She had always had an electrician call on her specially to fix the lights and she never hesitated to fetch him back again if something went wrong with them and they winked out before Christmas Eve. She was also in the habit of buying a few shillingsworth of holly each year, and sticking sprigs behind all the pictures in the house. Sometimes in addition, Becky sat in the kitchen, with a bowl of home-made paste in front of her and made long, paper chains that were then suspended from the centre lights of the hall and sitting-room.
This year Edith was disappointed when she called at the seedsman’s, on December 21st.
“’Olly, and a Christmas Tree, m’m? I’m afraid you’ve had that, this year,” said the man, massaging his bald patch, and looking at her with astonishment.
Edith was not at all familiar with the new Air Force slang and not unnaturally misunderstood him.
“Indeed I haven’t had it,” she protested, rather testily for her, for her temper had been subjected to the same stresses and strains as everybody else’s in the Avenue. “How could I have had it? I only remembered it this morning and came out straight away to buy it.”
The man grinned.
“I mean you can’t have it, because there isn’t any,” he explained, making a mental note of the conversation with the intention of passing it on to his son Roddy, who was serving in the R.A.F. “It’s just that we haven’t any trees at all this year and as for ’olly, well, I reckon there’s plenty about, but no one’s got round to picking it and bringing it in for sale!”
“But that’s very extraordinary, isn’t it?” argued Edith, “after all, it is Christmas week.”
“There’s a war on, m’m,” said the seedsman, and grinned so offensively that Edith had to resist an impulse to strike him smartly on his bald patch with her shopping bag, as she had once struck Mrs. Rolfe, of Number Eight, when the horrid woman had been so rude about poor dear young Edward and his nice Mrs. Simpson, in 1936.
Edith returned to the Avenue in very low spirits, reflecting how, in the past, she had taken Christmas trees and Christmas holly very much for granted, just as she had taken for granted so many aspects of life in the Avenue. Now, it would seem, festive decorations had gone the way of almost everything else that was pleasant and familiar in life, swallowed up in the welter of shortages, restrictions, and prohibitions of total war, like the amount of butter one might spread on one’s bread, or the number of sugar-lumps one could put in one’s tea.
A little spurt of rage followed these reflections, and it was rage directed against that dreadful little man with the toothbrush moustache, who was responsible for all this upset. Why didn’t one of his own countrymen assassinate him and restore things to normal? Why didn’t God, who must surely regard him as the Arch-fiend personified, strike him dead with that cancer in the throat that the newspapers said he was already afflicted with? How long Edith asked herself, was he going to be allowed to make their lives so drab and wretched? Nobody had had a moment’s peace since he began to rant and roar into microphones and march his savage-looking hordes into other people’s countries!
Two years ago Edith would have been horrified to catch herself hoping that even Adolf Hitler would die of cancer of the throat and even now, as her natural kindness flooded back, she felt a little ashamed of such dreadful thoughts. After all, it was Christmas, and even the Germans celebrated Christmas, didn’t they? ‘Silent Night’ was a German tune surely, and didn’t Christmas trees originate from Germany, or from somewhere near Germany?
She paused at the gate of Number Four, as a new thought struck her. Why not go out and find a Christmas tree? Why not take the secateurs from the kitchen tool-box and go out and steal holly from the nearest wood?
The prospect excited her and gave her spirits a distinct lift. The Manor Woods were just across the meadow and there was bound to be at least one little Christmas tree somewhere among that tangle of briars and close-set timber. Holly too! She remembered seeing holly bushes there, when she had walked in the woods before the war. Surely no one would miss a few sprigs of holly, particularly as no one seemed to own the Old Manor nowadays.
She made up her mind on the spot. Going into the house she walked through to the kitchen, found the secateurs, a ball of string, and her gardening gloves, and went briskly out again, crossing the meadow by the cart-track and taking the winding path that led towards the lake in front of the Manor.
