Jim Carver traced a pattern in a tea-stain on the American cloth table-covering before him. He was silent for a while, extinguishing the final flickers of anger against a son who had shamed and humiliated him. As the last embers of his resentment died he felt once more the surge of affection and admiration for the peaky-faced little clerk who reasoned with him so earnestly, and with such sincerity, and his mind returned to the previous occasion when this same man had revitalised him by falling back on the philosophy of the suburbs, a plain ‘get-on-with-the-job-and-stop-whining’ outlook, that epitomised every scrap of faith Jim had ever had in the common man.
“You’re a good chap, Harold,” he said, at length, “a real good chap, and you talk more common sense than anyone I know!”
His hand shot across the table and clasped Harold’s. “I’m sorry I made such a bloody fool of myself, and I’m glad you stopped me making an even bloodier one!”
He stood up, suddenly: “To hell with Archie! To hell with all the Archies. I’ll write young Esme a letter, and maybe send him some fags. I daresay he could do with ’em, I know I always could when I was in uniform!”
He kicked off his boots and went upstairs to his room. Harold looked at his watch and decided that he had time to wash up and catch the 9.24 from Woodside.
He felt pleased with himself, justifiably so.
CHAPTER XII
Night Ops For Archie
BY THE END of October, 1941, the face of the Avenue had changed for the third time in three years.
In mid-summer, ’39, it had curved between Links and Rec’ with its sweep unbroken, save for the Manor meadow cart-track that ran out from between Number Seventeen and Nineteen. Its gardens, for the most part, were trim, and lovingly tended. Its dwarf walls were well pointed and their festoons of chains were intact.
By the time its small quota of sons had trickled home from Dunkirk, however, the long crescent had already begun to look like a road in a ghost-town, from which families had moved away, to build new homes elsewhere. The front gardens were no longer trim, but sadly weed-sown, and rapidly encroaching upon one another.
By the early spring of the following year there were more definite changes. The iron chains had gone, offered up for scrap, suburban ploughshares to be beaten into Churchill tanks. The long line of ‘To Let’ and ‘For Sale’ boards had been taken away. The big lilac, at Number One Hundred and Twelve, had now leaped a shoulder-high privet hedge into Number One Hundred and Fourteen, as though inspired by the wanderlust of Number Ninety-Seven’s laburnum. This Avenue landmark, lacking its staked support, was leaning right across the path of Number Ninety-Five.
These changes, however, were superficial, and might not have been noticed by people who had not grown up in the Avenue. The big changes came later, after the bomb had torn a three house gap in the odd side. The blast wave of this explosion levelled a section of the dwarf wall, between Number Six and Eighteen, on the even side, and after that some of the houses were boarded up back and front, and all the occupied ones had their windows patterned with criss-crossed adhesive tape.
In the early summer the big gap was tidied but a good deal of the rubble remained. The smooth symmetry of the crescent had been destroyed and was never to be restored, for after this incident the Avenue put on its full battledress, and began to look like a neglected corner in a French battlefield. Then the grass really did grow in the street, pushing up between the cracked pavement slabs outside Number Fifteen, and surrounding the bronze chrysanthemums, that was all that remained of Nick Crispin’s front garden. In less than a month ragwort, nettles and dock had secured a hold on the rubble behind Number Seventeen, and campion willow-herb and viper’s bugloss began to sprout in the oblong flower beds that Edgar Frith had tended so lovingly through all the years that he lived there.
Conversational topics had changed too, and so had the subject matter of Avenue jokes. Nobody spoke much of the blitz nowadays and as a station-platform topic it had gone the way of the Graf Spee, and Dunkirk. If people did refer to it they did so in the way that they had once spoken of the Somme, and of Passchendaele. Today the principal platform topic was Russia, and this meant that a whole list of new and almost unpronounceable names had to be memorised, names that did not roll easily to the tongue, dreadful names like ‘Vitebsk’, ‘Mohilev’, and ‘Yekaterinoslav’.
Mr. Baskerville, he of the Avenue’s first four-valve radio in 1923, and the Avenue’s first ‘bomb-proof’ shelter, now found himself saddled with a new role, for besides that of fashion-leader of gadgets, he was now the Avenue Strategist, simply because he had acquired the knack of remembering the names of Russian towns, and Russian Commanders.
