The Complete Pratt (11 page)

His dinner was in his satchel. A ham sandwich, an egg sandwich, a cake made by Auntie Kate out of cornflakes coated with chocolate, and an apple. A dinner fit for a man going to
battle
. Especially when supplemented by a Mars bar out of your own pocket-money. His pocket-money was threepence a week. This bought him the
Beano
and the
Dandy
on alternate weeks. If he had enough coupons he would spend the rest on sweets. In those days of rationing, sweets were luxuries to be savoured. At his peak, he could make a Mars bar last an hour.

The first seven months of 1942 had passed quite smoothly. One of Simon’s budgerigars had won second prize in the cobalt or mauve cock or hen class at the Barnoldswick Fur and Feather Society. Henry’s progress at school had been steady. The nation fought germs almost as keenly as Germans in this era of food shortages and rationing. The newspaper adverts aimed at the authority of military commands. ‘Fortify those kidneys!’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Stop that terrible itching.’ ‘Sorry, sir.’ ‘Wake up your liver bile.’ ‘Righto, sir.’ Even in Upper Mitherdale, where ways of circumventing rationing were not difficult to find when you kept your own pigs, Henry was made to consume cod liver oil and Californian syrup of figs with the utmost regularity. There had been a big nationwide competition to see which area could collect the most waste-paper. Henry’s
Beano
was full of poems exhorting him to save paper:

Waste littler, paste Hitler.

and:

Come on girls! Come on chaps!

Dot Hitler on the napper.

Save up all your little scraps,

And be a ‘paper scrapper’.

and again:

Bop the Wop, Slap the Jap,

Stun the Hun, with paper scrap.

Dutifully Henry had added his old
Beanos
and
Dandies
to the Rowth Bridge pile much as he longed to keep them. Uncle Frank and Auntie Kate had rewarded his patriotic efforts by taking him and Ada to Skipton to see the opening of the Skipton and District Warship Week. The week was opened by Viscountess Snowden, and there were loud cheers as she moved the indicator to show that £109,557 had already been collected. The indicator had been made by members of the Skipton College of Art. There was a
march
past by the Skipton Home Guard, the Skipton A.T.C., the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, the Civil Nursing Reserve, the Civil Defence workers, the Women’s Land Army, which included Jackie, who looked very solemn, the Boy Scouts, the Wolf Cubs and the Girl Guides. Many of the stores featured attractive window displays with a naval theme. Henry wished that he was taking part in the march, although he knew that if he had been he would have wished that he wasn’t.

In the war there had been losses on all sides and victories for nobody. The British had bombed Lübeck and Rostock. The old wooden houses had burnt well. The Germans had responded with the ‘so-called’ Baedeker raids, on historic British cities. Once or twice, Henry had heard Ada crying in the night. This morning, a letter had come from Ezra. He was safe. The battle of…had been a right…they were now dug in at…and likely to be there for some time. The food was very…but he was well, and he loved them both very much.

So Ada was smiling, the sun was shining, Reginald Foort was playing, Auntie Kate, was bottling soft fruit and it was good to be alive.

Henry and Simon climbed the hill on the east side of the dale, past the remains of the old smelt mill. It was a clear morning, with just a few puffy clouds forming above Mickleborough. They disturbed an oystercatcher, and above them lapwings tossed themselves around joyfully.

They lay in the cotton-grass, commanding a view of the dale from Mickle Head to Troutwick, and kept their eyes skinned for Huns while they ate their Mars bars slowly.

Their conversation was an attempt at the style of the comics.

‘Gasp!’ said Henry. ‘Is that a Hun over there, Eckers?’

‘A Hun? Ho ho, you silly twerp! It’s a horse.’

Henry pointed excitedly.

‘I think
that
’s a Hun,’ he said.

‘Let’s go and bag the blighter,’ said Simon.

They crawled along the ground towards the unsuspecting enemy, which was actually Pam Yardley again. It was the first time the Leeds girl had dared brave the fells since she had last been taken for a Hun. She was collecting sphagnum moss to hand over
to
the Red Cross for use as padding in splints.