She kept a sharp lookout for holly as she pushed her way along the overgrown bridle path. The long briars caught at her thick, woollen stockings and at the hem of her skirt. There were beech trees, oak trees, larch trees and elm trees by the score, but no fir trees and no holly bushes.
She pushed on until she came to the boundary wall of the old kitchen garden, flanking the paved forecourt. The weeds here were waist high and the broken paving was very rough underfoot. She climbed the broken wall of the terrace, and passed along the face of the mansion, where coping stone had crashed down from the first storey and half buried the broad flight of steps leading up from the lake.
The gazebo beside the water had fallen in, and the lake itself was covered with vivid green weed. There was plenty of ivy here but still no holly. Ivy would do, she supposed, but somehow it was not as Christmassy as holly, despite the words of the old carol.
Over on the islet Edith could see fir trees, but there was no means of crossing to them. The punt, that had been moored near the gazebo, had long since rotted through and now lay in two feet of water on the margin of the lake. It had been there since the mid-twenties, when Esme Fraser, and his shield-bearer, little Judy Carver, had been shipwrecked in it, whilst enacting ‘The Passing of Arthur’.
Then, when she had almost made up her mind to abandon the crazy idea and return home empty-handed Edith saw a tiny sapling, growing at the extreme edge of the wood, on the far side of the house. It was a little Scots fir that must have seeded itself and to reach it Edith had to wade through a patch of reed higher than her shoulders.
The embankment here had crumbled away, and lake water had seeped through on to what had once been a croquet lawn. The water was higher than her ankles, but she plunged on, beating her way through the reeds, and wrenching one foot after the other, until at last she climbed the slope to the beech wood and reached the tree.
The little trunk was too thick for her secateurs and she saw that she would have to tear it up by the roots. Small as it was it was deeply rooted and resisted her for some time, but she persevered and finally got it free by scratching away at the loose earth and bringing the secateurs to bear on the slack fibres underneath.
When it came out she grunted with triumph. Her legs, hands and face were plastered with mud, she was sweating freely and her hairpins had fallen out during the struggle, so that long wisps of grey hair now hung down on each side of her face. She laid the tree on the ground and sat down on a fallen beech to recover her breath.
Then she saw the holly bush, about fifty yards off. It was a huge, straggling bush, spreading out between a beech and an elm. Even at this distance she could see there were plenty of berries on the sprigs and getting up she almost ran across the wood, forgetting her gloves that she had peeled off and thrown down whilst she was digging at the tree root.
She penetrated the bush and for ten minutes hacked away at the lower branches, cutting some twenty pieces of holly and pricking her fingers and thumbs in a dozen places. Reaching up for a long, heavily-berried sprig, some five feet from the ground, she felt the elastic supporting her bloomers snap but even this fresh disaster failed to check her enthusiasm and she cut the long sprig and tossed it after the others into the clearing.
Then, holding the secateurs in one hand, and supporting her sagging bloomers with the other, she ploughed her way out of the bush and set about bunching the sprigs. When the bundle was firmly tied it was almost as much as she could drag. She wound the loose end of string round her wrist and hitching at her drooping bloomers with her free hand, she stumbled back to where she had left the tree.
Here she was obliged to consider her position. It was going to be very difficult to return the way she had come, across the marsh, and over the wall, dragging the holly, carrying the tree, and supporting a pair of heavy bloomers, wrinkling about her knees.
She decided that something must be done about the bloomers and after a hasty glance around she cut a length from the string, hitched up her skirts and knotted the cord round her middle.
It crossed her mind then to wonder what her father, the rector, would have said, if somebody had told him that his elder daughter, fifty-eight years old, had tied up her bloomers with string, whilst in the act of trespassing, uprooting trees, and stealing holly from somebody else’s woods. It was, she thought with a surprised giggle, the most improbable situation in which she had ever found herself, so improbable, in fact, that it demanded audible extenuation.
“I’m sorry,” she said aloud, “but how was I to know that such a silly thing would happen, while I was picking a bit of holly for Christmas?”