Several catchers of the 8.40 strove to compete with him in this new field, but they were never serious rivals. It was difficult to argue with Mr. Baskerville, because his information seemed to stem directly from the Kremlin. He was very open-handed with it and apparently did not take the careless-talk posters very seriously. He once told a covey of Avenue husbands, awaiting their train on Woodside Station, that Marshal Budenny now had a reserve army quartered in and around Kursk, and was only awaiting the arrival of the German spearheads before co-operating with Comrade Zukov in a two-prong pincer movement. This, he pointed out, would at once sever the Nazis’ over-extended line, and isolate two army groups from base. Nobody contradicted him, after all, it might well be so, for all Mr. Baskerville’s fellow-travellers were aware, as they had but British newspapers to feed upon, and Mr. Baskerville had long been referring to Joseph Stalin as ‘Uncle Joe’.
Mr. Baskerville was militantly pro-Russian these days, and ready to cross attaché cases with anyone who doubted Russia’s ability to withstand the weight of German armour. He sometimes hinted that a little Russian discipline might not come amiss at Woodside Station.
One day the 8.40 did not show up until past nine o’clock, and Mr. Baskerville, stamping his feet up and down the frosty platform, told them all how ‘Uncle Joe’ had recently shot the Moscow station-master for a similar delay in respect of the Tula express. When Mr. Mainwaring, a very kind-hearted man, pronounced this ‘a bit much’, Mr. Baskerville rounded on him angrily.
“Nonsense, Mainwaring! It was a clear case of exigency!” he retorted. “You couldn’t have a clearer case of exigency!”
There were times, he added, when it became necessary for a State at war to be ruthless to the individual, in order to safeguard the majority. It was thus far, far better to shoot one station-master, than to keep ten thousand reservists away from the hard-pressed Mojaisk sector!
Mr. Baskerville was not the only Avenue train-catcher who conjured with topical words, like ‘exigency’. Up and down the Avenue others were experimenting with unfamiliar words, and unfamiliar place names. Where one had once heard words like ‘blitz’ and ‘panzer’, one now heard terms like ‘envelopment’, and ‘rapid deployment’. Nobody ever spoke of ‘bulges’, or ‘bridgeheads’, nowadays, but rather of ‘perimeters’, and the ‘hedgehog strong-points’.
The jokes were different too, from those of the previous year. Mr. Baskerville had ceased to tell bomb stories, but had developed the even more disturbing habit of describing funny cartoons that he had seen in the evening papers. He never bothered to enquire whether his audience had seen the same cartoons but launched regardless into a detailed description of the drawing, and hooted with laughter when he quoted the caption.
“I say, Godbeer,” he would gasp, running in pursuit of Harold, as they mounted the greasy steps to the ‘up’ platform, “I say old man, did you see: ‘Wot a War’, last night? There was a minesweeper, bearing down on a fishing boat, that was bobbing about near a mine, and the chap in the fishing boat was looking up at the minesweeper’s captain with a grin, and saying: ‘You don’t ’ave to worry, skipper, I’ve knocked all the spikes off with me boathook!’ Damned good, what? I don’t know how they think of ’em, blessed if I do! Knocked ’em off with his boathook! Get me? Just imagine, swiping a floating mine with a boath
ook?”
Harold usually resigned himself to walking back to the Avenue in the trying company of Mr. Baskerville, and would endeavour to steer the conversation away from cartoons by mentioning one or other of the Avenue’s more personal topics, like the posthumous V.C. awarded to Albert Dodge, for blowing up a viaduct near Bari, or the M.M. poor old Crispin had won in the Western Desert, on almost the very day that his family was wiped out on the last night of the winter blitz.
