A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  Alex was thinking all this as he held Mrs Wilson’s hand to cross the road to the church. In the middle of the road, he remembered one important result of his christening - and that was that he had collected two people he liked as his godparents as Edna’s snapshots recorded. They were people George and Edna had known for years: a twice-born atheist called Arthur - always known as Art - and his wife, whose name was Jen.

  Art was a good deal older than George and Edna. He was a very remarkable man. He had been born in King’s Cross and not been involved at all in the elementary education set up by the School Boards ten years earlier. He became a regular soldier and fought in the Boer War and the Great War. Early on in his time in the army, he had taught himself, and subsequently many of his comrades in arms, to read. Part of Alex’s impatience with the reading book used in his first week at school was the result of cheerful quarter hours with Uncle Art. Alex had no idea what a godparent was and nobody had ever tried to tell him, but he was very attached to Art and Jen, and was sorry he had not seen them in all the time he had been living in Oxford.

  His reverie was interrupted by arrival at the church door.

  “What’s that smell?” he asked Mary, the elder Wilson daughter, while Mrs Wilson herself took possession of two small books for each of them, including Alex himself.

  “This is what’s known as a high church and they use something called incense at the services. You’ll see what it is when they start: it’s burnt in a thing on the end of a chain and it gives off smoke which leaves this smell in the building all the time.”

  Alex did not listen to all the intelligent girl with a coveted place at the High School told him, but began to puzzle in his mind why they called it a high church. Once through the door, he had gone down three steps, and from outside it did not look very tall. The roof of the school round the corner was much higher.

  Mrs Wilson sent Mary into a pew first, followed by the other girl, Martha, then Alex, and sat at the end of the row herself, so he could not ask for further explanation. Alex was given the book bound in green and the red one was put on the little ledge in front of him.

  “You’ll need the green one first, so keep hold of it while I sort myself out,” she told him.

  Rummages in her handbag produced three of the multi-sided threepenny pieces with the plant called thrift on the obverse then in use and she put one in front of each of her girls and of Alex.

  “Leave that where it is, Alex, and I’ll tell you what to do with it when the time comes.”

  Alex’s mind raced again, What time? Would they all be turned into frogs unless they all paid somebody threepence? His mind went along such devious routes because from where he was sitting, he could not see much. By craning his neck he could see a sort of up-ended wooden box at a distance, with something that looked like the enlarged lid of a jam jar some way above it. Between the lid and the box a white carving of human figure hung by its arms on pieces of crossed wood.

  He turned to ask Mrs Wilson what the figure was, but saw that she was kneeling down on a little cushion she had in front of her (“Oh! I’ve got one as well!” he realized) with her hands in front of her closed eyes. So he asked Martha for information.

  “That’s Jesus,” she said. “A lot of wicked people took his clothes off him and hung him on a cross to die.”

  There was no time for her to give an interpretation of this sadness, even if her seven-year-old intelligence had been up to it, because the sizeable congregation stood up as the choir procession was heard entering. Alex realized that this poor man was the one who wanted him for a sunbeam to shine for him each day as the others had sung at school - and he wouldn’t.

  The organ, which had been played quietly up till now, became loud, and there was something that Alex could recognize as a strong tune. Mrs Wilson took the green book from his hand, turned quickly to one of the songs in it and gave it back to him, pointing with her gloved finger at the right hand page where some little print divided into shapes like house bricks was to be seen. He soon realized that these were the words the others all round him had begun to sing. The singing sounded better than what had happened at school, because there it was only children’s voices, and it certainly was more tuneful in here than it had been when heard outside that chapel a long time ago when he had walked back from the allotment with his father. He could not follow the words and he could not see anything beyond the knotty wood the pew in front was made of, or Mrs Wilson’s best coat on his left, or Martha’s on his right. When he turned round to find out if he could see anything behind, Mrs Wilson gently but firmly turned him back.

  Then they all knelt down, leaving Alex still standing. He could see, between the backs of the people in front of him, a group of people dressed differently from all the others standing in front of something the same shape as Auntie Joyce’s sideboard with a green tablecloth hanging from it. One of the people had a garment hanging down his back and front which was made of the same green stuff and he was saying a lot of words as a fairly quick pace, the same kind of words he noticed as Miss Cook used in the school hall before lessons and Miss Hill used at the end of the schoolday. When the man turned round and stood at one end of the sideboard with a large book in his hand, everyone sat down, and Mrs Wilson lifted Alex on to her knee. This meant he was able to see properly and take in a lot more: two big boys holding candles on long sticks, some more candles - he counted six of them - at the back of the sideboard and one or two elderly men standing about dressed in the same black and white things as the boys with the candles.

