A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  Edna presumed she was speaking from experience and was somewhat consoled since John was now approaching fourteen. It was Joyce and Graham’s concern for John that provoked the next event which was to affect the joined lives of these two families. It took place on the Saturday evening of the following week

  VII

  Alex was presumed asleep in George’s arms after a marathon reading of yarns for which all the others except John, who was up in his room, had been present. Before Edna stood up to take him to his bed in the next room, Graham said, with Joyce nodding agreement,

  “Look, George, Edna, there is something we both want to discuss with you.”

  Instead of acting upon her built-in instinct to prevent a child hearing anything that belonged in the field of adult concern, Edna left Alex where he was, and he heard most of the subsequent interesting discussion.

  “What’s all this, then?” asked George feeling apprehensive lest he was about to be asked to take Edna and Alex away.

  “Don’t worry,” said Joyce. “It’s only an idea in its early stages as yet, but we wanted to see what you might think about it.”

  “Go on, then,” said George, “The suspense is hard to bear!” and laughed to hide his misgivings.

  “Well,” began Graham, “It’s like this. The bombs seem to have been called off in London for a while now and, well, with John at what he calls a daft school here, we want to take him back to Motspur Park. Then he can go back to Rutlish School, where the teaching and discipline are better. Our tenant has written to us to say he does not want to stay there after this coming summer, and this makes it easier, and I would like to see if I could get my job back at the store.”

  “You’d be leaving here, then,” said Edna, taking off her glasses to wipe her eyes.

  “Yes,” Graham said, “But there’s a bit more to it if you wouldn’t mind hearing the rest.”

  “No. Go on,” said George, impatient to know it all.

  “If I were to leave here, they’d want a Maintenance Engineer to take my place, and I was going to ask you, seeing how you can’t get your house rebuilt within the foreseeable future, whether you’d like to take it on, and make life a bit easier for yourself. I know it’s only a job in a dairy, and it doesn’t have the prestige of what you are doing now, but you have been looking very drawn and tired lately with all the travelling and we both know how much Edna and the boy miss you when you’re not here. The pay is not much less, this house goes with it, and it’s not too bad a place to spend a few years in while the politicians and the generals get us back to rights.”

  “You mean you want me to change jobs with you, in other words.”

  “Neither of us had thought of it like that, George,” put in Joyce, on the defensive. “That was your comment, not ours.”

  At this point, Alex had too serious a crick in his neck to allow him to pretend to be asleep any longer and Edna, hastily picking him up and taking him to his bed, called out, “Don’t say any more till I get back!” Her words to Alex were no more than “Go to sleep quickly now,” as she took his blue dressing gown off and pulled the bedcovers up to his chin. She put the boiled sweet she often gave him into his mouth with equal rapidity and rushed back to her husband and friends. As the sweet finished and he dozed off to sleep, Alex heard the voices through the wall in deep discussion, but heard no more until Sunday afternoon when it was discussed again openly, without any apparent misgivings about him or John hearing it all.

  “I’ll get in touch with the Amalgamated Engineering Union tomorrow, then, and see what they say about it, shall I?”

  “That would be the best way, I think. If they say that it’s feasible, then I could approach my bosses here, and we could both see what the store people think.”

  Alex liked the sound of the words “Amalgamated Engineering Union” and began to recite them as he sat drawing on the floor.

  “What does it mean, Dad?” he broke an awkward silence by asking.

  “Shush, Dad and Uncle Graham are talking,” said Edna.

  George turned to Alex and told him what it meant:

  “A union exists to protect the interests of working men, and this one is for engineers like me and Uncle Graham. It’s called ‘amalgamated’ because a long time ago it was not one union but several. D’you see?”

  Before any more questions from Alex were possible the discussion began again and went round and round until it was time for tea - and then again until George went to pack his case and get on his way back to the seemingly quiet capital city.

  As he was tucked in that night, Alex asked Edna,

  “Are Uncle Graham and Auntie Joyce going to leave us here by ourselves, Mum?”

  “We’ll have to see,” said Edna in the tone she used when he asked for something special for Christmas or his birthday. Alex went to sleep thinking that this was what Edna wanted as much as the Pattersons did. He wanted it too, if it meant that George would be living here as well.

  VIII

  In the springtime, Edna seemed to Alex more turned in upon herself. At first she had seemed pleased about the possibility of George coming to replace Graham here and having the house to herself. As the week-ends became warmer and Alex and his parents walked about the city as visitors used to in happier times, he overheard a great deal of what was meant to be kept from him.

  One of the places George liked was Trinity College garden and he often led his family there in fine weather. Alex was nearer the ground than most people and met a tortoise for the first time. It had the appearance of being the owner of a particular stretch of border: its wrinkled face seemed timelessly wise to Alex as it blinked in the unaccustomed light after its hibernation. He was bold enough to pick it up by the shell and the accumulated contents of its bladder emptied in a stream upon the gravel path. Alex struggled not to drop the tortoise and George came to lend a hand from the seat where he and Edna had been discussing what might happen to them, glad of some relief and laughing. Alex looked up towards his mother while George placed the old tortoise back under the growing lupins and saw that her face was grim and her lips were chewing anxiously as she waited to resume the conversation.

