Then there were the kites. Plenty of children in the books that Alex read had them and the illustrations of kite-flying were always cheerful. Word went round at school one afternoon that the stationer’s shop further up Botley Road was selling them. Alex hurried home to ask Edna if she would buy him one, but she had not come home yet. He stood at the front door, hoping her return would not be delayed for very long. He saw boys and girls who lived nearby coming back with kites they had bought: gorgeous paper things in primary colours. Edna did not yet appear. Five or six more kites passed Alex in the hands of their delighted purchasers. Still no Edna. Then a bus stopped opposite and Edna emerged from behind it with her shopping bag. Alex did not dare to run across the road to meet her, but jumped about excitedly on the pavement as she approached him and he said,
“Mum, they’ve got kites at Williams’s! Can I have one?”
Edna was still being conciliatory after the ice cream anger and replied, “Of course you can, but let me put this heavy bag indoors first.”
When that had been done, she strode off like King Wenceslas, followed by Alex as her page, only to find Peter Simmonds from Alex’s class and his mother going off with the last one.
Edna and Alex were as disappointed as each other. They walked back to the house hand in hand for once. Even so Edna, whose internal misery at the prospect of living in George’s mother’s house conditioned everything she did now, could not resist telling him not to scuff his sandals on the pavement as he walked along.
IV
There must be an article in a sociologist’s file on the significance of Saturday afternoons in the development of family relationships. Alex was on his own at the table in the kitchen doing one of his drawings. George and Edna were in the front room dozing after a good meal, courtesy of the officers’ mess at Wheatley. The washing up was stacked in the scullery sink to be done later. Someone knocked on the back door. A man and a woman stood outside. Alex opened the door, and the man asked to see George.
“Tell him it’s Mr Robertson wants to see him.”
Alex had heard of Mr Robertson and now knew what a Glasgow accent was.
Two or three days before, George had come home from Wheatley to find an unopened letter waiting and an anxious Edna, who had seen its telltale postmark. It was, as she feared and George expected, from the owners of the dairy. George read it out to Edna. It said that Mr Robertson who had taken George’s job when he left, had been content up to now to come in each day from Headington where he rented a house. Circumstances had changed with the end of the war so that its landlord could not make it available to Mr Robertson after the month of August and this letter must be accepted as giving George three months’ notice to leave his present address. Mr Robertson would be calling to talk to him in the next few days.
Edna had shooed Alex away and closed the kitchen door behind him. He had turned round and looked at it from the other side, realizing that he had never seen it closed before. He had been aware that George was waiting for him to move completely away and heard his first remark, which was,
“Why does every other engineer in England have to be a Scot?”
When he thought Alex had gone, although he had tiptoed back, George had said,
“Well. Now we know we’ve got until the end of August to get out.”
“Can’t we fight it?” said Edna.
“Do you think we would stand a chance of winning a court case? No. They’ve given us a good deal of leeway, three months, and we would have to have gone some time.”
“Where will we go then?” asked Edna, knowing and dreading the answer.
“Down home is the only possibility for a while.”
“At your mother’s.” This was not a question, but a statement of defeat.
“Yes, unless you can suggest anything else. Can you?”
Edna’s father had died years before the war. She had just fallen out with her youngest sister and knew that the other one would have no room for them in her desirable but very small, undamaged bungalow in Essex and she had cut herself off from her since the war started.
“How long will we have to stay there, d’you think?”
“Until I’ve got a proper job and we can afford a mortgage. There will be something as compensation from the War Damage Commission, but don’t count on it being very much. We’ve got two hundred in the bank and we’ll need to keep that to tide us over. I don’t want to stay at the ancestral hall any more than you do and I’ll do my best to see that our time there is as short as possible.”
Edna sat and cried for a while. Then she sniffed loudly and began to speak.
“George, I’ll say this to get it off my chest. We ought to be grateful we’re alive after the blitz and that Joyce and Graham took us in when we were bombed out and that Alex was not killed or had his brain damaged in that accident. Somehow though, I still feel that we’ve lost out in all this while others have been luckier. Old Bill Thompson who stayed in the Navy and became a commissioned shipwright spent the whole war in Chatham and has done very nicely. Joyce and Graham themselves are back in their old home and he’s got your old job and they can afford all sorts of things we can’t even think of. What’ve we got left after all this, George? Answer me that!”
“What about each other - and the boy?” asked George, very gently.
He got up, and Alex heard him go to the cupboard in the dresser where he kept his whisky bottle, find glasses and pour out what he called two tots, one each, as he put them on the table. Drinks that size, as Alex imagined them, bore no resemblance to little children. Edna drank quickly and felt a little bit better.
