A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  “What do you think?” Martha asked.

  “Can’t the kitten come through the hole its mother uses?” Alex replied.

  “Of course,” said Martha and wrote that down in her book.

  For Alex, however, the important thing was not that he got the answer right, but that he liked the drawings with which the question was set. The bottom of the gate was drawn with care to show the grained wood. One picture showed the grown cat sizing up the hole with her whiskers and the other showed the kitten doing the same in a diminutive hole. Neither of the drawings was bigger than three quarters of an inch square and all you needed to know in order to answer the question had been presented to you.

  When Mary arrived home from the High School, she invariably did her piano practice before anything else, saying that it got school out of her system. The books from which she did her homework were more complicated than Martha’s, though she was quite willing for Alex to browse through them.

  “What are mathematics when they are at home?” he asked her.

  “I suppose maths is really plural,” she said, “The subject is in three parts: arithmetic: you know what that is, geometry, which is largely about measuring things, and algebra which is thinking things out logically.”

  Mary’s reply raced ahead of him, but he replied, invoking what Martha’s book had contained,

  “So what we’ve been doing about the hole for the cats is geometry, then!”

  “Not really,” said Mary. “I must do my practice now.”

  She pulled out the piano stool and lifted the polished lid of the upright instrument to expose the keyboard. She rummaged in a leather bag, which interested Alex because it had one ordinary handle passing under a metal bar with small knobs at either end to keep it closed. Having decided which piece she would begin with, she arranged the music for it on the fretwork in front of the piano and, peering at the notes, began to play them. Alex listened with fascination as Mary took charge of the music and, after five minutes, was playing the piece very rapidly. What impressed Alex did not have the same effect on Mrs Wilson, because she came quickly into the room to tell Mary not to hurry her task but to do it properly.

  Despite this exercise of parental discipline, Alex could not help comparing Mrs Wilson with his own mother. Only next door, despite the anxiety caused by a husband and father being away all the time and perhaps soon to be in grave danger, there was the kind of warm emotional security he wanted but did not receive from Edna. He was sure the Wilsons had more money than his parents, but that was because Mrs Wilson was a trained secretary who regularly received things in the post to type at home. This, added to what her husband earned, enabled the girls to be taught by people called nuns: Mary up to three years ago and Martha now. Susan Wilson had been provided with a convent education herself, so she was perfectly capable of knowing when her daughter was playing an adagio at twice its proper pace in order to shorten the time required for it.

  On the Wednesday when these arrangements were in force George rushed through the back gate at five. Mrs Wilson saw him across the garden fence and told Alex it was time to go home. George was already washing his hair when Alex came indoors. He called down the stairs to say he would not be long and emerged in a short while with his best suit on again.

  “How tidy are you?” he asked, and took a brush to Alex’s head, smoothing down his fringe and then telling him to put his shoes up on a kitchen chair one by one for a wipe with a duster.

  “That’s all there’s time for,” he announced and they rushed to the bus stop. At Gloucester Green, George phoned from a telephone-box for a taxi to be at the Radcliffe in half an hour. They walked off briskly with George explaining the significance of buttons A and B to Alex and found Edna sitting ready in her coat and hat, very anxious to be on her way. She was holding a sealed brown envelope in her hands addressed to the doctor in Holywell Street and her small case was ready for George to pick up.

  They cautiously and courteously said good-bye to the ward sister, took the opportunity to thank a young nurse who had been particularly kind and went out into the autumn evening to the waiting taxi. Edna got in first and then a folding seat was pulled out for Alex before George got in as well. They were home in ten minutes, and George did his best with a pound of sausages he had acquired, despite his lack of understanding of ration books, and boiled potatoes and some greens. After they had eaten Alex went to his room to read and his parents did nothing about him going to bed until gone ten.

  It was once more George who got him up in the morning.

  “Mum’s going to have the morning in bed,” he said.

  This set the routine for the following month, until Edna spent three more weeks in the Radcliffe and then seemed slowly to recover.

  IV

  The pattern of their family life had been changed. Instead of George being away most of the time, now he was in evidence for Alex pretty well all the time that he was not at school. Edna was there too. She went shopping and she cooked meals, but she had her preoccupations and rarely said anything more than necessary for life’s essentials.

  “Be careful how you cross the road,” was her main injunction to Alex, on the frequent occasions when she did not feel able to take him to school or collect him from it. It was agreed that if she was not at the school gate to meet him he was to come to the main road and wait in front of the shop for a reliable adult and ask him or her to see him across, while being left to assess reliability for himself. In this way Alex met his first American army officer, who not only brought him across the road but also knocked on the door to deliver her “well-mannered little boy” to an astonished Edna, whom he addressed as “Ma’am”.

  In the weeks that followed, the word Jeep came into every schoolboy’s vocabulary and Miss Cook was at pains to make this announcement at assembly:

  “Whilst some of our American guests in the city are accustomed to chewing gum at all times and find nothing objectionable in doing so, you are not to bring such gum into school, and you are certainly not to chew it while you are here. If you have chewing gum given to you, leave it at home.”