Little Miss Baker, at Number One, was missing the bombs, and begrudged Russia the almost exclusive patronage of the Luftwaffe. Like Harold Godbeer across the road it had taken rather more than Mr. Churchill’s bland assurances to lay for her the ghosts of Lenin, and Trotsky. Try as she would she could never quite see Stalin as ‘Uncle Joe’, or rid herself of the suspicion that the bombs he was manufacturing by the million in the Urals (‘Underground factories, mark you, and dug at least ten years ago, before anyone had heard of Hitler!’) were not destined to be used against Nazis. She could never forget that these same men had once shot the poor dear Czar in a cellar, and that the man they murdered had looked exactly like dear King George V, whose relation he had been. It was also widely reported that this Stalin everyone was making such a fuss about was once a bankrobber. Notwithstanding the British Premier’s adventurous past Miss Baker did not find it easy to link dear Mr. Churchill with the bomb-throwing bank robber. She confided these unworthy doubts to Edith Clegg, when Edith came over for tea one Thursday afternoon, and Edith promised to ask Mr. Carver about it, and report back, but she forgot to do so because troubles of her own were absorbing her attention just then, to the total exclusion of the war.
Since the Avenue bombing Becky’s ‘little trouble’ had shown itself once again. Not only had her spells become more frequent, but she had now taken to wandering away from Number Four, on one occasion for two whole days, and poor Edith was nearly frantic with worry and foreboding. When she was found and reclaimed Becky always asserted that she had met her husband, Saul, in the Lower Road, and that he was making a home for her and the baby on the proceeds of a lucrative commission for a landscape painting.
Edith knew of course, that this could not be so. Saul had been in his early thirties when he had eloped with Becky, and that was in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign. Saul must now be approaching his dotage, even if he was still alive, which must be extremely doubtful considering his mode of life in days gone by. Becky’s poor mind must have been stirred up by the bombings, so much so that long buried memories floated to the surface, causing her to identify someone else with the man who had treated her so shamefully.
After a number of attempts to reason with Becky, Edith consulted her neighbour, Jim, and together they had succeeded in tracking the ghost to a section of pavement, near the Croydon Town Hall. It was here that poor Becky’s fantasy led her, day after day, to stand patiently beside a bedraggled old man who sat cross-legged against the wall, sketching flagstone portraits of Churchill, and lurid impressions of aerial warfare, executed in coloured chalks.
Jim approached the elderly vagrant and talked to him about Becky and the man readily admitted profiting by her regular patronage.
“She’s alwuz ’ere, guvnor,” he said, “but I carn’t do nothin’ to stop ’er, can I? It’s a free country, or so they say, don’t they, and she c’n stand here if she likes, I suppose, so long as she don’t cause no obstruction. Bin real decent to me she ’as. Reg’lar two bob a day, and never nothing but kind words about me work neither! Wot’s that, gov? She thinks I’m somebody else? Well, I carn’t ’elp that neither, now can I? Orl right, gov, I’ll keep an eye on ’er from now on. Tell you wot—just write ’er address on a bit o’ peper, and I’ll bring ’er back ’ome, pervidin’ you’ll stand the fares. Shirley an’ Addiscombe ain’t my way see, I got a room in Norbury.”
After that things were a little easier for Edith. Whenever Becky did manage to slip out of the house she always turned up again by dusk, escorted home by the obliging pavement artist, to whom Edith paid a regular five shillings a week for his duties of chaperone.
It was all very trying, however, and sometimes Edith thought wistfully of the pleasant days between the wars, when Becky had seemed to recover most of her wits under the bob-bob-bobbing of dear Teddy, and they had all had such wonderful times singing ‘Horsey, Keep Your Tail Up’ round the cottage piano in the front parlour.
A close neighbour of Edith’s was having his share of anxiety in the autumn of 1941.
Along at the corner shop Archie Carver was still coining money but he was not able to give his chain of pop-ins all the attention it demanded, for his mind was now obsessed by a whole string of problems, some of which had no bearing on profit and loss.
There was young Anthony, for instance, Officer Cadet Anthony now, and destined for the Guards Armoured Division. During their final interview, Anthony, who had developed into a very pompous young man, told his father exactly what he thought of men who obeyed the Government’s injunction to ‘stay put’ too literally, and make money out of the present emergency.
