“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
After Christopher had drunk, he chuckled, and offered John a gaudy packet of cigarettes. “Go on,” he said, “they’re Cuban—soaked in molasses. I got the last couple of packets from the George today. There’ll be no more for the duration. They’ll knock you back. I gave Elizabeth one this afternoon and it nearly did for her. I say, you got across her last week, didn’t you?”
John had to think for a moment before he recollected. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose I did.”
“Well, I told you how it would be.” Christopher chuckled again, boyishly, in high good humour, and drank some more sherry. “She’s an angel with a flaming ruddy sword. Of course, she wants to keep in with the old woman. Pots of cash. You should see her when she goes to tea there—all dressed up like a Mother Superior. Black dress, white collar and cuffs—Christ!”
John laughed, smoothing his hair.
“I thought there was something.”
“You bet there is. I say, you don’t mind, do you? I mean, it would have been a damned good joke. Eddy wanted to try it himself. As long as you weren’t serious——”
John drew in smoke, and burst out coughing and laughing, the smoke arising round his head in a halo. “Lord, no. No, it was only a passing thought.”
“Well, it would have been a damned good joke. Elizabeth’s such a rotten hypocrite.… We ought to have worked it better, planned it beforehand properly.”
John finished off his sherry, wondering idly what might have happened if this alternative set of events had come to pass. He did not care much.
“I suppose she’ll be going away soon?”
“Gillian, you mean? As a matter of fact, she’s gone—for the week-end. She’ll be back next week, till the end of term.” Christopher yawned. “I owe you some money, don’t I?”
“Eight shillings.”
“As much as that? Crikey. Will you take five and another drink?”
“All right.”
Christopher up-ended the bottle. There was just enough for two nearly-full glasses, though the wine was clouded. John drank quickly, looking at the foreign printing on his cigarette. In the distance seven o’clock struck.
“I think I’ll go to the Lodge and see if there’s any message,” he said, getting up. “It’s just possible there is.”
“See you later,” Christopher assented, subsiding on to the sofa. John picked up his gown and crossed the dark echoing quadrangles, feeling his way and wishing for a torch. He drew strongly at his cigarette to get a light from that.
There was nothing in the Lodge. The Dean of the College was standing inspecting a sheaf of letters from his pigeon-hole, holding them into the dim light, and the porter, who had been chatting with an auxiliary fireman, came out from the inner room rubbing his hands and saying:
“The sirens have just gone, sir, in London.”
It was long and depressing, the journey north the next day. As the train left Oxford John had a pang of regret and also of fear, because he seemed to be leaving a region of unreality and insubstantial pain for the real world where he could really be hurt. The raid had been too large to ignore and the morning papers had gone to the other extreme, extracting every ounce of horror and pathos they could. John had looked carefully at the gaunt windows of churches, the rescue parties among the debris, the little children clutching hot mugs of tea, before he started, The dominating picture showed an old man gazing fiercely up at the sky: it was captioned
THEY’LL GET IT BACK!
The impression they gave was that the whole town was a heap of wreckage. John was certain that the worst had happened to his parents, he knew they were dead; it was obvious, he deserved to be punished in this way. Since leaving them, he had pushed them to the back of his mind, had sometimes felt ashamed of them, had not bothered to write to them regularly, he had done things they would have been sorry at. Now he could only think of their goodness. The very things that in the past had most irritated him about them—his father’s deliberate way of hooking on his spectacles: first one ear, then the other; or the noise his mother made when she swallowed—these very things turned suddenly round and became emblems of their most lovable qualities. And when he remembered how recently they had been getting old, being increasingly sleepy after meals, more cautious in coming downstairs, he was tormented with thinking the worst had happened, they had been killed because he treated them lightly. There was no reason why he should remember all this if it were not to make his pain the more agonizing: he deserved it, twenty times over, but it was unbearable that they should have suffered because of that.
It was twenty-past three when the train arrived at Kilbury Halt, a tiny junction three miles from Huddlesford Central, and as it would go no farther all passengers for Huddlesford had to get out. In a sombre line they clumped over the wooden footbridge, John last. He nerved himself for any shock when he got into the street, but everything was quite undamaged: a baker’s van stood at the kerb, a sweetshop was open.
Pulling his thoughts together, he started off. Kilbury was some distance from his home, and it would take three-quarters of an hour’s quick walking to reach it. If his house and parents were untouched, he would stay the night: if not—well, it hardly mattered what happened if they were not. He had heard that the wounded had been taken to hospitals in surrounding towns.
He had never walked this way before, never in his whole life. Under the sour sky and occasional unwilling sun the streets seemed menacing: for five minutes he saw no damage at all, then all at once he saw a bombed house, nearly the first he had ever seen. He looked at the broken bricks, lurching floors and laths sticking out like delicate broken bones. The front gate, blown off its hinges, had been propped neatly against the hedge. The bomb had gone straight through the roof and exploded inside.
