The Dreaming Suburb (65 page)

“Sydney? Did you know he had joined the Air Force,?”

“No,” said Edgar, “but I suppose he'd have had to join something, sooner or later. They all will, won't they?”

She glanced at him, trying to think of some way to cheer him up. It was not like Edgar to be so depressed and fidgety. For years now he had been so relaxed, even when he had come home from a sale shaking his head, and admitting that he had paid too much for a piece, and that it would probably hang around in the back room for years.

For all that she knew him so well she misjudged the true cause of his gloom.

“Wouldn't you like to go up to town and see Sydney, Edgar?” she suggested. “He might be going overseas, and it might be for years.”

Edgar considered, and then shook his head.

“Sydney wouldn't want to see me after all this time, Francie, and I don't think I want to see him. I suppose I ought to be proud of him, doing a thing like this so quickly, but I'm not. You see, Francie, I never really liked him, not even when he was a little chap. I always felt he was watching me, but in a nasty way, if you know what I mean.”

Frances laughed, and at the sound of her laugh he smiled again.

“Ah, I know what you're thinking, Francie,” he said.

He seemed to have aged ten years over the week-end, and the relationship between them today was more like that of an uncle and niece than a man and his wife. “That was before I met you, and in those days I didn't need watching!”

She kissed him lightly on his bald spot, and went out into the kitchen, where Pippa was making coffee on the gas stove. Pippa had grown into a tall, graceful girl, with a long, and rather serious face.

“He's terribly down in the mouth today,” Frances told her. “Do you think he's still worrying about the war?”

“Isn't everybody?” asked Pippa.

Mother and daughter had long since discussed Edgar in this way, as if he was a special kind of relative they shared with one another.

“I don't see why he should let it upset him so much,” said Frances, doubtfully; “they aren't likely to call on us, are they?”

She took over Pippa's task, and the girl stood looking down from the window on the slow-moving holiday crowds, that were threading their way through the narrow street towards the Esplanade. She was a thoughtful girl, who sometimes surprised them when she put her thoughts into hesitant words.

“It isn't a
personal
thing, mummy,” she said presently, and Frances thought she had never seen her look so solemn. “I think it's more the feeling of nothing mattering any more!”

So, thought Frances, now I've got two of them in this silly mood!

“That's quite ridiculous, Pippa,” she said impatiently; “there have been plenty of wars before, and the last one was terrible enough. This one certainly couldn't be any worse!”

Pippa looked at her, and decided that she was convincing herself, remembering, perhaps, a young man of long ago, who had come to her in the night, and wept because he had to go back and die in the slime. She knew all about her father now, for since coming up here, and since Pippa had grown up, Frances had made it her business to ensure that there were no secrets between them, not even trivial ones.

The girl said: “All the people you talk to are most afraid of air-raids, and gas, and things like that. I don't think those things are really important. What
is
important is that people have let it happen again, so soon after your war. That means that they always will let it happen, even after this is over and done with. You see, a war like this makes everything else useless, doesn't it? I mean, planning things, and looking forward to things.”

“What sort of things?” asked her mother, and it occurred to her that Pippa might have a secret or two after all.

“The sort of things,” said Pippa, “that you dream about, but without meaning to.”

Frances suddenly discovered that she was crying, and wondered if it was simply because Pippa had grown up, and she hadn't noticed it before. She put down the coffee-pot, and half-turned, dabbing her eyes, and if Pippa saw the tears she was sufficiently adult not to comment on them, and Frances was duly grateful.

“I don't think you're the one for Edgar today,” she said, as soon as she had recovered herself. “There is one thing though, a thing like this is never as bad as one imagines, not for you, not at your age! You can take it from me, Pip, war or no war, there'll always be plenty to dream about.”

