A Childs War (2 page)

The final snapshot in the little boy's memory of his evacuation from the London blitz was of his mother rummaging in her handbag for the wherewithal to pay the driver, who thanked her, touching the peak of his cap in a salute to her before pocketing the money. Alex watched as he went forward on the wrong side of the road before turning round in a side street and roaring off home as fast as he could before the blackout could make unaccustomed rural travel really difficult.

Hearing the taxi stop outside, Joyce Patterson opened the door and greeted her friend warmly. The two women were in total contrast to each other in looks. Joyce was tall with greying, wavy hair, a clear complexion and a neat dress for the afternoon. Edna appeared crumpled and defeated, with her face powdered and her lipstick wearing thin after nervous movements of her mouth all the way in the taxi. She evaded the embarrassing embrace as soon as she could and, picking up Alex to be kissed in turn, followed Joyce who was carrying their luggage into the house. Edna put Alex down as they stood in the hall.

“Here is the reason we are imposing ourselves on you for a week or so until he's better,” she said in a rather mournful voice.

“He does look as though he's been in the wars, doesn't he?” remarked Joyce, looking down at the child's swollen, discoloured chin with its large plaster covering the wound.

“Well, we all have had six whole nights in a row in the shelter – and that followed a fortnight of having to go down to it in the middle of the night when those terrible air-raid sirens began their wailing sound. They were enough to wake the dead, let alone the sleeping,” Joyce laughed.

“George set up a place under the stairs for us,” Edna went on, “for when he was on nights at the store, but luckily he was on days this week so he was able to carry Alex down the garden while he was still asleep.”

“What you need is a real rest then, Edna, by the sound of it. Come on; don't stand about in the hallway. You take your hat and coat off and go upstairs. The room you are in is the first on the right upstairs. There's a double bed and a single for this little chap. Leave the push-chair there by the hall stand, and go and put your case away while I make the tea. I've already put the kettle on; it's just about to boil so it'll be ready in a second.”

Alex watched his mother go up the stairs and sat on the bottom one to wait for whatever happened next. Talk of the shelter in the garden reminded him of the time when he had watched George and some of his neighbours excavate and cover it and then go on and help the rest of the neighbours in their turn. The government, George told him, supplied the two curved walls made out of corrugated iron and the rails they were bolted to. He also told him that the government minister responsible for supplying two and a quarter million shelters was called Anderson, so they were all known thereafter as Anderson shelters.

George was looking forward to a time when, if he and his family survived, he would be able to teach things to his boy with higher hopes of him understanding all he said. He would have been pleased if he knew that Alex was remembering it all now, as he waited in a daze for Edna to finish tidying herself up. Alex remembered that a lot of shovelling of earth and digging up of earth had to be done because the walls had to be put up over a pit three feet deep and the completed shelter had then to be covered with soil to a depth of eighteen inches. By the time the bombs started to fall there was many a marrow coming to full size on the top of the shelters along Chestnut Road. Most of the residents had bought their shelters a year before, since they earned rather more than would qualify them for free ones. They all agreed that it was probably ten pounds well spent, since a family of six could be kept safe from the blast that might take away the houses, provided that the shelter did not receive a direct hit itself. They all felt sorry for the people who lived down near the docks or in central London without gardens in which to build the shelters. At least in the western suburbs they were consoled by the idea that if death came to them, it would come to family groups huddling together and not to a communal shelter full of people who would be strangers to each other.

When Edna came down again, she was very distressed to find a wet patch underneath Alex on the stair carpet, though Joyce did not seem to mind at all and produced a bucket of water and a cloth to deal with it. He was none too gently dragged upstairs for a wash and some hastily found clean clothes. Before she married George, Edna had worked for a short time as a nurse in the children's ward of an infectious diseases hospital. She knew how to be efficient, and her son now felt the full force of that efficiency.

When she rang him at work, George knew that Edna was under more strain than she usually was. He had accepted years ago that she would never turn into a gentle and imperturbable woman, and recognized his own tendency towards anxiety well enough. So while he agreed that she should visit their close friends in Oxford on account of her tense state, underneath he was glad of the chance to have a proper reason for getting her to a safe place without her seeming to have run away, or appearing to be trying to escape himself at the weekends.

