A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  VI

  Christmas was coming. “I feel sorry for the poor buggers in the Midlands,” Edna announced after the Home Service news one dinnertime had reported that industrial centres there were being bombed. Alex was bound to ask who these poverty stricken people might be and was once more unsatisfied with Edna’s answer. Joyce did not help by saying that the other word he asked about meant “souls” in this instance.

  George was home (as it now was) for the best part of a week around Christmas. He had brought things with him about which he was very secretive, and discovered to every one’s amusement (or not, depending on the time of day) that he could still whistle in spite of his full dentures and did so with great determination. One morning Alex found him in the garden with his jacket buttoned up over his thick cardigan, a scarf round his neck and his hat on, completing the picture by wearing one of Edna’s pinafores and sitting on a kitchen chair on an old sheet found for him by Joyce, plucking three diminutive chickens one after the other. The whistling prevented the smaller feathers getting into his mouth as he worked, but they either settled on every feature of his attire with very few actually reaching the sheet beneath him or blew about in the wind before sticking to the rough wood of the fence, the frost-damp rollers of the mangle and the decaying weeds in the flower bed beside it. Afterwards feathers grew in the garden for several days until Graham decided he really must get rid of them before anyone looking over the wall from the dairy yard asked awkward questions about where the birds had come from and how they had been obtained.

  George brought the naked and headless creatures into the kitchen and began the grisly task of removing the giblets. He whistled once more in order to avoid the expected stench and Alex, who had watched the process so far with enormous interest, withdrew when he discovered for the first time what the inside of a chicken smelled like. It reminded him of a morning about a week ago when he had evaded Edna’s demands that he should “do his duty” and to her unexpected amusement, considering her disciplinarian stance in these matters, he had broken wind spectacularly, provoking her to comment, “Good Lord, Alex! It’s as though something had crept up you and died!” Luckily he had forgotten this foul aspect of the preparation of the chicken when he came to eat his Christmas dinner.

  When the great day came, Alex could not remember having had chicken to eat before or having had a taste of a drink that the others called Sauternes. There was a Christmas pudding too: “We aren’t going to let a man with only one ball dictate to us what we eat at Christmas!” Graham said as he emptied the last of a bottle of prewar brandy over it in the dark and Alex imagined the entire German nation unable to play more than one game of football or tennis at any given time. He had been shown Germany on the map in John’s school atlas and was worried because, instead of being on the other side of the world as he had supposed since they had to use aeroplanes to bring bombs from it, it was not very far away after all. His gloomy thought was interrupted as the lighted match set off the blue flame of the burning brandy and a general cheerfulness broke out.

  After dinner, everyone went to the front room where there was a good fire and the blackout was already up at half past three. Alex’s present from George and Edna turned out to be better than any toy he had had before. He watched his father assemble it for him on the floor, for which transaction a fairly large space had to be cleared. None of the presents given and received that year in that house had wrapping paper on account of the war effort but the store still had a toy department with a good deal of stock in it and a long cardboard box from which all labels had been removed was duly opened for the components of Alex’s present to emerge one by one. George had been through the box before and arranged its contents so that they would come out in an order that would heighten the sense of wonder. First there was a circular piece of metal with a central socket which was put down as a base, then an upright, nine or ten inches high, with a bracket at the top of it. Next a longer metal bar was produced, with a bracket two-thirds along its length to be fixed horizontally so that it swivelled round on the upright. A weight was attached to the shorter end.

  “This is the tricky bit,” said George, as he connected a wire with a small screwdriver from the still vacant end of the horizontal bar through the swivel where the two bars met, to run down to the floor inside the upright, whence it was led away to a large battery at a distance. Alex was attentive to every move and he could not guess in advance what would happen next.

  “Now for the thing itself!” said George, and he produced from the bottom of the box something carefully concealed in a piece of cloth. He took the cloth off as if he were a magician and revealed a model aeroplane made of light metal. George explained that it was a fixed wing monoplane and he rapidly attached it to the vacant end of the horizontal bar by means of two nuts and bolts with the aid of a diminutive spanner beside which his engineer’s fingers seemed gigantic. The last job was to connect everything to a switch that he had fixed to a small piece of wood to keep it steady.

  “There,” he said. “Now all keep back and we’ll see if it works.”

  Alex was told to come over to where the switch was and to take hold of the small knob in one hand and steady the piece of wood with the other.

  “That’s right. Now switch on!”

  Alex did, and squealed delightedly as the propeller on the little aeroplane began to rotate and take it round the central pillar in a circle until it was going fast enough to leave the ground and fly, balanced by its counterweight.

  The flying hours of that monoplane were countless. It flew for the best part of the next hour and it was brought out at least once a day well into 1941, still making appearances when anyone remembered to obtain a new battery for it for several years after that.

