A Childs War (5 page)

One morning in his second week of sleeping there it was Edna who woke him up and told him to get dressed quickly because they were going out. She helped him into his shorts and jersey in haste and then took him up for a wash in a manner that was none too gentle. After he had sat down at the table, she remembered that he had not used the lavatory as she always insisted on him doing when he first got out of bed, and dragged him to the outside one despite the cold, telling him to hurry up.

He was only just given time to eat his piece of toast and dripping and his spoonful of government-sponsored thick orange juice (wartime fare for giving strength) when he was bundled into his coat and made to run holding Edna's hand to the bus stop. Once they were on the bus, he said to Edna,

“You haven't changed my plaster this morning.”

“You won't need it much longer,” she replied.

“Why not?”

“Oh, I didn't want to tell you where we are going in case it worried you. You are going to have the stitches out if you must know.”

The cause of all the bad temper was that Edna had overslept after arranging the appointment with Joyce's doctor who had her practice in Holywell Street, for half past nine and, if they missed the ten past bus to the city centre, they would be late for it. Edna had lost her ability to organize things since she had been uprooted from her home. She was never very keen on motherhood. Now its nuisance value was becoming more and more apparent to her. This was having a deleterious effect on Alex, she noticed, because he was often morose when he was with her. She found there was nothing she could do about it and all her attempts to be kind to him were artificial even in her own eyes. She needed George to prop her up, and he had to be in London because he had to earn their living. She knew that there were plenty of women managing by themselves, like Joyce's neighbour Mrs Wilson, who was bringing up her two girls on her own because her husband was in the regular army: he had been allowed home for a few days after getting back from Dunkirk, but was now heavily involved in training men who had been called up and she never knew when she would see him. Even so, after all the years of going without, Edna and George had had a comfortable way of life in a place they had chosen for themselves - and it had all been snatched away by this awful war.

She let her resentment fall on Alex as he sat on the seat beside her. Looking at the top of his head, she did not stop herself thinking, “If it weren't for you and your split chin, perhaps I could have prevented our home being destroyed; or if George and I had been at home, we could have stopped the worst effects of the bombing and had something more to rebuild.”

Self-recrimination is often sterile, but Edna found it impossible not to give way to a measure of self-pity now. She had become a lodger in someone else's house and she did not like it. She was thirty-eight years old, had been married for sixteen years and had thought her lodging-house days were over. Her reverie continued all the way until the bus conductor called out, “Magdalen Bridge anybody?” and she returned to awareness of her whereabouts, bundling Alex off on to the pavement where he turned his ankle on the kerb and began to cry.

“This is all I need,” she muttered, and made a hasty attempt to dry his eyes with her handkerchief. When she rang the doctor's doorbell she was two minutes late. The fact that the waiting room was full and they had to wait an hour did not make up for anything. It was hard to keep such a fidgety child quiet in a room full of mainly elderly people. She would have preferred to believe that they were the kind of solid provincial citizens who saw evacuees like her and her child as a threat to their well-being, whereas most of them were simply concerned for the little boy with a plaster on his chin and signs of recent crying. They kept smiling at him and at his mother.

Edna's prejudice about the people in the waiting room was coloured to a great extent by something that Joyce had told her a few days before. Apparently it was common knowledge that the Majestic Cinema further up the road from where they were now living had ceased showing films when war broke out, and had become filled with evacuee mothers and their children from the East End of London. It was being said that there were getting on for a thousand of them in there and the stink from the doors was terrible because all they had in the way of washing and lavatory facilities were those provided for cinema-goers. Many children had contracted head lice as a result and the women had given up on basic cleanliness. They had nowhere else to seek shelter and it was said that the local people shunned them and offered them nothing in the way of help or comfort. What made Edna more resentful was that if any of the East-enders had come looking for shelter in SW20, she would have reacted with the same kind of respectable apprehension as the people up the road had - and yet she was sharing the fears that had made her an evacuee in Oxford too. Edna made attempts at self-composure, but did not respond to anybody in the waiting room who tried to open a conversation with her.

Alex found that the pile of old copies of Country Life contained pictures from outside the range of his imagination, but went through a good many of the magazines because he did not want to talk any more than his mother did. When he did sit still, as he was constantly being told to do in a loud whisper, he found he was interested in the elegance of the room with its oddly pointed windows, its blue and white decor and two large lumps of shiny, flecked stone with the oddest handles coming out of the top of them on either side of the fireplace.

He was deeply considering the possible uses of these when the receptionist called out, “Master Alexander Ryland.” He did not recognize that as his own name and it took a long time for it to register with Edna. The woman was about to pass on to the next name on her list when realization dawned and Edna stood up, took Alex's hand and dragged him into the consulting room where the skirts of a large white coat over thick stockings at a desk was all he could see at first. Then the elderly head above it and eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses loomed down over him and a voice, later discovered to be Scottish, said, “Oh, little man, we'll soon have those wretched things out for you. Would you take that seat, Mrs Ryland, while I see to your brave boy.”

Alex did not consider himself to be brave: that was a word that Alvar Liddell and other announcers on the wireless news used about soldiers, sailors and airmen, and he soon discovered that he was not. The doctor's hand ripped away the plaster with even greater energy than his mother did, and set about cutting the stitches with some oddly shaped scissors before pulling them out of his face. After six loud protestations by Alex, which made Edna wince, the doctor said, “There! That didn't hurt at all, did it?” and Alex said, “Yes, it did,” but nobody took any notice. Then, to his surprise, the doctor put a new plaster on, “To keep it clean, you see.”

