The Dreaming Suburb (61 page)

Christmas came and went, almost unnoticed in a general atmosphere of acute boredom and petty irritation. There were no Christmas trees in the front-room windows. Grandpa Barnmeade saw to that. There were no carol parties of children, to sing one verse of
Good King Wenceslas
, before ringing the bell and demanding money. There was nothing, nothing at all, beyond a sense of bewilderment and disappointment.

The Avenue hunched over its radio sets on Christmas Day, and heard news that was not news, and recordings of carols, and the King's slowly articulated speech.

The decade ended in a kind of universal yawn.

2

Of the men still residing in the Avenue in December, 1939, two at least had no occasion to share the many-mouthed yawn. One was too busy, and the other was too worried.

The months since Munich had been frantically busy ones
for Archie Carver, a period of consolidation, staff reorganisation, and relentless buying.

He worked, on an average, sixteen hours a day. There was so much to do, and so little time to do it. If war really was on the way, not only his stockrooms needed attention, he had to look both to premises and personnel, especially personnel.

He remembered, towards the end of the last war, that men of forty had been called up, and it was, therefore, not impossible that he himself, with his thirty-eighth birthday just behind him, might be gathered into the fold, if not as a soldier, then in some sort of civilian capacity. Perhaps, he reflected, it would be as well to put oneself down for something now, when there was still an element of choice open to volunteers, and on the day Maria had shouted down the stairs that Hitler had invaded Poland, and war was said to be certain, he was on the point of enlisting as a part-time ARP worker, or a Special.

It was Mr. Brockett, a knowing traveller from a wholesale firm, who prevented him from committing this folly, for Brockett had studied the situation very carefully, and because Archie was a good customer he was willing to give him the benefit of his enquiries.

“Don't do a thing, old man,” Brockett cautioned him. “I've had inside information on this, and the thing to do is to lie doggo! You're in food aren't you, and someone's got to stay behind the counter. If you're thirty-eight now, and in a key position handling food, then you're sitting pretty, take it from me. Slap your name on some list, and you'll have a lot of trouble talking yourself out of it when something does happen. Now how about pilchards? There's bound to be a run on pilchards ... !”

So Archie did not volunteer, and soon had occasion to be grateful to Brockett, for the discussion encouraged him to look into the age-groups of the people he employed, and to replace every man younger than himself with a woman over forty. Thus the outbreak of war found him with eleven branch managers, eight of whom were women, and a dozen or so fourteen-year-old boys, all of whom had been hand-picked by Archie from the local Council Schools.

Here again Archie showed good sense. He not only hand-picked the boys, after talks with their Headmasters, but he followed up the engagement of each one of them with a visit to the lad's parents. The object of this was to forestall mothers and fathers who might persuade their offspring to exchange the grocery trade for something more lucrative, or more spectacular. Labour, he told himself, was soon going to be as short as food, and he did not want his trained personnel giving him notice in the middle of a war.

He made each visit a quasi-avuncular occasion, taking the parents into his confidence, and giving them to understand that they had, all unknowingly, produced a future Thomas Lipton.

“You've got a good boy there, Mrs. Dutton,” he would say to a flattered woman, on one of the Council estates that adjoined his premises; “a remarkably good boy in many ways, and I shall make it my business to watch him very carefully, with a view to his future, and mine!”

Having studied the effect of this introduction, he would continue: “I started in the grocery trade at about his age, and he reminds me of myself—willing, keen, and full of initiative! He's not simply using this job as a stop-gap, like most of them these days, so don't run away with the idea that I'm going to pay your lad an errand-boy's wage, Mrs. Dutton. That won't encourage him very much, and it's not fair to you! He'll go on to a qualified counterhand's rate in six months and, believe you me, he'll
get
somewhere; you see if he doesn't!”

He would usually stay and have a cup of tea with the mother, and he always saved a parting shot for the doorstep.

“There's one other thing, Mrs. Dutton! Times aren't any too good, are they, and it might pay to have a lad in the grocery trade if it comes to war! Well, nice to have met you, Mrs. Dutton, and my advice is keep young Arthur hard at it, no matter what else comes up.”

