A Childs War (25 page)

The back room had been let again, this time to a Polish man who had been in the Royal Air Force and his English wife. The Polish man did little other than laugh while he talked incomprehensibly in the presence of George and Edna and his wife tried to explain what he was laughing about. All they could do was be polite and take the weekly rent in cash, hoping that the dairy manager would not find out about this six-week arrangement.

From Alex's point of view, the presence of Mr and Mrs Zartovnish gave a new dimension to life. Mr Zartovnish made model aircraft out of kits while his wife was out at work as part of the therapy suggested to help him recover from what he had suffered in the cockpit of a real one some two years before. He had no use himself for the finished products: the making was the therapy. So, by the time their six weeks were over and the Zartovnishes had departed, Alex became the glad possessor of a Short Sunderland flying boat in its white livery, two Lancaster bombers and a Mustang, though the last named was out of scale with the others. He wanted to hang them on strings from the ceiling in his room as he knew others had done, but George thought that too many pinholes in the ceiling would not endear him to his former employers. He did not allow more than one of the Lancaster bombers to be displayed.

Mr Zartovnish excited interest on other grounds besides being a maker of models. Soon after he arrived, he had all his teeth pulled out, bled for several days and then submitted his raw mouth to the trials of the dentures that were made for him. George and Edna had both been through this process: in George's case because his teeth had decayed through being soft and in Edna's because of a popular scare supported by some unscrupulous dentists in the nineteen-twenties that she could neither spell nor pronounce. Alex's parents therefore had less sympathy than he did with their Polish guest's suffering. Alex's teeth had recently fallen out and grown again, so he did not really understand why there were so many dentures about, but neither of his parents seemed to want to answer many of his questions about these personal matters and he did not pursue the problem. Alex talked to Mrs Zartovnish about her husband's distress, which endeared him to her. This was how he came to be the recipient of the models, or they would have all gone elsewhere if they had survived at all.

From Mrs Zartovnish Alex also heard what had happened to bring her husband to England. His two brothers had been killed in the German invasion of their country, and the country house they owned had been destroyed when tanks went through the estate that went with it. He himself had escaped with others who had previously taken flying lessons and offered themselves to the RAF to fight a mutual enemy. He had narrowly avoided death in his fighter when bullets had gone right through its fuselage, wounding him in both his legs and making him unfit to fly any more. So he was invalided out.

“Just like my Dad from the Navy!” Alex put in.

Andrzej and Heather had met in the hospital where she was a physiotherapist and they had been married six months. Money was short, so they could not afford a house of their own and were going the rounds of available rented rooms for which Heather's salary paid.

When he felt he was confident enough with his new teeth to enter what might be called society again, Mr Zartovnish made a large model Spitfire, which he intended to fly. It was two feet long with a wingspan of twenty-one inches, made with a balsa frame covered in doped paper and given the livery of his own Polish 303 Squadron. Much time was spent by Alex in winding the propeller round in order to twist the gigantic rubber band that was intended to drive this beast through the air. Beast was its maker's word, not Alex's: Alex had great respect for it.

With Edna's agreement, Mr and Mrs Zartovnish and Alex took the model down to the rec. They carefully noted which way the wind was blowing and aligned the model accordingly. It was held up at stretched arms' length, with the propeller carefully restrained between Mr Zartovnish's thumb and forefinger. When he let go of the model, pushing it upwards and downwind, the propeller turned violently for about ten seconds and then the whole thing fell to the ground and the wings burst off the fuselage. Mrs Zartovnish gave Alex a censored translation of what her husband said. Alex heard for himself that the opinion expressed was loud and forthright. The translator led Alex to believe that he had said that it had not really behaved like a Spitfire after all, but something manufactured for the Luftwaffe by a firm whose name sounded very much like what Alex had heard said by both his parents in moments of extreme pressure. Since he had no further use for the broken model, Mr Zartovnish took it to the dustbins behind the pavilion and left it for anyone to take who wanted it. During the whole performance, the new teeth stood up very well to expletives in the Polish language alternating with the speaker's characteristic outbursts of laughter. The name Fokker is not easy to pronounce with a new set of full dentures.

