Of course she never did lose control, and her billet-mates thought of her as a shy, rather mousey little thing, a shade too conscientious about her work, and too fastidious to profit from the unit’s access to an almost unlimited number of young men.
Jim’s youngest children, the girl twins, known along the Avenue as Fetch and Carry, or simply as ‘The Likes’, had not joined the Forces. The outbreak of war found them serving as waitresses in a West End café, where the tips were good, and the customers moderately gallant. Both had inherited Jim’s big, muscular frame, and long, loose limbs. They were approaching their twenty-second birthday now, and a generation earlier they might have been described as ‘fine women’. They were certainly robust, and could whisk across a room carrying a tray loaded with heavy china, or kick open a service door with large, square, feet. They sang and whistled as they worked, and when they laughed in the kitchen all the customers heard them in the shop. Like their twin brothers, Bernard and Boxer, they were seldom seen apart, and always operated as a team, but in their case nobody could have said which of them took the lead. They seemed to arrive at conclusions simultaneously, and when they spoke they usually said the same thing, the one a split second after the other, so that hearing them was rather like listening to an echo.
They still lived at home, travelling up on the 9.5, so as to be on duty in time to serve morning coffee, and returning on the 6.35, after the dinner team had relieved them. In the train they read True Love Stories, buying only one copy, and holding it between them all the way home.
They were never any trouble to Jim, to their sister Louise, or to anyone else. They minded their own, and each other’s business. Everyone in the Avenue liked them, but somehow they did not impress people as did the older twins, Bernie and Boxer.
Over at Number Forty-Three, where Ted Hartwell the jazz orchestra leader had lived with his wife Margy since the early ‘thirties’, the house was often empty and silent for weeks at a time. Ted was away at sea, a steward on a tanker, and Margy, who had been queen of the Hartnell Eight before the war, and had succeeded, in that capacity, in converting her shambling sunny-natured, tune-tapping husband into a professional musician of some standing, had assembled a new orchestra and taken it away on an E.N.S.A. tour to the camps.
There had been heartache and disappointment at Number Forty-Three since Dunkirk. Ted was almost forty years of age when war broke out, and had never had an unsyncopated idea in his head until he engaged a Bavarian refugee to play in his band. The Bavarian was a Jew, known as Nikki, who had escaped from the Nazis by the skin of his teeth, in 1937. His father and brothers had disappeared into a concentration camp, and he himself had been badly shaken by his own experiences when he had met Ted, and given him a first-hand account of what it was like to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.
From the moment of his meeting with Nikki, Ted changed. Like everyone else in Britain he had read newspaper reports about concentration camps, and uniformed bullies, who called on their victims by night, but somehow it had not registered with him until he actually heard it described first-hand by Nikki. Once the facts were absorbed by him they drove jazz music out of his head, and made him long to become an active crusader, like Jim Carver, across the road.
Margy, his wife, was very irritated by the change in him. Throughout the long, dull months of the phoney war she had argued interminably with him, pointing out that no matter how terrible things might be in Berlin, or in Munich, they had nothing whatever to do with the engagement book of the Hartnell Eight, an orchestra sponsored by a man well over military age.
But Ted couldn’t see it this way at all. He said that he was still young enough to do something to dismay Heinrich Himmler, and Margy was obliged to resort to desperate measures to prevent him from enlisting in the Pioneer Corps, the day after the Invasion of Poland.
Up to that moment they had both been too busy and too mobile, to start a family, but when Margy saw that nothing else was likely to dissuade him from making a fool of himself, and sacrificing their goodwill and broadcast dates on the altar of Democracy, she at once set about starting one, and her announcement did succeed in compelling him to postpone enlistment for a spell.
For a very short spell, however, for the Dunkirk epic started it all up again, and the threat of invasion turned Ted into a patriot of the 1914 vintage. Without saying another word to her he went off and enlisted in the Ordnance Corps, and was called up shortly before Margy’s baby was due to arrive.
The child was still-born, and no wonder, moaned Margy, for Ted was invalided out of the Ordnance Corps almost at once, but instead of coming home with the good news the fool dropped in at a shipping office and put down his name for sea service in the cook’s galley!
The Merchant Service it seemed, was not nearly so fussy about physical fitness as the Ordnance Corps, and before Margy was out of the nursing home Ted was away on the high seas, en route for Venezuela!
She had one letter from him, posted in the Madeiras, but after that no further word for months and months. Half mad with anxiety, and bored stiff with waiting about the house for the postman, she marched out of Number Forty-Five one morning, swept together the wrecks of three disbanded orchestras, and set out on a tour of the camps. At one of their two-night stands she ran into Nikki, the refugee, but although by no means a vindictive woman, she could not bring herself to discuss Ted with him. If it hadn’t been for Nikki, she reflected, she and Ted might have made a good thing out of the war, and ultimately fought clear of suburban engagements, and modest summer tours. Nor was that all! By some tortuous process of reasoning she persuaded herself that Nikki, blast him and his concentration camps, was responsible for the stillbirth of her child!
Few households in the Avenue had changed as little as that of Number Four, where Edith Clegg, and her sister Becky, had now lived quietly for nearly thirty years.
