Eric stayed indoors with his leg in plaster, and no one came to visit. Maude never told the children why they were not allowed to have friends round to play. As they grew older, they didn’t want to, anyway. They were embarrassed by the smells that would sometimes waft through the house when their father had ‘one of his explosions’. At school, Eric and Margaret were thought to be stuck up and stand-offish. Their classmates’ mothers said as much about Maude, loud enough for her children to hear.
‘We’re moving,’ said Maude over breakfast one day, explaining weeks of tetchy, muttered conversations between the two adults. Sidney’s mother had died and Eric had caught a reference to ‘coming into a bit of money’. He’d allowed himself to fantasize about a life of luxury, so it was a disappointment when Maude finally broke the news officially.
‘We’re taking on the village shop at Currington. It’s a post office and general store. It will be hard work, but it has to be done. That way, your dad can always be close to facilities.’ She spoke as if she were making a huge sacrifice, demeaning herself by becoming a shopkeeper.
‘Imagine, kids,’ said Sid, trying to lighten the mood. ‘You’ll be able to have sweets and biscuits whenever you want.’
‘They’ll have no such thing!’ snapped Maude. ‘There’ll be no eating the stock. We’re going to need every penny we can make.’
Humiliated, Sid sank back into his now customary gloom, while Maude busied herself tidying the already spotless parlour.
The move was exciting for the children. There were trees to climb, strange country animals in fields, and a river. On the second day the children bounded into the shop with a couple of new friends. It was sunny, but their hair was wet. Maude greeted them, crossly.
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Swimming,’ Margaret said, laughing. ‘I saw a fish, Mummy. A real fish in the river!’
Everyone was shocked by Maude’s reaction. ‘How dare you go there! Don’t you know there are germs in that water? And who are these children? Dripping filth near food! Get out of my shop, and don’t go interfering with my family again!’
The terrified visitors ran outside. Eric and Margaret tried to follow them, but Maude called them back.
‘You two, stay here! I don’t want you mixing with those country kids. We’ve got standards to keep up. Now, you keep yourselves to yourselves.’
Eric and Margaret wanted to defy their mother, and carry on playing with the local children, but it was too late. From then on they were frozen out, as alien newcomers from the city.
Maude’s attitude to her customers didn’t help. Her shame at Sid’s ‘affliction’ stopped her asking anyone in to the flat above the shop. And, anyway, her work didn’t leave time for friendships. Yet again she was seen as a snob and it was a role she slipped into little by little as she got to know more and more about the villagers. She developed grand airs: enjoying the power of granting them credit when they were in trouble, and refusing it when she chose. Behind the counter she took pride in cutting the cheese so precisely that it was only a sliver on the right side of short measure. Hating waste, she would scrape off mould and re-pot jam, rather than throw anything away. She was impatient with ditherers, or people who didn’t have the right change, and she closed the door at five o’clock precisely every day (one o’clock on Thursdays), even if she could see a customer running to buy something at the last minute.
Managing the shop was hard, and Sidney was less and less useful. His illness recurred, and his self-disgust at his failure to provide for his family made him too weak to fight it. Maude moved from martyrdom to bitterness. Sometimes she would lash out at Sid, and the children would pretend not hear, but most of the time her exasperation was expressed in sulky silence. The mood became so ingrained that she lost the knack of encouraging Eric and Margaret. No matter how hard they tried, they could never impress her.
Margaret skipped into the shop with some good news. ‘I’ve won a book, Mum. You and Daddy are going to be invited to prize day at the end of term.’
‘What do they want to go giving you a prize for?’ said Maude. ‘Do they think I’ve got all the time in the world to go traipsing up to a ceremony? Who’ll look after the shop? I’ll lose trade, and I’ll have to shell out for a hat. And you know your dad can’t go. He’s taken to his bed again.’
Maude went off to shift boxes in the stock room, and Margaret slipped up to her parents’ bedroom and stroked her father’s thinning hair. He spoke softly.
