Mother’s Boy, page 16
Against the rear, he saw, there were doors let into the cliff, presumably for more changing rooms or lavatories, but the feel of the place was rougher than the new lido beside it and had some of the improvised feel of the Jubilee Baths.
The two sailors he had passed by stood just then and went together through one of the doors at the back. The one with the hat on glanced quickly around before closing the door behind them but nobody seemed to be paying attention. No one but Charles. A new young man arrived and Charles glanced up in case it was Ginger, but he had the wrong coloured trunks on. Then another door at the rear opened and a large man came out. He only had his bellbottoms on, but Charles recognised him at once as the one they had passed on the way up to the Hoe from Goodbody’s, the one with the arms like logs. Charles watched, marvelling at his simple physical confidence, as he stooped to retrieve his shirt and hat, which he put back on before leaving, lighting a cigarette as he went.
Too cold to stay in the water any longer, Charles swam back to the pool’s edge and tugged himself out. He was just towelling himself dry again when Ginger emerged through the same door the big sailor had, saw Charles and waved. Charles had never seen him so merrily relaxed. Happily, he had kept on his trunks as well.
‘Sorry,’ Charles said. ‘I’m blind as a bat without my specs and I lost you out there.’
‘That’s all right,’ Ginger told him. ‘I lost you, too. Charles, your teeth are actually chattering.’
‘Bit cold,’ Charles stammered. Whether from nerves or cold, his whole body was juddering.
‘They do nice cocoa at the café at the top. Let’s go up there and sit in the sun.’
They dressed again, then headed back upstairs to drink cocoa until Charles had stopped shaking, then lay on the grass in a sea of basking sailors.
They talked about Ginger’s hopes for medical school, Charles’s next play, anything but where they had just been and what Ginger and the sailor might or might not have been doing that was suddenly making Ginger loll as though he wasn’t wearing cricket whites but a clinging metallic evening gown.
‘You do know,’ Charles wanted to tell him, ‘that what you were doing, or what I suspect you were doing, could have you up in the courts in Bodmin and wreck your prospects, even send you to prison?’ But he said nothing about it because what he longed to do was ask questions instead, and he knew the answers Ginger might give would change the dynamic of their friendship for ever in ways for which he wasn’t ready. Not yet.
They lost track of time so then had to rush across town for a train that wouldn’t involve them missing supper and making Charles late for the dance. On the train they fell silent until they had stopped at Tavistock and Lydford.
Then Ginger asked, ‘If there’s a war, as Joe seems so sure there will be . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Will you fight or object?’
‘I’ll fight. I mean if they’ll have me. I’ve thought about the other, but this time I think there’s a proper enemy, not just someone the papers want us to hate. Besides, I’m not sure I’m brave enough to be a conchie. Can’t you imagine how people would be at home?’
‘Mrs Netley would hand you a very public white feather.’
‘Leading Girl Guides with drums and fierce expressions.’
Ginger laughed then fell back into thought, staring out of the window as they gathered speed. ‘Army, Air Force or Navy?’ he asked quietly.
Charles sighed. ‘Well I’ve always promised Mother I’d not join the Army because of what it did to Father. And we stayed with a cousin of hers once near Crownhill Fort on the far side of Plymouth and you could hear how they shouted at the new recruits, drilling them into obedience or whatever. I don’t think I could do that . . . And the Air Force is a non-starter because of my eyesight. Anyway, this is all academic. Who’s to say Joe’s not wrong?’
‘Hmm.’
‘Apparently in the Navy, clever boys can be something called a reader. Or perhaps it’s a writer?’
‘That sounds peaceful and undemanding.’
‘Yes.’
‘Navy it is, then.’
They fell to staring out of the window again and Charles pictured himself sitting in a chair surrounded by sailors in various stages of undress held rapt as he read them Robert Louis Stevenson. Then he imagined himself at a cosy mess table writing letters home for an inarticulate young gunner who looked like Joe but with red hair.
He had been keeping a diary since the shock of leaving school. It was a pointless exercise really, a not terribly scintillating conversation with himself. He did it, he supposed, as an act of quiet rebellion against the tedium of his job at Finn’s and against the increasingly stifling limits of the conversations he had with Mother. It wasn’t a great literary outpouring, not written for posterity, not even written as an aide memoire of witty thoughts or interesting observations he might otherwise forget. He didn’t even write in the sort of page-to-a-day diaries that were published for the purpose, but in tiny pocket appointment diaries of the sort to allow barely two square inches for each day’s entry. And half the time he wrote in pencil, so that his entries faded and smudged, and he might as well have written in invisible ink.
The entries were truthful, that was the thing, even if the truth was dull. Every walk with Mother, or talk with Joe, every film he saw with Ginger at the cinema or party he played at with the band was recorded. Nobody reading them in years to come would have much idea what the playwright Causley thought of world affairs or whether he believed in his heart when he knelt in church with his mother, but they would know that he’d seen The Bride of Frankenstein twice and attempted oddly unsustainable not-quite romances with young women whose names always seemed to begin with J.
