A Childs War (15 page)

The curtains were the ones that had been there before. The old divan was still his bed and its green checked cover was the same, but there was a chest of drawers of his own with his clothes in it and his cupboard from downstairs was not the only place where he could stow his gear - a term he had learned early from his father.

When he went downstairs again the changed appearance of the living room gave him something of a shock. Some of the furniture he had not seen since they had left the old house was there: the sideboard, the extending table, the dining chairs, and the old Cossor wireless, which George had persuaded to work again. Edna's Singer hand sewing machine stood under the window on the tea trolley with its wooden cover on: Alex recognized it from the many times he had crawled round it a long time ago on the floor in a corner where it was kept while not being used. The mirror over the mantelpiece had survived intact, which Edna never ceased to marvel at:

“So we might get some good luck after all,” was her repeated comment about it for a week or two.

In the front room Joyce's velvet curtains remained; so did the sofa and armchairs. The pictures from the living room had been brought into it, resting on the back of the sofa (always called the settee) waiting for George to put them on the wall after work. The Pattersons had left the carpet with its detached warps and woofs behind as additional reminders that there was a war on.

Alex went into the garden. The pie dish was still there but he had no use for it now. What caught his eye was that the shed door did not have its accustomed padlock in place. He tentatively reached for the doorknob, turned it and pushed open the door to see by the light of the sun through the little window something that really made it like home for him: George's old sea chest, with its black and white paint and brass handles, which were sometimes polished in times past, and George's name painted on the top. He ran his hands along the front of it and knew that this was a token of safety from the old house that had been restored to him.

Edna did not come to find him and he was sitting in the shed on a chair that had no back with his hand still resting on the black and white painted surface of the chest when George came into the garden just after six o'clock. George saw that the shed was open and came in too.

“Hullo,” he said. “Found something you like there, eh?”

“I'm glad you've still got this, Dad.”

“So am I - and the tools in it too. I'm glad we decided to keep it in the Anderson shelter last year. After tea we'll come out again and you can hold things ready while I screw the vice back in its place on the corner of the chest. This is a bigger shed than the one we had at home. I'd better not leave it unlocked, though, had I, or you'll be pinching all sorts of things - like your fingers!”

Alex shook his head in amused denial and they went in to find that Edna had tea ready for them on the living room table. The reason that she had not come looking for Alex was that she had made an apple pie as something special for their first evening as a family on their own together for a very long time.

“I hope you haven't burnt the custard,” said George, and Edna went to brain him with a plate, thought better of it, and hugged him as he stood at the head of the table with Alex holding them together as near to their waists as he could reach.

Ever since Edna and Alex had been in the house, Alex had noticed that on certain days during the week a number of cattle went past the garden gate.

“Where are they going, those cows?” he once asked her.

“It's a dairy. They are going to be milked,” was Edna's first answer, thinking on her feet. She had then hastily asked Joyce, who also asked Graham, to corroborate this statement of hers if ever Alex asked them where the cattle were going. She had sworn George to secrecy on the matter as well.

Like many of his generation, Alex had been a Cow & Gate baby and although he was no longer using the product had been aware of a good number of the tins it came in put to other uses in the old house before they came here. He had made the connection between cows and milk for himself and so was able to accept his mother's subterfuge for a surprisingly long time. When he had gone to school, it was easier for the pretence to be maintained, of course, because he no longer saw the beasts during term time. Although Alex was loth to provoke Edna's wrath, having done that with too great a frequency lately, the question of where the cattle were going arose once more in his mind now that it was summer again.

With the school holidays beginning, he spent a good deal of time in the garden. He would have liked to have spent some of that time in the shed, but George had restored the padlock and told him that he could only go into it when he was there too. There was also a new cupboard installed in it that was also locked and never opened unless George was there by himself. Whenever Alex asked George what the cupboard contained he was always given a jocular but firm refusal to answer truthfully. It was a very strongly built cupboard and he was sure it did not come from the shed that used to house the sea chest. Alex was more interested in the cupboard than the cows, but since no answer to the mystery about the former was given his mind returned to the unresolved difficulty about the latter. He had never seen the cows going back again after milking and besides, no cows were to be seen in any field close by. He had been on enough walks with either or both his parents to be sure of that.

The mystery soon solved itself, however. Now that George and Edna were under the same roof outside his working hours, she no longer felt any need to traipse around aimlessly with Alex in tow and this gave him more living space. It was raining a few days after his last ponderings upon this bovine conundrum and Alex was on his own in the living room drawing a battle scene. He was sitting at the small table under the window that looked out into the narrow passage between the back door and the brick wall dividing their garden from Mrs White's.

There was a sudden ferocious noise outside and at the same time the light changed from that of a sombre day to twilight. Alex looked up to see one of the cattle with its fore hooves on the top of the window frame and slobber from its mouth gathering on the window panes. He heard the terrified noises the poor beast was making. Alex expected the window to give way, threw aside his drawing, and rushed to the kitchen, where Edna looked as if she was doing her best to swallow the bottom of her apron which she had shoved in her mouth to stifle the worst of the piercing scream which was issuing from deep inside her. A man with a stick appeared behind the animal, senselessly hitting it hard and making its misery worse. Edna snatched Alex into the passage and slammed the door behind her. They made their way together up to his bedroom from which, since it was above the living room, they could see what was happening.

By the time they were there, other men had come into the garden and were throwing ropes to catch the animal's horns. With one man on either side of it, the beast was pulled down and led backwards until it was past the lavatory door where they could turn it round and take it away. Just as they had gone, George came running into the garden; he looked up to see his wife and child unharmed in the window and smiled with relief as he stopped and tried to recover his breath.

