Her brief and painful liaison with Tom Tappertitt, the proprietor of the circus that she had joined after leaving Benny Boy, the agent, had been equally unprofitable. That ridiculous episode had ended face down on a bed, in a small, private hotel, with an irate Mrs. Tappertitt, who happened to be a professional strongwoman, enthusiastically tanning her bare bottom, while husband Tom moaned from the confines of the shallow cupboard, into which his energetic wife had thrust him while she administered justice on Elaine.
After that Elaine had renounced hit-and-miss tactics, and had married young Esme Fraser, the boy who had been mooning after her since the late ‘twenties.’ There were two reasons for this decision. First the necessity of acquiring a base from which she could sally out to search for the Great Provider, and secondly because of Esme’s modest fortune, which turned out to be more modest than she had been led to believe.
Up to the moment of the outbreak of war Elaine had been ready to write off her marriage as yet another false start, but now she was not so sure. Their child, born on the actual day of the declaration of war, had been taken off her hands, and now Esme too had disappeared from the scene, and only appeared in the Avenue at irregular, and widely-spaced intervals. In view of all this there was still something to be said for a husband with a small unearned income.
Meantime, there had been Stevie, the big Polish airman, since posted overseas, and later Archie, who, carefully handled, might yet provide the terrace hammock, and yacht, notwithstanding his Italian wife, and young family down in Somerset.
Had she been less experienced Elaine might have settled for Archie there and then, but she hesitated because her dream was not a static dream, but a dream that was constantly expanding. If the war went on long enough who could tell what possibilities lay ahead, providing she kept her eyes open, and saved her steadily increasing capital?
On Sunday mornings, after Archie had dressed, and slipped out by the way he had entered, Elaine would sometimes lie relaxed, and watch the light flicker through the black-out curtain. Her mind would range, not over the remote, or recent past, but far into the golden future, across the Atlantic even, where some said that real money was waiting. Archie’s five pound notes were all very well to go on with, of course, and he was very useful in other ways, with his gin, groceries, and nylons, but after all, Archie, notwithstanding his chain of suburban pop-ins, was still very much of the Avenue, and Elaine had never been reconciled to the Avenue, or to any suburban feature of it.
Somewhere, sometime, bigger, better, and more streamlined game awaited her. She was only twenty-nine; there was time in hand.
Like her daughter, at Number Forty-Five, Esther Frith led a solitary life, more solitary these days than that of anyone in the Avenue. She had never made any friends there, and after her divorce, and Elaine’s flight, she had shared the house with Sydney, her only son. Now that Sydney was gone she worried about him unceasingly for he was all she had left in her life to worry about. She had once been devoted to her Methodist Chapel, in Croydon, but since Sydney had joined the Air Force she had stopped attending public worship, feeling that she needed a more personal approach to God, if He was to find time to maintain a duration-of-war watch over Sydney.
She spent nearly an hour on her knees before she climbed into bed each night, and her prayers had a single, repetitive theme:—‘Keep Sydney safe! Keep Sydney away from the bombs! Anything can happen to anyone only keep Sydney intact! Keep him away from the bombs!’
She might have spared herself a nightly vigil on the cold linoleum, for God was already keeping Sydney as safely as anyone could be kept in the Britain of 1940.
Sydney had joined the Volunteer Reserve of the R.A.F. nearly a year before the war, and he was now a Pilot Officer, in the Accounts Branch. By day he worked under the heavily-reinforced roof of Station Headquarters, and whenever the siren wailed he was authorised to dive into a deep shelter, carrying with him his loose-leafed ledgers, some long sheets of blotting paper, and a ready reckoner.
Esther Frith might have been excused for devoting her prayers to her own safekeeping, for all that stood between her and the Luftwaffe, was a thin screen of slates, but it had never occurred to her that she might be hit by a bomb. She was a very sound sleeper, and slept through most of the alarms, while her neighbours were crowding into their Andersons, and Morrisons, or fussing about their houses with flasks of tea, cushions, and trailing blankets. Sometimes, just before she went to sleep, she thought of Edgar, her former husband, and whenever she did so she experienced anew the cold wave of shock that his original confession had once brought her…Edgar, the mild, the drab, the hopelessly ineffectual, but an Edgar madly and recklessly in love with a woman at the shop, a woman who, so she had been given to understand, had already given birth to a love-child by a soldier of the last war!