‘I heard what you said. About the prize. Well done. Don’t take your mother to heart. She doesn’t mean to be sour. Life’s been hard on her.’
He was thinking of how, since the war, Maude’s pretty face had sharpened and settled into a scowl that drew her lip up towards her pointed nose. Her hair was always scraped back into a tight bun for reasons of hygiene, showing the bony outline of her skull. She was exhausted.
‘We must make allowances,’ said Sid. ‘Try to understand her.’
But Margaret didn’t understand. She was growing to hate her mother. At school the other girls called Maude ‘the witch’, and laughed about her funny ways. Worst of all, they thought Margaret was the same. No one would sit with her in the playground. When she walked into the classroom, intimate conversations stopped, and children held their noses and giggled. She had never told her father about that silent bullying, and was toying with the idea of telling him there, in the disinfected bedroom, when he interrupted her thoughts.
‘Your mother was beautiful, you know, before the war,’ he said, staring into his daughter’s face. ‘You’re so like her.’
Margaret was horrified. The image of herself turning into a younger version of the harpy downstairs stayed with her from then on and she resolved to get away from Maude as soon as she could.
And now there was talk of another war. Day after day the newspapers and the radio spoke of the threat from Hitler’s Germany. It made her father sicker. It made her mother worry about stock and suppliers, though, deep down, Maude felt a glimmer of excitement at the prospect of controlling the village’s rations.
Eric came home from his job as an apprentice mechanic full of romantic talk about enlisting. ‘I could join a local regiment, or the navy, or perhaps they might even take me in the RAF.’
‘Imagine it,’ said Margaret. ‘You lucky thing. Flying planes – I wish they’d let girls do it.’
‘Well, you’re not going,’ said Maude. ‘I need you here.’
‘How can you be so selfish when the whole country is threatened?’ said Eric.
Sidney intervened. ‘She’s not just thinking about herself. She’s thinking of what happened to me, and so many of our friends.’ And, at last, Sidney found a voice for his despair about the waste of life in the last war.
‘There’s no glory in it. It’s not fun. I’ve seen people blown to pieces, and I’ve killed men who were little more than children.’
But his son would not believe his accounts of mud, blood and pointless sacrifice. ‘If it was so bad, why have you waited till now to talk about it?’
‘That’s why I didn’t talk. I couldn’t. I can’t really do it now. It was so terrible.’
‘You’re just ashamed because you didn’t really fight. Got out on a sick note!’
For the first time, it was out in the open. Sidney slumped back on to his pillows, too devastated to reply. Almost letting himself share his son’s contempt. Wishing he had met a more glorious end.
Sidney and Maude were suddenly united in their passion to resist the jingoism of the newspapers. They both hoped for a diplomatic solution to German expansionism. They applauded Mr Chamberlain when he seemed to have achieved a last-minute deal with Hitler, but every night their children came home (Margaret from school, Eric from the garage) full of war talk and national pride. Sidney struggled to get out of bed once a day to eat with his family. But the meal, which for him was no more than some thin soup, always ended in slammed doors and shouting. He grew weaker, too weak to be moved
to hospital, and early in 1939 he died, another victim of the Great War.
But the village didn’t turn out for the funeral in the way it had for others twenty years before. They didn’t rally round his family with stew, cakes and kind words. If he was spoken of at all it was as the henpecked husband with the stuck-up wife at the shop, who was rumoured to be keeping the best food behind the counter for herself.
Eric left to fight, but was reported missing in action. His loss made Maude even more unbearable to live with, and Margaret was gone within a year: away from school at the earliest opportunity, and helping out at an aerodrome, trying to live like an adult, though she was still really a child. She thought she had rebelled against her mother’s attitudes, and yet Maude had left her mark and the cruel effect of the first conflict rattled down through the generations.
