‘Who was that lady with the dog?’
‘Oh, just a friend,’ his father said.
Sometimes his mother was ill with her nerves. She stayed in bed for days at a time and Dr Ainsworth came to see her. It was her time of life, he said. He prescribed a tonic and plenty of rest. Mrs Ash was forty-six.
Philip had to go and stay for a while with Evie Nicholls, his father’s friend, who lived with her sister and little dog and had a canary in a cage. There were dark red carnations in the garden that took his breath away with their scent. He was allowed to take a bunch home, but his mother threw them out of the house.
‘I never did like carnations,’ she said.
Philip took the petals off and put them into a glass jar. He poured water on to them and screwed on the lid, hoping that the scent would thus be preserved; but the petals only turned to slime and the smell of them when he opened the jar was an evil smell that made him feel sick. He threw the jar into the dustbin.
His mother got better gradually but she was not strong and sometimes she cried.
‘Crying! Crying! What is it now?’ his father said in a loud voice.
‘Taking my child away from me! You had no right to do such a thing!’
‘Somebody had to look after him.’
‘Yes, but not her!’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, not another scene! I can’t stand much more of this!’
‘Don’t shout at my mother!’ Philip said.
When his father had gone out, he went and stood at his mother’s knee, putting his hands into her lap.
‘I won’t go to that place again. Not if you don’t want me to.’
‘Oh, you can go if you like,’ she said. She was not crying now. ‘If your father asks you, you say yes. Then you can tell me all about it.’
One night in June a bomb had fallen on Pitts Road School. The building had been badly damaged and the children had to stay at home till arrangements were made for them to go elsewhere. Philip didn’t mind; he hated school; and now, he was free to do as he pleased. There were always plenty of books to read.
Sometimes Jimmy Sweet came in and they played together in the garden. Jimmy Sweet was very fat and all the children in the district called him Fatty-Barrage-Balloon. ‘Have you got a bible, Phil?’
‘Of course we have,’ Philip said.
‘Fetch it, then, and I’ll show you something.’ Fatty-Barrage-Balloon opened the bible at a page in the Old Testament and pointed to a passage there: ‘Hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?’ Fatty gave a little snort, looking at Philip with screwed-up eyes. Philip slammed the bible shut.
‘Your mother’s calling you,’ he said.
At the back of Matlock Road stood the factory where his father was works manager. Sometimes Philip was allowed in to watch the men at work on the furnace, with its big iron door that rose on chains, and its little peep-hole at one side.
Behind the furnace was the stoke-hole and Philip stood watching Albert Verney shovelling in the shiny black coal. When Albert turned away, Philip threw the bible into the fire.
‘What was that you threw in?’
‘Only some rubbish, that’s all.’
The Old Testament was unclean. Philip would never read it again. But not everything in the bible was like that. Not the baby Jesus in his crib, with the ox and the ass standing by; not the boy in the temple, whose sayings Mary kept in her heart; not the bearded man with the gentle hands, blessing the loaves and the little fishes.
‘Am I a Jew or a gentile?’
‘What a question!’ his mother said.
‘Yes, but which?’
‘Well, you’re certainly not a Jew!’
‘I’m a gentile, then?’ Philip said.
The air-raids were becoming more frequent now. Hurlestone Park had a lot of factories, which made it a target for the German bombers, but it was the houses that were usually hit.
‘You ought to go down to the shelter,’ Norman Ash said to his wife.
‘With all those people? I can’t!’ she said.
But as the bombing grew worse she went, with rugs and cushions and folding-chairs, biscuits and cups and vacuum flasks. The shelter was under the factory: a large, deep basement, reinforced, which smelt of sandbags and creosote. All the people from the shops and houses in the block were allowed to use the air-raid shelter and they sat together on wooden forms or lay on cushions on the floor. There was a notice on the wall: ‘No cats or dogs or other pets. Please leave this shelter as you find it and take your bedding home with you. Signed, Norman Ash, works-manager’.
‘That’s my father,’ Philip said.
‘Tell me something I don’t know!’ retorted Fatty-Barrage-Balloon.