This was the first of many, and as he came nearer the centre of the town, where disused tramlines were still in the streets and there were warehouses and shops, ruins all at once appeared on every side. Many streets that harboured delayed-action bombs were barred off, and in these streets the tiles and broken glass remained unswept, littering the road, not in tidy heaps in the gutters. He had sudden perspectives of streets that had been completely wrecked. There were very few ordinary pedestrians about here: groups of men and boys in helmets and blue overalls stood chatting at street corners, and among one such group John noticed a boy who had been at school with him. In his anxiety he at once crossed the road and went up to him.
“Hallo, Fred, is——”
“Johnny! Well, I don’t know. Fancy seein’ you in these parts. Made a bit of a mess, hasn’t it?”
“What’s it like up my way?”
“Where’s that?”
“King Edward Street—by the Stadium.”
“I don’t know about that.” The boy took the chinstrap of his helmet into his mouth.
“Does anybody know?” John appealed to the four or five others. “Have they had it badly round the Stadium?”
No one seemed to know: they all lived close by and their interest did not extend outside this particular district. “They had it badly round the hospital,” volunteered one of them. John turned away impatiently.
“Well, nowhere’s had nothing, that’s a sure thing,” said Fred. “But I don’t think it’s any worse round the Stadium than anywhere else. I’d go and look, if I were you. But you can’t go through the centre. They’re dynamitin’—what’s left of it.”
“They are?”
“Yes, there’s a barrier at one-mile radius all round the Town Hall. You’ll have to go round Swanmill Park way. There!” A dull explosion sounded from the distance, and Fred grinned, his hand lifted.
“What’s it for?”
“Stop the fires spreading. I say, Johnny!”
“Yes?” said John, turning ten yards away.
“How y’getting on at Oxford?”
“Oxford? Oh—all right.”
As soon as he was out of their si
ght he broke into a quick shamble, filled by the other’s words with a desire to know the worst. He ran down a side street, leaping over pools of a curious red mud compounded of brick dust and hosepipe water. It seemed utterly deserted here: here and there a house, a mere shell, would be standing, but on the whole it seemed like a city abandoned because of pestilence or a migration of humanity. Only a cat pushed against a front door, pushed and mewed, rubbed its head and looked up and mewed again. John crossed from street to street, streets he had never been in before, streets he had only known of by hearsay and never traced. Several times he thought he was lost. Everywhere, though all else had gone, evidence of destruction appeared: a burnt-out shop, the window-frames charred, the inside a pile of smouldering rubbish. A thin stalk of smoke still trickled slowly up into the air. Nearby a house had fallen on a car, and though the rubble had been shovelled away the car still remained, crushed and covered with white dust, the leather seats full of bricks and glass.
There was another muffled explosion, like a funeral salute of guns.
And now the sun was going down, after he had hurried several miles through all this, panting and sweating all over. As he at last reached the bottom of the long road off which his own street branched, he saw the sun behind the dark grey clouds, no more than a wrathful disc behind a row of factory chimneys. It had a monitory, baleful look; it was spreading a curious warm dusk which made even this most familiar spot grow strange: it stared apocalyptically down over the back entries, rickety sheds, straight dirty brick houses and rubbish tips, like one hostile eye. He was filled with dread. As he went stumbling up the long hill, noticing half-bricks driven by fierce explosions into the hedges, the years reeled back and he was praying for his parents like a child and fervently. He gasped aloud that he would do anything, promise anything, if only it would be all right. Any attempts at a personal life he had made seemed merely a tangle of a hypocritical selfishness: really he was theirs, dependent on them for ever. Everything would be renounced, if only everything was all right. And if the worst had happened, he prayed for enough strength to stand it.
The globular white lamp still hung over the corner shop, surprisingly intact. He turned into King Edward Street.
It stretched unbrokenly, two lines of poor houses without front gardens, just as it had always done. He could see his house, number forty-eight, standing in line with the rest, just as it had always done. He walked to it.
There was a note pinned to the door in his father’s writing, saying they had gone to Preston, to the address of an uncle’s house.
He walked a few steps away, hardly knowing what he was doing, he was so thankful. Relief streamed over him as palpably as if he had been swamped with a bucket of water: he was smiling, looking up at the sky and down along the street, seeing how the dying sun made the brick houses glow just as through all his childhood. It was if he had just come home from school and was having to go up the entry road to the back door because his mother was out shopping. The key had been under a loose stone and later under a flower-pot. He turned and read the note again: then examined the house carefully, walking round to the back to make sure it had not even been scratched. The garden had been dug over, and a huge alien lump of concrete lay embedded in the freshly turned soil. He stood staring, touching the creosoted fence with his hand, walking round to the front again, unwilling to go away. Bending close to the window-pane, he looked into the front room: it was tidy as usual, there were ornaments on the mantelpiece and the clocks showed the right time. There was a pile of newspapers on the table and behind a glass vase he could see the half-dozen letters he had written home all put neatly together. It was strange, like looking into a doll’s house, and putting his hands against the window frames he felt as protective as a child does feel towards a doll’s house and its tiny rooms. He wanted to make some signal to show that he understood that all was well.
