Long and the Short

by Saddler, Allen

  He found another conglomeration of a pleasure palace called the Winter Garden, which seemed to have something of the style of the old Crystal Palace, masses of glass and chandeliers. The Winter Garden was a little more sedate than its rival, with palm trees and flower baskets. There was an orchestra in the ballroom playing waltzes and foxtrots but never quicksteps and a notice on an easel announcing that there was to be NO JITTERBUGGING. This was a wild gymnastic import which had come with the Yanks, in which the girl was swung about madly while gyrating like a top, while her male partner controlled all the movements with a kind of insolent ease. Harry had seen jitterbugging in American films but had judged that these exponents were professional dancers anyway.

  While he was watching a girl approached him with a look of pity on her face. She was big, with a fat face, but had a warm smile. ‘On your own, soldier?’

  ‘Just looking,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t get a look-in, can you? Come on. I’ll dance with you.’

  ‘No thanks. I’m all right.’

  ‘Let’s sit this one out then, shall we? Where are you stationed?’

  ‘I think that’s supposed to be a military secret.’

  The band had started on a medley which included the ‘Palais Glide’, the ‘Two-Step’ and the ‘Veleta’, finishing with the inevitable ‘Lambeth Walk’, which Harry regarded as a travesty and a slander on the cockney spirit. He turned to the girl with a gesture of despair.

  The girl smiled. ‘I don’t blame you for feeling left out of things. The girls all go for these Yanks.’

  Yanks dancing the ‘Lambeth Walk’. For Christ’s sake! They didn’t even know where Lambeth was. She was wearing a dark blue dress with an imitation pearl necklace. She smelt of Palm – olive or Lux, and she had nice teeth and long dark hair and the warmth of an uncomplicated friendship. Harry decided that he could do worse.

  ‘What’s your name, Olive?’ he said.

  ‘It’s Joan. What’s yours?’

  ‘Alf. Do you really want to dance?’

  ‘Only if you do,’ she said gravely.

  He couldn’t make up his mind whether he was being patronized. Joan was obviously not a run-of-the-mill floozie. She was sensible and easy to get on with. Was she seeing it her patriotic duty to befriend a lonely Tommy frozen out by the foreign competition?

  ‘Do you live here?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Well, I do at the moment. I work here. I’m a secretary at the hospital.’

  ‘I’m from the Smoke.’

  ‘Go on,’ she laughed. ‘I’d never have guessed.’

  The band stopped playing and there seemed to be a kind of interval.

  ‘Do you know anywhere we could go?’ he said. ‘A bit quieter. Smaller.’

  The girl called Joan looked at him, as though she were weighing her chances, good or bad, with this stranger whom she had befriended.

  ‘There’s quite a nice pub, but it’s at the back of the town.’

  Harry tried not to sound too eager. There was a chance of this trip turning out all right after all. ‘Let’s go,’ he said briskly. ‘Can we get a taxi?’

  It was still early evening. Blackpool was seething with people. There were fresh battalions arriving by the minute, garishly dressed and made up like pantomime dames, ready for any kind of slapstick and tickle. There was Albert Modley to see, Frank Randle and Revnell and West. There was still a bloody circus. There were drinks to guzzle, balloons to bat around, silly hats to flaunt, shagging to be done under the piers. It was a mad place was Blackpool.

  They soon got a taxi, and Joan directed the driver out of the town through a dim suburban patch to the edge where fields took over from streets and houses. There was a mock Tudor pub, just off the road, with a few cars in the car park and a view of flat farmland with no trees or buildings on the horizon. The air was fresh, and the sun was stuck in the sky as though it had parked there by accident.

  ‘This is it,’ Joan said. Harry reached for his pocket, but she got her money out first.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the drinks.’

  The girl asked for a dry sherry, which was one up on Betsy and May and their eternal Babychams. He got himself a pint and took the drinks to a table. It was, as she had said, a quiet neighbourly pub, with middle-aged and old couples drinking soberly, mostly in a companionable silence.

  He began to relax. ‘So it’s started then.’

  She knew what he meant. ‘Do you think it will take long?’

  ‘Long! Christ, I don’t know. These Germans. They don’t give in, you know.’

  ‘Yes, but now we’ve got the Americans on our side.’

  Harry, she could see, was sceptical about the advantage of American assistance.

  ‘Will you have to go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said indifferently.

  Joan looked at him. He wasn’t young; he might be thirty even. He was a hardened soldier. He exuded a kind of casual confidence.

  ‘Are you married?’ she asked.

  There was a long pause. Somehow Harry didn’t care to lie. He had only just met this woman, might never see her again after tonight.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m married. You?’

  Joan nodded. ‘Yes. He’s out there somewhere. In the infantry. We’ve only been married three months. I never thought it would come to this.’

  ‘Do you love him?’

  He thought she would have said, ‘Of course’, or even got angry and said, ‘What do you mean?’ But she seemed to consider the question carefully.

  ‘I don’t know. I thought I was pregnant, but it was a false alarm.’

