A Childs War (31 page)

When it was wet once, George took Alex and Edna to the Ashmolean museum. She was not very interested in the pictures and made fun of the nude male figures in bronze and marble. The college quadrangles and gardens were explored again and George sowed a seed in Alex's mind by saying how pleasant it must be to spend three years here with nothing else to do but study the subject of your choice. When Edna remonstrated by saying that only toffs went to Oxford University, George became very thoughtful and commented,

“It might not be always like that, or even like that for much longer with this new Education Act that was brought in last year. Maybe boys from ordinary homes will stand a chance in future. If we're really going to have free medical services for all of us as the Beveridge report says, then why not free university education for as many of us as are capable of it?”

“Would I be capable of it, Dad?” Alex unthinkingly asked.

“Despite that bang on the head, you seem to be all about, to judge by the questions you ask. The real thing though is that working class boys and girls will be able to go to grammar schools free of charge - and then if they've got brains they can win scholarships paid for out of taxes to come here, or to other places like this.”

“What about the poor devils that don't get into the grammar schools, though?” asked Edna.

“There're going to be as badly off as they've always been, I suppose.”

They were in Tom Quad. George's last comment before they left it was,

“I shall miss coming into these places. The Georgian dockyard buildings at Chatham are impressive, but in a very different way. It won't be the same.”

“They are named after you, though, Dad.”

“That was another George as it happened. I'm not old enough to have that honour!”

Alex had similar feelings to his father's in school at the end of the academic year. Edna had gone to Miss Cook to say that they were leaving the district at the end of August and that Alex would not be coming back in September. She knew the name of the school round the corner from where his grandmother lived and told Miss Cook that she assumed he would be accepted there. The Headmistress undertook to give her a testimonial to take with her to the head of that school. She said that it was always helpful to know something in detail about newcomers.

Edna had never encouraged Alex to bring friends home, so he was not particularly close to any one of his contemporaries, but on the last day of term he was given little gifts by one or two of them to remember them by. Isabel, who had sat next to him for four years without falling out with him, gave him an old fashioned silver sixpence from a bracelet she had. The boy whom Edna did not like him associating with gave him a regimental cap badge his brother had given him which was obviously one of his treasures. On the last afternoon many wished him well and he sat sadly in the front room for a while when he got home.

Then he remembered something and went up to his bedroom. He picked up the old pie dish. Its last function was to become a tin hat for a moment or two, and then Alex realized that you didn't need tin hats on this side of the world any more. He brought it downstairs and, taking it out to the path between the shelters, he flung it, spinning, at the back gate, watching its trajectory until it crashed and fell. After that, he went and picked it up and put it in the dustbin, which was kept in the last shelter on the right by the gate. He felt very grown up as he went back into the kitchen and determinedly stood up straight, squaring his shoulders, feeling able to face future uncertainties with new found courage.

“Whereabouts is Hiroshima, Dad?” Alex asked George as they sat at table ten days later, after he and George had been listening to the news on the wireless together. Edna, as was usual for her now, had got up and laid the table in the kitchen when the news came on.

“On the Japanese island of Honshu, boy. At least, it used to be. There can't be much left of it after what has happened. The Yanks at the hospital say the atomic bomb killed thirty-five thousand people.

“Why kill so many people? Aren't we supposed to be stopping wickedness, us and the Americans?”

“All I can tell you is what they are saying out at Wheatley. Apparently the British and American scientists, hoping we would have it before Hitler did, have been developing this bomb for many years in a desert in America. One of our scientists - his name was Rutherford - began the process in the thirties when he discovered at Cambridge that you could split the atom. We all feared then that if they did split it, then everything else would start to break down. Perhaps it has now, though not in the way we thought it would. What the Yanks are saying (he repeated that, Alex noticed, as if he thought what they said might not be true) is that, if it had not been dropped, the Japanese would go on fighting to their last man and that would mean the end of a lot of our men too. This seemed to President Truman the best thing to do, they say.”

“How did it manage to kill all those people? Even the V2s didn't get all that many.”