Archie was not so much shocked, or shamed by this outspokenness as genuinely puzzled by the boy’s abhorrence of commerce as a whole. What the hell was wrong with making money, anyway? Without it, he, Anthony, could never have lorded it in the prefects’ common room, at Hearthover, and it was galling to be sneered at by a young man whose cricket boots had been bought with the profits of the businesses he so arrogantly condemned. What did the boy expect his father to do about the war? Sell out at a loss, and enlist in the Pioneers? Or leave the pop-ins to take care of themselves, while he strutted up and down the Avenue in a tin-helmet, like all the other mugs? People had to eat didn’t they? True, most of the stuff that went over and under the counter at the corner shop had first to be shipped across the Atlantic, at the risk of men’s lives, but what else could happen to it once it was here but to be distributed from shops like Archie’s pop-ins? The boy’s attitude simply did not make sense. What was the difference between wartime grocery, and wartime stock-jobbing? How many of his friends’ fathers were making a pile of money out of the war? Presumably all of them, if they paid the school fees out of income, and if they didn’t, if they paid them out of capital, then it was almost certainly capital amassed and invested during the First World War!
Grudgingly Archie paid a hundred pounds into the boy’s account at Court’s, and told himself he was a damned fool for doing so, but he had heard that officers who overdrew their accounts were automatically cashiered, and Archie decided that a disaster of this sort would make nonsense of the entire Hearthover investment.
So he paid the money, and washed his hands of the matter, telling Maria, during the final family reunion before Anthony left for training, that it would damned well serve Anthony right if he was blown to pieces within twelve months.
The one bright spot in the episode as far as Archie was concerned was Anthony’s quickness to take advantage of his school cadet training, and short-circuit the requisite three months, preliminary training in the ranks. It comforted Archie somewhat to reflect that his son was not quite a one-hundred-per-cent patriot, and was still sufficiently human to think up at least one little wangle.
During the period that he spent down in Somerset that summer Archie had a brief opportunity to study his two other children, James, the fourteen-year-old boy, and Juanita, his twelve-year-old daughter.
Maria told him that James was very backward at school, and spent most of his time ranging the hedgerows and woods, in search of birds and small animals. All the books that he owned dealt with wild life, and Archie found crude drawings of stoats and owls on the fly-leaves. Archie tested him at arithmetic, and found him very inadequate. Asked to choose between a pile of coppers and a shilling, James promptly chose the coppers, although there were only eleven of them. Archie reflected sadly that he would never have made a mistake like that, at the age of fourteen, and turned to Juanita for consolation.
He found none. The
child was very pretty, and graceful, and lacked the coltishness of her age and sex. She moved, he thought, like a little ballet dancer, and Maria told him she was a good dancer and had recently been chosen to lead a company of much older children in a ‘Savings Drive’ dancing display, at Taunton. She had earned high praise in the local papers. He found her, however, extremely difficult to approach, for to all his praises and blandishments she showed no response but continued to regard him with polite, but unwavering hostility, as though he was a strange visitor, whose presence in the house interfered with her playtime. He was very puzzled by her attitude, and mentioned it to Maria: Maria said flatly:
“She doesn’t like men! She never has!”
“But dammit, I’m her father,” protested Archie. “I pay for her dancing lessons, don’t I? Doesn’t she realise that?”
“It isn’t the sort of thing you can explain to a little girl of twelve,” said Maria, stiffly.
She did not tell him that Juanita had been schooled to distrust and dislike men, or that in almost every conversation Maria had had with her daughter since the child could lisp one-syllabled words, her mother had let slip some remark calculated to develop in Juanita a suspicion for all men, except possibly her grandfather, Toni, who had died entertaining her in the meadow behind the Avenue.
This training was deliberate on Maria’s part. It was her way of hitting back at Archie, for years of gross neglect and indifference and the fact that Archie was troubled by the girl’s attitude towards him afforded her immense satisfaction. Maria had lost the sweet submissiveness she had possessed when her father had instructed her to marry Archie, and to bear children for his delight. The memory of her wasted life nagged at her unceasingly, so that she had engendered, at length, a sour hatred for this big, brisk, matter-of-fact man, who had never once kissed her affectionately. She warmed herself with the reflection that Juanita’s indifference to him, and his disappointment in both the boys, was only the beginning of her revenge, and that one day she would strike him where it really hurt, straight in his cashbox. She was in no hurry, however, for her real revenge on him could wait; in the meantime, she could amuse herself by frustrating him in other little ways, in the matter of withholding a divorce if he asked for one.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 17