A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  He proceeded out of the room near the end of the last file as the initial of his surname demanded, followed by James Vaughan and Roy Wheeler. As the door was reached, they pushed past him, and he was the last one through the door. A backward glance gave him a glimpse of Miss Hill sinking into the chair behind her desk and resting her head on her arms. None of the children in her class yet knew that she was new this term, sent to replace a male teacher who had been called up, or that she lived in Didcot whence she intended to travel on the train each day since she looked after her elderly parents there, or that she had been kept up most of last night as a result of bombs, jettisoned from an enemy plane hit by anti-aircraft fire while attacking the West Midlands and off course, falling on the street where she lived. Her satin blouse was her Sunday best, kept in a different place from the chest of drawers containing her everyday wear that was soaked by the fireman’s hose being used next door after bomb blast had taken out her bedroom window.

  Edna was imitating an ostrich at the gate, stretching her neck over the heads of the other mothers as she looked for Alex who seemed to be taking a long time coming out of the building. She became annoyed when she saw him. The other children ran to their mothers with tales of new things on their lips, but Alex was moving slowly with his mouth turned down at the corners to make the face that often encouraged George to say to him, “Give us a ride on your lip!”

  Instead of saying, “What’s wrong?” as he hoped she would and expecting to be told why he was sad, all she could think of was the challenging question, “What’s the matter with you, then?” This could only evince his miserable answer, “Oh, nothing.”

  Edna was relieved not to be compelled to spend emotional energy on him that afternoon. She had opened the letter from the solicitor in Wimbledon that came by the second post, in which she had learnt that hopes of repairing the damage to the house in Raynes Park had receded. She was compelled to remain as an evacuee and a weekend wife to George. The sight of Alex snivelling across the playground on his own was not calculated to help her out of her despair and she had few resources of strength left.

  A symptom of her desperation, as they reached the pavement opposite the house, was her decision to begin to teach Alex how to cross the road safely in hopes that at some future time she would not need to accompany him to and from school. Standing on the kerb with his hand firmly held in hers, she said,

  “Look up the road. Is there anything coming?”

  “Yes. A lorry and a horse and cart.”

  “Now look the other way, down the road. Is there anything coming that way?”

  “Yes. Two men on bikes and a bus.”

  “Look the other way again. Is there anything coming now?”

  “The horse and cart is still coming, followed by a car.”

  “And the other way?”

  “I can’t see past the bus.”

  At this point, Edna realized that the time was not right for any more education that afternoon and that he was no higher than the tops of the bus wheels as they passed. So she dragged him with her behind the bus, knowing that the car on the other side of the road could not accelerate because of the milk cart it was following. As she dodged behind the milk cart, the driver of the car had ample leisure to sound his motor horn at her as she jumped from the kerb up to the front step of Joyce’s house. Alex landed on his knee beside her and had to have ointment put on the graze. The fact that the flat, round tin Edna opened was labelled “Germolene” produced an interesting train of thought in his mind, and the question to his mother,

  “Haven’t we got any Englolene?”

  This made her smile at him. At last, the load was lightened for both of them and, when she had taken her coat and hat off, Edna sat down to cuddle him for a little while. For once she did not tell him not to suck his thumb.

  VI

  Later on, when Graham, Joyce, John, Edna and Alex sat at the kitchen table for their high tea, the inevitable question was asked. It was Graham who asked it.

  “How did you get on at school, Alex?”

  “I got on all right with the reading, Uncle Graham.”

  “Did you make any friends?”

  “Not really, Auntie Joyce.”

  By this time all at the table had realized that there had been something wrong with Alex’s first day at school and wanted to find out what it was. John tried next.

  “Were the lessons easy?”

  “The tables were all right: all you had to do was keep on saying them.”

  “Give us one of them now, then.”

  “Once two is two, two twos are four, three twos are six, four twos are eight. That’s enough isn’t it!”

  “That’s very good, Alex.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t mean anything, does it?”

