by Graham Swift
It was a long time before it struck him—words could have a way of slipping by you then suddenly speaking: Evergrene. It chimed softly with his own name, as it did with his place of birth. He didn’t know whether this was an encouraging sign or a dark omen. As he inclined towards the latter, fear began to replace mere misery.
But it’s remarkable how quickly, especially when you are only eight, the whole mood and tilt of things, even the very nature of the world itself, can change.
* * *
—
This great exodus of children had many consequences, not all benign. There would be horror stories. Some went to dreadful encampments. Some went to so-called ‘good homes’ to be imprisoned, enslaved—worse. Some would even feel compelled to escape from their sanctuaries, slinking back, like aliens in their own country, to take their chances with the bombs.
But Ronnie was to arrive at a house in the depths of the countryside—he had never known countryside before—where, except for the blackout curtains and a few other minor privations and inconveniences, you might never have known that a war was going on. Evergrene.
He soon forgot about the war and quickly began to believe that this place he’d been sent to was where he really belonged, even that his previous life, including his home in Bethnal Green and the existence of his own parents, Agnes and Sid, must have been the result of some mix-up or misunderstanding.
In this house lived Mr and Mrs Lawrence, Eric and Penelope, now in their middle years, with no children of their own. They had been only too willing to do their bit, in their charitable and non-combative way, by taking in this ‘Ronnie’. But it seemed to Ronnie, almost from the start, that it might be him doing them the favour. He was like a gift they were gladly receiving. There was gratitude on their side too, not just the gratitude that he’d been told he ought to feel towards them.
‘Remember to say thank you, Ronnie’ had been among his mother’s most fervent parting words, though clearly uttered between tight lips.
But he did feel gratitude, and rapidly overcame his determination not to express such a cowardly emotion. He soon began to wish, though he knew he was to be transplanted only ‘for the duration’, a once appalling phrase which he knew might mean years, that he could stay in Evergrene for ever. Though this would be like wishing (but Ronnie soon stopped thinking about this too) that the world’s current bout of slaughter and destruction might never end.
Evergrene was unlike any house in his experience. For just two people it was enormous. It had separate rooms for doing different things in. It had a dining room for dining in. What was dining? It had a bathroom with a huge white tub in it. It had a sitting room—a room just for sitting in. It had two separate little rooms for shitting in.
Even the garden—garden!—which seemed to extend indefinitely till it merged into trees, had separate bits: a vegetable patch, a lawn, flower beds, a greenhouse and a cold frame. What was a cold frame? There was even an ancient, withered but clearly strong man called Ernie who came now and then to ‘do’ the garden. For a brief period Ronnie thought that Ernie lived in the greenhouse.
As if the house and garden were not enough, there was also a car. Thanks to petrol rationing, it was sparingly used, but Ronnie would get his chances to ride in it and would often sneak into its rickety wooden garage just to check it was real.
To all of this he had responded, in his first astonishment, with an unspoken expletive that he would never have used aloud in front of the Lawrences, nor indeed his own mother—he was only eight and still basically a good boy—yet it was proof, as was his accent and other things about him, that he’d known the rough life of the East End.
‘Fucking ’ell,’ Ronnie said to himself. ‘Fucking ’ell.’
* * *
—
Here, anyway, Ronnie began his new (his proper?) life. Here he existed, while the world disintegrated, in security and comfort—in luxury, by any standard he had known.
More than this. Here he was fondly looked after and appreciated—the word really began to be ‘loved’—by Mr and Mrs Lawrence, so that it gradually became a struggle to think of his mother, dodging bombs and thus to be pitied, in Bethnal Green. Where was Bethnal Green, and were bombs really dropping on it? Or to think of his father. Where was he? Where had he ever been?
It was part of Eric and Penelope’s earnest commitment to their responsibilities that they strove not to supplant Ronnie’s parents and to ensure he kept in touch with them. But this was difficult and in the case of Ronnie’s father impossible. Agnes herself had once declared that ‘out of touch’ was Sidney Deane’s middle name. For all the Lawrences’ scrupulous efforts, Ronnie came to seem more and more like their own child.
