The Avenue Goes to War

by R. F Delderfield

  Presently the turning and twisting of the lorry ceased and it settled down into a steady rush through the rain. Esme was about to ask where they were going, and whether or not Claude was safe in the back, but his drowsiness overcame him and he let his head fall on the shoulder of the man on his left, remembering nothing more until he opened his eyes and looked into the face of a pretty girl about eighteen who was stooping over him and shaking him gently.

  “M’sieur…Sergeant…! Can you walk…? Must we carry you to the aircraft?”

  He sat up quickly, and winced with pain. His left hand shot to the source of pain, the upper part of his right arm, and he discovered that it was heavily bandaged and that he had scarcely any feeling in his right hand. He felt dizzy as he struggled to his feet and the girl put her arm round his waist to steady him.

  “We must hurry, m’sieur…! The Anson can only remain a very few minutes!”

  It was still dark as they limped together into the open, and it occurred to Esme what a desperately long night it had been. The wind, however, helped to clear his head a little and he said:

  “What happened to Claude? Did Claude come with us, in that lorry?”

  “No, M’sieur,” the girl said very soberly, “Claude was killed last night, and you were lucky to escape yourself! You must take things very quietly, Sergeant. You have lost a great deal of blood from your wound. Lean on me, Sergeant, but hurry.…Please hurry!”

  Two other figures materialised out of the darkness and the girl called to them. Esme felt himself lifted and carried sedan-fashion across uneven ground. Then, directly ahead, he saw the aircraft, with a few bobbing lights about it and the rain glistening on its fuselage. The girl, now at his elbow, said: “Lift him inside…no, no, wait…! Martin said I must find out about the papers…!”

  Suddenly Esme’s brain cleared and he remembered, for a moment or two, all that had happened since he had jumped up from his mattress on hearing the car brake in the street below.

  “I’ve still got the bloody papers,” he grumbled, sleepily, “I’ve got them safe, just where Claude stuck them, and you can tell Claude I’ll give his regards to that bloody policeman’s daughter, the one that wouldn’t play ball the way he wanted to!”

  He had forgotten that Claude was dead, and perhaps this was the reason why the girl would not accept his statement about the papers, but tore open his trousers and thrust her hand against his thigh. Her action embarrassed him and he shouted: “Hi, what the hell?” but the girl only made the kind of soothing noise that a busy nurse makes at a bedside, and after running her hand across both thighs, and locating the bulge of plaster, she turned to the men who were lifting him into the aircraft.

  “It is in order, he has them safe!”

  Then she bent swiftly forward as the men stepped away and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  “Bon Voyage, Sergeant!” she whispered, breathlessly.

  He noticed then how young and how pretty she was, and he wanted to ask her how she had become mixed in this crazy cloak-and-dagger nonsense, and why she wasn’t home and in bed, instead of slopping about the open country, and lifting men into aircraft in the middle of the night.

  The roar of the unthrottled engine blotted out further thoughts of her and he said to a man in a windcheater who was sitting close beside him: “I’m bloody cold! Hasn’t anyone got flying-kit in this kite?”

  “Relax, cobber,” said the man, in a strong Australian accent. “You’re on your way home, kiddo, so what the hell are you bellyaching about?”

  CHAPTER XXIX

  Open House

  THERE WAS A brief period, in the summer of 1943, when the war that had already lasted nearly as long as its predecessor was almost forgotten by the people of the Avenue.

  This was in the week when the majority of them became, for a few days, at least, a closer-knit community than they had ever been in the past, even during the worst nights of the blitz.

  Then, for the first time since the Avenue houses had been built, the people of the big-number end mixed freely with the rump of the Golf links’ end, and there was a coming and going between houses, and a glib exchange of Christian names, that belonged more properly to a country village than to a suburb twelve miles from London Stone.

  The occasion was the double wedding of two of the Avenue’s fighting men, Private Bernard Carver, repatriated after more than eight months in German hospitals, and Flight Sergeant Esme Fraser, recently back from the dead, and due to be decorated for exceptional devotion to duty.