Now, with this great load removed, it was the strangeness of everything that occupied him. The town had been so familiar and so intimately wound into his boyhood that its destruction became fascinating. Dozens of places he knew well had been wrecked: the local dingy cinema, a fish shop; great gouts of clay had been flung against posters. As he walked he looked at the ruins, tracing the effects of single explosions on groups of buildings, great tearing blows that left iron twisted into semi-interrogative shapes. Darkness fell very quickly: a few cyclists swept home from work along the lanes cleared in the streets. The moon, by day a thin pith-coloured segment, hung brilliantly in the sky, spilling its light down on to the skeletons of roofs, blank walls and piles of masonry that undulated like a frozen sea. It had never seemed so bright. The wreckage looked like ruins of an age over and done with.
Light-headed with hunger, he picked his way back to Kilbury Halt, not knowing what he was going to do except that it would be best to try to get back to Oxford. On inquiry he found that there would be a south-going train in half an hour.
“And is there a pub near by?”
“There’s the Brandon Arms over the road. Can’t say if they’re open.”
John went across to find out, his shadow preceding him in the moonlight. The building was all in darkness, but he found a door ajar, and, going in, he found a small bar lit by candles and half a dozen men sitting round the wall. Three candles were in sticks and one in a bottle: the landlady leant with her elbows on the counter, in silence. The room was bitterly cold and she wore a coat with a fur collar. All was silence. Every time the wind blew outside the candle flame danced and flapped.
He asked for a pint of bitter. “And have you anything to eat?”
“There’s not a thing in the place, love. And there’s only bottled dark. Will you have that?”
“Yes, please.”
He watched it, black and rich-looking in the candlelight, come glistening up to the brim of the glass. To drink it on an empty stomach would make him ill.
“Are you sure there’s nothing to eat? I’ve had nothing all day.”
She looked at him apathetically, dragging herself upright. “I’ll see if there’s anything.”
In three minutes she came back with a thick sandwich on a plate and a packet of potato crisps. The sandwich was two slices of dry bread with a bit of cold bacon in between.
“Thank you—thank you very much.” He paid her, taking up the sandwich.
The assembled men watched her put the money away in silence, then they watched John as he ate. They did not show any personal interest in him: they seemed more as if they had to have their attention occupied all the time by one thing or another. Four were workmen, two looked as if, like John, they were awaiting a train.
The woman aimlessly rubbed the bar down with her dishcloth. “I thought I’d open as long as there’s anything to sell,” she said. “Can’t have everything going on strike, can we?”
“That’s right,” said one of the men.
“How’s yer ’usband, Mrs. Page, ’ave you ’eard?” another said, stirring to speak. He was heavily built, with a moustache, bowler hat and overcoat stained with mud; like the rest of them he looked as if he had been sleeping in his clothes.
“No, I ’aven’t—and I shan’t, neither.” The woman settled her elbows on the bar again. “I’m not worrying, though. There’s no good worrying.”
“No, there’s no use worrying.”
“And ’e always ’ealed quick.”
“Ah, a quick ’ealer, like,” said the bowler-hatted man, as if helping her to find words.
“Oh, he always ’ealed quick, yes.”
“That’s a blessin’.”
“That’s right. And it’s only ’is leg. Lots ’ave ’ad worse. Be thankful, I say.”
Another man let his breath explode emphatically in assent and took up his beer. A third man, sitting with his elbows on his knees, looked up and broke excitedly into speech. He was under thirty, with a fresh face beginning to grow lined, fair wavy hair and a clipped moustache: his clothes were smart, but grubby, his oiled-stained camel-hair c
oat being fastened by a belt without a buckle. A soiled trilby hat lay by his beer-glass.
“I’ve had a time, I have. I don’t hardly know what I’m doing, why I’m here or anything. I came over from Manchester on Wednesday to see the branch here—Fowler’s, you know; business trip, firm’s petrol, bring the wife, expenses found. We was putting up at the King’s Head. Just started dinner when that little lot starts coming down. Well, there was a lull in the middle, you remember there was. We came out of the cellars and I told her to go up and pack a case and meet me round the front in five minutes, while I got the car out.”
He paused and drank, keeping his eyes fixed on the landlady, who still leant and stared back, a half-polished glass abandoned in her hands. The paper in the windows flapped. The men had their heads lowered, as if in church: they seemed to recognize the young man’s need to speak without being overmuch interested in what he was saying.
“Of course, as soon as I get round to the garages a copper comes up and tells me not to be a b.f. The streets were all blocked—couldn’t get a wooden horse through them, let alone a V8. But I stand there arguing. Then we hear one coming down. The noise they make!—it gets the hotel fair and square, that was the one that hit it first. Now all yesterday and today—can’t get near the place, can’t get anything out of anyone. Don’t know a soul here—don’t know a soul here, except the manager of Fowler’s, and they say he’s copped it. Can’t get near the works, anyway. No one seems to know anything. I don’t know what to do.”
He stopped as abruptly as he had started, staring down at the ground between his feet. A very old man piped up in a trembling voice:
“They hit a shelter down our way.”
There was a pause.
“I reckon they’ll do this to everywhere,” said the young man, looking up again. “Everywhere. There won’t be a town left standing.”
His voice had a half-hysterical eager note as if he desired this more than anything.
“But they’ll get it back, the papers say,” said the bowler-hatted man, wiping his nose.
Jill Page 23