The sheer staggering improbability of these facts buffeted Esther particularly when she recalled her husband’s feeble reaction to her decree that they should sleep apart, after the birth of their second child, Sydney. She remembered how he had received this ultimatum, how he had been content to mumble something into his straggly moustache, and drift away to tend potted hyacinths in his greenhouse. It was curious how, during all the years when the children were growing up, Edgar must have continued to think about That Thing, the Thing that had come between them during the first hours of their Bournemouth honeymoon, when she had at length been brought face to face with the appalling demands men could make upon the women they married! Even a man like poor, wispy, skimpy, little Edgar!
Just across the road, at Number Twenty-Two, lived another wartime recluse, white-faced, earnest and amiable Harold Godbeer, solicitor’s clerk, of Stillman and Vickers, St. Paul’s Churchyard.
Before the war Number Twenty-Two had been among the most contented homes in the Avenue. Eunice Godbeer, formerly Eunice Fraser, had married her Harold in the mid-twenties, after a courtship lasting several years. Courting had begun on Harold’s part, after Eunice’s appeal for professional advice, following the death of her Scots mother-in-law.
Eunice was a soft, small-boned, flaxen-haired, little woman. In those days she had reminded the bachelor Harold of helpless Mrs. Copperfield, adrift in a world of widow’s problems, the solving of which would be a privilege to any susceptible bachelor. For years, however, his courtship did not prosper. Esme, Eunice’s only child by her first marriage, had interposed between Harold and his heart’s desire, for young Esme was a romantic, and had made a hero out of his dead soldier father. Because of this he did not take kindly to a stepfather who made his living in an office, drafting conveyances, and scratching about in the deed-boxes of the dead.
Then, unexpectedly, the fog had lifted, and the way to the altar was clear. Esme, and his friend little Judy Carver, next door, had become embroiled in a ridiculous dispute about a bag of confetti, sold to them by a huckster, at the Shirley Easter fair, and Harold, a bespectacled knight-errant, had come galloping to the rescue. As a direct result of this encounter Esme’s entire attitude towards clerkly stepfathers had changed overnight, and Harold had won his fair lady in a canter.
Then Esme had grown up, and married Elaine Frith, the dark, exciting, rather mysterious girl who lived directly opposite to Number Twenty-Two, and the young couple had delighted everybody by making their new home further down the Avenue.
In less than a year, little Barbara had been born, giving all of them such short-lived delight, for Barbara was now the cause of her grandparents’ separation, and in his lonelier moments Harold could not help asking himself why it should be he, a mere step-grandfather, who was denied the comfort and solace of his wife for the duration, when the child’s mother, Elaine, could have evacuated herself at will, taken charge of the child, and sent Eunice home to the blitz and Harold.
In the days before the war Harold had sometimes yearned for solitude. He was the kind of man who liked to come home from the office, eat a cold supper, put on his slippers, and lose himself in a careful scrutiny of The T
imes.
After that he liked to listen to brass bands on the radio, or potter about the house, embellishing it, and increasing its capital value, by applying little touches of primrose paint, or installing extra cupboard-space.
He soon discovered, however, that Eunice much preferred light conversation, but in more than ten years of married life he had still not acquired the habit of seeming to listen without listening, or of making a tame husband’s monosyllabic replies to his wife’s endless small-talk.
After Esme had married, Harold had lost a valuable ally, and was left to swim against the tide of small-talk alone. The result was that he sat down to read an article on far Eastern policy, and then, unaccountably, found himself running an eye up and down the stock market column, or studying the obituaries. He also lost patience with Eunice sometimes because of her irritating habit of performing several trivial tasks at once, particularly late at night, when he was tired and anxious to sleep.
He would lie in bed, with the sheets up to his chin, glumly watching her, as she pottered to and fro in a pretty pink nightdress, or sat brushing her long, soft hair, rubbing her cheeks with cream, or hanging and re-hanging frocks in the mahogany wardrobe. Contemplating her at times like this he would marvel that any woman alive could take so long to achieve so little.
