A Childs War (26 page)

Precisely a week after D Day, any possible grounds for national complacency were brutally taken away when the flying bombs appeared and fell on London. It was known that the all-clear had not sounded all day on several occasions in the capital. Official reporting said nothing about flying bombs so as not to harm civilian morale, beyond recording the damage. There was worse news to come concerning these terror weapons, as everybody soon called them. On the eighth of September, when enemy action destroyed eight houses and damaged fifty in Chiswick, George explained to Alex that Chiswick was not far from where they used to live.

It was decided, since no one appeared safe from these weapons even on the other side of the Chiltern Hills from London, that air raid shelters were needed for the people whose homes were near the dairy. They were to be located in the gardens of the terrace in which George, Edna, Alex and their neighbours lived.

The dividing walls came down almost overnight. Large piles of breeze blocks were delivered in the dairy yard, footings were hastily dug and concrete floors poured. Then the breeze blocks were assembled into walls and roofs. Alex was free to come and go while all this was taking place and his imagination was seized by an integral part of these buildings, which was a seat that ran around inside each area of about eight feet by twelve feet, the area of each shelter, and there were thirty or so shelters altogether. In his mind's eye he saw ninety to a hundred people, including himself and his mother and father, cowering in the shelters while the sound of an exploding gas main deafened them; when they emerged they had nowhere left to live but the shelters themselves.

In fact the idea of gas mains exploding was an officially backed cover for this large scale destruction for the best part of two months, until the tenth of November when Mr Churchill told the House of Commons and the rest of the nation what many people had already seen for themselves and reported to their relations in their letters to them. George explained it all to Alex when he had digested the news himself.

“Hitler knows he's beaten,” he said, “But a fatally wounded tiger fights to the last. His scientists developed the V1 flying bomb and then followed it up with the V2 rocket bomb. Our fighter pilots and anti-aircraft gunners have been stopping some of the V1s, but there is no way of stopping a rocket because it goes so fast and falls at the end of its trajectory. It also carries a great deal more explosive than the flying bomb. The Germans call them reprisal bombs - ‘reprisal' in German begins with a V - hoping to get their own back for the American and British raids on their cities.”

“They say you know when a V1 is going to fall,” he went on, “because its engine cuts out and if you're underneath, you say your prayers. But these V2 bastards have knocked down a building before anyone heard them coming at all. Two thousand houses went like that in Croydon, which is also in Surrey, but over the other side from where we used to live.”

Edna added her comment,

“Perhaps it's as well we couldn't get our house rebuilt. At least it means that it's not there for one of these things to get it.”

“If we'd gone back there and it had got the house, it would've got us too,” George hastily mumbled.

So the gardens disappeared and George's shed with them. The secret cupboard and the sea chest came indoors. Alex never saw the cupboard again after a day or two: George had arranged for the Admiralty to have it back, he told him after he had sworn him to secrecy, and Alex imagined half a dozen elderly gentlemen dressed in cocked hats and covered in gold lace calling for it to carry it away along Botley Road amid deferential onlookers.

All three of them barked their shins on or fell over the sea chest in the following days. Because it was too heavy with all the tools it contained to stow anywhere but the front hall, it remained there. Alex had remembered his old pie dish in time and rescued it for sentimental reasons before it could be taken away with all the garden topsoil that was being removed. It spent the best part of the next year on his bedroom floor, despite all Edna's efforts to persuade him to let her throw it away.

As it turned out, the shelters would have been more useful in the London suburbs. In west Oxford they had no other function than as places to hang new washing lines and store bicycles and the garden tools usually kept in the sheds they had replaced, together with Alex's home-made scooter. By the time the shelters were in being the scare had passed and no one saw fit to provide them with any doors at all, let alone such as would keep those inside safe from bomb blast.

A little while later, gates were put at the outside ends of the rows of shelters, because the residents complained that the houses were no longer secure from intrusion without them. When he came home on the evening after their gate reappeared, George looked out of the living room window and called to Edna,

“Here, girl! Look at this. In Raynes Park we only had one shelter when the bombs were falling all round us. In this place it's as quiet as the grave at night and we've got eight of the bloody things all to ourselves!”

Just before the Christmas holidays, Miss Cook made one of her special announcements in the school assembly. It went like this:

“You all know that, after the D Day landings in June on the coast of northern France, the allied troops made great advances into that country. Perhaps you do not know that the German army appears to have recovered some of its former strength and has been advancing rather than retreating into eastern France and Belgium for the last week. When we say our prayers, in a minute or two, we must pray that our men will be courageous in resisting them. But there is something important that I wanted to say this morning before the newspapers carried the news that I have just mentioned. I have been told that some of you, boys and girls alike, have seen the lorries carrying German prisoners of war through and out of the city by the main road here and have been shouting rude remarks at them. I know that for as long as many of you here can remember you have not been stopped from hating the Germans. Some of you who have been bombed out of where you used to live have a particular grievance against their leader and against them too. But these men we have recently caught sight of in our own streets are a defeated enemy with no more power to hurt us and it is our Christian duty to be gracious towards them as their vanquishers. It is enough that they have been captured by our men. They do not need the insults of children to make life worse for them.”

Then she announced the hymn and Alex ignored it as he usually did. Yet he did recall that he had been standing in Botley Road with some eight or ten others when such a lorry passed and they saw some Germans crowded into its open back under the eye of their armed guards. There had been derisive hoots and dirt had been belatedly thrown towards them. This was the work of only three or four of their number. The rest felt sorry for them in their shabby uniforms, which cinema newsreels had shown to be splendid in the recent past, and were not sorry that the headmistress had spoken as she did. When she came to pray for the troops caught up what was to be called “the Battle of the Bulge”, the Amen was more fulsome than it usually was, especially from the boys and girls whose fathers and elder brothers were in the army and might actually be in the Ardennes.