Sometimes, when the raids were bad, people came in from some distance away and Lilian Ash was indignant.
‘That old Mrs Jones! She’s got no right there. She comes all the way from Adelaide Road.’
‘I told her she could come,’ Philip said. Old Mrs Jones was a friend of his. Sometimes he went to tea with her. ‘She’s got no shelter of her own.’
‘You had no business telling her that.’ And Lilian Ash spoke to her husband. ‘It’s your job to see them and tell them,’ she said, ‘all these people who keep crowding in.’ But Norman Ash was never there in the evening when the shelter filled. He was always at a Masonic lodge or fire-watching at Head Office.
‘Fire-watching!’ his wife exclaimed. ‘Do you expect me to believe that?’
‘You can believe what you damned well like!’
He was always there in the morning, though, to carry Philip home to bed: up the stairs of the air-raid shelter, through the narrow factory yard, and across the garden into the house. Wrapped to the ears in a warm rug, Philip would stir in his father’s arms and would feel the cold air upon his face; overhead the sky would be grey and in his ears would be the wail of the siren sounding the All Clear. His father would put him into his bed and would draw the bedclothes up to his chin.
‘You’ve got another couple of hours before you need get up, lucky chap. Make the most of it while you can.’
Old Mrs Jones had a large wooden packing-case in her kitchen and Philip, with his coloured crayons, had drawn make-believe knobs on the front, so that it looked like a wireless-set. He would sit inside the box and Mrs Jones would reach out and pretend to turn a knob, click.
‘This is the B.B.C. Home Service. Here is the one o’clock news and this is Philip Ash reading it.’
‘Just a minute. I can’t hear. I’ll have to tune it up a bit.’ She pretended to twiddle the knob and Philip spoke up in a big loud voice.
‘Last night London suffered its heaviest raid of the war so far. Bombs fell on Pitts Road School and the Hurlestone Park power-station. Two hundred and sixteen enemy bombers were destroyed ‒’
‘That’s the stuff!’ Mrs Jones exclaimed. ‘Give it to ’em, hot and strong!’
‘‒ and the rest of the raiders were driven off.’
‘Serve ’em right, the rotten devils!’
‘R.A.F. Wellingtons attacked Berlin and strategic enemy targets were put out of action. Three of our aircraft failed to return.’
‘Poor chaps. I hope they baled out.’
‘That is the end of the one o’clock news.’
‘You’d better come out now and have your tea.’
Mrs Jones, although old, took an active part in the war effort. She collected shrapnel and tinfoil and was always knitting for the soldiers. She had even given her aluminium jelly-moulds to a boy-scout collecting at the door.
‘They’re needed to make Spitfires,’ she said, and whenever an English plane flew over, she would stand in her kitchen doorway and point to it with a grimy finger. ‘There go my jelly-moulds!’ she would say. ‘Can you see them on his fuselage?’
September came, sunny and warm. England had been at war for a year. The raids on London grew worse than ever and sometimes in th
e mornings Philip’s mother would take him out to see the damage that had been done in the night. Pemberley Road had been badly hit and five of its houses lay in ruins. One house had been sliced in half and a piano stood on a ledge, high up, with a vase of artificial flowers on it, untouched by the blast. Among the heaps of bricks and rubble a child’s cot lay on its side with a golliwog hanging from its rail.
‘Oh, the poor souls! How terrible! And only a stone’s throw away from us!’
Lilian Ash went home feeling ill. She could not get it out of her mind, she said, and would never be able to sleep that night.
‘Why do you go and look, then?’ her husband asked impatiently.
‘It’s no good closing your eyes to these things.’
As the air-raids grew worse, there was talk of a new evacuation scheme.
‘Philip must go,’ his father said. ‘He should have gone at the very beginning but you wouldn’t listen to what I said.’
‘Yes, he must go, I realize that, but I don’t like the thought of sending him.’
‘Why not go with him? That would be best. I should feel happier in my mind if I knew you were both safe in the countryside.’
‘Yes, it would suit you, wouldn’t it, to have me out of the way like that?’
