A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  Alex had come to associate taxis with hospitals and hospitals with taxis, thereby suppressing the memory of an old journey that had re-appeared in his dreaming since the accident. One was ready to take him and his parents home when the declaration about his sound mind had been made. He was not allowed to walk on his leg yet and a very large pushchair was delivered in which Edna took him for walks.

  “They can’t really be walks though, can they?” he remarked during one of them. “You’re the only one walking, Mum.”

  George’s Americanisms had been passed on to Edna. “Don’t I know it!” she said, “Next time you want to get close to a lorry, ask it to stop first!”

  They had reached the low wall outside the factory where she would have been making detonators for shells had he not stepped out into the road that day and Edna gratefully sat down on it to get her breath back. Like their own house frontage, the wall had lost its iron-spiked railings, so that was perfectly possible.

  When one of these excursions, made “to get some fresh air into your lungs” as Edna said to Alex, led to the school in which he had not been seen for six weeks, there was some severe embarrassment. Miss Cook greeted him as though he had actually died in the accident and had returned despite it. Miss Hill even kissed him on the forehead, which had fortunately healed by then, and his present teacher asked if she should set him some work to do at home. His mother assumed the shining armour worn by Viking women in a series in the comic books when she said that school work at home would not be necessary just yet as he had been told to keep to recreational reading, whatever that was. The teacher looked relieved because she would not have to mark what might have been set and virtuous because she had made the sacrificial offer. The music specialist who taught the tonic sol-far in each class in rotation was the most embarrassing with her little speech,

  “When Miss Cook told me that if I came in here I would have a nice surprise, I thought I should see a beautiful butterfly on a windowsill but, instead of that, it’s you, Alexander!”

  Miss Cook, as uncomfortable as the recipient of this outburst, ushered Edna and Alex out and as they stood on the steps at the school door, said as the conclusion of a short exchange with Edna,

  “We’ll expect him back in for the second half of the summer term then, shall we? He’ll be a lot stronger by then. Meanwhile, we’ll keep in touch, Mrs Ryland.”

  Having the same need to repress the tendency to pat children on the head as George had had towards Alex, Miss Cook turned to go back into the school and Edna put her best foot forward to get home.

  In doing so she fetched her ankle a crack on the back of Alex’s pushchair. Alex heard a vulgar Anglo-Saxon expletive uttered in the full force of its consonants, but thought better of asking what it meant. He sensed that George would be better qualified to give him an explanation since he had heard him say it quietly in his shed when he thought he would not be overheard.

  Edna was especially nervous as she took the pushchair across the road between the shop and the house, the place where the accident had happened. An American Jeep, which she had not noticed in her struggle to bring the wheels down the kerb, did manage to stop in time and George got out of it, glad of a lift home, but white with fear of what might have been. He used the word that Edna had uttered, but as a present participle in a sentence of rebuke to his beloved spouse. The GI driver hid his mirth in his forage cap and made hurried excuses for leaving.

  There was no way of bringing the ice cream George carried home as a treat back to its solid state, so they drank it from glasses and marvelled at its unaccustomed taste. As they sat at the table relishing it, George said to Edna,

  “I’m sorry I got so aeriated, but I hope none of us survived the blitz in order to be killed by lorries or Jeeps. Here, Major Feinstein insisted on me having these pork chops as well,” and he went to fetch a greaseproof paper parcel from his overcoat pocket on the hall stand.

  Alex expanded his vocabulary of cooking smells and tastes as well as his verbal one that day. He was beginning to think that all you needed to do to get people to be pleasant to you was to step out in front of a lorry. It was only when he began leg exercises supervised by a brutal woman in the outpatients’ department that he was disabused of this idea.

  VIII

  In May 1944, Alex was walking fairly strongly and George decided that he would respond to the invitation of the major to bring his boy up to the hospital to meet the people with whom he worked. Edna took the opportunity of seeing whether she could have her job assembling detonators back while they were out, since Alex would soon be going back to school and she had heard that more detonators than ever were being demanded now, without the reason for the demand being given in as many words. George still sent off his weekly mystery parcels, so why shouldn’t she do her bit to get her own back on the son of a gun (like George, she never forgot the sayings taken for granted in the Navy) who had dropped the bomb that made her homeless?

  The Jeep was sent to pick George and Alex up at the time George would have caught the bus to go to Wheatley. Alex was dressed in his best clothes and Edna had made a fuss about his hair being tidy and his fingernails clean. The driver was one that George had never seen before, so he was able to carry out his intention of appearing as the dignified English father of a family without any memory of his vulgar outburst of a week or two ago detracting from it.

  It was discovered in conversation that the driver was a Private First Class from a place he called Peoria, Illinois and when Alex remarked under his breath to George that that was a long-winded place to come from, it was explained to him again that the States of America were United, and that Peoria was a place in one of the states, which was called Illinois. He also learned that the President of the United States was called Roosevelt and that he had been elected on something called the New Deal, which had meant that a whole lot of people were enjoying the kind of life they had never had before. As a result of that, George reminded Alex, the Americans were in our country to help us win the war against Hitler and his little friends; then they would go on to avenge Pearl Harbour, where the Japanese had sunk a fleet of theirs over two years ago, help us get our own Empire back and set free our imprisoned servicemen in Singapore.

