A Childs War

by Richard Ballard

  Edna was pleased to find that Alex did not argue when she declared it was time for him to go to bed. Alex was glad of a way of escape from the brooding atmosphere and thought about Joyce’s canary, which used to be in his cage in this room. It had managed to keep cheerful despite being in prison all its life - but then what did it know of any other life?

  Alex did what he did not usually do: he gave Edna a kiss on her cheek and said, as kindly as he could, “Goodnight, Mum.” He did not even mind tonight when her reply was no more than,

  “Make sure you wash behind your ears. I’ll be up to see if you have.”

  As she said it, she had a look on her face that belonged to a woman who had forgotten how to be happy, even if she ever knew. Going upstairs, Alex had to find his handkerchief and blow his nose hard in order not to cry at the horror so far away of having to kill so many so as to finish a war and the horror at home of his parents’ unhappiness, about which he could do nothing although he longed to be able to be of help. Sadness they cannot understand is hard for children to deal with. Edna was partly right.

  VIII

  With nearly three weeks still to go, Edna set about packing such china and glass as she had accumulated since coming to Botley Road. There was no more than would fill one large cardboard box. Alex was very keen that she should not forget his fairground Jacobean tumbler. George carefully checked over all his tools in his old black and white sea chest. Alex’s books and toys were to be taken as they were in the cupboard that had been left behind by Joyce. Clothes fitted into two cabin trunks and a suitcase that George bought in what he called an old tot’s shop. All this would be a part load along with the sea chest for Carter Paterson’s who would bring the things down to Gillingham at some unspecified future time.

  While the carrier’s men were dealing with the sea chest’s passage through the front door to the van on the day appointed for the move, both of them being older than he, George wryly gave thanks that hernias were not infectious. Once down the front step, they put the sea chest on rollers and made the job easy. That tickled George - a sea chest making its way over the rollers. He told Alex about it to amuse him, but unfortunately he had only seen the sea at Walney Island and had not learned to call waves rollers, so he did not get the joke.

  When the neighbours saw the van had gone, they called to say their goodbyes. Edna was pleased that Mrs White came first, brimming over with the news that when Lord Mountbatten’s amphibious force had taken Rangoon, all the prisoners of war kept there had been released, and Jim was among them. He would be repatriated as soon as possible. Then Mrs Wilson came to say that her husband would be in Germany for some time but she now knew for certain he was safe, which she had not for the last three months. The girls gave Edna a little clock to remember them by, and Alex a Doctor Dolittle book they knew he did not have. All George got was a kiss from each of the girls and from Mrs Wilson herself, but he seemed more pleased than anybody.

  They were not going to hospital, but they did have a case each, so a taxi arrived to take them to Gloucester Green. George had decided that they would be sure to have a seat each on the Black and White Coach direct to Victoria. Travelling that way rather than by train, would save a lot of trouble and be a sentimental journey for him. Edna had agreed and added that it also cost a lot less.

  Before they left, Martha produced a box camera, saying she had been saving the last film on a roll for this very occasion. She lined the Rylands up before the privet hedge, George in his best suit, Edna in the dogtooth tweed costume she had had made when Alex was in hospital and Alex himself in his white shirt with a tie and the grey school suit that used to belong to John. As she stood there Edna realized that this was the place where she had seen Alex’s shoe under the lorry and was glad that Martha said they must all smile or she would have done the opposite. As soon as the shutter had clicked in the camera, the taxi stopped in front of them.

  There was nothing left to do after the luggage had been stowed (Sea-going language came readily to George’s mind in moments of stress). He opened the taxi door for Edna to get into the back seat and, in his preoccupation with what might lay ahead, went round to the other passenger door and settled himself next to her. Alex was left standing on the pavement. It was the taxi driver who told him to get in the front seat. The taxi was parked facing the oncoming traffic, so he said to him,

  “Look both ways before you step into the road!”

  This time he did.

  10

  Alex stood in the garden on the second day after their arrival in Gillingham with his father and grandmother. Edna had gone to bed with a sick headache.

  “Do you think you could take it over while you are here, son?” Louisa said.

  “Go on, Dad!” said Alex. “I’ll help!”

  “They certainly need to be pruned,” George commented.

  The roses had flowered well, but the dead heads outnumbered the budding hopefuls by about three to one.

  “Yes. I can’t leave all his years of work on it to go to wrack and ruin, can I? I’ll help where I can.”

  Alex noticed that his grandmother’s arm had gone round his father’s waist in a proprietary fashion and that George quickly moved away. When he looked up, he saw that Edna was standing in the bedroom window with the expression on her face he had seen a lot of recently. She stood listless, leaning against the window frame with her mouth partly open and her eyes staring at George. That was why he evaded his mother’s embrace. Alex already realized the sadness of a love so possessive that it tries to stop its object loving the people who were already loved before. Edna in the window in the evening light seemed to Alex like a fey apparition from an illustration by a man called Arthur Rackham in a book of tales he had looked at among the books at school. Alex feared his feeling that his mother was becoming more of a threat to family happiness than a component of it. He could remember how unhappy she was when they first went by themselves to Oxford without George and she had to accept Joyce’s domestic arrangements. It was far worse now, here at Gran’s house amid the smell of mothballs and lavender furniture polish and with George at home all the time with his nerves on edge.

