When he returned she had a lorry waiting. They drove across the dispersal area towards the Waffery and two L.A.C.W.s emerged, one carrying a spruced up Barbara, and the other Barbara’s freshly ironed blanket. Behind them came an overalled A.C.W., with a small armful of toys, and behind her yet another girl, carrying Judy’s attaché case.
“Good God,” laughed Esme, “it’s a ruddy ceremonial!”
“Call again any time,” said the L.A.C.W. with the blanket, “linen laundered, children welcome, single airmen entertained after lights out!”
“And the next time see that she goes on ration strength,” said the girl in the overall, “she’s been eating like a horse all the time we’ve had her!”
The guard came out to the wire gate to watch them pass through into the road, and as the lorry driver slipped into neutral, he winked down at the corporal, and jerked his head to the nearside of the cabin, where Judy sat, with Barbara on her knees.
The corporal took the hint.
“Preseennnnnnt hi!” he shouted, and the men about him, quickly catching on, shuffled into line, and smartly presented arms.
“You see?” said Judy, to the smiling but embarrassed Esme, “she’s practically a V.I.P. around camp!”
CHAPTER X
First Gap
SPRING, 1941, AND the Avenue still intact!
Behind it, at the corner of Delhi Road, and in several places along the Cawnpore Road, and Lucknow Road, the scars of the winter siege showed in uniform façades. Immediately west of the Avenue there were several large craters in the downsweep of the links, and a huge pyramid of freshly-turned soil where the Ninth green had been sited, against the dwarf oaks of The Lane.
Eastward, the ‘Rec’ itself was showing scars. The bowls pavilion was in splinters, hit by a land mine, that had showered wreckage as far away as the back gardens of Outram Crescent. Where the bandstand had once stood, and Ted Hartnell had played for a season of open-air dancing, were now piles of wrecked and twisted seats, scattered here and there in the uncut grass, with buttercups already thrusting up among the rusting frames.
There had been one or two minor incidents on the night of the Great Fire, when the sky beyond the nursery turned bright orange and people in the back rooms of the even numbers had read newspapers in the glare of burning office blocks. A stray incendiary had whipped through the roof of Number Eighteen, next door to the Carvers, but Jack Strawbridge, fire-watching in the back lane, had been on the spot within ten seconds and had dealt with it in twenty more.
Over at Number Ninety-Seven, the Baskerville Family, snug in their de luxe shelter (now fitted with spring bunks, a radio, and electric light)had had their anxious moment, when anti-aircraft shrapnel smashed down on their greenhouse only a few yards away, but no one was hurt, and Mr. Baskerville had poked his head out and reported, chirpily: “Just the glass! Just the glass! What goes up has got to come down, kids!”
Under the impetus of the blitz, Mr. Baskerville, always the Avenue’s jolly-man, was developing into a tireless raconteur. He now had an endless fund of blitz stories, acquired during his regular journeys to and from the City each day. It was unfortunate that he could never remember which of his neighbours he had travelled up or down with on the previous day, so that some of the more long-suffering Avenue husbands were obliged to hear the same stories twice or thrice, and were unable to head them off, because Mr. Baskerville seldom listened to anybody, but did most of the talking himself.
Poor Harold Godbeer, now almost himself again, was obliged to copy the tactics of a fugitive resistance fighter when he saw Mr. Baskerville hurry along the pavement for the 8.40 each morning. He had to gauge whether or not he was out of earshot of Mr. Baskerville’s hail and then act accordingly, either scrambling out of the gate, and increasing the distance between them by breaking into a trot, or flattening himself behind the privet hedge that bordered his front-garden and remaining there until Mr. Baskerville had passed on and buttonholed somebody else. Of these two methods of Baskerville-dodging Harold much preferred the former, in spite of the fact that a brisk trot down Shirley Rise brought on his asthma. If he concealed himself, and let Baskerville pass, he had to dawdle all the way to Woodside and chance missing his train.
