There was not much room downstairs when the bus came along and Edna decided not to see if there was more room on the upper deck. She found a seat for herself next to a young woman wearing slacks and a scarf as a turban who was smoking a cigarette despite all the notices to the contrary on the lower deck, unseen or ignored by the bus conductor. Alex was dragged on to Edna’s lap and she held him tight around his waist to keep him in place since the lack of room between Edna’s bunched up overcoat and the next seat made his slipping down to the floor in front of her a strong likelihood. She held him in place with the aid of her old shopping bag, which he noticed was made out of quilted patches. Many of the stitches that should have held the patches together had split apart from one another. It seemed that the perpetrator of his discomfort had found an accomplice at the same time as he squirmed round to complain to her, because a tube of smoke issued from the double mound of lipstick six inches beneath the turbaned scarf and met his nostrils, giving him an unwelcome share of the young woman’s breath and second-hand tobacco smoke. His unrestrained coughing embarrassed Edna, who began apologising to her fellow passenger. Alex considered his mother’s words to be unfair, since the woman should be apologising to him.
When the bus reached the station, the young woman stood up, asking Edna to excuse her while she got off. Edna took away the bag, picked Alex up, stationed him violently in the gangway, and stood herself to let her out. When Alex rushed to take her seat by the window, Edna sat down again close to him, still seeming to him to think it better if he were wedged into his seat by her full-skirted coat and the weight of her body. His intention had been to look out of the window but it was steamed up, and Edna told him off for wiping the moisture away, claiming that this would put indescribable filth on his hand which would soon make his way to his lungs and stomach to cause incurable illness.
It was a relief to change buses in the city, involving a short walk along the High Street and a wait outside one college and opposite another.
“These places aren’t houses, are they?” he said.
“No,” said Edna.
“They aren’t shops either, are they?”
“No.”
“Are they offices?”
“No.”
“What are they, then?”
“Oh, do stop asking me things,” said Edna, and immediately thought better of it. She told him, “They are Oxford colleges.”
“I know this is Oxford,” he said, “But what’s a college?”
Edna gave up worrying about George’s absence and not being able to return to Raynes Park. She tried to furnish a reply.
“It’s a place where rich young men come to study after they leave school.”
“Why are colleges only for rich young men?”
“Because it costs a lot of money to study in one of these places.”
“What does ‘study’ mean?”
“It means reading a lot of dry books and talking posh and going to lectures.”
She realized then that she might have to cope with providing meanings for all the three terms she had used and was relieved when all he said was, “That’s funny. Why do the books they read have to be dry? I suppose it’s because if you drop a book in water you can’t turn the pages very easily.”
This was a scientific observation based on an experiment of his own which had upset him some days earlier in the garden, involving the old pie dish again.
Edna was very glad to see the bus crawling towards them and said remarkably gently, “No more questions now. Let’s get ready to get on.” This process involved lifting him up to the height of her waist where he was buffeted by her handbag from one side and completely blinded as the shopping bag found its place in front of his mouth and was sucked over his face. Once on the bus he regained his sight and during the uneventful journey out of the city that followed few words were spoken by either of them. Edna planned her strategy for her first foray into illegitimate food purchases, which necessitated bringing her growing child with her in order to excite the poultry farmer’s sympathetic feelings, instead of leaving him at home with Joyce. Alex considered the likelihood that his father would give him a fuller explanation of what the rich young men got up to in their colleges and decided to ask him at the weekend.
Edna was surprised how easily the black marketing had been achieved as she dragged Alex back to the return bus stop, keeping the now valuable shopping bag at arm’s length from her leg. She made him hold her hand so as to keep him on the pavement and he showed a dangerous tendency to disturb her balance as he skipped about at her side. As they waited, with no one else about to hear, Edna said,
“Now, listen. I don’t want you to say anything about what’s in this bag while we’re on the bus going home.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll get me into trouble with the authorities if you do. So it will be best if we don’t have any chatter at all.”
Alex took her at her word and did not answer, though he would have liked to know what an authority was and why, together with others, it constituted a threat to his mother.
“Do you hear what I say?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you answer me, then?”
“I thought you told me not to!”
Edna bit her bottom lip and hurt it to add to her problems. She was glad to see that when the single-decker bus stopped, Alex had enough sense to take hold of the rail and step on to it by himself.
Edging her fragile and precious bag in front of her, she followed Alex to the only vacant seat, and motioned him to take a place by her as she sat down.
“You’ll have to stand in the gangway,” she whispered in his ear.
“I don’t want to,” he muttered.
“Keep quiet now. Remember what I said.”
Edna did a balancing trick with shopping bag, handbag and purse to pay the fare while the bus conductor patted Alex’s cap, thereby depriving him of sight for the third time that morning. Alex took his cap off. Edna wanted him to put it on again lest he dropped it and it got dirty, but remembered in time that she had enjoined silence upon him and kept quiet herself.