Lilian Ash refused to go. A wife’s place was with her husband, raids or no raids, she told her son. Philip would have to be sensible and not mind going alone.
‘I’m not afraid of the bombs,’ he said. ‘I’d sooner stay at home with you.’
‘Your name’s been put down,’ his mother said.
Philip called on Mrs Jones. He took his carton of shrapnel and his collection of milk-bottle tops. She would know what to do with them.
‘I shan’t be coming any more, I’m being evacuated,’ he said.
‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know. It’s a secret.’
‘I shall miss you,’ Mrs Jones said. ‘Who’s going to read the news to me now?’
She gave him French toast for tea.
Outside the Evacuation Centre, motor-coaches lined the road, ready to take the children to Paddington Station. Philip stood waiting with his parents. His gas-mask, in its cardboard box, was slung by its string over his shoulder, and he had a label tied to his coat.
‘I do think they ought to tell us where our children are going to.’
‘I don’t suppose it’ll be very far. Oxfordshire, that’s what I heard.’ Philip’s father was cheery and bright. ‘Oxfordshire’s not very far. We’ll be able to drive down and see him at the weekend sometimes.’
The children were getting into the coaches. Philip’s mother hugged him tight and he felt her tears wet on his face.
‘Don’t! You’re squashing my gas-mask!’ he said.
‘Cheerio, old chap,’ his father said. ‘We’ll be down to see you when we know the address. ‒ If we can get the petrol, that is.’
‘Write to us, Philip. You’ve got some stamps.’
They stood on the pavement and waved to him. The coach drew away and left them behind. A light rain began to fall and he saw his father’s umbrella go up.
When the coach reached Paddington Station, the air-raid warning began to sound, and the children were herded down into the underground. They stood packed together for over an hour, and a little girl next to Philip cried silently to herself, even though he held her hand. At last someone shouted ‘All Clear!’ and the children were taken up again. Soon after that they were on the train.
Philip had no means of knowing what time it was. When other children in the compartment began to open their packed lunches, he decided to open his own; but he soon found he was not hungry and wrapped the sandwiches up again; the smell of hard-boiled egg and tomato made him feel sick. Later he gave the sandwiches to a girl who sat opposite, staring at him, and she gobbled them up in no time at all.
‘Greedy thing!’ somebody said, and she put out her tongue.
The train was travelling very slowly. Philip, who had a corner seat, looked out at the rain that was blurring the landscape. It seemed to him to be getting dark. He turned to the boy sitting beside him.
‘Are we nearly there?’ he asked.
‘Nearly where?’ the boy replied.
‘Wherever it is we’re going to.’
‘How should I know? Ask them out there!’
Outside in the corridor the two women in charge of the party patrolled up and down, regularly, looking into each compartment and quelling any squabbles that broke out.
‘What about a sing-song? That should keep our spirits up! Let’s start with “Roll out the Barrel”!’
All along the slow-moving train, the children raised their voices in song, encouraged by the two attendants. They sang until their throats were sore; till all but the strongest had worn themselves out; but Philip, although he moved his lips, had no voice for singing songs, and his neighbour nudged him in the ribs.
‘Why aren’t you singing?’
‘Never you mind!’
‘You’ll burst into tears in a minute, cock.’
‘Oh no I won’t!’ Philip said.
‘Call this a train? It’s more like a snail!’ said the girl in the corner opposite. ‘Why don’t they get a move on?’
‘There’s a war on, that’s why,’ someone said. ‘I expect there’s been a few bombs on the line.’
‘Anyone like a cigarette?’
‘Get away! They’re only sweets!’
‘I wish I’d brought my tiddly-winks.’
‘I wish I was bleeding back at home!’
Blinds were drawn down over the windows and a dim bulb came on in the carriage roof.
‘Anyone know what time it is?’
‘Not me. I’ve pawned my watch.’
‘It’s half-past seven,’ the attendant said.
‘Cor! I thought it was midnight at least!’
‘Miss, can you tell us where we’re going?’
‘You’ll know soon enough. It won’t be long now.’
‘She don’t know any more than us.’
