A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  With Edna’s agreement, Mr and Mrs Zartovnish and Alex took the model down to the rec. They carefully noted which way the wind was blowing and aligned the model accordingly. It was held up at stretched arms’ length, with the propeller carefully restrained between Mr Zartovnish’s thumb and forefinger. When he let go of the model, pushing it upwards and downwind, the propeller turned violently for about ten seconds and then the whole thing fell to the ground and the wings burst off the fuselage. Mrs Zartovnish gave Alex a censored translation of what her husband said. Alex heard for himself that the opinion expressed was loud and forthright. The translator led Alex to believe that he had said that it had not really behaved like a Spitfire after all, but something manufactured for the Luftwaffe by a firm whose name sounded very much like what Alex had heard said by both his parents in moments of extreme pressure. Since he had no further use for the broken model, Mr Zartovnish took it to the dustbins behind the pavilion and left it for anyone to take who wanted it. During the whole performance, the new teeth stood up very well to expletives in the Polish language alternating with the speaker’s characteristic outbursts of laughter. The name Fokker is not easy to pronounce with a new set of full dentures.

  The other enthusiasm that Mr Zartovnish had was for fishing. From the people he had met and told through his wife as interlocutor about the enjoyment he used to have beside his native lakes and rivers, he had access to several prime stretches of water in the neighbourhood and on one occasion he brought home a live rudd, saying that since George and Edna had no refrigerator, the fish must be kept alive in a bath full of water until such time as it was needed for the table. Edna had been prevailed upon to provide the zinc bath. The fish flopped about in the bath for several days in their bedroom until Mrs Zartovnish facilitated its escape into Osney lock while her husband was asleep. She reported, as he laughed and snorted, that he was relieved that this had happened because he had felt sorry for the poor thing himself.

  When the couple left, Alex missed them for a long time and talked about them to anyone who would listen. Since there was none such at home, he regaled his friends at school with these tales, until the audience diminished only to Isabel Shergold, who was a captive audience by virtue of still having to share a desk with Alex and a very polite person. How much he missed this couple came home to Alex himself in an incident that happened a month or so after they had gone.

  Alex had not completely recovered from his accident. There were days when Edna kept him home from school to rest, making arrangements to stay away from the factory to look after him. This was how the model flying boat was lost, to his great consternation. There was a draw-leaf table in front of the window in the front room. If you stood on it, Alex found, you could see over the hedge that had been allowed to grow up to replace the railings. Edna came in from going over to the shop and told Alex to climb up on the table to see a long low-loading lorry go by with an aeroplane wing on it. He got out of his chair and excitedly clambered on the table to watch this wonder go by. He jumped with excitement and then saw with sadness that he had broken the wing of the model flying boat with his foot and sat down to cry about it.

  This made Edna inexplicably angry and she shouted at him.

  “It’s not my fault you stepped out into the road and it’s not my fault you broke this sea-plane, or whatever it is. Mr Zartovnish isn’t here any longer to mend it for you, so it can go into the rubbish!”

  She took up the broken but beloved model and went to throw it in the dustbin in the garden.

  The rest of the day was passed in mutual resentful antagonism by Alex and Edna. Only when George came home was it explained to him why she had behaved like that. Yesterday, the owners of the dairy had given George notice to get out of the house. It was generous, open-ended notice, but it was final. This had taken away all Edna’s new-found confidence and her depression focused on Alex as it had four years ago when he had split his chin. George’s determination to be strong to give her strength had also taken a severe knock.

  “We’re up against it, girl. But,” he added through his clenched teeth, “we’ve come through so far.”

  Edna rescued the flying boat before the contents of the dustbin could be put out for collection. George glued it together again but because he did not have the wherewithal to repaint it, it had lost its pristine glory and besides, it now reminded Alex of what had become a dreadful day.

  George wanted to strengthen Alex’s leg without having to have days at home, which obviously frustrated Edna who spent a long time after their child had gone upstairs to bed complaining to him. He decided that the making of what he sent to the Admiralty in the greased paper packages could be put off for a couple of evenings. He used the resulting free time in the shed to convert a bicycle frame he had acquired as a spare for the one he and Alex used on the country outings into a scooter for him. He cut the bicycle frame in pieces with a hacksaw to be converted into the base, upright and handlebars and completed the design with a wooden footboard and metal wheels taken from a discarded bottle trolley in the dairy, upon which he fitted tyres ingeniously fashioned from lengths of hosepipe.

  Strict instructions were issued by George on the geographical range for Alex’s use of this machine:

  “Keep on the pavements. Don’t go on the main road or Henry Road round the corner. When you are in the rec go only on the paths. Stop whenever other users of the pavement or path are going by you so as not to bump into them.”

  Edna had been told not to interfere in these arrangements, though her objections had not been easily overcome.

