The Caxley Chronicles (27 page)

'I suppose this is it,' said Joan.

'And about time too,' rapped out the old lady. 'All this shilly-shallying !'

She, with Winnie and Joan were going to lunch at Bertie's. The parents of the young mother, Nora Baker, were coming to spend the day, and Mrs Forbes' son was paying a last visit before setting off to an army camp in the north.

'Let them have the house to themselves for the day,' Bertie said, 'and come and see us.'

And so it had been arranged.

Just before the broadcast, the inhabitants of Rose Lodge settled themselves in the drawing-room. Bobby, mercifully,
had been put into his cot for his morning sleep, but the baby, freshly-bathed and fed, kicked happily on the floor enjoying the admiration of so many women.

By now it was known that an ultimatum had been handed to Germany to expire at 11 a.m. There was a feeling of awful solemnity when finally the Prime Minister's voice echoed through the room. There had been no reply to the ultimatum, he told his anxious listeners, and in consequence we were already at war.

Joan felt a cold shiver run down her back. She shot a glance at the older women around her. Their faces were grave and intent. Only Nora Baker and her baby seemed unaffected by the terrible words. The baby gazed with blue, unfocused eyes at the ceiling, and its mother nodded and smiled gently.

'It is the evil things we shall be fighting against,' said Mr Chamberlain, 'brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution'.

Old Mrs North nodded emphatically. A little nerve twitched at the corner of her mouth, but otherwise she looked calm and approving.

The speech ended and she turned off the set.

'Thank goodness, that poor man has done the right thing at last,' she said.

'Well, we know where we are,' agreed Mrs Forbes.

She had hardly finished speaking when the sound of wailing came from the distance, to be followed, seconds later, with a similar sound, five times as loud, as the air-raid siren at the Fire Station sent out its spine-chilling alarm.

'It
can't
be an air raid,' whispered Winnie. They all gazed at each other in incredulous perplexity.

'Trust the Germans,' said Mrs North briskly. 'Too efficient by half. And where did I leave my gas mask?'

'Gas!' gasped little Mrs Baker, snatching up the baby. She had become a greenish colour, and the child's pink face close to hers made her appear more terror-stricken than ever.

'I'll go and get the gas-masks,' said Joan, and began, methodically to shut the windows. How idiotic and unreal it all seemed, she thought, suddenly calm.

'I must get Bobby,' cried the young mother. 'Oh, my Gawd, who'd think we'd get gassed so soon?'

'I'll fetch him,' said Winnie. She and Joan ran upstairs to collect their gas masks, a bottle of brandy and—no one quite knew why—a rug and a box of barley sugar. Meanwhile the two teachers ran round the house closing windows and looking anxiously up into the sky for enemy invaders.

They were hardly back in the drawing-room before the sirens sounded again, but this time on one long sustained note which, they were to learn, heralded safety.

'That's the "All Clear",' cried Joan. 'What can have happened?'

'Very confusing,' said her grandmother severely. 'It was far better arranged in our war, with the Boy Scouts blowing bugles.'

'No doubt someone pressed the wrong button,' said Winnie. 'What a fright to give us all!'

Mrs Baker, her baby clutched to her bosom and a very disgruntled and sleepy Bobby clinging to her skirt, had tears running down her face. The others did their best to comfort her, and Joan insisted on administering a dose of brandy. It seemed a pity to have brought it all the way downstairs, she thought, and to take it back again unopened.

'D'you think it's safe to put them upstairs to sleep?' asked Mrs Baker pathetically.

'Perfectly,' said old Mrs North. 'Take my word for it, that stupid fellow Taggerty's at the bottom of this. Fancy putting him in charge at the A.R.P. place! If he's anything like that foolish cousin of his we had in the shop, he'll lose his head on every possible occasion. I hope he gets thoroughly reprimanded.'

'I don't think Taggerty has anything to do with it,' began Winnie. But her mother was already across the hall and beginning to mount the stairs.

'We must hurry,' she was saying. 'Bertie asked us there for twelve and we musn't keep the dear boy waiting.'

If they had just ejected a troublesome wasp from the drawing-room she could not have been less concerned, thought Joan in admiration, following her small, upright figure aloft.