“My sister had an idea,” he said. You know when you had gone to bed and so had Mum, Sal and I stayed talking for a bit and she asked me if I had ever thought of taking the exam for the Civil Service. She knows what she is talking about, because she’s been in the Civil Service since she left night school and her husband Michael’s on the way to becoming a Principal, whatever that means, but he went to university. If I got a job at Chatham Dockyard to keep the wolf from the door and we saved for a deposit, then we needn’t be at Mum’s very long if I passed the exam. What d’you think?”
“Sounds all right, George. D’you think you could do it - the exam I mean?”
“I could have a go. Then I’d give up engineering altogether and be able to wear my truss without anyone giving a flying fart about it. Meanwhile, I’d better see this Scottish bloke and sort it out with him. Will he want to buy the furniture, d’you think? If not we’ll have to store it; it won’t fit in at Mum’s and she’s far too house-proud to let it, even if it would!”
Edna had begun to cheer up and when Alex had opened the door to ask if there was anything to eat, they had seemed to him to have recovered some kind of balance.
By the time Mr and Mrs Robertson were on the doorstep now, Alex had suppressed the pain of what he had overheard then, but remembered the conversation of theirs in Aunt Hetty’s flat. On the strength of that memory he blurted out to the Robertsons:
“My Dad says the dairy can do what they like and we’re not leaving!”
“Perhaps you’d actually let me speak to him myself, sonny,” was the best reply the visitor could think of, hoping that, despite his convictions as a Presbyterian, truth was not the prerogative of precocious babes and sucklings.
Alex went and found George, told him Mr and Mrs Robertson were here and also what he had just said himself, feeling he had done his bit to defend the family’s interests but by no means sure that George would take it kindly. He was very surprised when George only laughed and said,
“Thanks for the confidence you have in me, boy. You stay here. I’ll go and see them.”
Then Alex and a shivering Edna heard George take the Robertsons into the living room and sit them at the table. They were there together for ten minutes, after which George brought them to meet Edna for the first time and Alex again, calling him “my misguided offspring”, whatever that might mean. Mr Robertson was generou
s enough to laugh. It took half an hour to show them all the rooms and they left expressing interest in a good deal of the larger furniture, since their lodgings in Headington had been let to them furnished.
V
George encouraged Edna to make the most of their last summer in Oxford.
“There’s no river to punt on in Gillingham,” he reminded her and made sure that several Saturdays and Sundays in July and the first part of August were spent on the one they had here. Alex was allowed to use a paddle from time to time, but never when George was using the pole and doing it properly. A two-pound jam jar was trailed in the water for tiddlers, which sometimes obliged by accepting a free ride for a mile or so.
When it was wet once, George took Alex and Edna to the Ashmolean museum. She was not very interested in the pictures and made fun of the nude male figures in bronze and marble. The college quadrangles and gardens were explored again and George sowed a seed in Alex’s mind by saying how pleasant it must be to spend three years here with nothing else to do but study the subject of your choice. When Edna remonstrated by saying that only toffs went to Oxford University, George became very thoughtful and commented,
“It might not be always like that, or even like that for much longer with this new Education Act that was brought in last year. Maybe boys from ordinary homes will stand a chance in future. If we’re really going to have free medical services for all of us as the Beveridge report says, then why not free university education for as many of us as are capable of it?”
“Would I be capable of it, Dad?” Alex unthinkingly asked.
“Despite that bang on the head, you seem to be all about, to judge by the questions you ask. The real thing though is that working class boys and girls will be able to go to grammar schools free of charge - and then if they’ve got brains they can win scholarships paid for out of taxes to come here, or to other places like this.”
“What about the poor devils that don’t get into the grammar schools, though?” asked Edna.
“There’re going to be as badly off as they’ve always been, I suppose.”
They were in Tom Quad. George’s last comment before they left it was,
“I shall miss coming into these places. The Georgian dockyard buildings at Chatham are impressive, but in a very different way. It won’t be the same.”
“They are named after you, though, Dad.”
“That was another George as it happened. I’m not old enough to have that honour!”
VI
Alex had similar feelings to his father’s in school at the end of the academic year. Edna had gone to Miss Cook to say that they were leaving the district at the end of August and that Alex would not be coming back in September. She knew the name of the school round the corner from where his grandmother lived and told Miss Cook that she assumed he would be accepted there. The Headmistress undertook to give her a testimonial to take with her to the head of that school. She said that it was always helpful to know something in detail about newcomers.
Edna had never encouraged Alex to bring friends home, so he was not particularly close to any one of his contemporaries, but on the last day of term he was given little gifts by one or two of them to remember them by. Isabel, who had sat next to him for four years without falling out with him, gave him an old fashioned silver sixpence from a bracelet she had. The boy whom Edna did not like him associating with gave him a regimental cap badge his brother had given him which was obviously one of his treasures. On the last afternoon many wished him well and he sat sadly in the front room for a while when he got home.