  However, George had not finished. At five o’clock he asked Alex to turn the aeroplane off and gently dismantled it, putting it in its box and explaining to Alex how he would be able to get it out for himself on subsequent occasions. Then he, Graham and John moved all the chairs to the side of the room opposite the front window. The table had been brought in from the living room after the washing-up had been completed and was now moved forward to allow George to stand behind it in front of the curtains. Then he asked everybody to close their eyes and not to open them until he said so. All obeyed, including Alex, and they waited while they heard George moving about behind the table.

  “All right. Open your eyes now!”

  There on the table was a beautiful model theatre. John switched off the light in the room. A string was pulled and the curtain went up to reveal a lit stage with scenery and a frenetically dancing harlequin. The curtain descended and rose up again and this time there was Mr Punch. With Graham behind the table as well, four characters were possible: Mrs Punch, the policeman, the baby and the crocodile all appeared in turn and the script was read out by two distorted voices by the light of a torch held by a clamp in a stand constructed for the purpose. Everybody joined in at “That’s the way to do it!” and it did not occur to them that there was any cruelty involved in Mr Punch’s violence. George’s own voice then announced an interval, and a tray of drinks was produced from behind the table with something appropriate for everyone present.

  Then, after ten minutes, George and Graham were ready to present two figures in ballet costume for a version of a pas-dedeux, with the music played by the two fathers on kazoos. The curtain fell and rose again and as a finale Harlequin appeared once more to wish all present a prosperous New Year and, God willing, more peaceful times. The curtain descended and rose for the last time and then the two controllers of the straight wires that supported each of the cardboard figures with knotted joints produced a curtain call appearance of the whole cast amid the acclamations of all four in the audience. Alex was making most favourable comparisons between this show and the ones he had seen on his Saturday visits to the New Theatre.

  To maintain the magic, Joyce ushered everyone to the kitchen on a pretext all understood except Alex, while the two m
en quickly took the component parts of the theatre upstairs and restored the front room to its normal state except for the large table. The reason for leaving the room was to pick up little cakes, which were then brought back on plates and eaten. Christmas was kept until ten o’clock, by which time Alex was dozing off and bedtime was decreed.

  VII

  In their room, George and Edna reviewed the day.

  “Thank you for this dress, George. I like it very much indeed.”

  “I’m glad you do. You look nearly as good in it as without it.”

  “Go on! Don’t start all that: these walls are very thin.”

  “Thank you for these gloves, too. Just what I need for those cold nights on the coach when the heater fails, as it usually does just past High Wycombe. And this tie is just what I like.”

  “I’m sorry there wasn’t more. They were very strict about clothing coupons in the shops here.”

  “A bit of black market comes in handy from time to time if you know the right contacts!”

  “And you must’ve to get a silk dress like this!”

  She gave one last twirl before she took it off and carefully hung it up. George wished she wouldn’t wear corsets. Gone were the days when she ran to fat and her friends called her “Pudding” or “Pud” (to rhyme with mud) for short. Since they had come here she had lost a good deal of weight and her jet-black hair had begun to go grey, “To match mine,” he thought to himself.

  “I haven’t seen Alex so happy for a long time,” she said to him with a lot of feeling. “He really enjoyed the aeroplane, didn’t he? And the theatre: those lights you made for it were marvellous.”

  “It’s wonderful what a lot of torch bulbs in the right sockets can do!” he modestly replied. “But what about your curtain? That was the best bit!”

  “You must take the credit for getting hold of the theatre itself, though. I bet it cost a pretty penny.”

  “It did, but not so bad with staff discount. Anyway, the best thing was seeing his face through the proscenium arch!”

  “The what arch?”

  Then the mood of happiness suddenly evaporated. The strain of what had happened overcame them and making their own necessary preparations in isolation from each other they quietly got into bed with their teeth out, after switching off the light and drawing the blackout back a little so as to be able to breathe. There was not much difference between age of this house and its outlook and the one they had lost. That one, however, had been their own, not a friend’s like this one, nor tied up with someone’s job. They missed the quiet and the trees. This house was on a main road with buses often passing and an increasing amount of military traffic. An odious comparison between the houses was always being summoned up in their minds.

  “At least we’re all three alive,” said George, trying to take a positive line against his present disposition. “We must see what the solicitor has been able find out about the possibility of rebuilding number seventy-four.”

  But a great sadness had taken over in Edna, and all she could do in reply was take his hand in both hers to hold it desperately.

  3

  In the New Year things went on very much the same. The air raid warning sounded in Oxford when the Luftwaffe was making its way to bomb the midland cities. George and Graham often burst out into verbal imitations hostile to Hitler, balanced by imitations supportive towards Churchill. When John, who was still too young to see the point of this, tried to imitate the King’s stutter, the adults thought what he did was in very bad taste:

  “The poor man can’t speak very confidently at the best of times, but he does try to rally us, and I think he has,” said Joyce.

