As she wriggled sideways she wondered whether his head was free beyond the obstruction or whether, like his knees and thighs, it was weighted down by rubble. The terrifying thought speeded her movements, and the rubble above her shifted slightly, squeaking and pattering as fresh trickles of plaster poured from above the joist, powdering her hair and half-filling her mouth with grit.
After that she moved more stealthily, drawing one leg after the other with infinite caution, until she reached the space and rose slowly on her knees, levering herself upward until her shoulders were straining against the edge of the timber.
The stench of the burning linoleum was now so pungent that she had the greatest difficulty in breathing and could only continue to do so by turning her head towards the exit. Forgetting that nobody would understand her she called:
“He’s in here…I’m holding the roof…someone crawl in and take hold of his legs!”
The warden, who had been following her movements with his torch, called her gently: “Is there room? Can’t you work him free?”
“No, no, I can’t!” She was fighting hysteria. “Get that stinking lino out! Come in, quickly, quickly!”
Even had there been no impediment it is doubtful whether he could have heard and understood her, but he was an experienced and resourceful man and reached inside, dragging out the burning linoleum and then forcing his way into the narrow space beside her.
In the meantime, men outside were frantically enlarging the hole and when other men joined them they were able to pass back a hundredweight or so of bricks and mortar. Then, in the beam of their torches, she saw Philip’s waist freed, then his chest, and finally his head.
When they eased him out into the open the rubble shifted again and the strain on her shoulders became intolerable. She dropped her torch, crying out and raising both hands to prevent the joist crushing her down to the floor.
The hole behind had now been further enlarged and the warden was able to crawl a little closer and take some of the strain. Together they managed to hold on until somebody passed through a billet, sliding it up between the warden’s legs and wedging it under the joist at the instant of Jean’s collapse.
The billet saved them both. They were seized and dragged out feet foremost, to be laid on two stretchers that had been set down outside the hole.
When two men came to carry her away, however, she sat up, protesting.
“I’m all right…it’s just my back.…What happened to Chiefie? What have you done with Chiefie?”
The man at her head grinned but said nothing beyond, “Relax, sister, relax!” as he lifted his end.
The man at her feet addressed his partner. “Lumme! I’ve heard o’ perishing Sampson, but that there carry-on beats all, jigger me if it don’t!” Then he smiled down at her as she sat up, steadying herself. “You ever tried all-in wrestling, Miss?”
She must have fainted then for she recalled nothing more until she found herself lying on a mattress, accepting a cup of Bovril from somebody.
She tried to sit up and ask after Philip again, but the effort made her sick and she was glad to lie still. Her shoulders felt as though they had been belaboured with an iron bar and her lungs seemed to be full of the fumes of that stinking linoleum and powdered plaster.
After they had washed her and given her another drink she slept, dreaming that she was looking out of the upstairs window of Number Four, watching Jim Carver’s dog, ‘Strike’ run yapping under the wheels of a bicycle, ridden by Philip. Philip was wearing—heaven alone knew why—a Wrinkless support, like those she had been sketching to illustrate the advertisement copy of ‘Trimfit’.
Jean was discharged from hospital in less than a week.
Her shoulders were raw and horribly bruised but there had been a large number of casualties in the last raid and the hospital was very short of beds. She was given a month’s sick leave and a railway warrant back to London.
She did not use the warrant, preferring to remain in Bristol in order to see Philip on visiting days.
She found, when first admitted, that he too had had a very lucky escape. His right leg was broken, his collar-bone fractured and he had multiple minor injuries on chest and neck. They told her that he would be in hospital for at least a month and then asked her if she was a relative. She told them no but nodded when they asked her to write to his mother, whose address had been found on a label attached to Philip’s identity disc. Jean did write to his mother and also to Edith, giving a brief account of what had happened and asking for a change of underclothes to be sent on to her hostel.