These visits proved extremely fruitful in the strenuous days ahead, and Archie must have somehow convinced the boys themselves that they were on the way to becoming Liptons and Sainsburys, for not one of them left him for better-paid
war work, and only one, Johnny Lewins, anticipated his call-up by volunteering for service with the Armed Forces. Lewins went down with the
Hood
in 1941, and Archie could not help feeling that it served him right.

The mass evacuation from the suburbs, in early September, was a means of solving yet another of Archie's problems. It presented him with a wide choice of empty premises, three of which he immediately bought, thus adding three more links to the chain. Others he was able to rent for storage purposes.

When war came he had bought so heavily that he had an overdraft at the bank, and he had also drawn extensively on his floating reserve in the oil-drums. But Archie never thought in sixpences, and shortage of ready cash did not bother him in the least. He was now stripped for action, with fourteen branches, each staffed by employees too old, or too young, to be called up, and with sufficient stocks to garrison a small town for a long siege. Hitler, he thought, could now do his worst, and if Archie yawned with the rest of the Avenue during the dragging months of the phoney war, it was not because he was bored but because he was tired. After all, he began work at six a.m., and seldom went to bed before midnight.

Maria, his wife, saw even less of him than usual these days. He had no time at all for family life, and since the Gloria Hazelwood episode, his private life had been cut to the barest minimum. When evacuation began he sent Maria and the two younger children to Somerset, finding them a cottage not far from the district where Tony, his elder boy, was at school. He had a woman in to clean the house over the corner shop and to prepare such meals as he had time to gobble, but he saw to it that his daily was a widow on the safer side of sixty, thus proving that even Gloria's ninety-seven pounds had been an investment.

3

Jim Carver was no longer yard-manager for Jacob Sokolski, the wholesale furrier of Bond Street, for Jacob had gone,
more than a year before, and his firm closed down in October 1939, putting Jim out of work once again.

At this time, however, there was no sting in the word “unemployment”, and one hardly ever heard the word “dole”. There were so many jobs for men over forty that Jim could have found plenty of steady work within five minutes of the Avenue. He would even have been welcomed by his former employees, Burtol and Twyford, the removers in the Lower Road, but Jim did not care about starting all over again, on the brink of sixty. He was now better off than he had ever been, for he had his savings, plus a recently matured life-insurance, but this did not add up to retirement.

He had not been caught unawares by the closing down of Sokolski's, being one of the few people in the Avenue who had made an intelligent assessment of the situation from Munich onwards. Perhaps this had some connection with all the pamphlets he had read, or perhaps it was because he had once fought in the field against Germans. At all events, Jim did not regard Hitler and his cohorts as a bad joke, but as dangerous lunatics, capable, likely indeed, to bring the whole of Western civilisation crashing down whenever they felt so disposed, and therefore, the actual declaration of war brought him a certain amount of relief. His relief, however, proved momentary, for even now, with armies in the field, it did not look to him as if Fascism was being seriously challenged, and he had an uncomfortable suspicion that the “Old Gang” at Westminster were “up to something or other”.

It had given him no satisfaction at all to see his prophecies regarding the fate of Czechoslovakia fulfilled to the letter, and that within six months of Munich. Throughout that final summer of peace he campaigned furiously for an alliance with Soviet Russia, as the one certain hope of national survival.

When, in August, the Russo-German Pact was trumpeted across the world, he almost despaired, and the actual declaration of war came as an anticlimax. What frightened him more than any one factor was the apathy of the Avenue as a whole. He found it very difficult to believe that sane men and women, people with access to the same sources of information as himself, could hunch their shoulders against the
storm, and continue to plod to and from their work, and up and down their back-gardens behind lawn-mowers during the week-ends, without showing more than a casual interest in the situation.

He did not expect to witness a repetition of the 1914 fervour, with hysterical crowds howling for war (as later they howled for peace) outside Buckingham Palace, and in a way he was glad about this, for at least it proved that the Avenue had learned something from the past.