  When the man with the book finished what he was reading - it had many long words in it - he went to the other end of the altar and began to say something which made everybody stand up to listen to it and mumble something in reply to what he read out. Then, while he seemed to be reading a story, Alex was cooped up between pew and best coats again, but he could see the smoke which Mary had told him about rising up to the roof and that gave him enough to ponder upon until they all started to sing again, for the purposes of which Mrs Wilson took his green book away, and gave him the red one open, pointing once more to the relevant words, one of which was God, yes, “one God”, and they went on singing for ages, singing, but observing no particular tune as it seemed, although the melody did go up and down in places on a regular pattern.

  At the end of it, there was silence. The man who had been talking before said something else, Mrs Wilson waved her hand up in front of her face, and then brought it down again, and everyone sat down. The man was in the upturned box under the jam pot lid with his back turned to Jesus, and he said a lot more things. Alex noticed that while he spoke both his eyes twitched in a wild fashion. The others were listening attentively to his words. Where he was, Alex found it hard to hear most of it. He heard words like “hope for peace”, and “end of all conflict” and stopped listening and started wondering again at the words “fullness of time”, which the man uttered with some emphasis. Bottles were full, cups and glasses were full, but how could time be full? By the time Alex had turned this idea over in his mind several times, thereby emptying it, the man had finished.

  They all got up to use the green book again and, while they were doing so, an elderly man in a smart suit came round with a green bag and took away all the threepenny bits. Then they knelt for ages while the man spoke many more words in a monotone until everybody moved with apparent relief to sit down. After that, the people got up row by row to walk up to where the man who had talked so much was standing facing them with something round in his hand. Mrs Wilson went in her turn, leaving Alex to sit with Martha and Mary who were both very still with their eyes closed.

  “What are you doing?” he asked Martha in a whisper.

  “Praying for Daddy,” she answered.

  Alex left her to do that, and realized that all the prayers he had been witness to since he went to school last Tuesday, and here in church now, were expressions of great longing for something everyone wanted and could not yet have. What George ha
d said to him when he asked him if he believed in God came back to him with some force. Remembering it then, he never forgot it afterwards: about hoping there is a God when there are miles of sea between you and the bottom, and it connected in his mind with the phrase the man in the box had used, “peace in the fullness of time”.

  Then Mrs Wilson and all the others were back in their places. More words followed, then another hymn. The man’s voice again, using the word “peace” once more. There was some loud organ music, and all the members of the choir followed the boys and old men wearing black and white down between the people. After kneeling down again for a little while, Mrs Wilson and the girls stood with Alex to join the slow moving queue for the church door. All the people seemed to have much to say to each other. What Alex overheard was mainly news about relatives away in the armed services.

  When they were at last outside the church, Alex asked,

  “Why did the man who talked to us keep on making those funny movements with his eyes, Mrs Wilson?”

  “It’s something very sad. Alex. He was a priest in London, near the docks where the ships are loaded and unloaded, and his parish was severely bombed. He stayed there with his people as the bombs fell night after night and he did his best to help the rescue parties. After several weeks of this he had what people call a nervous breakdown. Our priest here was a younger man and went to be a chaplain in the Air Force, so Father Watson was asked to come here, so that he could get well again and we could be looked after. He is well again now, but he has been left with that nervous tic as it is called. Some children are very cruel and make fun of him, but you wouldn’t, would you, Alex?”

  “We were bombed out, Mrs Wilson.”

  “I know, Alex. Your Mum told me all about it.”

  III

  For some reason or other, Edna had not been able to obtain tickets for the New Theatre the following Saturday, so it was decided when George arrived on Friday night that they would have a day out instead. Consultation with Graham and Joyce revealed that Boar’s Hill was a very pleasant spot to visit in the early autumn because there was such a wonderful view from the top over as many counties as you could shake a stick at, enhanced by the sight of the autumn colours.

  “That sounds good,” said George. “We’ll go there.”

  “I’ll make some sandwiches to take,” said Edna.

  “There’s a Thermos flask in the cupboard in the scullery,” put in Joyce.

  So next morning, George woke Alex and told him to get up quickly because they were going out for the day.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Oh, some boring place,”George told him in a loud voice so that Edna should hear, and she responded with her over-loud laugh in the kitchen as she spread a concoction she had provided out of the huge tin of National Dried Egg, which both families dipped into as and when there was need. The sandwiches were put in a brown paper bag from the greengrocer’s, and there was a stale rock cake each left over from Wednesday when Joyce had asked Mrs White in for tea. All this was put in a small shopping bag, together with milky tea in the Thermos.

  George put on his sports jacket and helped Alex into his coat, which he had to wear although the sun was shining over the garden, while Edna produced the new green ‘box’ coat, complete with its CC41 label, for which she had been saving up her clothing coupons. She decided to put it on today, despite the temperature the day before having still been in the sixties Fahrenheit (no one’s anti-German feeling ever stretched to changing the name by which temperatures were still measured then). Joyce came down in her dressing gown to see them off, cheerfully commenting,

  “I hope you all have a good day. Have you got everything you need?”

