That's My Baby

by Frances Itani

  He arrived in London from East Sussex, where the Regiment was sent after the rainy month in Scotland. He told her how they’d worked and trained non-stop, going up and down the sides of ships; he told her about landing in barges, crossing beaches under mock fire. All the while, soaked through by bone-chilling rain.

  Everything done in preparation. But for what, he didn’t know and wouldn’t have been permitted to tell if he did.

  “Do you remember how I made whistles?” he said. They were crossing Bayswater Road at the end of her street and followed it until they could find an entrance to the park. They took a well-worn path and headed for trees along the far side. Despite the chill, a man with white hair was bundled up and seated on a folding chair, reading. Hanora had made sandwiches from slices of meat she’d been given at the canteen. She’d baked the bread herself.

  “Whistles? Sure I remember. One day, your collection was lined up on your mother’s sill. You made some of them from the maple in our backyard. With your pocket knife. You were so careful about selecting the small branches. You preferred ones that had already broken off so you wouldn’t damage the tree. There couldn’t be any little twigs coming off the sides; I remember that. And you tapped the bark with that tiny hammer you carried over from your house. You taught me.”

  “Could you still make one?”

  “Probably. We had to twist the bark without damaging the branch—the branch that became the whistle.”

  “And cut the V, and the sliver of wood from the end.”

  “Yours was always sharp, decisive,” she said.

  “And yours a bit ragged.”

  She shrugged. “And then we slid the bark back on. I was good at that.”

  “Sometimes I’d like to return to that backyard, doing nothing more important than making whistles,” said Tobe. “Sitting on the thick branch in the middle of the tree, waiting for the birds to settle.”

  “We did learn to be still,” she said. “And quiet. We didn’t blow whistles when we were in the tree.”

  “We got through all those childhood years, and after that all the way through the Depression, and now we are part of a war. Has the world moved any further ahead since your father came home from his war?”

  There was no answer to that. They both knew Tobe would be facing something he had never faced before. She tucked her free arm into his and pressed herself against his side.

  That was as close as they came to discussing the war. Tobe maintained his extraordinary calmness. They had three days together in London, and three nights.

  The first night of the three was spent in an Underground shelter that was overcrowded when they arrived. They had planned to look up a dance hall outside her area that evening, but sirens began to wail while they were in the street, and they had to follow signs to the nearest shelter. They ended up sitting on the stairs of the Underground, deep below the streets, leaned into each other all night. They were exhausted from lack of sleep by the time morning came. Hanora had to work that day and stumbled through the damage, through smells of dust and fire and ash and cinder, sometimes the odour of gas. She returned to her room as soon as she could after the children at the canteen had been fed. Tobe had taken advantage of her absence to catch up on sleep, and was still sleeping when she returned. If the landlady knew he was there, she did not complain to Hanora. The Fury now had her own friend, never named, but referred to as “my gentleman friend.” The Fury mentioned him every chance she had when greeting Hanora; she and her gentleman friend made a point of staying deep in the cellar of the house during air raids, and did not go to shelters. They had met, Hanora was told, while queuing for rations, and it was love at first sight. The Pekingese was not yet convinced, and nipped at the gentleman friend’s ankles and chewed at the cuffs of his trousers. The Pekingese was jealous, she said. He’d just have to get used to sharing her.

  Every moment shared by Hanora and Tobe during the three days they were together led to the lovemaking between them at night. Every look exchanged. Every touch of skin. Every moment heightened because they knew they’d be separated when his orders came through. They walked the streets arm in arm, hand in hand, sometimes in silence. They stopped at an underground club to have a drink. They danced to slow music; they talked to two other couples at their table. They found a restaurant with an entrance several steps beneath sidewalk level, but it was so full they returned to her room and lit candles and made dinner from what she had saved and from rations he had brought with him. They called it their smorgasbord, and Tobe opened the bottle of wine he’d brought and they turned it into a feast.