  The idea of a double wedding was Pippa’s, but the idea of converting the weddings into an Avenue occasion was Harold’s and that of his friend, Jim Carver. In the event there was no double wedding in the real sense, for Esme was a divorcee, and he and Judy could not be married in Shirley Church, like Pippa and Bernard, but this circumstance made little or no difference to the main event, for the plan to invite at least half the Avenue to a combined wedding breakfast in the gardens of numbers Twenty and Twenty-Two, had taken firm root in Harold’s heart, and fired the imagination of both Pippa and Jim. Thus, the marriage of one couple in church, and the other almost simultaneously in a register office, at Croydon, did not even complicate the arrangements.

  The Avenue gathered for the Church wedding but toasts were held back until the smaller family party, who had been attending Esme’s and Judy’s wedding, returned to the Avenue soon after midday. Then the neighbours began to crowd into Numbers Twenty and Twenty-Two, where the first thing they witnessed was a lively little ceremony sponsored by Harold and Jim.

  This was the symbolic demolition of the highboard fence that had separated the two verandahs and gardens for more then thirty years.

  There were, of course, identical fences between all the houses in the crescent. They were constructed of thin, overlapping boards, seven feet high at the verandah ends, and shortening to four foot where they had passed the tiny tool-sheds, and outside W.C.s, to join the paling fence separating back gardens from alley and Nursery.

  For some time now the fence between Numbers Twenty and Twenty-Two had been no more than a token boundary. As long ago as the ‘twenties’, when Judy had been the playmate of Esme, and living on very friendly terms with Eunice Godbeer, his mother, there had been a swinging plank, held in place by a single nail. Later, when Jim moved into Number Twenty-Two to share quarters with Harold, this plank had been removed altogether and chopped up for firewood, but the fence as a whole remained and up to the outbreak of war it had been given an annual coat of creosote on each side by Harold and Jack Strawbridge respectively.

  The notion of pulling it down did not occur to Harold or Jim until the week of the weddings.

  He and Harold were sitting in the kitchen of Number Twenty-Two, working out the seating arrangements for the event while Louise, Edith Clegg, Jean Hargreaves, and Mrs. Hooper, of Number Six, were hard at work in the adjoining kitchen, sorting the combined resources of the Avenue in preparation for the wedding breakfast.

  Almost everybody had contributed something to the feast. Tins of spam were much in evidence, and there were even three or four hoarded tins of sliced peaches and apricots. There were the ingredients of scores of pasties, sausage rolls, and cakes, two dozen eggs (the product of Mrs. Hooper’s visit to her sister on a farm, near Penshurst) and a limited supply of gin, rum, and minerals, procured, somehow or other, by the obliging Mr. Saunders, who had succeeded Archie as proprietor of the corner shop.

  The four women had formed themselves into a kind of committee under the chairmanship of Louise Strawbridge, and the men were content to leave them to organise the food and to concentrate upon the problem of accommodating nearly one hundred people in a garden strip measuring about twenty-five yards by ten yards.

  Chairs were to be had in plenty, for these, plus two long trestle tables, had been borrowed from the Delhi Road Church Institute, but Jim said that when the tables were erected, and the chairs arranged around them, there wouldn’t be room to pass the bottle, much less to jiv
e, as his daughters, Fetch and Carry obviously intended to jive with their American friends from the Manor Wood depot.

  Harold said: “It’s a pity we can’t have it in two gardens, old man!”

  “Well, and why can’t we?” asked Jim, suddenly.

  “There’s the fence!”

  “Then to hell with the fence!” retorted Jim.

  They sat smiling at one another for a few seconds, both instantly appreciating the enormous significance of the proposal.

  For years now, it seemed, they had been ducking to and fro through the narrow gap between the two main supports of the fence, but the idea of removing the barrier altogether had never occurred to either of them. It did now and it appealed to them immensely, for each felt that in some way the removal of the fence would cement a friendship forged in the fires of war and ensure that this friendship survived the war. Never again, now that Esme and Judy were marrying, would Numbers Twenty and Twenty-Two be two houses, indeed, if one thought about it they had ceased to be two dwellings on the day that Harold had made his first tentative suggestion that Jim should move in and keep him company until Eunice returned from Torquay.