At the time they had married in 1923 he had been twenty-two and an Engine Room Artificer in the Royal Navy, handsome in his fore-and-aft uniform and his cap worn at a rakish angle in the style of Admiral Beatty. She was twenty-one, with appealing brown eyes and hair like the feathers of a raven. Nothing wrong with all that, though his parents thought there was, and her own mother had been dead four years or she might have made some remark about repenting at leisure. Edna's father had become dispirited since his bereavement and expected his middle daughter to look after his youngest one, a responsibility to which she had not taken very kindly. Edna was not very fond of the idea of children nor, indeed, of their reality in spite of her job looking after some of them. George was a kind man, and had felt sorry for the attractive children's nurse he met at a dance. He was willing to outface his mother and father when she accepted his proposal of marriage. He offended them even more by arranging his wedding by special licence in a short period of leave when he was meant to have been initiated to a lodge of freemasons during his father's year as its worshipful master. His father, who was also in the Navy, had high hopes for his elder son, which did not include an early and probably improvident marriage to a girl who had no more in her stocking than her obviously fetching leg. David Ryland was more surprised than pleased when his daughter-in-law did not give birth to a child during the next nine months nor for that matter for the next thirteen years. By the end of that time hope of having grandchildren had overridden his earlier misgivings about his son's marriage. Nevertheless, the doubts of George's mother still lingered and erupted into unpleasant scenes from time to time when she and Edna met, which did not happen very often.

George and Edna themselves had become used to their lack of diminutive dependants and forgot the risk involved in their contentment with each other one barmy night towards the end of 1935. Alex was born after a difficult pregnancy and a horribly long time in labour, which precluded the possibility of other children, as Edna would tell anyone who would listen for many years to come. Although George was thrilled to have his son and heir, as he incessantly called him to his friends, Edna found the joys of motherhood overrated. She was ashamed to remember the occasion, before the war started, over eighteen months ago, when Alex had not only been singing while she wanted to sleep after lunch on a fairly cold day, but had also been playing with his wooden bricks, causing clicking sounds. She had threatened to throw his bricks on the fire if he continued. He did not stop and being a woman of her word, she threw three of the offending bricks into the flames. This neither facilitated her sleeping process nor provided the hoped for silence from her son. Time had to be spent in quenching his rage as his bricks burned in the grate, despite her remorseful attempts to rake them out of the fire. As Edna saw things, in her generation, parents were not required to apologise to their children - so she had not done so.

When the little so-and-so fell over and split his chin, something gave way in her. Relations had been strained between them for some time because he would still sing his tuneless songs while he played after lunch at the side of her chair when she wanted to have her five minutes' sleep and in recent days her internal clock had failed after all the sleepless nights caused by the air raids. She considered that even Tommy Handley could not have seen the funny side of what she was going through. George considered that she laughed more loudly than was justified by his ‘It's That Man Again' programme on the wireless because of a desperate need to be cheerful when she was far from being so. Historians say that revolutions are caused by the agitation of those who have something to lose. George saw the corollary of that argument. Having worked hard, after many years of disappointment, he had become a conformist in order to keep what he had eventually gained. He had been born in 1900. In July 1917, after being embarrassed for several months by girls in the street looking at his tall, rugby-playing frame and wondering why he was still a civilian, George had volunteered for the Navy as he had long intended to do in any case. He was glad to become what was called a ‘boy tiffy' at H.M.S. Fisgard in Portsmouth because of his dread of ever being placed in the special care of his father who had a responsible post at the Naval Detention Barracks in Chatham. He had gained his promotions in the engine room of a destroyer and then of a light cruiser. He suffered a fall on board ship, which resulted in a hernia. This was confirmed in medical language as a right inguinal bubonocele on account of which he was granted a hurt certificate in April 1927. It was graciously conceded on the document that he was sober at the time. However, George refused to submit to surgery. He was transferred to a shore establishment where he was discovered to be in need of glasses for his recently developed short sight, which he discovered when he was drilling a party of sailors who found it difficult to accept his order to march straight through a wall. The final entry on his certificate of service in the Royal Navy said that his character was very good and his ability as an Engine Room Artificer Third Class was superior. He was then invalided out of the service with a gratuity in the summer of 1928.

