The Dreaming Suburb

by R. F Delderfield

  During twenty months of married life he seemed to have learned almost nothing new about her, neither had he been able to inspire in her anything more rewarding than a purely physical response to his devotion. She was still the Elaine she had always been, despite that brief glimpse he had had of her as the tender, submissive, dutiful creature during the interval between their reunion under “The Death of Chatterton” and their return from the Paris honeymoon. He never once knew, or could guess, the pattern of her thoughts, when they were alone at meals, or sitting by their fireside. She never nagged him, and such tiffs as they had were trivial, even for newly-weds. But if there were no quarrels, neither was there any real accord between them, and although he was conscious of this, he was helpless to alter it in the smallest degree. When he made love to her she was all and more than one could expect of a wife who had never pretended that she was in love with him, and if her preparation of his meals and the care of the house left something to be desired, then that too was something he had half-expected, and had settled for in advance.

  As time wore on, and there were so many external things to worry about, he was able to adjust himself to her aloofness, and if it worried him at odd moments he was always able to thrust it into the back of his mind, where he kept all his disappointments, and they were many..

  His dreams were mostly ghosts now, keeping silent company with the cohorts of childhood, the cavaliers in their feathered hats, and the Arthurians in their plate-armour. He was not, and was aware now that he never would be, a great and popular writer of fiction, but he had earned good money by freelance writing and that, he decided, would have to suffice for the time being, at any rate until sanity had been re-established in the world.

  Of all the dreamers in the Avenue, it is probable that Esme alone was conscious of putting his dreams into cold storage; this was because his dream was fundamentally unchanged.

  By what still seemed to him a miracle he had accomplished the rescue of his lady-in-a-tower, and he was not prepared to see her exchange her wimple and stomacher for a siren-suit or a battle-dress, no matter how alarmingly the sanctuary rocked and shuddered.

  In his limited free time, during his six weeks recruit training, he sat down in the N.A.A.F.I. and billet to write her long and passionate letters. But married life with Elaine had brought him closer to realism than all his wanderings, and he was aware by this time that tender words meant nothing at all to her, and that the purely physical manifestations of tenderness were all that she was prepared to give, or to receive. So that letters beginning My Own Darling Wife seldom continued in this strain, but trailed off into animated descriptions of the men around him and the life he was leading, and the love letters that he intended should rival Napoleon's outpourings to Josephine never got written after all.

  He carried her photograph about with him in his pay-book, a favourite studio portrait, taken just before their marriage, showing her with her hair in a pageboy bob, curled at the ends, her oval face, half-smiling, looking over her bare shoulder. It was an impressive likeness, and his tent-mates whistled when he showed it to them. He made no attempt to conceal his pride in her, but he was beginning to ask himself if this was sufficient to sustain him for a lifetime, and whether or not he had a right to expect something more from her in the years ahead.

  Then it struck him that perhaps there were no years ahead, for any one of them. It was strange that a thought like this did not worry him as much as it seemed to worry everybody else.

  There was a minor event in the Avenue towards the end of June that succeeded in bringing the people of the crescent together in a way that nothing had done since the war commenced.

  The twins, Boxer and Bernard turned up, more than a month after all the other Dunkirk survivors of the suburb had spent their leaves, told their stories, and gone into fresh training for another challenge.

  The reappearance of the twins was celebrated in the Avenue like a local Mafeking.

  They dropped off the 'bus one day at the bottom of Shirley Rise, and wandered slowly up the hill in stained and bulging, battle-dresses, each with a haversack stuffed full of N.A.A.F.I. chocolate and battered packets of cigarettes.

  They did not think of themselves as heroes, and they certainly did not regard their escape across some three hundred miles of enemy-occupied territory as in any way miraculous, or even extraordinary.

  To them, so long as they were together, it had been more like a prolonged, pastoral ramble, punctuated with occasional games of string-and-parcel with the Panzers. They came across a dump of antique French mines in an abandoned village, and laid some in front of German tanks, concealing themselves close by, and watching the first tank explode with the same glee as they had once watched an unsuspecting pedestrian stoop and grab at a half-brick, neatly tied up in brown paper.

  It was exhilarating to crouch behind the burned-out frontier post, and watch the tank soar into the air, like an exploding Chinese cracker. Boxer nearly had hysterics.

  “Let's nip across that field, and lay some more where the road forks,” he gurgled, through his laughter. “Whatd'ysay, Berni, whadysay?”

  Berni had looked quickly at the rapidly-reversing Number Two tank, before nodding his blond head.

  “Okay, Boxer, but look lively, before the silly sods come out and see what's hit 'em!”

  They laid another mine, and narrowly avoided a stream of machine-gun bullets. Then they moved on, crossing mile after mile of parched countryside, stopping to pass bits of news to distraught refugees, and unarmed poilus, whom they met in shattered villages, and whooping with delight when they came upon an abandoned N.A.A.F.I., with its stores and even its till intact.

  Boxer disliked the N.A.A.F.I. “Let's set it on fire, and watch it burn,” he suggested, after they had helped themselves to everything they could carry. “Whatd'ysay, Berni, whadysay?”

  But Berni had sympathy for the hundreds of civilians who were now well behind them, and had slowly shaken his head.

  “No, Boxer, let's leave it for the Frogs. The poor baskets can do with it, I reckon!”

  And so they rambled their way along the coast, heading due west into Brittany, where their astonishing luck held, and they were able to jump a coal-barge on the point of putting out for Falmouth.

  Jim gasped when he came in and saw them wolfing food in the kitchen that night Then, with a great bound, he jumped to embrace them, thumping their backs, and pummelling them as he had never done when they were children. After he had coaxed some of the details of their escape from them, he refused their invitation to go down to the local and celebrate, but went instead, across the meadow, and into Manor Wood, taking the winding path to the lake in front of the old house.

  Strike, the retriever, pottered along in his wake, too old now, and too blind, to chase sticks and imaginary rabbits.

  It was dusk when man and dog returned, and as he crossed the Avenue, Jim saw a pipe glowing at the gate of Number Twenty-Two, and paused to exchange a word with Harold Godbeer, who was standing there in his shirtsleeves, looking down into the crescent.

  The two men had never been intimate, in spite of living next-door to one another for more than twenty years.

  In the past Jim had always thought of Harold as a “typical bourgeois”, but that was in his agitating days, before he really understood the word. Now he thought of him as a little dull and stuffy, and would have written him down in committee-meeting jargon as “typically white-collar”.

  For his part Harold had always thought of Jim as a rather dangerous fellow. Ten years ago he too would have had his labels ready, and would have classified him “Red”, or “Bolshie”. But ready-made labels were not as reliable as they had once been, and now he would have preferred to describe his neighbour merely as “a steady chap, but Left Wing”.

  “I just wanted to say how delighted I was about your boys,” he told Jim. “My word, but they must have had some terrible experiences over there!”

  Yes, said Jim, they had, and were probably a
great deal luckier than they realised. It was an obvious, and a civil reply, but as he said it Jim found himself drawn towards this peaky-faced little man, who had been such an inoffensive neighbour for so long, and because he was feeling uplifted by the miraculous return of the twins his natural reserve lost its topmost crust, and he felt closer to Harold than he had ever felt over the years.

  Leaning on his front gate he showed a disposition to chat.

  “What do you make of it all, Godbeer?” he began. “Pretty frightening, isn't it?”

  Harold said nothing for a moment, but sucked his pipe, while he endeavoured to adjust himself to Jim's unexpected cordiality.

  “Well, I'm not as worried as I was, old man,” he said at length. “No, I'm not nearly as worried as I was!”

  Jim was mildly surprised. He would have imagined Harold Godbeer to be the type of man who had helped to keep the muddlers in power for so long between the wars, and who was therefore quite incapable of facing up to the liquidation of the British Empire, and the collapse of civilisation as they both knew it. He would have wagered a pound note that, throughout the past winter, his neighbour had slept serenely on the ramparts of the Maginot Line, and was now flouder-ing hopelessly in a welter of terrifying possibilities. Nevertheless he recognised, from Harold's tone, that this was not so.

  “Do you think they'll have a shot at invasion?” he asked.

  “No, old chap,” replied Harold very levelly, “I certainly don't! I think they'll try hard to make us believe that they're going to, but their nerve will fail 'em at the last minute. As a matter of fact, I think that chap Hitler is in for one hell of a shock!”

  Jim was impressed by the man's quiet, forceful confidence. It wasn't the brand of confidence he had encountered in pubs and committee rooms recently, rehashes of hastily written leader-articles, or echoes of the bombast of bewildered politicians. It was a confidence that had obviously grown up inside the man while he was living here, in this Avenue, among millions of people almost exactly like him, it was a distillation of centuries of security and national triumph, with its roots deep down in Trafalgar and Waterloo, and the assault on the Hindenburg Line. It drew its strength from the dry bones of men like Palmerston, and Gladstone, and Sir Edward Grey, and its inspiration from the Chartist movement, and the Education Act, and Lloyd George's campaign against the House of Lords. It was born and belonged here, among the small, neatly-kept front gardens of the terrace, with their rough-cast fronts, little gatepost pillars, and looped chains, that seemed at this moment of history to make each little block of brick and slate a fortified castle, manned by a garrison who would count it a privilege to die where they stood, with or without some reserve ammunition in the back bedroom.

  Looking at Harold's pale, narrow face, in the soft glow of the pipe-bowl, Jim's doubts and fears of the last few weeks fell away from him. He felt immensely braced and refreshed by the contact, and intensely curious to hear more.

  “Go on, Godbeer,” he said earnestly, “tell me why you think that, please—it's important to me ... I don't mind admitting, I've been in a fog up to now!”

  Harold smiled into the gathering dusk, vaguely flattered by his neighbour's invitation.

  “Well now, I don't pretend to be a strategist, old man,” he went on, “but I've always thought of myself as a man of average intelligence, and I like to think about what I read, and what I see. Now here are those two boys of yours, I watched them grow up, and it always fascinated me to note how they always did everything together. Well, you see how it paid off in the end? Someone turned them loose over there, weaponless, as far as I can see, and with every card stacked against them. Just turned 'em loose, with the entire countryside in chaos, and what did they do? They just set out for home, using their heads, I imagine, and absolutely refusing to panic. But what struck me about it all when I talked to them earlier this evening was that they did it together, the same as they've always done everything together, and it seems to me—this is a bit far-fetched, no doubt—that this is what we've all got to do from now on. We've got to stop nagging at one another, and face up to things as a people again, the way we did last time, and I don't doubt every time before that! Once we do that no one can beat us. We'll get hurt all right, and it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of us didn't live to see the end of it, but plenty will, enough to put paid to that mob of scoundrels. The point is, if we once do this, if we once show the rest of the world that we're not going to stand for the sort of thing that's been going on long enough over there, then we'll be a sort of front-line of our own, and everyone else in the world who thinks like us will come bustling up to lend a hand. When that happens it can't last very long, can it, old chap? Nobody's going to convince me that there aren't a damned sight more decent people about than there are bullies and perverts, who get a kick out of stamping on other people's corns. Does that seem sense to you, Carver?”

  Jim took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of baking grass, that blew in from the meadow on the light breeze. He felt better, and more at peace with himself, than at any time since Munich.

  “It makes a dam' sight more sense than anything I've read in the papers since the last Armistice, Godbeer,” he said emphatically, “and if my guess is right, and all the people round here think even roughly as you do, then I'd say you're on a good wicket, old chap, and that that little bastard is in for the biggest surprise of his life! I'd better go in now, the twins'll be back from the pub. Goodnight, old man!”

  “Goodnight,” said Harold, methodically knocking out his pipe on the pillar of Number Twenty-Two.

  They went in, closing their doors after them.

  The moon rose slowly over the beeches of Manor Wood, and its white light crept over the blacked-out facade of the even numbers. Presently, far away to the south-east, beyond the wood and the open ploughland of the Kent border, came the faint, intermittent throb of heavy aero-engines, and a moment later, from the direction of Shirley Rise, the long, banshee note of the siren.

  People began to move inside the silent houses, making their preparations.

  In the store at the corner Archie Carver came out of the back door, and carried a fire-extinguisher inside, placing it immediately above the trap that covered his oil-drum vault.

  At Number Four, Jean Mclnroy buttoned her navy battle-dress blouse, and groped for her tin-helmet, reflecting, with a glow of pleasure, that it was her night on, and that she would soon be sharing a mug of tea with Chief Officer Hargreaves, the Ideal British Male, lean-jawed, silent, and superbly cool in a crisis.

  At Number Seventeen, Esther Frith climbed stiffly out of bed, and fell upon her knees. Whenever the siren sounded she made a point of asking Jehovah to deflect all high-explosive and phosphorous from Pilot-Officer Frith, S. (Accounts Branch), wherever he might be. Her greying hair fell forward over her clasped hands, and her pale lips moved soundlessly. “Oh Lord, keep Sydney safe, keep Sydney away from the bombs.”

  It was not exactly a prayer. It was more like a politely expressed command.

  At Number Four, Edith lit a candle, and gently woke Becky. “Come along, Becky dear, the si-reen's going! I've put the thermos under the stairs. We'll make ourselves comfy, and have a nice cup of tea. Come along now, there's a dear.”

  At Number One, little Miss Baker turned stiffly in her specially-constructed bed, flicked on her bedside light, opened her leather-bound volume of Rupert Brooke at the turned-down page, and began reading, Blow Out You Bugles. In the winter ahead this poem was to become a talisman against sirens, crumps, and the cough of aircraft-engines overhead.

  At Number Twenty, Jim Carver made cocoa for Louise, Jack Strawbridge, and the faintly amused twins, as they all sat smoking in the kitchen. Boxer, grinning his medieval clown's grin, pulled back the blackout curtain an inch or so, and said: “Let's go out and have a looksee! Whatd'ysay, Berni, whad'ysay?” Bernard peeped too, and then winked at his father, where he stood pouring cocoa.

  “Nope, Box! You go if you like. Me? I've had a bellyfull of
bombs for the time being.”

  But Boxer, of course, did not go.

  At Number Twenty-Two, next door, Harold finished screwing his striped trousers into Esme's abandoned trouser-press, and then went downstairs to mix himself a strong dose of bicarbonate.

  His indigestion was very troublesome these days, and he was yearning for Eunice. When he heard the first far-away crump he kissed her photograph, and then gathered his flannel dressing-gown around him, turned off the light, and opened the kitchen door to look out into the clear sky. He was not afraid to die, but if he had to he would have much preferred to die with his pretty, silly wife close at hand.

  Over at Number Forty-Three, Elaine Fraser was whispering to the Pole, “Stevie”, as they stood, with his push-cycle held between them, in the deep shadow where the back gate of Number Forty-Three opened on to the meadow. “Not now, Stevie, there are too many people about! No, Stevie darling, you mustn't come in, Stevie. Thursday then—Thursday, I promise!”

  She leaned over the 'cycle, and kissed him as lightly as it is possible to kiss a Pole. He tried to grab her, but she escaped from him with a little giggle, and ran up the path and into the kitchen, locking the door after her. When she was sure he had gone she shook the grass from the plaid rug she was carrying, and poured herself a large gin, sipping it slowly, and looking at herself in the mirror over the sideboard. She felt a little breathless and battered, and wondered whether she should answer the 'phone when he rang on Thursday. Then she felt sorry for him as, in a sense, she felt sorry for all men, all over the world. It must be terribly lonesome, she thought, to be hounded and hounded by such insatiable appetites, appetites urgent enough to induce Stefan to break camp, and push-bike all the way over from Biggin Hill night after night, urgent enough to induce Esme to hitch-hike two hundred miles last week, for a single night in her arms, and strong enough to persuade Archie Carver, who worshipped money, to part with it by the handful simply for the pleasure of an hour or so in her company. Tiresome for them, lucky for her.