In 1946, Margaret chose an injured man for a husband, and found herself caring in her turn. She didn’t mean to, but somehow she gave her own child, Susan, the message that bodies were shameful, that what went on in the bathroom should never be spoken of, and that doctors were to be avoided and distrusted. As time went on, and the medics discovered the dangers of smoking, Margaret said it was a plot to control the population by taking away harmless pleasures. She and her husband puffed on, and went to early graves. They didn’t see Susan reach adulthood in a time of prosperity and peace, or their grandchildren growing up in a new century, clouded once again by war and terror.
Those boys and girls barely knew Sidney’s name, even though they had all inherited his deep brown eyes. Their mother, Susan, was everything Maude might have been: friendly and cheerful. But, without knowing it, she found herself replaying some of her grandmother’s behaviour. The twenty-first century children wondered why lavatorial humour wasn’t appreciated in their household, why toilet paper was smuggled back from the supermarket like some sort of contraband and why Susan tried every lunatic remedy at home before taking them to the doctor when they were ill.
Susan lay in bed night after night wondering if she should swallow her pride and face the shame of having the lump in her breast checked out. She could never explain, even to herself, why she feared doctors so. When she did go, it was too late, and soon Sidney and Maude’s great-grandchildren were on their own.
It didn’t say so on her death certificate in 2005, but Susan was another casualty of the First World War. That little microbe in the water bottle had set off a chain of events that had blighted lives and caused her death as surely as a bayonet or a shell. But nobody knew. After all, Sidney had been one of the lucky ones. It was a bit of an embarrassment, really. He hadn’t had a story to tell. There was no family legend to pass down the generations. Lucky Sidney had come came back from the Great War uninjured. Not a scratch.
George Layton
Readers who are acquainted with my books The Fib and Other Stories and The Swap and Other Stories will know that they centre on a young boy growing up in a northern industrial town in the 1950s. Though works of fiction, the catalyst for each story is some distant memory tapped from my own childhood.
When Michael Morpurgo asked me to contribute to this anthology of war stories I went back to my earliest memories and they were all post-war: food rationing, cod liver oil, the radio comedy ITMA (It’s That Man Again) and its star Tommy Handley, a time of austerity and hardship when a banana or an orange was a rare treat. More seriously: a time of diphtheria, rickets, infantile paralysis, doctors’ bills and malnutrition.
This is a story of post-war Britain which tells how life and lives were affected immediately after the Second World War. As with all my stories, the conflict is in the boy’s head. A self-proclaimed coward, he struggles with his demons as he grows up in a world he finds impossible to understand.
Some things never change.
THE PROMISE
‘This is the BBC Light Programme.’
‘Come on, Doreen, it’s on!’
It’s the same every Thursday night. We have to get our tea finished, clear the table, get the pots washed and put away so we can all sit round the wireless and enjoy ITMA.
‘Doreen! She does it every time, goes out to the lavatory just as it’s starting.’
Except I don’t enjoy it. I can’t understand it. I don’t know what they’re talking about.
‘Tell her to hurry up, will you, love.’
I went out the back to call my Auntie Doreen but she was already coming up the path pulling on her black skirt. She’d come straight from work.
‘He’s not on yet, is he?’
He was. I could hear the audience on the wireless cheering and clapping the man who’d just shouted, ‘It’s that man again!’
‘Just startin’, I think.’
She ran past me into the house.
‘Freda, why didn’t you call me?’
‘I did.’
I can’t understand what they get so excited about. They all come out with these stupid things like, ‘I don’t mind if I do,’ ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ ‘Tee tee eff enn.’ What’s funny about that? Don’t mean a thing to me.
‘What’s funny about that, Mum? “Tee tee eff enn”? It doesn’t even mean owt.
‘Ta Ta For Now!’
‘Ta Ta For Now!’
They both sang it at me, laughing like anything.
‘It’s a catchphrase. Now shush!’
What’s a catchphrase? Why’s it funny? Who is Tommy Handley anyway?