He was only four and was weary with travel and frustration at not having his questions answered to his satisfaction. He was puzzled by mystery being created round such an apparently simple thing as buying three dozen eggs. He longed to sit down. There were no free seats so, despite her whispered and frantic protests, he climbed on her lap and sat on the shopping bag, hearing the cracking of the shells and Edna’s furious gasp, “Oh, bugger!”
Alex saw the amused pity in the eyes of the woman in the other half of the seat. Edna felt the slimy wetness penetrating her coat and skirt and stockings and neither mother nor son said anything for the rest of the lengthy, miserable journey.
Edna found getting off the bus very difficult indeed since she could not avoid egg white and pierced yolk dripping from the bag and from beneath her coat as she went uncomfortably along the bus. She left Alex to make his own way to the pavement, while he was hoping that he would never see her again.
He let her catch up with him soon and because she did not want to foul another bus seat beneath the gaze of fellow travellers she dragged him on foot all the way home from the city centre. Since she still did not want anyone else to know about her nefarious purchase, she said under her breath while she spread the tears on her face with her free hand,
“You silly little fool. Why did you have to sit on my lap? I told you about the eggs and how awkward it would be if anybody found out that I had them. Now they’re still dripping all over the pavement and people can see what I’ve got here and I’ll have to take my clothes to be cleaned and the cleaners will see what has happened and wonder where I got the eggs from, besides the fact that my crutch is all wet and sticky - and it’s all because of you, you silly little fool!”
“You only told me to keep quiet. You didn’t say anything about not sitting on your lap!”
“But I told you there were egg
s in the bag and you know that eggs break when you sit on them!”
“I’ve never sat on one before,” he replied and felt her hand in full force on his ear so that he wished he still had his cap on.
He said no more and Edna kept her thighs as far from each other as possible as she went forward, dragging Alex behind her, exciting the interest of those whom they passed with the wet shopping bag dripping alongside her. What they noticed more, however, was the exasperated expression on the face of the limping woman with a wet and slimy coat, whose little boy seemed to share her grief. Fortunately, they were of a mind to pass by and not render assistance. That would have been more than Edna could have borne. The showers had gone now and as they walked the day had become oppressively hot.
When they were home, Joyce tried to stop herself laughing at what had happened, and found two of the eggs undamaged in spite of everything. Edna had a wash down and put on clean clothes. The bag was assiduously cleansed and left hanging out on the clothesline for the rest of the week in order to remind Alex of his misdemeanour.
When George arrived home on Friday night, he produced three full egg boxes in mint condition from his case and one of them was opened on Saturday morning. Alex had forgotten how nice a soft-boiled egg tasted eaten with soldiers of toast dipped into it. Nothing was said about Monday’s fiasco in his presence, but George’s knowing wink as he took away his eggcup when Alex had finished let him know that what he had done was not held against him. Just then, Edna appeared with a large newspaper parcel. She gave it to George and quietly said to him,
“Thanks for seeing to this for me.”
George took it from her, and went out quickly.
He was back after half an hour or so.
“They’ll be ready on Thursday,” he said. “Here’s the receipt. Don’t go paying twice.”
Edna took the shopping bag from the line and put it in the dustbin.
III
Towards the end of June Alex came to the breakfast table one Sunday morning to hear his father and honorary uncle excitedly talking about the war. There was nothing new in them talking about it: it was the excitement that was different.
“He’s bitten off more than he can chew this time!”
“So much for non-aggression pacts made with him!”
“Yes, but the important thing is what the papers say Winnie said.”
“You mean, ‘any man or state that fights the Nazis has our aid’.”
“Yes. I never thought we’d end up in cahoots with Uncle Joe.”
“Any port in a storm, George. Any port in a storm.”
This discussion was brought to an end by Joyce calling out from the scullery,
“Do either of you want another piece of fried bread?”
As Alex climbed on his chair and put a large tea towel round his neck as was required of him, he tried to decipher what seemed to have happened. He knew who “Winnie” was from the impressions of his speech often made at this table: he went about smoking a cigar and making a gesture with his fingers that Alex was not allowed by Edna under any circumstances to imitate for fear that his version might be imperfect and therefore misinterpreted by the respectable. What a non-aggression pact might be eluded him, as did the possible identity of “Uncle Joe”. And someone else had his mouth too full of food that he could not swallow, which had some bearing on the war.
All that became insignificant when Joyce brought his porridge in for him. He was relieved that he did not have to chew porridge, or he might end up like the unfortunate subject of his father’s remark.
Before he actually needed to ask, George explained to him that Hitler had unexpectedly sent his army into Russia in force and this meant that Great Britain was no longer fighting him and the Italian Fascists on her own. Edna had not come downstairs yet so it was all right to produce the Sunday paper, breaking her rule against reading at the table, and George showed Alex the map of the invasion and explained it to him.
“No one has ever been able to invade Russia successfully,” George said. “You see: this will make a lot of difference. Napoleon was defeated after he reached Moscow. Lenin was able to impose peace on the Kaiser in the first war when the German generals found they could not win a war fought on two fronts. Nobody expected what has just happened because one of the worrying things has been that Hitler and Joe Stalin . . .”
