Tin Hats and Gas Masks (3 page)

Johnny thought about this remark a lot. Maybe he could go back too. Then again, Billy might be exaggerating. He knew his mum was working in a factory now, that was why she hadn’t yet been down to see him, and his dad was busy on the barrow all day and firewatching all night. His
brothers, Jim and Ron, were both in the army, and he wished he was older and more in charge of what was to happen.

Mrs Bookman came for a visit at the beginning of December. Johnny met her at the bus station in Bushton. It was bitterly cold and the bus was late arriving. By the time it came he was starving.

‘Honestly, mum, I’m ever so hungry.’ he said when she opted to wait a while before eating.

‘You know I’m a bad traveller, Johnny, and I couldn’t face a meal yet.’

They went into a café and while she drank a cup of tea Johnny enjoyed a substantial plate of sausage and chips. There wasn’t a chance for her to come out to Winchurch, ‘to see me digs’, Johnny said, because of the time of the return coach.

‘Next time I’ll come by train, Johnny,’ she told him. ‘That’ll be after Christmas.’ She gave him a carrier-bag with his presents in. ‘No peeping now. Hide them until the twenty-fifth.’

Christmas wasn’t as bad as he expected. The WVS laid on a huge party in the church hall, and Johnny enjoyed every minute of it. There were spam sandwiches, mincepies and home-made lemonade. Someone dressed up as Father Christmas and handed out small gifts wrapped in pink for the girls and blue for the boys. Johnny had a puzzle like a miniature bagatelle and Anita was given a small hairbrush-and-comb set. There was even a film show – an old Charlie Chaplin film which kept breaking down.
This caused almost as much merriment to the children every time it happened as the film itself.

Afterwards Anita said, ‘The crackers weren’t a patch on those I was telling you about, Johnny. Didn’t have such good presents in either, but they were nice. Didn’t the table look gorgeous?’

Mr and Mrs Dover gave each of them a warm jumper. Johnny’s was red and Annie’s royal blue. Their daughter Alison and her husband arrived for Christmas dinner, and their son and his wife telephoned them after the King’s speech in the afternoon. Then Alison suggested that her husband might go into the loft and find some games she was sure were still there. He emerged a quarter of an hour later with several dusty games and half a dozen equally dusty annuals. Some had belonged to Alison and some to her brother, and Anita and Johnny lay on the floor reading them when it was generally agreed to pack in playing games for a while.

Alison and her husband slept in the study. Anita helped her to set up and make two camp-beds which were kept in a cupboard there.

‘I’ve never been in his study before’ she said to Johnny when they were upstairs later that night, ‘it’s quite a large room, bigger than our bedrooms. He’s got a gigantic desk there, with neat piles of paper and envelopes on it, and a jar filled with pencils, and guess what, they were all the same height. I specially noticed because they looked so odd. Perhaps that’s why he spends so much time in there – sharpening all those pencils until they’re the same size.’

Johnny thought about the pencils when he woke up
several hours later, and began to laugh quietly to himself. To his dismay the laughs became sobs and he burrowed beneath the clothes and stuffed his handkerchief into his mouth so that, in the stillness of Christmas night no one else would hear.

The snow came in January and Anita caught flu. Johnny wasn’t supposed to go near her. Mrs Dover said, ‘I don’t want to be running up and down for both of you,’ but every time he went upstairs to the bathroom he popped in to see her. He paid numerous visits to the bathroom during the few days she was confined to her bed.

‘It’s all gloom and doom downstairs,’ he told her, ‘they’ve just announced on the wireless that food rationing starts next week. I didn’t think old man Dover
could
look more miserable, but he does.’

Anita had not been allowed comics at home, nor at her boarding-school, although she sometimes managed to see one. Her mother had told Mrs Dover, ‘No comics’ but Anita often bought them and hid them under the mattress. When she finished reading them, she distributed them among her friends at school. She had to be careful not to leave them around on bed-changing day, and had one or
two near misses.

Johnny, who now had regular pocket money in the form of a postal order for one shilling (double what he used to get when he lived at home) and sent with his mother’s weekly letter, bought
Radio Fun
for her while she was ill.

‘Johnny, that’s my favourite. I’ll pay you.’

‘No,’ he said gruffly, ‘it’s a present. Mind she doesn’t catch you with it.’

His mother didn’t get down for a visit during January or February.
Working terribly hard at the factory
, she wrote, and
I can’t take time off. Your dad’s in munitions now too. He doesn’t like working inside but hasn’t any choice really, and it’s all we can do to help our boys
.

‘It don’t seem fair us being safe down here while Mum and Dad risk being bombed, Annie.’

‘That’s why they wanted us to come, but what’s the point if we all end up orphans?’ she replied.

Johnny opened his mouth to say that she was away from her parents so much normally that it wouldn’t make much difference in her case, then he had second thoughts about it.

‘It’s all right for you and me, we’re older, but there were a lot of real tiny kids on the train, weren’t there?’

‘Some of them have returned, Johnny. The air-raids they expected haven’t happened.
The phoney war
it said in big letters on Mr Dover’s paper the other day, and I asked Miss Coventry what it meant. Quite a lot of the young children from the infants classes have gone home.’

‘Mmm, I know.’

A few of Johnny’s mates had gone too – Billy Green
among them. He went for Christmas and never returned.

Once a week the school held gasmask and air-raid-shelter drill, but so far they hadn’t needed either. Sometimes they heard and saw planes overhead, but much to Johnny’s disgust he never saw a dogfight and had to make do with listening or reading about them.

He discovered the date of Anita’s birthday accidentally. Mrs Dover gave her a letter when they returned from school one afternoon in early March, and she pushed it into her pocket. Much later that evening when they had been sent upstairs to prepare for bed Johnny said, ‘Who was your letter from, Annie?’

‘From home. It looked like Mummy’s writing.’

‘Haven’t you opened it then?’

‘I forgot.’

Johnny was amazed. ‘Forgot! Go on, open it now. I’m going to the bathroom anyway so you’ll be nice and private, like you like.’

Anita giggled. ‘Miss Coventry would be after you if you said that in her class. “Like you like indeed”, she’d say, “now who can tell me the correct phrasing?” ’

Johnny laughed. ‘Her voice squeaks more than that. Miss Clark is much nicer anyway. As teachers go,’ he added.

When he returned from the bathroom Anita had a card and a pound note in her hand.

‘Tell you what we’ll do, Johnny,’ she said. ‘We’ll go to the baths in Bushton on Saturday for a swim, shall we?’ She waved the note in the air.

‘What’s that for? Is it your birthday?’

She nodded. ‘Next Monday. But Mummy and Daddy will be away then – they sent it early so I can buy something.’

‘Well, you don’t want to spend it on going to the baths then.’ He turned to go but she put her hand on his arm.

‘I do Johnny, honestly. It will be more fun to do that than to go out and buy something, really it will. And I’ve still got most of last week’s pocket-money, so we’ll have plenty.’

‘No, Annie, it’s yours. I got me own pocket-money.’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘OK. I’ll ask Janet instead.’

‘You do that.’

They were both so quiet when they came down in their pyjamas and dressing-gowns for their nightly drink that Mrs Dover asked if they were feeling well.

‘You’re usually chattering nineteen to the dozen,’ she remarked. ‘What’s got into the pair of you?’

‘Nothing. Just feel a bit fed-up,’ Anita mumbled.

In bed that night Johnny had an idea. He would ask Mrs Dover to make Annie a birthday-cake.

She didn’t slip into his room for her usual nightly chat, which was always conducted in whispers so the Dovers wouldn’t hear, and when he tapped and popped his head round her door she appeared to be asleep.

‘Poo, bloody poo,’ he said to the picture of the Spanish lady hung on the wall opposite his bed. ‘She’s only a girl anyway, not me best mate.’

Nevertheless he had forgotten his chagrin the following morning, and woke early feeling very excited. It would be a surprise, this birthday-cake, and he’d buy her a present
too. On Saturday, that was when he’d do it – when she went to Bushton with Janet. He would nip down to the shops in the square and have a look round.

Mrs Dover had two shocks that morning. The first was that Johnny, whom she usually had to call at least three times, was up, washed and dressed almost an hour earlier. The second was his request.

‘A
birthday
-cake, Johnny?’

‘Sshh, keep your voice down – I don’t want her to know. I’ll pay for all the stuff you use.’ He waggled his head from side to side in what he hoped was a knowledgeable way. ‘On Monday. Can you do it? Please?’

‘It isn’t money that’s the problem, son. It’s getting the ingredients. A lot of them are rationed – butter and sugar for a start.’

‘I’d forgotten that.’ He heard Annie moving around upstairs. ‘OK. Leave it now and I’ll work on it.’

He thought about it for most of the day, earning himself playtime detention writing out a hundred times, ‘
I must pay attention in cla
ss’
. It was while he was doing this, being careful to spell ‘attention’ as Miss Clark had at the top of the page, so as not to have to forfeit another free time, that the idea came to him. He would buy Annie a birthday-cake. He could get it from the baker in the square. They were allocated extra because it was their living – he remembered hearing that somewhere, and now he came to think about it, only last week he’d seen a big wedding-cake in the window.

He scrawled the last twelve lines and skidded down to Miss Clark’s desk. ‘I’ve finished, miss. Can I go out now?’

She looked at her watch, then smiled at him. ‘Go on, you have seven minutes left,’ she said.

He hugged his secret to him all the way home from school. ‘I want to go into town, Mrs Dover,’ he said. ‘I won’t be gone long.’ He took the stairs two at a time, and standing on the chair in his bedroom he pulled his case from the top of the wardrobe. Frantically he counted the money in his cocoa-tin. Five shillings and sixpence. His mum had promised him some extra pocket-money when she visited, but when would that be? It was March already. Heck, he needed it now. He had already spent his two ten shilling notes on Christmas presents for his family and going halves with Annie on a plant for the Dovers.

Clattering down the stairs he heard Mrs Dover’s voice (she had never become ‘Auntie’ to him), but didn’t wait to hear what she was saying.

‘Be back in half an hour,’ he shouted, slamming the door and running down the path and all the way into town. He was breathless when he reached the baker’s shop.

‘Yes, sonny, what can I do for you?’

‘I want a birthday-cake.’

‘Oh, you do. Well, well. And what sort of birthday-cake had you in mind then?’

‘Not too big, and I want some writing on it. I want it to say: HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANNIE.’

‘Not so fast young fellow. Where do you suppose I’m going to get the ingredients for a birthday-cake from in the first place. Don’t you know there’s a war on?’

‘’Course I do. Aren’t me two bruvvers in the army, and me mum and dad doing war-work in London; but you get
extra, don’t you?’

The baker leaned his elbows on the counter and rested his chin in his hands, ‘Know it all, don’t you? Well I can’t make you a birthday-cake unless you can produce this
extra
you’re on about, because I don’t get it.’

‘You got a cake in the window – a wedding-cake.’

The man glanced towards it. ‘Quite right, sonny, so I have. I’ll make you one like that if you want me to. I’ll have to charge of course, and paper and cardboard are getting scarce now, but I could probably manage that! For a price, you understand.’

‘Paper. You mean.…’

‘That’s right. The cake on display in the window is made from cardboard, Master Know-all.’

When he reached 14 Kerry Avenue, entering through the back door as usual, Mrs Dover was in the kitchen.

‘In a tearing hurry, weren’t you, Johnny? Don’t you do that again. I’m responsible for you while you’re under this roof, and I want to know where you are all the time. Understand?’

Anita came into the kitchen, and grinned wickedly at him. He kicked her ankle.

‘Ouch.’

‘Well, Johnny, I’m waiting. Where did you go?’ Mrs Dover watched him.

He held back the cheeky answer that almost escaped, because he remembered in time that he might want Mrs Dover to make him a cake.

‘I had to see a man about, you know, what we talked about this morning.’

‘What are you on about? Now listen to me, your mother telephoned this afternoon. She’s coming down to visit you on Saturday. Just as well she wasn’t here today as a surprise – what she would have thought I don’t know.’

‘Mum? Coming here? Hey, Annie, d’you hear that? Me mum’s coming in two days’ time. Yippee.’

That evening after dinner Johnny helped to clear the table with Anita, as he knew was expected of him. Then he took the tea-cloth from the rail and volunteered to wipe up. If Mrs Dover was surprised she didn’t show it. ‘Thank you, Johnny,’ she said.

Half-way through he knew he must sort the birthday-cake business out with her quickly before Annie appeared again.

‘About that cake, Mrs Dover.’

‘It’s not possible, Johnny. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make some of those cornflake cakes we had the other week. As a special treat.’

Disgustedly he clattered the cutlery into the drawer and banged the plates about as he put them away.

‘Be careful Johnny, you’ll break them.’

‘Me mum’ll make a cake,’ he said. ‘She’ll manage it somehow.’ He knew she would too, but how to get a message to her. Tomorrow was Friday – not time enough for a letter to reach her, and they hadn’t a phone at home. A telegram. That was it. He could send a telegram. If he did it on his way to school tomorrow morning she’d have it within hours and she could bring the cake with her on Saturday. Then they could hide it in his bedroom until
Monday after school. He began to whistle and Mrs Dover shushed him.

‘Mr Dover likes quiet while he’s reading the evening paper, you know that,’ she said. ‘Now run along and fetch your book.’

Johnny bounded upstairs. Annie’s door was ajar and she called to him as he went past.

‘Can’t stop,’ he told her, ‘I’ve something important to do before I come downstairs. And don’t ask me to tell you about it now, ’cos I can’t. It’s a dead secret.’

He dragged the chair over to the wardrobe and climbed up to get his case. Annie had been scathing when she first saw it, but she had changed since then, he thought. She was OK, a real pal. It wasn’t exactly her fault she’d been to a posh school before.

The cocoa tin yielded his five shillings and sixpence. A bike might have been quite good down here in the country, still he could probably earn a bit doing a newspaper-round or an errand boy’s job. This was for Annie’s cake and the telegram. He replaced the lid and once more clambered to the top of the wardrobe with his suitcase.

He didn’t hear anyone come upstairs and go into the bathroom.

‘What do you think you are doing, young man?’ Mr Dover’s voice almost made him fall from the chair. It wasn’t often he spoke to either of them, and he certainly had not been into their rooms before.

‘Getting something,’ he mumbled, pushing the case well on to the top of the wardrobe and jumping down. No need for quiet now.

‘Be more specific please.’

‘What? I mean pardon?’

‘Exactly what were you getting?’

‘Something out of me case.’

‘I asked you a civil question. Answer it.’

‘It’s private,’ Johnny mumbled.

Mr Dover came closer, and Johnny moved away towards the bed. Suddenly he felt very powerful. He put one hand on his hip and faced his inquisitor. ‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ he said.

Mr Dover pushed him on to the bed. ‘You cheeky young upstart. We’ll soon see about that.’

His face had turned a purple colour, and Johnny hoped he wasn’t going to have a heart attack. Turning towards the door, but keeping Johnny pinioned on the bed with his podgy hand, he called, ‘Ethel, Ethel, come here quickly.’

She came bounding up the stairs with Anita close behind her.

‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’

‘I found him hiding something on top of the wardrobe.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Johnny said.

‘What were you doing then?’ She looked puzzled.

‘I was getting something. I told him it’s private. In my house we was allowed that. Me mum reckons everyone has their rights like.’

‘Well you’re in our house now, and our rules are different. What have you got in your hand?’ She prised his fingers open and the money fell on to the bed; eight sixpences and six threepenny-bits.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘It’s mine.’

‘Where did it come from? You’ve had no pocket-money since you’ve been here. Not to my knowledge you haven’t.’