The Clegg sisters had lived in the Avenue longer than any other family, and people who moved in during the First World War remembered that Becky had once been regarded as rather less than half-witted. She had, they were told, some sort of mental ailment, that drove her to appear at her garden fence, from time to time, clad only in a night-dress, in order to summon her cat, Lickapaw, who had lived wild for long spells, in the abandoned nursery behind the even numbers.
Lickapaw was dead now, and lay buried in the garden of Number Four, under a headboard marked with his name and age, but although Becky had long ceased to appear at the fence in night attire, her reputation for feeble-mindedness lingered among the older residents, and they were not unduly surprised when they heard, via Mrs. Hooper, of Number Six, that ‘the fair-haired one was having her spells again’!
Becky’s spells as they were called, had been a great trial to her plump and sweet-tempered sister, Edith. They had begun early in the century, after Becky, then a handsome girl of twenty-two, had been rescued by her sister from a tenement in Lambeth, after a disastrous runaway marriage to a wandering artist whom the sisters had met in their Devon village, where their father had once been priest-in-charge.
Edith had found her, several months after the elopement, badly bruised in mind and body, and poor Becky had never quite recovered her wits. At certain times she would retreat wholly into the past, and imagine that they were still the rector’s daughters, in a village on the shores of Bideford Bay, or that she was still living with her husband, Saul, and expecting his child, or simply preparing supper against his return.
In the early ‘twenties’, soon after Edith had taken in Ted Hartnell as a lodger, and the three of them began living such pleasant, musical lives at Number Four, Becky’s spells had become far less frequent, although she was still liable to confuse tradesmen who called at the back door with boys who had been killed on the Somme, years and years ago. Under the impetus of war, however, her wits began to fail again, and about the time of Dunkirk she had returned from a shopping visit on the Lower Road one evening, and set about frying supper for Saul, whom she declared she had encounte
red outside the Odeon.
For a time Edith was half-convinced that she really had seen the man with whom she eloped all those years ago, but then Becky had begun to knit for her baby, and Edith, sick at heart, soon realised that the shock and excitement of the war had caused the spells to begin all over again. She called in the doctor, and was relieved when he assured her that there was no immediate danger of ‘putting Becky away’, but that she would need ‘keeping an eye on’. This injunction did not worry Edith unduly. She had been keeping an eye on Becky for nearly forty years, and was on very friendly terms with dear, strong Mr. Carver only a few houses away, who would always come to her aid if she needed him. It would mean, however, that Becky could not be left alone for long, and this looked like curtailing Edith’s visits to the cinema, which was a great shame seeing that she had only just recaptured her earlier enthusiasm for films, after seeing the epic ‘Gone With the Wind’, in glorious technicolour.
Edith had once worked in the Odeon as pianist, but that was in the old silent-picture days, when it was called the Granada, and poor, dear Rudi was alive, and no one had heard of Al Jolson. After Mr. Billington, the Granada proprietor, had installed the talkie apparatus, in 1929, Edith had lost her job, and she had been years getting accustomed to stars who used their lips instead of their eyes, and a heaving bosom, to convey a simple statement such as ‘I love you, I’ll always Love you!’
It was the depressing aspect of the Avenue under the strain of total war that had driven Edith back to the cinema, and she had been immensely cheered to discover that it still retained its magic for her, and only needed ‘a little getting used to’. Perhaps their girl lodger, Jean McInroy, would take charge of Becky once a week, and enable her to sit through at least one feature film a week, providing she attended matinées. After all, she reflected, everything worth while was being spoiled or dislocated, by that awful man Hitler. Surely the occasional solace of the cinema would not be denied her?
Like her neighbour Jim Carver, Jean McInroy, Edith’s lodger since the week after Ted Hartnell had married, was finding some consoling factors in total war.
Jean was a commercial artist, and up to September, 1939, she had earned a reasonable living illustrating magazine stories, and press advertisement copy.
She was a very pretty girl, and almost every man who passed her in the street, or sat opposite her in the ’bus, kept her in view for as long as was practicable. For all that she was now twenty-six and still unclaimed.
Young men seemed to go to extraordinary lengths to get acquainted with her, but these friendships never developed into courtship, the reason being that poor Jean had a large cavity in the roof of her mouth, that made coherent conversation with her almost impossible. She could make a variety of gobbling, nasal sounds, and people who were used to her, like Edith for instance, had little difficulty in understanding her, but the affliction proved a hopeless handicap in the early stages of courting, and Jean had long since abandoned any idea of forming a permanent association with one of the young men attracted by her pretty face and figure.
Instead of grieving over what couldn’t be helped she did a sensible thing, the kind of thing that one might expect from a girl with sensible Scots blood in her veins. She created her own man, a dream man, and called him The Ideal British Male. She went one better. She made him provide for her, by putting him into almost every sketch she sold to the advertisement agencies, for whom she worked on commission.
