A Childs War (30 page)

When Alex woke briefly at Didcot, he saw that his father was holding a handkerchief to his eyes and was glad for his sake that they were the only ones in the compartment now. He did not know about the thousands of displaced persons wandering about in central Europe, so he could be excused for wondering why his parents had to be so unhappy when everyone else was so glad that the war in Europe was over.

He thought it best not to show George or Edna that he was awake and resolutely kept still with his eyes shut. He heard George say to Edna,

“I wish you hadn't said those things to Hetty last night.”

“I wasn't going to put up with her looking down on us like that.”

“But she only said she was enjoying her new life and intended to keep her place at the hotel now the war is over.”

“It was the way she said it, George, as if to pooh-pooh whatever we might be thinking of doing. She knows we're in such a fix over not being able to go back to our old life and just sat there smug, counting her own blessings and not caring a tinker's cuss about us.”

“But I wish you hadn't called her a selfish bitch with no concern for her own flesh and blood. That's what got Geoff's goat and the reason for his being angry and telling us to be gone by the time they got up in the morning.”

“If that's the way he's going to talk to me after all I did for Hetty when she was a girl and poor old Mum had died, then I'm glad to see the back of him, and her too, with her stuck up la-di-dah ways. Who does she think she is?”

“Well,” replied George, “There's nothing we can do about it now. We can't go back and say we're sorry. It's such a pity, though.”

“Sorry! Say sorry! I thought you would back me up George, but you didn't. You just let him say that and bundled me into the bedroom. Did you see the look on his face as we went? I don't care if we never see either of them again. They made it quite obvious they didn't want to see us!”

Alex heard Edna start to cry and then to sob. He opened his eyes and pretended to be waking up.

“Is it far to Oxford now?” he asked, to cover his pretence.

Edna stifled her crying, holding her handkerchief over her nose and mouth, and announced, “I must go along to the toilet,” and left the compartment.

“Mum's upset,” George said to Alex.

“You look a bit unhappy, too,” his son replied.

“We'll be there soon,” was all George could think of to say.

As the train was slowing down to come into the station, Edna pushed the sliding door back and came in to retrieve her small case from the luggage rack. George stood up next to her to grapple with the big one with one hand while he put his free arm round Edna's waist. Alex saw her flinch and move aside. So George got the case down with both hands, and looked grim as he slid the compartment door open again and the three of them left the train and stepped down to the platform without offering assistance to one another.

Peace in Europe had come, but the war was leaving scars hitherto unnoticed while the adrenalin was still needed. Now these scars were seen and fingered as their causes were sought. Hopes of erasing them were probably vain. All three Rylands went to bed unhappy in the house in Botley Road that night and each one was closed off from any consolation that could be offered by either of the other two.

A certain normalization began which affected what the shops could sell. Haines's shop over the road was suddenly selling bananas. Edna saw people on a Saturday morning leaving the shop impatiently tearing the skins off the ones they had bought, not wanting to delay the rediscovery of the lost taste until they reached their homes. She called Alex down from his room where he was putting his shoes on and, still wearing her pinafore despite her own criteria of respectability, took him over the road so that he should have a banana to taste before they were all sold out. She bought a bunch of six: two each, she thought, and kept them in the brown paper bag until they were indoors. She took one out of the bag, made Alex sit at the kitchen table and solemnly taught him how to peel it. She said,

“Go on then, have a bite.”

Alex did, and the taste was fantastic to him. It was something he remembered, but was yet fresh to him. He must have tasted a banana before the dangers of the War in the Atlantic prevented their dispatch from the Caribbean, but the experience had been submerged in all that had happened since. He was so thrilled with this until now forbidden fruit that he agreed to save up the other one until dinnertime. No subsequent banana ever tasted as good as that one.