  Now Eunice would never return, and Harold supposed, rather glumly, that once Hitler had crossed into the shades in pursuit of Kaiser Wilhelm and everyone had made a victory bonfire of their blackouts, Jim would return to his own home, Esme would make a home of his own somewhere, and he, Harold, would be left in lonely isolation at Number Twenty-Two. No wonder that the idea of pulling down the fence struck him as a very happy one indeed.

  Jim, for his part, no longer regarded himself as a lodger in Harold’s house. Ever since Bernard’s return the accommodation in Number Twenty had been almost as cramped as it had been when all the children were growing up and all his family had lived at home. Louise and Jack occupied the front bedroom, Pippa had the back bedroom, the twin girls slept on camp beds in the parlour, and Bernard was temporarily accommodated among Jim’s yellowing pamphlets in the little room over the porch. There was no place for him any more, for even if the twins married Louise would need an extra room when Boxer came home, and would doubtless like to keep a spare room for any other members of the family who visited her after they had married and moved away, so he too thought the idea of destroying the fence a very sensible one, and they at once got down to practicalities.

  “We could do it right away,” he told Harold, “it’s rotten right through at the far end and only needs a pushover!”

  “No,” said Harold, his brown eyes sparkling behind his thick-lensed spectacles, “let’s make a kind of ceremony of it! Let’s do it tomorrow, in front of everyone!”

  Jim at once saw what he was getting at and approved. It matched his own feelings about the Avenue since Churchill had taken charge of the war. The levelling of the fence would be symbolic of the unity of the British, of the sinking of party differences and social distinctions, and of the Avenue’s implacable determination to scorch German fascism from the face of the earth!

  “Very well,” he agreed, “we’ll do it before the toasts, and we’ll make a proper old issue of it!”

  And so they did, watched by a large and enthusiastic audience, for by the time they had returned home with the second bridal couple, the house and garden of number Twenty was teeming with guests, and Pippa, with Bernard standing shyly beside her, had as much as she could do to keep the party from beginning prematurely, and was glad to step aside in favour of Judy, who, as a sergeant-instructor in the W.A.A.F and an ex-marshal of Pony Clubs, was much more at home with exuberance en masse.

  The symbolic levelling of the fence, with Jim swinging a 14-lb. sledge hammer at the verandah end, and Harold (assisted by an uplifted Mr. Baskerville) at the nursery end, was a spectacular opening to a party that, from its outset, proved the most joyful and uninhibited in the Avenue’s history.

  Not even on Armistice Day, 1918, or subsequently, when almost every thoroughfare in the suburb celebrated its VE Day by a communal meal in the open street, did the Avenue let its hair so far down as it did upon this occasion.

  This may, of course, have been partly due to the presence of Mitch and Orrie, the American boy friends of the younger Carver twins, for it was they who provided the music, and the howl of their amplified records could be heard as far away as Cawnpore Road, but Jim and Harold preferred to think that the success of the party lay in the genuine goodwill of neighbouring families, people who shared their own joy in the miraculous return of not one, but two prospective bridegrooms!

  ‘The Unlikes’, of course, had always been popular along the crescent, ever since the days when they had enlivened the district, with their games of string-and-parcel and knocking-down-ginger, but the sudden popularity of Esme was more difficult to understand, for he had always been regarded as an aloof young man, and had never made many friends in the Avenue. Perhaps Harold reflected, people like the Cleggs, the Baskervilles, and the Westermans, recognised in the story of Esme and Judy a real-life fairy-tale to which, as yet, there was no happy ending, or perhaps they simply identified him with the R.A.F., that had performed such wonders in 1940, and was now engaged in giving the Germans regular draughts of their own medicine.