  “It does. Look . . .” John reached for the jar in which Joyce collected copper coins and set out some pennies - the big old ones with Britannia ruling the waves on them. “Here are two pennies. Here are two more, so that’s four. Then two more: six. Another two: that makes eight, and so on.”

  “All it is is counting, then!”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why didn’t Miss Hill say so, then?”

  No one had an answer to that. Joyce asked the telling question,

  “Did you do any writing?”

  Then she wished she had not.

  “I didn’t like that much.”

  “Why?”

  This time it was his mother who asked.

  “Because she wouldn’t let me use my left hand and made me use the wrong one. It wouldn’t work at all and all I got was an untidy mess on the paper. When I did it with the right hand - this hand, I mean,” - at this point he waved his left hand - “I drew some nice Js. But with the wrong hand I couldn’t do anything properly. She said I would never get anywhere in life if I didn’t use my wrong hand.”

  Edna assumed the countenance of Britannia rising from the pennies, wielding her fork like a trident.

  “I’ll come in and see the headmistress again in the morning, Alex. They can’t mess you about like that! I won’t let them!”

  “Thank you, Mum,” sniffed Alex, and was glad when John started telling them about what had happened at his school. It didn’t sound much better to Alex. Perhaps all schools were the same.

  “When will I be able to stop going to school?” Alex asked.

  “Not before you’re fourteen, sonny,” said Graham, “and if the war’s finished by then, they’ve promised to make it when you’re fifteen!”

  John was Buttons to Edna’s fairy godmother.

  “It gets a bit better as you learn the dodges, Alex.”

  “‘Ow long have you been in the service?” asked his father, and at last there was some welcome laughter.

  Later on, from his divan in the living room, he heard Edna say to Joyce as they went upstairs, “I don’t know what gets into people like Alex’s teacher! Little Hitlers, all of them!” This was an encouraging saying to him as he lay in bed awake, frightened of the morning and dreading his return to Miss Hill’s classroom. He went to sleep after the dread had produced a clear image in his mind of Miss Hill, wobbling deliciously under her satin blouse, with her grey skirt discarded, her hair sleeked down on one side and a little moustache, raising her right hand in the appropriate salute, and mouthing “Achtung”. Fantasy and fear often go together.

  VII

  Edna did go to the school in the morning at twenty past eight with a sleepy Alex trailing behind her. She made straight for Miss Cook’s door and hammered upon it with her fist. The wood and glass were unharmed. The side of Edna’s fist hurt all day. Miss Cook appeared behind her in the corridor, wearing her hat and carrying her Gladstone bag and umbrella.

  “Good morning. Mrs Ryland, isn’t it? What can I do for you?”

  “You can tell your Miss Hill to let Alex use his left hand for writing,” said Edna with more truculence than she had ever heard from her own lips, though this was by no means the first quarrel sh
e had picked with authority since she came of age.

  “Won’t she let him, though?” asked Miss Cook as she unlocked her door. “Come in and sit down while I go and see her.”

  Edna and Alex went into the classroom and sat down on a desk this time, preferring to avoid the cold stone step that was in this room as well as the infants’. After a few minutes, a smiling Miss Cook returned and asked Alex to go to his classroom to see Miss Hill. She did it so sensitively that he forgot to be frightened for long enough to comply with her wishes.

  When he had gone, Miss Cook told Edna,

  “Yesterday was very difficult. Miss Hill is new to us, replacing a young man who has been called up for war service. She was late in for the half hour’s induction I was supposed to give her on her first morning on account of an unusual air raid at Didcot where she lives and I was not able fully to explain this school’s policy to her. I decided some years ago to abandon that old-fashioned compulsion to use the right hand only. There have been plenty of left-handed geniuses. Let us hope your Alexander will turn out to be one, Mrs Ryland!”

  “I do hope not,” said Edna. “Clever people are so difficult to live with.”