A later experience was not so happy. Haines's shop was also the origin of it. Ice cream was for sale there. Edna was anxious to produce some more happiness and had taken Alex to buy a cornet for him. Outside the shop, before they crossed the road to come back, she put it in his hand but did not tell him how to deal with it. He turned it upside down and was left with the empty cornet, feeling foolish and angry. Edna felt the same and exploded into her repertoire of disappointed words of rebuke. Alex tried to repair the damage he had caused by cramming the cornet into his mouth and saying how nice it was, but the scoop of ice cream in the gutter, which you could see from the front room window, remained for several hours. The rediscovery of that taste had to wait for several weeks since, as Mr Haines explained to Edna next day when she tried to make up for her own shortcomings, that delivery was a one-off and there would not be any more for some time.

Then there were the kites. Plenty of children in the books that Alex read had them and the illustrations of kite-flying were always cheerful. Word went round at school one afternoon that the stationer's shop further up Botley Road was selling them. Alex hurried home to ask Edna if she would buy him one, but she had not come home yet. He stood at the front door, hoping her return would not be delayed for very long. He saw boys and girls who lived nearby coming back with kites they had bought: gorgeous paper things in primary colours. Edna did not yet appear. Five or six more kites passed Alex in the hands of their delighted purchasers. Still no Edna. Then a bus stopped opposite and Edna emerged from behind it with her shopping bag. Alex did not dare to run across the road to meet her, but jumped about excitedly on the pavement as she approached him and he said,

“Mum, they've got kites at Williams's! Can I have one?”

Edna was still being conciliatory after the ice cream anger and replied, “Of course you can, but let me put this heavy bag indoors first.”

When that had been done, she strode off like King Wenceslas, followed by Alex as her page, only to find Peter Simmonds from Alex's class and his mother going off with the last one.

Edna and Alex were as disappointed as each other. They walked back to the house hand in hand for once. Even so Edna, whose internal misery at the prospect of living in George's mother's house conditioned everything she did now, could not resist telling him not to scuff his sandals on the pavement as he walked along.

There must be an article in a sociologist's file on the significance of Saturday afternoons in the development of family relationships. Alex was on his own at the table in the kitchen doing one of his drawings. George and Edna were in the front room dozing after a good meal, courtesy of the officers' mess at Wheatley. The washing up was stacked in the scullery sink to be done later. Someone knocked on the back door. A man and a woman stood outside. Alex opened the door, and the man asked to see George.

“Tell him it's Mr Robertson wants to see him.”

Alex had heard of Mr Robertson and now knew what a Glasgow accent was.

Two or three days before, George had come home from Wheatley to find an unopened letter waiting and an anxious Edna, who had seen its telltale postmark. It was, as she feared and George expected, from the owners of the dairy. George read it out to Edna. It said that Mr Robertson who had taken George's job when he left, had been content up to now to come in each day from Headington where he rented a house. Circumstances had changed with the end of the war so that its landlord could not make it available to Mr Robertson after the month of August and this letter must be accepted as giving George three months' notice to leave his present address. Mr Robertson would be calling to talk to him in the next few days.

Edna had shooed Alex away and closed the kitchen door behind him. He had turned round and looked at it from the other side, realizing that he had never seen it closed before. He had been aware that George was waiting for him to move completely away and heard his first remark, which was,

“Why does every other engineer in England have to be a Scot?”

When he thought Alex had gone, although he had tiptoed back, George had said,

“Well. Now we know we've got until the end of August to get out.”

“Can't we fight it?” said Edna.

“Do you think we would stand a chance of winning a court case? No. They've given us a good deal of leeway, three months, and we would have to have gone some time.”

“Where will we go then?” asked Edna, knowing and dreading the answer.

“Down home is the only possibility for a while.”

“At your mother's.” This was not a question, but a statement of defeat.

“Yes, unless you can suggest anything else. Can you?”

Edna's father had died years before the war. She had just fallen out with her youngest sister and knew that the other one would have no room for them in her desirable but very small, undamaged bungalow in Essex and she had cut herself off from her since the war started.