  Alex soon became used to the wind eddying round the open sides of the canvas-topped vehicle, even if it did undo all Edna’s careful work on his hair. He enjoyed seeing the city and then the hedges and villages go by. Eventually they drove into a place composed of single-storey brick huts and stopped while a man in a white helmet looked at George’s identity card and the permit held up by the driver. After the man’s careful scrutiny, he let them through the hospital entrance by raising a pole on a hinge, pressing down hard on the short end of it. During the time it took to reach the part of the hospital where George shared an office with Major Feinstein, Alex received an explanation of the documents that the guard had appeared anxious to see. The explanation included the words sabotage and saboteur.

  “I got in without one, though. I might have been a saboteur for all he knew!”

  “You might turn out to be,” said George, “But you were let in because of this piece of paper attached to my card, which has your name on it as well as mine.”

  “What is a saboteur, anyway?”

  “Someone who kicks his way in with his big feet and breaks things.”

  The lesson ended at George’s office door and the driver went his way. Alex was introduced to Major Feinstein, who treated him with the utmost politeness after welcoming him with,

  “So! You’re Mr Ryland’s boy. I’ve heard a lot about your troubles. I hope you are getting well again now.”

  “Thank you, I am much better now, sir. Thank you for all the books (George had explicitly told him not to say “comics”) you and your colleagues sent for me - and for all the candy.”

  This was the right word, in George’s mind, because he feared that “sweets” might mean something else in American, although he did not know and was later relieved
to find that it did not.

  “I expected to meet somebody whose teeth had all rotted away!” said the Major. “Now, Mr Ryland,” he went on as efficiency clicked in, “We have to make a check on all our arrangements for the operating theatre. Did you find out if the lights are acceptable to the medics where we put them?”

  George’s working day gathered momentum. He used the telephone a lot, making jokes where he thought it was appropriate, and being very deferential when that was required. Alex was given a chair and a spare desk and more paper than he had ever seen to draw on, since George had proudly shown some of his drawings to the Major. When he tired of that, there were more comic books to read. Three times in the morning, George took him with him when he went to other parts of the camp and he saw that some of the soldiers did not walk round on their own, but marched in groups with someone pacing at their side, shouting incomprehensibly at them without them seeming to resent it. One of these groups was made up of men whose skin was dark brown.

  George did not appear to have anything on his mind so on the basis of one or two of their conversations during their bicycle rides, Alex asked him,

  “Are those men freed slaves?”

  “Their great-grandfathers probably were.”

  “As a matter of fact, they don’t seem very free, do they?”

  “I’m afraid they aren’t. Don’t mention this back in the office, but they have a pretty rough time here. They are segregated - that means kept apart from the white soldiers - and they do pretty menial jobs around the place. Their corporals and sergeants are in theory equal to the others, but in practice they have to keep themselves to themselves or things get unpleasant for them.”

  “That’s unfair on them, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but some things have to be accepted until you can find a way of changing them and not enough people want change at present.”

  They had reached the building that contained the operating theatres now. George had no fear of anaesthetics for other people and checked a storeroom full of long canisters with dials attached to them with one of the officers while Alex watched.

  Afterwards, on the way back to the office, Alex, who knew what hospitals were for after his protracted stay in one, asked,

  “Why is there a hospital out here in the country? And why does it have so many operating theatres? Surely the people who live out here aren’t all going to need operations at the same time?”

  “You know I told you about the Second Front? You’ve drawn a lot of pictures of battles. What happens in battles?”

  “People get killed?”

  “Yes. And a lot are wounded. The idea is that when American soldiers are wounded and need proper care in hospital, like you did after you got run over, they will be brought here and given the right treatment without the long journey to America and back after recovery.”

  “They’d have to go back and fight again after all that?”

  “If their wounds were cured, yes.”

  And Alex pondered on the unfairness of creation all the way back to the pile of comic books.

  Over lunch he met Captain This, Captain That and Lieutenant The Other, who was a nice lady from New York with a winning smile. She readily accepted the compliments paid to her by the men present, including George. She gave Alex a half dollar piece to keep, she said, until he came to spend it in America. Someone else explained the significance of the Stars and Stripes on the flag displayed at the end of the mess hall. Yet another had a War of Independence button with thirteen stars on it, which he showed Alex and was pleased to find that Alex knew about that war and even more pleased to hear that it had been George who had told him.

  Lunchtime was short but the food was excellent and Alex fell sound asleep in the Major’s leather desk chair afterwards, at his invitation. George went about his tasks until mid-afternoon and then some cups appeared and some sandwiches and the Major returned together with another man who was more important called a colonel (Alex needed some help with spelling this later on). Central heating for next winter was discussed, with George taking notes of what was said and saying yes and no to the questions they asked him.