  It was strange how this kind of direct conversation seemed all right under the circumstances. Two strangers posing frank questions to each within half an hour of meeting. Peoples’ feelings were on display. Nobody could pretend that things were all right any more. Lives were floating on a sea of emotion. You could hear of stark tragedy in a chip shop, learn about someone’s entire life in a bus queue. Nobody bothered to pretend that they weren’t worried to death about the course of the war.

  ‘You see her over there?’

  Harry looked at a woman sitting by herself near the door. A mousy little person, wearing a raincoat, a beret and an ARP armband. She was smiling, as though she was remembering something amusing.

  ‘Her husband went down in a submarine. Only two weeks ago.’

  ‘Christ,’ he said, with a shiver. ‘Poor sod.’

  Good wishes and pride in ‘our brave soldiers’ didn’t cover the hundreds of private tragedies spread all over the country. There was no time to weep, no time to mourn. The forces had to press on with the next assignment, not even looking back to see the dead and dying.

  ‘It’s the war,’ said Harry. ‘There’s no bloody sense in it.’

  ‘I know. Have you got to go back tonight?’

  ‘I ought. If I run into a redcap they’ll send me straight back. I just got out in time. All leave will have been cancelled by now.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Do you know what’s going to happen? Thousands of people who’ve had no say in anything will be killed. They’ll be blown up, shot and flattened into the ground by sodding great tanks, riddled by machine-gun bullets or blown up in their beds. And in the end one side will have won, and bloody good luck to them. I hope your bloke is all right.’

  The woman who said her name was Joan grasped his hand. ‘You can stay with me tonight if you want. It’s just for company. I could do with talking to somebody sensible.’

  Harry smiled. It was there on a plate, but he wasn’t excited the way he usually was. There was a damp hand over everything. It was as though the two of them were clinging to the wreckage of a doomed ship.

  He looked at her with a speculative grin. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You sure?’

  She looked down, blushing. ‘I’ve got a Put-U-Up.’

  They drank up and left. By this time it was dark, and they stood a few moments in the car park so that their eyes could get accustomed to the abs
ence of light.

  ‘You’d better stay close to me,’ she said. ‘You can’t see anything when you get down the lane. There’s a few ditches and potholes. I know where they are.’

  He fell in beside her and linked her arm into his. They walked along like an old married couple returning from a quiet drink. She turned off the main road, and he could feel damp hedges at the side of a narrow road. Joan had a torch, which she switched on occasionally just to confirm that they were on the right route.

  ‘Does your husband know about the baby?’

  They took several steps before she answered. ‘No. He doesn’t. He’d be upset. He was keen on becoming a father.’

  She opened a gate and led him up a short path. He had the impression of a small estate of fairly new houses, some maisonettes. Little England on the outskirts of Blackpool. The town was on show, but the people who lived there tried to ignore it.

  ‘Alf,’ she said.

  ‘Eh?’

  And she laughed. ‘Caught you out that time, didn’t I?’

  He laughed. ‘It’s Harry, but it doesn’t matter, does it?’

  She opened the door. It was the ground floor of a maisonette. A bit boxy inside but kept very trim, with chair covers and matching curtains, an oak draw-leaf table with four chairs, a bookcase, a small three-piece suite, a Bakelite wireless set; the sort of room that might appear on the cover of the Radio Times to represent the comfy old England that everyone was fighting to preserve.

  It was only about ten o’clock.

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ Joan said and disappeared into a small kitchen. ‘Do you take sugar?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He knew that from this time on he wouldn’t be able to relax any more. He would be on the go, fetching and carrying for the Major, who would blow up with self-importance and regard any small query as treason.

  ‘You can pull out the Put-U-Up,’ she called. He saw the solid leatherette chair sited in a corner with a solid air of respectability, but he didn’t move. He could feel the tension slipping from his arms, his shoulders and his neck. Them two women, Betsy and May, they weren’t worth chasing. They were all right for a shag, but after that they weren’t much use to anybody. You couldn’t strike up a conversation with them, couldn’t discuss the war. They just ate, drank, smoked and shagged. Anything above these basic activities was hoity-toity to them. He realized how he had so easily slipped into a piggery and had found it too comfortable to move. Of course he had his needs. Even the Major had a posh bit of stuff somewhere, but with this woman, Joan, he felt that there were other layers of life that he had missed.

  She brought the teapot, covered with a tea cosy, which he found comfortable and somehow endearing, and two cups and saucers, which after army mugs seemed delicate and precious. He lit up two cigarettes, as he had seen Paul Henreid do for Bette Davis in Now Voyager, and gave one to Joan. She smiled as she recognized the cliché.

  ‘You know,’ he said. ‘This is great. I feel sort of at home here.’

  Joan sat beside him on the sofa.

  ‘What does your husband do? I mean, before he joined up.’

  ‘He didn’t join up. He got his papers. He’s a milkman. That is, he collects the churns from farms and takes them to be processed. There’s lots of farms on the Fylde. His father has the business, and Brian just fell into it.’

  ‘Do you see anything of his family?’

  ‘Sometimes. They’re sort of – er – rustic, down to earth.’

  ‘Farmers.’

  ‘That sort of thing.’

  It was a comfortable, desultory conversation, not going anywhere, no startling revelations; just a preliminary exchange by two people getting to know each other.

  ‘It was good of you to come,’ Joan said. ‘I’m here all alone – well, there’s people upstairs, but I feel cut off, you know. And then I think all kinds of things. I wonder what’s going to happen. There’s no pattern or order in our lives, is there? I mean how long is this going on? When it started in ’39 I was just finishing at school, and I thought, well, I thought it might be a bit of a lark, you know, exciting; but then it went on and on, getting worse and worse, with no end in sight, everybody’s lives turned topsy-turvy, and you couldn’t shut it out of your life. And every time my father said something like “There’s not much meat on this chop” and my mother said “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” I wanted to scream. Then I got this job and moved up here, met Brian and we got at it, and then I thought I’d clicked, and Brian ran around as though his arse was on fire, fixing up the wedding at the registry office just before he went off, and it was all unnecessary …’ She trailed off indecisively. A potted history of her life, dominated by the war.

  Then Harry started. ‘When it began I got called up right away. So I missed all the bombing in London, but my dad and mum got bombed out, in Poplar, and I got compassionate leave to get them fixed up. I made a promise to myself that whatever happened I was going to come out of it alive. It wasn’t my idea. Someone, some politicians I expect, had made a cock-up. The first war was never really over. The Germans got defeated, but they never really thought they’d done anything wrong. The leaders, maybe, but the ordinary German, he was just caught up in it like we are now, but they got punished. The point is that when the high-ups, the people in power, make a cock-up it’s us that carries the can …’

  The confused mental meanderings seemed to bring comfort to the participants.

  ‘Can you handle that thing?’ Joan said, indicating the fearsome Put-U-Up.

  ‘Do you have many visitors?’

  ‘My sister.’

  She went out of the small lounge into the bedroom and returned with some blankets and an eiderdown. He got up and pulled at the Put-U-Up. The springs clanged and the hinges squeaked, and he had to give it a jerk for the bottom end to reach the floor.

  ‘They’ve got beds like these in the army,’ he said. ‘In the Tower of London.’

  She laughed. ‘What time have you got to get off in the morning?’

  ‘Early. You won’t hear me go. Nor will the neighbours.’

  ‘They won’t take any notice. All kinds of comings and goings around here.’

  He felt a bit restless. ‘Do you rent this place?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s owned by a seaside landlady. She bought it for her son and his wife, but they’re both away. He’s in the air force and his wife’s a WAAF. You know what seaside landladies are like. Can’t bear to see a property not earning its keep. Are you hungry?’

  ‘No. I’m all right.’

  ‘I can do some toast, and I’ve got some cheese. I’m registered as a vegetarian, so I get extra.’

  He went into the small kitchen. There was a grill under the electric oven. He watched as she made toast and melted some cheese on it. The whole scene felt comfortable and orderly. This was what life ought to be like. Two people, living together, sharing interests, bits of gossip. He put his arm around her shoulder. She carried on with her task as though she hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Joan,’ he said. ‘It is Joan, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think we could hide in here until it’s all over?’

  ‘We’d run out of food.’

  ‘No we wouldn’t. I’d go out and snare a rabbit, pinch a cow and tie it up outside. Get a chicken to lay pork pies.’

  ‘Harry,’ she said, looking at him fondly. ‘You’re a nice man. And I was brought up never to trust a cockney.’

  ‘And I was brought up to think that all northerners were savages.’

  ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘They’re just a bit closer to life. London isn’t for real people. It’s just for Londoners.’

  They were sitting opposite each other with just the small table between them, staring into each other’s faces as though examining the eyes and features for any sign of insincerity or falseness.

  Harry put his arm up and touched her face, and she gasped slightly at his touch and closed her eyes.

  ‘Were yo
u sorry?’ he asked. ‘About the baby.’

  ‘I don’t know. The whole thing was a shock, but as it went on I got used to the idea.’

  He let his hand travel down to her neck. ‘You could still have it, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ she said softly.

  ‘The war might well be over before it was born.’

  She was smiling, as if in her sleep, with her eyes closed. He felt that just a touch, a twinkle of magic, just a stroke of her hair, could make her pregnant. It would, of course, be a love child, in the full sense of the term, conceived casually, as though by a magic wand.

  It was clear that Joan was already in a haze of romantic enchantment, and Harry felt a grave sense of responsibility. If her husband came back he wouldn’t be disappointed. If he got killed Joan would have something of her own, which would be recognized by the authorities as a serviceman’s child.

  Joan stood up and walked out of the kitchen. He followed her into the small living-room, but she had gone into the bedroom.

  ‘There’s only a single bed,’ she called.

  He lit a cigarette. It was an odd situation. He was being invited to impregnate this woman and then disappear. It was something that didn’t happen in real life, and yet the woman was real enough. He didn’t feel the usual urgency. He wasn’t against the idea, and yet it was something to think about. Everybody’s life was upside down. Most couplings were for convenience. You couldn’t promise to love someone for ever when for ever might only be the next day. It was grab what you could of happiness, or ecstasy, and be glad of it.

  He went to the door of the bedroom. She hadn’t pulled the curtains, so there was some light from a watery moon.