  They had made sure that there was a bus due at ten to nine. They were astonished to see it coming over the canal bridge and had to rush across the road to beat it to the stop. George dryly commented as they made their way upstairs,

  “I wonder if this old rattletrap will get us there!”

  “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” said the bus conductor.

  “Wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t!” said George through his clenched dentures.

  Alex climbed along the lengthy seat to the window side and he sat next to Edna as the bus wound its way through the villages until it reached the hill where they were going. It took a very long time and there were many exhortations to him not to fidget and commands to him to wait when he said that he needed what his father had taught him to call a “Jimmy Widdle”.

  Relief was soon given. The bus driver had made every attempt to take his vehicle up the lower contours of the steep hill with as much horsepower from the engine as he could call upon. Suddenly, after two or three agonizing minutes for the engine during which it was heard complaining, it cut out and the bus lurched violently as the brakes were applied to stop it rolling backwards downhill. After an attempt to start it up again, the driver was heard getting out and slamming his door. He came round to the conductor and told him,

  “I might be able to get it to start again if the gentlemen among the passengers would be so good as to give it a push.”

  Several young servicemen on weekend passes were on the bus with their girlfriends and they alighted to do what the driver asked while he went back to his cab. The upstairs passengers had heard all this and, very reasonably, the conductor asked them to get off the bus while the attempt to start it was made. They all made their way downstairs and Alex shot off to some bushes beside the road to attend to his acute need, only to find Edna when he had finished crouching behind the next bush with the box coat carefully held up by George to prevent her being seen while she did the same.

  When comfort had been restored, they saw that there had been little success in bringing the bus engine back to life. A dozen or so youngish men had pushed it several yards, but there was no effective spark. George went forward to help.

  “George, your hernia!” shouted Edna.

  “Never mind that! We can’t wait here all day for a breakdown truck that might not come,” and he went to join in, with Alex running after him.

  The sound of Chatham cockney being loudly spoken captured the attention of the Oxfordshire souls who were pushing if men, and encouraging the pushing if women. One of the lads, said,

  “Yeah, come on George, you can add weight at least if not muscle!”

  This “got George’s goat”, as he later commented, and he put his hands on the stern of the bus to give it a good shove with the others while it went uphill at an unimaginable speed. The driver put it in gear and the engine caught, bringing gratification to all concerned.

  “Well done, George!” shouted one of the girls.

  “Hero of the hour!” one of the better dressed ones called out.

  “Let’s all get back on before it stalls again,” said George to hide his embarrassment, though his red face made that difficult. Edna was the first on the bus dragging Alex with unnecessary force, he thought, up the stairs.

  Once they were all back in their seats, the driver took the bus away gently with all the passengers’ hearts in their mouths and made it to their destination. Edna took her coat off.

  “I’m much too hot in this,” she said. “I wish you hadn’t made an exhibition of yourself, George.”

  “You help where you can,” he said, miserably.

  As they got off the bus, the conductor said to him, “We need to carry a mechanic with us these days.”

  “If it was a matter of turbines, I’d have known what to do,” said George.

  “Navy?” asked the conductor.

  “Used to be,” replied George.

  “Good to meet you, Chief! Thanks for what you did.”

  “Think nothing of it, Chief. All in a day’s work.”

  “I hope there’ll be no ill effects,” said the conductor, looking at Edna.

  “No, I don’t expect so. It happened a long time ago now, on the Danae.”

  Edna grew more impatient as the conductor revealed that
he too had been on the World’s Cruise in the engine room of another ship and before the reminiscences could begin in earnest, dragged George away. George remembered his marital and paternal responsibilities and complied, though not all that meekly.

  Boar’s Hill was a lovely place and they looked at the views in several directions it afforded before they sat on one of the seats provided to eat the sandwiches and rock cakes and drink the tea. They had to pass the flask to each other as they had not brought any cups and Alex burnt his mouth on the hot liquid, “Because you would be selfish and take it first,” said Edna.

  They were forbidden access to the very top of the hill and could see that it was occupied by men who from time to time took long turns with large versions of what Alex had seen people using at the New Theatre. George explained to him that they were members of the Observer Corps and that the things they were looking through were powerful binoculars, which made far off things seem close.

  “What are they looking out for?” asked Alex.

  “Jerry,” George told him.

  “Will he come this afternoon?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, boy,” was his welcome reassurance. “Even bomber crews like a day off now and again.”

  “Another drop of tea?” asked Edna.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” said George, looking down at a friendly roof, having observed what it covered as they walked up. A pleasant hour was spent looking at the view in the garden of the pub, with Alex allowed to wander away as long as he could still see his parents and his parents finding that their characters did have at least some compatibility, though it had been damaged by the Sunday night to Friday night parting each week.