  When this quizzing of George was over, they all stood up, the Major and the Colonel exchanged salutes (“Even without their caps on,” George pointed out, later) and there was time for a little conversation, during which Alex was introduced. He hoped he did not let George down and sprinkled his answers to the inevitable crop of questions with deferential terms. George appeared to be pleased with him, and, when the Colonel had gone, the Major said it was OK (whatever that meant) for George to take him home now. Major Feinstein apologized for a Jeep not being available and remarked to George,

  “Sometimes you can work it and sometimes you can’t!”

  He gave an order to Alex: “Now you be careful not to go singing and dancing in the road again!”

  George brought Alex back on the bus an hour earlier than he usually came home himself. Alex had been given a bag to put the pencils and paper in. The comic books were offered, but George said there was a limit, although they both knew he would bring them for him himself over the next few days.

  When they reached the house, they found Edna in a headscarf and an overall on under her coat coming from the other direction.

  “They asked me if I’d do a shift today,” she said. “I said I could - and I did! When Alex goes back to school, I’ll go back regularly. They agreed.”

  As D Day came near, though unknown to them, the Rylands began to enjoy a measure of prosperity and content they had not had for several years. Alex was glad to walk to school again a week later. Edna had the good sense to trust him to cross the road by himself, though George had had to insist upon it in the ten minutes before he got out of bed that morning. When she went out to go to the factory there was no blood on the road and she looked forward to her day with the other women. Some of her reticence had fallen away lately now that she felt more at home in West Oxford. Having George with her all the time had given her back more than half the life she considered herself to have lost. She was worried about Alex being so skinny since his accident, but was assured at the hospital during one of his physiotherapy sessions that the provisions allowed by means of ration books were the result of careful planning on the part of dieticians. George had taken over Graham’s old allotment and had used it carefully for growing vegetables and salad ingredients in season and there were several kind gifts that had once had feathers and beaks that came from a Wheatley direction, so Edna hoped to be able to feed him up.

  IX

  The back room had been let again, this time to a Polish man who had been in the Royal Air Force and his English wife. The Polish man did little other than laugh while he talked incomprehensibly in the presence of George and Edna and his wife tried to explain what he was laughing about. All they could do was be polite and take the weekly rent in cash, hoping that the dairy manager would not find out about this six-week arrangement.

  From Alex’s point of view, the presence of Mr and Mrs Zartovnish gave a new dimension to life. Mr Zartovnish made model aircraft out of kits while his wife was out at work as part of the therapy suggested to help him recover from what he had suffered in the cockpit of a real one some two years before. He had no use himself for the finished products: the making was the therapy. So, by the time their six weeks were over and the Zartovnishes had departed, Alex became the glad possessor of a Short Sunderland flying boat in its white livery, two Lancaster bombers and a Mustang, though the last named was out of scale with the others. He wanted to hang them on strings from the ceiling in his room as he knew others had done, but George thought that too many pinholes in the ceiling would not endear him to his former employers. He did not allow more than one of the Lancaster bombers to be displayed.

  Mr Zartovnish excited interest on other grounds besides being a maker of models. Soon after he arrived, he had all his teeth pulled out, bled for several days and then submitted his raw mouth to the trials of the dentures that wer
e made for him. George and Edna had both been through this process: in George’s case because his teeth had decayed through being soft and in Edna’s because of a popular scare supported by some unscrupulous dentists in the nineteen-twenties that she could neither spell nor pronounce. Alex’s parents therefore had less sympathy than he did with their Polish guest’s suffering. Alex’s teeth had recently fallen out and grown again, so he did not really understand why there were so many dentures about, but neither of his parents seemed to want to answer many of his questions about these personal matters and he did not pursue the problem. Alex talked to Mrs Zartovnish about her husband’s distress, which endeared him to her. This was how he came to be the recipient of the models, or they would have all gone elsewhere if they had survived at all.

  From Mrs Zartovnish Alex also heard what had happened to bring her husband to England. His two brothers had been killed in the German invasion of their country, and the country house they owned had been destroyed when tanks went through the estate that went with it. He himself had escaped with others who had previously taken flying lessons and offered themselves to the RAF to fight a mutual enemy. He had narrowly avoided death in his fighter when bullets had gone right through its fuselage, wounding him in both his legs and making him unfit to fly any more. So he was invalided out.

  “Just like my Dad from the Navy!” Alex put in.

  Andrzej and Heather had met in the hospital where she was a physiotherapist and they had been married six months. Money was short, so they could not afford a house of their own and were going the rounds of available rented rooms for which Heather’s salary paid.

  When he felt he was confident enough with his new teeth to enter what might be called society again, Mr Zartovnish made a large model Spitfire, which he intended to fly. It was two feet long with a wingspan of twenty-one inches, made with a balsa frame covered in doped paper and given the livery of his own Polish 303 Squadron. Much time was spent by Alex in winding the propeller round in order to twist the gigantic rubber band that was intended to drive this beast through the air. Beast was its maker’s word, not Alex’s: Alex had great respect for it.