  “Go and see what else you can find,” said George to Alex, “Only stay where we can see you, won’t you?”

  “All right, Dad,” replied the boy and walked to where a girl in khaki jodhpurs and a green jersey much too thick for the late spring weather was taking dead flowers from the wisteria. A friendly conversation followed, in which the behaviour of the tortoise was discussed and Alex acquired information about the species that was unlikely to have come from home or school. He also learned what the Land Army was, that this young woman was in it, and that people like her could be recognized by their distinctive clothing. Her father was something to do with the college and she was helping out on a free weekend since most of the gardening staff was in the army.

  When the wisteria looked once more like any other creeper on a college wall, Alex left his new acquaintance and went behind his parent’s seat to hear Edna burst out,

  “But after all we’ve worked for, to give it all up and leave without doing our level best to get it rebuilt seems so sad. We’ll be back where we were when you first came out of the Navy.”

  “I’m not suggesting we burn our boats. There is no possibility of getting it rebuilt for a couple of years at least. The solicitor is quite firm about that. It doesn’t mean that we are never going back: just that we aren’t going back yet, that’s all.”

  “Do you mean that, though. Or are you saying it just to keep me quiet?”

  “Could I ever keep you quiet?” George said in a desperate attempt to make the mood lighter.

  “No, that’s why I’m having my say now, out of the way of Graham and Joyce, for whom it all seems to be more or less signed and sealed.”

  “It may seem signed and sealed, but it isn’t. The firm may agree to his taking my job, and the dairy may see me as well suited as him to run their machinery, but there’s all the w
artime red tape to be untied about correct use of manpower and so on that all the bureaucrats talk about. It’ll take a good long time to get all that sorted out.”

  “That’s beside the point to me, George. What I mean is that their reasons for going back home are more or less the same as mine. I don’t want to be stuck here where I don’t belong. I came here expecting to stay for two weeks and then go back. Alex’s chin was what brought me here and I don’t want to stay here longer than I have to, with all the locals standing on street corners and eyeing me up and down as a Londoner as if I was dirt to them.”

  “Haven’t you imagined that? You seem to get on well with Mrs Wilson and Mrs White.”

  “Yes, I do, but there are plenty of men in brown suits with watch-chains on street corners who say ‘Ooh aar’ as I go by and spit in the gutter while looking at me.”

  “I think you’ll find they would have spat in the gutter anyway, whether you were there or not. There were plenty of people at home in Chatham who did that.”

  “But they didn’t do it in Raynes Park, and I miss being there and want to go back. Sooner, not later!”

  “There’s no way of doing that, girl, just at present,” said George, taking his hat off and fanning himself with it. “One thing I’ve got to tell you that I haven’t up to now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They’ve been understanding at the store, but there is a lot of tension there about me being away as soon as it shuts every Friday night. They open on Saturday, and the plant is maintained by people who weren’t there when it was put in, and don’t understand it as well as I am supposed to and they have to cover for me. Things are being said and the message is increasingly, ‘Either come back full time, or we’ll have to ask you to go.’ I don’t know how long I can fend off that kind of thing.”

  “Couldn’t we move somewhere else then, to let you work as you used to?”

  “I’ve thought all round that, but the only way to do it would be to sell our house and buy another one with a new mortgage, and who’s going to buy a place with only a downstairs front room still standing, however desirable the area was before the war? There’s something else, too. This old hernia of mine has been playing up a bit lately. The sawbones I went to see says that I have got to find something less demanding in terms of agility to do - and perhaps Graham’s job would suit me in that respect. I don’t want to be sacked on health grounds.”

  “So that’s it,” said Edna. “I’ve been on at you all these years to go and have the operation that would put it right, and you won’t. Why won’t you go and have it seen to now?”

  “You wouldn’t leave Alex in hospital overnight because of the bombs. Whatever Graham thinks, there are still a few of them falling in London, you know. That night in the coach station scared the life out of me; you remember where the London hospitals are? Sitting targets, all of them.”

  “Couldn’t you have it done here?”

  “Not very easily without living here, could I?”

  Edna was quiet, and then jumped to her feet saying, “Good Lord, where’s Alex?” only to find him standing three feet behind her. Then she added, “No good talking about it any more. It’s getting cold here now. Let’s go back, shall we?”

  “It would be pleasant to be able to say ‘Let’s go home’,” added George.

  Edna blew her nose and only just caught her glasses in time before they fell on the pavement by the iron gates of the college. When sight and a measure of calm had returned, she took Alex by the hand and said to him,

  “Look at all them funny old heads on the pillars over there.”

  Although Alex was more interested in his parents’ and his own anxiety than a row of old emperors’ worn heads, for once he had the tact to reply,

  “Yes, Mum. Funny ain’t they?”

  George found he could still smile as he thought of telling his son and heir not to say “ain’t”, but he was being sensitive too.

  On the bus going back to what was still their lodging house, all three of them quietly thought their own thoughts, each being miserable in their own way. Although he was longing to, Alex could not bring himself to ask George what red tape had to do with anything, nor what a bureaucrat might be.