  Going out on the scooter in the late afternoon after school and at times over the weekend was fun for the solitary Alex. Using it helped to strengthen his injured leg as his father intended. He did fall off once, but fortunately he was a good way into the recreation ground and there was nobody about to see what happened or the tears that followed. There was only one other scooter left over from pre-war in the neighbourhood and that now belonged to a girl two years younger than he was and was obviously for a little kid, so Alex was justly proud of what his father had given him: the gift amounted to one of independence such as he had never had before.

  Alex was able to follow the sound of cheerful voices at the river one day and to find that he was looking at several older boys and two older girls who were swimming in the wide stream that was the boundary of the rec, taking turns to swing into a deep stretch of water by means of a rope hung over and secured to a safe branch of a tree. When one of the boys caught him watching with interest what happened to her dress when one of the girls took her turn at getting wet through, facing him as she swung back to the bank, Alex was shooed off very forcefully. Nevertheless, having seen enough to satisfy curiosity and feed his prurient imagination for quite a time, he haunted the spot for several hours of several warm days afterwards in hope of a repetition of the fascinating show.

  8

  Soon news of D Day was on everyone’s lips. Alex went several times in June and July to the cinema with his parents, hoping that no little houses would be burnt in the features they were going to see. However, he saw newsreel pictures of plenty of houses of all sizes burnt out after the allied landings and the liberation of villages near Caen and the city itself. George was hard pressed to give Alex a biography of General de Gaulle when he had been received with a great welcome at Bayeux, but told him all about the tapestry instead. He did understand the Mulberry Harbour and the pipeline called PLUTO, when they were reported at the cinema and on the wireless. Explanations were willingly given and received with great interest.

  Edna considered that she had been incautious about leaving one particular week’s copy of Picture Post lying about before having looked at it herself. She was settling down to have one of her snoozes in the living room with Alex on a Saturday afternoon. He picked up the magazine and read the captions under pictures of young French women having their heads shaved in retribution for having slept with German soldiers during the occupation. Then he turned
over to see a full page photograph of another woman with no clothes on at all, walking away through a jeering crowd. They had left her with her high-heeled shoes and she was walking upright, not shielding herself from anyone’s gaze. She had far more dignity than any of her detractors. He showed it to Edna, whose reaction he did not understand.

  “I don’t want you looking at pictures like that,” she said. “They will fill your mind with filthy thoughts and that will lead to a great deal of trouble.”

  “But why was sleeping with a German soldier so bad as to make the people so angry that they did that to her?”

  “It’s no business of yours, Alex. I shall be careful where I put the book in future and you’re not to look at it without asking me if you can.”

  With that she abandoned her five minutes as she called it -though it was usually more than half an hour in the afternoon at weekends - and took the magazine away to her bedroom where he could not get at it. When she came down, she thought that some kind of explanation was necessary. It was not the one that Alex expected:

  “Picture Post is a book for grown-ups, not for seven-year-olds. Dad and I read it because of the news about the war. Sometimes the pictures in there are very frightening and I don’t want you upset by seeing them. What is going on in France is terrible and it’s best that you listen to the news on the wireless or to what Dad tells you.”

  “But I saw several of the pictures in Picture Post in the newsreel at the cinema last time we went. Some of them were the same!”

  “Don’t start an argument now. Just do as you are told. I’ll tell Dad what I have said to you, so don’t go asking him if you can look at it, because he will say no as well.”

  Alex wondered why his mother’s face had gone so red and why she kept fanning herself although the room was shady and cool. Then he went back to the comic book he was halfway through, but still kept seeing the image of the naked woman walking away with her head held high. He decided it was one of the most absorbing pictures he had ever seen: more intriguing than what the wet dress revealed of the girl at the river in the rec who was, of course, a lot younger than this woman. In addition, the boys and girls there had been happily enjoying what they had been doing, reserving their displeasure for himself as an intruder, while Alex recorded in his memory the ugly hatred shown on the faces of the people jeering at the French woman and was angry with them on her behalf, wishing he could have been there to act in her defence. He could not understand why there was no one to stand up for her: whenever things became violent in the school playground and someone was victimized, there was usually someone who would stand up against the bullies.

  II

  Precisely a week after D Day, any possible grounds for national complacency were brutally taken away when the flying bombs appeared and fell on London. It was known that the all-clear had not sounded all day on several occasions in the capital. Official reporting said nothing about flying bombs so as not to harm civilian morale, beyond recording the damage. There was worse news to come concerning these terror weapons, as everybody soon called them. On the eighth of September, when enemy action destroyed eight houses and damaged fifty in Chiswick, George explained to Alex that Chiswick was not far from where they used to live.

  It was decided, since no one appeared safe from these weapons even on the other side of the Chiltern Hills from London, that air raid shelters were needed for the people whose homes were near the dairy. They were to be located in the gardens of the terrace in which George, Edna, Alex and their neighbours lived.