To Joan and Winnie's delight, Edward was at Bertie's.

'We tried to ring you last night,' cried his mother, 'but there was no reply. How did you get on?'

'Don't talk about it,' said Edward, throwing up his hands despairingly. 'I trotted along to report at the town centre and I'm on
indefinite leave,
if you please!
Indefinite leave'!

'What exactly does that mean, dear?' asked Winnie anxiously.

'It means that I go back to work as usual, and sit on my bum waiting to be called up.'

'Language, Edward, language!' interjected his grandmother severely. 'There's no need to be vulgar just because you're disappointed.'

'No uniform?'said Joan.

'Only when I report each week,' said Edward. 'It seems the
training units are bunged up at present. I suppose our turn'll come, but it's the hell of a nuisance, this hanging about.'

'At least you know what you will be doing when you do get started,' comforted Bertie. 'How are your evacuees, mamma?'

'Very pleasant people,' said the old lady firmly. 'And yours?'

'Gone home,' said Kathy entering. 'Took one look at the bedroom and said it wasn't what they were used to.'

'Now, I wonder how you take that?' queried Joan.

'With a sigh of relief,' said Bertie, taking up the carving knife. 'She was quite the ugliest woman I've ever clapped eyes on, and the babies were something fearful. Enough to give us all night terrors.'

'Now, Bertie!' said his mother reprovingly. 'Don't exaggerate!'

'The trouble is,' said Edward, looking at his Aunt Kathy, 'your standards are too high. You don't know when you're well off.'

Bertie made no reply. But he smiled as he tackled the joint.

During the next few weeks, Caxley folk and their visitors did their best to shake down together, while the seasonal work went on in the mellow September sunshine. The harvest was gathered in, corn stacked, apples picked. In the kitchens frugal housewives made stores of jam and preserves, bottled their fruit and tomatoes and put eggs to keep in great buckets of isinglass.

Those who remembered the food shortages of the earlier war told gruesome tales to younger women.

'And I had to feed my family on puddings made of chicken maize on more than one occasion,' said one elderly evacuee.
'And not a spoonful of sugar to be had. You stock up with all you can. Rationing'll be tighter still this time.'

There was general dismay among farmers who had lost land to the defence departments. 'Where corn used to grow for hundreds of years,'
The Caxley Chronicle
reported one as saying, 'camps are now sprouting in profusion. Thousands of acres of good farmland have been sterilised for artillery ranges, exercise grounds for tanks, barracks and aerodromes.'

Edward, reading this at his solitary breakfast table snorted impatiently. They'd got to train
somewhere,
hadn't they? Oh, if only he could get started!

He flipped over the page.

'Petrol rationing hits delivery vans,' he read. 'Old cycles being brought out again.'

His eye caught a more bizarre morsel of wartime news.

'New Forest ponies may be painted with white stripes to make them more visible to motorists in the black-out.'

Edward laughed aloud.

'Good old
Caxley Chronicle
! And what's on at the flicks this week?'

Will Hay in
Ask a Policeman
and Jessie Matthews in
Climbing High,
he read with approval. Below the announcement was a new wartime column headed 'Your Garden and Allotment in Wartime.'

'Thank God I'm spared that,' exclaimed Edward, throwing the paper into a chair. But the caption had reminded him that he had promised his Uncle Robert, who so lovingly tended the garden of their shared premises, that he would give him a lift this morning on his way to work.

***

Edward's Uncle Robert was the youngest of Sep Howard's children and only eleven years older than Edward. He felt towards this youthful uncle rather as he did towards the youngest child of Bender and Hilda North, his attractive aunt Mary, who was much the same age as Robert. They seemed more like an older brother and sister than members of an earlier generation.

Aunt Mary he saw seldom these days, which was a pity. She was a moderately successful actress, better endowed with dazzling good looks than brain, but hard-working and with the good health and even temper which all three North children enjoyed.

'A messy sort of life,' Grandpa Sep Howard had commented once. 'I'm glad no child of mine wanted to take it up.' To Sep, staunch chapel-goer, there was still something of the scarlet woman about an actress.