Over at Number One, little Miss Baker had successfully weathered the blitz and could now write triumphant letters to her brother and his wife, safe in the Lake District. They were gay, brave, letters and might have proved interesting, had Miss Baker’s relatives been familiar with all the Avenue families. As it was Gregory Baker found them slightly irritating. He was a stranger to the suburb, and had moved north to avoid being bombed. He found it embarrassing to receive a stream of wish-you-were-here messages, from a woman who was semi-paralysed, yet preferred, for some inexplicable reason, to hang on in her dreary little house, risking violent death night by night.
As it happened little Miss Baker was thoroughly enjoying the blitz. In pre-war days Miss Clegg had been her only regular caller, but nowadays all sorts of visitors rapped on her windows, or came round by the alley and let themselves in by the back door.
“You okay, Miss Baker? Can I get you anything, Miss Baker? What price Nicolson Terrace, Miss Baker—four houses down, and only one ruddy canary dead!”
It was all very matey and stimulating and if it wasn’t for the poor people who sometimes got themselves killed she wouldn’t have minded it continuing indefinitely. Air Raid Wardens popped in for cups of tea, at all hours of the day and night, using her gas-stove, and bringing a chipped mug to her bedside. Fire-watchers, like jolly Jack Strawbridge across the road, whistled and waved, as they paced past her window, and on one memorable occasion the chairman of the local Council called on her, and she had her picture taken by a newspaper photographer, and published under a caption: “Move out! Me! Not Pygmalion Likely!”
There was a charm and a friendliness about the Avenue, that it had lacked in pre-war days. It had never housed a cheek-by-jowl community. In spite of its terraced rows, separated here and there by narrow alleys, the families had never developed a community spirit, like those in the streets nearer the Thames. People had always been civil to one another, and some of the families intermingled, but even these seldom used each other’s Christian names, and hardly anybody along the road would have ‘popped in next door’, to borrow a cupful of sugar, or rice.
Only one member of the Avenue rump continued to live in isolation. Esther Frith, at Number Seventeen, had resisted all efforts on the part of her neighbours to loosen up, to mingle on the pavement, or to gossip over the back fence.
Number Seventeen had always been a very silent house, but now it was more silent than ever, for most of the time Esther lived there alone, without even a cat, or a budgerigar, and the only time the people opposite, or the Crispins, on her immediate right, saw any movement in and out of her front gate, was when Esther went shopping, or when Esther’s son, Sydney, came home on leave, from the R.A.F.
Neither was Sydney given to mingling very freely. The only time he had ever been seen to speak to anyone in the Avenue was when he reprimanded young Albert Dodge, of Number Ninety-One, for passing him without giving a salute due to an officer.
Albert was a paratrooper, home from Egypt after an adventurous spell in Crete, and it is doubtful whether Albert would have saluted an R.A.F. officer had he been wearing wings, which Sydney was not.
Sydney, at this stage of the war, was the only commissioned officer in the Avenue, but he was the kind of man who valued salutes, and was very punctilious about returning them. He returned this one before he got it, which was very embarrassing, particularly as Albert Dodge chortled aloud when it happened.
Sydney almost ran after him, piping “I say…I say there!” and Albert, a genial soul, obligingly stopped, and turned round, with an expression of polite interest on his broad, sweating face.
“You called me?” he asked, as Sydney drew level.
“Don’t you salute an officer when you see one?” demanded Sydney, breathlessly.
“Not officers like you, I don’t,” replied Albert truthfully.
Sydney gasped. He had had several previous encounters of this sort, but none of the rankers he had reprimanded had been openly insolent towards him.
“I’d think I’d better have your name and number,” he said, “I daresay you’ll hear more of this.”
“I doubt it,” said Albert, who had volunteered for a second spell of overseas service before coming on leave. He gave his name and number, however, for he was an obliging young man, and he thought it might be amusing to bait Sydney.
Sydney left him, and turned, glowering, into Number Seventeen. He said nothing of the incident to Esther when she set his lunch before him.
The role of mother and son had been reversed in the last few years. Throughout his boyhood Sydney had crept about the house in terror of Esther, who kept a lithe, twopenny cane behind the picture entitled ‘A Tempting Bait’. She had hardly ever used the cane on Sydney, who was her favourite, and upon whom she relied for a steady flow of information about his sister, Elaine, but Sydney occasionally saw it descend on his sister, and until he had passed his seventeenth birthday he had gone out of his way to propitiate his mother.