“This bomb is more powerful than anything that has ever been used before. It creates an enormous heat as well as having the effect of a normal explosion. Then there's what's called radiation, which makes a lot of people who didn't die when it exploded very ill indeed.”

“Do eat your tea, Alex,” put in Edna. “And let Dad have his. I don't know why you have to enquire about these terrible things. You'll find out how horribly cruel the world is soon enough when you grow up without you wanting to know about what's happened thousands of miles away and doesn't affect you.”

“It does affect me if it means that when I have grown up the war is still going on.”

“Oh, go on, then,” shouted Edna, and got up from the table. “I can't stand listening to any more of it. Let me know when you've finished, George, and I'll come back and wash up.”

“No, girl. You just go and put your feet up and Alex and I will square up out here. He needs to know - though I can't cope with all this any more than you can.”

Edna sniffed away to the living room and put the dance music on the wireless up very loud.

George relayed to his son what the Americans had told him earlier that day about the atom bomb and about their hopes that this would bring about the end of Japanese continuance of the war. He explained to him about what was called Bushido, and how it was different for people from another culture to see things our way. He also expressed his own fears. He knew as well as any informed civilian that the Russians had declared war on Japan now, but could not help telling Alex that it was expected that the next war would be with Russia, though he kicked himself for it.

“Will there always be wars then, Dad?”

“And rumours of wars,” said George, dredging up the words from nearly thirty years ago when part of the routine for boy artificers in the Navy was being confirmed in the Church of England.

By this time they were at the scullery sink, whose window gave no light any more because of the air-raid shelters outside. George had Edna's pinafore on and was washing the plates, while Alex was doing his best to dry them with a tea towel. Alex looked up at his father from behind and thought he was looking little and old as he stooped with his hands in the low sink. He had been grey-haired for years and increasingly thin on top, but now in the obscurity of the little room denied its natural light he looked bent with many cares and, when he turned round to smile at Alex with what reassurance he could summon to give him, he appeared to Alex to have lost his usual vitality. For the first time that he could remember, Alex did not want to stay with his father. For a moment as he looked up, Alex feared that the war had crushed him in the way it had crushed Edna and he wondered for a moment how he would cope if that turned out to be true.

The mood soon passed. George took off the pinafore, Alex hung the tea towel up and they both went to join Edna. In desperation, or so it seemed to Alex, George went and found the board, the counters and the dice for a game of Snakes and Ladders. Edna reluctantly agreed to play, but when all she seemed to land on was the heads of successive long snakes, her mood became blacker and George felt more unable to be of any use to her. Alex seemed to be put on several ladders by his shakes of the dice and George hoped this was an omen for him. As in life, he for his part went down one long snake on the board and seemed to make very little progress thereafter. The thought of taking Edna and Alex to live at his mother's meant now to him that he had got nowhere since he had left the home she and his father had in the Naval Detention Barracks at Chatham when he joined H.M.S. Fisgard in 1917.

Edna was pleased to find that Alex did not argue when she declared it was time for him to go to bed. Alex was glad of a way of escape from the brooding atmosphere and thought about Joyce's canary, which used to be in his cage in this room. It had managed to keep cheerful despite being in prison all its life - but then what did it know of any other life?

Alex did what he did not usually do: he gave Edna a kiss on her cheek and said, as kindly as he could, “Goodnight, Mum.” He did not even mind tonight when her reply was no more than,

“Make sure you wash behind your ears. I'll be up to see if you have.”

As she said it, she had a look on her face that belonged to a woman who had forgotten how to be happy, even if she ever knew. Going upstairs, Alex had to find his handkerchief and blow his nose hard in order not to cry at the horror so far away of having to kill so many so as to finish a war and the horror at home of his parents' unhappiness, about which he could do nothing although he longed to be able to be of help. Sadness they cannot understand is hard for children to deal with. Edna was partly right.