That night, after he returned, brain fizzing and fairly drunk from a long evening of playing with the band for a dance at Egloskerry, he opened the latest diary and wrote, ‘Went to Plymouth with Ginger and sat in the sun on the Hoe. There were sailors everywhere. Oh, how I wished I could draw!’ He had written it in ink, he realised, so couldn’t rub it out. He thought of crossing the entry through, or just the last sentence, which might have been shouting from the little book, but he left it, set down his pen and slid the diary back into its hiding place. It was true, after all. He could not draw at all. But when he had put on his pyjamas and tumbled into bed, the pictures in his head were as vividly coloured as the new season’s postcards before the summer faded them.
NATIVITY – 1941
In the summer of the previous year Councillor Netley had been required to call round at every house to note who had spare rooms that might be used for evacuees in the event of the cities being attacked by poison gas, which made it clear that the threat might become reality. He had been eagerly assisted by his wife, who clearly relished the chance it gave her to peer behind front doors previously closed to her. And to wield influence.
Although anyone taking evacuees in was to be paid, via the Post Office, for their board and lodging, not everyone was keen on the idea, not least those old enough to remember how the last war had been promised to take only months, then had ground on for years. And people didn’t like the idea of not having a choice in the matter. Laura, and occasionally Charles, had already helped out in the effort to rehome families fleeing the civil war in Spain, so it was shocking suddenly to be asked to do the same for English families. Of course Laura hadn’t demurred in showing the Netleys her small spare room where Vera had lived while she was their lodger, and where Maggie slept when she came on visits from Trusham. And Charles had been at pains to make sure such notorious gossipmongers knew he had enlisted in the Navy, and that his bed would also be available once he was called up.
‘What about when you’re home on leave?’ Laura asked him, startled, momentarily forgetting Mrs Netley with her pen and notebook.
‘It won’t be for long, or that often,’ he told her. ‘The sofa will be comfy after a hammock.’
Laura could imagine few things worse than entrusting a small child to the care of distant strangers, or more upsetting than to have to be sent away from home while still little, so she set about redecorating the spare room to make it more welcoming. The official packing lists issued only covered clothing, and she suspected the poorer mothers would have trouble fulfilling even those meagre requirements: a warm frock as well as two cotton ones, six handkerchiefs, one pair Wellington boots, etc. She asked among friends whose children had outgrown them for a teddy, a doll, jigsaw puzzles, children’s books and so on, to make the little room more welcoming. By the bedside table she hung a print from her own room she had always found immensely comforting, of a shepherd on a hillside at sunset with a rescued lamb in his arms.
Only then she learned that her evacuee was to be Gertie from Hackney Wick, who was fifteen, so was too old to need to go to school, and would possibly be old enough to help Laura around the house or even to find a paying job. She thought at first she should clear some of the toys out, lest they be thought babyish, but Charles said they’d still be comforting but why not add things a fifteen-year-old might like? He rustled up a stack of fairly recent copies of Film Weekly from the girls at the office and Laura found a hairbrush and mirror set at a church jumble sale, which cleaned up well.
She could not remember a time when she had felt so pinned against the wall by officialdom. They were issued with identity cards and ration books and there was a flurry of indecision as people had to decide which grocer and butcher to patronise until further notice, and then register with them and shop nowhere else. They had to queue up at the Congregational Sunday school to be fitted with gas masks, and provided with little boxes on straps in which to carry them at all times.
Inevitably there was much talk about gas bombs and terrible reminiscences from any men who had experienced gas in the trenches. An exercise in which the local volunteer nurses, doctors, air-raid patrolmen and ambulance drivers had to act out their responses to a horribly realistic air raid involving incendiary and poison bombers, driven inland from a raid on Plymouth, put the fear of God in everyone. Laura had never seen the church so full outside of funerals and Christmas.
War was finally declared on a September Sunday. The first evacuees left London on a series of trains on the Monday. The logistics were mind boggling, with an army of volunteers from the Women’s Voluntary Service at every station west of Liskeard, and bus and van drivers standing by to ferry the children destined for outlying farms and cottages.
‘Just think of it,’ Laura told Charles. ‘They’re mobilising bossy women everywhere: a whole army of Mrs Netleys bearing down on you!’
Entire schools were coming, complete with teachers, she heard. But perhaps Launceston was thought to be too close to Plymouth, a likely bombing target, to be considered safe, and most of the evacuees were settled in farms and villages deeper into the country.
Entirely characteristically, the Netleys saw to it that Launceston’s evacuees were sorted along class lines: children with smart little overcoats and shiny buckle shoes were taken uphill to the smarter households where, as Mrs Netley put it, ‘they will feel at home’, and humbler boys and girls were scattered around the households nearer the stations and the town’s dirtier industries.