Alex said to his friend Isabel,

“I wonder if this means that we shall find out what peace is like soon.”

“A lot more Germans will have to be captured first,” the gentle girl replied.

“Or killed, I suppose,” Alex added.

The war news soon faded into the task of multiplying unlikely sums in pounds shillings and pence by unreasonable numbers: “A shop is selling tables at £4 11s 7d each: how much would you have to pay for sixteen?” Alex was told off for being seen to write, “I would not want that many tables,” in his work book. This was a cover for the ignorance resulting from his long absence from school. He kept quiet about it at home and no one in the school seemed very concerned to help him catch up. Later on, of course, George taught him, but only after Edna found he could not confirm that she had been short-changed when she was spoiling for a row with a man in the market from whom she had bought some remnants of cloth.

The poignancy of the plight of prisoners of war was brought home to the Rylands next Monday morning when Edna called on Mrs White to return a plate that she had used to give her neighbours a rhubarb pie to eat over the weekend. Mrs White was plainly in tears and hardly able to manage to get to the back door. Edna knew that she had been a widow for a long time and that she had an only son called James who was in the army. Mrs White told Edna that she had heard last evening by telegram that her boy had been captured by the Japanese in Burma. She had read a popular newspaper's account earlier in the year after Anthony Eden's statement in parliament about how such prisoners had been treated and was very frightened. Edna went into her kitchen with her, refilled the kettle and put it back on the kitchen range while she listened to Mrs White's distress.

“I haven't seen Jim for three years now, not since his call-up papers came. He hasn't lived here since he finished his apprenticeship at Morris Garages before the war and moved to work in Birmingham. Please God he'll come home safely when it's all over.”

Edna made the tea. As she and Edna drank, Mrs White talked and talked: about her husband, a stonemason who worked at the colleges, dead these fifteen years now; about Jim's childhood and youth; about her hopes for him and the nice girl he had taken up with before he went away. Edna listened, as Joyce had listened to her in her distress about bricks and mortar and as Mrs Wilson had when Alex was run over, which approached the distress which Mrs White was going through now.

Edna thought that it was fortunate that George was no longer at the dairy. He was out at Wheatley and would not need a midday meal. Alex took a sandwich and an apple to eat in the playground these days, so she could stay with Mrs White if she needed her until the time school was over. Normally she would herself had been at the factory, but the women had been told not to come in until Tuesday that week because a new type of detonator was going into production and the machines had to be re-jigged over the weekend and tested today.

Mrs White did need her so she sat and listened and went next door to find something from her own larder to make a meal for them both, though Mrs White ate little. Edna stayed while her neighbour dozed in an exhausted state until half past three. She left by Mrs White's front door to be at home for her son. She saw him coming down Ferry Hinksey Road jumping about and doing what George would call skylarking with other children.

“Nothing much wrong with him now, thank God,” thought Edna, as she went in her own front door to be there when he came in.

This sense of gratitude evaporated fairly quickly. She told Alex about Jim White and his mother's distress about him being captured and her fears concerning the treatment he might receive from his captors.

“It's up to those who take prisoners to be gracious towards them,” was his response, and all Edna's fear of having produced a precocious child returned from the dormant state into which she had pressed it since her early spring vigil in the Radcliffe waiting for him to recover consciousness.

“Why did you have to say that, you little know-all? What do you know about being taken prisoner, or grief at the chance of losing your only son?”

Alex was not a know-all and could not cope with this. He hid upstairs from his mother until he heard her slam her way into the front room. Then he hurried downstairs, went out of the back door to find his scooter and shot off on it through the dairy yard into Henry Road and the rec to wait for the time when George would be home. Although they glowered at each other over the table, neither of them told George why - at least, he didn't: maybe Edna did later. George was distressed to learn about Mrs White's boy.

“Good job he's too young for all this,” George said, with a nod towards Alex.

“And that you're too old,” she said, getting up to hug him. This very rarely happened outside their bedroom and in his embarrassment George smiled towards Alex, who made no attempt to interfere in his parents' closeness, which lasted an astonishingly long time. Their embrace had its own desperation and he knew about their anxiety caused by the notice given to them by the dairy.

“We are going to stay with Gran down home for the weekend,” George told Alex.

“Why?” he asked, wondering if he would receive an honest and full reply.

“Because I haven't seen her since your Grandad died - and you and Mum haven't seen her for longer than that.”

“Is it far?”

“A hundred miles or so: go and get the atlas and I'll show you where it is.”

Alex brought the now dog-eared book to George and he found the Southern England page, as opposed to the France and The Low Countries opening they had recently spent a lot of time with.

“Look, you know we are here? Well, we go to London - look, the black line is the railway - and get off at a station called Paddington. Then we go across London, probably on the Underground, to another station called Victoria, and the train from there takes us to Gillingham where we get off. Then there's a bus ride and a bit of a walk.”

“What do you mean by ‘a bit of a walk'?”

“Further than you want to walk, but not far enough to kill you!”

“And why do you call it ‘down home'?”

“Because near there is where Mum and I grew up. I was born in Rochester - there, and Mum was born in Chatham - there, see? I'm never sure which is which, but I think I'm a Kentishman rather than a Man of Kent. The River Medway - there - is the dividing line between the different sorts. I might have ended my short life there the night Mafeking was relieved, when Gran nearly dropped me off Rochester Bridge when she was trying to get through the crowd celebrating it.”