Robert, of course, Edward saw almost daily. He did part of the supervision of Howard's bakery at the corner of the market square, but spent the major part of his time in running the restaurant on the ground floor below Edward's establishment.

Howard's Restaurant had flourished from the first and had now been in existence for about eight years. Sep's dream of little white tables and chairs set out on the lawn at the back of the property had come true. The garden, which had been Bender North's joy, remained as trim and gay as ever and added considerably to Caxley's attractions in the summer.

'I suppose you won't be running this little bus much longer,' observed Robert as they sped along.

'I've just enough petrol to keep her going for about a fortnight. With any luck I'll be posted by then.'

Robert was silent. Edward would dearly have liked to know
Robert's feelings about the war, but he did not like to ask. No doubt Robert's job would be considered as a highly necessary one and he would be more advantageously employed there than in some humdrum post in one of the services. Nevertheless, Edward had not heard him mention volunteering or offering his services in any more martial capacity, despite the fact that he was only in his early thirties. In some ways, Edward mused, Robert was a rum fish.

Take this stupid business of his tenants, the couple who lived below his own flat and above Robert's restaurant, thought Edward. They were quiet people, taking care to be unobtrusive, but Robert had complained bitterly to Edward that the ceiling of the café was flaking and that this was due to the 'banging about upstairs'.

'And they had the cheek to say that the cooking smells from my restaurant went up into their sitting room,' asserted Robert.

'Daresay they do, too,' said Edward equably. 'There's a pretty high stink of frying sometimes. I can even get a whiff on the floor above them.'

Robert's face had darkened.

'Well, you knew what to expect when you came to live over a restaurant,' he said shortly. 'The old man was a fool ever to think that the property could be divided. The floors above my bit should have been kept for storing things.'

Edward had been amazed at the depth of feeling with which Robert spoke. For the first time in his carefree life, Edward realised that he was encountering jealousy, and a very unpleasant sight it was. Luckily, he had inherited a goodly portion of the Norths' equanimity and could reply evenly. But the barb stuck, nevertheless.

He dropped Robert now at his wholesaler's and drove on to the office. If only his posting would come through! There was no interest in his work during these tedious waiting days, and he was getting thoroughly tired of Caxley too, as it was at present. He was fed up with hearing petty tales about evacuees' head-lice and wet beds; and fed-up too with the pomposity of some of the Caxleyites in positions of wartime authority. Somehow, in these last few weeks Caxley had become insupportable. He felt like a caged bird, frantic to try his wings, in more ways than one.

Ah well, sighed Edward philosophically as he turned into the yard at the side of the office, it couldn't be long now. Meanwhile, "Will Hay and Jessie Matthews were on at the flicks. He would ask that nice little teacher, Maisie Something-or-other at Rose Lodge, to accompany him. At least it was a new face in dull old Caxley.

Edward was not alone in his frustration. This was the beginning of a period which later became known as 'the phoney war', when the Allied forces and those of the Germans faced each other in their fortresses and nothing seemed to happen.

The Caxley Chronicle
echoed the general unease. 'Don't cat these berries!' said one heading. Foster parents should make sure that their charges knew what deadly nightshade looked like. Could they distinguish between mushrooms and toadstools?

The Post Office issued a tart announcement pointing out that it had a much depleted staff and far more work than usual.

Someone wrote to say that country people were being exploited. Why should a farm labourer, with about thirty
shillings a week left after paying his insurance, feed the parents of his two evacuees when they spent Sundays with them? And who was expected to pay for the new mattress that was needed? There was no doubt about it—the heroic spirit in which the nation had faced the outbreak of war was fast evaporating, in this anti-climax of domestic chaos and interminable waiting.

'If anyone else tells me to Stand By or to Remain Alert,' said Bertie dangerously, 'I shall not answer for the consequences.'

'It's better than being told We're All In It Together,' consoled Kathy.

Joan, meanwhile, had started her new job, for the schools had reopened. A London school's nursery unit had been attached to the combined infants' school and this was housed in the Friends' Meeting House, a pleasant red-brick building perched on a little grassy knoll on the northern outskirts of Caxley. A Viennese teacher, who had escaped a few months before Austria was overrun by the Nazis, was in charge, and Joan was her willing assistant.