Something, but what? The power of German might? No, by God! Even in committee his colleagues were still drooling about cardboard tanks, and Luftwaffe paper squadrons. The strength of the Maginot Line possibly? But how long could France defend itself against Fascism, when it already had its own concentration camps for fugitive Spanish patriots in the South? The crass idiocy of war as a means of settling disputes then? Perhaps, but what good was that, when one was facing a bunch of neurotic gangsters?

He sat in the kitchen of Number Twenty biting his nails, as the long weeks dragged by, and at last he could stand it no longer, and marched round to a recruiting office, to sign on with his old regiment. A bored young regular sat doodling at a small card-table and when Jim stated his purpose the N.C.O. laughed in his face.

“You? How old are you, dad?”

“Forty-one!' lied Jim, wishing heartily that he could knock the cigarette stub from the man's mouth.

The man sniggered. “Well, let's say that you are ... er ... forty-one,
and
an ex-sergeant, with bow-and-arrow experience! Take a look out there, Dad!”

He pointed, through the grimy window into an alley that ran alongside the office. Jim looked, and saw a stationary queue of young men. The queue was more than a hundred yards long.

“They're not forty-one, are they, Dad? But not one of ‘em'll get taken on today, nor tomorrow either.”

Jim passed a hand over his freshly-shaven chin.

“Then what the hell is the idea, man?” he demanded. “You've got a notice chalked up outside, and it says
‘Drivers
Urgently Wanted'
If you can't take any more on why don't you scrub the notice?”

The Sergeant half-rose from his broken-backed chair, and regarded Jim with an expression of dismay.

“Scrub the notice?” he echoed. “Scrub the bloody notice? And you an ex-sergeant, telling me to do that? Listen, cock, I'm here to obey orders, aren't I? I was instructed to put that notice up, and so far I haven't been instructed to take the bloody thing down again. So don't throw your weight about in here, trying to teach me my job, Dad!”

Jim gave it up. It seemed to him that he was living in a vast lunatic asylum, but before he started for home he had a word with two or three of the young men at the head of the queue, and was afterwards glad he had done so, for their conversation cheered him a little.

“It's the same everywhere,” one fresh-faced youngster complained. “Wait for the call-up, they say, but I got a pal of nineteen, who's had his papers seven weeks, and he hasn't heard a word since! What's it all in aid of? That's what I'd like to know. There's all these posters about—join this, join that, and when you show up all that happens is that you get your arse kicked, don't you, Charlie?”

Charlie, the young man beside him corroborated.

“Yerse, you do that. Take me, I been turfed out of four recruiting offices a'ready.”

“This looks like being your fifth, son,” said Jim, “but all the same I like your spirit. Just keep on trying.”

“You know what they say,” called the first boy, as Jim moved off, “we lose every battle but the last!”

Perhaps that was it, thought Jim, as he walked to the 'bus stop. Perhaps almost a thousand years of victory over all Continental armies had bred in the British a confidence that had become swollen to arrogance. Maybe Hitler was relying on that, and even more perhaps, on all the strident pacifist talk that had streamed across the Channel between the wars, and for which he himself must take part of the blame. For all that, he was sure that there was nothing basically wrong with the country. Those boys were keen enough; their fathers and uncles had once stood shoulder to shoulder with him in flooded ditches all the way from Switzerland to the sea, and
had fought like lions, year after year. What they needed was direction, direction and inspiration from the top, but would they get it from Chamberlain and his gang? Did the people at the top really believe in this war?

He found a partial answer in the company of his old crony, Goreham, the former school inspector, whom he had met, and made a friend of, after the twins' escapade at Lucknow Road School in the early 'twenties. Like himself Goreham was a trench veteran, and a Socialist, who now found himself in a limbo of conflicting ideals.

“I don't know,” said Goreham, as they discussed the news. “I imagine that little basket over the water will have to make the first move, and you can be dead sure he'll make it, as soon as the ground is dry enough for his tanks!”