  George had written to apply for a job at the dockyard as he said he would, and had sent to the Civil Service Commission for application forms to take their examination. He was in a sort of dead man’s gulch, as he put it, for the present. He even behaved out of character towards Alex on occasion. In the last months of the European war soldiers had sung a current hit song with nonsense words as they marched, and singers on the wireless made it a standard for a time. So it was that whenever Alex started to sing:

  “Mares eat oats

  And does eat oats

  And little lambs eat ivy,”

  he never got as far as “A kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you-oo?” because George, not Edna, would shout at him to be quiet.

  While he was waiting for something to happen, and in order to get out of a house one hundred per cent overpopulated by female close relatives, George did take on the garden and was dead-heading and pruning one morning, bizarrely dressed in formal trousers which would no longer do up round his waist. He had bought them to wear when he had been asked to give away his older sister-in-law at her wedding since her father was no longer alive. An old shirt with no collar and a green cardigan out at the elbows completed the ensemble, along with his father’s old lace-up rubber gardening boots from the shed, which were a bit too large, but would save his own shoes from the ravages of gardening after several days of wet weather. He had intended to wear his hat, but after it caught in the branches of the apple tree above the roses two or three times, he left it off.

  Alex came out to be with him. George gave him a job. He was to take the basket that was on the ground at George’s feet whenever it looked full up, and empty it out on the pile behind the tree at the bottom of the garden past where vegetables were growing. When he had done that three times or so and was waiting for it to be filled again, George began to speak to hi
m in a weary tone such as he had not heard him use before.

  “How are you getting on here? Are things all right between you and Gran?”

  “Yes. She doesn’t say much to me, but lets me get the history book down whenever I ask. She doesn’t tell me off for touching things, as I thought she might do.”

  “What about Mum. How are things between you and her?”

  “She’s closed up altogether on me.”

  “You mean she doesn’t talk to you?”

  “Only to tell me to do things I would be doing anyway, like washing and cleaning my shoes. You know how quiet she has become.”

  “Only too well. Look, Alex; this can’t be any more easy for you than it is for me or Mum. Tomorrow you’ll start at the school round the corner. I don’t know when I’ll be able to go to work again and be with other people a bit during the day, but what worries me is that when we are both out, Mum and Gran will be left here together, getting on each other’s nerves all day long. I was hoping your Aunt Sal would still be here to keep them apart, but Michael got a her a passage to go and join him sooner than she thought he could - and just because we’re not very happy we mustn’t begrudge other people a chance of it. I shouldn’t be talking like this to you, but it’s all bottled up inside me.”

  Then he grew anxious and went on,

  “Please don’t say I said all this to either Mum or Gran, will you? One day we’ll have a place of our own again and live as people have a right to. But for now we’ve all got to put up with things as they are I suppose.”

  Alex realized that by now his father wasn’t actually talking to him, but just talking to himself, or to God, if God were listening. He knew how distressed George was, but was at an eight-year-old’s loss to know what to do to help.

  “When the bike comes on the van, can we go out for a few rides around here?”

  “I’m afraid you’re a bit too big for that now. But yes, we could go out and look at nice places around, like Newington, which is only a short bus ride away, and to Rochester Cathedral and the castle there, of course. They make and test those flying boats you had a model of across the river from there and you can watch them take off from the water.”

  “That’d be good. When can we?”

  “School tomorrow, but let’s see what happens at the weekend.”

  By this time George had finished cutting and pruning in his father’s beloved rose beds and looked with a small measure of pride at what he had been doing.

  “Time to wash our hands before dinner,” he said. “Thanks for your help - in more ways than one.”

  They put the secateurs and the basket away, locked the shed and went indoors. Edna came down to join them and Louisa. They ate their lunch in a monastic silence. Alex found that eating while three other people with full dentures were doing the same was funny. The only trouble was that he could not tell them what he was laughing at, and this made both Edna and Gran cross with him and left George no way of defending him from their rebukes and the charge of silliness. The dread sentence from Edna’s lips was uttered:

  “Tell him not to do it, Dad.”

  George looked at Alex, whose giggles were almost under control now, and only allowing his eyes to smile behind his glasses, uttered the words, time-honoured in all families,

  “You heard what your mother said.”

  II

  George took refuge in current affairs. Coping with another taciturn meal, he had got up from the table and put the wireless on for the six o’clock news and the family heard that an American battleship called USS Missouri had steamed into Tokyo harbour and high ranking officers from all the countries involved in the conflict had received the official Japanese surrender. Now the war really was all over. Louisa Ryland was not the sort to have champagne in her cupboard, but she had half a bottle of port and brought that out to celebrate the return of international peace.

  When they had all, including Alex, had some in their glasses, Alex saw his grandmother get up and walk round the table to where Edna was and put her arms round her.