On these occasions his mind sometimes slunk back to his cosy bachelor lodgings, in Outram Crescent, beyond the Nursery garden, but he was always able to dismiss these regrets when, at long length, Eunice turned out the light, and snuggled down beside him, warm, soft, and delicately perfumed.
She would then take his hand, tuck it possessively under her breast, and murmur “Goodnight dear, it’s been such a nice day, hasn’t it?” And he had to agree that, taken all round, it certainly had.
The days were not anything like so nice now, or the nights either, what with crowded trains to and from the city, cheerless news about shipping losses, the terrifying isolation of dear Old England, and the constant, stomach-churning wail of the siren from the A.R.P. post, in Shirley Rise. It was a miserable business to get up and dress after a broken night’s sleep, and come downstairs to make one’s own toast on the gas-stove, in a fireless kitchen. It was just as depressing to come home, tired and low-spirited to an empty hearth, at the end of the day, to thresh about the big double bed, night after night, to reach out one’s arm, and find nothing but emptiness, to yearn and yearn for the warmth of a silly, pretty, chattering little woman who, never once, in all the years they had been married, had been anything but submissive and generous to him, once she really had turned out the light, and could think of no new topic to discuss with him.
One way and another Harold was having a tiresome war, and if it had not been for his new-found friendship with Jim Carver, the big, solemn Socialist, next door, he might have thrown up the sponge long since, resigned his head clerkship, and hurried down to Devonshire to dodge bombs, and keep Eunice and little Barbara company.
By way of contrast Jim Carver, of Number Twenty was by no means as depressed by the war. Jim had been a widower many years, and his elder daughter, Louise, had cared for him, and for the rest of his family, with great skill and thoughtful economy, ever since his wife had died in the ’flu epidemic shortly before he came home from France, in 1919.
Since Dunkirk Jim Carver had been more at peace with himself than he had been since the days of the General Strike, for at last his crusading zeal had been released into an officially authorised assault on the triple citadel of graft, cruelty, and social injustice.
Ever since Armistice Day, 1918, Jim Carver had been crusading. On that momentous day he had seen a vision that seared his soul, even as the soul of St. Paul had been seared, on the road to Damascus. On that day he had seen a dead boy on a bank, just outside Mons, a boy he believed to have been sacrificed not to freedom, or democracy, but to the stupidity and vanity of a potbellied base major, who had ordered a last-minute suicidal attack on a German machine-gun post.
Over the corpse of the boy whom he believed to have been the final casualty of the First World War, Jim Carver had sworn an oath. He had sworn to devote the remainder of his life to the abolition of war, and the system that made wars inevitable.
So far as he was able he had kept that oath. For years now he had stumped about the suburb, preaching the gospel of the Brotherhood of Man, and the League of Nations, but so far his only reward for these endeavours had been a flagrant succession of betrayals. He had been collectively betrayed by the governments of the world, and by his own government in particular. He had seen the workers betrayed by white-collar volunteers in 1926, and again, by their own, worthless leaders, in 1931. He had seen Abyssinia betrayed by the City of London, in 1935, Spain betrayed by the League itself in 1936, and Czechoslovakia betrayed by all and sundry in 1938. The final betrayal, the most shattering of all, had come from the Left, in August 1939, and when, not long afterwards, Russia had swept into Poland, and then turned its guns on Finland, Jim came very near to despair, which seethed within him right through the period of the phoney war, until it erupted over the beaches of Dunkirk.
Then, at one minute, fifty-nine seconds to doomstroke, Winston Churchill had spoken up—Churchill—a man who, until that historic moment, Jim Carver had always disliked, and distrusted, the politician whom he had labelled a turncoat, and a typical autocrat of the ruling caste, but a man who, at that hour, said the things that Jim would have liked to have said, and did things that he would have liked to have done, and in the way that Jim would have said and done them!
For a day or two, before Churchill took office, Jim hovered over the abyss of utter hopelessness, and then, under the impetus of Churchill’s fight-on-the-beaches broadcast, he moved cautiously into the Valley of Hope. Here, Jim told himself, was a Man, and a man worth following! Here was someone who, for all his shifts, and cynicisms in the past, knew England, and Englishmen, and knew what he was fighting for, a man, moreover, who was not prepared to fool himself or anyone else about the bloodiness and immensity of the tasks ahead.