“Oh,” put in Alex, “Then that’s ‘Uncle Joe’!”
“Yes. Swore that they would never attack each other only two years ago and this left Hitler free to keep his attention on us. Now he’s turned round and gone the other way. If only the Americans would do a bit more than lease us a few of their old destroyers we could see him off while his back’s turned.”
“He’s still got his U-boats though, George,” put in Graham.
Alex noticed that the two men had changed their rôles. George was saying all the hopeful things with Graham putting a damper on him, whereas always before it had been the other way round. But the interesting grown-up men’s talk soon stopped when George heard Edna on the stairs and quickly folded the newspaper to make it disappear. He got up and offered her his place, since there were only four chairs at the table and the other one was Joyce’s if she wanted it. He went to get his wife a cup of tea from the pot warming on the kitchen range as she came into the kitchen.
Alex said,
“Hitler’s invaded Russia, Mum.”
“Never mind about that. Just eat your porridge.”
George shook his head with a smile at his boy and went off to devour the rest of the paper in peace.
“Morning, Edna,” said Graham. “Things have taken an unexpected turn, though. George seems quite hopeful that it will make a difference.”
“Yes. Dad says it means we haven’t got to fight Hitler on our own anymore.”
“It will be a good thing when you go to school and you won’t have to fill your head up with things that are beyond you.”
This thought about school was to be reiterated constantly over the next three months, hanging over Alex and assuming the proportions of a threat greater than he could imagine. He knew where the school was. He knew that everyone just a year older than he had to go there. But what they did inside that great big building in Ferry Hinksey Road, and why they had to take their gas masks with them every time, were questions he could not answer for himself and was afraid to ask his mother.
Later on in the day he asked George about the purpose of going to school.
“They’ll teach you how to read,” he told him.
“But I can read. Can’t I?”
“Not quite yet,” said George, “And there’s counting and writing to learn as well. You might as well take what they are offering. Come to think of it, you could read to me for a change.”
Edna and Joyce came in at this point, and Graham soon followed. Alex realized that it was time for the great Sunday afternoon snooze and went out to the garden, stopping at his cupboard in the sitting room for some balsa wood off cuts that John had given him and bits of wire and lengths of string. He went into the garden, where he manufactured a fully rigged and armoured warship. Alex saw what he had made as H.M.S. Exeter taking on the Graf Spee, which he had been told about ages ago. Some dirt off the inspection cover made it the right grey and some of the spills used to light the gas oven were fetched and became, in small pieces, signal flags and, in long ones, its main armament. He came in for two cotton reels he knew he had and these became the fore and aft turrets. When it had finished its battle, it limped home and was put into his pie dish, found where he had hidden it behind a scruffy rose in the corner of the garden, and now metamorphosed into a dry dock in which the ship underwent its refit before going on to further triumphs, perhaps to bring help to the Russian navy...
After an hour of self-absorption, he took the whole thing in, pie dish and all, to his waking father, who rubbed his eyes and said what a parent never must: “Hullo, that’s good. What is it?”
He had the presence of mind, how
ever, to ask Alex less curtly to explain to him what it was, thus restoring self-respect on the boy’s part. When Alex had gone, Edna said,
“You oughtn’t to pander to that boy’s fancy world so much.”
“I don’t know. You’re not lonely for long if you’ve got a good imagination.”
And there they both left it because George had to go to Gloucester Green for the coach in another two hours and they did not want to be in dispute before that happened. It was important to both of them that the smiles as they parted at the front door each week were unforced so that they could remember them and keep them in focus until the following Friday. Edna prided herself on being practical and left imaginative thoughts to George and, reluctantly, to Alex.
“I’ll make a cup of tea,” she said and asked Graham and Joyce if they would like one.
IV
When older people talked about “before the war . . .” with a wistful look on their faces, Alex did not understand what they meant at all. He had come to consciousness of reality while the war was beginning. He had emerged from babyhood in an Anderson shelter and he was just about to go to school with others of his age who could not imagine a world without ration books, or in which new clothes and furniture did not conform to a standard of utility which was serviceable but not elegant, and where everything was marked with two circles with a segment cut out of them and the number forty-one.
Edna always looked elegant when she was in her better clothes. She still had many of her pre-war things, since George had brought up a great suitcase the weekend before the house was destroyed. Clothes were worn to destruction if they were liked. In the summer, Edna often wore a thin black coat with appliqué embroidery around the collar and on its facings, held together in front by a row of small covered buttons fastening into loops over her new pink silk dress trimmed at the neck with lace. The hat she wore with this coat was nearly all covered in black feathers over its crown and brim, with a large crimson feather over her forehead resembling a maple leaf. Sometimes she wore the spotted veiling that went with it and sometimes not. The coat was what she had on when she and Alex arrived in Oxford last year and it would see out each wartime summer before it was discarded. She only stopped wearing it then because she could no longer get it on over her increased weight once she had decided to be a matronly figure at the age of forty-three. Alex associated it in his own mind with another garment she often sang a song about, not realizing that he was listening, or she never would have:
A Childs War Page 6
