Child from Home

by John Wright

  As the green of late spring became the gold of high summer, cow parsley grew tall on the verges and we saw ever more Lancaster bombers flying low over the village after taking off from East Moor, where the Canadians were being trained in their use. Gran came through again saying, ‘I have had another letter from your Uncle John.’ He was now in Campo 73 at Carpi, a small town in northern Italy not far from Modena.

  ‘I’m glad to hear the Red Cross parcels are getting through to the boys,’ Mrs Harris said, pretending to be concerned. ‘Don’t you have something to do with raising money for them?’

  ‘Yes, I go round the houses collecting the contributions to the Red Cross Penny-a-Week Fund every week in all weathers. They are doing a grand job for the boys in the prison camps who really look forward to receiving them.’

  Just before we broke up for the summer holidays Miss Curry updated us on the war situation: Allied forces had invaded Sicily; 150,000 men had landed on 10 July and were moving steadily forward; General Montgomery was leading the Eighth Army, known as the ‘Desert Rats’ after the long-legged rodent called the Jerboa, and the American General Patton was in command of the US 7th Army.

  I missed Jimmy very much and when Gran came again I cried and pleaded with her to take me home. When Mrs Harris left the room I said to her, ‘I hate it here and Mrs Harris is always hitting us. Can’t I come home with you?’ ‘Don’t be silly now. I’m sure it’s not that bad,’ she replied, just as Mrs Harris came back into the room and we were sent upstairs to play while they talked. When we came down nothing more was said. Mrs Harris must have convinced Gran that she did not hit us and we noticed that the belts and cane were missing from their usual prominent place.

  Gran then turned to me and said, ‘Jimmy is staying with Aunt Ruby while his Mam sorts out her discharge. He sends you his love as do your Mam and Dad. Keep your chin up and be good boys.’ She did not stay long as she had to catch the Darlington train, and on arrival there she would have to hope that she was not too late to catch the connecting train to Middlesbrough. It would be a long tedious journey for her with the windows painted over and the blinds down, and she would not arrive home until well after midnight. Luckily she enjoyed knitting, which helped to pass the time. She told us that, ‘Sometimes the trains are so packed with servicemen that they lay on the luggage racks.’

  During the summer break we heard on the news that Mussolini had fallen out of favour and had been dismissed from office by the king of Italy bringing an end to the Italian fascist government. We knew it was good news but it did not really affect us and, as it was another lovely summer, we roamed far and wide in the local countryside. Pink-flowered spikes of rosebay willowherb grew tall on the grass verges as large white trumpets of bindweed were fully open in the hedgerows. The days were hot, and golden sunlight danced on the surface of Widd’s pond as we tried to catch the newts, the silvery-looking diving beetles, the pond-skaters and the waterboatmen that skittered across the surface. On leaving the field we always jumped the drainage ditch and Nancy Robson, who had bobbed, mousy hair, and wore wire-rimmed glasses, thought she could do the same and fell in. She was covered in mud and when we got back Mrs Harris dumped her unceremoniously in a bath of cold water with all her clothes on. She got a good slap on the legs and was sent to bed for the rest of the day and we got an earful for letting her do it.

  The summers seemed to last forever in those days. When Gran came to visit us again, she told us that, ‘Aunt Hilda is out of the army and has got herself a job in the steelworks. Renee is still driving the overhead crane at Cargo Fleet Steel Rolling Mill and Archie is serving his apprenticeship as a steel plater in the Britannia Bridgeyard.’ The steelworks were now involved in the manufacture of landing craft and amphibious vessels for the planned invasion of Europe, but the workers had been sworn to secrecy.

  Sometimes I would see the little curly-haired figure of Maud Fisher tottering around in her mother’s high-heeled shoes and wearing her jewellery and strings of beads. She was only four years old and I felt that she should not be out on the road on her own. Taking her tiny hand in mine made me feel more grown up as I took her back to her front garden and told her to play in there. Luckily very few cars came along Usher Lane in those days. One day I noticed Nurse Lealman’s bike propped up by the Fisher’s front door and I found out later that Maud had pushed a clay marble up her nose and her mother, being unable to get it out, had sent her older brother to fetch her.

  As day succeeded day, I found the blazing sun tedious and irksome and I missed Jimmy who had always come up with good ideas for things to do. Flies and biting insects plagued us and dust settled on the leaves of the hedgerows turning them a greyish green in colour. After finding that Nancy had warts on the back of her hand, we thought we would try out an old country cure. Mr Harris had told us that rubbing a black slug on them before impaling it on a hawthorn spike usually did the trick. So we did this and waited, as it was said that when the slug died the warts would be charmed away. We examined her hand every day and, to our astonishment, the warts became smaller and gradually disappeared. It was pure magic! On the verges of the lane beside the tall, straggly hedges, goldfinches fluttered and pecked at the thistledown causing the tufted seed heads to float away on the wind. Mr Harris often worked until ten at night getting in the harvest; then our summer holiday came to an end and we went back to school.

  I was pleased to learn that my group teacher was to be Miss Francis again and I always felt secure in her comforting and smiling presence. Miss Curry – in comparison – was rather prim and proper as she informed us that the Allies had taken Sicily in August. This meant that Allied shipping was now able to sail through the Mediterranean Sea to Egypt virtually free from enemy attack and things were starting to look up on the war front. She pointed out to us where these places were on the large world map before proudly announcing that, ‘The invasion of Italy is now under way. General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army is steadily advancing northwards from the toe of Italy.’

  At playtimes, Billy Pyecroft, whose dad was a member of the local AFS, could usually be found standing on a box peering over the school wall. He was a scruffy kid who always seemed to have a snotty nose and when it ran down onto the upper lip of his loose, floppy mouth he would lick it off. He was a bit simple and too young for school, but we didn’t mind him being there as he was a likeable lad. The family tended to keep themselves to themselves. Young Billy would have loved to play football with us but he was too awkward and uncoordinated in his movements. His older brother, who was a good pal of Bernard Fisher, had been born with two thumbs on one hand. I heard Mrs Harris say that these birth defects were the result of years of inbreeding, which was quite a common thing in the old days. The wireless was helping to break down the isolation of these small rural communities and, as travel became easier, fresh blood was coming in, but there still seemed to be at least one idiot in every village.

  I was glad I was not in the headmaster’s group at school. It was bad enough having Miss Curry for singing lessons in which we sang mostly traditional songs like D’ye Ken John Peel, Lavender Green and Greensleeves, which I have hated ever since. The older lads said Mr Fox could be quite sarcastic and he sometimes humiliated the quieter, shy children in front of his ‘chosen few’. He also forced children who were left-handed to write with their right hands saying it was an unnatural practice and against God’s will. We called left-handed people cuddy-wifters. By this time the lanes were lined with sodden piles of fallen leaves and it was starting to get chilly in the big, high-ceilinged classrooms. Cold draughts crept in and wrapped themselves round our bare legs like a cat and we stood with our behinds pressed to the big, green, cast-iron radiators at every opportunity.

  When our nineteen-year-old aunt Renee came to see us, I could smell the cheap perfume on her neck. Harry was with her and she was saying to him, ‘Think yourself lucky that you’re with Miss Law and Miss Barker who only give you the best. They seem able to get anything they want. Money d
efinitely talks round here.’ The cracked timbre of Harry’s voice had disappeared now and he spoke in deep manly tones as they took us down to see his foster parents in their comfortable home. A dish of dried lavender scented the air and the homely couple seemed like a throw back to a more mannered age. Harry had nicknamed my little brother Podge as he still had a fair amount of baby fat on him. We were offered a choice of delicious cakes from a gold-rimmed bone china cake stand and drank our pop from real crystal glasses. Renee told Harry that their elder brother John had sent Gran a letter, and it seems he had been taken to Germany when the Italians surrendered. The journey of around 300 miles had taken eight long days.

