by Joan Thomas
This war will be fought in the air, he said.
Oh, Stanley, that’s ever so ugly, said Aunt Lucy. What will we do afterwards?
If there’s an afterwards, said Uncle Stanley with satisfaction, we’ll break it out and get another.
Uncle Stanley rolled sticky tape over the fanlight in a cross-hatching pattern. Then he fished a little screwdriver out of his pocket and took the glass face off the mantel clock. The mirror in the front hall had to go as well. (You girls won’t be primping, he said. You’ll have better things to think about.) All of these deadly missiles he packed into a crate destined for George’s shed. Then he went down to the shops and picked up a new bucket and a jute bag of sand. If a bomb landed in the hall, we were to hold the sandbag in front of our faces as a shield while we ran up to it. The bucket was for water to put the fire out if the sand didn’t do the trick.
Aunt Lucy said we should each have a new frock while you could still get fabric for that sort of thing. Her own was well advanced and Nettie Nesbitt came over to hem it. It had a full skirt with buttercups sprinkled over it, and the bodice was pale green like willows in the spring. Talking around the pins in her mouth, Nettie Nesbitt told us about working at the munitions factory at Chilwell in the Great War and how the sulphur in the TNT turned her skin yellow. I was just as yellow as that, she said, picking out a bright patch at the centre of a buttercup in Aunt Lucy’s skirt. She was only sixteen at the time, younger than all of us girls. She was called a canary.
Oh, my poor dear, said Aunt Lucy. Well, you’d never know it now. You have skin like a rose (which could not have been further from the truth). Aunt Lucy stood on a kitchen chair, her own face flushed pink from the cry she’d had that morning, revolving slowly while Nettie crouched below her. When Nettie got round to the beginning again she stuck the last of her pins into the pincushion on her wrist and sat back on her heels and sang,
There’s no uniform so dinky As the girls’ munition blue She’s working hard for the coming home Of the boys at the front so true.
Dinky? laughed Madeleine from the floor, where she lay on a carpet of the Oldham Chronicle. She caught my eye and made a droll face. Listen to this, she said, bending over to read out: Sir: I wish to call the public’s attention to the grave risk posed by individuals of Teutonic origin residing in our midst. Allowing such individuals free access to bicycles and roadway maps is the height of folly and a threat to the security of the British people. Mr. Schwartz at the pharmacy! she cried. He has a bicycle.
Oh, they do go on, said Aunt Lucy, still standing like a queen on her chair. Nobody living in Blighty today would side with the Germans.
Don’t you believe it! cried Nettie Nesbitt. She hoisted herself to her feet and looked passionately about. There was them working for the Huns right in Chilwell. In 1916! Why do you think our lads had such a wretched time at the Somme? Their shells was duds! Not one in three would fire proper. It was them devils at Chilwell lost the war for us.
No one bothered to correct her. Aunt Lucy put her hand on Nettie’s shoulder and stepped down. I’ve enough to plague me without being frightened of my own neighbours, she said. She had a glazed look, as though she’d been sitting up all night at the bedside of a dying loved one. Everyone was waiting. I could not be afraid the way Aunt Lucy was because I had no idea what was coming. None of our ways of seeing this was right — that’s what I felt. If you see the funnel of a cyclone twisting across the fields towards you, you don’t have any idea what you should fear, but you know that it will teach you.
That summer was as hot as home. We girls went around with no stockings. Out on Oldham Edge there was a breeze, and I tried to get Madeleine to bring her embroidery hoop and work outside, but she would not, she said it was common. I went out alone, walking through the prickly gorse, sweat trickling down from my hairline, and looked out at the dry brown Pennines. Remembering snow, a fantastic notion, the wetness and coldness of it, the way it blew into a sculpted frozen sea my last winter at home. I thought of snow and one night I dreamt of it, the field between our place and the Feazels’ lying glistening in moonlight.