Pippa shook her head slowly. “I don't think you understand what I'm trying to say, Mummy.” She pointed down into the street below. “All those people ... they've all got plans—coming here for the summer holiday was just one of them. But I don't really mean that sort of plan, I mean big plans, big for them anyway. They were all saving, or working, or falling in love, or studying for something; and now this thing's happened, and they might just as well have not made any plan, because at any moment now all the young ones will be given a railway ticket to go somewhere they've
never wanted to go, and when they get there they'll be pushed into something that isn't part of their plan. Then all the old ones, like poor Edgar out there, won't count any more, just because they
are
old, and when it's all over they really will be old, and they'll just go on living on things they remember before it happened. That's what's so awful about a thing like war—it stops people dreaming.”

“Maybe they just mark time for a bit, and make do with dreaming about what they'll do when it's all over,” said Frances, but without much conviction, for Pippa had never talked like this before, and her words had a peculiar chilling effect on the older woman, as though Pippa was saying them to her over a telephone from a long way off.

“Yes, there is that, I suppose,” said Pippa, after a long pause, “but that isn't really dreaming, is it? Not the sort of dreams that make up the nice part of life. That's just like a prisoner in a cell, waiting for the years to pass until they let him out. Take today, for instance—it's the second day of the war, and nobody, not even Hitler, could possibly say how long it'll go on. So from yesterday we start counting the hours, all of us, the Germans as well, and we've all got to stop what we're doing, and just count, without even knowing whether we've got to go on up to a thousand, or a million, or a million millions. We've got to start without ever knowing when we shall stop.”

But neither Pippa, nor Frances, nor Edgar really began counting that day, any more than the people in the Avenue, two hundred miles away, began on that day, or that month, or in that year even. They had first to live through a prelude unique in the history of wars, and then begin counting when the winter was gone, and the sun that was to shine so brilliantly week after week beat down on scenes and events that were now just around the corner of time, waiting to be born, like Margy Hartnell's baby.

IN
one sense Pippa was right. Most of the Avenue dreams were soon to go into cold storage for five years, but in another sense she was wrong, for the years ahead were prolific in new dreams.

It was during the Spring, and the early summer of 1940, that old dreams fell away, and the new ones began to germinate along the Avenue. But first, for most dreamers, there was an interval, during which day-dreaming was altogether suspended, and they stumbled about like the people of some ancient city, overwhelmed by a catastrophe, the dimensions of which made the lives they had been leading up to that moment seem plodding and insignificant.

It began that April, when the long frosts had passed and the buds were bursting beside the tangled tracks of Manor Wood, but the rumblings of early Spring were faint and far away to the north, and they were not heard very clearly in the Avenue.

In after years, when somebody mentioned the rape of Norway, all that the Avenue could remember about it was the Prime Minister's comment about Hitler missing a 'bus. The invasions of Norway and Denmark were thus a mere stretch after the long yawn of winter.

Jim Carver heard the rumbling more distinctly, and sensed panic afar off, but then Jim was a trained soldier, and Jim read lots of books and pamphlets, and more than one daily newspaper.

Once the rumblings began to be heard generally there was no mistaking them for other than what they were. As the Maytime sun swung over the meadow, and began to warm odd and even numbers alike, and shine on with an intensity
and permanence reminiscent of 1919, the news from across the Channel grew more alarming day by day, almost hour by hour. It was this that finally peeled away the reticence of the most isolated Avenue train-catcher, and prompted him to address neighbours he hardly recognised whilst en route for Woodside Station each weekday morning.

“Doesn't look so good, does it?”

“What do you make of this chap Weygand?”

“What possessed those French to build a Maginot Line only half way along their frontier?”

Always that Maginot Line figured in these anxious conversations, perhaps because everybody in the Avenue lived on a modest budget, and to them it must have seemed very careless housekeeping to pour the greater part of one's annual income into the building of a boundary wall that enclosed only half the back garden.

The sun went on shining, and the news went on getting worse.

“Fancy the King of the Belgians packing it in. A bit much, don't you think?”

“They'll probably hold them outside Paris, like they did last time!”

“Nuns they were, coming down by parachute! It makes you think, doesn't it, old man?”

But soon even these conversations dried up, and the train-catchers took to spacing themselves out along the platform, and awaiting their trains in gloomy silence. Some mornings they could hardly bear to meet one another's eyes. There were still the old perky ones, like Mr. Westerman of Number Ninety-Eight, who was ready to crack a joke or two at the expense of the situation, but these jokes usually fell rather fiat. Here were possibilities that didn't bear thinking about, much less joking about, things like utter defeat, and the sack of London, things that had hitherto belonged in history books, not in newspapers, and when the call came for amateur yachtsmen to extricate British soldiers from a town called Dunkirk the perky comments of Mr. Westerman were received in frigid silence.

By the end of May the very word “Dunkirk” came to have a kind of finality about it To the Avenue folk it suggested an
iron safety-curtain, slamming on an epoch, and cutting them off once and for all from the ragtime that Ted Hartnell used to play, the cloche hats that Eunice used to wear, the Charleston steps that Elaine tried to teach Esme, and everything they knew, or remembered, during the interval that they had always thought of as a peace. Even this they were now told, by knowing leader-writers, hadn't been a peace at all, only a kind of truce.

Then the word “invasion” came to be used quite freely, along with new words like “blitz” and “Panzer”, and evacuation began all over again among families that had crept back to the Avenue after an uncomfortable Christmas in the provinces. They now set about packing again, sometimes leaving in a body, with “for sale” notices lashed to their front gates.

Dreams were going very cheap in the Avenue that season, and among the bargains was Jim Carver's twenty-one-year-old dream of the Brotherhood of Man. Jim hardly noticed its flight, for in its place he already had a new dream, the dream of Militant Democracy, of the gathering together of free men the world over for one frantic, pulverising assault on the active forces of Fascism, and on the maddeningly supine Government of his own country, which he now regarded as aiders and abettors in the murder of civilisation. For had he not read, in a pamphlet on Ghandi's India long ago, that sloth was the worst crime of all?

Jim was a difficult man to live with these days. His impotent wrath did not spend itself at committee meetings, as in the Depression and the Munich days, but spilled all over the kitchen of Number Twenty, sometimes reducing poor, bewildered Louise to tears.

“Bloody treachery,” he would roar, crashing his huge, freckled fist on the table, and making the breakfast china dance, and the flies skim away from the decoy jam-pot that Jack Strawbridge had placed on the window-ledge. “Bloody treachery in high places! That's what it is! Open your mouth to protest at the muddle and what do they do? Slap you in jug, for talking alarm and despondency! My God, I'm alarmed all right! I'm alarmed and despondent right down in my belly, and I'll go on being alarmed and despondent, until
there's a clean sweep of those fumbling bastards, and somebody takes over who really intends to fight Fascism....”

And so we leave Jim for a moment, roaring up and down the Avenue at anyone who would listen to him, feeling round for a rifle, or a stick-grenade, that he did not possess, and then cursing the Government for failing to provide one. He was a man who had once seen a vision, of a sacrificed boy on a bank, but he now clamoured for a million such sacrifices, and the means to provide them. He was a man who had run the whole gamut of the “isms” during the peace that they now called a truce, all the way from pacifism to jingoism, with brief stops at every station in between.

And he was not such a rare bird at that. You could have matched him almost anywhere in the suburb that summer.

Eunice Godbeer, of Number Twenty, had been packed off to the country on May Day.

She had gone willingly enough, for all along the Lower Road the shop-windows were emptying, and there was nothing much to look at except shapeless, utility clothes, and Harold seemed to be acting very queerly these days, entrenching himself behind his
Times
, and poring over maps scored with lines and splashed with arrows, that he cut from papers, and held balanced on his knees, when the news-bulletins came over the air. He was gloomy too, gloomier than she ever remembered, and even talked about persuading Esme to let him arrange to send little Barbara, the baby, all the way to America, as if the poor mite wouldn't die of seasickness on the way, seeing that she found it difficult enough to keep down her spinach after a feed on dry land.