The Dreaming Suburb (62 page)

“That's fine,” argued Jim, “but suppose it's too late then? Damn it, man, we didn't sit about on our backsides, waiting for Jerry to move first in the old days, did we? “

Goreham chuckled. “Didn't we? How about the big breakthrough, in March '18? We knew he was transferring all his Eastern Front divisions to the West in front of Gough's mob, didn't we? And what did we do about it? I'll remind you, Jim: we put up a bit of bloody wire, and hoped for the best! No, Jim old man, there's nothing to do but wait, and the minute Jerry begins to make progress you might see a General Post over here. Might? I'll go further than that! You will! They won't even have time to put up the ruddy umbrella!”

“And who are we going to put in their place when that happens?” grumbled Jim. “Clem and Herbie Morrison couldn't handle it, could they?”

“Search me,” said Goreham, “but I can promise you some rare scurrying around, once it looks like invasion.”

“Invasion?” Jim's jaw dropped, “Lord, you don't think they'll get that far, do you?”

“Why not? Wouldn't you, once you'd bagged the Channel Ports?”

“But dammit, man, we've got the French, and the B.E.F. over there.”

“So we have, so we have,” said Goreham, “but we're going to need men over here too. So my advice to you, Jim—if you can't get stuck into a good book by the fire, that is—join one
of the Auxiliary Services, and be sure of a front seat when it happens.”

That week Jim took Goreham's advice, and joined the heavy rescue squad at the A.R.P. Centre. There was not much to do, but the conscientiousness that he brought to all his jobs soon recommended itself to his superiors and within weeks he was promoted, and taken on full-time.

If Goreham was right, Jim reflected, if Germany did break through in the Spring, then maybe he would be as useful here as anywhere. In the meantime, like the rest of the Avenue, he could only wait, and hope, and wonder what sort of messages they were printing on the leaflets that the R.A.F. were forever dropping over the Rhineland. He knew what he would print on the leaflets: simple, a six-word message, reading “Just try it on, you bastard!”, but something told him that the messages were probably couched in more diplomatic language.

They often saw him striding along the Avenue, as the frost held into the new year, a long, lean figure, with serious eyes, and large, swinging hands. Little Miss Baker, who had lived in the downstairs flat of Number One since 1915, and remembered him swinging along from Shirley Rise for the first time in the year of the great influenza epidemic that had carried off his wife, thought to herself how little he had changed in twenty years, and wondered whether he ever
would
marry that spinster at Number Four who seemed so attached to him.

The Avenue had been little Miss Baker's window on the world ever since she had been confined to a wheeled chair, with arthritis, a score of years ago, and she did not miss much that went on at her end of the crescent. That was why, in the summer before war broke out, she saw Judith Carver and a young man turn in from Shirley Rise, and walk the short distance to Number Twenty. Seeing Judy reminded Miss Baker of two inseparables long ago, a pair of whom this graceful girl was one, the other being young Esme Fraser, who had recently married the Frith girl.

Musing, Miss Baker wondered who this strange young man was, and if the Carver girl had heard about the Fraser wedding, which, to Miss Baker's intense disappointment, had
been celebrated very quietly, so quietly indeed that there had been nothing to watch except the departure of a couple of taxis.

4

Judy had heard about the wedding by letter from Louise, and the news made her a little pensive, as she walked her hunter along the pinewood rides overlooking the Channel, at the head of her small cavalcade of chattering children.

Judy had lost touch with the Avenue years ago, and only came home at odd and widely-spaced intervals, to spend a week-end with Louise and her bull-necked husband, Jack.

Judy's dream of a semi-detached in the Wickham area had faded long ago, ironed out by new interests, in new localities, but not, until quite recently, by a new face. That was what had brought her home to Number Twenty again, in the summer of 1939, for she wanted to display Tim Ascham, the young man she intended to marry before he sailed for Kenya in the New Year.

Maud Somerton, her employer, had been quite right about the cure for love. The dream of Esme, and the semi-detached in Wickham, had survived a few months of tack-cleaning and pole-jumping at the riding school over beyond Keston, but it began losing ground rapidly once the Somerton stable moved into the West, and set up in business on the heathery plateau, between Exe and Otter. Then the tear-stained little girl, who had never so much as led a horse until that dismal afternoon when she met Maud beside the Roman Well, found a new dream, and began to study for her B.H.A., and enter gymkhanas that led on to hunter trials and county show-jumping events. A serious study of equitation, Miss Somerton had warned her, left little room in the mind for anything else, not even faithless lovers, and that was why it was so often prescribed by doctors as a cure for nervous disorders; the patient was so occupied with the business of keeping her seat that there was no opportunity to brood on anything else.

