Surely, Jim reasoned, that could not be so far off now? Russia was roused, and America was fully committed; that much at least was obvious from where he stood, in the broad, winding path that led through the Rec’ gates, for a group of American GI’s were playing baseball on what had once been the football pitch, and they had attracted a group of idlers, who stood watching a game that looked to Jim like a hotted-up variant of rounders.
He joined the group and stood looking on for a moment, noting that the ruins of the Rec’ pavilion had been now cleared and converted into some kind of American depot. Interested he moved nearer, recalling vaguely that he had heard his younger twins, Fetch and Carry, talk about the presence of Americans in the neighbourhood.
As he stood there somebody hailed him from the verandah of the new pavilion.
“Hiya, Pop!”
It was Carry, one of the twins, and he noticed, with slight irritation, that her jaws moved rhythmically up and down as she sprawled on the verandah seat, watching the game below.
Before he reached the pavilion Fetch, her sister, appeared, wearing a highly coloured apron, printed with the names of American states. Fetch’s jaws moved too, in the same slow, circular movement, and the moment she saw him she called to somebody over her shoulder.
“Hi, Orrie! Mitch! It’s Pop! Come an’ say ‘howdy!’ It’s my Pop! What-do-y-know ’bout that?”
Two G.I.s wearing khaki slacks lounged on the steps, one of them giving Fetch a resounding slap on her bottom as she passed. Jim regarded the quartette with dismay. His daughters seemed no longer to belong to him, or even to his country, but were now part and parcel of a transatlantic organisation that had been shipped in with jeeps, aircraft parts, and vast crates of chewing gum all draped in stars and stripes.
“What on earth are you two doing here?” he managed to say, as Carry introduced him to Orrie, the shorter, frizzy-haired soldier, and Fetch gave the taller, lantern-jawed man, (‘Mitch’ presumably) a return whack on the buttocks.
“We work here, Pop,” Fetch explained, waving her hand towards the pavilion.
“Sure thing! Sure do!” corroborated Orrie; then, advancing, “Glad to know you, Pop! Kinda wonderin’ when you’d show up, weren’t we, Glam?”
“But I thought you worked over at Catford,” protested Jim. “The last I heard you were waitresses, in the British Restaurant over there.”
“That crummy joint?” exclaimed Carry turning to the others. “Get a load o’ that, Fetch! Gee, Pop, we quit that flea pit a fortnight since! We met Orrie and Mitch at a U.S. hop, and soon as they knew we lived hereabouts they fixed us as waitresses in the canteen!”
“Orrie comes from Oregon, an’ Mitch comes from Michigan,” explained Fetch. “Kinda cute, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” said Jim, vaguely, “but why do we have to meet one another like this? Why not bring them home to supper tomorrow night? Louise would be delighted to meet them, I’m sure.”
“You hear that, Mitch?” said Carry, laughing. “Pop wants to okay you! We go for that kind o’ thing over here! Maybe he thinks you’re kinda fresh, like I do!”
“Mighty nice o’ you, mister,” said Mitch, seriously, “but if we do come around I guess we’ll hev to bring sumphn to help out.”
“Bring something?” said Jim, “bring what?”
“Whatever’s to hand, I guess,” said the G.I. “It’s like this, sir; our Top Brass is mighty particular ’bout that! ‘Don’t none of you eat them pore bastards’ rations!’ he tells us, soon as we git here!”
“That’s so, Pop,” agreed Orrie, “we got it printed in a book, too! Take a looksee.”
He extracted a small booklet from his hip-pocket and handed it to Jim. The brochure was entitled ‘What to do and what not to do in Britain’, and the sub-title read: ‘A short guide for overseas enlisted men’.
“That’s extremely considerate of them,” said Jim, smiling, “but you don’t need to bring anything. We can run to a supper for allies, I guess.”
“I guess!” Damn it, he thought, this clipped, outlandish jargon is catching! He grinned, shook hands and hastily excused himself, leaving the four of them to chew their way through the baseball game and discuss the impression that he had made upon the Americans.
“Nice guy,” said Orrie, “but kind of educated! You never said your pop was a college man, Glam.”
