A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  “If you like. It matters a lot that he doesn’t get the chance. Then, perhaps, we can get back to something like the life we were beginning to have before the war. His blitz took away a lot of what your mother and I had worked for and would have liked to pass on to you when we’re gone.”

  “Why haven’t I got a brother or a sister?”

  This change of direction made George stop in mid-stride. Alex realized that he had to think out his answer and felt sorry he had asked when it eventually came as they stood together where a jetty overlooked some oily water churned up by the screw of a motor launch moving about between the quays.

  “Your mother was very, very ill when you were born and the process took a long time and gave her a great deal of pain. So we were advised that you should be our only one - and I’m glad you are here.”

  Alex found George doing what he very rarely did nowadays, ever since people started commenting on how tall he was getting: he picked him up. Then he remembered his hernia and put him down again.

  “Come on, he said, we’d better find our bus back to your aunt’s place.”

  Going on a bus with George was much more relaxing than going with Edna and talk that interested Alex continued right up to Hetty’s front door.

  IX

  The rest of the holiday was not so full of activity. George was glad to be away from his work and found books on the shelves, which he picked up and began to read. He slept a lot of the time because the intensity of his life had receded for a few days. Edna envied him his power to relax because she could not. She felt that Hetty was judging her for having kept her distance for so long and for still speaking with the local accent of their part of north Kent rather than refining her speech as her sister had. Her husband was obviously someone who had got on in life, not having suffered setbacks like George. She still blamed herself for not having supported George enough in his time in the Navy, particularly when they lived in Malta in the nineteen-twenties. One or two of their contemporaries who had remained in the service were officers now, but on the other hand, she thought grimly, three or four of them had been killed in action. Time to reflect upon their life was all very well but, like life itself, reflection on it was frightening. She was not enjoying her holiday because there was nothing to get on with. Moreover, it was quite obvious that Alex had enjoyed his day in Barrow looking at the ships far more than anything she could have offered him. Needless to say, the weather was appalling.

  She heard Hetty at the front door and went to meet her, aware that she would be carrying a good deal of shopping. They went together into the kitchen and Hetty put the food she had bought in the larder.

  “I thought we’d have a chicken for your last evening here,” she said. “They’ll even pluck and prepare them for you at the farm for a consideration. Saves us getting feathers all over everything and the stink of pulling out giblets.”

  “That’ll be nice. Thank you,” said her sister, with the unpleasant thought crossing her mind that the consideration she spoke of might not be monetary in Hetty’s case.

  “Look, I’ve bought this as a present for Alex, if he’d like it.”

  She put a paper bag on the table.

  “It’s a soldier suit. But the more I think about it since I saw it in the shop, I have misgivings about it.”

  She opened the bag and took out the two garments, a battledress top and long trousers.

  “Yes, as I thought. It’s French. So I can’t give it to him, can I?”

  Alex had appeared in the doorway while this was going on.

  “But I’d like it,” he said.

  “You could never wear it where anyone else would see it,” said Hetty.

  “Why not?”

  “Ask Dad to tell you about the Maginot Line,” said Edna.

  So he did.

  “The French let us down,” said George. “We all thought the French army would hold the Germans off alongside our army. We sent our expeditionary force across the Channel when war broke out expecting that their line of defences would hold. The Germans just bashed their way through the Ardennes forest in their tanks and went round the end of the line of forts. We were forced back on Dunkirk. The army got back home, but not the equipment. Mr Churchill was astonished at this and even dashed across to France to meet the French ministers while there was still time. Then a new government was set up in France under a First World War hero, give him his due, called Marshal Pétain, who made peace with the Germans. So we had to sink their fleet in the Mediterranean to keep it out of German hands, or we’d be in an even worse state than we still are. I told you about all that when it happened. Sorry, boy, but Aunt Hetty is right, though you ought to go and thank her for buying it for you, just the same.”

  Alex accepted all this because he had heard it from George, his reliable source. He went back to the kitchen.

  “Thank you for buying me the soldier suit, Auntie Hetty, but Dad thinks you are right about me not having it. He’s told me about what happened and about Marshal Pétain.”

  “Well, that’s that, then. It’ll do me as polishing cloths, perhaps. Now then, Edna, would you get the greens ready for us - and I’ll scrape these lovely new potatoes I got at the farm.”

  Edna remembered her own foray after eggs and, bearing in mind her suspicious thought earlier, asked awkwardly, “How do you find getting food up here?”

  “You soon get to know who grows it and not too many questions get asked. We thought of growing things in the garden ourselves, but Geoff’s so busy at work and I don’t known how to start.”

  The sisters kept each other at arm’s length while they prepared the dinner together, on Edna’s part because she was ashamed of herself for thinking ill of Hetty, and Hetty’s because she had tried to get on with Edna and seemed to have failed. Then a bottle of sherry appeared and some glasses and Hetty put them on the sideboard ready for when Geoff came home. Some orange squash was in readiness for Alex, too. This made Edna feel inadequate again and she excused herself to do her hair and have a wash. George felt the need to go and tidy up as well. They met in the bedroom.

