A Childs War (28 page)

“Hullo. I was miles away,” she said.

“I expect it's nicer there,” replied Edna, and stood aside while the older woman led the way downstairs to where George was ready with a pot of tea. Alex was sitting expectantly in front of a pile of scones put on the table a few minutes before they arrived.

George commented on his father's garden and his mother said that one of their neighbours had promised to keep an eye on it until further notice. George kept back from offering to look after it himself if they came to live here, but would have liked to do so.

Conversation was desultory and dealt with no important family issues while Alex was still at table and this gave him time to look round and notice that in two corners of the room, built in next to the fireplace on either side, there were tall cupboards with glass fronts in which fine china and large books were kept: the books on the shelves above and the china below.

“Can I get down?” he asked, when he had finished all the scones covered in butter and jam he thought he would be allowed to consume. George answered, as he always did whenever he remembered his old headmaster at Chatham Technical School,

“You can, my boy. The question is whether you may!”

And Alex replied, as usual on these occasions, taking the words from a play he had heard on Children's Hour about children in the English Civil War,

“May it please you, Papa, I wish to leave the table now.”

“If your grandmother will permit,” George responded, cheerfully taking up the idiom, and this gave Alex his opening:

“May I ask you something, Gran?”

“Yes, of course, Alex.”

“Would you let me look at those books up there in that cupboard, please?”

“Of course. Get a chair from the kitchen to climb up on. I'll open the door of it while you are out there.”

Edna looked apprehensive lest Alex should break something, but George took her hand under the table in friendly restraint.

Alex climbed up with his grandmother's help and looked with interest at the titles on the spines of the books. Some did not interest him at all, like The Universal Home Doctor; he had had enough from actual doctors in the last year; and they had a Pear's Cyclopaedia at home. It was the next one that caught his eye: Cassell's Illustrated History of England.

“Can I get this one down and look at it, please?”

She looked up from her awkward conversation to say,

“Of course. Be careful as you get off the chair with it,” and rose from the table again to help him down, taking the book from him since it was heavy, and giving it back once the chair had been returned to the kitchen.

“Go in the front room, put the light on and read it in there, while we carry on talking out here.”

Alex did as she suggested. He went into the other room and sat in a big armchair ready for the opening of a new chapter in his life.

The book was bound between thick boards covered in brown cloth with embossed Gothic letters in gold above and below the star of the Order of the Garter. The paper inside was thick and creamy in texture and the illustrations were most attractive to a boy who spent all the time he could with a pencil in his hand, drawing. On every page was at least one steel engraving and some of the pictures were full-page reproductions of historical paintings. The images that interested him most were the ones within the pages of printed text depicting some event, like the Empress Matilda escaping from Oxford Castle in 1141, or Oliver Cromwell dismissing the Rump Parliament in 1653. The local colour of something happening at Oxford Castle appealed to him and he was amused by the idea of a Rump Parliament. He decided to ask George what it might mean later on . . .

For the rest of his short evening he was fascinated by this book. The pictures showed the changes in costume from what Saxon men and women wore right through to one of the more extravagant of Mr Gladstone's collars and the history of facial hair from William the Conqueror's clean-shaven chin to the Third Marquess of Salisbury's full set. Military and naval uniforms also seized his attention. Wellington and Nelson took his eye and what George had told him about the Seven Years' War came to life for him when he saw the picture of General Wolfe's troops storming the Heights of Abraham. He hardly noticed George, who had come in on the pretext of seeing if all was well with him in order to withdraw for a moment from the tension in the next room. George decided not to disturb Alex because that book had fed his own imagination many years ago as well.

Alex looked up for a moment, just long enough to say,

“I'm enjoying this,” and for George to respond,

“Good. So did I.”

Then George was back again acting as mediator between his mother and his wife and nearly keeping the uncertain peace.