Madeleine and I spent the summer playing cards at Jenny’s next door, doing little jobs for Aunt Lucy, and sometimes working at the WVS depot, sorting clothes for evacuated children. And I wrote to George. George usually wrote on Sundays, as they did fieldwork every day until dark and then they had to catalogue everything. He sent me a hand-drawn cartoon in which a girl picks up a belemnite and says, Oh! It’s a fairy finger! and farther down the beach a military officer picks one up saying, Ancient artillery shell. It was labelled THE BELEMNITE: A CRYPTIC CURIOSITY. My own belemnite sat on the window ledge of the room I shared with Madeleine, a talisman against lightning. I thought about this cartoon, about what George was trying to say about the war, whether it was something we invented because it fit the way we thought about things. But you couldn’t say we invented Hitler, obviously.
In August George’s notice came, and Uncle Stanley managed to reach him by telephone and he said he’d come home from Dorset by train. We’d worried so much in advance that it was almost a relief to have it settled. Now we could all get on with doing what had to be done.
Poor lad, said Aunt Lucy. They won’t know what to do with him.
He’s just the sort they like, said Uncle Stanley. He’ll be a testament to the army’s powers of transformation.
It was a Thursday when he got home, the first week of the trial blackout, and we girls went to the station to meet him just after tea, before it was dark. Monty met us there and sat beside me on the bench. He had escaped conscription by two months, and at the moment he was working at the brick works. He was in a mood. There were boys in uniform all over the platform, holding their shoulders with a new importance, and he looked sourly at them and said, Playing at being their dads.
What about you? I asked. Going to sign up?
I don’t know, he said. I’m holding off at the moment.
In the winter he’d wanted to go to Spain to fight the Fascists, except that his dad was poorly. I knew that, so I thought he wasn’t opposed to being a soldier. Well, England didn’t pitch in then, did she? he said. This anti-Fascist fervour is all a bit sudden. So I’m waiting to see if I’ll pitch in now. I’m waiting and watching, but so far I haven’t noticed myself signing up.
He sat close to me with his arm along the back of the bench. I hear your beau’s a Party member in Canada, he said. What does he think? Does he see this as an imperialist war?
He’s not my beau, I said.
Then the train pulled in with the blackout blinds already down. When George got off he made nothing special of me, so I made nothing special of him either. His friend David was there in his new blue RAF uniform and we all walked up Union Street and David got us into a canteen. There was a gramophone, and the place was crammed with people dancing. Monty pulled out a chair for me with an irritating, proprietorial manner, so that simply sitting down on it made me feel as if I were surrendering to his designs. Then as soon as we were seated he said, How about it? and so I got up again to dance with him. He grasped my waist firmly and held me close to him, and under the guise of offering me dance instruction, insisted on pressing his leg between my legs the whole time. Every time I turned around all night there he was, wanting more, and I was forced to sit down and say I was tired. Imogene Miller, the very thin girl I first saw at their New Year’s party, the girl whom George was said to fancy, appeared and stood by the table, lifting her chin and pulling on a cigarette.
I adore your frock, said Madeleine, who had a bright spot on each cheek from the cider.
Ta, Imogene said, blowing out smoke. Her dress was black with jet at the neckline.
So that’s how we dress when we’re ruined, said she, said Monty.
Sod off, said Imogene. She wandered away and then I didn’t see her again and I couldn’t see George. Across the table a girl named Ruth was fighting with her boyfriend. Her eyes were brimming with tears, she had a fixed
smile on her face. You’re horrible, you are, she kept saying, smiling and weeping while he drank his ale and stared out into the crowd.
Where’s George? I said to the table. I want to dance with George. I was drinking cider too.
You can’t be sweet on George, a boy named Harry said. He’s your cousin. It would only end in tears.
It would only end in circus freaks, someone said. They all laughed and Harry tapped a drum roll on the table. The lights dimmed and the master of ceremonies announced a novelty dance, the Blackout Shuffle.
He’s not really my cousin, you know, I said.
Anyway, Charles Darwin married his cousin, Madeleine cried. He would know, wouldn’t he?