She took the long way home, round the edge of the wood, across the brook and behind the mansion, to the point where she guessed a foothpath would join the wider ride that opened on to the meadow.
She had never walked along this path before, and it did not appear that anyone had trodden it in years, for it was scarcely more than a rabbit run. The going was terribly hard, so hard indeed, that once or twice she almost abandoned the trailing bunch of holly because it would catch on roots and briars, making every yard of her progress a back-breaking struggle.
The brook, when she reached it was the worst obstacle of all. It was not deep, but its banks had been undercut by the rains of fifty winters and the bridge between them looked so frail and worm eaten that Edith dare not test her weight on it and was obliged to wade across.
Halfway over she lost a shoe and with her hands so full was quite unable to recover it. She staggered up the far bank, gasping, and almost in tears. In her struggles to save the shoe the waistband of her bloomers had worked free of the string girdle and the wretched garment was once again about her knees, making upright movement impossible.
She put down the tree and the holly and retied the string, this time boring a hole in the waistband with the secateurs, and threading the string through the hole, in order to guard against a third descent. Then she faced up to the prospect of pushing through brambles without a right shoe, and after a moment’s thought she took off her woollen scarf and wrapped it round and round her right foot, knotting it securely across the shin.
Gathering up the holly and the tree she set off on the final stage of her journey, emerging some fifteen minutes later into the meadow and crossing it in a series of spurts, spaced by two-minute breathers.
By the time she reached the boundary wall of Number Seventeen she had ceased to care what she looked like. Esther Frith, standing on a chair in the back bedroom and making some adjustment to the blackout curtains, saw the strange, mud-daubed figure walk crabwise into the Avenue. For a moment Esther failed to recognise the occupier of Number Four. The Thing—it could hardly, thought Esther, be a human being—wore one mud-caked shoe and stocking on its left leg, and a plaid scarf wrapped round its right leg. Its hat—Esther supposed it was a hat—was tipped rakishly over its left eye and its iron-grey hair hung in festoons about hunched shoulders. Its garments, such as they were, were ripped in half a dozen places, it clutched an uprooted fir-tree to its muddied bosom and dragged behind it a huge bunch of holly, tied on the end of a length of string!
Esther stared and stared, but still did not know what to make of it, and as she watched the figure passed out of her line of vision and staggered right-handed towards the golf-links end of the Avenue.
The only other person who saw Edith cross from the track to the gate of Number Four was the postman, who was making his mid-day deliveries. He knew Edith well but even he, face to face with her as she came out of the front gate of Number Six, had some difficulty in reconciling the battered, mud-caked figure that limped past him, with the placid little body who gave him half a crown every Boxing Morning, although she rarely received anything more exciting than a circular during the postal year.
“I say, Miss Clegg,” he called out, “you had an accident, m’m?”
Edith paused and faced him. She was breathless, battered, scratched, bruised, and ready to faint with exhaustion. Her clothes were in tatters and her wretched bloomers were on the point of slipping to her knees again. Her scarf-bound foot throbbed and ached after contact with hundreds of brambles, nettles, and sharp stones. Her hair, damp with sweat, obscured her vision, so that she seemed to regard the postman through a shredded mat, but she minded none of these hurts and indignities. Her heart glowed with triumph. Now that she was clear of the woods she felt as though she, personally, had inflicted a crushing defeat on the Forces of Evil, represented by the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe and the U-Boat packs. She pushed aside a hank of hair with a scratched and bleeding forearm.
“No, postman,” she said slowly and deliberately. “I’ve not had an accident, I’ve been getting my decorations for Christmas!” And when the man’s jaw dropped, and he made no immediate reply; she added: “After all, I don’t see why we’ve all got to forget it’s Christmas, just because That Little Beast doesn’t believe in it, do you?”
“Well…nnno…” stuttered the postman, “no, I suppose not, Miss Clegg,” and he stood watching her fumble with her elbow at the latch of her gate, far too astonished and overcome to leap forward and assist her.