Almost everyone in the Avenue was familiar with Jean’s Ideal Man although, to all but Edith, he was simply a sketch inside the frame of an advertisement or story illustration. They all knew him, however, without connecting him with his creator, Jean. He was six feet in height, had broad shoulders, nice, but not effeminate wavy hair, a long, lean, leave-it-to-me-little-woman jaw, a slightly sunburned complexion, radiant good health, and blue, Empire building eyes. He also possessed the distinct advantage of being able to supply his wife and family with anything on the market, from a sleek white sports car, like the one Archie Carver drove, to a surprise box of chocolates for stay-at-home-wifie, or a tin of high-grade sardines for the children’s tea. He was incapable of letting anyone down and he was the perfect lover, always saying the right things in the right way and at the right time, and always tender, manly, true, and courageous things, like: “This isn’t the end, Jean darling. Some day I’ll return to you, and when I do your heart will tell you how I regarded you through the empty years between….”
Fetch and Carry, the twins of Number Twenty, were very familiar with Philip, the Ideal British Male, whom they encountered each day in their magazines, and even the sour Esther Frith, of Number Seventeen, was dimly aware of him, for he appeared in advertisements for washing powders in all the daily papers. Only Jean, his creator, however, knew that he actually existed in the flesh, and that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, her duty nights with the Auxiliary Fire Service, at the Fire Station in Cawnpore Road, she had the heavenly privilege of handing him a cup of tea in an enamel mug, and watching him demonstrate the use of the stirrup-pump to beginners.
After years and years of scrutiny in trains, ’buses, and crowded city and suburban streets, Jean had at last come face to face with the Ideal British Male in the person of Chief Officer Hargreaves, head of the suburb’s fire service. She had lost no time in joining the A.F.S., in order to be near him, and watch over him, and see that he got his tea hot, fresh and strong, whenever he needed it. He was almost unaware of her, of course, and had hardly addressed a word to her in all the time she had known him, but he smiled his warm, kind smile when she put his mug of tea down in front of him, and said: “Thank you, Miss McInroy,” in the soft but deep-throated voice she always knew that Philip would use when she found him.
One day, perhaps, something would happen that would bring them together.
He was unmarried, and appeared to be without attachment of any kind, besides which, God would hardly have brought them together so miraculously had He not had some positive development in mind.
So Jean slipped gaily into her blue slacks on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and tripped blithely down Shirley Rise to the fire station, while overhead the enemy bomber fleets began to multiply with the shortening of the days, and the people of the Avenue waited to see what Armageddon had in store for them, both individually, and as a community.
CHAPTER II
Incident
ON THE NIGHT of November 5th, 1940, Jim Carver went on duty at eight o’clock, moving along the Avenue, head down, shoulders hunched against thin, driving rain.
As he was turning into Shirley Rise, to make his way up the hill to the Aid Post, the siren began to warble, and he quickened his step, his rubber boots clumping over the wet flags, his khaki haversack, packed with Louise’s sandwiches, bumping against his hip and reminding him, almost without him being aware of it, of blundering ration-party trips up the Line, under very similar weather conditions, more than twenty years before.
He walked surely in almost complete darkness, his hands stretched out to break the force of a collision with a lamppost, or telegraph pole; as he edged round the wide bend, towards the junction of Upper Road, he saw a faint glow in the sky over to the north-east. They were making another night of it apparently. Before midnight the suburbs would have bonfires enough, and on a scale undreamed of in prewar Guy Fawkes’ celebrations.
His mind travelled back a decade and he remembered the bonfires he had made for his children in the ‘twenties’ and early ‘thirties’. He recalled how Boxer, who always delighted in these occasions, had thrown a twopenny cannon into the garden of Harold Godbeer, next-door, and received a smart box on the ear in consequence. He remembered another year, the year a spark from the bonfire had landed in the cardboard box containing the family’s pooled fireworks, and the whole evening’s fun being concentrated into one mad, explosive minute, with crackers leaping in every direction, and Judy screaming with fear, while that young devil, Boxer capered about in the midst of the const
ellation, shouting with laughter, and looking like a demon from the pit.
The glow in the sky broadened and his mind returned to the present. How were people taking this non-stop assault? How long would it be before they cracked under the strain of terror, and sleeplessness? It was only November now and before them stretched months of long, winter nights, most of which looked like being spent on makeshift beds, in minute-by-minute expectation of sudden death. It was well enough for men like himself, men who had endured, and survived, years of concentrated bombardment, under far worse conditions. An experience like that helped to put the thing in a proper perspective. Out there the German gunners had usually had the line taped to an inch, and had sometimes strafed it for hours on end, without killing or even wounding, more than a tenth of the trench garrison. The chance of being hit and killed by a bomb dropped at random, on a city the size of London, was negligible. There was more chance, they said, of being run over in the blackout, and casualty returns had so far proved as much. But how did you convince people of things like this? How could you persuade dear old souls like Edith Clegg, of Number Four, or poor old Harold Godbeer, next-door, that it was more than a thousand to one against their being killed by blast, or crushed under falling masonry?
So far everyone had behaved extraordinarily well, as good or better, than the new drafts of youngsters pushed into the line after the 1918 break-through had behaved, but would it last? Could untrained civilians stand up to this kind of punishment?
The Avenue Goes to War Page 3