Evergrene had a telephone. Ronnie’s mother was encouraged to call at any time. It was vital anyway, when the air raids began, that they should all know she was safe. Ronnie was unable to convey to Mr and Mrs Lawrence what an extraordinary object a telephone would have been to his mother (it was for him too another of the exotic wonders he was now living with) and how the idea of speaking on such a thing to the occupants of Evergrene—even merely having to hear the well-spoken tones of Eric Lawrence—might have daunted her more than Hitler’s bombs.
And perhaps Mr and Mrs Lawrence were also naive—though Ronnie could not have indicated this to them—in their impressions of conditions in London, including the state of repair of many a public telephone box.
Mr Lawrence, all in the cause of doing his bit, had signed up as an air-raid warden. He had a uniform and a helmet and every other night, alternating with another local warden, he went out into the dark to keep watch. Yet the truth was that even while London and other cities suffered, hardly a bomb fell in their part of the country. Ronnie would sometimes feel that Mr Lawrence’s warden’s uniform was a hoax—merely a costume he dressed up in. The whole thing seemed a bit of a fraud. And Eric Lawrence himself would retain from his time as a warden the principal memory of an uncanny nocturnal peace. While he patrolled, looking for offending chinks of light, he would gaze up at a sky (from which all hell was supposed to fall) that, because of the blackout, was lit by a spectacular display of stars.
He could grasp no better than Ronnie that whole swathes of London might be on fire.
Ronnie began to attend a local village school—Mrs Deane would not have to fear that her son’s education was being neglected—and while he was there both Mr and Mrs Lawrence sometimes went into Oxford, again in the interests of doing their bit. When he was a little older he would come to understand that they served on ‘committees’ and were even part, in a small way, of the setting up of a thing called Oxfam, to help refugees. It came as something of a shock to be reminded that that was what he was, in a manner of speaking: a refugee.
Ronnie himself would get taken into Oxford—it wasn’t so far—to be shown around. It was a special place. It had a thing called a university, and, what with his starting at the village school, Mr and Mrs Lawrence could now make the joke that Ronnie would always be able to say that he had ‘been to Oxford’, a joke which at first passed Ronnie by completely.
Oxford was certainly a special place, he had never seen anywhere like it, but what was particularly special about it, despite the sandbags round doorways and the soldiers drilling in college grounds, was that it would remain almost completely unscathed.
This too, during his early days as an evacuee, would make Ronnie think that the war must be some kind of fraud. Later, when he’d learnt other things that proved it was real, he learnt from Mr and Mrs Lawrence that there were factories not far from Oxford producing munitions. Yet still Oxford lay intact.
‘Oh yes,’ Mr Lawrence had said, ‘I used to work in one of them myself, during the last war.’ When he’d said it he’d given Penny Lawrence an odd smile, so that Ronnie had felt that some other hoax might be at work. But by this time he had acquired a quite developed sense
that with Eric and Penny Lawrence anything might be the case.
All sorts of things began to emerge about them. Ronnie had never before had the opportunity to observe two grown-up people at close quarters, to see into their mysteries. It was perhaps that he’d grown up just sufficiently himself, and yet it was strange that the Lawrences could exert this fascination which he’d never felt with his own parents. His years as an evacuee were to give him many things, but almost from the start they gave him this curious sense of discovery and initiation.
It seemed that both the Lawrences had their ‘business’ to attend to in Oxford, and yet this was not their main or only occupation. It seemed that Eric Lawrence occasionally did work for other people—he was their ‘accountant’. Penny Lawrence had once confided to Ronnie that Eric was very good at figures, at sums, yet she said it as if it was only one and not the most important of his interests. And then of course he had his nights going out as a warden. It seemed that they were people who might keep changing into a variety of roles and thus they were not like his own parents of whom Ronnie was only ever able to say, if required, that his father was a sailor and his mother was a char. As if that was what they had to be eternally.