  In Haxby, violent October winds hurled the boughs of the tall elms around threatening to throw down the large nests of the ragged and ungainly rooks. Gran visited us again and told us that Jimmy was living with his mam and dad again and they were sharing with her friend. They had got back together after he had turned up in uniform saying he was on leave from the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment and he swore that he was now a good Catholic and had seen the error of his ways. He promised her that things would be different this time round, and she believed him. Aunt Ruby had talked her into going back with him after seven years apart.

  The ice formed early in the gutters that winter as tragedy struck the Bradford family yet again! We were told that Jimmy’s mother was dead. The days in school dragged and I spent much of my time in a trance thinking about poor Jimmy as I gazed out at the dim November light filtering through the tall sash windows. As if the family hadn’t suffered enough already. Poor Gran had now lost six of her eleven children with another one a prisoner of war in Germany, and she was worried to death about his safety. In December we had squalls of pelting rain and thick fog and we heard that two Canadian Thunderbirds had crashed on their return to Linton airfield from raids on Berlin.

  That year it was clear and frosty at Christmas and the celebrations were somewhat muted and toned down but we made the best of it. Gran and Renee brought us the odd home-made toys and a few sweets, and Sylvia and Nancy’s parents came to see them, which made me feel sad, as mine didn’t. Nancy got a doll with a pot head and a cloth body that she loved and took everywhere with her, and Sylvia got a doll’s house made of thick cardboard. We didn’t get so much to eat but we enjoyed what we had and Mr Harris had acquired a few chestnuts, which he roasted for us. He put them on a shovel, and held it over the fire, and we laughed when they split open and jumped about. They were steaming hot and had a lovely sweet taste. We had collected lots of hazelnuts from the hedgerows in the autumn and we cracked and ate them, as nuts were very hard to come by in the shops at that time. We wore paper hats and pulled the crackers that we had made at school from crêpe paper and in each of them we found a boiled sweet.

  So another year turned and we had snow and frost and had to endure one of the coldest winters on record. There was thick, low cloud for most of January which made flying conditions difficult and there was less aircraft noise as a result. The ice on Mr Harris’s rain butt was four inches thick at times and the driving snow froze on the windward side of the trees and stayed there for days on end. The air-raid siren was seldom heard in Haxby these days so we slept well, but in school the days dragged.

  Our history lessons seemed to involve long boring lists of English kings and queens who always seemed to have been good or bad, i.e. ‘Good Queen Bees’ and ‘Bad King John’. The dates when they reigned and died had to be memorised and it all seemed to be a confused hotchpotch of things that had no connection with each other. History seemed to have nothing to do with the present day and us and I tended to fidget, switch off and daydream. I enjoyed learning about the Roman Empire, the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, which fed my imagination that ran away with me at times. I also loved the Robin Hood legends, the siege of Norman castles and the stories of Richard the Lionheart and his crusades against the Saracens.

  Geography lessons seemed to be used as a means of infusing us with patriotic fervour. We were told that we were the children and heirs of a proud and mighty Empire and a large, brightly coloured world map accompanied each lesson. It was printed on the outer waxy coating of a rolled-up oilcloth, which was slung over the top of the blackboard. Large parts of it were pink in colour and it was proudly pointed out that these represented the British Dominions. Our great British Empire spanned most of the globe and we were told that belonging to it gave us many advantages in life. It provided us with true and lasting values and we should be proud at being British, as we were a great race. Empire Day was celebrated every year at the end of May with parades and a special church service. We were, of course, unaware that the balance of world power was rapidly changing. Great Britain was no longer the power it had once been and this early brain-washing took many years to be unlearned.

  Mnemonics were often used as aids to memory and these tried and tested methods were to stand us in good stead for the rest of our lives. We didn’t have electronic calculators; we had to work things out for ourselves.

  When we saw the Canadians in the village we knew which were aircrew by the wings or other brevets on their breasts, and by the white lanyard round their left shoulder that was attached to a whistle in their breast pocket.

  On a snowy day in February I was sent home from school feeling unwell with a very sore throat and a high temperature. Mrs Harris was unsympathetic, as usual, saying, ‘There’s no need to make such a song and dance about it. Stop snivelling every time I speak to you, it’s probably just a bit of a cold.’ I developed a blinding headache and she put me on the settee in the front room and drew the curtains to shut out the weak winter sunlight. When I started to vomit, she put a white-enamelled pail on the floor beside me and I was sick in it several times. She thought it best that I should not sleep in the bed with the others and I spent a restless night on the settee where I slept fitfully and had nightmares. As I seemed worse the next day, she sent for Nurse Lealman and I was somewhat apprehensive, as the last time she came I had a painful septic spot on my thumb and, without warning, she had jabbed her scissors into it making the pus spurt out. However, it worked and the spot soon healed up, but it left a scar to remember her by.

  When she arrived she said to Mrs Harris, ‘His face is very flushed, except round his mouth, and his pulse is rather fast. I think you should let the doctor have a look at him.’ She then cycled to the surgery to ask him to call and, in the meantime, Mrs Harris rushed about like a maniac dusting, tidying up the house and putting her best soap and clean towels out in the bathroom.

  Dr Riddolls had been the local GP for the last sixteen years but Mrs Harris had not put her name on his ‘panel’ when she moved into the house on Usher Lane. Like most general practitioners of that time, he performed small surgical operations in the patient’s home and he often worked late into the night. The old, bald doctor with the grey beard and moustache eventually turned up at the house on his little autocycle, as his large black car had been put in storage to save on precious petrol. ‘And what seems to be the problem, tuppence?’ he said, without waiting for an answer. He always called the local children tuppence and after placing a glass thermometer under my tongue, he examined me. He placed the ivory ends of his stethoscope in his ears but, unfortunately for me, he hadn’t bothered to warm the membrane at the other end before putting it on my chest, and as my skin was really hot and feeling as rough as sandpaper, I jumped.

  Turning to Mrs Harris he said, ‘The lad has a very red throat, a “strawberry” tongue and a rash everywhere – except on his face. The swollen glands in his neck; the redness of his skin and the pale area around his lips are typical of scarlet fever, which is highly infectious and we must get him to the Fever Hospital at Malton straight away. Nurse Lealman will make arrangements for the ambulance to come and she will see that your doors and windows are sealed with tape before the house is fully fumigated. She will have to burn the clothes he was wearing for school and, by the way, my fee for a home visit is five shillings.�
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  Mrs Harris was none too pleased at having to pay up on the spot but she could claim it back from the parish council. When the cream-coloured ambulance came the men knocked on the front door and I was granted the singular honour of being carried out of the house through it. I think that was the only time I ever used it. The canvas stretcher had a wooden pole through each side of the canvas and I remember that the ambulance had small oval windows in its back doors. The house was fumigated before the others came in from school and Thelma told me later that Podge and Nancy were quite upset, asking, ‘Do you think he’ll die, Mrs Harris?’ Someone must have told them that the disease was still a killer.

  On the fourteen-mile journey to Malton, I was ‘burning up’ but I felt chilly and shivery and don’t remember much about it except for the loud clanging of the bell. I was isolated and barrier nursed behind screens; treated with penicillin and I stayed in the hospital for two weeks. My bedding, crockery and cutlery were kept separate from those of the other patients and the nurses in their white-starched caps and aprons had to wear white gowns and face masks when dealing with me. I was given bed baths and was not allowed visitors. The nurses were gentle and caring, which was something I had not experienced since leaving Grove House three years earlier. My tongue was sore and I found it hard to eat, so I was given lots of milky drinks and soft foods like porridge, soup and scrambled eggs. I particularly liked the jellies, custard and the macaroni, which I called ‘pipes’ and I loved it when I was given honey, syrup and chocolate; things which we never saw at Haxby. The rash turned scaly then peeled off and as I got better I enjoyed being mollycoddled by the nurses. I liked the quiet atmosphere and felt warm and cared for, except when Matron, who ruled the wards with a rod of iron and reminded me of Mrs Harris, did her rounds. On seeing a man sitting on the edge of his bed, she blew up, shouting, ‘Get off that bed this instant! You are either in bed or out of it, never on it. Do you understand?’