  Alex was with Edna in the Home and Colonial one day near the end of the long time it took her to recover from whatever they had done to her at the Radcliffe, and she started to talk to another woman whom she vaguely knew. Alex overheard their conversation, which began with Edna being complimented on how well she was looking, and Edna’s reply that the other woman was very smartly dressed. To this the woman answered,

  “All you need to do, Edna, is get yourself a Yank. They’ve got more money than they know what to do with. Very pleasant young men, some of them.”

  As the woman went away towards the empty bacon counter, she called back in a loud voice,

  “They know how to treat a girl!”

  As Edna blushed to her hair roots, Alex saw that she could not be described in any sense as a girl any more. She pulled Alex out of the shop and sought the earliest opportunity to sit down and fan herself with the evening paper she had bought in which to look at some advertisements.

  Hence Alex’s confusion when, not very long afterwards, a young American serviceman appeared at their evening meal (it had been upgraded for this purpose). He spoke in a very friendly manner to them all, was welcomed enthusiastically by George and took possession of the vacant back bedroom, where he stayed for four weeks, apart from Saturdays and Sundays when he went to see “The grand sights of your great country,” as he put it. They all liked him and valued his amusing and informative contributions to their table talk. Alex had questions to ask him about the device on the buttons of his tunic, which seemed to be duplicated on his cap badge. His uniform seemed to be of better quality than the ones worn by the few English soldiers he had seen whose tunics were short and made out of rough cloth, buttoned up to the neck, whereas the American uniform consisted of a smart coat and a collar and tie all made out of soft material. If Alex had known about the difference between officers and other ranks in the British Army,
he would not have seen this as so puzzling. Their lodger, as Edna called him when he was not there, was a junior officer, but the few ordinary soldiers in the American Army that Alex had seen about in the Oxford streets did not appear dressed very differently from him. George found everything the young man had to say fascinating. He had always wanted to go to the United States of America, as he delighted in calling his guest’s country, but their Lordships of the Admiralty had never sent any of the ships in which he served any nearer to that nation than the Panama Canal.

  George explained to Alex, when he confided his misgivings as tactfully as he could to him in the light of what he had overheard in the Home and Colonial, that the young man was one of several Americans for whom accommodation had been sought in private houses while proper training facilities were being completed.

  “What are they training for?” asked Alex.

  “For The Second Front (there was no doubt about the capital letters in George’s mind), which will open soon.”

  Edna came into the living room to find George and Alex both spread out on the floor with the atlas open for George to explain what the invasion of Europe might mean if it ever happened. She stood and listened and for a few minutes let herself hope that the war would all be over soon and they could go home.

  “. . . see: there’s Stalingrad, where the Russians lifted the long German siege in February and since then have been pushing the Germans back where they came from and now they want us to attack the Germans not only up through Italy, down there. Look, that’s Salerno, where some of our troops landed last month, and there’s Rome, the capital of Italy, which they hope to take soon, but they’ve been held up at this place (here he put his finger where Monte Cassino was). The Russians want the Americans and us to attack somewhere else as well, perhaps in France over here, or down the river Rhine there. But the politicians and the generals say it can’t be done yet. The fact that young Lootenant Zimmerman (George deliberately pronounced his rank in the way he did himself) and the other Americans are over here signifies that at last somebody means what they say and the war might be ended before we all get too old to remember what peace was like.”

  “Zimmerman sounds like a German name.”

  “It is. His family must have emigrated to America some time ago.”

  “What does emigrated mean?”

  “It means that his family left Germany about three generations back and became settlers in America and have lived there ever since.”

  “What’s a generation?”

  “That’ll do for one day,” he said, looking up and catching Edna’s appreciative eye. “Mum wants her sewing machine out and we’re in the way.”

  V

  On one of their forays down Binsey Lane on a Sunday morning, George replied in a friendly way to a bearded man who was leaning over a gate and greeted him with a smile and strange words.

  “. . . And to you, sir,” George replied.

  “What did he say?” said Alex.

  “He said, ‘Good day, sir,’ in Italian.”

  “Why is he wearing overalls?” Alex was still looking at the man as he turned round and left the gate. “And why has he got that big coloured circle sewn on his back?”

  “He’s an Italian prisoner of war and he has been brought here until we have finished fighting the Germans. This is one of their prison camps. He’s as glad to have stopped fighting, as we shall be in due course. But that circle is there so that the guards can shoot at him if he tries to run away.”

  “He won’t though, will he?” said Alex.

  “Not if he’s got any sense,” said George. “And by the look of him, he has.”

  Miss Cook had already told the children in assembly what was happening in Binsey Lane and that they must be courteous to any Italians they met. Alex had found her to be a reliable source of information concerning military matters, but he needed to hear it from George before he really believed any of it. George did not know much about Italy at first hand, but had gathered much from the cheerful years he had passed with Edna in Malta. He told Alex what Malta was like, with its ancient churches and the headquarters of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem in part of which he and Edna had rented rooms.