  At night, Hanora barely slept. She watched over a sleeping Tobe—since he’d been with the Hasty Ps, he could sleep anytime, anywhere, standing up if necessary—as if watching him would also keep him alive. She’d become used to writing at nights when he wasn’t there, or writing in the shelters, and sleeping as much as possible during daytime hours when she wasn’t at the canteen. And now it seemed to her that she hardly slept at all. She accepted this as what she thought of as her perpetual wartime state.

  On the day Tobe departed, Hanora felt she was seeing him through a haze before he had even boarded the train. She accompanied him to the platform, and when he walked away, she watched from behind, the shape of his shoulders, his tall, lean body in uniform. He grinned back at her after he found a seat next to the window. Raised a hand in farewell and stayed that way, frozen in position, watching her intently while the train pulled out and she was left alone.

  1998

  COVENTRY

  THE COVENTRY DIARY IS THICK NOT ONLY because of the quality of the paper, but also because Mariah had inserted loose drawings on separate sheets between some of the pages. This diary was never completely filled, but it does include the final Canadian entries. There are several blank pages at the end. The diary is open now, as if Mariah had laid it out on Hanora’s desk in readiness for the next entry, the next drawing.

  Hanora turns to the beginning and reads slowly and carefully, arriving at the section where Mariah received her necessary but abrupt training as a hospital volunteer in 1939, after war was under way. It is not clear where the training took place, but following the November 1940 bombing of Coventry, she was working at the Gulson Road Hospital. She was in her mid-fifties, and had every intention of making—and did make—a valuable contribution during the early years of the war.

  There are dozens of sketches, sometimes two or three small ones on the same page. The handwriting is easy to recognize. Compared to the diaries of her teen years, this writing, as expected, is more mature and confident. Drawings were done in coloured pencil, sometimes ink. Mariah delighted in colour. Her art is vibrant, alive. Before the outbreak of war, she created country scenes outside Coventry, and drawings of radiant gardens. She was pulled to outrageous colours, the blazing, the bright. She recorded the sale of her paintings during this period, and kept a list of earnings on the inside end-cover of the diary.

  Further on—Hanora lifts a chunk of pages—after the bombing of the city began, Mariah’s portrayals darkened: destroyed buildings, a house in greys with its entire front blown off, rooms hanging in the air so that the whole resembles an oversized but badly tilted dollhouse. There is nothing static about this work. There is movement, energy. It’s as if the viewer is compelled to become part of the scene, must breathe in the soot, the smoke, the fumes.

  There are drawings of a crowded hospital ward, three rows of beds the length of a room, a nursing sister reaching for a basin high on a shelf, a friend or relative seated beside someone’s cot. The patient lying in the cot is heavily bandaged, face hidden from the viewer.

  It is in this set of drawings that Mariah begins to depict herself within a hospital setting, even though she had trained as a volunteer before the city was devastated during bombing raids, and before the large cathedral was destroyed.

  NOVEMBER 11, 1940

  Last night, my friend Lizzie and I stumbled through dark streets to the local hall to listen
to a Sunday evening concert. The musicians played downstairs, not quite a cellar, but we felt as safe there as anywhere, and when the sirens began their warning, we remained where we were. Chamber music was played. I greedily indulged, and had no problem surrendering to the Haydn string quartet.

  This was the second luxury of the day for me, as I’d attended church in the morning and listened to the choir at Holy Trinity. The director has been there a year or more. Every one of us standing or sitting in the church was inspired by those glorious singing voices.

  In the evening, at the Haydn concert, the small hall was crowded. Afterward, I felt that I would surely float across the room. As we made our way to the exit, we met one of Lizzie’s friends, a man in his sixties, a cardiologist who invited us back to his place for a bite. We followed along, and when we arrived he poured us a glass of sherry and proceeded to prepare scrambled eggs and toast. Two eggs divided among the three of us, and toast without butter. We did justice to every crumb. After that he offered biscuits to dip into molasses. I was surprised at the biscuits, but he told me he’d been cooking for himself since his wife died several years earlier. The food was excellent, despite the rationing we are quickly learning to endure.