In eleven years he had learnt pretty well all there was to know about turbines so, after months and years of uncertainty, he had landed an extremely good job as Chief Maintenance Engineer in the spacious basements beneath a prestigious department store very near to Knightsbridge underground station. On the strength of this, he had taken out a mortgage in 1938 and bought a house in the tree-lined road in Raynes Park, where he hoped to settle for the rest of his life to grow roses, just as his father did not very far from Chatham in the years after completing his own pensionable service.

When the second war, as his generation called it, began George did not have a great deal of regret about not being called back to the Navy: a Chief Petty Officer wearing a surgical truss might be a liability in an engine room. As the conflict went on he would find his engineering skills of great value to the war effort, and his loyalty to King and country was never in question. In personal terms, the threatened destruction of life and property in the blitz was about the worst thing that could happen: George had a great deal to lose. He had not wanted to put his wife and son at risk and so he secretly congratulated Edna upon finding a way of keeping herself and the boy safe for a while as the guest of his friend Graham Patterson. When the bombing had finished, all being well, they would come home again.

Graham was older than George, who had become a close friend as well as a colleague at the department store until, at the end of what people later called the phoney war in order that his wife and twelve-year-old only son should be safe, he left to take an engineer's job at a dairy in Oxford. This carried with it a fairly good sized tied house in a short terrace in Botley Road close by. What convinced him that this was a sensible course to take had been a newspaper article that assured him that Hitler would never order the bombing of Oxford because he wanted it for the training of British Nazis after a putative successful invasion. Graham was protective of his own enough to be spurred into action by the first idea, while his patriotism denied the possibility of the latter. He had let his house in Motspur Park on an open-ended basis, intending to return there when Britannia ruled the waves and the air space again.

His friendship with George was initiated by the fact that he had also served in the Navy, though he and George had never been shipmates. His wife Joyce was an outgoing person, who was more than willing to help someone through a difficult patch in their life. A woman who looked as out of sorts as Edna did and a little lad who was so distressed as to forget his toilet training were fit objects for her genuine compassion. Alex was glad of this, though his mother, now that she had arrived where she had chosen to be, resented having to put herself under someone else's control.

Alex went to sleep in a big armchair and had disturbing dreams. There had been a great deal to feed such dreams lately. The nightmare he remembered was about a London tram on fire after being bombed during an air-raid in a city street. They had trolley buses where he lived, but he had heard George telling Edna about a seeing a tram that had been hit by a bomb as he made his way along to the station from work one night. In the dream people could be seen upstairs and downstairs inside the tram, pushing to get out and having to run through flames that seemed to rise from the street itself. Like many dreams, it recurred with variations while the boy slept. After watching him shake his head with his eyes shut and hearing his little noises of distress for about ten minutes, Edna woke him up, put him beside her on the settee and cuddled him while he fell asleep to dream again. This time he was standing at night in the back garden in Raynes Park, waiting for George to open the Anderson shelter while there were noises in the sky, which Edna told him were fireworks going off, though he could not remember ever having seen real ones (This was the same idiom as she would use many years later to try to reassure a grandchild that thunder was caused by someone moving grand pianos in the sky). One of the fireworks appeared behind a large shadow and was followed by a great explosion a few streets away. Neighbours, who were also in their gardens on their way to their shelters, were asking anxiously of each other: “Ours or theirs?” or “That must have come down over Merton way!” - words which may as well have been said in Mandarin for all the sense they made to Alex both at the time and when his mind was sending them up again to disturb his traumatized sleep as a result of his painful chin. He heard the agonizingly mournful wailing sound of the air-raid siren in the final dream before he woke up and when he did, he found it metamorphosed into his mother's voice as she tried to soothe him by singing to him: