A Childs War (17 page)

The clouds were still low the next day, so all the Rylands and Hetty did was walk as far along the beach as they could to see and hear the Irish Sea pound on the stones. One or two vessels in the hazy distance were discerned and George told Alex they were probably making for Belfast where there were more naval facilities.

As he grew, with George as his mentor rather than the women at school, Alex had no problems with words like “facilities”. Edna frowned on the way George treated their son, thinking that he would only be a little boy for a precious few years: there was time enough for all that grown-up stuff when he was of an age for it. Her own Edwardian childhood had been in a village called Luton, not far from Chatham, fairly uncomplicated, and with no enthusiasm for education after her poor mother died. George's world however, just three miles away, had been more demanding. His mother had the same view about childhood as Edna: the two women from different generations were very like each other, though they never would admit it to themselves in their now rare meetings. His father, however, saw things differently and made sure that George learned all he could at the technical school - not just the things that would help him fulfil his immediate task of getting into the Navy as a craftsman, but others like a knowledge of English history and playing rugby football, both of which he was enthusiastic for and good at. George, and his younger brother later on, were both supported in the best kind of education then available to boys like them. Their father also made sure that their sister acquired the skills needed for office work rather than accepting her mother's pressure to go into domestic service, despite the claim that it was a girl's best preparation for the early marriage usually seen as inevitable.

George and Alex walked along the sea road, with occasional forays on to the beach to see whether one of them could still make stones skim and jump on the water and if the other could acquire the necessary acumen. After several minutes it was decided between them that George had forgotten how and Alex would never learn, but it was fun all the same. Edna and her sister, meanwhile, were exchanging each other's stories of the last two years, with Edna concluding that her sister was a social climber and that she herself was not all that sorry that they lived a long way apart. This was the sister to whom their father wanted Edna to devote her youth. Resentment still lingered and there was nothing that Hetty, who wanted to be reconciled, could do about it. She tried very hard during these days they had together, but Edna did not change her mind very much as a result. Alex kept a memory of them: Edna in her green utility box coat and his aunt in her fitted one, both wearing simple hats, walking at a distance behind him with linked arms but no real contact. Years later, when he was told what body language was, he found he already knew.

So Hetty was amused by George performing antics for his son to laugh at, entertained by him as she always was over the years since she had known him, and Edna felt uncomfortable until they went back to a lunch of sandwiches. Geoff did not come home for lunch, so dinner was eaten in the evening. Edna complained to George as he put the light out not long after it that she did not like going to bed on a full stomach.

“Why don't you lie on your side, then?” said George.

As she turned with her back to him, she felt safe when his arm went round her and slept in the warm comfort he had always given her.

“There she blows!” George called out as he and Alex stood on a road bridge looking into one of the basins being used for submarine tests. The great black shape burst upwards, expelling water from its tanks to settle on an even keel. Then it went rapidly down again as the water was taken back in. They watched this happen several times. Activity then stopped and the conning tower hatch opened for people to climb out and down. Another submarine moved almost without sound under the bridge on which they were standing to berth astern of the first one. George explained the manoeuvre to Alex and he mastered the nautical terms to his father's satisfaction. A large surface vessel was berthed where the inlet widened to meet the sea and George explained that this was called a submarine depot ship, not because it was a submarine itself but because it provided facilities (facilities again!) for submarines at sea so that they had a longer range to match that of the German U-Boats.

“Why do they call them that?”

“It's short for the German words for ‘under sea boat', which is what they call their submarines.”

“I see. But why do they need to go under water?”

“Their intention is to sink as many British merchant ships as they can before they are seen themselves, so that food for us and supplies for our troops don't reach us, and then they can win the war. Big submarines like those two are being developed to stop them by catching and sinking them.”

“Where does all this happen?”

“Turn round,” said George. “Over there behind the depot ship is the Irish Sea. Then there is Ireland, another stretch of land about half the size of England, Wales and Scotland together. After that there's three thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean before you get to America, where these supplies are coming from. The Germans go out from the ports they have captured in France and Holland, which are about three hundred miles in the other direction: you know where they are from that atlas that John left behind for you. The U-Boats have started to hunt our ships in what they call wolf packs and we have got to find ways of intercepting them before they can attack.”

George smiled to himself as he began to work out his definition of what “interception” was, and when Alex asked, he was very fluent in reply,

“It means getting in among them and sending the blighters to Davy Jones - and before you ask, Davy Jones's Locker is a term for the bottom of the sea.”

He thought to himself, all the same, “I wish Geoff was allowed to be a bit forthcoming. Surely there's more to it than bigger submarines that can go farther than the old ones.”

Both men had signed the Official Secrets Act and George, like the rest of his contemporaries who were not personally involved with such secrets, had to wait until the peace-time war films to know about Asdic and Sonar, or even longer to hear about Enigma and the codes that were broken at Bletchley Park.

With a sufficient number of rests on public seats and on the edges of horse troughs still conscientiously filled with water each day by the council workmen, Alex was very happy to spend the whole day like this. So it was that, towards five o'clock, they were walking past one of the shipyards when a hooter sounded on a building very close to them. The huge gates in front of the building slid open and hundreds of men rushed out to make their way to the lines of buses that stood on the other side of the road ready to take them to their homes and lodgings. George and Alex quickly jumped out of their way. Alex noticed that some of the men's clothes smelt as though they had been burning and that all were dressed in a way similar to George when he was at work in the dairy, except that instead of the old trilby hat he invariably wore they had flat caps a bit like his own, only with more cloth in the crown. It took a time for the men to find their buses and for engines to be started to take them away. Then the road became quiet again, except for the sound the riveters made in other buildings at some distance away.