‘What’s a catchphrase, Mum? Why’s it funny?’
‘I’ll tell you when it’s finished.’
They waved at me to be quiet.
‘Turn it up, Doreen.’
My Auntie Doreen twiddled with the knob on the wireless. Oh, there he goes again: ‘I don’t mind if I do’, and they both laughed even louder this time and my mum started taking him off.
‘I don’t mind if I do … !’
My Auntie Doreen had to take out her hanky to wipe away the tears that were rolling down her cheeks.
‘Oh, stop it, Freda, you’re makin’ me wet myself …’ What’s he on about now, this Tommy Handley bloke? ‘Colonel Chinstrap, you’re an absolute nitwit!’ and my mum and my Auntie Doreen fell about laughing.
Nitwit. That’s what Reverend Dutton called me and Norbert the other day when we ran into him in the corridor. ‘You are a pair of clumsy nitwits, you two.’ Thank goodness his cup of tea wasn’t too hot, it could have scalded him. If it’d been Melrose we’d run in to it would have been more than nitwits, more like the cane from the headmaster … Ooh no, the note! I’d forgotten all about it. I went out into the hall to get it from my coat pocket. We’d been given it at school for our parents. I was meant to give to my mum when I got home. I went back into the kitchen. They were sitting there giggling away at Tommy Handley.
‘Eeh, he’s a tonic isn’t he, Doreen?’
The audience on the wireless were cheering and laughing.
‘I’ve got nits.’
I handed my mum the note. She grabbed it. She wasn’t giggling now.
‘What do you mean, you’ve got nits? Who said?’
‘Nit-nurse. She came to our school today.’
Next thing she was up on her feet and going through my hair.
‘Oh my God, look at this, Doreen, he’s riddled!’
‘Can I do you now, sir?’ the lady on the radio was asking Tommy Handley but my mum wasn’t listening; she was halfway to the front door, putting on her coat.
‘Get the kettle on, Doreen. I’m going down the chemist to get some stuff.’
‘At this time of night? He’ll be long closed.’
‘Well, he’ll have to open up then, won’t he? It’s an emergency. He can’t go to bed with nits.’
She’d come back with two lots of ‘stuff’. Special nit shampoo and special nit lotion.
‘One and nine this lot cost! Come on, get that shirt off.’
She’d sat me at the kitchen sink while my Auntie Doreen had got the saucepans of hot water ready. Nit shampoo smells horrib
le, like carbolic soap only worse.
‘Doreen, put another kettle on, will you. It says you have to do it twice.’
Another shampoo and then the special lotion. I’d had to sit there with it on for ages while my mum had kept going on about missing Tommy Handley.
‘It’s not his fault, Freda. He can’t help getting nits.’
Then it had started to sting, the nit lotion.
‘No, he’s most likely caught them off that Norbert Lightowler. They’re a grubby lot, that family.’
It had got worse, my head was burning.
‘I don’t like this, Mum. It’s burning me.’
‘Good, that means it’s working …’
‘Ow! Ooh! Mum, stop, please, you’re hurting me …’
The nit lotion was bad but this was worse. She was pulling this little steel comb through my hair and it hurt like anything.
‘Please, Mum, I don’t like it … please …’
If I hadn’t made her miss Tommy Handley I think she might have been a bit more gentle.
‘You couldn’t have given me that note as soon as you got back from school, could you? No, you had to wait till ITMA was on, didn’t you?’
I don’t know if it was the smelly nit shampoo or the stinging nit lotion or my mum dragging the metal comb through my hair, but I didn’t feel very well.
‘You know how much your Auntie Doreen and me look forward to it.’
I started to feel a bit dizzy.
‘He’s the bright spot in the week for me. I don’t reckon we’d have got through this war without Tommy Handley, eh, Doreen? Him and Mr Churchill.’
‘And Vera Lynn.’
‘Oh yes, and Vera Lynn.’
War Stories Page 12