  In time, when the penny dropped on the patriotic nature of these imitations, John took over for himself the stereotyped schoolboy’s Hitler imitation, which involved strutting about in a goosestep with the first finger of his left hand held under his nose and his right hand aloft. Since the only German word John knew was “Achtung”, that was spluttered out many times, mixed in with a great deal of gibberish which must have made Goethe and Schiller turn in their graves. John’s school had gone for xenophobia full steam ahead. Nobody said “Nazis” anymore. It was always “Germans”. Under Graham’s roof no objection was raised to that. On the contrary, Alex time and time again heard his parents and his adoptive uncle and aunt talk about “unfinished business from twenty years ago”, which was a very dark saying to him and raised the question whether you had to have a world war like this every couple of decades.

  The two sailors were wrapped in grief and mourned the loss of H.M.S. Hood with very nearly her entire ship’s company. On the Saturday in May after it happened, George told Alex to go and get the World’s Cruise book. He opened it at the picture of the battle cruiser that had been the flagship and pride of the Special Service Squadron. She was a magnificent ship and George wept for her loss as he sat there with the book on his knee. He thought of the men in the engine room, such as he would have been if he had still been in the service, not a few of whom would be his age. He thought bitterly of several men he knew from way back who were at risk now. Alex watched and thought he nearly understood. George quietly remarked that many of them must be at sea with the knowledge that their wives and children were living where the bombs were falling. He was glad to know from his father and mother who still lived near Chatham that not much was happening there in the way of bombing but news reports of much of Portsmouth being totally destroyed were very frightening - and the Hood was a Portsmouth ship.

  On Sunday afternoon the two fathers and their sons went up to Graham’s allotment to see if the runner beans were above ground. As they stood there they heard the faint noise of aero engines and looked up to see an aeroplane, which John identified with the help of a small book he always carried, as a Witley bomber. Its progress across the sky was so very slow and George became reflective.

  “That plane is like us,” he said. “We are digging for victory and using Shanks’s pony and our clothing coupons and ration books, accepting shortages and blackout, and we haven’t started to fight back yet.”

  “Don’t forget we did sink the Bismarck,” said Graham. “They’re not having it all their own way.” The pessimist in George still thought the worst was about to happen, only for Graham to assume the part of the optimist who reckoned that it already had.

  Alex, nevertheless, accepted the presence of runner bean shoots three inches in the air above the ground as his symbol. They had looked very inert as mere beans a little while ago, yet the sticks had been put up in the expectation that the plants growing from them would be as tall as a man before very long.

  There wasn’t much to do on the allotment now. Some desultory draws were given with a Dutch hoe along the ranks of potatoes around the shoots that were showing above ground. Graham fairly quickly made two drills and put some broad beans in and then all four of them simply stood there in the calm light hoping for better things, but not expecting too much. The reverie lasted until John told his father he was getting hungry and they walked home. Each father and son formed a pair to go out of the field which had been divided up to provide the allotments and along Helen Road with its terraced houses on either side towards the main thoroughfare. As they passed the open outer doors of the chapel on the corner they heard a hymn being sung.

  “What are they doing in there?” Alex asked George.

  “You can hear. They’re singing.”

  “Why are they singing?”

  “Because it’s Sunday.” “But we don’t sing on Sundays like that. Why should they?”

  “Because they believe that if they sing hymns it will be pleasing to God.”

  “Why should God be pleased if they sing hymns? It sounds awful to me.”

  “It does to me, too. Come on, don’t let’s hang around here any more, or they’ll be coming out and asking us to join in.”

  “Would they really do that? “

  “Come on, will you? Shake your feathers!”

 
Alex did move along but he was not going to let the question go.

  “I can’t see why, because they believe in God, they have to sing hymns.” Then came his real question:

  “Do you believe in God, Dad?”

  George realized that there was no smart answer to this that would let him off his son’s hook. Now that they were out of range of the singers and very near home he stopped. He thought carefully about his answer. His response to his son was: “I don’t know whether there’s a God or not. But I do know that when you’re at sea with a mile or so of water between you and the bottom, you hope there is.” His own private thought was that there was more than one kind of sea.

  With that he took the last two strides to join Graham at the front gate and went indoors. Alex heard Graham say to George as he went out of the back door to go to the lavatory,

  “I thought you answered that well. Who said being a father was easy?”

  II

  Fresh eggs had become hard to get. Edna asked discreet questions of her new acquaintances and neighbours about where a plentiful supply of new-laid ones might be available. Gossip among the women she was getting to know, backed up by the information channelled towards her by Joyce, led to hard information and her quest narrowed to an out of the way chicken farm at Old Marston. On a showery day she poured Alex into his coat and pulled a hat with flaps down over his ears before leading him out to the bus stop. Alex’s own view of this was that she had perforce to lead him because he could only see the ground a few feet in front of him until she realized that in covering his ears she had covered his eyes as well. He consoled himself with the idea that at least there was no need now for the itchy leggings she made him wear in the winter.