  The dividing walls came down almost overnight. Large piles of breeze blocks were delivered in the dairy yard, footings were hastily dug and concrete floors poured. Then the breeze blocks were assembled into walls and roofs. Alex was free to come and go while all this was taking place and his imagination was seized by an integral part of these buildings, which was a seat that ran around inside each area of about eight feet by twelve feet, the area of each shelter, and there were thirty or so shelters altogether. In his mind’s eye he saw ninety to a hundred people, including himself and his mother and father, cowering in the shelters while the sound of an exploding gas main deafened them; when they emerged they had nowhere left to live but the shelters themselves.

  In fact the idea of gas mains exploding was an officially backed cover for this large scale destruction for the best part of two months, until the tenth of November when Mr Churchill told the House of Commons and the rest of the nation what many people had already seen for themselves and reported to their relations in their letters to them. George explained it all to Alex when he had digested the news himself.

  “Hitler knows he’s beaten,” he said, “But a fatally wounded tiger fights to the last. His scientists developed the V1 flying bomb and then followed it up with the V2 rocket bomb. Our fighter pilots and anti-aircraft gunners have been stopping some of the V1s, but there is no way of stopping a rocket because it goes so fast and falls at the end of its trajectory. It also carries a great deal more explosive than the flying bomb. The Germans call them reprisal bombs - ‘reprisal’ in German begins with a V - hoping to get their own back for the American and British raids on their cities.”

  “They say you know when a V1 is going to fall,” he went on, “because its engine cuts out and if you’re underneath, you say your prayers. But these V2 bastards have knocked down a building before anyone heard them coming at all. Two thousand houses went like that in Croydon, which is also in Surrey, but over the other side from where we used to live.”

  Edna added her comment,

  “Perhaps it’s as well we couldn’t get our house rebuilt. At least it means that it’s not there for one of these things to get it.”

  “If we’d gone back there and it had got the house, it would’ve got us too,” George hastily mumbled.

  So the gardens disappeared and George’s shed with them. The secret cupboard and the sea chest came indoors. Alex never saw the cupboard again after a day or two: George had arranged for the Admiralty to have it back, he told him after he had sworn him to secrecy, and Alex imagined half a dozen elderly gentlemen dressed in cocked hats and covered in gold lace calling for it to carry it away along Botley Road amid deferential onlookers.

  All three of them barked their shins on or fell over the sea chest in the following days. Because it was too heavy with all the tools it contained to stow anywhere but the front hall, it remained there. Alex had remembered his old pie dish in time and rescued it for sentimental reasons before it could be taken away with all the garden topsoil that was being removed. It spent the best part of the next year on his bedroom floor, despite all Edna’s efforts to persuade him to let her throw it away.

  As it turned out, the shelters would have been more useful in the London suburbs. In west Oxford they had no other function than as places to hang new washing lines and store bicycles and the garden tools usually kept in the sheds they had replaced, together with Alex’s home-made scooter. By the time the shelters were in being the scare had passed and no one saw fit to provide them with any doors at all, let alone such as would keep those inside safe from bomb blast.

  A little while later, gates were put at the outside ends of the rows of shelters, because the residents complained that the houses were no longer secure from intrusion without them. When he came home on the evening after their gate reappeared, George looked out of the living room window and called to Edna,

  “Here, girl! Look at this. In Raynes Park we only had one shelter when the bombs were falling all round us. In this place it’s as quiet as the grave at night and we’ve got eight of the bloody things all to ourselves!”

  III

  Just before the Christmas holidays, Miss Cook made one of her special announcements in the school assembly. It went like this:

  “You all know that, after the D Day landings in June on the coast of northern France, the allied troops made great advances into that country. Perhaps you do not know that the German army appears to have recovered some of its form
er strength and has been advancing rather than retreating into eastern France and Belgium for the last week. When we say our prayers, in a minute or two, we must pray that our men will be courageous in resisting them. But there is something important that I wanted to say this morning before the newspapers carried the news that I have just mentioned. I have been told that some of you, boys and girls alike, have seen the lorries carrying German prisoners of war through and out of the city by the main road here and have been shouting rude remarks at them. I know that for as long as many of you here can remember you have not been stopped from hating the Germans. Some of you who have been bombed out of where you used to live have a particular grievance against their leader and against them too. But these men we have recently caught sight of in our own streets are a defeated enemy with no more power to hurt us and it is our Christian duty to be gracious towards them as their vanquishers. It is enough that they have been captured by our men. They do not need the insults of children to make life worse for them.”

  Then she announced the hymn and Alex ignored it as he usually did. Yet he did recall that he had been standing in Botley Road with some eight or ten others when such a lorry passed and they saw some Germans crowded into its open back under the eye of their armed guards. There had been derisive hoots and dirt had been belatedly thrown towards them. This was the work of only three or four of their number. The rest felt sorry for them in their shabby uniforms, which cinema newsreels had shown to be splendid in the recent past, and were not sorry that the headmistress had spoken as she did. When she came to pray for the troops caught up what was to be called “the Battle of the Bulge”, the Amen was more fulsome than it usually was, especially from the boys and girls whose fathers and elder brothers were in the army and might actually be in the Ardennes.