“I don’t think he was, was he, Fetch?” said Carry.
Carry said no, she didn’t think he was, but ever since she could remember Pop had spent most of his time addressing meetings, and reading piles of dull-looking books, so perhaps that accounted for the way he spoke.
Jim left the Rec’ and returned to the Avenue. He was half-alarmed and half-amused at the chance encounter. He told himself that, as time went on, and he grew older and older, he began to understand less and less about the world he lived in.
Orrie and Mitch came to Number Twenty for supper on the following evening.
Despite Jim’s protest they brought with them a small sack of American canned goods and a large cardboard box, full of extravagant confections that they described, collectively, as ‘candy’. This they presented to Louise, for whom the chief sacrifice of total war had been the strict rationing of sweets.
Jim, who came in with Harold about seven o’clock, had anticipated a dull evening and attended only because he considered it was his paternal duty to inspect the Americans at close quarters. His encounter in the Rec’, had left him with an impression that the two Americans, the very first American soldiers he had met in this war, were a pair of boisterous extroverts, with whom he had little in common, beyond perhaps, a mutual antipathy for Nazis and Japanese warlords.
He was surprised, therefore and also somewhat nonplussed by Mitch’s outspokenness on the conduct of the war up to the time of America’s entry.
It seemed that Mitch, the unsmiling, lantern-jawed soldier, (who, so far as Jim could determine, favoured Fetch) had a poor opinion of British strategy as a whole and his views, which he went out of his way to declaim, immediately put Jim on the defensive.
Jim’s view of American participation in the conflict was typical of the view taken by the Avenue as a whole. Everyone living in the Avenue resented America’s claim to have won the first war, although Jim, as a front-line soldier, had never underestimated the part the Americans had played in the final offensive of 1918.
The few American soldiers he had run across in France he had rather liked and he was fully prepared to welcome those who had now appeared (very tardily to his way of thinking) to assist in vanquishing Hitler.
He was not, however, prepared to admit America into allied conferences as a senior partner—Russia perhaps, but not America, for Uncle Sam had failed democracy, and that almost fatally, by failing to join the Allies in 1939!
Harold shared these views but with a single reservation. What he did not share was Jim’s enthusiasm for Cossacks, Joseph Stalin, girl-snipers and the partisans of the unending Steppes. Like Miss Baker, of Number One, he found it very difficult to shed the distrust of half a lifetime, and Red Russia was the one topic that he and Jim had learned to avoid, for fear it should provoke a serious quarrel.
Jim had resigned himself to Harold’s distrust of Russia, writing it off as the result of years of ruthless propaganda by a capitalist press. Harold, on the other hand, easily persuaded himself that Jim’s militant partisanship of Russia was merely a hangover from his friend’s twenty-year championship of the underdog. It was thus sadly dated and belonged, properly, to the days of pogroms, smoking-bombs, and chain-gang migrations into Siberia. Both men were secretly sure that time would ultimately reveal the truth and convert each to the other’s way of thinking.
When the unsmiling American began to inveigh against British military inefficiency, however, the neighbours promptly closed their ranks. Mitch, who had hardly given global politics a thought until the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbour, seemed to have made up for lost time by reading millions of words written
by American war commentators. He had a capacious memory and sought to confound his hosts with strings of dates and figures, each dealing with the sorry progress of the war to date.
“You guys have been balling everything up by pulling your punches,” he told them. “For crying out loud, mister, look at your North African campaign, in the fall of ’40! You go for the Eyeties and scoop a cool hundred thousand of ’em into the bag! You get within spittin’ distance of Tunis! Then what do you do? For Pete’s sake, what do you do? You pull out and ship every man and every goddamed gun you got over to Greece, and stand by while the poor guys get pitched into the Med by the Krauts!”
“That mightn’t be very good strategy, I’ll admit,” said Harold, biting his lip, and checking Jim’s retort by a prim, little wave of his hand, “but we British happen to be fighting this war for honourable reasons, and our government had given an undertaking to Greece that we would come to her assistance at once if she was attacked!”
