III
When she rang him at work, George knew that Edna was under more strain than she usually was. He had accepted years ago that she would never turn into a gentle and imperturbable woman, and recognized his own tendency towards anxiety well enough. So while he agreed that she should visit their close friends in Oxford on account of her tense state, underneath he was glad of the chance to have a proper reason for getting her to a safe place without her seeming to have run away, or appearing to be trying to escape himself at the weekends.
At the time they had married in 1923 he had been twenty-two and an Engine Room Artificer in the Royal Navy, handsome in his fore-and-aft uniform and his cap worn at a rakish angle in the style of Admiral Beatty. She was twenty-one, with appealing brown eyes and hair like the feathers of a raven. Nothing wrong with all that, though his parents thought there was, and her own mother had been dead four years or she might have made some remark about repenting at leisure. Edna’s father had become dispirited since his bereavement and expected his middle daughter to look after his youngest one, a responsibility to which she had not taken very kindly. Edna was not very fond of the idea of children nor, indeed, of their reality in spite of her job looking after some of them. George was a kind man, and had felt sorry for the attractive children’s nurse he met at a dance. He was willing to outface his mother and father when she accepted his proposal of marriage. He offended them even more by arranging his wedding by special licence in a short period of leave when he was meant to have been initiated to a lodge of freemasons during his father’s year as its worshipful master. His father, who was also in the Navy, had high hopes for his elder son, which did not include an early and probably improvident marriage to a girl who had no more in her stocking than her obviously fetching leg. David Ryland was more surprised than pleased when his daughter-in-law did not give birth to a child during the next nine months nor for that matter for the next thirteen years. By the end of that time hope of having grandchildren had overridden his earlier misgivings about his son’s marriage. Nevertheless, the doubts of George’s mother still lingered and erupted into unpleasant scenes from time to time when she and Edna met, which did not happen very often.
George and Edna themselves had become used to their lack of diminutive dependants and forgot the risk involved in their contentment with each other one barmy night towards the end of 1935. Alex was born after a difficult pregnancy and a horribly long time in labour, which precluded the possibility of other children, as Edna would tell anyone who would listen for many years to come. Although George was thrilled to have his son and heir, as he incessantly called him to his friends, Edna found the joys of motherhood overrated. She was ashamed to remember the occasion, before the war started, over eighteen months ago, when Alex had not only been singing while she wanted to sleep after lunch on a fairly cold day, but had also been playing with his wooden bricks, causing clicking sounds. She had threatened to throw his bricks on the fire if he continued. He did not stop and being a woman of her word, she threw three of the offending bricks into the flames. This neither facilitated her sleeping process nor provided the hoped for silence from her son. Time had to be spent in quenching his rage as his bricks burned in the grate, despite her remorseful attempts to rake them out of the fire. As Edna saw things, in her generation, parents were not required to apologise to their children - so she had not done so.
When the little so-and-so fell over and split his chin, something gave way in her. Relations had been strained between them for some time because he would still sing his tuneless songs while he played after lunch at the side of her chair when she wanted to have her five minutes’ sleep and in recent days her internal clock had failed after all the sleepless nights caused by the air raids. She considered that even Tommy Handley could not have seen the funny side of what she was going through. George considered that she laughed more loudly than was justified by his ‘It’s That Man Again’ programme on the wireless because of a desperate need to be cheerful when she was far from being so. Historians say that revolutions are caused by the agitation of those who have something to lose. George saw the corollary of that argument. Having worked hard, after many years of disappointment, he had become a conformist in order to keep what he had eventually gained. He had been born in 1900. In July 1917, after being embarrassed for several months by girls in the street looking at his tall, rugby-playing frame and wondering why he was still a civilian, George had volunteered for the Navy as he had long intended to do in any case. He was glad to become what was called a ‘boy tiffy’ at H.M.S. Fisgard in Portsmouth because of his dread of ever being placed in the special care of his father who had a responsible post at the Naval Detention Barracks in Chatham. He had gained his promotions in the engine room of a destroyer and then of a light cruiser. He suffered a fall on board ship, which resulted in a hernia. This was confirmed in medical language as a right inguinal bubonocele on account of which he was granted a hurt certificate in April 1927. It was graciously conceded on the document that he was sober at the time. However, George refused to submit to surgery. He was transferred to a shore establishment where he was discovered to be in need of glasses for his recently developed short sight, which he discovered when he was drilling a party of sailors who found it difficult to accept his order to march straight through a wall. The final entry on his certificate of service in the Royal Navy said that his character was very good and his ability as an Engine Room Artificer Third Class was superior. He was then invalided out of the service with a gratuity in the summer of 1928.
In eleven years he had learnt pretty well all there was to know about turbines so, after months and years of uncertainty, he had landed an extremely good job as Chief Maintenance Engineer in the spacious basements beneath a prestigious department store very near to Knightsbridge underground station. On the strength of this, he had taken out a mortgage in 1938 and bought a house in the tree-lined road in Raynes Park, where he hoped to settle for the rest of his life to grow roses, just as his father did not very far from Chatham in the years after completing his own pensionable service.