Then he remembered something and went up to his bedroom. He picked up the old pie dish. Its last function was to become a tin hat for a moment or two, and then Alex realized that you didn’t need tin hats on this side of the world any more. He brought it downstairs and, taking it out to the path between the shelters, he flung it, spinning, at the back gate, watching its trajectory until it crashed and fell. After that, he went and picked it up and put it in the dustbin, which was kept in the last shelter on the right by the gate. He felt very grown up as he went back into the kitchen and determinedly stood up straight, squaring his shoulders, feeling able to face future uncertainties with new found courage.
VII
“Whereabouts is Hiroshima, Dad?” Alex asked George as they sat at table ten days later, after he and George had been listening to the news on the wireless together. Edna, as was usual for her now, had got up and laid the table in the kitchen when the news came on.
“On the Japanese island of Honshu, boy. At least, it used to be. There can’t be much left of it after what has happened. The Yanks at the hospital say the atomic bomb killed thirty-five thousand people.
“Why kill so many people? Aren’t we supposed to be stopping wickedness, us and the Americans?”
“All I can tell you is what they are saying out at Wheatley. Apparently the British and American scientists, hoping we would have it before Hitler did, have been developing this bomb for many years in a desert in America. One of our scientists - his name was Rutherford - began the process in the thirties when he discovered at Cambridge that you could split the atom. We all feared then that if they did split it, then everything else would start to break down. Perhaps it has now, though not in the way we thought it would. What the Yanks are saying (he repeated that, Alex noticed, as if he thought what they said might not be true) is that, if it had not been dropped, the Japanese would go on fighting to their last man and that would mean the end of a lot of our men too. This seemed to President Truman the best thing to do, they say.”
“How did it manage to kill all those people? Even the V2s didn’t get all that many.”
“This bomb is more powerful than anything that has ever been used before. It creates an enormous heat as well as having the effect of a normal explosion. Then there’s what’s called radiation, which makes a lot of people who didn’t die when it exploded very ill indeed.”
“Do eat your tea, Alex,” put in Edna. “And let Dad have his. I don’t know why you have to enquire about these terrible things. You’ll find out how horribly cruel the world is soon enough when you grow up without you wanting to know about what’s happened thousands of miles away and doesn’t affect you.”
“It does affect me if it means that when I have grown up the war is still going on.”
“Oh, go on, then,” shouted Edna, and got up from the table. “I can’t stand listening to any more of it. Let me know when you’ve finished, George, and I’ll come back and wash up.”
“No, girl. You just go and put your feet up and Alex and I will square up out here. He needs to know - though I can’t cope with all this any more than you can.”
Edna sniffed away to the living room and put the dance music on the wireless up very loud.
George relayed to his son what the Americans had told him earlier that day about the atom bomb and about their hopes that this would bring about the end of Japanese continuance of the war. He explained to him about what was called Bushido, and how it was different for people from another culture to see things our way. He also expressed his own fears. He knew as well as any informed civilian that the Russians had declared war on Japan now, but could not help telling Alex that it was expected that the next war would be with Russia, though he kicked himself for it.
“Will there always be wars then, Dad?”
“And rumours of wars,” said George, dredging up the words from nearly thirty years ago when part of the routine for boy artificers in the Navy was being confirmed in the Church of England.
By this time they were at the scullery sink, whose window gave no light any more because of the air-raid shelters outside. George had Edna’s pinafore on and was washing the plates, while Alex was doing his best to dry them with a tea towel. Alex looked up at his father from behind and thought he was looking little and old as he stooped with his hands in the low sink. He had been grey-haired for years and increasingly thin on top, but now in the obscurity of the litt
le room denied its natural light he looked bent with many cares and, when he turned round to smile at Alex with what reassurance he could summon to give him, he appeared to Alex to have lost his usual vitality. For the first time that he could remember, Alex did not want to stay with his father. For a moment as he looked up, Alex feared that the war had crushed him in the way it had crushed Edna and he wondered for a moment how he would cope if that turned out to be true.
The mood soon passed. George took off the pinafore, Alex hung the tea towel up and they both went to join Edna. In desperation, or so it seemed to Alex, George went and found the board, the counters and the dice for a game of Snakes and Ladders. Edna reluctantly agreed to play, but when all she seemed to land on was the heads of successive long snakes, her mood became blacker and George felt more unable to be of any use to her. Alex seemed to be put on several ladders by his shakes of the dice and George hoped this was an omen for him. As in life, he for his part went down one long snake on the board and seemed to make very little progress thereafter. The thought of taking Edna and Alex to live at his mother’s meant now to him that he had got nowhere since he had left the home she and his father had in the Naval Detention Barracks at Chatham when he joined H.M.S. Fisgard in 1917.
A Childs War Page 24