  I mentioned my volunteer work at the hospital and he (his name is John—the fourth John I’ve met in Coventry) told me about a former colleague, a Spanish doctor who arrived for a time as a refugee from his own brutal Civil War. The Spaniard was a pediatrician and was helping to fill the vacancies left by doctors who are currently serving in uniform. He had also become particularly fond of a young child on the ward. The boy had a sweet disposition as well as a head of thick black hair. One night, very late, this Spanish doctor returned to the hospital after hours and shaved the boy’s head. He believed that shaving the head would make the child strong in life. Predictably, the staff members were upset when they arrived the next morning to see this little fellow shorn. The parents, and by that I mean the young mother—the father is a fighting man, as are most young men—well, the mother was not happy about this and had to be calmed by the Spanish doctor himself. He did not make much of an apology for his misdeed, as he felt that the shearing was of enormous benefit to the child. He saw the shearing as a gift. Because the doctor himself was so likeable, he was quickly forgiven.

  Lizzie and I laughed over the story, though we wondered how the child felt about the whole affair. Here, below, is my imagining of the head-shaving scene. I’ve used charcoal, to make the hair truly dark.

  I did not tell John and Lizzie my own recent story, though I was tempted, if only to make a contribution to the conversation. At the hospital, I have been trained on a medical ward as an aide, and must perform a number of tasks to help the short-staffed nursing sisters. Really, I’m doing the work of someone in the Voluntary Aid Detachment; there is such a shortage of help. But I am not exactly a VAD. Still, I could work with the Red Cross after all the training I’ve been given within the hospital itself.

  One task I’ve been taught is to give injections, and while practising, I jabbed a poor old half-rotten grapefruit so many times it finally succumbed. Where the fruit had come from, I’ll never know, for I haven’t seen another since, and there are no grapefruit to be had in the entire country, as far as I can tell.

  For the administration of my first-ever injection, the nursing sister who was supervising offered me the choice of two patients, one of whom would unknowingly be the guinea pig. The choice was between an elderly blind woman and a woman half her age, in her forties. I buckled under my own cowardice and chose the blind woman, believing that if I fumbled or showed fear, she would not be aware. And so it went. I hesitated before plunging the needle into the scrawny buttock that had been bared, and the blind woman asked, timorously, if something was wrong. Of course, she sensed my fear, but I carried on.

  I was surveying the muscle, trying to ensure that the tip of the needle was not only sterile but also aimed at the correct spot. I plunged and all went well. After we left the room, and before I took the needle and syringe to the utility room to be cleaned, the nursing sister told me that from now on, I would find it easier to give injections. The blind woman will never know that hers was the first I ever did.

  Here I am, below, wild-eyed, holding the needle in the air—but really, I see that this has turned out rather cartoonishly. I will, however, vouch for the expression. My own, that is. The expression, I would say, is valid.

  Hanora turns to the entries after November 14, when so much of the city was destroyed.

  NOVEMBER 16, 1940

  The bombing went on for what felt like twenty-four hours, though I’m told it was twelve, in all. The sirens sounded shortly after seven in the evening. Having finished my shift, I was with Lizzie when we took shelter. We who tried to stay alive beneath the horror of this attack felt that the bombs would go on dropping forever. Indeed, the effects of this will stay with us forever, and no one believes otherwise. I speak of those of us fortunate to be alive. Hundreds were killed, hundreds injured. The damage to the city is unspeakable. There are no detailed numbers yet. Lizzie and I have rooms in the same house and our own dwelling is largely undamaged, though the windows have shattered. We were in the shelter most of the time, and when I tried to reach the hospital in the early morning, I was turned back. I’ve since been told that many of our patients were moved.