The other enthusiasm that Mr Zartovnish had was for fishing. From the people he had met and told through his wife as interlocutor about the enjoyment he used to have beside his native lakes and rivers, he had access to several prime stretches of water in the neighbourhood and on one occasion he brought home a live rudd, saying that since George and Edna had no refrigerator, the fish must be kept alive in a bath full of water until such time as it was needed for the table. Edna had been prevailed upon to provide the zinc bath. The fish flopped about in the bath for several days in their bedroom until Mrs Zartovnish facilitated its escape into Osney lock while her husband was asleep. She reported, as he laughed and snorted, that he was relieved that this had happened because he had felt sorry for the poor thing himself.

When the couple left, Alex missed them for a long time and talked about them to anyone who would listen. Since there was none such at home, he regaled his friends at school with these tales, until the audience diminished only to Isabel Shergold, who was a captive audience by virtue of still having to share a desk with Alex and a very polite person. How much he missed this couple came home to Alex himself in an incident that happened a month or so after they had gone.

Alex had not completely recovered from his accident. There were days when Edna kept him home from school to rest, making arrangements to stay away from the factory to look after him. This was how the model flying boat was lost, to his great consternation. There was a draw-leaf table in front of the window in the front room. If you stood on it, Alex found, you could see over the hedge that had been allowed to grow up to replace the railings. Edna came in from going over to the shop and told Alex to climb up on the table to see a long low-loading lorry go by with an aeroplane wing on it. He got out of his chair and excitedly clambered on the table to watch this wonder go by. He jumped with excitement and then saw with sadness that he had broken the wing of the model flying boat with his foot and sat down to cry about it.

This made Edna inexplicably angry and she shouted at him.

“It's not my fault you stepped out into the road and it's not my fault you broke this sea-plane, or whatever it is. Mr Zartovnish isn't here any longer to mend it for you, so it can go into the rubbish!”

She took up the broken but beloved model and went to throw it in the dustbin in the garden.

The rest of the day was passed in mutual resentful antagonism by Alex and Edna. Only when George came home was it explained to him why she had behaved like that. Yesterday, the owners of the dairy had given George notice to get out of the house. It was generous, open-ended notice, but it was final. This had taken away all Edna's new-found confidence and her depression focused on Alex as it had four years ago when he had split his chin. George's determination to be strong to give her strength had also taken a severe knock.

“We're up against it, girl. But,” he added through his clenched teeth, “we've come through so far.”

Edna rescued the flying boat before the contents of the dustbin could be put out for collection. George glued it together again but because he did not have the wherewithal to repaint it, it had lost its pristine glory and besides, it now reminded Alex of what had become a dreadful day.

George wanted to strengthen Alex's leg without having to have days at home, which obviously frustrated Edna who spent a long time after their child had gone upstairs to bed complaining to him. He decided that the making of what he sent to the Admiralty in the greased paper packages could be put off for a couple of evenings. He used the resulting free time in the shed to convert a bicycle frame he had acquired as a spare for the one he and Alex used on the country outings into a scooter for him. He cut the bicycle frame in pieces with a hacksaw to be converted into the base, upright and handlebars and completed the design with a wooden footboard and metal wheels taken from a discarded bottle trolley in the dairy, upon which he fitted tyres ingeniously fashioned from lengths of hosepipe.

Strict instructions were issued by George on the geographical range for Alex's use of this machine:

“Keep on the pavements. Don't go on the main road or Henry Road round the corner. When you are in the rec go only on the paths. Stop whenever other users of the pavement or path are going by you so as not to bump into them.”

Edna had been told not to interfere in these arrangements, though her objections had not been easily overcome.

