A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  “We’re both upset, boy, because we’ve had bad news. This is a letter from Mr Marsh, our solicitor in Wimbledon. He says that we won’t be able to repair our house as it’s too badly damaged. The only thing we could possibly do would be to have it rebuilt from scratch. We certainly can’t afford to do that and wouldn’t be allowed to in the present circumstances anyway.”

  Edna picked up the letter and read it through again. Then she said,

  “Life’s so unfair to us. These Merton Council minutes he quotes says that tenders are out to repair the houses opposite, yet he tells us ours is beyond hope of it. We don’t get any luck, George, do we?”

  “So we can’t go home, then,” said Alex, not so much as a question to his mother and father but as the conclusion of their discussion with each other.

  “No,” George said. Then he stood up, went to the window and looked out at the dairy. Alex noticed that the backs of his hands were against his hips and his fingers drooped downwards. He looked very distressed. Then he stood up straight, squared his shoulders and turned to face Edna and Alex.

  “Well,” he said, “Now we know where we stand. We’ve got to stop hoping we could go back because we know now that we can’t. We stay here as long as we have to and then work out what has to be done. What Mr Marsh has told us is spilt milk not to be cried over.”

  He tried to smile to comfort Edna, but knew he would have to wait a long time for any reassurance to affirm itself in her for whom this was the end of the world. It was for him, too, but his view of the universe was somewhat more informed than hers. She had no idea that there were other worlds besides her own. She did not want to know about them if there were, just then.

  “We’re caught, then, George, aren’t we?”

  “Yes. But we’ll find a way through, I expect, in time.”

  IV

  Remarkably, it was Edna who took decisive action first. She had noticed an advertisement in the paper for women to do valuable war work in a factory that had been empty along the main road from where they lived. So she started working there within a very few days, making detonators for shells. She intended to finish each working day in time to be at home when Alex came out of school, although taking him to school and going to meet him had been a thing of the past for some time.

  Every time he left the house in the morning, there was a kind of automatic incantation from her,

  “Look both ways before you cross the main road!”

  This got on Alex’s nerves. For some months now he had been allowed to go out by himself so long as he did not cross any roads apart from when he went to school. This meant he could go as far as the rec gates and he sometimes went through them as far as the river on the other side of the green space. One day he tried, instead of turning left and going direct to Henry Road, to walk across the dairy yard, but the disembodied voice of George himself, shouting like God from a third floor window that he was not allowed to be there, sent him scuttling back into the garden. Nevertheless, he became confident in the street by himself, and was often to be found out in it.

  In response to his application, the people in charge of the new American army hospital at Wheatley sent transport to take George there to be interviewed for the vacant position. Edna had taken a great deal of trouble over ironing his shirt. He had his hair cut specially and took his best suit and his ex-navy tie to be cleaned. He went to Dunn’s and bought a new trilby hat to show how determined he was to do all he could to obtain the post. He had ransacked Pear’s Cyclopaedia for American information and discoursed learnedly about what he found to Alex as his captive and admiring audience in the evenings before the interview. Edna stayed in the room while all this was going on and unreservedly supported his endeavour. He came back decidedly hopeful and was like a caged bear during the three days it took for them to make up their minds and let him know.

  George’s morale was greatly improved at the end of those days. Another letter was waiting for him on the tea table. Edna had found it on the mat when she got in and thought it safe to put it there, as it bore no ominous London SW postmark. He opened it with his wife and son looking on.

  Before he said anything, he took off his glasses and wiped his brow with the back of the hand in which he was holding them, with the open letter in his other one.

  “Well,” he said, “Sometimes you get some good luck, girl. I’ve got the job out at Wheatley. They want me to start in a week’s time.”

  “Is that enough notice for the dairy?” asked Edna, before she allowed herself to be pleased.

  “It’ll have to be. They wanted me out in the first place, didn’t they?”

  She let herself smile in encouragement at him and said,

  “Well done. We knew we had to stay here, but perhaps it won’t be so bad after this.”

  “It might even begin to be good,” George’s euphoric mood allowed him to say. He crossed his fingers, nevertheless.

  After tea, he wrote to the dairy management with his resignation, carefully pointing out that he had obtained other employment in the Oxford area and he would be glad to avail himself of their kind offer for him to remain in the tied house as long as it was still acceptable to them.

  It really did seem as though there were fewer clouds to look for silver linings behind. George took his letter with him to put in the manager’s office in the morning. His cheerfulness persisted:

  “Only six more days as a bottle washer!” he said to Edna as he went back after dinner.

  V

  Alex had recently been allowed to cross the main road to go to the shop with a few pennies to spend if it was known to Edna where he was going. Alex was on such an errand on a Saturday in March.

  Edna called from the kitchen as he went out,

  “Look both ways . . .”

  But he decided not to. He considered he had heard that command too often. He ran into the road.