  “Maybe they are,” replied Miss Cook. “I haven’t met many!”

  Meanwhile, Miss Hill opened the classroom door for Alex, smiled at him, and told him that she had been thinking about yesterday and had decided that he should use the hand with which he was more comfortable to do his written work. Alex was more than relieved, and he even smiled at her.

  “Go outside for a minute or two, now, Alexander,” she said. “We have assembly in the hall first thing this morning, and I haven’t practised the hymn tune on the piano yet. Off you go!”

  Alex did not know what had happened, but he was very sorry to see that Miss Hill’s mother had dried out and pressed the clothes she usually wore in school after the firemen had finished with the house next door. The plain, straight dress she was wearing today had very little to enthral him compared with yesterday’s attractions.

  During assembly, Alex learnt that Jesus wanted him for a sunbeam, and decided that whoever he was, he couldn’t have him as such. It was a silly idea to suggest that he could. Likewise a few mornings later he decided that he bore little resemblance to a “pure, clear light” either and wasn’t going to be anybody’s “little candle”. He found out that these fatuous songs were called hymns and the penny dropped from when he was outside the chapel at the end of Helen Road with his father on a Sunday afternoon months ago. He decided that hymns had no part in his sense of mystery. In fact they spoilt it for him. This was sad, because mystery was important.

  He warmed, in contrast, to the lovely sound of Miss Cook’s voice at the end of the assembly as she said:

  “. . . defend us in the same with thy mighty power; and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger; but that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance, to do always that is righteous in thy sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

  He had not the slightest idea what these words meant in detail, but they spoke to him of deep peace, so it didn’t matter to him that he had never heard of sin. The inconsistency between now and his annoyance the afternoon before, when another prayer that he might be kept from danger only made him resentful, passed by him.

  As he took his place at his desk a few minutes later, he asked Isabel,

  “Did you like that song we sang in the hall?”

  “Not the words, but I like to sing. It cheers me up.”

  Alex found that this was a widely prevalent attitude but for his part he liked the words of songs to mean something. Those songs on the wireless meant a great deal. It was a pity that all they conveyed was sadness, though.

  “Why did we have to stand on those green spots in the hall?” Isabel asked him.

  “I expect it’s so that we don’t catch colds from each other.”

  While one of the trusties who sat in a front desk was giving out the reading books, Miss Hill quietly made Alex and Isabel change places in the double desk they shared to avoid the inevitable clash of elbows now that Alex was going to use his left hand with impunity. She was not unbearably tired as she had been the day before, and she smiled quietly to herself as she thought of five-year-old Isabel giving Alex the elbow. The straight-laced element in her soon reminded her of her proper responsibilities and she called the class to order for a recapitulation of Nat running through the pictures in the reading book to see the fun.

  “How was school, boy?” asked George on Saturday morning.

  “Not bad at all,” said Alex.

  Edna had already told him the real story.

  4

  George, Edna and Alex had kept up their theatre-going in order to give Graham, Joyce and John a chance to be on their own for at least some time each week. On the Saturday after Alex had started at school, the variety show they went to see took on a special quality. A well-known comedian called Sid Field was top of the bill and Alex rolled about in his seat in the upper circle, helpless from what he said and did. His parents’ laughter was infectious too. Alex could not tell why it was funny when the straight man observed that the comedian’s Astrakhan overcoat was very long, and the comedian replied, “Yes, if it were any longer it would look silly!” But it was, and what particularly appealed to him was a well-painted set depicting the inside of a grocer’s shop that looked just like the Oxford branch of the Home and Colonial. There was a long ladder with its upper end leaning on the top shelf behind the counter. Sid Field was the shopkeeper. Customers came in and asked for a pound of sugar. He made some remark about it being rationed and hard to get, while climbing right to the top of the ladder to obtain it. After doing this three times, he stopped at the top of the ladder with the third bag of sugar in his hand, looking round to say to the latest customer in the shop,

  “I suppose you want a pound of sugar, too, don’t you.”