She spent most of her mornings sitting about in British restaurants, sipping tasteless coffee or drifting about the street, waiting and waiting for the visiting hour to strike.
On the first day that she was permitted to stay at his bedside for more than a few minutes, she showed him the gladioli and irises she had bought for him and watched the V.A.D. ease him into a sitting position, by manipulating the ugly pulley that supported his broken leg.
He seemed quite rational, except for the fact that he seemed to have forgotten about her inability to converse, for he began by asking her a number of questions about the technical side of the incident. How long had the section taken to get that factory blaze out? Was anyone else successful in extricating the child he had tried to rescue? Was their section likely to remain in Bristol, and if not would it go North or back to London?
She made no attempt to answer these questions, and had begun to blush even before the V.A.D., who had remained within call, started to wink at her in the strangest manner, and point meaningly to her ears.
Jean interpreted this as some kind of warning and looking at Philip she put a finger to her lips, indicating that he must not tire himself by talking too much. At this the nurse smiled approvingly and then jerked her head towards the other end of the ward.
Puzzled by this mime Jean left the bedside and walked down the ward towards the glazed swing doors, where the nurse was hovering.
“I forgot to tell you,” she whispered, “he can’t hear you, he’s stone deaf!”
“Deaf!” murmured Jean. “Deaf!”
“Sister said it was blast,” she added. “A bomb went off near him didn’t it? He’ll be all right apart from that, but he’ll always be deaf. His ear-drums are perforated, both of them, poor chap!”
Jean looked back towards the bed and noticed that there was a certain vacancy in Phillip’s expression. He was not looking at them but across at the patient immediately opposite. He seemed listless, so unlike the bustling, masterful Philip she remembered at the Fire Station, the man who never moved without a purpose, or turned his head to one side without knowing exactly what he was looking for at any particular moment.
The nurse lacked professional brusqueness and gave her time to absorb the shock of the news.
“We haven’t told him yet,” she said at length, “we were waiting until he’s a bit better. He knows he’s temporarily deaf, of course, so you’d better play along with us for a bit, there’s a dear!”
She left her to answer a call from one of the other patients and Jean nerved herself to walk the short distance back to Philip’s bedside. He smiled at her as she sat down, avoiding his eyes.
“They told me you saved my life,” he said and she noticed that his voice was rather flat and toneless. “They told me all about it,” he went on, “and I can’t say that I’m that surprised. You’re a good kid, Jean, one of the very best! I’ve written to H.Q. about it and I daresay it’ll be in the papers sooner or later!”
She mumbled something in reply but still kept her eyes levelled on the floor. She heard him say:
“Of course I can’t expect mother to trail right down here, so I wondered if you’d care to hang around and come here whenever you can?”
She was struck by the note of pleading in his voice, particularly when he went on: “You see, Jean, I don’t know a soul in Bristol and it’s very dull lying trussed up in this kind of contrivance all day!
”
She looked up and nodded, her eyes full of tears. Then, without thinking at all about what she was doing, or what he would think, she caught up his hand and pressed it hard against her mouth.
He looked startled for a moment but then his pale features relaxed and he reached out with his other hand and gently stroked her hair.
“I say…” he faltered, “I say…is there anybody…? I mean, well, when I get out of here, couldn’t we…? Supposing we…?”
He was too overcome to be able to finish what he had meant to say. He had never addressed anybody in these terms before, this being the one occasion in his entire life when he had made a decision without a blueprint. As he watched her, however, even Philip was aware that no blueprint was needed, and that he had already said everything that needed saying. Presently she let fall his hand and bobbed forward, kissing him firmly on the mouth and ignoring the contemptuous snort of the old man in the next bed, and the amused glances of the row of patients on the other side of the ward, one of whom whistled in the way that she had sometimes heard young men whistle as she walked home to the Avenue on summer evenings.
Jean and Philip were married three days after his discharge from Hospital and the section’s departure for the Midlands.
