A Childs War Read Free Page B

Artificer Third Class was superior. He was then invalided out of the service with a gratuity in the summer of 1928.
    In eleven years he had learnt pretty well all there was to know about turbines so, after months and years of uncertainty, he had landed an extremely good job as Chief Maintenance Engineer in the spacious basements beneath a prestigious department store very near to Knightsbridge underground station. On the strength of this, he had taken out a mortgage in 1938 and bought a house in the tree-lined road in Raynes Park, where he hoped to settle for the rest of his life to grow roses, just as his father did not very far from Chatham in the years after completing his own pensionable service.
    When the second war, as his generation called it, began George did not have a great deal of regret about not being called back to the Navy: a Chief Petty Officer wearing a surgical truss might be a liability in an engine room. As the conflict went on he would find his engineering skills of great value to the war effort, and his loyalty to King and country was never in question. In personal terms, the threatened destruction of life and property in the blitz was about the worst thing that could happen: George had a great deal to lose. He had not wanted to put his wife and son at risk and so he secretly congratulated Edna upon finding a way of keeping herself and the boy safe for a while as the guest of his friend Graham Patterson. When the bombing had finished, all being well, they would come home again.
    Graham was older than George, who had become a close friend as well as a colleague at the department store until, at the end of what people later called the phoney war in order that his wife and twelve-year-old only son should be safe, he left to take an engineer’s job at a dairy in Oxford. This carried with it a fairly good sized tied house in a short terrace in Botley Road close by. What convinced him that this was a sensible course to take had been a newspaper article that assured him that Hitler would never order the bombing of Oxford because he wanted it for the training of British Nazis after a putative successful invasion. Graham was protective of his own enough to be spurred into action by the first idea, while his patriotism denied the possibility of the latter. He had let his house in Motspur Park on an open-ended basis, intending to return there when Britannia ruled the waves and the air space again.
    His friendship with George was initiated by the fact that he had also served in the Navy, though he and George had never been shipmates. His wife Joyce was an outgoing person, who was more than willing to help someone through a difficult patch in their life. A woman who looked as out of sorts as Edna did and a little lad who was so distressed as to forget his toilet training were fit objects for her genuine compassion. Alex was glad of this, though his mother, now that she had arrived where she had chosen to be, resented having to put herself under someone else’s control.
IV
    Alex went to sleep in a big armchair and had disturbing dreams. There had been a great deal to feed such dreams lately. The nightmare he remembered was about a London tram on fire after being bombed during an air-raid in a city street. They had trolley buses where he lived, but he had heard George telling Edna about a seeing a tram that had been hit by a bomb as he made his way along to the station from work one night. In the dream people could be seen upstairs and downstairs inside the tram, pushing to get out and having to run through flames that seemed to rise from the street itself. Like many dreams, it recurred with variations while the boy slept. After watching him shake his head with his eyes shut and hearing his little noises of distress for about ten minutes, Edna woke him up, put him beside her on the settee and cuddled him while he fell asleep to dream again. This time he was standing at night in the back garden in Raynes Park,