by David Lodge
– I thought so, said Uncle Jack.
– Biggest raid yet, they reckon. Jerry’s lost a packet of planes, they say. But they just keep on coming over in waves.
– Oh dear, I wish we didn’t live so near the river, said Auntie Nora.
– We’re all right here, ducks, said Uncle Jack. Must be three miles away, those fires.
– Well, I just hope we don’t have any up this way tonight, said Timothy’s father, because I reckon every fire-engine in South-East London’s down at the Docks.
– Mine isn’t! said Timothy, holding up his fire-engine with a ladder, and all the grown-ups laughed.
– ’Attaboy, Tiny, said Uncle Jack. He took out a packet of cigarettes and offered them round. Timothy’s mother shook her head, but Auntie Nora took one.
– I don’t usually, she said, but these raids . . .
The cigarette smoke hung in the air in curly shapes. Its smell mixed with the smell of the oil stove and the smell of cocoa. Timothy yawned.
– Time these children had a nap, said Timothy’s mother. Looks as if we might be here all night.
– I’m not tired, said Timothy.
– And I’m not tired, said Jill, putting her arms round her father’s neck.
– I’d better be off, said Timothy’s father. You be a good boy now, Tim. I’ll come back and fetch you when the All Clear’s gone. He put on his tin hat and buttoned up his raincoat.
– I’ll see you out, Geoff, said Uncle Jack. He got up holding Jill in his arms and carried her across to the bunk where Timothy was.
– You and Timothy have a nice sleep now, love. I’ll see you in the morning.
– You’re not going away tomorrow, are you Daddy? said Jill, keeping her arms round his neck so he couldn’t stand up straight.
– Not straightaway, no, my precious.
– Not ever?
– You have a nice sleep now, my pet, or you’ll be too tired to play with me in the morning.
– Can Timothy sleep in my bunk?
– We usually let them, said Auntie Nora.
– I suppose it’s all right if he’s going to marry you, said Uncle Jack, and the grown-ups laughed.
– Can’t I go outside for just a little look? Timothy pleaded, as the two men were getting ready to go out.
– No, said his mother. Now get into bed, and let’s have no more nonsense.
– Why can’t I?
– Because you might get killed, that’s why.
– What about Dad, then?
– Dad is grown up and he has a tin hat.
– Uncle Jack hasn’t got a tin hat.
– And Uncle Jack ought to have more sense, said Auntie Nora, only he’s not much more grown up than you are, Timothy.
– He is, he is grown up! He’s brave, Jill said.
– Fact is, said Uncle Jack with a grin, you’d hardly know there was a war on at the station. I have to come home to see a bit of action.
– You’re welcome to it, said Timothy’s father, as they disappeared up the steps. Sixth night running, this is.
– Blimey, just look at that sky! they heard Uncle Jack say, as Auntie Nora closed the door behind them.
– Now, she said, let’s get you two comfy.
His mother took off his siren suit and Auntie Nora took off Jill’s dressing-gown. Then Auntie Nora tucked them in tight under the blankets. She put a shade over the light so that it didn’t shine in their eyes. His mother gave him One-Ear Rabbit to hug and Jill had Susan. He looked up at the curved roof of the shelter and felt warm and safe. The two mothers sat over the oil-stove, talking in low voices. They were talking about Kath again. He couldn’t hear properly, and he couldn’t understand what he did hear.
– Wants to join the W.A.A.F.s as soon as she can but Geoff won’t hear of . . .
– Don’t blame you, Jack says the morals . . .
– Keep her at home if we can, plenty of useful . . .
– Wedding practically every week, Jack says, and mostly because they. . .
– That Roberts girl up the road . . .
The heads came closer together, the voices whispered, Auntie Nora’s knitting needles went clicketty-click, clicketty-click. Shadows shifted on the roof of the shelter with the quick movements of her hands. The guns sounded faint now, a long way off. He pulled down his pyjama trousers and Jill wriggled beside him as she pulled up the skirt of her nightie. Then he felt her cool soft fingers on his thing and with his own finger he felt for the little crease between her legs. He was warm and safe and sleepy. He hoped there would be another raid the next night.
A big bang woke him. There was a buzzing in his ears, and although Jill was still in bed beside him it was as if she was crying a long way away. The first thing he did was to pull up his pyjama trousers. Some dirt had fallen on his head. The electric light was swinging in the air, throwing wild shadows over the walls and roof. The two mothers were standing at the bottom of the steps.
– Jack, Auntie Nora was shouting, are you all right Jack? Jack? Oh my God! She went up the steps, tripped, and crawled out of the shelter, calling Jack.
– Nora, don’t, be careful, his mother said. He saw her make the sign of the cross and her lips moving silently as she closed her eyes tight.
– Mummy! Daddy! Jill wailed, hugging her doll. Where’s my Daddy?
Timothy started to cry too, not knowing why. Jill jumped out of bed and ran to the steps. His mother opened her eyes.
– Jill! Come back!
But Jill was already through the door at the top of the steps. His mother scrambled after her. Timothy was frightened. He would be left on his own.
– Mum! he shrieked.
She stopped and turned round, saying something, but he couldn’t hear. There was a loud whistling noise and a flash and a roar and just before the light went out his mother seemed to be flying across the shelter towards him. He felt her body fall across his and cried out because she had hurt him but he couldn’t hear his own voice because of the buzzing in his ears. A lot more dirt had fallen on the bed. It was pitch dark and he was very frightened. Then he felt his mother move and her arms tighten around him. She was saying something but he couldn’t hear properly. Then he could hear as if she was a long way away. She was saying:
– Timothy, are you all right, Timothy? She was crying.
After a little while he could see things. The oil stove, surprisingly, was still alight, and there was a dim red glow from the little window at the bottom and some yellow light coming through the holes at the top. The doorway of the shelter was blocked up with earth and stones, and some had fallen into the shelter. There seemed to be grass and even flowers in the dirt. And there were two eyes that shone in the dim light of the stove. He couldn’t see any face, just the two eyes, very close together, and they frightened him. His mother tried to get up, but he wouldn’t let go of her. She said:
– Timothy, if you let go of me I could light a candle and then we won’t be in the dark.
So he let go of her, and she stumbled slowly round the shelter looking for a candle. She found one and lit it. Then he saw that the eyes belonged to Jill’s Susan.
– Look, he said, pointing. Susan.
His mother picked the doll from the dirt and began to cry. There was a hole in Susan’s cheek and one arm and one leg were missing and her dress was all torn and dirty. His mother went over to the doorway and began to dig at the dirt with her hands. More dirt and stones fell into the shelter. A brick fell on her foot and she gave a cry of pain.
– It’s no use, she said, we’ll have to wait here until they dig us out. Daddy will come soon and dig us out. She limped over to the bed and sat down, putting her arms around him.
– I don’t want to go out, he said, I don’t want to go up there.
– Daddy will come soon. It’ll be all right.
They used three candles before the men dug them out. His father wasn’t one of them. But his Dad was all right, they said. It had been a shock, that was all
. He was resting at home, waiting for them.
– Come on, son, your Dad’s waiting for you, they said.
But Timothy didn’t want to leave the shelter. In the end, one of the men had to carry him, kicking and screaming, out of the shelter, into the open air.
2
THERE WERE NO more nights of getting up and going up the road to Jill’s house. Jill’s house wasn’t there any more, and Jill had gone to heaven and so had her Mummy, and her Daddy had gone back to the Air Force. Timothy and his mother went to live in the country where they didn’t have air raids. They lived in a place called Blyfield, in a dark narrow house near the gasworks. The house belonged to Mrs. Tonks, who was fat and smelled funny. They had the front room that was full of hard shiny furniture, and a bedroom upstairs. His mother shared Mrs. Tonks’ kitchen, which was a drawback.
There were a lot of drawbacks at Mrs. Tonks, his mother used to say. There was no electric light in the house, and they had to light the gas when it got dark. His mother held a spill to the white lacy bit and it lit with a little pop and turned blue and red and then yellowy-white and burned with a faint hiss. You could make it brighter or dimmer by pulling on a little chain. Mrs. Tonks wouldn’t have a gaslight burning on the stairs because it was a waste, so when his mother took him up to bed she held a candle in a candlestick, and she used to leave the candle burning on the bedroom mantelpiece because he didn’t like the dark now. If the candle went out before he fell asleep, he called out and she came and lit another candle. It was cold in the winter and when you woke up in the morning there was ice on the inside of the window. He scratched it off with his fingernail, and looked through the holes he had made, at the gasworks. Behind the gasworks there was a field with some cows in it. One day his mother wanted to take a short-cut through the field, but as they started across the field one of the cows looked at them and he was frightened and they went round by the road. In the mornings they washed in a basin in the bedroom. His mother brought the hot water upstairs in a jug from the kitchen. Mrs. Tonks’ house didn’t have a bathroom. His mother bathed him in a tin bath in front of the fire in the front room. It was nice having a bath in front of the fire, especially getting dried afterwards, but he wasn’t allowed to splash; and when his father brought him his boats from home there wasn’t really room for them in the tin bath. His father was still working at the office in London, but he came to see them at weekends.
He went to school at a convent near the village. He liked his teacher, Sister Teresa, she had a nice smile and rosy cheeks, but he was frightened of Sister Scholastica who had a big pimple on her chin with hairs growing out of it. Sister Scholastica taught the big girls, but sometimes she was in the playground. Her name was hard to say and once he called her Sister Elastica and the little girls laughed and Sister Scholastica looked cross. On Sundays he and his mother went to mass in the convent chapel. The priest came on a bicycle. The mass was very long because the nuns sang a lot. Sister Teresa sang the best and Sister Scholastica sang the worst.
There was a song they often sang on the wireless called There’ll Be Bluebirds Over The White Cliffs of Dover.
There’ll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
There’ll be love and laughter,
And peace ever after,
Tomorrow, when the world is free.
Nearly at the end of the song were the words:
And Jimmy will go to sleep
In his own little room again.
When he came to those words he always thought of his own little room in London.
One day they had a concert at the school and everybody had to sing a song or recite a poem. He sang The White Cliffs of Dover and Sister Teresa cried and gave him a kiss afterwards. Dover was a seaside place with tall white cliffs. He thought it would be nice to go there after the war was over and see the bluebirds.
One day his mother came to school with him to see Mother Superior, to ask if he could be a boarder. He didn’t want to be a boarder, but his mother said she had to go back to London to work and it was too dangerous for him to go with her. Mother Superior said he would like it, the boarders had lots of fun, and she took a bag of toffees out of a drawer and offered him one. He took the toffee but he didn’t eat it. On the way back to Mrs Tonks’s he threw it into a ditch. His mother saw but she didn’t say anything.
The next day she took him to the school with a suitcase with his clothes in it, but no toys except One-Ear Rabbit. Boarders weren’t allowed to have their own toys, but Mother Superior said he could keep One-Ear Rabbit. His mother kissed him goodbye and told him to be a good boy. She was crying and he couldn’t understand why she was leaving him all on his own. He didn’t cry but he was frightened and unhappy. The boarding part of the school was cold and dark, with wooden stairs and passages that had no carpets and creaked when you trod on them. There was stew for supper with bits of white fat in it and watery gravy that made the potatoes all mushy. He didn’t eat any of it, but he was frightened in case Sister Scholastica noticed. After supper they went into the chapel and sang hymns and said long prayers which he didn’t know. He opened and closed his mouth soundlessly to pretend that he was singing and praying with the others. Then it was time to go to bed. His bed was in a big room with some other little boys. There was a place to wash, but only cold water. There was only lino on the floor and it was cold under his feet when he took off his shoes and socks, so he got in bed quickly. The Sister who was in charge asked him if he had said his night prayers and he said his mother let him say them in bed if it was cold and the other boys giggled. The Sister said next time he must kneel down beside his bed to say them like the other boys. She turned out the lights, except for a little one at the end of the room where she sat, saying her rosary. The rosary beads clicked as she fingered them. It reminded him of Auntie Nora’s knitting needles in the shelter. He wished he was back in the shelter before the bomb fell. He didn’t like being a boarder at the convent. He felt like crying, but the other boys would hear him and it wouldn’t be any use. When his mother came to see him he would cry a lot and ask her to take him away. He pictured himself crying and saying to his mother Take me away, take me away, take me away, and she took him away. It was a nice picture. Thinking of it, he fell asleep.
The next morning a bell woke him when it was still dark. Someone had put his arms outside the blankets in the night and they were cold. He pulled the blankets over his head and tried to think of the picture of his mother taking him away, but it was no use. He couldn’t believe in it, with the sounds of the other boys getting up and water running and shoes clattering on the wooden stairs. He got out of bed, shivering in the cold air, and put on his clothes. But he wasn’t used to dressing on his own, and he couldn’t manage the buttons on his shirtsleeves or his shoe-laces. He stood beside the bed with his shoe-laces trailing and his shirt cuffs hanging open until the Sister came to help him. She took off his shirt and told him to go and wash. When he came back she looked at his ears to see if they were clean. For breakfast there was porridge, but not nice porridge like his mother made. It was runny and there wasn’t enough sugar to taste.
After breakfast they went to the cloakrooms to clean their shoes. A Sister in a blue apron gave him a tin of black shoe polish and a brush. He looked at them helplessly. Suddenly he began to cry, hopeless, useless tears, tears he had planned to save for his mother when she came to visit him, now wasted on the indifferent boys and girls around him, tears unheard, unseen in the dark, noisy cloakroom, smelling of boot polish.
– What’s the matter, Timothy? Big boys mustn’t cry.
He turned to look up at the Sister. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and sniffed.
– Don’t know how to do it.
– Well, now, that’s nothing to cry about. Here, I’ll show you.
The Sister bent down over his shoes, brushing vigorously. Some of the other children sniggered and stared. Timothy was ashamed and
looked away, through the barred window that faced the main gate, and suddenly saw his mother coming up the drive, carrying his Wellington boots. Without thinking he ran from the cloakroom and down the passage. A nun saw him coming and threw up her hands to stop him. Running in the corridors was not allowed. She was smiling, but he felt in his heart that if she stopped him he would not see his mother and he would be a boarder for ever and ever. He ducked under the nun’s arm, felt her hand catch at his sleeve, wriggled free of her grasp and stumbled to the door. Another Sister had just opened it and his mother stood on the threshold. He threw himself into her arms.
It was lovely to be back home again. For days he went about the house in a trance of delight, scarcely daring to speak or play in case it would break the spell and send him back to the convent. But his mother promised him he wouldn’t have to go back. There were not many raids in London now, and they had a shelter of their own. It wasn’t in their garden, like Jill’s; it was in the front room, and it was like a big iron table. You slept underneath the top, on mattresses. The shelter was called a Morrison, and it nearly filled their front room. His father said it wouldn’t save you from a direct hit, but nothing much would. Anyway, Timothy felt safe as soon as he had crawled into the shelter. It was lined with mattresses and cushions and the sides were joined with wire mesh so you could breathe, but if the ceiling fell on top of you you wouldn’t be hurt. Timothy slept in the Morrison every night, and if there was a raid his mother came downstairs and crawled in beside him.
Uncle Jack sometimes stayed with them when he was on leave, because he hadn’t got a house any more. Where Jill’s house had been, and the houses on each side of it, there was just a big space and piles of bricks and twisted pipes. Grass and weeds had grown over them while Timothy had been away. One day he saw Uncle Jack standing on the bomb-site with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground. Timothy nearly called out to him, but decided not to. When he got home he told his mother, and later he heard her telling his father. His mother said it was only natural but he shouldn’t brood. His father said Jack blamed himself but what was the use. From their talk he found out what had happened on the last night in the shelter. When the first bomb fell in the next street, the one that had woken him up, Uncle Jack ran off to help. He shouted first to Auntie Nora, but she didn’t hear him. When she came out of the shelter to look for him, with Jill behind her, their own house was hit by a second bomb and they were killed in the garden. Killed meant you were dead and buried in the ground, but your soul went to heaven. You were happy in heaven but the people you left behind were sad, like Uncle Jack. Timothy missed playing with Jill, but he wasn’t as sad as he had been boarding at the convent.