They got to within twenty yards of the Hun without his suspecting them. Then they charged. He ran off. They chased him. Henry brought the fiend crashing to the ground. It was the only successful rugby tackle he would ever make in his life, wasted on a lonely evacuee girl who didn’t even know that she was supposed to be a Hun.

‘Give over,’ said the Hun, picking himself up and trying not to cry.

‘Tha’s a Hun. We’ve just captured thee,’ explained Henry.

‘Oh. Right,’ said Pam Yardley, a little more resourceful than on her last capture. ‘Hang on a sec.’ She worked herself up into being a captured German. ‘Der wow!’ she cried. ‘Der ouch! Der Gott in Himmel! Der lemme go, Britisher swine!’

The Deadly Duo discovered that capturing German prisoners was a mixed blessing. You had to share your dinner with them. They did think of starving her, but had to admit that she had been a pretty sporting blighter, for a rotter.

They saw no more Germans, and fairly soon grew bored. As they returned to Low Farm, they could hear the music of Reginald New at the theatre organ.

Henry volunteered to escort the prisoner home, but as soon as Simon had gone home, he abandoned the pretence that she was a Hun, and told her that he liked her. She kissed him quickly, and skipped off into the Wallington home, clutching her puny collection of sphagnum moss in her hot little hand.

Stay-at-home holiday activities were laid on in the towns that summer, and Skipton was no exception. Ada was to take Henry in the bus. He was so excited that he got up at half-past six. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have seen the Real Live Hun!

Uncle Frank had gone out early, to examine some sick sheep, whose complaint he was unable to diagnose.

Henry wandered up the field towards his great-uncle. The dew was heavy, and cloud hung over the top of Mickleborough.

Suddenly there was a great roar, and an aeroplane with a swastika on its side came rushing up the dale towards Mickle Head. A long trail of dark smoke was pouring from its tail. The
pilot
had a faulty compass, and was trying to get home after being the only man ever to make a Baedeker raid on Burnley.

Henry and Uncle Frank stared open-mouthed. The plane tried vainly to gather height. The pilot ejected, tumbled headlong for a hundred feet, then his parachute opened. The plane crashed into the side of Mickleborough and a great flame spurted into the air. Silence fell, save for the bleating of the surprised Swaledale sheep in the next field, as the Hun fiend landed gently among them.

Henry’s flesh came out in goose-pimples as they approached the Terrible Teuton.

The pilot gathered up his parachute and walked towards them nervously. To Henry’s surprise, he looked young, bewildered and frightened and really quite nice, not like a fiendish killer with bared teeth and a snarl.

The German youth looked at Uncle Frank nervously, but Uncle Frank seemed quite calm.

‘Now then, lad,’ said Uncle Frank. ‘Does’t tha know owt about sheep?’

It was a long day for Ada. There was the bus ride, on two buses, changing at Troutwick, down winding roads bordered by stone walls and grass verges flecked with meadow cranesbill. An advert on the village bus showed a drawing of a conductress. The caption was ‘Give her a big hand – with (if possible) the correct fare in it!’ On the village bus the conductor was the driver, Jim Wallington. He gave out brightly coloured tickets from his clip board. On the outskirts of Skipton, in the second bus, they passed a static water tank. They watched a display of blitz cookery by a team of Girl Guide camp advisors in the Friendly Society’s yard. The girls demonstrated the use of the sawdust cooker, the haybox cooker, the camp cooker and the W.V.S. blackout cooker. They lunched in style on Australian minced-meat loaf at the café in the bus station. They joined a large crowd on the rugby field. The crowd were amazed at the speed with which the Home Guard put up barbed wire entanglements. She took him to the cinema for the very first time. They saw ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at the Plaza. It was his best film ever, so far. It was quite a day, and by the end of it Ada’s ankles, large at the best of times, were swollen horribly. You couldn’t
have
said that Henry hadn’t enjoyed his day, but Ada felt that much of her thunder had been stolen by the real-life German prisoner.

Back at Rowth Bridge, Germans and outings over, the summer continued placidly, and Henry wrestled with his secrets.