By that time it was clear that Philip would never serve again in the A.F.S. In addition, his mother, who had gone to stay with her daughter, in Glasgow, wrote saying that she intended to remain in Scotland for the duration.
This unexpected news hastened the wedding and Jean, hearing that Margy Hartnell, of Number Forty-Five, was anxious to let her house before touring overseas with E.N.S.A., at once introduced her to Philip, who took the house and paid a quarter’s rent in advance.
The details of the wedding were arranged by Edith Clegg, who had somehow managed to persuade Jim Carver to give away the bride.
“She’s such a nice little thing, really,” purred Edith, bubbling with excitement at the prospect of yet another Avenue wedding, “and she hasn’t a soul in the world, other than me!”
Jim protested that he hardly knew the girl but he let himself be talked into the job and turned up at Wickham Hill Congregational Chapel wearing his best navy-blue suit, the one he had purchased, ten years before, on the occasion of Louise’s wedding to Jack Strawbridge.
The Avenue was well represented at the ceremony, for the Advertiser had recently published a quarter-column story of the happy couple’s gallantry during the Bristol blitz. Harold Godbeer, in high collar and faultless grey cravat, represented Number Twenty-Two, and Jack and Louise Strawbridge joined Jim at the church.
Miss Baker, of Number One, was also present. Edith had seen to that by ordering an extra taxi ‘with a driver accustomed to handling invalid ladies, please’, and several families from lower down the crescent were there, including Mr. Westerman, the Avenue jester, Mr. Baskerville, the suburb’s confidant of Joe Stalin, and all Mr. Baskerville’s children, who brazenly defied the minister’s ban on the use of confetti and danced with glee round the A.F.S. Guard of Honour, that lined the path when the couple emerged.
Mrs. Jarvis, of Number Six, was also there, and wrote an account of it to her son serving in Libya and so was Mrs. Hooper, of Number Six, and many others from houses nearer the Rec’.
Philip still limped rather badly and Jean was obliged to adjust her stride to his when they passed under the arch of firemen’s axes, but this gave everybody time to remark how wonderfully pretty she looked, quite the prettiest bride, someone told Edith, that the Avenue had ever contributed to a local wedding.
Edith agreed, thinking that dear Jean looked just like a bride on the cover of one of those pre-war pieces of music that Ted Hartnell had left behind in the parlour of Number Four. Her eyes, she told Becky afterwards, shone like stars and her cheeks, under the Brussels veil that had been worn by Edith’s grandmother nearly a century ago, looked like the petals of the cream roses that still grew in one or two of the Avenue’s front gardens.
There was a modest reception at Number Four and Edith could not help remarking proudly to Jim that it was strange that she, an old maid, without a single niece or nephew, had now organised her third Avenue wedding in the space of ten years!
There were no speeches, apart from a brief expression of goodwill from Jim, and afterwards everyone trooped out on to the pavement to watch Philip hand his radiant bride into the taxi that was to take them to East Croydon, and thence, by train, to Glasgow, where they were to pass a week-end with Philip’s relatives, before spending the honeymoon at Oban.
Jean had once visited Oban as a child and had always promised herself that she would honeymoon there.
As she leaned out of the taxi, to wave goodbye to the little group round the gate of Number Four, Jim thought that he had never seen anyone look so serenely happy and he commented on this to Harold who, because weddings always reminded him of Eunice, seemed to be in low spirits as they went into Number Twenty-Two to change.
“It’s a curious thing,” Jim remarked, “how unimportant these disabilities are when it comes to the point. Take those two! He’s stone deaf and she can’t get her tongue round a two-syllable word without making everyone in earshot feel sorry for her! Yet does it worry them? Either of them? Not a jot, anyone can see that! Come to think of it, I’ve noticed this before. I once knew a chap who had lost both his legs in a factory accident. He started making pottery in his back-shed and I never saw him when he wasn’t on top of the world, and making the rest of us feel damned ashamed of bellyaching about trifles! It seems to me that you get a healthier perspective if you’re deprived of something!”