Edna and Alex went downstairs as he came into the kitchen.

“Thank God you're both all right,” he said at once, still gasping, “Saw the bullocks coming in and then the commotion round our gate, so thought I'd better come over and see what was up! I must sit down.”

And he did so, panting, at the kitchen table while Edna and Alex worried about him in their turn.

“Why was the cow so frightened of going to be milked, Dad?” Alex asked after the wheezing had become less acute. George looked at Edna, and Edna looked at George.

“Well? Why?”

“You might find this difficult to take in, boy but, well, it was not a cow, as a matter of fact, and it was not going to be milked.”

“What was it going past for, then?”

“It was going to the slaughterhouse.”

Edna looked away, as if to let George know he was on his own now.

“Slaughter is killing isn't it?”

“Yes, that's right.”

“So they were going to kill it . . . and the others with it?”

“That's right.”

“If it wasn't a cow, what was it?”

“A bullock: in this case a well-grown one.”

“I don't know what a bullock is.”

George looked desperately at Edna and she looked up at him trying not to smile at his predicament.

“A bullock is a young male, and a cow is female.”

“So that's why it had no udders!” Alex burst out as a subsidiary question had been answered for him.

Edna's face was like a beetroot now, largely because of this taboo topic being raised in this way, but at the same time at amusement caused by the expression on George's face when he heard what Alex said. However, the speech that had come into George's mind under such provocation could not be denied emergence into the daylight, although its redundancy was plain to him even before he began to speak.

“Look,” he said. “If we were cattle on a farm, then I would be a bullock, well, no, a bull, that's a full grown bullock; your mother would be a cow, and you would be a calf . . .”

The meretricious associations of the word “cow” were all too much for Edna and she spluttered while George dried up. She had just been frightened to death, as she put it, and now that they were all three safe her fear burst out in hysterical laughter which went on and on while neither her husband nor her son could think of anything to do to stop it. It was halted in the end by the manager of the slaughterhouse appearing at the door. He knocked apprehensively and when he saw they were sitting there opened the door for himself, wiped his feet and came in.

“I came to see if everything was all right, George. You're all safe, I hope.”

“Yes, we'll live, Ben. I trust this sort of thing doesn't happen too often, though.”

“It's never happened before, to my knowledge. He was a big beast, that one, larger than we usually have, and poor old Jim just didn't know what to do except hit it with a stick. Your ferns look a mess, don't they, and I'll see the painter comes over to put the window frame right. How it managed not to break the glass I'll never know!”

“Righto, then,” replied George, “Thanks for coming round. I suppose I'd better be getting back myself. Bottling starts in a minute or two and I better be there in case the machine seizes up.”

The embarrassed slaughterer left and George kissed Edna and patted Alex's shoulder.

“See you at dinner time,” they all said at once.

Alex found his drawing book and carried on where he had left off.

Later in the day it stopped raining. George had been home to eat and gone back to work and when it was just after three o'clock Edna washed Alex's face and took him with her to the recreation ground, which all the locals called simply “the rec” for a concert to be given by an army band. They went out of the back gate, noticing that one of the bullock's horns had raked across it, through part of the cobbled yard between the house and the dairy and out into Henry Road, which had more of the dairy on the right and houses similar to their own on the other side. It was a short street and it ended in at the rec gates, through which they went. They occupied two of the chairs that had been arranged upstairs in the pavilion that overlooked the sports ground.

The sky was full of ominous dark clouds but the members of the band dutifully marched on in their khaki battle dress, broke ranks and took their places on the improvised bandstand. The bandmaster took his station, turned to the audience and saluted before he began the medley of songs from the shows that had been rehearsed and often played at other venues. Edna sang along with some of the tunes, as did several of the audience, mostly mothers and grandmothers with young children on holiday from school.

As the performance was woven together out of its component tunes, the clouds became lower and, from the height of the pavilion, Alex watched this meteorological phenomenon with great interest: the clouds became more dense and firm in their outline until lightning split the sky, thunder took over from the band's percussion section and rain suddenly emptied itself all over the bandstand canopy and into the balconies from which the audience was watching. The balconies soon emptied as the women and children made their way into the rooms of the pavilion from where they could still see whatever might be going on. The bandmaster kept conducting until he realized that no one could hear above the noise of the downpour and its accompaniment of thunder. Then he put his baton under his arm and waved a dismissal to the musicians who, picking up instruments and sheet music, ran headlong to the pavilion ground floor, with their uniforms taking on a blackish appearance as they were soaked in an instant.

“What a shame,” said Edna. “I was enjoying that.”

“So was I,” said Alex. “The clouds were wonderful, weren't they?”

“The clouds? No! The music.”

“I was watching the clouds . . . and the lightning!” And here Alex made his imitation of a thunderclap. Although some of the women standing there were amused, it made Edna profoundly uncomfortable. The discomfort was mollified when the bandmaster came upstairs to apologise for the swift curtailment of his programme.

“I am so sorry, ladies,” he said. “But you will agree that all this is beyond anyone's control.”

He then bowed in an old-fashioned way and smartly left.

The storm passed and the audience dispersed. At home (as it now certainly was) Edna went to get tea ready and Alex went upstairs to look at his books. He found the old one with the trees, which was still a favourite of his, and lay down on the bed to leaf through it. That amused him: he had only just heard of leafing through a book, but not all books were concerned with trees, were they? He must remember that to tell George at tea.