A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  He meant it as a joke, but Edna thought it good sense. So they did it. All three slept on the big bed in the front room upstairs, still dressed, except that the only part of George to go to sleep after one o’clock was his arm because Alex was asleep lying on it. George did not want to wake him up or he would wake Edna and then he would be kept awake himself, because she had done nothing but worry about the journey out loud in the hour it had taken her to get to sleep at twelve.

  So a bleary-eyed George was not displeased when the alarm clock went off, and he quickly shaved and re-packed his shaving tackle before locking the house securely as they went to the station, with Alex in awe of the stars in the sky and the silence in the main road.

  V

  After all the months with John’s Meccano Magazines, of which Alex was sadly now deprived, actually to stand on a platform in the dark and see a fiery locomotive come into the station right in front of him was very thrilling indeed. George took him to inspect the great wheels and the pistons and, when they had got into the compartment and settled down, quietly explained how steam builds up to drive a piston, is condensed and then used again. As the train moved away, “There,” he said, “you can feel the surges of the steam, can’t you?”

  Alex could and was delighted that George should share his enthusiasm for what the engine driver and fireman were achieving while they sat here in comparative comfort and a dim wartime light. The carriage itself was interesting too, with its rich upholstery, the leather strap at the window and the brass lugs that went with it to keep the window open or shut as desired. The blinds were down as blackout on the side of the carriage where there was no corridor. Above the seats were framed photographs of seaside places and a castle and a sort of fishing net hung between brackets, upon which George had settled the big brown case and Edna had put the little case together with the shopping bag with the sandwiches and the thermos flask. Joyce had forgotten to take this last object out of the kitchen cupboard when she left.

  “Come on, now,” said Edna. “Stop asking questions, and let Dad have some shut-eye. He didn’t get much last night.”

  “Why not?” asked the still excited Alex.

  George could see that Edna was about to tell him about Alex keeping him awake by lying on his arm and his stare dared her to say anything. She quickly registered this and said to Alex, “Oh, never mind. Get some sleep yourself. It will be a long day and you’ll need it.” Alex, perched by the window, realized that he would not be able to see anything until it was light and took her advice. This time George kept his arm firmly to his side, and smiled at Edna sitting opposite him.

  “It may be a funny way of doing it,” he said to her. “But it’s good to be going on holiday.”

  “I hope so,” said Edna.

  The changes of train were all successfully accomplished and George, after sleeping in his seat for two hours, pointed out things of interest as they passed them. Going through the midlands landscape, they were saddened to see a great deal of urban destruction. George commented:

  “Look at the mess the bombing’s made of all the industrial plant. I wonder if we shall ever be in a position to fight back.”

  Later however, when they were passing through scenes of agriculture and wild land, morale improved under the inspiration of the bright sun on the landscape.

  VI

  Hetty’s husband met them at Barrow station in a car. He had a broad smile, though Edna saw that his teeth were detached from each other and tobacco stained. She thought his expression was shifty and the broad shouldered suit he wore flashy. She withheld her confidence in him, sensing that he was too much of a smooth operator. Nor did she warm to his attentions to her as he helped her into the front seat of the car, leaving George and Alex to take their places in the back where there was plenty of room for legs and luggage alike. She kept her right knee well away from his hand whenever she saw it moving towards the gear stick.

  As far as Alex was concerned, Geoff was a real uncle, not a self-appointed one, and very soon he and Alex were on good terms. When opportunity arose, Alex asked,

  “What kind of car is this, Uncle Geoff?”

  “It’s a 1934 Morris Ten Four. Don’t run away with the idea that it’s mine! I’m allowed to use it to get around the various operations we have here - and don’t ask me anything about those because they’re all very secret. I can sometimes manage to squeeze an extra journey out of the petrol tank if I’m careful.”

  By this time they were crossing a strip of water to reach a village where he and Aunt Hetty lived near the sea. Alex had never knowingly seen the sea before. And there it was: grey under a cloudy sky past a beach made up of big grey stones that seemed to reflect it.

  “On a clear day, you can see the Isle of Man,” Geoff told them as he turned a corner into the road where they would be staying for the next ten days.

  Hetty was tall and angular, unlike Edna, who was no longer overweight but still fleshed out. She had long hair, fashionably cut, with its length flowing out of the back of the roll which many women now wore because they could set it up for themselves without recourse to a hairdresser.

  “Here you are then!” was her greeting and she came to kiss her sister, to comment on how tall Alex had become and to hug George, who had always had a soft spot for his little sister-in-law.

  “We’ve put you and George in here, Edna, and Alex has a bed in the attic room.” Their home was on one floor except for this little room built into the roof with a window that allowed a squint at the sea from one angle. Alex liked it and was pleased when George brought his clothes and a few of his books up so that he could make the room his own as he put them in the places assigned to them.

