Open Writing

With Proust it was madelines, for Noel Coward (remember Private lives?) cheap music. Me – well, just show me an old newspaper and I’m off.

This morning I found a copy of Picture Post, August 31st 1940. A nostalgic flick through and there it was – “Children’s Hotel” with photos of small children with gas masks. Two paragraphs in and I was hooked.

“You can be carried downstairs to an air raid shelter every time there is an alarm…’’

I am standing at the gate of a suburban semi with my mother, my father and my grandmother. A peculiar wailing reverberates around us.

“Are they only practising having a war?”

They laugh at me, but I’m used to being laughed at. I’m only six.

When the noise began mum was making a cup of tea.

The grown-ups were gloomy, a man with a dark-brown voice had just said, on the wireless “This country is at war with Germany.”

Mum went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, then we all went to the front gate.

On this sunny September Sunday morning some people had stayed home from church to hear Mr Chamberlain, the brown-voiced man. Others went to beg, with frail, superstitious hopes, for peace.

Neighbours peered through curtains or stood, like us, at their front gates, some lugging cardboard boxes containing the ugly masks collected earlier in the week. One man was wearing a tin hat, a woman was crying, a scene foreign to this neat dormitory street where people kept themselves to themselves.

“Looks quiet enough to me.”

That was my dad.

“Perhaps they’re only practising” Mum said.

That’s when I put in my bit

“Are they only practising a war?”

They looked at me, a little slip of a thing, blue overall covering my pink Sunday dress, matching pink bow in my short curls, white ankle socks (“Mind you don’t get them dirty”), brown Clark’s sandals.

I’d been kept home from Sunday School “In case.”

In case what? In case the world disintegrated at 11am?

“Our Margaret’s always got an answer.” they said, half-indulgently.

What was ”War” to mean? Hazy memories of trying on my gas mask, of the tin Anderson shelter dug in my father’s precious lawn, his pride in the storage seats he built. It made a wonderful playhouse for me and my friend Lennie from next-door.

My Uncle Bill went off in the army. Would my cousin Phil go? Worse, would my Dad? Two more uncles left but I heard Mum say Dad “Might just get away with it.”

I was puzzled, I thought soldiers were heroes (not that I knew what a hero was), so why did she not want Dad to be one?

Most of my school was evacuated and those left behind worked with Miss Kingsley, one of the teachers, meeting in each others’ houses. If the sirens went we crowded under the dining table. It all seemed like a game. We were different ages, possibly the more timid or sick, or with anxious parents who wouldn’t trust us to strangers.

I don’t know what changed Mum’s mind about evacuation, but in October she took me by coach to Stamford, where we usually spent our summer holidays with her two aunts and one uncle in their tiny house.

Outside the Aunts’ back gate was an alley I had never noticed, dividing the two rows of houses. The gate opposite led to the cramped house where I was to live with Mr and Mrs Rice and Doris, their daughter.

There were hissing gas lamps, an outside toilet, no kitchen, just a scullery with a shallow sink and cold red-tiled floor. In the corner was a huge stone copper. A fire was lit underneath it on Mondays. It heated water first to do the laundry and then more, to be scooped out into a tin bath for my weekly scrub beside the black-leaded range in the living room.

Mr Rice would go out for a beer with the lads on Monday evenings, presumably to spare both our blushes.

When we arrived the table was piled with “High tea”, which I came to recognise as regular Saturday fare. Pork pie, salad, sandwiches, home-made cakes and scones. My Mum had a job and never baked cakes or provided such a full table.

Doris Rice was fourteen and did her best to make this little London evacuee welcome. She took me up to my bedroom, where she had piled toys she had outgrown; real treasures, grocers and butchers’ shops, scale models of Victorian interiors with food and a till I was allowed to play with.

On Sunday Mum took me to church before she left me with the Rice family. She grabbed my hand so hard she hurt me and when I peeped at her I saw she was crying. Walking me back to my new home she talked non-stop.

“You can go in and see the Aunts whenever you want, but ask Mrs Rice first and be a good girl and don’t forget to say your prayers and clean your teeth and say please and thank you.”

The phone is ringing, my face is damp and I am sniffing. Damn Picture Post!