In general Judy found this to be the case, but her new occupation did much more for her than heal a bruised heart.
It provided her with a passport to a new world, that seemed a thousand miles from the suburb, a warm, hearty, open-air world, of sun, rain, and wind, of thrilling gallops across open country, and gentle jog-trots into the sunset, with every muscle aching, but pleasantly so, and the feeling of a day well spent in good company. Then, as darkness came, there was the prospect of boiled eggs, and an open hearth, and the comforting sound of tired horses, champing away in their loose-boxes across the yard.

On nights such as these, when she climbed the uncarpeted stairs to her little room, Judith sometimes did think of Esme, but she was able to smile at the solemn child of Number Twenty, whose life had been centred in the boy next door, yet who had, it seemed, cheerfully survived a broken heart.

She discovered too that Manor Wood was not the only wood where campion and cow-parsley grew, and where it was possible to smell the resin in the pines on lazy summer afternoons, or where the larches whispered like gossips in the evening breeze. Before her chance encounter with Maud Somerton, Judy had never been more than a few miles outside the suburb, but now she had travelled over wide stretches of English countryside, the Cotswolds, Cornwall, the West Midlands, and almost every part of Devon and Somerset.

She did not make friends easily, but she came to love the craggy, hoarse-voiced Miss Somerton. Maud Somerton loved her in return, and took pleasure in teaching her everything she knew, until there came a time, some five years after their association had begun, when the riding instructress led out a huge chestnut that she had bought (much to Judy's surprise) the previous day at the horse fair.

“There you are, me gel! See what you can make of this joker! He's all yours!”

“Mine?” exlaimed Judy, with wildly beating heart, “you mean...
my own?”

“I always promised you something worth riding when you were good enough, didn't I?” Miss Somerton had replied, speaking even more harshly than usual, in order to conceal her emotion. “Well, you're as good now as I can ever make you, and you've worked harder than any gel I ever took in
hand, so take him, and try him, and don't let me hear another word about it!”

Judy had to use the block to mount but, once up there, it was like sitting astride a warm, golden statue.

“What's he called?” called Judy breathlessly, as Miss Somerton released the bridle, and stood back against the wall.

“Jason,” Miss Somerton shouted, “but if you don't like it change it. Take him across the Common, and I'll follow on, as soon as I've mucked out.”

The chestnut moved beautifully, responding to the slightest movement of calf and finger, and once on the open common she gave him his head, and raced into the wind on huge, even strides, so that Judy felt she was flying, and would have ridden Jason to John-o'-Groats and back without drawing rein.

It was a glorious gallop, a glorious world, a glorious day. It was the day she was introduced to Jason, and the day she introduced herself to Tim.

Tim Ascham was a thin, lanky young man, with unruly, copper-coloured hair, a mass of freckles, and laughing eyes. That afternoon he was sitting on a low bank at the edge of Hayes Wood, and his horse, a fat, slow-munching skewbald, was cropping the long shoots a few yards away.

The young man stood up as Judy thundered into the mouth of the sunken lane, and called “Hi there!” as she sat back and wheeled, slowing to a trot, and bringing the chestnut smartly up alongside him.

“My, but you've got a beauty there,” he said, reaching out to stroke Jason's sleek nose.

“It's my first time out on him,” said Judy, smiling down. “Isn't it a wonderful day?”

“Any day would be wonderful from where you're sitting,” he said. “Does he belong to the riding stables over at The Dene?”

“No,” said Judy, unable to keep pride out of her voice, “he belongs to me! I'm Miss Somerton's assistant, and she's just given him to me.”

The young man whistled. “Some boss!” he said, and then,
“I'm staying with the Applegates. I'm a sort of cousin to them.”

Judy knew the Applegates, a rowdy, horsey family, who had recently moved south from the staghunting country round Dunkery Beacon. She looked at the young man with interest.

“Weren't you out with the hounds on Tuesday?” she asked.