Laura had not realised how intense her anticipation of Gertie had become until she was waiting for her on the station platform, as WVS women shepherded children away around her, and she felt a lurch of shock when the rather tall, shabbily dressed girl stepped forward to name herself to Mrs Netley, clutching a very new baby. Mrs Netley immediately started to make a loud, insensitive fuss about ‘nobody having mentioned a baby’, but Laura swiftly intervened, saying there was plenty of space and that it would be a delight to have the baby as well.
Little by little, bun by sugared bun, Laura coaxed the shreds of Gertie’s sad story out of her, learning that her parents had delivered her to a mother and baby home when she proved unable or unwilling to name the father, and assumed she would agree to give the baby up for adoption. But Gertie was determined to be a mother, however young a one, and had seized on the evacuation call as her and Fred’s escape route. She was no trouble, didn’t eat nearly as much as Laura felt she should, and was at pains to keep out of Laura and Charles’s way most of the time.
Tonight was the last night of the Nativity play. Charles had written several short plays already, two or three had been published and one had even been on the radio, so that lots of people had heard it. But this was different. It wasn’t grand, although the local papers covered it in detail, and he wasn’t being paid, but it was a commission from the community, for an intensely communal event where the audience participated as much as those on stage. Half the people cramming into every available seat in St Stephen’s community hall had been involved in some way, from lending props to making animal masks or gluing feathers on to angel wings. An immense amount of work was involved considering there were only a few performances but that, people kept saying, was the point. The country was at war, everyone was on edge and this gave a focus and a temporary diversion.
Laura had been buttonholed after church one day and asked to starch the white dresses for the angelic choir – Gabriel and the rest. These had to be really stiff so their folds would stand out. The job had taken up two whole days when she couldn’t do any paid work. And then she had sewn the robes for one of the kings, Caspar, from curtain fabric donated by Hart’s the drapers. It was a good green brocade that could be turned into some nice cushion covers afterwards, she pointed out, though it wasn’t clear what would become of any of the costumes once the play was done, or to whom they would belong.
Charles was very secretive about his writing, as he always was, telling her only, ‘Well, I can’t change the story, can I?’ and complaining that the director wanted at least some of it in verse.
‘I suppose that’s to make it more solemn,’ she said, which was plainly the wrong thing to say as he pulled that face of his, as she told Aggie, that made her feel she was back in service and had been accused of not smelling quite clean.
She would sooner die than admit it to anyone, but she had rather fallen out of love with Charles in the last two years. When Finn’s went bust, around the time when several firms did, she managed to land him a job at the Electricity Board in Market Square for better pay and in an environment that was less dusty and more sociable than a builders’ yard. He took the job but with an ill grace, and then was so taken up both with the band and with his clever, pinko friends that he seemed to have no time for her and barely came home to eat and sleep. The most she saw of him was when there was something he wanted to hear on the radio – he had bought them a good one with his staff discount – and then she was obliged to sit in silence across from him, listening too, and darning or knitting.
Great rages would burst out of her sometimes, that she was barely fifty and could have done other things with her evenings than wait in for him and wash and mend his clothes, that other sons were grateful for such a sacrifice and so on. But these rages made him contrite in a ghastly, pitying way, so that she knew he knew, had somehow guessed, that she was reaching what stupid women called ‘a difficult age’. She had never admitted to wanting a second child – fathering one had clearly been out of the question in Charlie’s condition – but the few years of having Vera as her lodger had awakened in her a painful, pointless longing for a daughter. She dreamed of a daughter who would understand her, work alongside her, marry a good man but still appreciate her, then give her grandchildren like so many of her friends were already boasting of. And, just recently, as her monthlies had begun to stutter to the point where, last month for instance, the lateness and meagreness of her bleeding, a cruel parody of early pregnancy, had brought savagely home to her the foolishness of such fantasies. Having Gertie arrive, complete with baby, sometimes felt like a compensation.
And of course, her temperature had gone haywire. She had been warned by Em to expect the sudden heat rushes at night, where she would sweat so hard it woke her and she would have to leave her sheets and nightdress draped around the bedroom to dry when she got up. She could cope with those easily enough as she slept alone. It was the hot flushes by day she found excruciating. She always sweated when doing laundry – there could be no nonsense about laundrywomen merely glowing, for it was hot and vigorous work. Her mother had taught them each in turn always to keep a small towel handy in case someone called by when you were at it, pounding sheets or whatever in the boiler, so you could at least mop your face and armpits and not be caught ‘looking unnecessary’, as Mother put it. But flushes when she was shopping or in someone else’s house were a thing to be dreaded. She was convinced they made her smell, so took to using lavender water for her own ironing, until Charles said she was smelling like the sweeter old ladies in church.
And while she suffered, Charles was either out at his play-reading club or rehearsing with his dance band or drinking beer with friends, or else he was shut in his room, stabbing away at his typewriter, or listening intently to the radio, as often as not to some programme about the international situation and politics, which made her head spin if she tried to follow it, and telling her to knit more quietly.