Already a full-time A.R.P. worker, Jim at once joined the Home Guard. One glorious morning, when crippled Junkers came fluttering over the suburb, he actually took a pot shot at Fascism with a real rifle, and saw the aircraft explode in flames, on a patch of gorse just over the hill. He cheered and danced as though his shot had brought the aircraft to earth.
From the summer of 1940 Jim dedicated himself to war with all the single-mindedness that he had dedicated himself to peace. There was no effort that he would not make to further the cause of democracy. In between long spells of duties at the A.R.P. Centre, he somehow found time to instruct middle-aged neighbours in the art of grenade-throwing, and when this was done, he hurried home to help Jack Strawbridge, Louise’s ponderous husband, to dig for victory, in the old Nursery, behind the house. He encouraged Harold, his next-door neighbour, to start a local Savings Group, and when this was underway he moved from house to house along the Avenue, soliciting aluminium cooking utensils for Beaverbrook’s Spitfire drive.
He was exalted, and inspired, as he had not been since 1914, when he had walked into a Hammersmith recruiting office, and volunteered to fight Kaiser Bill.
The war had scattered Jim’s family. His fourteen-year-old quarrel with Archie, over the boy’s betrayal of the workers’ cause by enrolling as a Special during the General Strike, had been set aside for Louise’s wedding before the war, but it had never really healed, and when father and son passed one another in Shirley Rise they did no more than exchange a casual greeting. Nowadays, however, Archie’s approach to life ceased to worry Jim, who was too busy to ponder what the boy was doing at that corner shop of his, or what part he was playing, if any, in the overthrow of tyranny. Archie was a bad egg, and best forgotten. Fortunately this was easily done, for Jim had two younger sons of whom to be proud.
Bernard and Boxer, the Unlike Twins, whom he had dismissed in pre-war days as empty-headed, speed-crazy young idiots, had turned up trumps after all. They ha
d been out with the B.E.F., in ’39, and had fought their way home across the entire breadth of France, to turn up unscathed, weeks after the wreck of the army had trickled back from Dunkirk. In their own way they had been heroes, slightly comical heroes, perhaps, but deserving an Avenue triumph, for all the might of Hitler’s panzers had not vanquished them, and now they had volunteered to train as Commandos, and were gleefully scaling cliffs, and blowing up buildings, in a Highland stamping ground.
They turned up in the Avenue from time to time, having thumbed or fiddled their way across England, using the same methods, one assumed, as they had employed in France. They were taut, bronzed, and spoiling for a fight, and Jim looked at them with quiet pride, as they sat wolfing his bread and tinned beans, in the kitchen of Number Twenty. The thought of what they would do to the next Nazi they encountered uplifted him, and increased his confidence in ultimate victory.
Jim had one other member of the family serving in the Forces—Judy, his younger daughter, and the favourite among his children.
Judy had joined the W.A.A.F. a week after she received news that her husband, the young infantry officer whom Jim had met but once, at the wedding, had been drowned in a torpedoed troopship. Poor Judy, he reflected, had only been married about a month, and his heart bled for her, but she seemed to have rallied very quickly, and found some kind of anodyne for her grief on the plotting tables of a fighter-station, during the Battle of Britain.
When she came on leave, in September, Jim gained the impression that she was over the worst of it, and might even marry again given time, perhaps to one of those slim, clear-eyed youngsters, who had put up such a wonderful show over South-Eastern England during the summer.
As it happened Jim was wrong about Judy, but he was a man who saw life in broad outline and was by nature prevented from estimating, even approximately, the extent of the damage that the death of Tim Ascham had done to the heart of his favourite child. He had no means of knowing, nor indeed had anyone else, that when Judy’s daily spell of duty was done, when she had undressed and climbed into her little iron cot, alongside girls gaily discussing forthcoming dates, she sometimes had to drag her mind away from Tim Ascham’s infectious chuckle, and his plain, freckled face, lest she should suddenly break down and sob like a child, or scream at her room-mates—“For God’s sake stop talking about men as if they were trophies! They’re going to die! Almost all of them are going to die, just as mine died!”
The Avenue Goes to War Page 2