  “I can’t keep on saying this, Edna. I have tried on several occasions to make peace with you. When we came up to see you in Oxford before David died, and again when you came here earlier in the year, I tried to tell you that I really do want to bury the hatchet. It is about time we were able to accept each other and, as we are under the same roof for a time at least, I want to be able to make you welcome as my daughter-in-law. I didn’t do it when I should have, but I want to now.”

  George put down the slice of bread and jam that had stayed motionless in front of his mouth as his mother said this and he and Alex waited in apprehensive silence to see how Edna would react.

  Slowly she stood up and just as slowly put her arms out to draw Louisa to herself in an embrace. George could not see her face. Alex could not either. They could both see that George’s mother had meant what she said and waited for Edna to put her reply into words.

  The two women moved apart and with intense relief father and son saw that Edna was smiling at Louisa. Holding both her hands, she said,

  “I’m very glad you said that. Now I can call you Mum after all these years.”

  They hugged each other again and, completely out of character, as George knew well, Louisa poured another glass of port for Edna and herself, then remembered that George and Alex were still there, gave George some, and a trickle in the bottom of a glass for Alex.

  “David used to do this a lot when he was master of the lodge,” she said, and raised her glass to George and to Edna as they sat together. “I drink to your future happiness and you finding fitting work and a home of your own in good time.”

  They responded and as the glasses were put down Edna said,

  “And thank you for having us to stay here until such time as that happens.”

  Alex finished his little drop of port and thought he ought to say something too. What he came out with was,

  “Isn’t it good that the war’s all over now?”

  “Very good indeed, boy, very good indeed!” said George, and the laughter broke out.

  III

  When the table had been cleared and the washing-up done, Louisa went out to play cards with some friends as she always did on at least one evening a week. This left George and Edna on their own once Alex had gone upstairs.

  “Does she mean it, d’you think?” asked Edna.

  George looked at his wife in silence for a long time before he answered:

  “I think she does. It’s what my father wanted; she told me as much when they came to see us the Christmas before he died and again after his funeral. What she said then was that she longed to be able to get on with you, but didn’t quite know how to go about it.”

  “That suggests that us not getting on was my fault, then, doesn’t it?”

  “You know it isn’t, though, don’t you?”

  “They never gave me a chance at the first and that was why things went as they did. It’s difficult to turn round and behave differently now.”

  “But . . . do you think it’s worth a try? We have to be in her house for a while until we get ourselves sorted out. It needn’t be too long. Even without the civil service, there might be a job in the drawing office in the dockyard that I could do and then, with a regular income again, we could borrow for a house.”

  “That would mean us staying round here, though, George.”

  “But we both came from round here in the first place . . .”

  “Yes. But we left, and were glad to have done so. You have given your mother’s address to the War Damage Commission, haven’t you?”

  “You know I have. You saw me post the letter.”

  “D’you think what they pay us will go towards a deposit on a house?”

  “I sincerely hope so.”

  “Even if we don’t go back to Wimbledon, we would be on our own again if that happened.”

  “All we can do is try to start again. Do you think you could turn the other cheek a bit when I�
�m out at work and you and Mum are here on your own together?”

  “I can try,” Edna said, “As long as I don’t get slapped on both at once!”

  The uncertain smiles that followed that remark led to a change of subject and possibilities for their future were discussed in circles and in spirals until Louisa came back and Edna made a cup of cocoa for the three of them. Peace was certainly kept until it was time to go to bed. There was even a deal of warmth between them, expressed in pleasant chatter.

  IV

  In the little room he had been given facing the top of the stairs next to Gran’s - the one Aunt Sarah had when they were last here -Alex had gone to bed fairly early, consenting willingly to this on the grounds that he did have the new school to come to terms with in the morning. He had not been able to see inside it. When his parents had tried to take him to the school the day before there was no one to let them in, so it would all be new and strange to him. Yet, if things really were to be better between his mother and father and grandmother now, he thought that he would be able cope with whatever a new school might do. Children have a great capacity for hope.

  V

  People like George and Edna lost a good few landmarks at this time. Mr Churchill had lost the general election to Mr Attlee. President Roosevelt had died back in April and his place been taken by President Truman. Conventional warfare - bad enough in itself with the millions of violent deaths all over the world in the last six years - had been replaced by Britain and America possessing and using the ultimate terror weapon. Stalin was once more recognizable as an adversary rather than an ally. Things that appeared permanent were unpleasant: rationing, the lack of a home of their own and the discontinuance of George’s well-paid and enjoyed work at the American hospital.

  For Alex as well, the terrain was very different from what he had become used to. Junior schools would be very much the same as each other, he decided. There were people you got on with, people you didn’t; teachers who were supportive, others who were officious. Soon men teachers would return to classrooms with enthralling editions of war stories to tell, having imposed a subconscious denial process upon their memories as a protection against the horrific things they had seen. Living in Gran’s house brought new tensions. “Wipe your feet when you come in!” had replaced “Look both ways before you cross the road!” as Edna’s principal injunction to him. He and George and Edna all tried to pretend that things were going well for them.