Since Edgar had run away, and Elaine had followed him, Sydney had usurped the throne at Number Seventeen. He now treated his mother like an old, and exasperating housekeeper. He accepted her slavish ministrations as his right, and when he brought home his fiancée, Cora, he hardly bothered to introduce her to Esther, but said, with a lordly wave of his hand: “This is Miss Gilpin, from the camp. She’ll be staying until Sunday night, mother!”
Cora Gilpin was a civilian typist, attached to Sydney’s accounts section, at Beacon Down Technical Training Depot. She was tall, pale, slightly round-shouldered, and extremely talkative. Sydney had cultivated her after he had failed to make headway with the few W.A.A.F. officers stationed at the camp. There were plenty of other W.A.A.F.s available, but a regulation (of which Sydney wholeheartedly approved) forbade an officer to walk out with a W.A.A.F., so that he was obliged, at length, to fall back on Cora, a civilian seconded from Works and Bricks Section.
Cora dressed well. She could afford to, for she earned three times the amount the W.A.A.F. clerks earned for doing precisely the same work. She had the additional advantage of being free to leave Camp at 5 p.m. without first looking at Daily Routine Orders, to discover whether her name was down for fire picket, or duty clerk.
She was an ideal mate for Sydney, for she shared the same horror of being thought ‘common’. That was why she had hurried into Works and Bricks, and put herself down as a civilian clerk. She had no wish to be put into a common uniform, and share a common billet, with common girls, fishergirls some of them, straight from the herring-sheds of Grimsby, girls who swore freely, and used common expressions, like ‘Wrap up’, and ‘Get knotted’. Cora used but one expletive, that did for almost anything. It was ‘Jeepers-Creepers’, and no one had ever told her it was a genteel cousin of Jesus Christ, so she went on using it, sandwiching it between long and detailed descriptions of how a typing ribbon had become frayed, and jammed the carriage, or what a masterful way Flight Lieutenant Frith had with airmen, at flag-hoisting parades, that she watched each morning from her office window.
A guest of honour, at Number Seventeen, Cora talked and talked and talked, mostly about Sydney, how highly Sydney was regarded by his Commanding Officer, how briskly Sydney presided over pay parades, and how strict Sydney was about the accounts section’s gas-drill.
Esther said little or nothing in reply, but she fed them adequately, using up her own rations, and building a generous coal fire in the front room, where they could be alone, and get on with their courting.
They were here, on the last night of April, when, at about ten o’clock, the Shirley Rise siren sounded, and the Avenue folk, who had slept undisturbed for four nights in a row, began to go through their shelter-drill with the precision of veterans.
Unfortunately neither Sydney nor his fiancée were familiar with air-raids in this district, while Esther, who had now been in bed for more than an hour, had not even told them whether or not she had a shelter, or what she did, or where she went when there was a raid.
Sydney jumped up from the sofa, and drew aside the blackout curtain, in order to look out, and see if he could get a cue from a neighbour, but a warden must have been very close at hand, for a strident voice bawled: “Put that light out, damn you!” with a promptitude that would have warmed the heart of the late Grandpa Barnmeade.
Sydney hopped back in alarm, and Cora, who had become rather tousled in the process of resisting Sydney’s cautious advances, stood up, smoothed down her frock, adjusted the shoulder-strap of her slip, and exclaimed: “Jeepers-Creepers! Where do we go from here?”
Sydney did not know where they should go, and freely admitted as much. He ran into the hall, and up the stairs, tapping on Esther’s door, and calling:
“I say, mother…! I say there…! Where’s your shelter?”
Esther had heard the siren but, as usual, had ignored it, reposing her trust in God, and in the slated roof above her head.
When she heard Sydney call, however, she climbed out of bed, threw a mackintosh over her shoulders, and pattered to the door. She was surprised by the urgency in his voice. After all, he was a soldier, and he surely must be accustomed to air raids by now.
