Reading by Lightning (29 page)

When I wrote I asked George if he was afraid. He wrote back that he did not believe there would be a war. He believed that England and France would make a pact with Russia so that Russia could help to hold Poland against the Germans. This would happen before the summer was out, he said, and the conscription notice would be cancelled. He told me that George Bernard Shaw was of this opinion, and that, by the way, so was Russell Bates. And so I believed him, and felt above everyone's constant nattering about the war, and thought just about our holiday as we clacked along in the train past fields where black-faced sheep lay facing all in the same direction the way cattle will, and white gulls stood in the fields facing east as well like some species of domestic fowl. The train ran under dripping bridges with ferns growing on the ledges and through tunnels built of brick, not carved through stone as in Canada. As we approached Blackpool Aunt Lucy offered sixpence to the first to see Blackpool tower, the way she'd always done when the kiddies were young, and Madeleine won because she knew where to look.

This was Blackpool, the mill worker's dream: a red-brick town of terraced houses just like every other. Except that the moss on the rooftops was mustard-coloured and dribbled over with white gull droppings. And the hydrangeas tumbling over the walls (last year's rusty hydrangeas) were huge, as big as Nan's tousled head and about the same colour. It was the sea air that did it, and the sea air that brought people out by the hundreds to have a photograph taken on the beach when it was far too cold to bathe, sticking their heads through an oval hole in a propped-up painting of a Victorian bathing costume. Hotels lined the waterfront, mile after mile, but we stayed in lodgings with a lady they had stayed with before. The wind blew without pause and sand was carried all the way up to our
street, two blocks up from the sea, where it lay like drifts of brown sugar on the pavement.

In the afternoon Aunt Lucy drank tea with the landlady, and we girls went down to the waterfront and took our shoes off and walked out onto the sand. The tide was out and we walked a long way, holding our skirts and watching the water seep into our footprints. The water in the tidal pools was warm with sun, and the wet sand shone like satin. That sparkling blue strip on the horizon was the grey sea I had seen from the deck of the
Franconia.

Oh, I love the sea, I said with a sudden change of heart.

Huh, said Jenny. Good thing you can't see what's in that water. There's Germans right there. Right under that there water in their U-boats. Sally Higgins was dancing on Central Pier at high tide and she and her mates all seen a periscope sticking up watching them.

Oy, you out there, called Madeleine, lifting her skirt and flashing her knickers to the sea.

When we turned back, two boys were coming towards us across the sand, knapsacks slung over their shoulders, and a voice called, Die schönen Frauen mit der rosy cheeks! It was George and Monty. Madeleine ran to meet George.

Did you get it yet? she asked, meaning his conscription notice.

Nein, he said. Nicht. Nussing.

Monty came up to Jenny and me and kissed us both in an elaborate, European way, crying, Wonderbar, wonderbar!
That 'un can see through a keyhole with both eyes,
was what Uncle Stanley said about Monty, not just as an ordinary, general insult (which it was, in Oldham) but because his eyes were set so close to the bridge of his nose. But I liked Monty for his eager woodpecker face, and thought he liked me. Die schönen Frauen haben salt on zer lippen, Dr. Goebbels, he said when George came up.

So then George kissed us too, Jenny first, and then me. Ja, Herr Goering, sie schmecken vom Salz, he said. Sie schmecken wonderbar.

We walked back up to the boardwalk and wiped our feet with our handkerchiefs before we put our shoes on, and Jenny took the rubber sealer rings she had slipped over her sleeves and stretched them back onto her feet to keep her slippers on. The boys kept up their German foolishness all the way back to the lodging house, and Jenny held on to the strap of Monty's knapsack and sang as we walked. When we crowded into the hall we found Aunt Lucy still sitting in the parlour with the landlady. Look what the cat dragged in, she said, pulling George down to kiss him. You're coming home with us, aren't you, love?

Nein, he said. I can't. Dr. Acworth needs me in Charmouth by Tuesday.

He dropped his knapsack by her chair. Your dad wants a word with you, Aunt Lucy said.

He ignored this. Have we missed tea? he asked. I'm famished.

When we arrived back in Oldham without George, and Aunt Lucy reported that he'd gone to Dorset to wait for his conscription notice, Uncle Stanley kicked at a dining-room chair and knocked it over. The barmy little git, he shouted. He's not got the brains he was born with.

Bloomin' heck, Stanley, said Aunt Lucy, picking up the chair.

Maybe there won't be a war after all, said Madeleine.

We can always hope, said Aunt Lucy. We can always pray. That's all we can do, really, is pray that the good Lord won't put us through that again. Sit down, all of you. Your tea's growing cold.

Our tea — head cheese and barm cakes — lay already cold and pallid on our plates.

Maybe we'll make a pact with Russia, I said, pulling out my chair. Russia could move into Poland and help to hold it.

Oh,
aye!
said Uncle Stanley. That would be clever. Let's put a fox in the henhouse to guard the chickens. Who's put that in your head? George and that Bolshie mate of his?

No, I said hotly.