It emerged that Penny Lawrence had once had a grandfather who’d lived in Evergrene, in this house, so that Penny had come here often when she was small—‘When I was your age, Ronnie.’ Then when her grandfather had died he’d left it to her—to her and Eric, since they were married by then—because she’d always loved being there as a child and he wanted her to have it.
‘It was our windfall, Ronnie. Our blessing.’ Ronnie didn’t understand the meaning of either of these words, but he got the spirit of them and he kept the nice words—windfall, blessing—somewhere in the back of his mind.
Of course, Penny told him, her big brother Roy was miffed that she’d got the house—and lots of money besides—because she was her grandfather’s favourite. But then—Penny gave a thin little laugh—Roy had gone off to Canada anyway and was doing very well out there thank you, so what did he need a house in Oxfordshire for? And Penny laughed again.
Ronnie understood very little of this—he knew nothing of Canada and what did he need to know about this Roy?—and yet Penny told him these things as if he were a grown-up himself and might have appreciated them. At the same time he realised that though he was supposed to think of them as Mr and Mrs Lawrence he had very quickly begun to call them in his head Eric and Penny, as if they were no different from friends he’d had at his school in Bethnal Green. And he quite soon felt, though it was not as if they ever formally said he could, that he might call them by these names aloud. Or rather that there were times, and he understood the difference between them very clearly, when he might say ‘Mr Lawrence’ and times when he might say ‘Eric’.
When Mrs Lawrence, or Penny, had these little grown-up chats with him, even talking about her brother Roy, she would suddenly seem to remember that he was just a child and say, for example, ‘But shall we have a game of snakes and ladders?’
There was a whole cupboard full of games. Games!
Or—much more interestingly—she might look at him with a sudden soft expression which Ronnie, to his surprise, could quite accurately interpret as her wishing he was hers, and which might melt even further into a look that almost seemed to say that he was hers—so her wish had come true. It was a quite wonderful look and it was quite wonderful to see the way it turned from one thing into another. And it was much better than any game of snakes and ladders.
These conversations—or games or looks—occurred when Mr Lawrence had to go into Oxford by himself. When Ronnie returned from school he and she would have an hour or so together. Their little chats (though Ronnie mainly listened) always seemed to reveal something new. For example, one day Penny said that Mr Lawrence would be staying all evening in Oxford and wouldn’t be back till late. This was because he was giving a show. A show? Ronnie felt sure that Mrs Lawrence was teasing him and was daring him to ask, ‘What kind of show?’ And so he didn’t say it, which would have been falling into some sort of trap.
Yet he enjoyed being teased and it seemed that Mrs Lawrence enjoyed teasing him. And it was true that Mr Lawrence didn’t return till late that night and Ronnie, in his bedroom but woken by sounds below (the car being eased into the garage), distinctly heard Mrs Lawrence say, ‘How did it go, darling?’ And then Mr Lawrence say, ‘Not bad.’
Such snippets of adult life were like nothing Ronnie had known before. They were like something you might see in a cinema, a place where he’d only ever been twice.
And yet everything might turn around. Penny Lawrence often wore a big floppy cardigan with large side pockets into which she would thrust her hands and waggle them, as if she was trying to sprout wings. Or just for the fun of waggling them. She was just like a girl. A girl! He could see how she must have done this same waggling thing when she was a child—done it in this very house in front of her grandfather and her stuck-up brother Roy—and had never got out of the habit.
Ronnie began to like Penny Lawrence very much—or he understood how Eric Lawrence might like her. And he liked Eric too. He would start to wonder, though quickly put a stop to this thought, what his mother might feel if she could see him and Penny Lawrence having their chats.
And he could never picture his mother as a girl.