  George sensed Edna’s distress more acutely now than he had during the last nine days in Hetty’s house and asked her outright,

  “What’s up, girl?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, but I’ll be glad to be gone tomorrow. I can’t take much more of Hetty’s money and success.”

  “Then you do know. I wish you could have relaxed and enjoyed the time here a bit more. Is there anything else bothering you?”

  “Yes, George, there is. You know that I’ve always had a good deal of pain every month since Alex was born. Well, just lately it has been terrible.”

  “How long is ‘just lately’?”

  “Well, I suppose since Joyce and Graham left.”

  “The last two months, then.”

  “Yes. I get so run down too. This last three days it has been really nasty.”

  “When we get home we’ll make a doctor’s appointment. You’ve had more than enough to worry about since the blitz, besides all you went through when the boy was born.”

  “Thanks, George.”

  “Good. Well we’ll have to go and eat this dinner Hetty’s been good enough to provide for us. I think that’s Geoff coming in now.”

  “I expect they have a chicken whenever they want it.”

  Yes, girl, I expect they do. And we have a nice butcher’s chop whenever we want one!”

  “So we do.”

  “Come on then . . .”

  The sherry bottle was opened and Geoff filled his wife’s and her sister’s and brother-in-law’s glasses.

  “Here’s to your safe journey home,” he said.

  “Here’s to your happiness together; it’s the first chance we’ve had of properly wishing you two well,” George said.

  “All the best,” said Alex, and before they began to laugh, everybody looked round to see where the voice came from. Drinking standing up, they had forgotten him down at their waist level.r />
  As Edna sat through the meal in pain, the only thing that comforted her was that a taxi had been ordered for nine o’clock in the morning and that there was on this occasion a through train from Carnforth to Oxford. Only one change was needed and they would be home in time for tea.

  6

  August saw Edna becoming more anxious about herself. George spent as much time with her as he could, while keeping up with his evening commitment in the shed. He discovered that once the few undergraduates left in the university had gone down, there was plenty of opportunity for town people to use the punts on the river, so on a Sunday afternoon George, Edna and Alex made their way to the boathouse by Magdalen Bridge. George wore his flannels, as he called them, although they were made of light material fully cut in the style of the late thirties. He handed Edna, wearing a new cotton dress and a short matching jacket, into the punt and she leant back on the cushions in the bow. Alex sat next to her, while George took up his position in the stern, at first seated with a paddle and later standing up with the pole in his hands. He soon became very proficient in his autodidact’s way, in the use of the punt pole, steering properly with the thrust without fishtailing. Except on the rare occasions when someone else came with them, they had to turn round and come back at Parson’s Pleasure, where men were allowed to bathe in the river without swimming costumes. Because George’s hernia sometimes caused him discomfort, he could not manage to push the punt on his own over the rollers that allowed them to by-pass the swimming place. Even Edna made ribald jokes about the elderly college fellows who were known to make use of the place for swimming and sunbathing. These afternoons were much enjoyed and remembered by Alex deep in his unconscious mind until more like them came to him fifteen years later.

  George’s hernia did not stop him doing things he wanted to do and Edna was astonished one evening as he came home from the dairy wheeling an old but serviceable sit-up-and-beg bicycle that he had bought for two pounds from someone in the dairy who was hard up. Once he had repaired one or two things it was in good condition again and he set about modifying it with the addition of a small saddle that he made and attached to the centre of the crossbar for Alex to sit on, and a small crosspiece on which to rest his feet as if on stirrups. Instructions were given to Alex that he must always hold the handlebars with both hands and George added extra rubber grips for the purpose.

  Edna had been to see the Scottish doctor in Holywell Street and had accepted her opinion that exploratory surgery at the Radcliffe Infirmary was necessary. She also had to accept the waiting list. Both these factors had made her temper even shorter in respect of Alex, so George’s plan was to take him on lengthy cycle rides either on Saturdays or Sundays in fine weather to give her some “peace and quiet” as she liked to express it. It also meant that George could have the exercise of which being confined to one workshop rather than a large plant had deprived him and he found that his hernia did not inhibit his cycling, whatever his wife might say.

  Everyone was saying how tall Alex was, but he was only tall for a five-year-old and fitted on George’s bike very well that year. Villages were explored, churches visited, tombstones deciphered, blackberries picked when the time came and quantities of them, left over from the ones they ate, were brought back for Edna to put into a pie for Sunday. George opined quietly to Alex that her fruit pies were better than the meat ones she made because the only stewing steak she was able to find was always sinewy and she never cut the sinew away. Alex was bound, equally confidentially, to agree.