After a few hortatory words to Edna, the doctor opened the door and said, “I shall not need to see him again. It's all healing very well,” and mother and son were ushered into the street by the receptionist before Alex could ask what those weird stones in the fireplace were. He asked Edna, but she did not know and was in no mood for such questions in any case.

They were soon in Broad Street, and Edna made her way to the end of New Inn Hall Street past the theatre where they had gone on Saturday afternoon.

“We can walk home from here,” she said, and they did eventually, after Alex wanted to go to the lavatory, which meant retracing their steps all the way back to the Ladies in the centre of St Giles: an underground structure full of polished brass and white tiles which impressed him greatly as it provided him in his imagination with a vision of the engine rooms on board ship that his father talked about to him. How he did miss his father - and worried about him too. Even a four-year-old knows what happens when large buildings are knocked down with people in them and George spent his working days underneath one such large building. Alex could not persuade himself that bombers were only active during the night and had forgotten that George was often doing maintenance work in the store at the time the Luftwaffe infested the skies over London.

He was very tired when he was at last brought home and made a decision that remained with him for life over the lunch that Joyce set before him. He would not eat fish however many of the children who were starving in China would like to have it instead of him. He did not know where China was and did not know any of the children who lived there. He did remember other children though, with whom he used to play in the quiet street from time to time at home, and gave himself some solace by thinking about them. There was the boy a little older than himself who one day, at the end of a game of oranges and lemons, brought out an axe from his father's shed, coinciding with the chant, and advanced towards Alex, making great slashes with it as the others all sang:

‘Here comes the candle to light you to bed:

‘Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!' which would have become a reality if Edna had not seen what was happening through the front room window and rushed out to protect him. Afterwards, she went to denounce the aggressive boy to his parents.

Edna now wanted to send Alex to bed as a punishment for refusing good food and offending Joyce; Alex wanted to go to bed himself because he was tired out after the walking he had been made to do and Joyce wondered whether she had done the right thing in being so generous as to take her husband's friend's wife and child in. However, there was no bed for him to go to because Joyce had lit a fire in the living room for herself and Edna to sit by and so he went out into the garden and told himself how unhappy he was for a good hour until it was too cold to remain there. Towards evening, he was told off again when it was found that he had pulled several ferns out of the earth where they grew under the living room window. His defence that he thought they might have been weeds cut no ice with his Medusa of a mother. She would have preferred a stone child at that point. Garden gnomes don't tear up other people's plants.

George was late in his arrival that weekend. He had left the store behind time and had missed the coach he usually caught in the early evening. He found there was another one at nine o'clock and when it came in at Victoria Coach Station he sat on it to read the newspaper and doze off. The air-raid warning sounded but he did not want to lose his seat and did not go to the shelter as some of the other passengers did. The raid was close by and the blast damaged the glass roof of the coach station. When he did get to Oxford in the middle of the night, he was still very alarmed indeed. He kept on telling his wife and his friends who had anxiously waited up for him, how he had sat there listening to the glass crashing down onto and around the coach, wondering if this was where he was going to meet his end. When the all-clear sounded he had lent a hand to sweep a path for the coach to get out on to the road. He tried to repeat the story again and again and it took a drink-induced sleep to make him calm down.

By the morning the memory of his fear had become an exciting story to tell his son and, having sensed that Edna would like a break from looking after Alex, he decided that he would take him out for a walk. He asked Graham to tell him a pleasant route that would occupy an hour or two. Graham suggested Binsey Lane as far as the Perch and the river, so he got Alex into his coat and cap and, at Edna's insistence, put on the woollen leggings she made him wear over his short trousers and socks to keep him warm. They buttoned up at the sides of his legs causing them to fit tightly and Alex's own protestations that they itched were ineffective. George put on his long black overcoat and took his bowler hat from the peg on the hall stand and off they went.

The outward journey was amusing. George had things to tell Alex, and Alex had things to ask George. It was George who cleared up the mystery of the large stones with handles in the doctor's fireplace by explaining that they were curling stones used on frozen ponds in a Scottish sport. He knew this because of going ashore at Rosyth once during a short visit by courtesy of Grey Funnel Line. That led to a long explanation of the difference between the colour used on home fleet ships and those, which were painted in the more comely Mediterranean Grey, and how captains of ships in time past had been responsible themselves for having their ships painted. It was on this walk that Alex first heard of Nelson, the British admiral with an eye and an arm missing who in spite of his disabilities had destroyed the sea power of someone called Bonaparte who ruled France a hundred and fifty years ago, and about someone called Pétain who had taken power in part of France now and whose ships had also been sunk by the Royal Navy in order to keep them out of German hands in a port with the intriguing name of Mers-el-Kebir. Alex noticed that George's delivery of these lengthy pieces of information made him a little out of breath. When Alex commented on this, George replied, “Yes. I'm getting a bit like the guide who used to be at Rochester Castle when we used to go there as boys: if anyone asked him a question, he had to start his speech all over again because he had learned it by heart and couldn't stop in the middle of it without forgetting what he was saying”

“Did you learn all that about Nelson by heart, Dad?” asked Alex.

“I suppose I did when I first learnt it.” George replied. “You heard the bit about Marshal Pétain and the ships at Oran for yourself on the news, though, didn't you?”

“Where's Oran?”

“On the northern coast of Africa in a country called Algeria which has been a French colony for more than a century.”

Then followed explanations about what colonies were, and how Great Britain had many of them and therefore needed a strong navy, which was now being eclipsed by American sea power . . .

When Alex became tired, George took off his bowler hat and lifted him onto his shoulders to carry him part of the way. The hat was entrusted to Alex's safe-keeping for this, although George was a little anxious that it should not get out of shape at his son's hands. After a quarter of an hour, George asked Alex if he felt like walking again.