“What did you say, dear?” she asked, opening the door an inch or two.
“I said ‘Where’s your shelter’?” said Sydney testily, “what do you do, when there’s an air-raid?”
Esther blinked once or twice. “There isn’t any shelter in the house, dear, and I’ve never done anything. I believe there is a public shelter in the ‘Rec’, but it’s rather damp, I think. The woman from over the road was telling Mr. Carver only yesterday that…”
Sydney was not interested in the views of the woman from over the road, and grunted his impatience. Back in the camp they had very good shelters, well below ground, lined with concrete, and heavily bunkered above. They were said to be proof against anything but a direct hit, and on the few occasions they had had a raid on the camp all the administrative staff, with the exception of those on duty, had filed into the shelter and waited for the all-clear.
He had imagined, until now, that similar accommodation was available to civilians, and if he had thought about it at all, which he had not, he would have supposed that immediately the siren sounded, Esther would slip into some clothes, and hurry along to the public shelter with everybody else in the neighbourhood. It amazed him that she could be so offhand and casual about air-raids, when bombs had already destroyed whole blocks of houses as close as Delhi Road, beyond the nursery garden.
“Get your things on, and hurry,” he said, cocking an ear for the double throb of enemy aircraft.
But Esther still seemed bemused. “Hurry where, dear?” she asked, mildly.
“To the shelter, where else?” demanded Sydney, with the edge to his voice that he reserved for recruits.
“But I never go there,” protested Esther, “I’ve just told you, Sydney, it’s so damp and…”
Cora called urgently, from the foot of the stairs. She had donned her coat and scarf, and was clutching her handbag.
“Come on, Sydney,” she shouted, “come on—do!”
A few hundred yards away, at the A.R.P. Post, in Shirley Rise, Jim Carver looked up at the sky, and yawned. Another nuisance raid, he imagined, and wondered what had caused this sudden scaling down of the raids. There had been no big attacks now for more than a month, yet small units of the Luftwaffe continued to roam haphazardly about the sky, blitzing here and blitzing there, giving London a small ration, every now and again and behaving, he thought, like a dazed heavyweight boxer in Round Twelve, still hitting out, but soggily, unscientifically.
Then he heard the familiar burp-burp approaching from the south-east, and his ear, trained to an accurate pitch throughout the winter assault, told him th
at heavy aircraft were moving diagonally across the suburb, heading northwest. Perhaps it was Ealing, or Chiswick, but whoever got it would not have to endure much of a raid. There was no real ‘weight’ in the sky.
Sydney heard the throb of aircraft clearly, yet he remained fidgeting about the landing, barking at Esther through her half-open bedroom door.
“For goodness sake, Mother…make up your mind…! We can’t just stand here! Where do you go? What sort of drill do you follow?”
And then, from Cora, at the foot of the stairs, a short burst of direct questions:
“Are we going, or aren’t we? Is there time? Is it wise? Is it far?”
And from Esther, stumbling about in the bedroom:
“I should have to get dressed, Sydney! Often nothing happens, dear, but you go, if you want to, by all means go if you wish to, Sydney…!”
Sydney, standing on the polished linoleum of the landing, felt himself sucked into this maelstrom of indecision. If Esther had panicked he would have known exactly what to do, or if Cora had stopped calling up the stairs he could have made up his mind, but with a havering woman on each floor he felt bewildered, and quite helpless. His instinct was to abandon them both, to tear out of the house, and bolt down the Avenue towards the ‘Rec’, to get underground, to get something thick and solid, between himself and the bombs. But Sydney had pride, and he knew that he could not abandon mother and fiancée in such a shameless fashion. He knew that, as an officer, he should set an example, be casual and jocular, even while devising a masterful plan that he could impose upon them by a single word of command.
Then the whistle of a descending bomb drove every other thought from his mind, and he was conscious only of an agonised contraction of his stomach, a shrinking that forced the breath from his body, and the stability from his legs.
The bomb’s descent sounded like a tragedian’s sigh, half moan and half wail, and it ended in a shattering roar, that seemed to split his eardrums, and sent him crashing against the flimsy door of the airing-cupboard.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 14