“Why were there so many of them, Dad?”

“It takes a lot of manpower to build and refit ships - riveters, carpenters, metal-workers and engine fitters like me: and that's a shift coming off work. Prior to that there would be just as many who arrived to take over from all those and there's every chance that the shift that's there now will go on well into the night.”

“Not much of a life, is it?”

“Not when it's on a large-scale like this and there's the national emergency to consider as well.”

“National emergency?”

“The threat from Hitler to defeat us, occupy our country and subjugate us.”

“Subjugate?”

“Put us under his yoke as if we were cattle.”

“Like that poor beast that broke into our garden?”

“If you like. It matters a lot that he doesn't get the chance. Then, perhaps, we can get back to something like the life we were beginning to have before the war. His blitz took away a lot of what your mother and I had worked for and would have liked to pass on to you when we're gone.”

“Why haven't I got a brother or a sister?”

This change of direction made George stop in mid-stride. Alex realized that he had to think out his answer and felt sorry he had asked when it eventually came as they stood together where a jetty overlooked some oily water churned up by the screw of a motor launch moving about between the quays.

“Your mother was very, very ill when you were born and the process took a long time and gave her a great deal of pain. So we were advised that you should be our only one - and I'm glad you are here.”

Alex found George doing what he very rarely did nowadays, ever since people started commenting on how tall he was getting: he picked him up. Then he remembered his hernia and put him down again.

“Come on, he said, we'd better find our bus back to your aunt's place.”

Going on a bus with George was much more relaxing than going with Edna and talk that interested Alex continued right up to Hetty's front door.

The rest of the holiday was not so full of activity. George was glad to be away from his work and found books on the shelves, which he picked up and began to read. He slept a lot of the time because the intensity of his life had receded for a few days. Edna envied him his power to relax because she could not. She felt that Hetty was judging her for having kept her distance for so long and for still speaking with the local accent of their part of north Kent rather than refining her speech as her sister had. Her husband was obviously someone who had got on in life, not having suffered setbacks like George. She still blamed herself for not having supported George enough in his time in the Navy, particularly when they lived in Malta in the nineteen-twenties. One or two of their contemporaries who had remained in the service were officers now, but on the other hand, she thought grimly, three or four of them had been killed in action. Time to reflect upon their life was all very well but, like life itself, reflection on it was frightening. She was not enjoying her holiday because there was nothing to get on with. Moreover, it was quite obvious that Alex had enjoyed his day in Barrow looking at the ships far more than anything she could have offered him. Needless to say, the weather was appalling.

She heard Hetty at the front door and went to meet her, aware that she would be carrying a good deal of shopping. They went together into the kitchen and Hetty put the food she had bought in the larder.

“I thought we'd have a chicken for your last evening here,” she said. “They'll even pluck and prepare them for you at the farm for a consideration. Saves us getting feathers all over everything and the stink of pulling out giblets.”

“That'll be nice. Thank you,” said her sister, with the unpleasant thought crossing her mind that the consideration she spoke of might not be monetary in Hetty's case.

“Look, I've bought this as a present for Alex, if he'd like it.”

She put a paper bag on the table.

“It's a soldier suit. But the more I think about it since I saw it in the shop, I have misgivings about it.”

She opened the bag and took out the two garments, a battledress top and long trousers.

“Yes, as I thought. It's French. So I can't give it to him, can I?”

Alex had appeared in the doorway while this was going on.

“But I'd like it,” he said.

“You could never wear it where anyone else would see it,” said Hetty.

“Why not?”

“Ask Dad to tell you about the Maginot Line,” said Edna.

So he did.

“The French let us down,” said George. “We all thought the French army would hold the Germans off alongside our army. We sent our expeditionary force across the Channel when war broke out expecting that their line of defences would hold. The Germans just bashed their way through the Ardennes forest in their tanks and went round the end of the line of forts. We were forced back on Dunkirk. The army got back home, but not the equipment. Mr Churchill was astonished at this and even dashed across to France to meet the French ministers while there was still time. Then a new government was set up in France under a First World War hero, give him his due, called Marshal Pétain, who made peace with the Germans. So we had to sink their fleet in the Mediterranean to keep it out of German hands, or we'd be in an even worse state than we still are. I told you about all that when it happened. Sorry, boy, but Aunt Hetty is right, though you ought to go and thank her for buying it for you, just the same.”

Alex accepted all this because he had heard it from George, his reliable source. He went back to the kitchen.

“Thank you for buying me the soldier suit, Auntie Hetty, but Dad thinks you are right about me not having it. He's told me about what happened and about Marshal Pétain.”

“Well, that's that, then. It'll do me as polishing cloths, perhaps. Now then, Edna, would you get the greens ready for us - and I'll scrape these lovely new potatoes I got at the farm.”

Edna remembered her own foray after eggs and, bearing in mind her suspicious thought earlier, asked awkwardly, “How do you find getting food up here?”

“You soon get to know who grows it and not too many questions get asked. We thought of growing things in the garden ourselves, but Geoff's so busy at work and I don't known how to start.”

The sisters kept each other at arm's length while they prepared the dinner together, on Edna's part because she was ashamed of herself for thinking ill of Hetty, and Hetty's because she had tried to get on with Edna and seemed to have failed. Then a bottle of sherry appeared and some glasses and Hetty put them on the sideboard ready for when Geoff came home. Some orange squash was in readiness for Alex, too. This made Edna feel inadequate again and she excused herself to do her hair and have a wash. George felt the need to go and tidy up as well. They met in the bedroom.