  A great deal of real communication went on between George and his father during these outings. When a tombstone declared something about its own time, George would set the life commemorated against the background of Clive of India, or William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham (as, with the pride of his birthplace, he never forgot to call him), or the Duke of Wellington, or Lord Palmerston. Alex learned from George before ever he opened a history book about things like the expansion of the British Empire, the defeat of Napoleon, the value of naval power, the abolition of slavery, debtor’s prisons, the plague and the fire of London. George carried his own syllabus in his head and never used it except in response to what Alex wanted to know. At another time he explained how metal expanded in hot weather, which was why lengths of a contemporary railway line had small gaps between them where they met; this was explained when Alex noticed the phenomenon once while they were waiting at a level crossing. Alex could not understand why the bicycle did not seem to get bigger as they went along in the heat. On this occasion, as on several others over the months when they went out on the bicycle, Alex came to respect George’s integrity as a teacher whenever he replied that he did not know how to answer a question.

  George became very tired doing all the pedalling, so there were frequent stops in the gardens of pleasant public houses. Alex was introduced to Smith’s Crisps, which he delighted in saying while his front teeth were temporarily missing, and he was particularly fascinated by the little piece of blue paper in each packet that contained the salt. Once they followed the van which delivered the crisps out of a pub garden and Alex read on the back of it, “Please sound your horn: we wish to extend to you the courtesy of the road”. He challenged George to overtake the van once he had explained what courtesy was.

  “We’re not going downhill,” was George’s breathless response to such confidence placed in his abilities.

  Although George had spent his teenage years in a town, when he was a boy of Alex’s age his mother had taken him back to live with her parents and brothers and sisters in the rural area of the Hundreds of Hoo during one of his father’s nine-year tours of duty at sea. He understood the ways of the countryside, although he fancied that the lords of creation who owned and worked the rich Oxfordshire acres would not have thought much of what went on in Kent to the south of the Thames Estuary.

  These outings were always far too short for Alex. Nevertheless, on the way home, he would often lean back against George, take his hands off the handlebars and tell him, “I’m going to ride no hands now, Dad,” and fall asleep against his father’s chest for a mile or two.

  They usually found that Edna had enjoyed a few hours’ sleep and she welcomed them back; but she never expressed much interest in what they had seen or done while they were out. Alex at first tried to tell her where they had been and what George had told him, but he soon realized that she was not responsive towards his news and after a few such outings no longer tried to interest her in it. She did not seem to want to cheer up, Alex thought.

  II

  While infantrymen, gunners and tank crews from the Scottish highlands and the English home counties were doing their best to cope with the heat of an Egyptian summer and being trained to bring General Montgomery’s plans to fruition at El Alamein, Edna went for her tests in the Radcliffe Infirmary. Alex’s days while she was away from home had been carefully arranged before she left. George took him to school riding the bike to make the process quicker. Once school was over, Mrs Wilson collected him and looked after him while George was still at the dairy. In the evenings and at the weekend, he was in George’s sole charge. On the Sunday, George put on his best suit, found Alex’s white shirt and a straight tie with horizontal stripes for him to wear and took him to visit Edna. They brought with them a bottle of lemon squash and the sort of sweets she liked. She embraced each of them in turn as she sat looking forlorn by her hospital bed and chairs were found for them. The talk was about nothing in particular for a while and then George told Alex to go out into the garden and see if he could find any more tortoises. He made the acquaintance of a friendly tabby cat, which let him stroke her for a while until she decided she would walk by herself after all.

  George came out to look for him after a time, looking determined to be happy, Alex noticed.

  “What’s wrong with Mum?” Alex asked.

  “Nobody seems to know, so they are doing one or two more tests and then sending her home on Wednesday evening. We’ll come and fetch
her after I’ve come back from work.”

  “She didn’t seem very cheerful, did she?”

  “No. Well, she wanted them to find out what was making her feel so lousy and put it right. Now, I suppose, she’ll just go on feeling lousy. Come and say cheerio to her. The ward sister seems to want all the visitors to go now.”

  So they went in again and were very soon ushered away.

  “Why did it smell so funny in there?” asked Alex.

  George’s mind was elsewhere but, in parallel with his real thoughts, he explained antiseptic and the discoveries of a man called Lister all the way along Walton Street and up to the Cornmarket. On the bus he told Alex all he knew about Florence Nightingale, which led to a more interesting discourse on the Crimean War, which lasted until the kettle had boiled. One of their forebears was known to have been a bugler as a boy soldier and had served in the campaign.

  After tea, George wrote letters to his parents, to Hetty and to Edna’s other sister, with many false starts and a good deal of complaint under his breath. He wrote few letters in his lifetime and did not relish such activity as an art form. The wireless was not put on, so Alex drew imagined scenes at Sebastopol and Inkermann and later received the accolade he desired, with George looking only at the side of the paper upon which he had drawn and saying, “Not bad at all, boy. Not bad at all!”

  III

  Alex found the hours between his own coming home from school and George’s return from the dairy enjoyable and relaxed at Mrs Wilson’s, particularly if Martha was there for part of the time. She went to a convent school and had some interesting books from which she worked at her homework. She showed him one that was about measuring spaces. It said that a man made a hole for his cat in the bottom edge of the back door through which it came into the house. The cat produced four kittens, of which the man gave three away to his friends and kept the fourth. Now that there was a kitten, should there be a smaller hole in addition to the normal sized one to enable it to come indoors?