  Since the front door had been left open to allow him to come back in without bringing Edna from the kitchen, where she was immersed almost to the elbow in cake mix once again, she heard a commotion in the street. She washed her hands and, still holding the towel with which she was drying them, went to the front step. An army lorry was halted in the road, slewed to one side, and a crowd was interested in its front near side wheel. The driver was looking anguished at the edge of the crowd. He was a sergeant and seemed to be in his forties. Most of the people gathered were women, also of a certain age. Edna looked at the ground to see a small brown shoe lying between the feet of these women, one of whom was bending down.

  Edna stood still on the step where the old iron gate had been, compulsively drying her hands for what seemed to her a long time. Then she realized that it was Alex’s shoe she was looking fixedly at and, with a scream, ran forward to push two of the women aside.

  “Steady on,” said one of them. “You’re not the only one who wants to see!”

  “That’s my son under there,” shouted Edna, and knelt beside him. The front mudguard of the lorry had gouged its way through the flesh of the back of his left leg, and his head lay on the road, grazed from being dragged a little way as the driver had braked from a fairly slow speed.

  “There was nothing I could do,” the sergeant was saying to a policeman who had just then appeared and taken charge. “He didn’t look, and just leapt out into the road. I can’t help thinking of my own little boys.”

  Mrs Wilson had come out too; she had a telephone and went back quickly to ring for the ambulance and for George, once she had found the American hospital’s number on the mantelpiece in Edna’s kitchen.

  The policeman had hoped never to use his St. John’s training, but now he was glad he had received it. He kept Alex warm with his uniform tunic and gently restrained the unconscious child from twitching over-violently. He forbade everyone, including Edna, to move him. The bell on the ambulance was soon heard, coming from the direction of the station. The white vehicle turned round in the road and two elderly men came forward from it to take Alex v
ery gently into the back. Edna identified herself and got in too, leaving Mrs Wilson in charge of the house, telling her where the keys were and to let George know where she was, not realizing that both those things had already been done.

  The ambulance crew were very kind to her and very careful for her son as they sped past the station and Gloucester Green, along Walton Street and into the casualty entrance of the hospital where Alex and Edna were both given attention: the former for a fractured skull and a lacerated leg and the latter for shock and self-accusatory guilt. The treatment for Alex’s condition was in part the result of the researches of Howard Florey and Ernst Chain on the applications of penicillin in treating wounds, available particularly in Oxford where they had carried on their work. For Edna’s condition there was strong tea, food at regular intervals and the presence of George who had already obtained such a good rapport with his new employers at the American hospital that they gave him plenty of freedom to come and go. He was often with her while she kept her vigil at night in the single room allotted to Alex until he should recover consciousness. Such an opportunity to be close to each other was at times a solace, and at other times a strain, because there was nothing they could say to each other to let reassurance replace anxiety. Silent embraces were a help, but words that made sense in these circumstances were lacking

  VI

  Alex himself, of course, was spared all the anxiety of the next three days. He woke up after seventy hours of unconsciousness, aware of how heavy his left leg felt and looking at a round, glass lampshade set in a plain, white ceiling. He heard voices, one of which was Edna’s and the other that of a man he did not know. Edna’s remarks were not audible to him, expressed as they were in between sniffs and whimpers appropriate to her acute anxiety. But he heard the man’s voice very clearly. It said,

  “He will recover consciousness, but you must prepare yourself for the possibility that he may not fully be in charge of his mental processes.”

  “You mean, he might be insane?” he heard Edna reply.

  “I carefully avoided the term but, well, it is not impossible that he might need special care.”

  The next thing Alex heard was a long intake of breath, presumably from his mother. So he called out,

  “Is that you, Mum?”

  Then he heard a flurry of feet, one pair clumsy in high heels, and saw Edna, followed by a man in a white coat, pulling a curtain aside, looking at him and smiling with intense relief. She made as to hug him, but the doctor held her back from this until he had looked into Alex’s eyes with a little light and taken his pulse. The doctor’s face was serious as he set about his task, but he seemed to Alex to be more cheerful as his routines drew to a close. Edna’s mouth was working anxiously as she hardly dared to hope for good news.

  “I think you could embrace him now, Mrs Ryland, but be careful not to hurt his leg,” the doctor said and left them alone together.

  “Is this a hospital?” Alex asked.

  “Yes. You’re in the Radcliffe and they’ve given you the best possible care and attention. Tell me how you feel.”

  “Fine, only there are all these bandages round my leg and I feel a bit dopey.”

  “How many fingers have I got up?” asked Edna.

  “Up where?” said Alex, and then realized that she was holding up her hand about a foot from his face. “Oh. Three.”

  “Thank God for that!” said Edna. “So you can hear and see perfectly well.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because three days ago, you went under an army lorry and hit your head severely on the road.”

  “How do you mean, severely?”

  “I mean very hard.”

  “Did I? Is that why it’s sore on my forehead when I touch it?” He did not persist with his experiment: it hurt too much.