When the second war, as his generation called it, began George did not have a great deal of regret about not being called back to the Navy: a Chief Petty Officer wearing a surgical truss might be a liability in an engine room. As the conflict went on he would find his engineering skills of great value to the war effort, and his loyalty to King and country was never in question. In personal terms, the threatened destruction of life and property in the blitz was about the worst thing that could happen: George had a great deal to lose. He had not wanted to put his wife and son at risk and so he secretly congratulated Edna upon finding a way of keeping herself and the boy safe for a while as the guest of his friend Graham Patterson. When the bombing had finished, all being well, they would come home again.
Graham was older than George, who had become a close friend as well as a colleague at the department store until, at the end of what people later called the phoney war in order that his wife and twelve-year-old only son should be safe, he left to take an engineer’s job at a dairy in Oxford. This carried with it a fairly good sized tied house in a short terrace in Botley Road close by. What convinced him that this was a sensible course to take had been a newspaper article that assured him that Hitler would never order the bombing of Oxford because he wanted it for the training of British Nazis after a putative successful invasion. Graham was protective of his own enough to be spurred into action by the first idea, while his patriotism denied the possibility of the latter. He had let his house in Motspur Park on an open-ended basis, intending to return there when Britannia ruled the waves and the air space again.
His friendship with George was initiated by the fact that he had also served in the Navy, though he and George had never been shipmates. His wife Joyce was an outgoing person, who was more than willing to help someone through a difficult patch in their life. A woman who looked as out of sorts as Edna did and a little lad who was so distressed as to forg
et his toilet training were fit objects for her genuine compassion. Alex was glad of this, though his mother, now that she had arrived where she had chosen to be, resented having to put herself under someone else’s control.
IV
Alex went to sleep in a big armchair and had disturbing dreams. There had been a great deal to feed such dreams lately. The nightmare he remembered was about a London tram on fire after being bombed during an air-raid in a city street. They had trolley buses where he lived, but he had heard George telling Edna about a seeing a tram that had been hit by a bomb as he made his way along to the station from work one night. In the dream people could be seen upstairs and downstairs inside the tram, pushing to get out and having to run through flames that seemed to rise from the street itself. Like many dreams, it recurred with variations while the boy slept. After watching him shake his head with his eyes shut and hearing his little noises of distress for about ten minutes, Edna woke him up, put him beside her on the settee and cuddled him while he fell asleep to dream again. This time he was standing at night in the back garden in Raynes Park, waiting for George to open the Anderson shelter while there were noises in the sky, which Edna told him were fireworks going off, though he could not remember ever having seen real ones (This was the same idiom as she would use many years later to try to reassure a grandchild that thunder was caused by someone moving grand pianos in the sky). One of the fireworks appeared behind a large shadow and was followed by a great explosion a few streets away. Neighbours, who were also in their gardens on their way to their shelters, were asking anxiously of each other: “Ours or theirs?” or “That must have come down over Merton way!” - words which may as well have been said in Mandarin for all the sense they made to Alex both at the time and when his mind was sending them up again to disturb his traumatized sleep as a result of his painful chin. He heard the agonizingly mournful wailing sound of the air-raid siren in the final dream before he woke up and when he did, he found it metamorphosed into his mother’s voice as she tried to soothe him by singing to him:
Do you want the moon the play with
Or the stars to run away with?
They’ll come if you don’t cry . . .’
He had never liked that song, especially its nonsensical and unbearably distressing chorus that went, ‘Lulla lulla lulla lulla bye bye’. When he heard her singing it he began to cry. Great sobs came out of him and he was inconsolable while Edna became more confused and unable to be calm herself, because she too had been ground down by the same ordeals as he had in these last weeks. Joyce, with her arms round both of them together, eventually brought calm, but she realized it was the calm of exhaustion rather than recovery.
Not long afterwards, Graham came over from the dairy and his son John arrived home from school. At teatime good things were prised from carefully garnered pre-war tins and put on the table for them to eat. Joyce made sure that there was enough whisky in Edna’s teacup for her to fall sound asleep in the front room after the meal, while she put Alex to bed, now self-promoted to an aunt. She made him laugh by telling him funny things and then reading to him out of a dog-eared story book found by John and illustrated with black and white line drawings of lovely trees. These images, still sombre but beautifully so, took over from the earlier ones in his mind as he fell into restorative sleep. When his mother came to her bed three hours later he was sound asleep. During the night he woke up and needed a pee. He found the china pot and gratefully relieved himself, then returned to bed and slept again. This time, his dream was of lying on the crown of a tree with his injured face held up towards therapeutic and happy sunlight.
He woke to hear his mother as she sat up in bed and took the teacup she was offered, saying to Joyce,
“How lovely it was to be able to stay in bed all night!”