  Food was ready on the table when he answered Hetty’s call to come down and they all had a pleasant meal together. George expressed interest in the reason for Geoff being up here, knowing that naval shipbuilding was something that went on in the Barrow yards, but Geoff kept the information he was prepared to give very general.

  “I’d like to take you round, George, but what we do here is so vital in combating the U-Boats that I’m not even allowed to tell myself where I’m going in the mornings!”

  “Anyway,” put in his wife, “whatever you do is a damned sight easier than being at the office all day and then being on called out for the Fire Service, isn’t it, Geoff?”

  She turned to Edna, and went on, “D’you know, he didn’t take his fireman’s boots off for three days and nights over one weekend in the worst of the blitz and then they had to be cut off.”

  George and Edna made sympathetic sounds in Geoff’s direction as they ate.

  Alex wanted to know more.

  “What did you have to do then, Uncle?”

  “I had to drive a big fire appliance as far as I could get it among the rubble, lend a hand with putting out fires, and after that we had to help as many people as we could.”

  A distant look came into his face as he finished and he attacked his sardines in order not to say anything else. Aunt Hetty gently patted Alex’s arm as he sat next to her and said quietly,

  “Promise me not to ask him any more. He saw a lot of very nasty things and he can’t talk about it, any more than he can tell you about his work here, though for different reasons. It was my silly fault for bringing the subject up.”

  Alex felt sorry for a man who couldn’t tell people about his achievements, but George’s reaction to what he had said about the shipyards made him more appreciative about what might be in the locked new cupboard in the shed at home.

  The silence was replaced by talk of family matters. Hetty produced the few photographs she had of her wedding day and told Edna all about re-styling one of her pre-war dresses for the occasion. Geoff asked if that was a picture of his wedding as well and, when reassured that it was, added apprehensively,

  “I’m sorry it had to be a small occasion. We couldn’t ask anyone to it because we did not know if we could keep the appointment ourselves even, on account of the raid
s and my fire service duties.”

  “How did you feel about that?” Edna asked, remembering her own wedding under not dissimilar circumstances.

  “Well, our Dad’s gone on, so there was no one to give me away and Geoff’s family are all in Australia. It was for us two, anyway. I feel fine about it! We’ve got the bit of paper and the registrar’s signature. What more do you want for legal happiness?”

  After that, George carefully steered their conversation into other, less sensitive, areas than marital bliss in wartime.

  “I have to be at work tomorrow,” Geoff told them, “but there’s the sea here and a few old bits of ruins that are worth a look at. Perhaps one day, George, you would like to take Alex into Barrow and just watch what’s going on in a few places. Don’t wear a leather overcoat and dark glasses under your trilby, though. I don’t want to come and have to bail you out and Alex is far too young to be a spy!”

  It was agreed that they would slough off the effects of the long journey the next day and then, while Hetty and Edna went their own way the day after, George would rediscover his maritime roots, even if it was a case of submarines rather than cruisers. What really mattered was to stop Jerry from sinking convoys. George wanted to believe that the allies were fighting back properly now. Information about that would be very heartening to him, especially in consideration of what he did most evenings after unlocking the secret cupboard in his shed when Alex had gone to bed and while Edna listened to the wireless in the living room. He hoped his little parcels of marine engine parts worked on the small lathe provided for the purpose and sent off each week in an approved manner were his small but vital contribution to the national war effort. In his own unofficial way, George was as patriotic as Horatio Nelson and as determined as the statesman from the past whom he had made his personal hero, William Pitt the Elder.

  VII

  The clouds were still low the next day, so all the Rylands and Hetty did was walk as far along the beach as they could to see and hear the Irish Sea pound on the stones. One or two vessels in the hazy distance were discerned and George told Alex they were probably making for Belfast where there were more naval facilities.

  As he grew, with George as his mentor rather than the women at school, Alex had no problems with words like “facilities”. Edna frowned on the way George treated their son, thinking that he would only be a little boy for a precious few years: there was time enough for all that grown-up stuff when he was of an age for it. Her own Edwardian childhood had been in a village called Luton, not far from Chatham, fairly uncomplicated, and with no enthusiasm for education after her poor mother died. George’s world however, just three miles away, had been more demanding. His mother had the same view about childhood as Edna: the two women from different generations were very like each other, though they never would admit it to themselves in their now rare meetings. His father, however, saw things differently and made sure that George learned all he could at the technical school - not just the things that would help him fulfil his immediate task of getting into the Navy as a craftsman, but others like a knowledge of English history and playing rugby football, both of which he was enthusiastic for and good at. George, and his younger brother later on, were both supported in the best kind of education then available to boys like them. Their father also made sure that their sister acquired the skills needed for office work rather than accepting her mother’s pressure to go into domestic service, despite the claim that it was a girl’s best preparation for the early marriage usually seen as inevitable.