  “Yes, you walked on your head for a little way before the lorry driver could stop to let you out. You leg was caught between his wheel and his mudguard, which is why it’s all bandaged up.”

  “Is it broken? My leg I mean, not the mudguard.”

  “No, but it’s in bit of a mess, which is why they have bandaged it so thoroughly,” Edna told him.

  “Wouldn’t be much use bandaging a mudguard, would it, in any case?” her son commented and she then began to wonder whether the dreadful possibility suggested earlier by the doctor had come about.

  “Don’t say silly things, Alex.”

  George came in then, his face beaming. He held up three fingers in front of Alex’s face.

  “I’ve already done that,” said Edna.

  “Hullo, Dad. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine, especially now you’ve come to. You can see and hear and speak, then?”

  The use of so many interrogatives in the last ten minutes left the three of them exhausted. A companionable silence fell and remained until a starched apron appeared and the vivacious young face above it asked George and Edna,

  “Would you mind just waiting outside for a few minutes while I see to the young man’s leg dressing?”

  George and Edna got up to leave Alex, and George, just in time, managed to stop himself patting him on the head as he often did in affectionate moments.

  The nurse set to work, which astonished Alex, because no one other than his mother had ever approached him so intimately and Edna had not done so for some years now. The nurse unpinned the top of the bandage that covered his whole leg from groin to ankle and asked him to bend his leg while she rolled the bandage away from it. He was horrified by what he saw under the bandage: a mass of scab that appeared when his leg was lifted and one particular piece of it that appeared to the right side of his knee looked like one of the flower-headed upholstery nails on the single surviving dining chair that had been brought from Raynes Park. When the whole bandage was off, the nurse applied some lotion, which stung the uninjured parts of his leg a bit, and then she began putting a new dressing in place. She did all she had to do with amazing tenderness and Alex felt very comforted. She had made him feel that the damage to his leg was less severe than it looked because what she had done had eased the discomfort he had been feeling when he woke up.

  The nurse pulled the sheet up and called George and Edna back.

  “There, I’ve given him a new dressing. The wound’s all very clean and there seems to be no infection.”

  She turned back to smile at Alex, leaving him wishing that his mother would smile at him more and bring him comfort, instead of leaving it to other people. The nurse’s warm smile, he realized, was for his own reception only. She picked up the old bandage and left him with his mother and father who puzzled him by blowing their noses very hard and wiping their eyes. He also found that his mother was very keen to keep holding his hand, which was something she would never have done normally, but she did not smile at him, and that was what he would have liked.

  VII

  Alex was kept in hospital for three weeks, carefully observed as to his thought processes and his memory. George had a way of dealing with this that was very much to Alex’s liking. At the American hospital, word soon got round that Mr Ryland’s boy had been run over and piles of comic books appeared on his desk each day. George brought one or two of these for Alex to see every time he came in and subsequently questioned him carefully but unobtrusively, as if he were setting an intelligence test, about the stories in the strip cartoons. Lil’ Abner turned out to be the feature in the comic books that most attracted Alex’s attention and George read these strips carefully on the bus from Wheatley so as to be able to put questions about them to him after he had looked at them. Alex also spent many cheerful hours drawing cartoon characters from memory, but reminding himself of details as the need arose. All this made George able to say to Edna after a fortnight,

  “That bang on the head doesn’t seem to have done him too much harm, does it?”

  To which Edna naturally replied, “Even so, he’d have been better off without it! And so would we.”

  The ot
her children in the ward where Alex soon was were also glad to see George, who had realized that Alex could not possibly eat all the candy (George was not only learning American, but speaking it by now) that his American colleagues gave him for “his boy” and he shared it out fairly with them on the days when it had built up in a pile on his in-tray. The children soon came to know that he would arrive each evening at six and a corporate cry of greeting often went up as he came in. Edna remembered her basic nursing skills and lent her services to the staff, taking temperatures and feeling pulses, besides changing beds and emptying bedpans and bottles. Her main pre-occupation was of course her son, but she found she became interested in the other families and their stories. It gratified her to know that she was not the only evacuee who had stayed on and it was good to know that Oxford city people could be as friendly as those with whom she had now lost contact, largely through her own inertia, that were still in Raynes Park. She even used up her accrued coupons on a new costume, as a jacket and skirt were called at the time, made of very expensive-looking dogtooth patterned cloth. She even looked happy and was heard now and again to sing snatches of songs as she made beds and emptied bedpans. But she did not smile at Alex and that was his one regret during these days.

  He never saw the nurse who saw to him on the day he recovered consciousness on one to one terms again. She frequently appeared as a comfort in between the threatening dreams he was having again. He was glad when another lady, after one of the sessions he was made to submit to involving electrodes on his head and being shown pictures to evoke a strong mental reaction, told Edna and George, that his mind was as normal as any of us could claim our own to be.