“Yes, I was,” he admitted ruefully, “but I got left behind, soon after you found. You killed over at Twelve Beeches, didn't you?”

“I believe so, but I was left behind too. I had someone on the leading rein. That's usually my trouble!”

They chatted about horses and hunting for a few minutes. Then Judy said:

“Aren't you going to ride?”

“Good Lord no,” said Tim, jerking his head towards the skewbald, “nobody rides ‘George’. He was at Waterloo, or. Balaclava anyway! I'm just taking him for a quiet walk. Come on, George, old chap, we can't face this sort of competition,” and he freed George's reins from the stirrup leathers, and pointed up the lane. “Show me what he can do.”

She waved her goodbye, and cantered away between the high banks. A day or two later she met him again in the same place, but this time he was riding a young mare, and they circled the wood together.

After that, effortlessly, they drifted together, and he told her he was “killing time” until the New Year, unable to make up his mind whether to sit for Army Entrance, or emigrate to Kenya, and farm. He was inclined to the latter course, for he liked the prospect of an open-air life in a new country, but his father, a retired lieutenant-colonel, was trying to bully him into making a career of the army. He explained that the army was a tradition in the Ascham family. He already had two brothers in the Royal Engineers, and another in the Artillery.

“Our place at home looks like the Imperial War Museum,” he told her, laughing. “Everywhere you look scarred old warriors scowl down from the walls, and all the spaces
between their portraits are filled with loot, from Asian battlefields, and the implements we used to slaughter our wretched victims! I went for it in a big way when I was a kid, but now I'm not so sure; I mean, army life isn't like it used to be is it, you know, all lance pennants, and point-to-pointing, and ‘Floreat Etona’, and broken squares? Most of the time you seem to be sitting for exams, or wangling for a Staff job in town.”

She liked his sense of fun, his lack of snobbery, and his unexacting companionship. She liked his loose, easy seat on a horse, and the way his snub and freckled nose wrinkled when he laughed, which he did every few moments. Falling in love with him was rather like catching up with a gay fellow-traveller on a lonely road, and agreeing to complete the remainder of the journey in his company. There were few kisses, and hardly any avowals, between the day she first saw him, sitting on Hayes Bank, and the day he suddenly said to her:

“Well, Judy, I've finally decided to sidestep the army, and try Kenya.” And before she could exclaim, “On one condition tho'—that you come with me! Does that appeal to you at all, Judy?”

It appealed very strongly. He seemed to her the most gentle, engaging, and undemanding male she had ever met, and there was something about his quiet strength, and unhurried enthusiasm for open-air life, that told her he would make a first-class farmer, in Kenya, or anywhere else.

“I think I'd like that better than anything I can imagine, Tim,” she told him quietly, and they kissed very softly, more like brother and sister than lovers, and then rode silently back to The Dene, to talk it over with Maud Somerton.

5

The twins, Boxer and Berni, did not waste their time in any recruiting queues.

As far back as the autumn of 1938 they had smelled noise and speed, and jolly companionship from afar, and had come speeding down from the Midlands, where they were testing
for a firm of motor-cycle manufacturers, to join a London anti-aircraft unit as transport-drivers.

They need not have travelled south to enlist as Territorials, but they wanted to soldier with all their old Speedway mob, who had enlisted in a body. Within a fortnight of the Prime Minister's sombre challenge of “those evil things”, they were lumbering along French roads, one behind the other, towing brand-new Bofors guns, and shouting “Allez à la bloody trot-whah!” to smiling civilians, whose plodding progress along the centre of the
pavé
caused them to apply brakes.

The twins took to France, and the French took to the twins. Whenever they had an off-duty spell they could be found in the nearest estaminet, tossing off beakers of rough, local wine, and roaring lewd songs into an admiring circle of villagers.

The patron of the estaminet took to them, the mountainous Madame Drouet, with whom they were billeted, took to them, and all the girls who moved in and out the depot, in short woollen stockings, and plain, serge skirts, took to them. By the New Year, when they were due for their first leave, they were known, and readily recognised, in a whole string of shabby villages and hamlets along several main roads that led to Lille, and Madame Drouet shook with emotion when they told her they were going home for nine days, and she implored them to accept a roll of Lille lace, as a gift for their mother, who must, she declared, be very desolate to be robbed of two such fine sons for the duration.