His secrets were that he liked girls and evacuees! He liked the two in one! He liked Pam Yardley! He couldn’t think why boys thought girls were soppy. Pam had a nice, square, honest face, and chubby, smooth legs, covered in bites and scratches. It gave him a warm feeling in his body to be near her. He went to the Wallingtons’ house and listened to ‘Children’s Hour’ with her. They sat with pencil and paper and tried to do puzzles, questions and catches set by P. Caton Baddeley. They listened to ‘Mr Noah’s Holiday’, a Toytown story by S. G. Hulme-Beaman. They laughed together at an evacuee boy from the south who didn’t know that ‘laiking at taws on t’ causer edge’ meant playing marbles on the pavement. Pam Yardley showed Henry her marbles. They exceeded expectations. She came to Low Farm and they watched the harvest and listened to the faint strains of Reginald Dixon at the theatre organ wafting over the fields. Always there was music at Low Farm, exotic names from a magic world outside. Nat Gonella and his Georgians. Don Felipe and the Cuban Caballeros. The Winter Garden Orchestra under the direction of Tom Jenkins. They laughed together at Stainless Stephen, Jeanne de Casalis as ‘Mrs Feather’, Revnell and West, and Gillie Potter speaking to them in English from Hogsnorton, although they barely understood a quarter of it all.

Henry invited her to church one Sunday, and outside afterwards he held her hand and waited for Belinda Boyce-Uppingham to notice them and realise what she had missed.

Uncle Frank was chatting to Kit Orris.

‘How’s t’ lambs, Frank?’

‘Nobbut middling, Kit.’

There she was. If only she’d turn and see them.

‘Tha’s only got feed for six months. Tha feeds ’em up. They come on grand. Then they deteriorate. It’s a bad do.’

Belinda Boyce-Uppingham turned and looked straight at them. Henry squeezed Pam’s hand. Belinda Boyce-Uppingham turned away, her sang-froid apparently undisturbed, but Henry fancied
that
the thrust had gone home.

Pam came for Sunday dinner. Afterwards, they listened to the gardening advice of C. H. Middleton. ‘Not at this latitude,’ commented Uncle Frank. ‘April! Tha’ll be lucky…Six inches apart! Give over!’ The young love-birds slipped out and wandered down by the river.

Simon Eckington was approaching. When he saw them he veered away.

‘Simon!’ shouted Henry.

He watched his best friend walk away without looking back.

‘Forget him,’ said Pam Yardley. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

She put her arm round Henry. He blushed. He hoped nobody would see them, especially Simon.

‘Give over,’ he said, shaking himself free. ‘Gerroff.’ Then, so as not to seem unfriendly, he said, ‘Race thee to t’ top.’ They ran up the slope, away from the river. The sheep, just about over the shock of the German airman, retreated before them in panic.

Pam Yardley beat him by about forty-five yards.

She flopped on her back and waited for him to arrive.

‘What a weed,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t marry a weed.’

‘Marry,’ he gasped.

Pam Yardley put her hand on his private parts.

‘What’s tha doing?’ he said.

‘Don’t know,’ she admitted, ‘but I saw Debbie Carrington do it to Stanley Lugg, and he liked it.’

‘Aye, well, he’s a Lugg,’ said Henry.

Pam Yardley squeezed.

‘Give over. Tha’s not doing it right, wharever it is,’ he yelped.

Luckily, Pam Yardley gave over.

‘Are we to get married when we’re grown up then?’ she said.

He considered the question seriously.

‘I think we’re a bit young to decide,’ he said.

A cool evening breeze sprang up, and they ran helter-skelter down the hill, and tumbled breathlessly back into the farm fields.

They could hear the music of Reginald Porter-Brown at the theatre organ.

In the morning, Henry asked Auntie Kate if there was anything he could get at the Post Office and General Store. He needed an
excuse
to see Simon.

He stood in the cool interior of the shop, gazing longingly at the almost empty bottles of sweets. He’d used up his ration. He wanted two stamps, a packet of snap vacuum jar closers, some Eiffel Tower lemonade crystals, Gibbs Dentifrice (No Black Out for Teeth with Gibbs Dentifrice) and he could try for Reckitt’s Blue.

Mrs Eckington served him and he asked for Simon. Simon came into the shop and hissed, ‘Come outside.’