“How long will we have to stay there, d'you think?”

“Until I've got a proper job and we can afford a mortgage. There will be something as compensation from the War Damage Commission, but don't count on it being very much. We've got two hundred in the bank and we'll need to keep that to tide us over. I don't want to stay at the ancestral hall any more than you do and I'll do my best to see that our time there is as short as possible.”

Edna sat and cried for a while. Then she sniffed loudly and began to speak.

“George, I'll say this to get it off my chest. We ought to be grateful we're alive after the blitz and that Joyce and Graham took us in when we were bombed out and that Alex was not killed or had his brain damaged in that accident. Somehow though, I still feel that we've lost out in all this while others have been luckier. Old Bill Thompson who stayed in the Navy and became a commissioned shipwright spent the whole war in Chatham and has done very nicely. Joyce and Graham themselves are back in their old home and he's got your old job and they can afford all sorts of things we can't even think of. What've we got left after all this, George? Answer me that!”

“What about each other - and the boy?” asked George, very gently.

He got up, and Alex heard him go to the cupboard in the dresser where he kept his whisky bottle, find glasses and pour out what he called two tots, one each, as he put them on the table. Drinks that size, as Alex imagined them, bore no resemblance to little children. Edna drank quickly and felt a little bit better.

“My sister had an idea,” he said. You know when you had gone to bed and so had Mum, Sal and I stayed talking for a bit and she asked me if I had ever thought of taking the exam for the Civil Service. She knows what she is talking about, because she's been in the Civil Service since she left night school and her husband Michael's on the way to becoming a Principal, whatever that means, but he went to university. If I got a job at Chatham Dockyard to keep the wolf from the door and we saved for a deposit, then we needn't be at Mum's very long if I passed the exam. What d'you think?”

“Sounds all right, George. D'you think you could do it - the exam I mean?”

“I could have a go. Then I'd give up engineering altogether and be able to wear my truss without anyone giving a flying fart about it. Meanwhile, I'd better see this Scottish bloke and sort it out with him. Will he want to buy the furniture, d'you think? If not we'll have to store it; it won't fit in at Mum's and she's far too house-proud to let it, even if it would!”

Edna had begun to cheer up and when Alex had opened the door to ask if there was anything to eat, they had seemed to him to have recovered some kind of balance.

By the time Mr and Mrs Robertson were on the doorstep now, Alex had suppressed the pain of what he had overheard then, but remembered the conversation of theirs in Aunt Hetty's flat. On the strength of that memory he blurted out to the Robertsons:

“My Dad says the dairy can do what they like and we're not leaving!”

“Perhaps you'd actually let me speak to him myself, sonny,” was the best reply the visitor could think of, hoping that, despite his convictions as a Presbyterian, truth was not the prerogative of precocious babes and sucklings.

Alex went and found George, told him Mr and Mrs Robertson were here and also what he had just said himself, feeling he had done his bit to defend the family's interests but by no means sure that George would take it kindly. He was very surprised when George only laughed and said,

“Thanks for the confidence you have in me, boy. You stay here. I'll go and see them.”

Then Alex and a shivering Edna heard George take the Robertsons into the living room and sit them at the table. They were there together for ten minutes, after which George brought them to meet Edna for the first time and Alex again, calling him “my misguided offspring”, whatever that might mean. Mr Robertson was generous enough to laugh. It took half an hour to show them all the rooms and they left expressing interest in a good deal of the larger furniture, since their lodgings in Headington had been let to them furnished.

George encouraged Edna to make the most of their last summer in Oxford.

“There's no river to punt on in Gillingham,” he reminded her and made sure that several Saturdays and Sundays in July and the first part of August were spent on the one they had here. Alex was allowed to use a paddle from time to time, but never when George was using the pole and doing it properly. A two-pound jam jar was trailed in the water for tiddlers, which sometimes obliged by accepting a free ride for a mile or so.