With nearly three weeks still to go, Edna set about packing such china and glass as she had accumulated since coming to Botley Road. There was no more than would fill one large cardboard box. Alex was very keen that she should not forget his fairground Jacobean tumbler. George carefully checked over all his tools in his old black and white sea chest. Alex's books and toys were to be taken as they were in the cupboard that had been left behind by Joyce. Clothes fitted into two cabin trunks and a suitcase that George bought in what he called an old tot's shop. All this would be a part load along with the sea chest for Carter Paterson's who would bring the things down to Gillingham at some unspecified future time.

While the carrier's men were dealing with the sea chest's passage through the front door to the van on the day appointed for the move, both of them being older than he, George wryly gave thanks that hernias were not infectious. Once down the front step, they put the sea chest on rollers and made the job easy. That tickled George - a sea chest making its way over the rollers. He told Alex about it to amuse him, but unfortunately he had only seen the sea at Walney Island and had not learned to call waves rollers, so he did not get the joke.

When the neighbours saw the van had gone, they called to say their goodbyes. Edna was pleased that Mrs White came first, brimming over with the news that when Lord Mountbatten's amphibious force had taken Rangoon, all the prisoners of war kept there had been released, and Jim was among them. He would be repatriated as soon as possible. Then Mrs Wilson came to say that her husband would be in Germany for some time but she now knew for certain he was safe, which she had not for the last three months. The girls gave Edna a little clock to remember them by, and Alex a Doctor Dolittle book they knew he did not have. All George got was a kiss from each of the girls and from Mrs Wilson herself, but he seemed more pleased than anybody.

They were not going to hospital, but they did have a case each, so a taxi arrived to take them to Gloucester Green. George had decided that they would be sure to have a seat each on the Black and White Coach direct to Victoria. Travelling that way rather than by train, would save a lot of trouble and be a sentimental journey for him. Edna had agreed and added that it also cost a lot less.

Before they left, Martha produced a box camera, saying she had been saving the last film on a roll for this very occasion. She lined the Rylands up before the privet hedge, George in his best suit, Edna in the dogtooth tweed costume she had had made when Alex was in hospital and Alex himself in his white shirt with a tie and the grey school suit that used to belong to John. As she stood there Edna realized that this was the place where she had seen Alex's shoe under the lorry and was glad that Martha said they must all smile or she would have done the opposite. As soon as the shutter had clicked in the camera, the taxi stopped in front of them.

There was nothing left to do after the luggage had been stowed (Sea-going language came readily to George's mind in moments of stress). He opened the taxi door for Edna to get into the back seat and, in his preoccupation with what might lay ahead, went round to the other passenger door and settled himself next to her. Alex was left standing on the pavement. It was the taxi driver who told him to get in the front seat. The taxi was parked facing the oncoming traffic, so he said to him,

“Look both ways before you step into the road!”

This time he did.

Alex stood in the garden on the second day after their arrival in Gillingham with his father and grandmother. Edna had gone to bed with a sick headache.

“Do you think you could take it over while you are here, son?” Louisa said.

“Go on, Dad!” said Alex. “I'll help!”

“They certainly need to be pruned,” George commented.

The roses had flowered well, but the dead heads outnumbered the budding hopefuls by about three to one.

“Yes. I can't leave all his years of work on it to go to wrack and ruin, can I? I'll help where I can.”

Alex noticed that his grandmother's arm had gone round his father's waist in a proprietary fashion and that George quickly moved away. When he looked up, he saw that Edna was standing in the bedroom window with the expression on her face he had seen a lot of recently. She stood listless, leaning against the window frame with her mouth partly open and her eyes staring at George. That was why he evaded his mother's embrace. Alex already realized the sadness of a love so possessive that it tries to stop its object loving the people who were already loved before. Edna in the window in the evening light seemed to Alex like a fey apparition from an illustration by a man called Arthur Rackham in a book of tales he had looked at among the books at school. Alex feared his feeling that his mother was becoming more of a threat to family happiness than a component of it. He could remember how unhappy she was when they first went by themselves to Oxford without George and she had to accept Joyce's domestic arrangements. It was far worse now, here at Gran's house amid the smell of mothballs and lavender furniture polish and with George at home all the time with his nerves on edge.