“That’s about it,” added Jim, giving Harold a mental pat on the shoulders. “Over here we always try and honour our pledges, even if the maintenance of a pledge is temporarily inconvenient!”
“‘Temporarily inconvenient’!” exclaimed Mitch, not at all impressed by Harold’s line of defence. “Brother, it wasn’t inconvenient, it was suicidal as far as you Limeys were concerned! Why, you lost your whole outfit didn’t you, besides getting slung out of Crete and pushed back on the Gyppos! What sort of way is that to fight a war? You guys are still wearing kid mitts! You gotter learn to mix it, no holds barred! Take your bombing in Germany…!”
“What’s wrong with the R.A.F.?” growled Jim. “Haven’t they been knocking hell out of Germany’s war potential?”
“Sure they have, sure mister, by night!” retorted Mitch. “What in hell’s the use of plastering Krauts by night, when you can’t see where you’re hitting ’em? We’re going over in daylight from now on and brother, are you going to see the dust fly!”
“Well, I’m very glad to hear it,” said Harold, resignedly, “and as far as I’m concerned the oftener the better! But don’t overlook the fact, old man, that until Russia came in we were tackling this job alone!”
Jim felt he could have embraced Harold on the spot and he cocked an eye to see how the American would accept the rebuke. Mitch certainly increased his rate of his chewing but apart from that shrugged it off quietly enough.
“Yeah, I guess that’s so, feller, but you been getting a steady flow of war material from us ever since the startin’ pistol!”
“Yes,” said Harold gravely, “I suppose we have, but I don’t think we should have done, if it hadn’t been for Roosevelt! Tell me now, are you a Republican or a Democrat?”
The American looked surprised. “Say, you’re the first guy to ask me that over here!” he exclaimed. “I voted Republican…I guess our family have always voted Republican.”
“Ah,” said Harold triumphantly, “then it looks to me as if we should have gone short of war material if your party had been in office!”
“Heck,” said Mitch, “don’t get me wrong, brother! We’re all rootin’ for you over there, and we have been, right from the start of it!”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Harold, “but cheering from the touchline wasn’t very much use while the Nazis were swarming all over Europe!”
Mitch looked at Orrie for inspiration, but all Orrie said was: “This guy’s sure got something,” and then, enthusiastically, “Whatsay we quit chewing the fat an’ put the radio on? You can get a swing programme round about now. It’s pretty corny but I guess we could jive okay if we moved the furniture back!”
“Move anything you like! Make yourselves thoroughly at home,” said Jim, grateful of the excuse to go next door and hold an inquest on the Americans, in the company of an Englishman whose quiet thrusts had seemed to him much more lethal than the bluster of public-house patriots.
The girls came in from the scullery, where they had been helping Louise to wash up, and to stack away the remains of the American bounty on half-empty larder shelves. It was a fine, clear evening and they opened up the French doors that led to the tiny verandah.
Orrie fiddled with the knobs of the radio until he found a wavelength that seemed to satisfy him. Then they pushed back the furniture and began to dance, “whooping it up”, Fetch said, and seemed to be thoroughly familiar with steps that Jim had never seen anyone dance in the past.
Jack Strawbridge, smoking a Lucky Strike in the kitchen, watched them stolidly through the open window and Mrs. Hooper, from Number Six, heard the clatter and laughter seven doors away, and crept along the alley behind the gardens to see what was going on.
Safe in the kitchen of Number Twenty-Two Jim and Harold sat over a freshly-brewed pot of tea and discussed the American invasion.
“They’ve got a damn sight more bounce than I can stomach,” said Jim, “and I’m glad you put that fellow in his place!”
To his surprise, however, Harold refused to enjoy his moral victory.
“We shouldn’t argue with them, Jim! After all, they’re over here to help us, and we ought to go out of our way to make them welcome!”
“My daughters seem to be taking care of that side of it,” said Jim, grimly. “Just listen to ’em in there—‘jiving’ they call it! Like a bloody lot of savages celebrating a victory in the jungle if you ask me!”