CHAPTER V
Music At Sea
ONE OTHER MEMBER of the Avenue’s pre-war community thought of Christmas decorations on that particular day, December 21st, but he had no opportunity to gather any. The memory of Edith’s Christmas tree, as it had appeared in the window of Number Four every year before the war, invaded his waking dreams, as he lay drifting in an open boat, some three thousand miles from the wood in which Edith was trespassing.
The Christmas tree had come into his mind because he had got his dates mixed, and was convinced that it was already Christmas Eve. It was difficult to make an accurate reckoning of the time they had spent in the boat, since the tanker had exploded after two direct hits by a U-boat. Sometimes, it seemed to Ted Hartnell, one-time stonemason, subsequently jazz-drummer, that he had been lying here, his head on the gunwale, his face upturned to a brassy sky, for the better part of a lifetime. At other times he did not seem to be at sea at all, but back on the ragtime circuit, with Al Swinger’s Rhythmateers, beating it up in some airless, suburban institute, or dance-hall, rattling away at ‘Yes Sir, that’s my Baby’, or one of the wonderful hit-tunes of the early days, a tune like ‘Valencia’, or the record-breaking ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart’.
The waltzes returned to him more frequently than the quicksteps, or fox-trots, for the slow slap-slap of the sea against the thwarts was a waltz measure.
They had been adrift now for eleven days, the tanker having gone to the bottom on the night of the tenth, when the ship was less than a week out of Montevideo. Since then they must have drifted hundreds of miles west.
Gunter, the second mate, who was in nominal charge of the lifeboat, told them that prevailing winds and currents would carry them due west and that soon, at any time now, they would see the coastline of South America.
They had all believed him at first, until Lofty, the big stoker, had gone raving mad waiting for the coast to show up and had leapt overboard and disappeared, before they could throw him a line, or tell him that what he thought was land was only a bank of low cloud. The cloudbank faded out soon after Lofty, abandoning the boat to a limitless space of flat water and empty sky, in which the sun glowed and glowed from first light until merciful dusk.
There were only nine of them left in the boat now, for Chips, and the Negro greaser, had been badly scalded in the second explosion, and had both died on the third day adrift. They had stopped rowing after that, husbanding their strength, such as it was, for a concerted signalling e
ffort if they saw a smudge of smoke on the horizon.
The only breaks in the monotony of the long days were Gunter’s night and morning issue of rations, two malted milk tablets and about a wine glass full of water apiece, just sufficient to make them start sweating again and clamour for their turn under the awning of shirts and swabs that had been rigged in the narrow bows. There was only sufficient space under the awning for two at a time, so they took turn and turn about, lurching forward when Gunter, who sat rigidly in the stern, issued the command.
Now that Lofty was gone they seemed to have exhausted all topics of conversation. Lofty had kept them amused for more than seventy-two hours, describing the women that he had consorted with in the shanty-towns of ports all over the world, dilating on the various merits of Creoles, and Papuans, and the horizontal accomplishments of West Indian mammies and Boston dolls. Now Lofty had gone, ‘to look for a mermaid’ as Gunter had put it, rather unfeelingly thought Ted, who had been fond of the big, jolly stoker.
In the intervals of dreaming about Edith’s prewar Christmas trees, arguing with the Second-Mate about the date, and humming dance tunes of the ‘twenties’, and ‘thirties’, Ted Hartnell put in some repair work on his Mexican harmonica, the one piece of personal property that he had saved when he slid down the davits, and fell into the starboard boat a few minutes after the first impact.
He had purchased the harmonica at their first port of call, never having seen an instrument like it in a London musical store. In his jazz-band days he had not been much attracted to harmonica playing. For him it lacked the beat of the banjo, ukulele, banjolele, or even the mandolin, all of which he played expertly. Neither did it possess the blare and summons of conventional wind instruments, like the sax’, or the trumpet, and it was without the compelling ‘itchiness’ of drums and clappers, or the nostalgic wail of the accordion and concertina.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 6