Dance with me, said Harry, so I did, their words drifting away into the smoky air, and when the bell clanged in the dark and we had to change partners I stepped blindly into the nearest arms and it was bloody Monty. Then the lights came up and George was back at the table with David and it turned out they had walked up to the Chinese restaurant to buy cigarettes because the canteen was all out. The canteen was closing then so we crowded out into the black street. It was a moonless night and the buildings made black, hulking shapes against the sky. Everyone was walking with heads tipped up, staring at the stars. To me it was an ordinary starry sky, but to everyone else it was a marvel. My heart was aching with longing to be walking with George. All the while whoever was beside me walked me closer and closer into the wall and then pushed himself against me and before I quite knew for sure that it was Monty, he had clamped his hands around my bottom and was breathing beer into my face, trying to put his tongue in my mouth. Get off me! I cried, shoving him away.
Oh, you don’t half fancy yourself, he said bitterly.
Back at the house Madeleine was comforting a girl huddled crying in the hall. It was Jenny. She raised her head and stared balefully at me over Madeleine’s shoulder. I was trying not to cry myself. I went out to the toilet and when I came back in Jenny had gone home and George had gone out again with all the boys, so I went to bed.
The next day George took the coach into Manchester to report. He went to a huge depot, where he lined up with a lot of other boys singing, It’s a long way to Tipperary. He said it felt like a film set for a movie about the last war. He was made to stand for two hours (most of it in his underwear) before a doctor came and asked him to pee into a bottle, listened to his heart and checked his arches. I’ve seen better bleedin’ soldiers crawl outta cheese, he heard an officer say as he was getting dressed — not about George personally (he thought) but the whole lot of them. He passed the medical and was sent home again because they weren’t ready to take him into basic training.
Why call him up for nothing? said Madeleine.
They learned a lesson last round, said Uncle Stanley. By the end they had no reserves. Nobody except the midgets and the maimed.
Every day planes flew in formation over Oldham from the Manchester airfield. Huge ear trumpets were set up over London, they said, turned to listen to the sky. Near the end of August we all queued up to get respirators in tidy white cardboard boxes with carrying strings. Dinky, Madeleine and I called them. Boys in the service wouldn’t get their masks until basic training, but George and his friends stood out in the garden wearing ours, making rude noises in the soft rubber around the snouts to irritate Uncle Stanley. As ARP warden, Uncle Stanley had to inspect all masks on the street once a month and issue a little chit to show they were properly maintained. He came back from an ARP meeting and read us a notice about a chap in Rochdale who’d been taken to court for throwing his mask into a yard and cracking the visor. Stanley himself bought a red storage tin with Take Care of Your Gas Mask on it. And he had a new electric lamp with a little hood over it for walking the streets during blackout, a lamp that cast an eerie blue light. I don’t know whether he bought that lamp or they issued it to him. War had not been declared, but the shops were full of that sort of thing. All the while we were musing about the idea of another war and declaring it insane, factories across England were busy building fighter planes and respirators. Even at the time this struck me as a very bad sign: who would work to find another way after they’d made all this gear?
The question, of course, was whether there was any other way. George thought so, and he knew a great deal that Uncle Stanley did not know. He was standing in the Hartford Arms all night with Horace Maxwell, a reporter for the Oldham Chronicle. George knew that ambassadors from London were travelling up to Russia at that very moment in a steamship called the City of Exeter, on their way to make a pact with Russia. He knew that in a show of unconcern the prime minister was fishing in the Highlands, sending his friends fresh salmon in dripping crates of ice. George drew in more and more information, and saw so many angles to every question. He would quote George Bernard Shaw and Karl Marx and Neville Chamberlain and Julian Huxley. By the end of every argument he’d be trembling with eagerness, talking too fast, and Uncle Stanley would hitch himself testily around in his chair and pour another drink of stout with his disgust evident in the very way he held his tumbler. He had nothing but what they said in the Gaping Goose and his own self-evident truths. Then on August 23 it was Germany that Russia made a pact with. So Uncle Stanley was the one who turned out to be right.