Harold chuckled. “Ah, we’re getting old, Jim,” he said, “and I daresay we’re getting left behind. I don’t think they’re bad chaps, in spite of their cockiness. After all, they can afford to be cocky. They’ve got all the money and we’re absolutely dependent on them unless we want the war to drag on for the rest of our lives!”
“All I can say is, they might give us a bit more credit for sticking it out so far,” grumbled Jim. “I’d like to know what sort of show America would have put up after Dunkirk, or during the blitz!”
“That isn’t the way to look at it, Jim,” said Harold, and as always Jim felt himself soothed, almost against his will, by this little man’s homespun logic.
“Here’s a family—Britain—up to its eyes in debt, and facing eviction! Along comes a rich uncle, Uncle Sam, and agrees to square up and give us a fresh start. Can we blame him for pontificating a bit, and letting us know that we’re lucky to have him around? That’s only human nature, Jim, and you can neither wonder at it nor grouse at it!”
“Damn it, don’t talk as if they come in out of bigness of heart, man,” argued Jim. “They wouldn’t be here at all if the Japs hadn’t kicked ’em into it at Pearl Harbour!”
“I don’t care why they’re here, Jim,” pursued Harold, stirring his tea with the slow sweep of his hand that Jim had noticed during their innumerable sessions over this table. “I only care that they are here, and that their being here means that Hitler can’t possibly win! That way we’ll all get a second chance and make better use of it than we did in 1918, I hope!”
They went on to talk of other things, of the constantly postponed wedding of Esme and Judy, who were still making frantic endeavours to coincide a week’s leave from their respective airfields in Northamptonshire and Yorkshire; Boxer and Berni, now in training for the next show, that might be the Second Front everyone was expecting; of Louise’s sallow, silent girl-lodger, Pippa, who was getting a stream of letters from Bernard, a boy who had hardly put pen to paper before his last leave, in April.
Next door the girls and their G.I. friends were still ‘whooping it up’. They were dancing and singing to a chorus beginning ‘Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition’, and their voices rang over the darkening Nursery, where Jack Strawbridge had been digging for victory all spring and was making a market-garden out of what had been a wilderness.
“Thank God I’m going on duty,” said Jim, finally. “I don’t know how you can expect to get a wink of sleep with that din going on! Shall I tell them to pipe down?”
“No,” said Harold, “let ’em enjoy themselves while they can. They’re lik
e young bears, Jim, with all their troubles before them!”
“Don’t you believe it, Harold,” rejoined Jim, with a tired grin, “Look at us, we’re into our sixties, at least, I am, and you’re not so far off, yet it looks to me as if there’s just as much trouble in front of us as there is behind!”
He stood up and lit his pipe, puffing at it meditatively and looking up at the coral and purple sky beyond the saw-toothed silhouette of Delhi Road.
“It’s funny,” he mused, “I remember the day I came home here from Cologne. It was in the spring of 1919 and those two youngest kids of mine were parked out somewhere because the wife had died in the ’flu epidemic. I hadn’t even set eyes on ’em then. They were born on New Year’s day, and having ’em helped kill the missus, what with one thing and another! I never thought that by the time they were twenty-three we’d be halfway through another bloody war!”
“None of us did,” said Harold, “but I’m glad we are all the same, because this war isn’t like any other war, Jim. I never thought it was, and I still don’t think it is! I don’t believe this is a war to end war. That’s a bit too much to hope, but at least it’s a war that we couldn’t avoid fighting if we were to have any hope in the future. I think people will come to realise that in the end and if they do, then it might have served its purpose in the end!”
He yawned and began to carry the tea-cups towards the sink.
“Here, leave those old chap,” said Jim, “I’ll do them before I go on duty. You get some sleep if you think that’s possible.”
Harold accepted his offer and smiled.
“All right. Good night, old man.”
“Good night,” said Jim.
Harold went slowly upstairs but Jim remained puffing his pipe for a moment and looking out over the nursery. The noise next door had subsided somewhat and from the other side of the fence came the soft strains of a vocal number, Vera Lynn singing about a nightingale she had seen in Berkeley Square. The melody seemed to have sobered the quartette, for presently Jim heard Carry say: “I like that number! I think it’s a honey!”
The Avenue Goes to War Page 25