The trees that lingered in his waking memory disappeared at her next sentence:
“I hope George was all right at home.” Then his chin started to hurt again, only worse than before.
V
In a few days’ time, with his chin getting better and his mother a little less inclined to tell him off for everything he did, Alex found he was enjoying himself. He liked his new surroundings and the family with whom Edna and he found themselves living. Edna had given Graham avuncular status towards Alex to go with his wife’s new rôle. He was a stocky, jocular, easy-going man with a small moustache, grown after he had left the Royal Navy, and greased down hair, worn short in the fashion of all ex-servicemen. John emerged as admirable because his toys and games were interesting to the four-year-old, though careful prohibitions were issued about touching anything for which specific permission had not been given. Sharp words were to be said on the rare occasions when Alex did so. Nevertheless, Alex soon found in John a model to follow, being so much taller than he was, dressed smartly in his grey school suit, or casually in a sports jersey and short trousers at weekends after Saturday morning school. Alex was left to himself a good deal. The only rule issued, with terrifying sanctions attached to it, was that he should not open the front door by himself but since he could not reach the Yale lock it was of little importance to him. He was free to come and go in all the downstairs rooms and the garden where, again, only those who could reach higher than three foot eleven inches could open the back gate.
Other people’s houses are just as exciting to explore as other people’s bread and jam is better to eat. There were three rooms downstairs that could properly be called such, as well as a scullery off the kitchen, and a lavatory you reached by going out of the back door. There was an oblong hallway, with the stairs taking up half of it. Then, first on the right, was the front room as it was called, with the best furniture and some rich velour curtains now lined with black to comply with the air raid precautions, which were very strictly observed. The Pattersons practised such hospitality as they were able to in straitened times in this room. The next door off the passage belonged to what they called the living room, which was where most things happened around the big table and there were armchairs on either side of the fireplace. A birdcage hung near the window and a canary called Joey made his presence known at all hours of the day. Joyce talked to the bird incessantly as if he were John’s baby sister. She insisted that its name was short for Josephine but Graham was well aware that it was a male bird. John was now of an age to wonder how he knew. There were two pictures hanging in this room, both landscapes, one in spring and the other in autumn, bought with a staff discount from the store’s picture gallery when Graham worked there. The square carpet had seen better times, but they had had to leave their better carpets in the Motspur Park house in order to get a good rent as long as they were away from it. A single window at one end of the room looked out past the kitchen and lavatory towards the garden. The dairy buildings could be seen on the other side of a five-foot brick wall at the bottom of the garden.
Straight in front of you as you came to the end of the passage from the front door, you went down two steps and found the kitchen with a large black enamelled range on which the cooking was done and the kettle was incessantly boiling. A shift of a lever on the range would mean that you could have a bath upstairs in twenty minutes on hot days and an hour in the depth of winter. There was a table placed under the window between the scullery wall and the back door. The window looked out over the path and dividing wall to Mrs White’s window, next door. The kitchen was where most meals were eaten. The range was alight on most days: a coal allowance was part of Graham’s remuneration from the dairy because a great deal of it was delivered for the propulsion of the machinery and there was always some to spare, even in those days. The last room in the house downstairs was the scullery off the kitchen with a large stone sink, a concrete floor and a copper for the washing. Joyce had put a gas stove in there, which, now that there were two families to cater for, was to be used more than ever before.
Monday was a hot day for everyone because lighting the burner underneath the copper was a major task and in the time just be
ginning neither Joyce nor Edna was prepared to do that more than once a week. If the clothes you wanted had not been washed in this contraption on Monday, then you had to wait for them until after next wash day. Through the scullery window you could see the garden again, all down to grass with just a few flowers by next door’s wall. A huge Ewbank mangle stood outside ready for use after the copper had performed its function with the soap flakes and blue bag and what seemed endless rinses. All the washing had to be mangled in between the rinses. The garden was thirty feet long, and that allowed for a single washing line between two posts to cope with one family’s washing. Now that there would be more washing, the ex-naval personnel on the Saturday after the first wash-day that involved both the Pattersons and the Rylands and in anticipation of the next, rigged lines and tackle until the garden faintly resembled the shrouds of Nelson’s flagship in their imaginations. In fact there was much amusement with a couple of signal flags that emerged from Graham’s souvenirs at the inauguration of the lines. It was regretted that neither of the two chiefs had or knew how to use a bosun’s pipe.
During the early days at the house Alex liked the garden. It was still warm enough to play outside and quite safe there. Since his mother knew he was all right, she left him to his own devices, which he liked even more. He also had an assortment of 00 gauge Hornby railway lines and rolling stock that John had grown out of, but he was not allowed to touch his valuable locomotives. There was also a small wooden tunnel and a length of station platform. Since Alex could not remember having gone to a real main line station at any time, these mysterious objects made him more imaginative than he would have been had he merely accepted them as replicas.
A Childs War Page 2
