-damp rollers of the mangle and the decaying weeds in the flower bed beside it. Afterwards feathers grew in the garden for several days until Graham decided he really must get rid of them before anyone looking over the wall from the dairy yard asked awkward questions about where the birds had come from and how they had been obtained.

George brought the naked and headless creatures into the kitchen and began the grisly task of removing the giblets. He whistled once more in order to avoid the expected stench and Alex, who had watched the process so far with enormous interest, withdrew when he discovered for the first time what the inside of a chicken smelled like. It reminded him of a morning about a week ago when he had evaded Edna's demands that he should “do his duty” and to her unexpected amusement, considering her disciplinarian stance in these matters, he had broken wind spectacularly, provoking her to comment, “Good Lord, Alex! It's as though something had crept up you and died!” Luckily he had forgotten this foul aspect of the preparation of the chicken when he came to eat his Christmas dinner.

When the great day came, Alex could not remember having had chicken to eat before or having had a taste of a drink that the others called Sauternes. There was a Christmas pudding too: “We aren't going to let a man with only one ball dictate to us what we eat at Christmas!” Graham said as he emptied the last of a bottle of prewar brandy over it in the dark and Alex imagined the entire German nation unable to play more than one game of football or tennis at any given time. He had been shown Germany on the map in John's school atlas and was worried because, instead of being on the other side of the world as he had supposed since they had to use aeroplanes to bring bombs from it, it was not very far away after all. His gloomy thought was interrupted as the lighted match set off the blue flame of the burning brandy and a general cheerfulness broke out.

After dinner, everyone went to the front room where there was a good fire and the blackout was already up at half past three. Alex's present from George and Edna turned out to be better than any toy he had had before. He watched his father assemble it for him on the floor, for which transaction a fairly large space had to be cleared. None of the presents given and received that year in that house had wrapping paper on account of the war effort but the store still had a toy department with a good deal of stock in it and a long cardboard box from which all labels had been removed was duly opened for the components of Alex's present to emerge one by one. George had been through the box before and arranged its contents so that they would come out in an order that would heighten the sense of wonder. First there was a circular piece of metal with a central socket which was put down as a base, then an upright, nine or ten inches high, with a bracket at the top of it. Next a longer metal bar was produced, with a bracket two-thirds along its length to be fixed horizontally so that it swivelled round on the upright. A weight was attached to the shorter end.

“This is the tricky bit,” said George, as he connected a wire with a small screwdriver from the still vacant end of the horizontal bar through the swivel where the two bars met, to run down to the floor inside the upright, whence it was led away to a large battery at a distance. Alex was attentive to every move and he could not guess in advance what would happen next.

“Now for the thing itself!” said George, and he produced from the bottom of the box something carefully concealed in a piece of cloth. He took the cloth off as if he were a magician and revealed a model aeroplane made of light metal. George explained that it was a fixed wing monoplane and he rapidly attached it to the vacant end of the horizontal bar by means of two nuts and bolts with the aid of a diminutive spanner beside which his engineer's fingers seemed gigantic. The last job was to connect everything to a switch that he had fixed to a small piece of wood to keep it steady.

“There,” he said. “Now all keep back and we'll see if it works.”

Alex was told to come over to where the switch was and to take hold of the small knob in one hand and steady the piece of wood with the other.

“That's right. Now switch on!”

Alex did, and squealed delightedly as the propeller on the little aeroplane began to rotate and take it round the central pillar in a circle until it was going fast enough to leave the ground and fly, balanced by its counterweight.

The flying hours of that monoplane were countless. It flew for the best part of the next hour and it was brought out at least once a day well into 1941, still making appearances when anyone remembered to obtain a new battery for it for several years after that.

However, George had not finished. At five o'clock he asked Alex to turn the aeroplane off and gently dismantled it, putting it in its box and explaining to Alex how he would be able to get it out for himself on subsequent occasions. Then he, Graham and John moved all the chairs to the side of the room opposite the front window. The table had been brought in from the living room after the washing-up had been completed and was now moved forward to allow George to stand behind it in front of the curtains. Then he asked everybody to close their eyes and not to open them until he said so. All obeyed, including Alex, and they waited while they heard George moving about behind the table.

“All right. Open your eyes now!”

There on the table was a beautiful model theatre. John switched off the light in the room. A string was pulled and the curtain went up to reveal a lit stage with scenery and a frenetically dancing harlequin. The curtain descended and rose up again and this time there was Mr Punch. With Graham behind the table as well, four characters were possible: Mrs Punch, the policeman, the baby and the crocodile all appeared in turn and the script was read out by two distorted voices by the light of a torch held by a clamp in a stand constructed for the purpose. Everybody joined in at “That's the way to do it!” and it did not occur to them that there was any cruelty involved in Mr Punch's violence. George's own voice then announced an interval, and a tray of drinks was produced from behind the table with something appropriate for everyone present.