You know what a Communist is, don't you?

Yes, Uncle Stanley, I do, I said, for I knew what was coming. But he leaned over the table anyway and gave me his verse about the fellow with yearnings for equal division of unequal earnings, and then went on to tell us about the organizer at the mill who went to Tenerife on everyone's union dues.

What Uncle Stanley wanted was for George to join up before his notice came so he could join the RAF: it was the future of the armed forces. There hadn't been an RAF when Stanley enlisted, but if he had it to do again he'd have served in the Royal Flying Corps instead of slogging it out in the trenches watching his mates being blown to bits. George had been to university, he could be an officer in the RAF and he would be set up for life. George, however, declined to enlist because his first choice in any case was the army or the navy. The army because he liked the derivation of
infantry
— it called attention to the use of children as cannon fodder. The navy because of the daily tot of rum. I dare say George's reasons were designed to inflame his father, although no one had the nerve to pass them on to Uncle Stanley.

It was all very hard. If anyone had to do the killing eye to eye, it was the Tommies.
Horrifying
to think of George peering through the sights of a rifle at a boy who may have been one of his pen pals! — horrifying even if you knew it would never
happen. Madeleine and I lay in bed and thought up the sort of job George could do if there was a war. He could work as a code breaker. Or he could polish up his German and write the leaflets England was dropping from planes over German fields and towns, exposing to the Germans the wrongness of their ways. He could be a correspondent, sending news back from the front. Or even a cartoonist. Every day the
Manchester Evening Herald
ran a cartoon of Hitler as a beer-swilling Bavarian peasant. George could do much better! Or, if England was invaded (and everyone said it would be this time), he could be a double agent, waiting for the Germans on the beach and swinging his arm up from the hinge of his shoulder in a Nazi salute, and then he could lead them out to the moors and into a trap.

I knew where he was at every moment during those three days in Blackpool, but he had many thoughts in his mind besides me. I began to despise him for his scrutiny of the seaweed at low tide, for lecturing Jenny on the parts of a sea urchin and taking her with him into the kitchen to fry some up, for wading out by North Pier to examine the crustaceans growing on the piles while I was walking on the beach alone. For his bony frame and his unbecoming walking shorts, for the yellow tinge to his skin, for the goatish bulge of his Adam's apple, and for the way he laughed, the exaggerated way, as though he wanted things to be funnier than they were. How like the White Knight he is, I thought, and I put on lipstick and tried to act the way I would act if he were nothing to me. When he cast me a quick glance it was as though the beam of a bicycle torch passed over me and lit me up for a second, just for the second before the torch moved away. I hated him for that too.

On our third and last night in Blackpool, when I had pretty much turned to stone, Aunt Lucy set out to teach Madeleine,
Jenny and Monty to play bridge, and George said to me, A bit of air? I leapt up and we put our coats on and went out into the windy streets. We went down to the seafront at Central Pier, where Lois first met Archie when he came with a friend to watch the shopgirls dance. Everything was shut down. They'd even closed the entrances to the piers, and so we walked along the beach, along where the donkeys trudged at high tide, the wind plastering my hair to my face and snapping at our coats. He kept his hands in his pockets, and I dared to link my arm through his and felt him pull me closer, and it was enough, enough to chase away all the last three days and make everything between us true again.

There was no moon and no stars. The wind reminded me of home, of walking in a dust storm, and I narrowed my eyes to slits. The sky was black above us and the beach a different black and the dark ocean chasing itself back and forth beside us a third. We came upon a closed chip kiosk and took shelter beside it. We were both shivering. I was wearing my foolish black slippers and I bent and shook the sand out of them. I turned my face towards the sea and felt spray on my cheeks. In front of us the lights of North Pier tossed on the water in a chain of wobbly yellow globes. Beyond them, men wearing German uniforms and crammed into steel capsules sped through the heaving black water. Where would George and I be if this notion of war had not intruded — what would be filling his thoughts?

In spite of the cold he spread his arms out against the chip kiosk, as though he were measuring it. Make a dandy bratwurst stand, he said.

What — you mean you think they're going to win? I said. I teased his jacket open and moved inside it.

No, he said. That's not what I mean. His shirt was un-tucked and I felt his warm, thin back. Then he twitched
violently away from me, he whirled around and began to walk backwards up the beach, singing in an outlandish German accent,
There'll always be an England, while there's a country lane. . . .
Humiliation throbbed through me, burned my eyes so that I could hardly see.

The Royal Hotel was at the corner where we came up onto the street. Wait, I said. I leaned against the window and emptied my shoes again. Inside, a foot away from us, a woman with bare arms sat in the golden light of the dining-room chandeliers. We plodded in silence up the side street towards our lodging, sand scuffing under our shoes, and I followed George into the stale air of the hall, with its blue-striped bedroom wallpaper and a torn orange lantern hanging from the electric light. He wiped his feet on the scrubbing brush nailed to the floor, and I tapped mine against the door frame. There were two chairs in the hall and I sank into one. If only we could talk, that was all there was left, and in the morning he would be on the train.