  “Who are the Knights of St John?” asked Alex.

  “They were like monks, only they claimed they were serving God by fighting his battles against the Turks who turned them out of Jerusalem where they originally were for about three hundred years.”

  “They lost the battles, then?”

  “Yes. First they moved to Cyprus, which is a big island in the eastern Mediterranean you remember from the atlas. Then they were pushed across to another fairly big island called Rhodes and, once they were expelled from there by the Turks, they settled on Malta in about the time King Henry VIII was ruling England.”

  “Were they still there when you were?”

  “No, they’d been gone for about a hundred and twenty years by then. You remember I told you about Admiral Nelson and his enemy Napoleon?”

  Alex nodded.

  “Well, before Napoleon went to Egypt, where Nelson sank his fleet at the Battle of the Nile, the knights surrendered to him and the French, and that was really the end of their time there. We lived in their headquarters, but all that was left of them was a few souvenirs like bits of armour and things.”

  “Did you ever go to Italy, Dad?”

  “Not to see much of it. The ship called in at Naples, I remember, but we didn’t get ashore. Mum’s been through Italy on the train to get back home when we had finished living there, so you’d better ask her about it.”

  “She never tells me things in the way you do.”

  George sensed dangerous waters ahead and changed the subject quickly. He said, “Anyhow, about that Italian prisoner. His country had been taken over about twenty years ago by some people called Fascists, led by a self-important little man called Benito Mussolini. He persuaded the King of Italy to give him almost total power in the country. The Italians called him Il Duce, which means more or less the same as what the Germans called Hitler, you know, The Leader. The Italian army was in North Africa when the war started and they were backed up soon by the Germans, but they lost the battle against our troops who fought their way westwards from Egypt. Now our troops are fighting up through Italy, as I told you. The Italians gave in, and did away with Mussolini, but the Germans persist in their fight and defeating them is going to take a lot longer, I’m afraid.”

  George looked down to see if Alex was still listening and was very pleased to find he was responding with great attention and that gave him a good deal of pleasure.

  VI

  Edna had not wanted to spend all her Saturday afternoons on the River Cherwell in a punt so, since the warm weather had persisted, it was decided that they would go to a municipal open-air swimming pool for their outing on one occasion. George thought that it would be a good idea to begin to teach Alex to swim in any case. Edna would not go in the water, but would watch the proceedings from the grass by the pool and provide a picnic tea for them when George and Alex had had enough.

  George and Alex left Edna in the agreed place and went to the men’s cubicles. They found a row of what looked like garden sheds, painted not merely stained, though the paint was looking flaky and in need of a fresh coat. Alex was told to go into one of them to change into the bathing costume that Edna had bought for him the day before and to leave his clothes on the seat. George went into the one next to it, and emerged in a pair of maroon woollen trunks held up by a white canvas belt joined over his stomach with a silver buckle which carried its maker’s Italian name. Needless to say, his surgical appliance was hanging on a hook under his trousers. He explained to Alex, who was curious about the buckle, that his trunks were a souvenir from Malta where he had gone swimming a lot in places like St Paul’s Bay. He had picked them up in the collapsed ruins of his bedroom when he went to inspect the bomb damage in Chestnut Road.

  Despite pillage on an international scale current
ly taking place, the people in this locality were accepting of the rule of law and Alex was told simply to follow his father’s example in turning a handle on the cubicle door that raised the word “engaged” into sight. George was confident that all their belongings would still be there when they came back. They took careful note of the numbers on the two doors and went to get in the water, both waving at Edna. For her part, she busied herself with the tea-things in preference to acknowledging that she had anything to do with the portly white-skinned and hairy-chested man with an incipient corporation. Nor did she acknowledge the boy who was equally white in comparison with other boys at the pool that afternoon in his costume, which marked him like a wasp with black and yellow horizontal stripes. In any case, George had left his glasses with his clothes and could not see what she might be doing.

  George dived in from a springboard and Alex went in inch by inch from the steps at the side. After splashing around independently, trying to avoid others in the pool for a while, they met to stand in the shallow end and the instruction began.

  “Hold the bar at the side with both hands and float out with your legs like this,” said George, demonstrating the leg movements with his hands and arms.

  Alex did what his father told him.

  “Now kick your feet up and down.”

  Alex did that too and found that it kept him horizontal in the water. After a while, George said,

  “Stand up now and turn round to face away from the side. That’s it. Now lean forward with your arms out straight until you feel your legs lift, like this,” and he made more arm movements.

  Alex followed the instructions but the effect was not quite right because his head went under and his feet rose too far. George pulled him upright and then, after Alex had spluttered for a little while and complained that the water hurt his eyes, placed himself and Alex in deeper water where he could take both his son’s hands and walk backwards in front of him, pulling him though the water.