A Childs War (7 page)

The two sailors were wrapped in grief and mourned the loss of H.M.S. Hood with very nearly her entire ship's company. On the Saturday in May after it happened, George told Alex to go and get the World's Cruise book. He opened it at the picture of the battle cruiser that had been the flagship and pride of the Special Service Squadron. She was a magnificent ship and George wept for her loss as he sat there with the book on his knee. He thought of the men in the engine room, such as he would have been if he had still been in the service, not a few of whom would be his age. He thought bitterly of several men he knew from way back who were at risk now. Alex watched and thought he nearly understood. George quietly remarked that many of them must be at sea with the knowledge that their wives and children were living where the bombs were falling. He was glad to know from his father and mother who still lived near Chatham that not much was happening there in the way of bombing but news reports of much of Portsmouth being totally destroyed were very frightening - and the Hood was a Portsmouth ship.

On Sunday afternoon the two fathers and their sons went up to Graham's allotment to see if the runner beans were above ground. As they stood there they heard the faint noise of aero engines and looked up to see an aeroplane, which John identified with the help of a small book he always carried, as a Witley bomber. Its progress across the sky was so very slow and George became reflective.

“That plane is like us,” he said. “We are digging for victory and using Shanks's pony and our clothing coupons and ration books, accepting shortages and blackout, and we haven't started to fight back yet.”

“Don't forget we did sink the Bismarck,” said Graham. “They're not having it all their own way.” The pessimist in George still thought the worst was about to happen, only for Graham to assume the part of the optimist who reckoned that it already had.

Alex, nevertheless, accepted the presence of runner bean shoots three inches in the air above the ground as his symbol. They had looked very inert as mere beans a little while ago, yet the sticks had been put up in the expectation that the plants growing from them would be as tall as a man before very long.

There wasn't much to do on the allotment now. Some desultory draws were given with a Dutch hoe along the ranks of potatoes around the shoots that were showing above ground. Graham fairly quickly made two drills and put some broad beans in and then all four of them simply stood there in the calm light hoping for better things, but not expecting too much. The reverie lasted until John told his father he was getting hungry and they walked home. Each father and son formed a pair to go out of the field which had been divided up to provide the allotments and along Helen Road with its terraced houses on either side towards the main thoroughfare. As they passed the open outer doors of the chapel on the corner they heard a hymn being sung.

“What are they doing in there?” Alex asked George.

“You can hear. They're singing.”

“Why are they singing?”

“Because it's Sunday.” “But we don't sing on Sundays like that. Why should they?”

“Because they believe that if they sing hymns it will be pleasing to God.”

“Why should God be pleased if they sing hymns? It sounds awful to me.”

“It does to me, too. Come on, don't let's hang around here any more, or they'll be coming out and asking us to join in.”

“Would they really do that? “

“Come on, will you? Shake your feathers!”

Alex did move along but he was not going to let the question go.

“I can't see why, because they believe in God, they have to sing hymns.” Then came his real question:

“Do you believe in God, Dad?”

George realized that there was no smart answer to this that would let him off his son's hook. Now that they were out of range of the singers and very near home he stopped. He thought carefully about his answer. His response to his son was: “I don't know whether there's a God or not. But I do know that when you're at sea with a mile or so of water between you and the bottom, you hope there is.” His own private thought was that there was more than one kind of sea.

With that he took the last two strides to join Graham at the front gate and went indoors. Alex heard Graham say to George as he went out of the back door to go to the lavatory,

“I thought you answered that well. Who said being a father was easy?”

Fresh eggs had become hard to get. Edna asked discreet questions of her new acquaintances and neighbours about where a plentiful supply of new-laid ones might be available. Gossip among the women she was getting to know, backed up by the information channelled towards her by Joyce, led to hard information and her quest narrowed to an out of the way chicken farm at Old Marston. On a showery day she poured Alex into his coat and pulled a hat with flaps down over his ears before leading him out to the bus stop. Alex's own view of this was that she had perforce to lead him because he could only see the ground a few feet in front of him until she realized that in covering his ears she had covered his eyes as well. He consoled himself with the idea that at least there was no need now for the itchy leggings she made him wear in the winter.

There was not much room downstairs when the bus came along and Edna decided not to see if there was more room on the upper deck. She found a seat for herself next to a young woman wearing slacks and a scarf as a turban who was smoking a cigarette despite all the notices to the contrary on the lower deck, unseen or ignored by the bus conductor. Alex was dragged on to Edna's lap and she held him tight around his waist to keep him in place since the lack of room between Edna's bunched up overcoat and the next seat made his slipping down to the floor in front of her a strong likelihood. She held him in place with the aid of her old shopping bag, which he noticed was made out of quilted patches. Many of the stitches that should have held the patches together had split apart from one another. It seemed that the perpetrator of his discomfort had found an accomplice at the same time as he squirmed round to complain to her, because a tube of smoke issued from the double mound of lipstick six inches beneath the turbaned scarf and met his nostrils, giving him an unwelcome share of the young woman's breath and second-hand tobacco smoke. His unrestrained coughing embarrassed Edna, who began apologising to her fellow passenger. Alex considered his mother's words to be unfair, since the woman should be apologising to him.

When the bus reached the station, the young woman stood up, asking Edna to excuse her while she got off. Edna took away the bag, picked Alex up, stationed him violently in the gangway, and stood herself to let her out. When Alex rushed to take her seat by the window, Edna sat down again close to him, still seeming to him to think it better if he were wedged into his seat by her full-skirted coat and the weight of her body. His intention had been to look out of the window but it was steamed up, and Edna told him off for wiping the moisture away, claiming that this would put indescribable filth on his hand which would soon make his way to his lungs and stomach to cause incurable illness.

It was a relief to change buses in the city, involving a short walk along the High Street and a wait outside one college and opposite another.

“These places aren't houses, are they?” he said.

“No,” said Edna.

“They aren't shops either, are they?”

“No.”

“Are they offices?”

“No.”

“What are they, then?”

“Oh, do stop asking me things,” said Edna, and immediately thought better of it. She told him, “They are Oxford colleges.”

“I know this is Oxford,” he said, “But what's a college?”

Edna gave up worrying about George's absence and not being able to return to Raynes Park. She tried to furnish a reply.

“It's a place where rich young men come to study after they leave school.”

“Why are colleges only for rich young men?”

“Because it costs a lot of money to study in one of these places.”

“What does ‘study' mean?”

“It means reading a lot of dry books and talking posh and going to lectures.”

She realized then that she might have to cope with providing meanings for all the three terms she had used and was relieved when all he said was, “That's funny. Why do the books they read have to be dry? I suppose it's because if you drop a book in water you can't turn the pages very easily.”

This was a scientific observation based on an experiment of his own which had upset him some days earlier in the garden, involving the old pie dish again.

Edna was very glad to see the bus crawling towards them and said remarkably gently, “No more questions now. Let's get ready to get on.” This process involved lifting him up to the height of her waist where he was buffeted by her handbag from one side and completely blinded as the shopping bag found its place in front of his mouth and was sucked over his face. Once on the bus he regained his sight and during the uneventful journey out of the city that followed few words were spoken by either of them. Edna planned her strategy for her first foray into illegitimate food purchases, which necessitated bringing her growing child with her in order to excite the poultry farmer's sympathetic feelings, instead of leaving him at home with Joyce. Alex considered the likelihood that his father would give him a fuller explanation of what the rich young men got up to in their colleges and decided to ask him at the weekend.

Edna was surprised how easily the black marketing had been achieved as she dragged Alex back to the return bus stop, keeping the now valuable shopping bag at arm's length from her leg. She made him hold her hand so as to keep him on the pavement and he showed a dangerous tendency to disturb her balance as he skipped about at her side. As they waited, with no one else about to hear, Edna said,

“Now, listen. I don't want you to say anything about what's in this bag while we're on the bus going home.”

“Why not?”

“Because you'll get me into trouble with the authorities if you do. So it will be best if we don't have any chatter at all.”

Alex took her at her word and did not answer, though he would have liked to know what an authority was and why, together with others, it constituted a threat to his mother.

“Do you hear what I say?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you answer me, then?”

“I thought you told me not to!”

Edna bit her bottom lip and hurt it to add to her problems. She was glad to see that when the single-decker bus stopped, Alex had enough sense to take hold of the rail and step on to it by himself.

Edging her fragile and precious bag in front of her, she followed Alex to the only vacant seat, and motioned him to take a place by her as she sat down.

“You'll have to stand in the gangway,” she whispered in his ear.

“I don't want to,” he muttered.

“Keep quiet now. Remember what I said.”

Edna did a balancing trick with shopping bag, handbag and purse to pay the fare while the bus conductor patted Alex's cap, thereby depriving him of sight for the third time that morning. Alex took his cap off. Edna wanted him to put it on again lest he dropped it and it got dirty, but remembered in time that she had enjoined silence upon him and kept quiet herself.

He was only four and was weary with travel and frustration at not having his questions answered to his satisfaction. He was puzzled by mystery being created round such an apparently simple thing as buying three dozen eggs. He longed to sit down. There were no free seats so, despite her whispered and frantic protests, he climbed on her lap and sat on the shopping bag, hearing the cracking of the shells and Edna's furious gasp, “Oh, bugger!”

Alex saw the amused pity in the eyes of the woman in the other half of the seat. Edna felt the slimy wetness penetrating her coat and skirt and stockings and neither mother nor son said anything for the rest of the lengthy, miserable journey.

Edna found getting off the bus very difficult indeed since she could not avoid egg white and pierced yolk dripping from the bag and from beneath her coat as she went uncomfortably along the bus. She left Alex to make his own way to the pavement, while he was hoping that he would never see her again.

He let her catch up with him soon and because she did not want to foul another bus seat beneath the gaze of fellow travellers she dragged him on foot all the way home from the city centre. Since she still did not want anyone else to know about her nefarious purchase, she said under her breath while she spread the tears on her face with her free hand,

“You silly little fool. Why did you have to sit on my lap? I told you about the eggs and how awkward it would be if anybody found out that I had them. Now they're still dripping all over the pavement and people can see what I've got here and I'll have to take my clothes to be cleaned and the cleaners will see what has happened and wonder where I got the eggs from, besides the fact that my crutch is all wet and sticky - and it's all because of you, you silly little fool!”

“You only told me to keep quiet. You didn't say anything about not sitting on your lap!”

“But I told you there were eggs in the bag and you know that eggs break when you sit on them!”

“I've never sat on one before,” he replied and felt her hand in full force on his ear so that he wished he still had his cap on.

He said no more and Edna kept her thighs as far from each other as possible as she went forward, dragging Alex behind her, exciting the interest of those whom they passed with the wet shopping bag dripping alongside her. What they noticed more, however, was the exasperated expression on the face of the limping woman with a wet and slimy coat, whose little boy seemed to share her grief. Fortunately, they were of a mind to pass by and not render assistance. That would have been more than Edna could have borne. The showers had gone now and as they walked the day had become oppressively hot.