by Joan Thomas
8
Jenny knocked over a can and something rolled around in the dark. What in heck was that? she said.
It’s corks, I said. Uncle Stanley put them here. If they start bombing we’re supposed to put them in our mouths. So we don’t bite our tongues off.
Funny he bothers, said Lois. He’s sure to like us better that way. We laughed like maniacs. It didn’t matter, not even Uncle Stanley expected Germans to be walking the streets listening for noise, not at this stage.
We were under the stairs, where all the junk had been cleared out and cushions and blankets piled. Madeleine was gone with Aunt Lucy to the air raid shelter at the bottom of the street. Aunt Lucy wanted us all to go, but I said I had a sore throat, and Lois had just washed her hair, so she settled for Madeleine. Aunt Lucy felt it her duty as wife of the ARP warden to go and to model the right attitude. She kept a tin of barley sugar in her bag for the kiddies. She kept a scarf handy to tie over her curlers when the signal sounded. Imagine someone getting caught in a bombardment because they’ve stopped to fuss with their hair, she said. The shelter was cold and smelled of wet jute from all the sandbags stacked around. If we had to stay into the night, there would be the moist snores of elderly strangers and the fretful voices of children waking up confused and scared. So when the ARP warden walked up the street turning the handle of his rattle like a hurdy-gurdy, Jenny just came over to our place and we squeezed under the stairs. It didn’t matter: these were practice air raids.
Jenny wasn’t mad at me, she was over Monty. She’d met a sailor from Portsmouth at the canteen. His name was Joe and she’d known him for three days, and just that morning he shipped out to the North Sea. She sat with her big legs folded under her, looming over us in the dark. She wore her father’s pomade when her hair was unruly, and it filled the little space under the stairs with the smell of apples.
Joe was a right pest last night, she said. He wanted a little sommut to take with him. That’s how he put it. Come on, love, just a little sommut to remember you by, he says. But I said, Right-o, you’d be leaving a little sommut behind, more like. That’s what I’m afraid of, I said, It’s what you’d be leaving behind! This war suits the lads to a T, don’t you think? She passed us over a little bag of boiled sweets. What about Archie?
What about him? said Lois, taking a sweet.
When’s he leaving?
Next Tuesday.
You watch. He’ll bring his da’s car this weekend. More room in the back.
I don’t think so, Lois said stiffly.
I told Ma I was joining the WACs, Jenny said. But I was just winding her up. Girls look vulgar in khaki, don’t you think? That’s what everyone says. Friday I’m going back to the canteen. With Sally Higgins. She’s joined, did you hear?
I don’t know Sally Higgins, said Lois. How would I hear?
Come with us, said Jenny, poking me. Monty won’t mind.
It’s not Monty she fancies, said Lois. Lily’s in love with a boy from home.
I can’t go Friday, I said. I’m going to the music hall with my auntie.
And then we heard the ARP warden, Uncle Stanley or the other one, coming up the street ringing a handbell for the all-clear.
All the rest of the week I magnified my cold, although by then my throat was sore only if I thought about it. Secretly I hated George Formby. So in the end Aunt Lucy took Madeleine and one of her friends and I lay in bed with a hot-water bottle. After they left I heard Lois going downstairs in her high heels, and then I heard Archie in the hall. Their two voices went back and forth, and then the door slammed and the house fell quiet.
I lay in bed and thought about George. This was what I’d been wanting, the house empty so that I could think about George. George had been moved from Failsworth. He was somewhere on the moors, at a place he called Fetlock Fields. All day the captain blew his hunting horn and they charged across a meadow thrusting Great War bayonets into a row of straw-filled Germans hanging from low gibbets, with the sergeant screaming, Shove it in ’is adjectival gut. Twist the adjectival thing! Adjectival was George’s word, it took the place of something else. They were taught to scream as well, they had to practise it. They threw rocks in lieu of grenades, pulling imaginary pins out with their teeth. It’s a joke from the last war, he wrote, but we actually spent Wednesday digging a slit trench and Thursday filling the adjectival thing up. Nothing but chickenshit day after day, it’s designed to make you long for combat. He signed off, Auf Wiedersehen, George.
I’d spent those two weeks before he went to Failsworth in an agony of wanting to know where I stood with him. During the day Uncle Stanley had him working at the ARP depot and at night there was always someone around. When he went into Manchester to pick up his insignia, when Aunt Lucy said I should go along to keep him company, I was almost faint with happiness. I wore my blue poplin dress with the gored skirt and borrowed a cameo pin for the throat from Lois.
Is it true that you fancy Imogene? I said as soon as we got on the coach.
Yes, he said. We were secretly married in March. He looked at me with disgust. He didn’t touch me until we got off at Piccadilly Gardens, but I knew from the way we sat on the tram that things would be fine between us.
At Piccadilly Gardens he laced his fingers through mine and we walked close together up Portland Street towards the town hall, through the press of people. We went to the post office, where an old man gave us his place in the queue in respect of George’s uniform, and we looked into the library in St. Peter’s Square. Then we drank coffee in a café on Deansgate Street. He had until four o’clock to report to the depot, so after the coffee he took me into the Manchester Art Gallery, where Darwin and other famous intellectuals lectured when it was the Manchester Institute. It was in the Roman style, with columns in front. He wanted to show me a famous painting he thought I might know. He dragged me into a gallery and I was taken aback to see that he was right, I did know it. There, in a little painting shaped like a church window, was Jesus from the cover of a Sunday-school book, knocking on the door of someone’s heart.
A woman posed for this, George said. The artist used Christina Rossetti as his model for Jesus’ face.
An ornate lamp spilled yellow light over Jesus’ face and there was something confiding about the way his small hand hovered over the door. I looked warily at the familiar bearded face, which struck me as sad yet reconciled, not like any woman I had ever seen but not like any man either.
Then we spent a long time looking at a frieze George remembered, casts from the Parthenon. It was a strip of writhing, muscular forms, some with the hind ends of horses and some just human. It depicted the battle between the centaurs and Lapiths, George knew it from Ovid. The Lapiths had invited the centaurs to a wedding, and the centaurs got drunk and tried to make off with the bride. Ovid had an eye for detail, for ripped nostrils with jellied brains oozing out of them. George had read it in Third Form and said that all the boys loved it. George pointed out how the weapons were the goblets and candlesticks from the banquet table and the antlers that had decorated the walls.
Why would you study that? I asked.
Isn’t it obvious? he said. It was the turning point of Western Civilization. The victory of civilization over barbarism. Order over chaos. Athens over Persia.
That’s what I had to remember now that George was gone: standing in the lobby of the Manchester Art Gallery, under the big, square skylight and the four big lamps, looking at the centaurs and the Lapiths braining one another with candlesticks, and then standing in a doorway at Piccadilly Gardens after George had been to the depot, kissing while we waited for the coach, him reaching out and pulling me into an entrance, the way I had the first time with him. The height of him, the furtive dart of his tongue into my mouth. Him reaching for me at last, as though the war had taught him desire.
I turned off the lamp and lay in the dark. There was a half-moon, I knew without looking out the window. But the blackout curtain was pulled, and I lay in bed in t
he dark and wrote to George in my mind. Must I be interested in all of this? I asked him. Or is it enough if I’m interested in you? Finally I knew I wouldn’t fall asleep and I got up and went to the window and opened the curtain to let in the moonlight. I sensed right away that there was someone in the garden. Straight below me, in the corner you could see only from our bedroom, Lois was perched on the garden wall, embracing Archie, who was standing with his back to me. He seemed to be leaning into her, moving rhythmically against her. I could see her slender, white legs on either side of him, bright in the moonlight, and I felt understanding creep over me, starting deep inside me rather than in my brain: it was like coming across an engine room that accounted for a secret humming you could feel through the whole building. She had her face turned up to the moon (her look was preoccupied, as though she had to concentrate, brace herself), and I saw that she was not really embracing him but holding up his trousers.
I backed away from the window, afraid to draw the curtain again in case she caught the movement in the corner of her eye and knew I’d seen. I lay back down on the bed and found that I was crying, and I cried for a long time, giving myself over to my tears, drawing them up the way you draw water from a well. I had no idea why I was crying. Then I heard Lois come in, and I got up and wiped my face on my undervest and pulled the curtain across and finally I fell asleep.
The next morning was a Saturday, but Lois had to work and she came down dressed to the nines as usual and stood at the sideboard drinking her tea. I was at the kitchen table in my dressing gown. She finished her tea and set the cup on the drainboard. Then she took a little mirror out of her purse and touched up her lipstick and ran a finger over each eyebrow. I’m off, she said. Feeling better? She put her hat on, a new hat in the design of the artillery caps the lads were wearing, and clicked down the hall in her high heels without waiting for an answer. On some ordinary day she’d made a leap, an unimaginable leap like the movement of fish to land, and no one had been any the wiser.
Meanwhile Madeleine and I kept going to school. Some of the masters were gone, and some of the girls had left to enlist or take jobs, so our classes were the same size they’d always been. There were never any boys there anyway. Our English literature class was in the afternoon. As it started we’d pull the blackout curtains so that we could put on a light, and in the hiss of the gaslights we would sit and knit, knitting long mufflers of khaki wool, while Mr. Fox read Don Quixote to us. Mr. Fox usually read T.S. Eliot to the Sixth Form, but he said the war had rescued us from the twilight of modernism.
By the end of that first nine months, though, it was clear the war was going to be one of those things that failed to live up to expectations. As Jenny said, it was just as dull as peace. Worse, because the lads were gone. Our neighbours who’d moaned about having evacuees in the house moaned now that the ungrateful sods had sloped back to London. Uncle Stanley, however, saw no reason to lower the guard. He came home from an ARP meeting and showed us how to seal the fireplace all around with sticking paper so poison gas couldn’t pour down the chimney, although we couldn’t keep the seal up all the time because it was cold and we needed the fire.
Who thinks up this sort of thing? I laughed. They think German soldiers are dragging ladders up the streets and blowing gas down the chimneys? With no one noticing?
Uncle Stanley took me by the arm and sat me down on a chair. Does this war strike you as a bit of a joke? he said. Do you find poison gas funny? He pressed his face so close to mine that I had a disagreeable view of the inside of his nostrils. Maybe you should have a talk with some of the lads who were at Passchendaele, he said. They’ll tell you how funny it is, that’s if they have the breath to talk at all.
He let go of me and turned back to his sticking paper. The Jerries have a chlorine bomb now, flower, he said. They’ve moved beyond canisters. Apparently your intelligence is not keeping you up to date!
What I hated most was the flower.
By your intelligence of course he meant George. Who knows what George knew. His letters had become sporadic and very strange. The censor had finally caught up to him — most of my letters and Aunt Lucy’s as well arrived with parts of them painted over. I got one letter that was entirely blacked out, even the Dear Lily. Whatever could he have been writing about through the whole letter? Once he wrote to me in Latin, what appeared to be one of his lists. His regiment had finally formed, the 71st Searchlight Regiment of the Royal Artillery. Everyone had leave, but George didn’t come home then or at Christmas; Uncle Stanley got notice that he’d been subjected to a disciplinary cancellation of leave. They were outside doing Morse code drills with a heliograph (this was an instrument you could use to signal with flashes of light), and he used his turn at signalling to play the fool. What he signalled was Gott mit uns, which was apparently what the Kaiser’s soldiers had inscribed on their belt buckles in the Great War. It was considered very serious: he was put on charge for prejudicial conduct. Madeleine found this part out later from George’s friend Wilf.
