A Childs War (27 page)

“Mafeking?”

“Yes. Your godfather, Art, can tell you more about it because he was there at the time. A soldier called Baden-Powell with a small force was under siege there in the South African War and then the British Army beat the Boers and let him out.”

“Bores? Why call them that?”

“It's spelt differently: Boer is a Dutch or, perhaps, Afrikaans word that means farmer. The Boers had settled there from Holland and during the Napoleonic Wars the British had taken and subsequently bought South Africa from the Dutch as a stopping place on the way to India - in those days the ships had to go all round Africa to reach it because there was no Suez Canal then. After the freeing of all slaves in the British Empire a hundred years ago, these farmers moved to a new place where they were not subject to British rule (here the atlas came out again and Alex was shown the Transvaal) and complications later arose about diamond mines and one thing and another led to war - and the relief of Mafeking was part of it.”

“How come Gran nearly dropped you off the bridge?”

“She was frightened by the crowd, most of whom had had a few drinks. At least that's what she told me. I don't remember it myself being only a few months old! Anyway, we're going down there on Friday morning. I've got the day off from Wheatley. We come back Sunday afternoon.”

So on Friday they were on the train to Paddington, George standing in the corridor with Alex sitting next to him on the suitcase and Edna sitting in the compartment beside them with the door jammed back, trying not to breath in too often since six out of the seven soldiers in there with her were smoking with the window shut. From where Alex was sitting on the case, he could see her face close by through the glass and thought she looked a bit green by the time they got to Reading. He also noticed that the soldiers, although they were British and not American, were wearing a different kind of uniform from the thick battle dress he had often seen. This one was of lighter material and looked as though it did not itch and would not be so hot to wear.

By the time they reached Slough, Edna had to give up her seat and open the window in the corridor. Alex heard her say under her breath to George as she did so,

“The things I have to go through for your bloody mother!”

Alex was put out by his reply, which he only half heard and was not sure about,

“You might be glad like me of a roof over your head come the autumn.”

Eventually Paddington station came alongside the window and they got out of the train. They stood on the platform in a pale imitation of Frith's painting, though George had no silk hat or faun waistcoat, just his usual trilby and his three-piece suit with his mackintosh unbuttoned on top of it. They waited for the military men to leave the platform and then made their way down to the Underground, where Alex held Edna's hand firmly as he saw a train rush roaring from a tunnel and stop right in front of him, with the bottoms of its windows at the level of his eyes. He was very surprised that he was near such a monster and even more so to find he had to step into it. All this was explained by George when they sat down side by side with Edna opposite and the case in between George's and Edna's feet.

“This is called the Circle Line, because it goes in a ring all round the principal places of central, east and west London - and we get out at Victoria, as I told you, which is in the south-west. When you see Sloane Square on a sign at one of the stations, you'll know we're nearly there - and if I'm asleep wake me up!”

Here George put his head back and his hat fell over his eyes.

“He can't sleep in all this noise, can he, Mum?”

Even Edna, still fancying herself choked with second-hand tobacco smoke, had to smile in George's direction.

“No more questions now, Alex,” she told him.

Alex kept his watching brief and then after fewer minutes than he expected shook George's arm,

“Sloane Square, Dad. Wake up!”

George made his hat fall sideways so that Edna could see his face but not Alex, and made an expression which conveyed his good-natured weariness with the present demands of fatherhood.

The next part of the journey, which was shorter than the first, was slow and in a dirty train. George explained the absence of a locomotive as they got on the train, and Alex was delighted when he remembered all the pictures of Southern Railway rolling stock he had seen in John's Meccano Magazines a long time ago and asked George to explain the mystery of conductor rails. His explanation enlightened all within earshot, even Edna, who commented,

“I never knew all that! Nor that you did.”

“Goes with the job,” said George, and this time did settle to go to sleep because he knew that Edna knew where they would get off. When they arrived there, Alex was puzzled by how much this station resembled some of the so-called underground stations they had gone through earlier, which were not under ground at all. George led them as they made their way up a good number of steps to find the bus to Rainham, which could either be a green one run by the Maidstone and District Company, or a brown one which would be from the Chatham and District. The green one came first, so they got on and went upstairs. The upper deck of this bus did not have long seats like the Oxford buses because there would be no low bridges for it to go under, but a gangway down the middle with seats on both sides. Alex was next to the window on the right hand side, Edna was with him on the double seat and George was behind them both. Looking out of the window he asked,

“What's that over there with window spaces very high up over the other buildings? Has it been bombed?”

George put his head between his wife's and son's to reply,

“That's called The Jezreels. A man believed God told him to build a tower up to heaven and began to do so, but the money ran out, and nobody saw fit to take it down.”

Edna then put in,

“And just past it are some grass slopes called the Darland Banks, where we used to go blackberrying when we was kids. At the bottom of the slopes there's Luton where I lived when I was a girl, next door to the pub which was called ‘The Wagon at Hail'.”

Alex heard this as ‘The Wag and a Tail' and thought that was its real name for a long time afterwards until he actually saw it for himself. Then George told him that they were going along part of a Roman road called Watling Street and a few minutes later they went down the stairs ready to get off the bus at the top of Twydall Lane.

George's mother lived at the bottom end of it and had stayed on in the house after her bereavement the year before and intended to continue to do so. George had more than hinted to her in a letter that they might be in a homeless state fairly soon, and she had assured him in her reply that her door would be open to him and his family. This short visit was, as George put it, “a toe in the water”.

“If it's too bloody cold, we can find some other beach to paddle from,” he added, and Edna sniffed.

It was a very long walk to Gran's house, Alex decided, after what seemed to him like an hour had passed, although it was only ten minutes by his father's turnip watch. George tried to lighten the load by leaning round Edna and pointing out his own familiar landmarks in the valley in front of them.

“Look there, boy, there's the River Medway.”

Alex saw the strip of dark river and its further bank in front of which a large naval craft was making its way.

“Do you see the skeletons of the old barges sticking up out of the mud?”

“Where?”

“On the near bank of the river, look.”

“I can't see them.”

“What about those telegraph poles going through the gap in the orchards down there? That's the railway line the Golden Arrow express uses in peacetime to take the boat train to Dover.”

“I can see some trees, but no telegraph poles.”

George stopped trying to look towards Alex by craning round in front of Edna and, putting his mouth close to her nearside ear, expressed his anxiety under his breath:

“Maybe that bang on the head has done some damage after all or maybe he's never been able to see very far and no one asked him to look at distant things before. He looked at a lot of far off things when we used to go out on the bike, though.”

“We must get his eyes tested next week, then,” Edna quietly replied, allaying her fear of the next two days with pretence at being a practical woman.

At this point, the weary Alex walked into a tree that stood at the edge of the pavement. His exasperated mother remarked,

“He couldn't see what was right under his nose, let alone what's a long way off. Do look where you're going, for Christ's sake.”

Whenever she invoked the thin man hanging on the cross in St Frideswide's Church, Alex expected his mother's thunderclouds to burst upon his head, so he now made every effort to walk upright, to look out in expectation of further hazards on this interminable walk and not to say anything provocative, or he knew he would arrive at his grandmother's with the imprint of Edna's glove on a painful ear, partially deaf as well as short-sighted. He was obviously not deaf or he would not have heard his father's quiet comment or his mother's whispered reply before he came in contact with the tree.

George realized there was no point in saying anything else because Edna would have liked to have postponed the coming night under her mother-in-law's roof that she was dreading. She was keeping quiet too.

Then, after another five minutes, they reached the terrace of ten-year-old houses behind front gardens in which Gran lived and saw her at her bay window looking out into the evening light to see her beloved firstborn son arriving with the woman he had married against her own expressed wishes and their only child who was, in her opinion, growing too tall for his strength.

“Doesn't she feed him?” she asked herself before she opened the door to be as warm towards them all as she felt able to be.

She had always made a god of her late husband when he was away for long periods at sea - which covered her lack of understanding of his attitude to life when he was at home with her - and she prayed to him for guidance now, to some extent receiving it as she opened the front door, smiled at, embraced and kissed all three in turn, saying exclusively to George as she looked at Alex,

“Is he fully recovered from his road accident now, son?”

“I think so,” he replied.

His mother remembered that Alex had a mother also, and took her upstairs to show her the back bedroom where she had prepared beds for them.

“I'm sorry you're all in together, Edna. Sarah's here as well, so there isn't a great deal of room.”

Edna simpered in reply and did her best to overcome antagonism as she looked out over the little garden that her father-in-law had lovingly tended in his latter years. The fact that her young sister-inlaw would unexpectedly be here created a new problem, but Edna had made a mental resolution in spite of her real feelings to do her best to keep things on an even keel, especially if this was the only place where they could find shelter after the dairy took its house back.

Louisa Ryland was sixty-six years old. She was little in stature and had not much weight about her, especially since she had neglected her eating since she had been widowed. Her face was lined, largely from a nervous complaint which years before had given her a twitch. That had been cured, but it left the creases in her cheek where it had happened and Alex had been warned not to comment upon them before his grandparents had last come to see them.

Years of coping on her own while her husband was contemplating God's wonders in the deep had made her self-sufficient enough, but her composure was expressed in polishing furniture and beating carpets rather than forming strong bonds with her children, which she left to their absent father's eloquent letters. Edna and she both realized that like poles repel and that her character and Edna's were very similar. George realized in his worst moments that he had married a prettier version of his mother.

However, here they were, and Louisa was in no position to say to her eldest child with his wife and son that they could not come and live with her until they brought their heads above water again. George had told her that his present job at the American camp would only last until the end of the war against Nazi Germany -and that did not seem far off now. She was the only one in the family who could do anything for them and she had decided she ought to. Whether any of them would enjoy living together was another matter. Young Sarah would help for these two days, but she would be off before very long to join her husband in the Middle East where he was an administrator and George's brother would be in the Far East for a while yet, though his wife lived just round the corner from here.

As she stood in her own bedroom, waiting for Edna to finish putting her things where she wanted them in the other room, she looked up at the old photographer's portrait of herself and her husband with the three-year-old George. David was in uniform with his diver's badges on both sides of his jacket collar, standing upright in the centre, while she, in her full-length coat with its black collar setting off her high-necked blouse and her Gainsborough hat with feathers, was decorously presented on a garden seat. George, in a diminutive fore and aft sailor suit on the model of his father's topped with an incongruous Little Lord Fauntleroy collar and a huge Jack Tar's straw hat, was perched on the arm of the seat. It conveyed the tone of respectability she had wanted, though the scenery in the photographer's studio of great wrought iron gates set between monumental pillars was not very like the approach to their small house in Junction Road, which she would soon leave for her own parents' home in the country as soon as David had gone to sea again, that time to pursue his own respectability in a lodge of Freemasons, once more in Malta.

Edna scratched rather than knocked on her door to wake her from her memories,