George's thirty-year-old sister let herself in then, home from her sojourn in Bath, and George busied himself with carrying her cases upstairs while she greeted her mother and renewed her tenuous acquaintance with Edna. They left Alex and the personalities of England's greatness for a little while longer and then decreed bedtime. They insisted that he let the book be put back in its place, but the effect of the demand was lessened by a firm promise that he could take it down again, if he asked Gran first, tomorrow morning.

Aunt Sarah was nice to him and, knowing he was coming, had bought him a book of his own by somebody called Hugh Lofting, which was about a Doctor who could speak the languages of animals. The illustrations, drawn and painted by the author, were almost as good as the ones in the big book, and Alex fell asleep while happily browsing through it. They found him, when they came to put the light out, with his hand resting on the coloured picture which showed the curvature of the moon's surface. Alex had noticed at least two things before he fell asleep: that Dr Dolittle wore collars like Mr Gladstone's and that a simple line could produce such a good effect in a drawing.

When it was time to leave on Sunday afternoon, Alex was a good way on in reading Aunt Sarah's present and his imagination was fully charged with material both from it and from the history book, influencing the drawings he did himself for a very long time to come. He made a point of drawing on both sides of the paper thereafter, so that George could say, “Not bad at all,” twice in one go. This also meant that Edna would not tell him that he was wasting paper. Alex was learning to be diplomatic within his family, but the successful use of that skill was, he found, never certain. After the train left Gillingham station, Alex asked George about the Rump Parliament and sat back to be told all about Pride's Purge and the execution of Charles I, though the tale had to be broken off between Chatham and Rochester, where conversation turned to the nature of Norman fortifications and Short Sunderland flying boats, both of which were in evidence as the Medway was crossed.

“Is this the river Gran nearly dropped you in?”

And in the manner of speech often heard at work from his transatlantic colleagues, George replied, “Sure is!”

After a little more on Cromwell and what he did in Ireland, Alex remembered Dr Dolittle in the Moon, and it was brought out of the case for him to read while his parents talked quietly about future possibilities, not much of which interested Alex, beyond noticing that the talk was anxious and that both his parents were desperately worried.

The eye test was quickly arranged in a shop in St. Aldate's that had a huge pair of golden spectacles hanging at right angles to its door. An elderly man took Alex and Edna into a darkened room and sat him in an enormous chair, which, to Alex's imagination, resembled the pilot's seat in a bomber. A heavy contraption was laid upon his ears and the bridge of his nose and the optician kept on putting in and taking out various bits of glass in metal circles, asking Alex if he could see the letters in front of him any better, first with one eye, then with the other and finally with both eyes together. Alex found this a strain, but answered all the man's questions as politely as he could for fear of one of Edna's outbursts after it was all over.

George had told him what to expect, having been through it several times himself since the Navy had dispensed with his services. Edna wore glasses too, but did not say anything to him on the bus coming in to the city. Since they had come home from Gran's it had been difficult to get any words from her at all. The only activity she had involved herself in was arranging this appointment and getting the school to agree to him having the morning off. She had done both these things on Mrs Wilson's telephone because she said she could not face meeting people.

Alex thought there was an inconsistency in this, because she had to go and meet Mrs Wilson and she had to meet the optician to tell him what had happened on the way to Gran's that had caused her to submit Alex to all this. He sat in the seat with the thin optician making elaborate gestures with the lenses as he changed them and behaving as though Alex were the hat he was about to produce a rabbit from like someone he had seen at the New Theatre when they used to go to the variety shows there. All the time, he heard Edna sniffing behind him and clicking her teeth together.

Eventually, Alex could read down as far of the sixth line of letters on the chart lit up before him and the optician declared that he was satisfied with his work.

“Your boy does, indeed, have a myopic condition, Mrs Ryland, but all that is needed is a pair of spectacles to correct it. I will be very pleased to supply you with them.”

“A myopic condition” sounded awful to Alex. It may have sounded awful to Edna as well, but everything seemed awful to her at present, decided Alex, so there would be no use asking her if he was going to lose his sight altogether on the way home. The optician took Edna and Alex out into the front of the shop and Edna was asked to look at frames and choose a pair for her son.