  5

  Playground games were beginning to be more noticeable as the days became warmer. The five and six-year-olds in Miss Hill’s class were not allowed to take part, but were expected to watch what the older ones did. No one seemed to teach these games, but they happened. When some arbitrarily chosen girl was put in the centre of a circle made by the others who went round her singing, “Poor Mary is a-weeping on a bright summer’s day”, Alex associated the song with all the others he had heard which, in their accumulation of distress, convinced him that the nature of songs was to express globally felt sadness. There was even a violent element: “The Farmer’s in his Den” concluded with everyone heavily patting the child chosen as the bone wanted by the dog and this often allowed for heavy-handedness against its perpetrators’ victim.

  Relations between Edna and Joyce now seemed to be strained. They were very careful to be polite to each other now and the casual nature of their earlier chore-sharing had somewhat evaporated. George and Graham still got on with each other well enough: years in the mess deck had taught them how. They were working together at the dairy for two weeks, so that they could be assured of a smooth changeover when the time came. The time lapse between George leaving the London store and Graham going back to it was covered by the fiction of George being on leave. John was in a perpetual black mood about having to go back to a school where, as he put it, there were a lot of lines to toe. He was not as forthcoming with help to Alex as he had been, though he had almost forgotten about him finding his deliberately lost logarithm book.

  At eight o’clock one morning at the end of July, a large green removal van with Carter Paterson painted on it was parked outside. The name of the town it came from had been blacked out at the beginning of the war lest it should help lost German parachutists find their way about, as George told Alex when he asked him about it. The furniture that had survived from Raynes Park was being delivered and the few pieces that Graham and Joyce were taking to Motspur Park picked up. The rest of the furniture and effects had been sold for a song or two to the Rylands as the new tenants of the house that went with the job. This meant that there would be beds for the three of them to sleep on still and some saucepans and plates and cutlery for them to use since their own had perished in the bombing. The removal men obligingly put what was to stay behind in the rooms where George and Edna wanted them. George had carefully arranged this with them unheard by Edna so that he could wear his truss in peace.

  When Edna fetched Alex home for dinner, the arrangements had nearly all been made. Though not materially changed, the kitchen was oddly empty and the fact of George sitting down to eat there on a Monday, though it had happened twice already, was still strange. Graham’s good-humoured remarks were missing and Edna’s way of dishing food up lacked something of the finesse which Joyce always brought to it. George tried to be cheerful, but he reacted with an unusual silence to the tense feelings that emanated from Edna like a magnetic field. He sat at the table dressed as Alex had been seeing him in the last two weeks, though never before. He wore his working clothes: a khaki shirt beneath his overalls with a pair of Wellington boots positioned on the back doorstep ready for his return to work after his dinner. Alex thought he looked lost.

  At five past one, Edna broke with routine.

  “Are you ready to go back to school?” she asked Alex. Once she was assured he was, she took him, still in her apron, to the front door, and saw him across the road to find his own way back to school. The school was not far away, but she had never let him go by himself before. Once she had seen him safely across the main road, she shouted after him, almost as an afterthought,

  “Don’t come home on your own. I’ll come and meet you! Don’t forget!”

  Round the corner he met his frien
d Roy, of whom Edna did not approve, and they kicked a stone between them as far as the kerb opposite the school entrance. This brought the comment from his friend in his authentic Cockney voice,

  “Your Mum wouldn’t have let you do that, would she? Not respectable, is it?”

  After school Edna met him as arranged and told him on the way home that his bed had been moved upstairs to the room where she and George had been sleeping, and which would be his room from now on. George and she had moved into the front bedroom.

  “What about John’s room, then?” Alex asked.

  “You never know: we might have lodgers!” replied Edna expressing the subconscious mental reflex of one convinced that many a true word is spoken as a sick joke.

  Alex enjoyed taking possession of a room that was really his own. A year and a half of sleeping in the living room had been enough, he decided, especially since it had been shared with a canary whose personal hygiene was lacking on occasions. The canary had gone back to Motspur Park to chirp in more familiar surroundings. George, who had taken the risk of an unofficial two hours off work, had put Alex’s books in a bookcase, despite their disparate sizes, and he could go there in the day time if he wanted to and get things out without having to negotiate his way round everybody else who used the living room in the manner its name suggested.

  The curtains were the ones that had been there before. The old divan was still his bed and its green checked cover was the same, but there was a chest of drawers of his own with his clothes in it and his cupboard from downstairs was not the only place where he could stow his gear - a term he had learned early from his father.

  When he went downstairs again the changed appearance of the living room gave him something of a shock. Some of the furniture he had not seen since they had left the old house was there: the sideboard, the extending table, the dining chairs, and the old Cossor wireless, which George had persuaded to work again. Edna’s Singer hand sewing machine stood under the window on the tea trolley with its wooden cover on: Alex recognized it from the many times he had crawled round it a long time ago on the floor in a corner where it was kept while not being used. The mirror over the mantelpiece had survived intact, which Edna never ceased to marvel at: