Alex said to his friend Isabel,
“I wonder if this means that we shall find out what peace is like soon.”
“A lot more Germans will have to be captured first,” the gentle girl replied.
“Or killed, I suppose,” Alex added.
The war news soon faded into the task of multiplying unlikely sums in pounds shillings and pence by unreasonable numbers: “A shop is selling tables at £4 11s 7d each: how much would you have to pay for sixteen?” Alex was told off for being seen to write, “I would not want that many tables,” in his work book. This was a cover for the ignorance resulting from his long absence from school. He kept quiet about it at home and no one in the school seemed very concerned to help him catch up. Later on, of course, George taught him, but only after Edna found he could not confirm that she had been short-changed when she was spoiling for a row with a man in the market from whom she had bought some remnants of cloth.
IV
The poignancy of the plight of prisoners of war was brought home to the Rylands next Monday morning when Edna called on Mrs White to return a plate that she had used to give her neighbours a rhubarb pie to eat over the weekend. Mrs White was plainly in tears and hardly able to manage to get to the back door. Edna knew that she had been a widow for a long time and that she had an only son called James who was in the army. Mrs White told Edna that she had heard last evening by telegram that her boy had been captured by the Japanese in Burma. She had read a popular newspaper’s account earlier in the year after Anthony Eden’s statement in parliament about how such prisoners had been treated and was very frightened. Edna went into her kitchen with her, refilled the kettle and put it back on the kitchen range while she listened to Mrs White’s distress.
“I haven’t seen Jim for three years now, not since his call-up papers came. He hasn’t lived here since he finished his apprenticeship at Morris Garages before the war and moved to work in Birmingham. Please God he’ll come home safely when it’s all over.”
Edna made the tea. As she and Edna drank, Mrs White talked and talked: about her husband, a stonemason who worked at the colleges, dead these fifteen years now; about Jim’s childhood and youth; about her hopes for him and the nice girl he had taken up with before he went away. Edna listened, as Joyce had listened to her in her distress about bricks and mortar and as Mrs Wilson had when Alex was run over, which approached the distress which Mrs White was going through now.
Edna thought that it was fortunate that George was no longer at the dairy. He was out at Wheatley and would not need a midday meal. Alex took a sandwich and an apple to eat in the playground these days, so she could stay with Mrs White if she needed her until the time school was over. Normally she would herself had been at the factory, but the women had been told not to come in until Tuesday that week because a new type of detonator was going into production and the machines had to be re-jigged over the weekend and tested today.
Mrs White did need her so she sat and listened and went next door to find something from her own larder to make a meal for them both, though Mrs White ate little. Edna stayed while her neighbour dozed in an exhausted state until half past three. She left by Mrs White’s front door to be at home for her son. She saw him coming down Ferry Hinksey Road jumping about and doing what George would call skylarking with other children.
“Nothing much wrong with him now, thank God,” thought Edna, as she went in her own front door to be there when he came in.
This sense of gratitude evaporated fairly quickly. She told Alex about Jim White and his mother’s distress about him being captured and her fears concerning the treatment he might receive from his captors.
“It’s up to those who take prisoners to be gracious towards them,” was his response, and all Edna’s fear of having produced a precocious child returned from the dormant state into which she had pressed it since her early spring vigil in the Radcliffe waiting for him to recover consciousness.
“Why did you have to say that, you little know-all? What do you know about being taken prisoner, or grief at the chance of losing your only son?”
Alex was not a know-all and could not cope with this. He hid upstairs from his mother until he heard her slam her way into the front room. Then he hurried downstairs, went out of the back door to find his scooter and shot off on it through the dairy yard into Henry Road and the rec to wait for the time when George would be home. Although they glowered at each other over the table, neither of them told George why - at least, he didn’t: maybe Edna did later. George was distressed to learn about Mrs White’s boy.
“Good job he’s too young for all this,” George said, with a nod towards Alex.
“And that you’re too old,” she said, getting up to hug him. This very rarely happened outside their bedroom and in his embarrassment George smiled towards Alex, who made no attempt to interfere in his parents’ closeness, which lasted an astonishingly long time. Their embrace had its own desperation and he knew about their anxiety caused by the notice given to them by the dairy.
V
“We are going to stay with Gran down home for the weekend,” George told Alex.
“Why?” he asked, wondering if he would receive an honest and full reply.
“Because I haven’t seen her since your Grandad died - and you and Mum haven’t seen her for longer than that.”
“Is it far?”
“A hundred miles or so: go and get the atlas and I’ll show you where it is.”
Alex brought the now dog-eared book to George and he found the Southern England page, as opposed to the France and The Low Countries opening they had recently spent a lot of time with.
“Look, you know we are here? Well, we go to London - look, the black line is the railway - and get off at a station called Paddington. Then we go across London, probably on the Underground, to another station called Victoria, and the train from there takes us to Gillingham where we get off. Then there’s a bus ride and a bit of a walk.”
“What do you mean by ‘a bit of a walk’?”
“Further than you want to walk, but not far enough to kill you!”
“And why do you call it ‘down home’?”
“Because near there is where Mum and I grew up. I was born in Rochester - there, and Mum was born in Chatham - there, see? I’m never sure which is which, but I think I’m a Kentishman rather than a Man of Kent. The River Medway - there - is the dividing line between the different sorts. I might have ended my short life there the night Mafeking was relieved, when Gran nearly dropped me off Rochester Bridge when she was trying to get through the crowd celebrating it.”
“Mafeking?”
“Yes. Your godfather, Art, can tell you more about it because he was there at the time. A soldier called Baden-Powell with a small force was under siege there in the South African War and then the British Army beat the Boers and let him out.”
“Bores? Why call them that?”
“It’s spelt differently: Boer is a Dutch or, perhaps, Afrikaans word that means farmer. The Boers had settled there from Holland and during the Napoleonic Wars the British had taken and subsequently bought South Africa from the Dutch as a stopping place on the way to India - in those days the ships had to go all round Africa to reach it because there was no Suez Canal then. After the freeing of all slaves in the British Empire a hundred years ago, these farmers moved to a new place where they were not subject to British rule (here the atlas came out again and Alex was shown the Transvaal) and complications later arose about diamond mines and one thing and another led to war - and the relief of Mafeking was part of it.”
“How come Gran nearly dropped you off the bridge?”
“She was frightened by the crowd, most of whom had had a few drinks. At least that’s what she told me. I don’t remember it myself being only a few months old! Anyway, we’re going down there on Friday morning. I’ve got the day off from Wheatley. We come back Sunday afternoon.”
So on Friday they were on the train to Paddington, George
standing in the corridor with Alex sitting next to him on the suitcase and Edna sitting in the compartment beside them with the door jammed back, trying not to breath in too often since six out of the seven soldiers in there with her were smoking with the window shut. From where Alex was sitting on the case, he could see her face close by through the glass and thought she looked a bit green by the time they got to Reading. He also noticed that the soldiers, although they were British and not American, were wearing a different kind of uniform from the thick battle dress he had often seen. This one was of lighter material and looked as though it did not itch and would not be so hot to wear.
By the time they reached Slough, Edna had to give up her seat and open the window in the corridor. Alex heard her say under her breath to George as she did so,
“The things I have to go through for your bloody mother!”
Alex was put out by his reply, which he only half heard and was not sure about,
“You might be glad like me of a roof over your head come the autumn.”
Eventually Paddington station came alongside the window and they got out of the train. They stood on the platform in a pale imitation of Frith’s painting, though George had no silk hat or faun waistcoat, just his usual trilby and his three-piece suit with his mackintosh unbuttoned on top of it. They waited for the military men to leave the platform and then made their way down to the Underground, where Alex held Edna’s hand firmly as he saw a train rush roaring from a tunnel and stop right in front of him, with the bottoms of its windows at the level of his eyes. He was very surprised that he was near such a monster and even more so to find he had to step into it. All this was explained by George when they sat down side by side with Edna opposite and the case in between George’s and Edna’s feet.
“This is called the Circle Line, because it goes in a ring all round the principal places of central, east and west London - and we get out at Victoria, as I told you, which is in the south-west. When you see Sloane Square on a sign at one of the stations, you’ll know we’re nearly there - and if I’m asleep wake me up!”
Here George put his head back and his hat fell over his eyes.
“He can’t sleep in all this noise, can he, Mum?”
Even Edna, still fancying herself choked with second-hand tobacco smoke, had to smile in George’s direction.
“No more questions now, Alex,” she told him.
Alex kept his watching brief and then after fewer minutes than he expected shook George’s arm,
“Sloane Square, Dad. Wake up!”
George made his hat fall sideways so that Edna could see his face but not Alex, and made an expression which conveyed his good-natured weariness with the present demands of fatherhood.
The next part of the journey, which was shorter than the first, was slow and in a dirty train. George explained the absence of a locomotive as they got on the train, and Alex was delighted when he remembered all the pictures of Southern Railway rolling stock he had seen in John’s Meccano Magazines a long time ago and asked George to explain the mystery of conductor rails. His explanation enlightened all within earshot, even Edna, who commented,
“I never knew all that! Nor that you did.”
“Goes with the job,” said George, and this time did settle to go to sleep because he knew that Edna knew where they would get off. When they arrived there, Alex was puzzled by how much this station resembled some of the so-called underground stations they had gone through earlier, which were not under ground at all. George led them as they made their way up a good number of steps to find the bus to Rainham, which could either be a green one run by the Maidstone and District Company, or a brown one which would be from the Chatham and District. The green one came first, so they got on and went upstairs. The upper deck of this bus did not have long seats like the Oxford buses because there would be no low bridges for it to go under, but a gangway down the middle with seats on both sides. Alex was next to the window on the right hand side, Edna was with him on the double seat and George was behind them both. Looking out of the window he asked,
“What’s that over there with window spaces very high up over the other buildings? Has it been bombed?”
George put his head between his wife’s and son’s to reply,
“That’s called The Jezreels. A man believed God told him to build a tower up to heaven and began to do so, but the money ran out, and nobody saw fit to take it down.”
Edna then put in,
“And just past it are some grass slopes called the Darland Banks, where we used to go blackberrying when we was kids. At the bottom of the slopes there’s Luton where I lived when I was a girl, next door to the pub which was called ‘The Wagon at Hail’.”
Alex heard this as ‘The Wag and a Tail’ and thought that was its real name for a long time afterwards until he actually saw it for himself. Then George told him that they were going along part of a Roman road called Watling Street and a few minutes later they went down the stairs ready to get off the bus at the top of Twydall Lane.
George’s mother lived at the bottom end of it and had stayed on in the house after her bereavement the year before and intended to continue to do so. George had more than hinted to her in a letter that they might be in a homeless state fairly soon, and she had assured him in her reply that her door would be open to him and his family. This short visit was, as George put it, “a toe in the water”.
“If it’s too bloody cold, we can find some other beach to paddle from,” he added, and Edna sniffed.
It was a very long walk to Gran’s house, Alex decided, after what seemed to him like an hour had passed, although it was only ten minutes by his father’s turnip watch. George tried to lighten the load by leaning round Edna and pointing out his own familiar landmarks in the valley in front of them.
“Look there, boy, there’s the River Medway.”
Alex saw the strip of dark river and its further bank in front of which a large naval craft was making its way.
“Do you see the skeletons of the old barges sticking up out of the mud?”
“Where?”
“On the near bank of the river, look.”
“I can’t see them.”
“What about those telegraph poles going through the gap in the orchards down there? That’s the railway line the Golden Arrow express uses in peacetime to take the boat train to Dover.”
“I can see some trees, but no telegraph poles.”
George stopped trying to look towards Alex by craning round in front of Edna and, putting his mouth close to her nearside ear, expressed his anxiety under his breath:
“Maybe that bang on the head has done some damage after all or maybe he’s never been able to see very far and no one asked him to look at distant things before. He looked at a lot of far off things when we used to go out on the bike, though.”
“We must get his eyes tested next week, then,” Edna quietly replied, allaying her fear of the next two days with pretence at being a practical woman.
At this point, the weary Alex walked into a tree that stood at the edge of the pavement. His exasperated mother remarked,
“He couldn’t see what was right under his nose, let alone what’s a long way off. Do look where you’re going, for Christ’s sake.”
Whenever she invoked the thin man hanging on the cross in St Frideswide’s Church, Alex expected his mother’s thunderclouds to burst upon his head, so he now made every effort to walk upright, to look out in expectation of further hazards on this interminable walk and not to say anything provocative, or he knew he would arrive at his grandmother’s with the imprint of Edna’s glove on a painful ear, partially deaf as well as short-sighted. He was obviously not deaf or he would not have heard his father’s quiet comment or his mother’s whispered reply before he came in contact with the tree.
George realized there was no point in saying anything else because Edna would have liked to have postponed the coming night under her mother-in-law’s roof that she was dreading. She was
keeping quiet too.
Then, after another five minutes, they reached the terrace of ten-year-old houses behind front gardens in which Gran lived and saw her at her bay window looking out into the evening light to see her beloved firstborn son arriving with the woman he had married against her own expressed wishes and their only child who was, in her opinion, growing too tall for his strength.
“Doesn’t she feed him?” she asked herself before she opened the door to be as warm towards them all as she felt able to be.
She had always made a god of her late husband when he was away for long periods at sea - which covered her lack of understanding of his attitude to life when he was at home with her - and she prayed to him for guidance now, to some extent receiving it as she opened the front door, smiled at, embraced and kissed all three in turn, saying exclusively to George as she looked at Alex,
“Is he fully recovered from his road accident now, son?”
“I think so,” he replied.
His mother remembered that Alex had a mother also, and took her upstairs to show her the back bedroom where she had prepared beds for them.
“I’m sorry you’re all in together, Edna. Sarah’s here as well, so there isn’t a great deal of room.”
Edna simpered in reply and did her best to overcome antagonism as she looked out over the little garden that her father-in-law had lovingly tended in his latter years. The fact that her young sister-inlaw would unexpectedly be here created a new problem, but Edna had made a mental resolution in spite of her real feelings to do her best to keep things on an even keel, especially if this was the only place where they could find shelter after the dairy took its house back.
VI
Louisa Ryland was sixty-six years old. She was little in stature and had not much weight about her, especially since she had neglected her eating since she had been widowed. Her face was lined, largely from a nervous complaint which years before had given her a twitch. That had been cured, but it left the creases in her cheek where it had happened and Alex had been warned not to comment upon them before his grandparents had last come to see them.
A Childs War Page 21