* * *
—
Soon after his arrival at Evergrene a system of postcards had been instituted. His mother might write: ‘All well here—Love Mum.’ And Ronnie might write back: ‘All well here—Love Ronnie.’ These postcards, though he didn’t know it, were not unlike numerous postcards servicemen would send home, which had to be short and sweet for reasons of censorship.
Ronnie would be encouraged by Mr Lawrence to say more, to describe his life at Evergrene, his visits to Oxford even, but Ronnie was inclined not to do this. He did not want his ‘All wells’ to betray anything more than just that—though he had been urged, with some coughing and embarrassment on their part, to state that Mr and Mrs Lawrence were ‘very nice’. Which was true.
And how could he possibly convey to his mother such things as the fact that Eric and Penny sometimes had friends round, other grown-ups, for the evening—on the nights when Eric wasn’t doing his warden duties (or giving a ‘show’). Lying in bed, he could hear them talking and laughing. And once, before their evening started, they’d got him to come down, in his pyjamas, to be introduced or just displayed, and when he’d gone back up the stairs he’d plainly heard one of the visitors say, it was a woman’s voice, ‘What a charming little boy.’ Then he heard Penny Lawrence say, ‘Yes, he is.’
He’d never been called that before, never imagined that he might be called it. Charming.
But the most remarkable thing was that, though it was just Mr and Mrs Lawrence having a few friends round, they were all dressed up, the women in particular had nice dresses and necklaces and sparkly earrings and had done things to their hair (you couldn’t have imagined Penny doing her waggling thing). It seemed to Ronnie that they’d all changed, that the women had become beautiful and the men handsome, that they were all charming—yes, that was really the word. Everyone was charming, they had drinks in their hands. Was this what was meant by putting on a show?
Over in one corner of the sitting room (as he’d learnt to call it) was a table that he’d never seen before. It was square and had a surface that was entirely bright green. On it were a couple of packs of playing cards, neatly stacked, but there was something else. A top hat. Yes, a top hat. Not an object that Ronnie was familiar with, but he was not mistaken. It was turned upside-down, brim uppermost, so you felt it might be being used as a container for all sorts of things.
Ronnie took in all of this, even as, briefly, he was being made an exhibit of himself. They all said goodnight to him and he managed to say goodnight to them, and the green of the table made
him think of the name of this place he had come to and, though he was beginning to get used to it, the sheer astonishment of it all.
Things were not just all well at Evergrene, they were bloody fantastic. But to say this might (he was capable of perceiving it) hurt his mother, and it was not anyway in his interest to reveal that he was living the life of Riley. At the same time he strongly suspected that his mother’s ‘All wells’ were not exactly truthful either. How could they be if bombs were really dropping on London? (Were they?) And he could well recall how she’d once said a parrot had flown away when in fact she’d sold it for clean profit.
The postcards served their function: they knew each other to be alive. Ronnie was aware that both Mr and Mrs Lawrence themselves wrote to his mother and he couldn’t control what they said. Perhaps they were reporting on him. He knew anyway that for a while they’d had the idea that Mrs Deane might like to come and visit her son, might even like to stay. Might even like to stay for the duration. Wouldn’t that indeed be the best solution to everything?
These suggestions caused a cloud to hover temporarily over Ronnie’s generally euphoric existence and he’d felt a great relief when they were not taken up. It became gradually clear that his mother had seldom replied to Mr and Mrs Lawrence’s letters and never at any length. They wondered why.
Ronnie realised that though he was only a small boy he was in some things more versed than his vastly older hosts.
After a while the postcards were exchanged less frequently. An acceptance grew—was even allowed to blossom—that Evergrene was Ronnie’s home now. He was happy in it (he was happier than he’d ever been) and the Lawrences were happy to have him. Their loving-kindness enveloped him and they’d been diligent in testing its possible limits. Now it might simply prevail.
Wasn’t this the best solution of all? Even if one might fairly ask how could any of it be? How could you have had one life and then simply exchange it for another?
