Tuppence To Spend (41 page)

Dan had never cycled out of the city before. His bike had been purely a means of getting about, and he’d never been one for the country. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever going beyond Denmead and had only been up on Portsdown Hill with Nora in their courting days. After that there’d never been the time.

The road through Porchester and along the top of the harbour had been busy enough, but once through Fareham the traffic had dwindled and only a few lorries and carts passed him. There were hardly any private cars on the roads anyway – those rich enough to own one couldn’t get
the petrol, and most of them had been stood up on bricks in garages ‘for the duration’. He’d found himself cycling almost alone through leafy lanes, passing through small villages – Catisfield, Park Gate, Swanwick – with plenty of time to look about him.

Trees, he thought. I’ve never really noticed trees before. The ones in Pompey all looked a bit dusty and their branches had been chopped about, so that in winter they looked like gnarled fists being shaken at the sky. These trees were big and free, reaching up with a thousand twiggy fingers, and they were full of birds. He could hear them singing, almost deafening him as he rode along the quiet roads. Occasionally he spotted a rabbit scuttering into the hedge in front of him, and once an animal he was sure was a fox. Like a dog, but a rich, ginger brown with a thick, furry tail. And only a few minutes after that a squirrel darted across the road and up a tree, where it sat on a branch and chattered at him like a monkey. It was even redder than the fox, and its tail curled up behind it like a fancy dress. He nearly fell off his bike watching it.

Coming back, the dusk had been drawing in and he’d been riding faster, anxious to get home before it was properly dark. The trees had cast a deeper shadow and the birdsong had softened, as if they too were getting settled in their nests for the night. There were still animals to be seen, though – he’d been scared almost out of his life by a deer suddenly breaking cover from the woods and flitting across the road, its hooves barely seeming to touch the ground, and he’d been nearly as startled by an owl drifting past his head as silent as a ghost.

The streets of Portsmouth had seemed dingy and defeated when he arrived back, passing the derelict bomb-sites and the gutted buildings already beginning to grow over with weeds. Out in the country it had all seemed fresh and peaceful, with the cottage gardens full of flowers and vegetables, and the fields green with crops and grass. Out
there the air had been full of the music of birds; back in Pompey, all you could hear was sparrows and starlings, squabbling incessantly. For a few minutes, as he drew up at last outside his own house and wheeled his bike up the back garden path, he felt a sudden yearning to be back there, among the trees and the fields with his son. Then he shook himself and sneered.

‘Trees!’ he’d muttered that evening, bending to unfasten his cycle clips. ‘Fields! Pretty flowers! You’re going soft, you are, Dan Hodges. Soft in the head.
Pompey
’s where you belong – and Pompey’s where you’ll stay. And young Sam’s coming back too, one of these fine days. See if he isn’t!’

All the same, the feeling that he’d experienced as he cycled through the woods and fields that day had stayed with him and he’d found himself noticing those sorts of things more – even in Pompey. In the front gardens he passed on his way to and from work he could see that people were growing little patches of lawn, shrubs and trees – some of them covered in blossom – and flowers of all sorts. Some of them had dug up their lawns and flowerbeds and were growing vegetables instead, as exhorted by all those posters of a boot shoving a spade into the earth. Dig for Victory. It looked nice, he thought.

There were plenty of bombed houses too, derelict sites where roofs had been smashed in and walls lay in a tumble of bricks. In those places the gardens were a wreck too and weeds had already begun to take over.

The allotments, where Frank Budd grew all the vegetables and soft fruit his family could eat, stretched away behind the house, almost like a bit of countryside in themselves. Dan stood at the window in the back bedroom, where the boys had slept, and looked out at them. It gave him a strange, pleasant sort of feeling to look at all that green, those neat, tidy rows of vegetables, those bushes.
You’d get that feeling all the time if you lived in the country, he thought.

There weren’t so many raids now, but there were still enough to keep you on your toes. The RAOC camp in Copnor Road was hit in June and some of the military personnel killed. Nobody knew how many – that sort of news wasn’t given out. A couple of days later a huge bomb fell in Torrington Road but didn’t go off and a big crowd gathered to watch the bomb disposal engineers make it safe. After that it was another twelve days before the next raid, with the city showered by thousands of incendiary bombs and even some parachute mines. For some reason the Germans seemed to be concentrating on Portsdown Hill this time, and the gorse caught fire so that the city seemed to be ringed by a vast barrier of flame.

It was early in July, and Dan had been to the pub, but he hadn’t had more than a couple of pints. He hadn’t had the heart for more, somehow. He’d kept thinking about Sammy, out there among all those trees, and how Nora would have liked it there as well, and wondering what would have happened if she’d agreed to let him go out there earlier, if she’d been evacuated with him. Would she still have been so ill and died? Surely the country air would have made her better. Doctors didn’t know everything, he thought, and if being among trees and fields made a rough bloke like him feel better, what wouldn’t it have done for someone like his Nora?

He trudged slowly down March Street. Frank Budd was coming out of the allotment gate and turning towards the alley that led along the back of the houses in April Grove. He stopped and waited.

‘Hullo, mate. All right?’

Dan shrugged and nodded. ‘Can’t grumble, I s’pose. Not more’n anyone else these days, anyway.’

Frank eyed him thoughtfully. ‘You all right, on your
own? I know I didn’t like it much when Jess was out in the country.’

‘Well, it’s the way it is, isn’t it,’ Dan said gruffly. ‘We all got to do our bit. I gets a hot dinner down the canteen, and there’s fish and chips or the British Restaurant for other times. You don’t get a bad feed for tenpence.’

Frank nodded. It sounded a bit bleak to him, but he was lucky enough to have Jess, who had a good hot meal on the table for him when he got home and gave him a plate to heat up at work as well.

‘I reckon Hitler’s given up on the idea of invading us,’ he said. ‘He’s more interested in Russia now. Going in from all directions, he is, got Stalin by the short hairs. Stupid fool wouldn’t listen to Churchill when he told him the Germans were getting ready to invade and now the Red Army’s going down like ninepins.’

Dan nodded. ‘And it was on the news the other day, Japan’s getting ready to join in too. I mean, why? What have they got against us? What are the Jerries to them? I don’t understand it.’

‘They’re just taking the chance,’ Frank said. ‘While we’re all looking the other way they’ll nip in – here, that’s good,
nip
in – and snatch everything away, like kids. And that means we’ll have to fight
them
. Send blokes out there – just as if we hadn’t got enough to contend with here.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘It’s a bad business, Dan, and I don’t see where it’s ever going to end.’

He shook his head again, shifted his tools on his shoulder and said he’d better get home, Jess would be wondering where he was. He trudged away down the alley, and Dan walked up his garden path and let himself in through the back door. Maybe I’ll do a bit of digging at the weekend, he thought. Get in a few spuds or whatever it is you can plant at this time of year. I’ll ask Frank about that next time I see him.

He went into the little scullery and shrugged off his
jacket, hanging it on the hook on the back of the staircase door. The house was silent, and even on this July evening it felt cold and unwelcoming. There were dirty dishes piled by the sink – cups he’d used for tea, plates he’d used over and over again for the meals he’d cooked himself, mostly fry-ups of sausages and whatever meat he could get from Alf Hines’ butcher’s shop, and the frying pan itself, thick with grease. There was a smell of yesterday’s fish and chips; he’d dropped some of the newspaper they’d been wrapped in and forgotten to pick it up. A cloud of bluebottles rose from a few bits of batter and burnt chips still scattered among it, and he swore and picked it up to take it to the dustbin.

That too was full and stinking. He’d forgotten for two weeks running to put it down at the bottom of the garden for the dustmen to collect. He took it down there now. If it was by the gate, at least they’d see it next time they came.

As he trod slowly up the garden path, the twilight of the late evening gathering around him, he heard the distant drone of planes and then, rising all around him, the familiar and hated shriek of the air-raid siren. He stopped for a moment, feeling as if the rise and fall of the wail was coming from his own body, that he was screaming himself somewhere deep inside, that the misery of it all was gripping him in a harsh, unrelenting vice.

Why should we have to go through it all over again? he thought bitterly. Why?

It isn’t fair. It isn’t bloody
fair
.