“Can I choose, Mum?” Alex asked.

“No. It's a question of what I can afford.”

“Can you afford those?” he asked, looking at a pair with wire fixings for the ears but tortoiseshell frames.

“Of course not. I'm not made of money!”

“But yours are like that and they look good. I'd like a pair the same as yours. Dad's got them too, only his have got straight sides rather than wire over his ears.”

“Look, you'll have what I decide. Go and sit down over there.”

By this time the elderly optician, who had amused as well as overawed Alex, had gone, and Edna was being attended to by a woman the same age as herself who seemed to Alex to be similarly burdened with the world's troubles. These two agreed between them that Alex should indeed have wire over his ears, but the rest of the frame should be of thin metal covered with a dark substance flecked with orange and yellow.

“Very good, madam,” said the woman, “They take about a week to make up. Are you on the telephone?”

“No, but my neighbour, whose name is Mrs Wilson, said she would take a message for me if you rang her.”

Edna gave Mrs Wilson's number to the woman and she carefully wrote it down.

“Very well, madam,” she said again. “That will be done. Now, the cost is seven pounds. Will you pay now, or when you come to collect?”

“I'll pay now,” said Edna, and did so, giving what Alex called from then on her death ray stare, like one of the characters in the comic books from Wheatley.

Going home was also a silent business. There was a toyshop near the optician's where Alex wanted to look at a display of Dinky toys in the window, but she would not let him linger and dragged him up to Carfax in a manner that reminded him of her reaction on the day he had sat on the eggs. Today he had committed no such misdemeanour beyond expressing a wish that he should not have to look like a dead fish in his new glasses.

At the tea table he asked George,

“What's a myopic condition, Dad?”

“It means you can't see things at a distance. Your new glasses will sort that out.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, what did you think it was?”

“I don't know, only it sounded terrible when the man said it to Mum.”

“Didn't Mum tell you what it was?” “I don't know why he has to bother his head with all these things,” said Edna, with some vehemence. “The optician was talking to me not you.”

“Yes, but I've got to wear the things, and go to school in them, and I don't want to be called ‘four-eyes' by people at school like Ginger Thompson is - and his glasses are just the same as the ones you have chosen for me!”

Edna raised her hand towards him.

“That's enough now,” said George, looking at Alex, but wanting to say it to Edna too.

“Why do you always have to make trouble?” asked Edna of her child.

“Best you go away and play,” said George.

Next time Alex saw Edna, half an hour later, she had obviously been crying. George looked like misery made flesh.

“What's the matter?” said Alex to George.

“It's a private matter between Mum and me,” was the only reply he received.

Uncle Geoff's painful recollections of his traumatic experiences in the Auxiliary Fire Service during the London blitz had receded somewhat by the time that his task in submarine development at Barrow shipyard was complete. He had no misgivings therefore, when the Admiralty called him back to London at the end of 1944 to work on other hush-hush projects. He and Aunt Hetty did not have a housing problem for long. They had chosen not to have children during the war and Hetty was free to take a job. She found one very soon, as housekeeper in a hotel in Leicester Square that had managed to avoid anything more than cosmetic damage so far, in spite of the Doodlebugs. This job carried a small flat with it, ample accommodation for a married couple, and they moved into it in January. They asked George and Edna to come and see them for a weekend. At the time the invitation was given, General Montgomery's troops had overrun the V1 launch sites in their advance on Antwerp. Although the V2 menace had largely had its teeth drawn by the beginning of 1945, there were still “a few strays”, as the government minister charged with warding them off observed, and there was still danger in coming to London. Having saved her family from the bombing in 1940, Edna was in no mind to subject it to the final fling of Nazi terror weapons now, even for the sake of her sister, whom she did not like much in any case. So no answer was given for several weeks and then the invitation was accepted for a few days in the early part of May.