  George and Alex walked along the sea road, with occasional forays on to the beach to see whether one of them could still make stones skim and jump on the water and if the other could acquire the necessary acumen. After several minutes it was decided between them that George had forgotten how and Alex would never learn, but it was fun all the same. Edna and her sister, meanwhile, were exchanging each other’s stories of the last two years, with Edna concluding that her sister was a social climber and that she herself was not all that sorry that they lived a long way apart. This was the sister to whom their father wanted Edna to devote her youth. Resentment still lingered and there was nothing that Hetty, who wanted to be reconciled, could do about it. She tried very hard during these days they had together, but Edna did not change her mind very much as a result. Alex kept a memory of them: Edna in her green utility box coat and his aunt in her fitted one, both wearing simple hats, walking at a distance behind him with linked arms but no real contact. Years later, when he was told what body language was, he found he already knew.

  So Hetty was amused by George performing antics for his son to laugh at, entertained by him as she always was over the years since she had known him, and Edna felt uncomfortable until they went back to a lunch of sandwiches. Geoff did not come home for lunch, so dinner was eaten in the evening. Edna complained to George as he put the light out not long after it that she did not like going to bed on a full stomach.

  “Why don’t you lie on your side, then?” said George.

  As she turned with her back to him, she felt safe when his arm went round her and slept in the warm comfort he had always given her.

  VIII

  “There she blows!” George called out as he and Alex stood on a road bridge looking into one of the basins being used for submarine tests. The great black shape burst upwards, expelling water from its tanks to settle on an even keel. Then it went rapidly down again as the water was taken back in. They watched this happen several times. Activity then stopped and the conning tower hatch opened for people to climb out and down. Another submarine moved almost without sound under the bridge on which they were standing to berth astern of the first one. George explained the manoeuvre to Alex and he mastered the nautical terms to his father’s satisfaction. A large surface vessel was berthed where the inlet widened to meet the sea and George explained that this was called a submarine depot ship, not because it was a submarine itself but because it provided facilities (facilities again!) for submarines at sea so that they had a longer range to match that of the German U-Boats.

  “Why do they call them that?”

  “It’s short for the German words for ‘under sea boat’, which is what they call their submarines.”

  “I see. But why do they need to go under water?”

  “Their intention is to sink as many British merchant ships as they can before they are seen themselves, so that food for us and supplies for our troops don’t reach us, and then they can win the war. Big submarines like those two are being developed to stop them by catching and sinking them.”

  “Where does all this happen?”

  “Turn round,” said George. “Over there behind the depot ship is the Irish Sea. Then there is Ireland, another stretch of land about half the size of England, Wales and Scotland together. After that there’s three thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean before you get to America, where these supplies are coming from. The Germans go out from the ports they have captured in France and Holland, which are about three hundred miles in the other direction: you know where they are from that atlas that John left behind for you. The U-Boats have started to hunt our ships in what they call wolf packs and we have got to find ways of intercepting them before they can attack.”

  George smiled to himself as he began to work out his definition of what “interception” was, and when Alex asked, he was very fluent in reply,

  “It means getting in among them and sending the blighters to Davy Jones - and before you ask, Davy Jones’s Locker is a term for the bottom of the sea.”

  He thought to himself, all the same, “I wish Geoff was allowed to be a bit forthcoming. Surely there’s more to it than bigger submarines that can go farther than the old ones.”

  Both men had signed the Official Secrets Act and George, like the rest of his contemporaries who were not personally involved with such secrets, had to wait until the peace-time war films to know about Asdic and Sonar, or even longer to hear about Enigma and the codes that were
broken at Bletchley Park.

  With a sufficient number of rests on public seats and on the edges of horse troughs still conscientiously filled with water each day by the council workmen, Alex was very happy to spend the whole day like this. So it was that, towards five o’clock, they were walking past one of the shipyards when a hooter sounded on a building very close to them. The huge gates in front of the building slid open and hundreds of men rushed out to make their way to the lines of buses that stood on the other side of the road ready to take them to their homes and lodgings. George and Alex quickly jumped out of their way. Alex noticed that some of the men’s clothes smelt as though they had been burning and that all were dressed in a way similar to George when he was at work in the dairy, except that instead of the old trilby hat he invariably wore they had flat caps a bit like his own, only with more cloth in the crown. It took a time for the men to find their buses and for engines to be started to take them away. Then the road became quiet again, except for the sound the riveters made in other buildings at some distance away.

  “Why were there so many of them, Dad?”

  “It takes a lot of manpower to build and refit ships - riveters, carpenters, metal-workers and engine fitters like me: and that’s a shift coming off work. Prior to that there would be just as many who arrived to take over from all those and there’s every chance that the shift that’s there now will go on well into the night.”

  “Not much of a life, is it?”

  “Not when it’s on a large-scale like this and there’s the national emergency to consider as well.”

  “National emergency?”

  “The threat from Hitler to defeat us, occupy our country and subjugate us.”

  “Subjugate?”

  “Put us under his yoke as if we were cattle.”

  “Like that poor beast that broke into our garden?”