The raid that night was to be the last one over Portsmouth for over a year. It was a pathetic attempt, after the savage destruction of the Blitz, with bombs being dropped mostly in the sea and a shower of thousands of propaganda leaflets falling like confetti over the northern part of the city. Tommy Vickers found one in his garden and showed it to Freda, laughing all over his face.

‘
The battle of the Atlantic is being lost
… Who do they think they’re kidding? Looks to me like they’ve given up any idea of invading us, anyway. Got more to think about in Russia now. Going for the bigger plums.’

Freda looked at it sadly. ‘Pity they didn’t give up a bit sooner. Our Molly and Ron might still be alive.’

Tommy put his arm round her. Neither of them had yet got over the death of Tommy’s sister and her husband in the January Blitz. It was six months now, but they still missed the couple who had been so close, spending Christmas and Easter with them, and going for days out in the summer. Freda and Molly had been best friends right from their first day in infants’ school – in fact, that was how Tommy had come to meet Freda, when she’d come round to their house to play. It left a big gap when you lost someone as close as that.

Still, they’d done their best by young Clifford, offering him a home straight away when the Fratton house had been bombed. They’d got a bed-settee for the front room and it was his to use whenever he was on leave from the Army.
He didn’t use it much, being away a lot now, but it was there when he did want it.

Eunice wasn’t home much now, either. After the raid when she and Sheila had been at the cinema, both girls had decided to volunteer and now Eunice was in the ATS, in Army uniform just like Clifford – well, maybe not quite like Clifford, Tommy said with an attempt at his old humour, seeing as she wore a skirt – and only able to come home for short leaves. The house felt very empty without her.

‘Well,’ Tommy said now, ‘I think this is a good sign, Free. Dropping these leaflets, I mean, instead of bombs. Either they’ve given up the idea of an invasion – which means we’ve
won
, when you come to look at it – or they’ve just got bigger fish to fry. And one of these days they’re going to try a fish that’s just a bit too big for them. A
shark
!’

‘Like America, you mean,’ Freda said. ‘But they’re never going to come into the war, Tommy. They’ve as good as said so. Give us all the help we need, but think they’re better staying outside it all.’

‘When what we really need is soldiers and sailors and airmen.’ Tommy nodded. ‘Well, we’ll see. I don’t reckon they’ll be able to stay out much longer. What with Japan and China at each other’s throats, and Russia getting dragged in – it’s turning into a proper world war, Free, and a big country like America won’t be
able
to stay out of it. You mark my words.’

Out in the country, it seemed as if there had been some respite. The news overseas was bad, of course, but at home as the long, hot summer drew on, things seemed a bit easier. Coal had been rationed, so the winter wasn’t going to be easy, but winter was a few months off yet and you could get logs stacked up in the shed. The hens were laying well and there was good fresh milk from the cows, enough to keep the kiddies rosy-cheeked while the rest went off to
the bottling plant for the townspeople. There was still some bacon from the pigs killed last winter and a new lot of piglets fattening up nicely. Even the fact that clothes had been rationed didn’t bother the countrywomen as much as those in the towns. They went on wearing their old clothes for every day and saving their best frocks and costumes for Sundays, and didn’t worry about fashion.

‘I never was one for frills and pleats anyway,’ Ruth observed on seeing that these were to be actually against the law, to save on material. ‘My Jack always liked me best in more simple things.’

Sammy’s closest friend was Muriel, who had the face of a cherub and the disposition of an imp. Sammy, who ought to have known better after the incident with Silver on the picnic, followed her lead in whatever she suggested and was always the one who ended up in trouble. They went fishing for sticklebacks, and he was the one who fell in the stream. They went bird-nesting and he was the one who tumbled out of the tree. They walked over the farmer’s fields and it was Sammy who was chased by the bull.

‘I don’t know if it’s him gets Muriel into trouble or the other way about,’ Ruth said to Mrs Mudge when she went to the vicarage to apologise for Muriel’s frock, torn when they’d got lost in the woods. ‘They both look like little angels, with their fair hair and blue eyes – in fact, you could take them for brother and sister – but I don’t think there’s a child in the village gets into more scrapes than those two.’