When he finally got leave, when I came in and saw him sitting at the kitchen table with his strange short haircut talking to Aunt Lucy like a sane individual, I almost cried with relief. Wilf was there with him and he got up politely to greet me, but George didn’t get up, he just raised his hand in a two-fingered wave. I swear he was thinner, if such a thing was possible. His hands were chapped raw. He had dark notches under his eyes. I admired the shine on their boots and they told us there were two schools of thought: polish and then water and then polish, or oil, then polish, then Vaseline. George favoured the former and Wilf the latter. On their buttons they used jeweller’s rouge. They weren’t at Fetlock Fields any more. They’d been at a port somewhere for landing exercises. They’d learned to scurry like crabs down a scramble net. In the dark, everything in the dark. We sat and drank tea, and Aunt Lucy asked George for his ration book and Wilf started to laugh and George told her he’d lost it playing poker. She asked him when he was going to stop being such a silly apeth. This was the sort of conversation George always had with his mother, and I wondered if he seemed the same to her. To me he seemed very different, wary and contained.
Taperlegs, Wilf called him. While Aunt Lucy was up at the stove Wilf leaned towards me confidentially. He’s in Company E, our lad, he said. He’s in Company E and still they’re calling him Taperlegs.
What’s Company E? I asked.
It’s a company of ectomorphs, George said. Tall and thin, he explained when I didn’t respond.
They assign soldiers to companies by height? I asked. What’s the point of that?
Wilf leaned closer. Saves measuring, he said, when the coffin makers and diggers are called in.
George jabbed him with an elbow. It’s for parade, Lily, he said. We parade by company, and when you’re standing on the pavement watching a parade it makes a better show. The whole column swells as it comes towards you and gradually tapers off. Impresses the hell out of the crowd. Crikey! What a goddamn efficient marching machine!
That can’t be true! I cried. The army wouldn’t care about something like that.
No? said George. What would they care about?
Why, they care about winning, I said, and they both laughed.
Wilf was the only friend from Durham University that George had in his regiment. He had coarse yellow hair and an impudent face, like a turnip with wedges cut out of it. He was going to stay in Oldham for his leave because he lived too far away to go home. They tipped their kit bags out on the flagstones, and Wilf showed me his helmet, the shiny little mark on its rim from a bullet.
You were shot at?
In a training exercise, he said. We had to do an obstacle course through Dannert wire. We were wearing full gear, and the goddamn officers were firing on us. Turned out it was live ammo — but we didn’t know that at the time, did we, Taper-legs?
Oh, it was cracking, lad! said George. Adventures in the Woods Perilous!
Goddamn Dannert wire, said Wilf.
Barbed wire. It’s coiled so you can just unspool it, it saves putting up fence posts. It’s made in Germany. Nasty stuff. There’s Dannert wire full of rotting sheep from here to Bishop Auckland.
Remember Jammer? George said to Wilf. Jammer was down at the Albert Docks in Liverpool and he saw a German merchant ship unloading Dannert wire. This was the end of September.
We were at war in September, I said.
Well done, missy! said Wilf. We were at war. We were well at war and we needed that wire!
They weren’t going back empty either, said George. They were loading up with black pudding.
That’s just one of the stories people like to tell, I said.
Oh, little Lily, mein Liebling, said Wilf, and they put their heads together and sang a song in German, a song that had my name in it: Wie einst, Lili Marleen-a, Wie einst, Lili Marleen. Love, even the Jerries are dreaming about you, Wilf said when they’d wound down.
I cocked my head at George. What was it you sent me in Latin? I asked.
He shrugged. It was just a translation of our DRO. I was confined to barracks for three days. Had nothing to read.
Why? What had you done?
The fuckin’ NCO made me do an extra shift in the mess hall. Then he called inspection in the barracks and I didn’t have a chance to get my gear ready. The fuckin’ fucker fucked me over.
Adjectival’s fallen by the way, I see.
Fuckin’ right it has, said Wilf humorously. A lad in khaki talks like a toff, they think he’s one of them fuckin’ plants. Like the nun with the hairy knuckles who was spotted on the Clapham omnibus.
I stood on the flagstones, proud. They’d never talk like this in front of Aunt Lucy or Madeleine.