Harold said nothing. He was remembering how enchanting Eunice had looked in her little cloche hat at their wedding, some twenty years before. Jim, however, had taken a drink and was feeling very conversational.
“Take my eldest boy, Archie,” he went on. “He’s always been a strapping great chap, with plenty of brains and never a day’s illness in his life, but what the hell has he done with his life? Gets himself into one mess after another, and now he’s disappeared, put his shutters up and nobody knows where he’s got to. Take that girl that your boy, Esme, married! Good looks, good health and plenty of intelligence, but what does she do with her life? Hawks her body from place to place like a professional tart, and makes trouble, just like my Archie, wherever she goes!”
Harold, however, was reluctant to be talked out of his doldrums, so Jim left him and went off down the Avenue, ruminating on his neighbours as he passed their houses, and racking his brains for a theory that made sense out of their strivings and sorrows.
That afternoon the Avenue seemed to him to typify the bewildering muddle of life. Here was a lad like Albert Dodge, of Number Ninety-One, giving his life to blow up an Italian viaduct, and there a woman like Mrs. Crispin, of Number Fifteen, buried under the ruins of her home by a chance bomb that had been carried hundreds of miles through the sky by the German equivalent of young Albert Dodge! Here, thought Jim, were the people who were making the real sacrifices, the Dodges, the Crispins, the Hoopers, the Jarvises, and even the glum Friths, mother and son, who had been killed on their own doorstep.
Yet even here, in a little suburban Avenue, the sacrifices were monstrously unequal. A dozen houses in the crescent had been vacated on the first day of war and their owners were now far away, taking no active part in the struggle, but waiting for it to end before they returned and fell into step for the 8.40 again.
The same kind of thing, he supposed, must be happening in Russia, and even Germany. Some people were getting away with it and some were not. It was all a matter of luck, or the way the individual looked at things.
How would it end? What sort of future waited for a place like this Avenue when the final bomb had been dropped, and the last torpedo fired? Would the survivors inherit the new world that he had been promised in the trenches during the last war? Or would there be another decade or so of uneasy truce and industrial strife, before a third bunch of lunatics started it all up
again, and deprived these people of their chance of finding a way through the difficulties that, come war, come peace, attended the seventy years or so they spent on earth?
He had to admit that he didn’t know. There had been a time when he had thought that he did know, when he had believed that in Socialism he had an answer to humanity’s woes, when he was convinced that all that was needed to build a Millennium, right here in Britain, was control of the cartels and city speculators, and the public ownership of the means of production.
In those days he believed in the integrity of everyone earning less than three-fifty a year, in all the people who caught the 8.40 and weeded their strips of garden at weekends.
He no longer had that kind of faith in Socialism, or any other ism. Since the outbreak of war he had witnessed as much greed and selfishness among the little people as he expected of the profiteers. His own son, Archie, was typical of those concentrating on grab, those who were seemingly deaf, blind and indifferent to the responsibilities of Democracy. These people, the Archies, did not want freedom, certainly not the kind of freedom that Hitler and his associates were trying to deny everybody; they preferred licence, licence to enrich and indulge themselves, and it was nonsense to pretend that this preference was the prerogative of any one class or income-bracket. It certainly began at the pinnacle, with men who sat in comfortable city offices manipulating companies and dividends, but afterwards it reached right down into the Avenue, to people like Archie, who were not only one’s own class but often one’s own flesh and blood!
Meanwhile, for those who did believe, for the mugs like himself, and Harold Godbeer, for people like old Edith Clegg, and that young starry-eyed couple who had just driven off on their honeymoon, there was only one course to pursue—to hang on and to hope, to stamp out militant Fascism on the Continent, and then remain watchful for its revival in the chaos that would surely attend the overthrow of the swastika.
The Avenue Goes to War Page 24