Then, after ten minutes, George and Graham were ready to present two figures in ballet costume for a version of a pas-dedeux, with the music played by the two fathers on kazoos. The curtain fell and rose again and as a finale Harlequin appeared once more to wish all present a prosperous New Year and, God willing, more peaceful times. The curtain descended and rose for the last time and then the two controllers of the straight wires that supported each of the cardboard figures with knotted joints produced a curtain call appearance of the whole cast amid the acclamations of all four in the audience. Alex was making most favourable comparisons between this show and the ones he had seen on his Saturday visits to the New Theatre.

To maintain the magic, Joyce ushered everyone to the kitchen on a pretext all understood except Alex, while the two men quickly took the component parts of the theatre upstairs and restored the front room to its normal state except for the large table. The reason for leaving the room was to pick up little cakes, which were then brought back on plates and eaten. Christmas was kept until ten o'clock, by which time Alex was dozing off and bedtime was decreed.

In their room, George and Edna reviewed the day.

“Thank you for this dress, George. I like it very much indeed.”

“I'm glad you do. You look nearly as good in it as without it.”

“Go on! Don't start all that: these walls are very thin.”

“Thank you for these gloves, too. Just what I need for those cold nights on the coach when the heater fails, as it usually does just past High Wycombe. And this tie is just what I like.”

“I'm sorry there wasn't more. They were very strict about clothing coupons in the shops here.”

“A bit of black market comes in handy from time to time if you know the right contacts!”

“And you must've to get a silk dress like this!”

She gave one last twirl before she took it off and carefully hung it up. George wished she wouldn't wear corsets. Gone were the days when she ran to fat and her friends called her “Pudding” or “Pud” (to rhyme with mud) for short. Since they had come here she had lost a good deal of weight and her jet-black hair had begun to go grey, “To match mine,” he thought to himself.

“I haven't seen Alex so happy for a long time,” she said to him with a lot of feeling. “He really enjoyed the aeroplane, didn't he? And the theatre: those lights you made for it were marvellous.”

“It's wonderful what a lot of torch bulbs in the right sockets can do!” he modestly replied. “But what about your curtain? That was the best bit!”

“You must take the credit for getting hold of the theatre itself, though. I bet it cost a pretty penny.”

“It did, but not so bad with staff discount. Anyway, the best thing was seeing his face through the proscenium arch!”

“The what arch?”

Then the mood of happiness suddenly evaporated. The strain of what had happened overcame them and making their own necessary preparations in isolation from each other they quietly got into bed with their teeth out, after switching off the light and drawing the blackout back a little so as to be able to breathe. There was not much difference between age of this house and its outlook and the one they had lost. That one, however, had been their own, not a friend's like this one, nor tied up with someone's job. They missed the quiet and the trees. This house was on a main road with buses often passing and an increasing amount of military traffic. An odious comparison between the houses was always being summoned up in their minds.

“At least we're all three alive,” said George, trying to take a positive line against his present disposition. “We must see what the solicitor has been able find out about the possibility of rebuilding number seventy-four.”

But a great sadness had taken over in Edna, and all she could do in reply was take his hand in both hers to hold it desperately.

In the New Year things went on very much the same. The air raid warning sounded in Oxford when the Luftwaffe was making its way to bomb the midland cities. George and Graham often burst out into verbal imitations hostile to Hitler, balanced by imitations supportive towards Churchill. When John, who was still too young to see the point of this, tried to imitate the King's stutter, the adults thought what he did was in very bad taste:

“The poor man can't speak very confidently at the best of times, but he does try to rally us, and I think he has,” said Joyce.

In time, when the penny dropped on the patriotic nature of these imitations, John took over for himself the stereotyped schoolboy's Hitler imitation, which involved strutting about in a goosestep with the first finger of his left hand held under his nose and his right hand aloft. Since the only German word John knew was “Achtung”, that was spluttered out many times, mixed in with a great deal of gibberish which must have made Goethe and Schiller turn in their graves. John's school had gone for xenophobia full steam ahead. Nobody said “Nazis” anymore. It was always “Germans”. Under Graham's roof no objection was raised to that. On the contrary, Alex time and time again heard his parents and his adoptive uncle and aunt talk about “unfinished business from twenty years ago”, which was a very dark saying to him and raised the question whether you had to have a world war like this every couple of decades.