  One of Mariah’s Coventry drawings depicts the inside of a small bomb shelter. Half a dozen people are hunched over, sitting side by side on what could be a stone ledge. All are staring at a wailing baby who is at their feet, wrapped in blankets and arched unnaturally on a cushion, one arm and fist poking up into the air. The drawing has been executed in quick, bold strokes, as if Mariah was sketching hurriedly at the time. One of the six people staring at the baby is a very old woman who has a wizened face and wears a bonnet with ties under her chin. A flap of the bonnet is pushed back so that she can hold an ear trumpet to her left ear. She stares at the baby as if straining to hear its cries. It is clear that Mariah was trying to emphasize sound. Everything in the drawing is grey or black except the ear trumpet, which is the colour of blood.

  There is another—living and breathing—sketch of a young boy, perhaps ten or eleven years old. He is wearing short trousers, a jacket and a sailor hat, and pushes a bicycle over and through heaps of smouldering ruins. It is daytime, but a haze is suggested and blurs the sides of the drawing. The expression on the boy’s face is one of unconcern, his bearing almost casual as he makes his way around obstacles and toward an unseen destination.

  Following that, a sketch of two civilians beside a damaged doorway, perhaps leading to a medical station. An older man rests his chin in his hands and stares bleakly at his bandaged right leg; a woman lies flat on a stretcher, her head and part of her face bandaged. Both man and woman are intentionally static beside heaps of rubble that look alive and ready to tumble.

  From this point forward, most of the drawings are about war. The damaged city, the people within. Death. Shelters. Building and rebuilding, the shocked and shocking appearance of citizens, people dragging carts through streets, medical staff attending the injured.

  Several drawings depict Holy Trinity, which survived the bombings even though glass shattered from many of its windows. Mariah exaggerated the spire, having it pierce the sky while people stand small below, their backs to the artist as they stare up at the peak, at the height of this amazing monument to survival. All around Holy Trinity are screes of rubble, half walls, jutting timbers, downed wires, destruction, more destruction. Already, men and women are at work, hauling away glass and brick and stone.

  Hanora wants to take a break but she carries on and gets through another chunk of pages. She stops when she notices that the handwriting has changed significantly. This is in April 1941, after Mariah was injured in a bombing raid. Some pages are now undated, even though, until then, Mariah had taken care to record specific dates. The handwriting is spidery, as if her body had aged overnight.

  APR
IL 1941

  Lizzie brought me home from the hospital where I was treated. She tells me I was unconscious for several hours after the cellar door fell through in the shelter where we’d taken refuge. An upper panel, a thick splinter of wood, struck my head as the door broke into pieces, so Lizzie says. I had been sitting on the bottom step, below. I don’t remember that part, but I do remember thinking that I had to get to the hospital to work my shift as soon as the all-clear sounded. I also recall being comforted by a short woman in a long black coat, wellies and a tin hat. I had never seen her before and haven’t seen her since, but I could draw her in an instant, and will.

  My head hurts; my brain is partly in a fog. I can’t seem to remember where I’m about to go or where I’ve been. The doctor told Lizzie to reassure me that these problems will settle in time. I have bruises as large as a fist on my shoulder. My left arm suffered lacerations and is sutured. I am fortunate to have Lizzie around to check on me, and comforted by the knowledge that we live in the same house. I do not feel wonderful about adding to her daily tasks and responsibilities. Lizzie is much involved, now, in the Women’s Voluntary Services. She tells me that I was in hospital two full days, though I have no recollection of this, either. At one point after I spoke to her, she looked at me strangely, as if my words had come out upside down or backwards. She did not ask me to repeat, and I couldn’t have anyway, as I had no recall of what I had just said.

  One new pleasure I have is a cat that has adopted me. She is sleek and black except for her astonishing white face and white paws. She wandered into our area in the night; no one nearby recognizes her or claims ownership. The cat was at first terrified. Its owners must be dead, and the startled beast has chosen me as the most likely human to provide a home. I’ve named her Smoke because she was covered in ash on arrival, and smelled of smoke. Now, cleaned up, she stops, tilts her head and looks me over as if giving inspection. Her eyes remind me of a blackout poster I’d almost stopped seeing because I pass it so often. I’ll do drawings of both below. Smoke will be first, the poster cat second.