  Jim watched the neighbours congratulating the couples, as Esme, Judy, Pippa and Bernard stood close together on the verandah of Number Twenty-Two, and it seemed to him that here, at long last, was the first real evidence he had ever had that his old dream of a social millennium might be achieved during his lifetime! These people, and their sons and daughters overseas, were surely demonstrating the ascendancy of the common man over power groups and despots everywhere, and when at last final victory was won they would enter upon their reward—a sane, just, class-free world!

  The sun shone brilliantly but Jim saw that there was a far more subtle radiance at work in the two gardens. Baskerville, for instance, was actually listening to someone, and Westerman, for once, was not obsessed with the necessity of turning every remark into a feeble joke. Instead they were both listening attentively to Hargreaves, the ex-fire chief, who was commenting on a sheaf of snapshots that featured his six months’ old son, Winston.

  Jim marvelled at his audience’s patience and its ability to assume interest, for not only were Baskerville and Westerman notorious talkers, but both had already reared families of their own!

  Down against the loganberry bush that straggled along the fence dividing Number Twenty and Number Eighteen, dear old Edith Clegg was persuading Mrs. Hooper, and Mrs. Dodge, of Number Six and Ninety-One, to try yet another of Louise’s sausage rolls. One would not have imagined, Jim thought, as he studied their animated faces, that each of these women had lost an only child in this war, and that for them there could be no hope of weddings, or a tribe of grandchildren in the future. They could have been forgiven, he thought, for looking glum and envious, but instead they looked gay and eager. As he watched, he saw them bite into rolls and smile at Edith, and he realised that Edith too was remembering young Hooper of the Royal Oak, and young Albert Dodge, the paratrooper, and was making a special effort to draw these two women into the community of the living.

  Jim saw that old Mrs. Coombes was there, recounting her interminable story of the night that the bomb had disposed of all but her in Numbers Thirteen, Fifteen and Seventeen. Everyone along the Avenue must have heard that story by now, but Mr. Burridge, of Number Ten was listening attentively to it, and plying the leathery old girl with gin as she told it, illustrating her life-preserving dive in to the stair-cupboard by broad sweeps of her hands.

  Mrs. Barnmeade was there, whose father-in-law, the punctilious A.R.P. warden, had been the Avenue’s first casualty as long ago as the phoney war period. Everyone seemed to be there, everyone except Elaine Frith, Esme’s first wife, who could hardly be expected to put in an appearance, any more than could his son, Archie, for Archie, Jim recalled with a pang, was still doing time in a West Country county gaol, just as Boxer (who would have enjoyed an occasion like this so much!) was doing a differen
t kind of time, somewhere in Germany.

  Jim’s thoughts were interrupted by the tentative approach of Edgar Frith, who had travelled all the way from Wales, accompanied by his wife, Frances, and Esme’s little daughter, Barbara, in order to give Pippa away.

  Edgar was delighted to find himself related to big Jim Carver. He had never forgotten the genial hospitality Jim and Harold had shown him at Number Twenty-Two, on the occasion of his trip to town with the Sullen Cupid.

  Cupid had now been sold, and Edgar was the richer by two thousand guineas, as well as the reputation for ‘spotting a right buy’ that he had always craved, but he had already set aside a substantial part of the money to install Pippa, and her disabled husband, in a little garage on the Caernarvon Road.

  The project, which he regarded as a kind of dowry, was still very much in the air, but Edgar thought that Pippa would soon be able to convince Bernard that it was an excellent chance to overcome his handicap before the war ended, and men came swarming out of the forces to compete with him in civilian life. After all, Bernard, so he understood, was an experienced motor mechanic, and there should be money to be made in garages once this tiresome petrol-rationing was abolished.

  Edgar, however, had not approached Jim with the idea of enlisting his support in the garage plan, but simply to ask him whether he thought it would be bad taste to convey a message to Esme Fraser from his ex-wife, Elaine, of Number Forty-Three.

  “It’s put me in rather a spot, Carver,” he complained. “You see, Frances and I had to call on the girl to show her little Barbara, and she’ll be remarrying herself very soon, or so I understand. It was all rather awkward, but well…I did promise that I’d try and buttonhole Esme, and give him her message!”