Going out on the scooter in the late afternoon after school and at times over the weekend was fun for the solitary Alex. Using it helped to strengthen his injured leg as his father intended. He did fall off once, but fortunately he was a good way into the recreation ground and there was nobody about to see what happened or the tears that followed. There was only one other scooter left over from pre-war in the neighbourhood and that now belonged to a girl two years younger than he was and was obviously for a little kid, so Alex was justly proud of what his father had given him: the gift amounted to one of independence such as he had never had before.

Alex was able to follow the sound of cheerful voices at the river one day and to find that he was looking at several older boys and two older girls who were swimming in the wide stream that was the boundary of the rec, taking turns to swing into a deep stretch of water by means of a rope hung over and secured to a safe branch of a tree. When one of the boys caught him watching with interest what happened to her dress when one of the girls took her turn at getting wet through, facing him as she swung back to the bank, Alex was shooed off very forcefully. Nevertheless, having seen enough to satisfy curiosity and feed his prurient imagination for quite a time, he haunted the spot for several hours of several warm days afterwards in hope of a repetition of the fascinating show.

Soon news of D Day was on everyone's lips. Alex went several times in June and July to the cinema with his parents, hoping that no little houses would be burnt in the features they were going to see. However, he saw newsreel pictures of plenty of houses of all sizes burnt out after the allied landings and the liberation of villages near Caen and the city itself. George was hard pressed to give Alex a biography of General de Gaulle when he had been received with a great welcome at Bayeux, but told him all about the tapestry instead. He did understand the Mulberry Harbour and the pipeline called PLUTO, when they were reported at the cinema and on the wireless. Explanations were willingly given and received with great interest.

Edna considered that she had been incautious about leaving one particular week's copy of Picture Post lying about before having looked at it herself. She was settling down to have one of her snoozes in the living room with Alex on a Saturday afternoon. He picked up the magazine and read the captions under pictures of young French women having their heads shaved in retribution for having slept with German soldiers during the occupation. Then he turned over to see a full page photograph of another woman with no clothes on at all, walking away through a jeering crowd. They had left her with her high-heeled shoes and she was walking upright, not shielding herself from anyone's gaze. She had far more dignity than any of her detractors. He showed it to Edna, whose reaction he did not understand.

“I don't want you looking at pictures like that,” she said. “They will fill your mind with filthy thoughts and that will lead to a great deal of trouble.”

“But why was sleeping with a German soldier so bad as to make the people so angry that they did that to her?”

“It's no business of yours, Alex. I shall be careful where I put the book in future and you're not to look at it without asking me if you can.”

With that she abandoned her five minutes as she called it -though it was usually more than half an hour in the afternoon at weekends - and took the magazine away to her bedroom where he could not get at it. When she came down, she thought that some kind of explanation was necessary. It was not the one that Alex expected:

“Picture Post is a book for grown-ups, not for seven-year-olds. Dad and I read it because of the news about the war. Sometimes the pictures in there are very frightening and I don't want you upset by seeing them. What is going on in France is terrible and it's best that you listen to the news on the wireless or to what Dad tells you.”

“But I saw several of the pictures in Picture Post in the newsreel at the cinema last time we went. Some of them were the same!”

“Don't start an argument now. Just do as you are told. I'll tell Dad what I have said to you, so don't go asking him if you can look at it, because he will say no as well.”

Alex wondered why his mother's face had gone so red and why she kept fanning herself although the room was shady and cool. Then he went back to the comic book he was halfway through, but still kept seeing the image of the naked woman walking away with her head held high. He decided it was one of the most absorbing pictures he had ever seen: more intriguing than what the wet dress revealed of the girl at the river in the rec who was, of course, a lot younger than this woman. In addition, the boys and girls there had been happily enjoying what they had been doing, reserving their displeasure for himself as an intruder, while Alex recorded in his memory the ugly hatred shown on the faces of the people jeering at the French woman and was angry with them on her behalf, wishing he could have been there to act in her defence. He could not understand why there was no one to stand up for her: whenever things became violent in the school playground and someone was victimized, there was usually someone who would stand up against the bullies.