Finally George got his summons, for September 1, and went to pick up his uniform in Oldham. It was rough khaki cotton, a mockery on an educated lad, as Uncle Stanley said to Aunt Lucy out of George’s hearing. He had to report to a different depot in Manchester to pick up his insignia. I was the one who went to Manchester with him, and spent an hour waiting in Albert Square while he was in the queue. That was the one time we had together. That night after we got back Aunt Lucy sewed his shoulder flashes and insignia on, and Uncle Stanley borrowed a camera from a chap at work and we took pictures in the garden. Lots of other boys came by. A couple of airmen, looking so smart in their blue shirts and ties. Wilf, a mate of George’s from Durham, the only one of his old mates going with him into infantry training. Lads who hadn’t been away to school and spoke a shrill Lancashire. They stood together outside smoking and laughing, joking that they were attracting Zeppelins when they lit up in the garden at dusk. While they were there George seemed thinner and paler. His face was monkeyish — there was something eager about his cynicism, and I was glad when they left.
All that last day of August Aunt Lucy’s tears dripped. She kept a hanky tucked in her bosom. It’s Failsworth, Mother, said Lois. He’ll be home more often than when he was in school, more’s the pity.
In the morning Uncle Stanley and Lois said their goodbyes and left for work. George was wound up, jittery. He’d made himself up a case of books, although he didn’t bring them out until Uncle Stanley was gone, so he must have known he’d never be allowed to take them. Aunt Lucy stood in the hall and shook her head at him. Pick one, she said.
Take a notebook, I said helpfully. You can write your own. You can write poetry.
I think it’s all been said, he said. Then it was time to walk him to the coach and then time for him to get on the coach. He embraced each of us, the underarms of his uniform already black with sweat. It was me he embraced first in his stiff way, but I was all right with that, we’d had our trip to Manchester. Then he was gone, and Aunt Lucy stood on the sidewalk and said, I wish Hitler could see that lad. It might bring him to his senses. Then she took our arms and we walked home. When we got to the house she said, He’s sure to be home for Christmas. This year we will have a goose. Will there be geese, with a war on? Madeleine asked, and Aunt Lucy said, No, I suppose not.
He left on the eight o’clock coach, and he must have been in the battery when we heard on the wireless that Hitler had invaded Poland. That was a Friday. On the Saturday, in spite of the heat and to calm herself, Aunt Lucy made a rag pudding. On Sunday morning she picked the Michaelmas daisies that had bloomed so early because of the hot summer and put them in a jar on the table. Then she put on her new green and yellow dress and, although Uncle Sta
nley didn’t want to leave the wireless, she made him go to church with her. Madeleine and I were sorting out our things for school, rooting around in the bookshelves to find the books Lois and George had used in Sixth Form. A lady was giving a program about how to cook with tinned food, and suddenly her voice was cut off and the announcer said, This is London, and the voice of the prime minister came on. We both stood very still in the middle of the living-room carpet. Neville Chamberlain reminded England that he had asked Hitler to withdraw from Poland. I have to tell you, he said in his thin grey thread of a voice, that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany. Now may God bless you all. May he defend the right. Then they played “God Save the King,” and we kept standing because it didn’t feel right to move around or sit down during the anthem.
He’s declared war, said Madeleine in a small voice, and I thought how funny it was to put it that way. There’s Mr. Chamberlain standing by his desk in his morning jacket. He’s just taken a telephone call, his face is grim. There are children, maybe, playing outside the leaded window of his study, but he can’t see them or the bearded seed heads of last spring’s clematis hanging over the casement. He stands with his hand still on the telephone receiver, cornered into saying something unequivocal. So he says it. War! he declares.
The next day the papers were full of the SS Athenia being torpedoed by a German U-boat and 112 passengers dying, and what I thought was, Well, they won’t be able to make me go home now.