‘I hope the bloody driver knows!’
‘Mind your language in there, you boys!’
The long, slow journey ended at last. The train drew in at a darkened platform. The children walked in file through the streets, fumbling and jostling in the dark. Voices spoke and hands reached out, guiding them through a curtained doorway, and now they were in a brightly lit hall, where long trestle tables were spread with food and where women in white overalls were pouring tea from enormous teapots.
‘Come along, children, there’s plenty of room! Poor little mites, just look at them! They’ve been on that train for over eight hours! Come along, children, move down the hall! There’s plenty of food for everyone!’
Philip drank a cup of tea, but he didn’t want anything to eat. He held a buttered scone in his hand and pretended to take little bites from it. People stopped pressing food on him when they saw he had a scone in his hand. Later he left it on a ledge.
After the children had had their tea, they were lined up at one side of the hall, and a woman read their names from a list. Along the other side of the hall stood the rows of prospective foster-parents and their names, too, were called from a list. The organizers went to and fro, leading the children by the hand, and the foster-parents took charge of them. Philip was among the last to be called. His suitcase was brought and put at his feet.
‘This is Philip. He’s nine-and-a-half. Philip, you’re going to stay on a farm, with Mr and Mrs Truscott here. Say hello and shake hands with them. You’re a lucky boy. You’ll like Stant Farm.’
A man and woman looked at him. The man had merry twinkling blue eyes, deep-set under light-coloured brows, in a face as brown as mahogany, and his hand, squeezing Philip’s, was rough and warm. The woman was rather beautiful but Philip knew it was rude to stare and glanced away from her with a frown. Her hand, when he took it, was smooth and cold.
‘Well, Philip?’ the man said. ‘Are you willing to tak
e us on?’
Philip, not knowing how to answer, looked up at the lady organizer, who gave him a little pat on the back.
‘Of course he is. He’s a lucky boy. He’s the only one allocated to you so far, but Philip won’t mind that, I’m sure. He’s used to it. He’s an only child.’
‘Well, if it’s all settled, then …’ The man reached out for the suitcase. ‘What about saying goodbye to your friends?’
Philip glanced round the crowded hall.
‘They’re not my friends,’ he said with a shrug.
In the van, driving out to the farm, he sat between them, in the dark, his gas-mask balanced on his knees.
‘The poor kid’s nearly asleep,’ Charlie said. ‘He’s just about done in with it all.’
‘Yes,’ Linn said, ‘he’s had a long day.’
‘More than eight hours on the train, and only to travel a hundred odd miles! What a journey! No wonder he’s tired.’
‘Bed straight away, I think, don’t you?’
The motor-van rattled up the steep track. Philip was helped out, half asleep, and guided across the yard to the door. The cottage kitchen struck cold. There was a smell of old damp stone. Philip stood quite still in the darkness while Charlie, fumbling, struck a match and lit the oil-lamp on the table. A shiver shook him, whipping his flesh, and he stared at the rafters overhead. The kitchen ceiling seemed very low.
‘Has the electricity gone?’
Charlie gave a little laugh.
‘There’s no electricity here,’ he said. ‘You’re out in the country now, you know. It’s all oil and candles with us, I’m afraid.’
‘Shall I light the fire?’ Linn asked. ‘It hardly seems worth it at this time of night.’
‘Maybe Philip would like some warm milk?’
‘No,’ Philip said. He shook his head.
‘Something to eat, then? A biscuit, perhaps?’
‘No, I’m not hungry,’ Philip said.
‘Had a good feed at the Town Hall, eh?’ Charlie stood looking down at him. ‘I know what you want! You want your bed!’
‘Yes,’ Linn said, ‘I’ll take him up.’
She lit the candle and led the way. The staircase was steep and very narrow. Shadows lunged at him from the walls and he cowered away from them, ducking his head. In the bedroom there were two beds. The ceiling sloped steeply down at one side, almost to the very floor, and the room was very small and dark, smelling of polish and old varnished wood.
Seedtime and Harvest (The Apple Tree Saga Book 5) Page 23