  The new customer replied, “No, thank you.”

  The comedian-grocer began the long descent of the ladder, drawing out the process for as long as possible. He handed the pound of sugar to the previous customer, took the money and dealt with the ration book. Turning back to the latest entrant, he asked, “Well, madam, what can I get you?”

  The answer was, “I want half a pound.”

  As the grocer painstakingly ascended the ladder again, the lights blacked out, the whole of the audience were convulsed with mirth, and Alex remembered what laughing was. So did Edna, and so did George. So did everybody else in the theatre.

  Later on, Alex tried to explain this sketch and its impact to Joyce and Graham. No one would have dreamed of saying, “You had to be there” about a reported joke that no one else saw the point of in 1941, but it was true. He had skipped all the way home through the blackout with a hand held by each of his parents and occasionally they had shouted out together, “I want half a pound!” A policeman by the station entrance envied them their cheerfulness that evening as they bounded together past him. Even when the air raid warning sounded at the same time as they reached the front gate they did not quieten down.

  For a couple of hours that afternoon they had forgotten they had been bombed out and behaved as they fancied they would have if there been no Hitler and peace and prosperity had been assured for all forever. All through the evening meal Alex kept repeating the punchline and, time and time again, George and Edna began to laugh once more. In the end they realized why they were laughing and gradually stopped. They were more kind to each other that evening than they had been for a long time. George put his arm round Edna as they sat on the sofa and she welcomed it, even though Graham and Joyce were in the room.

  II

  On Sunday morning, something planned over the garden fence on Monday took effect. Mrs Wilson and her two daughters who lived next door took Alex with them to St Frideswide’s Church. Sergeant-Major Wilson had been home recently for a seventy-two hour pass, which, once travelling time had been deducted, gave him forty-e
ight hours with his family. Mrs Wilson knew how valuable such time was for a couple and what tension arose when children had to be built into it, so she offered to take Alex off George and Edna’s hands for an hour or so.

  He did not remember ever going to church before. He knew he must have been, because one of the things that had not been lost in the blitz was his baptism certificate. Edna had shown it to him and let him examine it for himself. He had perused it very carefully. It was printed on a white card that assured all its readers that it had originated in Great Britain. The card was headed Memorial of Baptism in very ornate lettering, although Edna assured him that it was a certificate not a memorial; a memorial was something else which he wouldn’t understand yet, she said. This confused him because he knew “full well” (another of Edna’s little phrases) what a war memorial was and Edna was quite right: he did not understand the connection between a large stone cross with a sword and some names on it and whatever his baptism might be. The card was decorated with gold, blue, green and red leaves and flowers and, in places, what looked like carrots. It was signed by a man called Thomas Parry in green ink to match the rest of the card, affirming that he was the Vicar of St James’s Church, Myatt’s Park, London, SE5. Edna explained that the church was not far from Flodden Road in Camberwell, where George and Edna had been living in lodgings when he was born.

  He had been allowed to hold it until he started to crease it and then Edna took it back like the holy relic it was, to be protected under the front cover of George’s World’s Cruise book where it was kept with other valuable papers. Edna told him that he was sick all over her after the christening and that she had managed to keep one or two snapshots taken at the party in their landlady’s garden. These pictures were kept in Edna’s handbag, which was how they had been preserved, along with one Alex always hated of himself aged about eighteen months, dressed in a matching overcoat and long trousers together with what he could only recognize as a flying helmet and, worse still, around his middle a leather contraption with round bells on it from which reins hung down behind him. The expression on his face was of a child who had put a whole tomato in his mouth and did not know what subsequent action to take. Worst of all, Edna was fond of passing this photograph round and he really wished she wouldn’t. Why didn’t she get someone to take a photo of him now and pass that round? It was what he looked like at present that was important. John had comforted him by saying that at least he had clothes on in that picture: Joyce had one of him that was very embarrassing indeed.