A Childs War Read Free

thereafter as Anderson shelters.
    George was looking forward to a time when, if he and his family survived, he would be able to teach things to his boy with higher hopes of him understanding all he said. He would have been pleased if he knew that Alex was remembering it all now, as he waited in a daze for Edna to finish tidying herself up. Alex remembered that a lot of shovelling of earth and digging up of earth had to be done because the walls had to be put up over a pit three feet deep and the completed shelter had then to be covered with soil to a depth of eighteen inches. By the time the bombs started to fall there was many a marrow coming to full size on the top of the shelters along Chestnut Road. Most of the residents had bought their shelters a year before, since they earned rather more than would qualify them for free ones. They all agreed that it was probably ten pounds well spent, since a family of six could be kept safe from the blast that might take away the houses, provided that the shelter did not receive a direct hit itself. They all felt sorry for the people who lived down near the docks or in central London without gardens in which to build the shelters. At least in the western suburbs they were consoled by the idea that if death came to them, it would come to family groups huddling together and not to a communal shelter full of people who would be strangers to each other.
    When Edna came down again, she was very distressed to find a wet patch underneath Alex on the stair carpet, though Joyce did not seem to mind at all and produced a bucket of water and a cloth to deal with it. He was none too gently dragged upstairs for a wash and some hastily found clean clothes. Before she married George, Edna had worked for a short time as a nurse in the children’s ward of an infectious diseases hospital. She knew how to be efficient, and her son now felt the full force of that efficiency.
III
    When she rang him at work, George knew that Edna was under more strain than she usually was. He had accepted years ago that she would never turn into a gentle and imperturbable woman, and recognized his own tendency towards anxiety well enough. So while he agreed that she should visit their close friends in Oxford on account of her tense state, underneath he was glad of the chance to have a proper reason for getting her to a safe place without her seeming to have run away, or appearing to be trying to escape himself at the weekends.
    At the time they had married in 1923 he had been twenty-two and an Engine Room Artificer in the Royal Navy, handsome in his fore-and-aft uniform and his cap worn at a rakish angle in the style of Admiral Beatty. She was twenty-one, with appealing brown eyes and hair like the feathers of a raven. Nothing wrong with all that, though his parents thought there was, and her own mother had been dead four years or she might have made some remark about repenting at leisure. Edna’s father had become dispirited since his bereavement and expected his middle daughter to look after his youngest one, a responsibility to which she had not taken very kindly. Edna was not very fond of the idea of children nor, indeed, of their reality in spite of her job looking after some of them. George was a kind man, and had felt sorry for the attractive children’s nurse he met at a dance. He was willing to outface his mother and father when she accepted his proposal of marriage. He offended them even more by arranging his wedding by special licence in a short period of leave when he was meant to have been initiated to a lodge of freemasons during his father’s year as its worshipful master. His father, who was also in the Navy, had high hopes for his elder son, which did not include an early and probably improvident marriage to a girl who had no more in her stocking than her obviously fetching leg. David Ryland was more surprised than pleased when his daughter-in-law did not give birth to a child during the