A Childs War (9 page)

Edna nudged him and he said it. They both got up and went to stand before Miss Hill as if she were going to ask him “When did you last see your father?”

What she actually said was, “Have you brought your gas mask?”

“Yes, Miss Hill.”

“Do you know how to put it on?”

“We have shown him how,” said Edna.

“He must answer for himself, mother,” said Miss Hill, reprovingly.

“Go on then, Alex, tell the lady,” snarled Edna, who would have preferred to express her dislike for the woman instead.

“Yes, Miss Hill,” said Alex.

“You know that you must never come to school without it, nor must you go home again without it.”

“Of course, Miss Hill.” This was said through a constriction in his throat and was not distinctly said. Because it was a variation on the approved formula, Miss Hill looked thunderous and replied,

“I did not hear what you said. You must speak clearly!”

Alex had heard “must” from her lips five times by now and had had enough of her imperative mood.

“I said I do know how to put it on,” he asserted, and this brought his mother to the side of authority, despite her earlier resentment of it.

“Speak to Miss Hill in the proper way,” she said.

Alex had not learned the precept that a soft answer turneth away wrath and knew that he had replied properly in giving Miss Hill the information for which she had asked. All he could do was be silent.

“Very well,” said Miss Hill. “Please leave him with me now, Mrs Ryland. Morning school ends at twelve o'clock sharp, so please be here to collect him and bring him back at twenty past one.”

Edna also thought that silence was the better part of resentment and left Alex with no more than a pat on the shoulder, which he was left to interpret as a smack. This made him even less willing to be co-operative with this new and apparently unpleasant authority who was taller than his mother and, if she were not so conscious of her need to keep the differentials between herself and her charges, could even have had a pleasant face. As it was, she would not allow herself to smile and seemed to take refuge in being stern to defend herself against parents and children alike.

Miss Hill got up and took him past the other three children and their mothers whose names began with S, V and Y, to a rank of what she called “cubby holes”. She pointed to one with the name Alexander Ryland printed in a large hand above it. Still seething with annoyance, Alex almost shouted,

“My full name is Alexander Martin Ryland!”

“We would only need to put that if there were another Alexander Ryland and there is not!” said the offended teacher, realizing just in time that she ought not to stamp her foot down.

She quickly shoved Alex behind a desk and went back to meet Mrs Shergold and Isabel. She turned out to be a nice little girl who did not argue.

Things got worse before they were better for Alex. He found that the lid of the double desk could be lifted up and there was no way of stopping it from clattering down again when he let it go since there was as yet no one sitting next to him. This made all the other children who had hitherto sat in an over-awed silence at Miss Hill's command release their own tension with uninhibited laughter.

When the laughter had subsided and Miss Hill's irritation abated, Alex was no longer the centre of attention, and he found he was not displeased by the seat in the desk alongside him being given to Isabel who smiled at him as she sat down. The seat behind them in the row of desks at the right hand end of the room was taken by James Vaughan and Mary Younghusband. Most of the girls already felt very sorry for Mary, while the boys would soon find her surname too much of a provocation not to leave her in peace.

When all the parents had left, Miss Hill set out her ground rules of silence unless she asked a particular pupil a question and undivided attention at all times to whatever she said to them. During this process Alex heard the word “must” a great many more times, often complemented with “must not”.

“Have you all understood?”

“Yes, Miss Hill,” came the automatic chorus.

The learning of arithmetical tables by heart began and never seemed to cease until something called playtime was decreed for Miss Hill's class: a different time from the children in the older classes in order to avoid the intimidation that had been known to be offered to newcomers in time past. Once in the open air, the new boys and girls began to speak to each other and form acquaintanceships that, it was supposed, would last as long as the children lived in this little part of the city. This bonding was represented by every book that they used for exercises having “City of Oxford Education Committee” emblazoned upon its front cover. There had been no distinction made between the children born in Oxford and those whose provenance was peacetime London. That was Miss Cook's school policy. Sadly, it was not always the policy of the children's parents, however egalitarian the children themselves might wish to be in choosing their friends.

After break, there was reading. Alex was astonished by the odd shape of the reading book they were given. It was longer than it was high, looking like the sort of book you stuck National Savings stamps into on your birthday. It was illustrated with little basic line drawings of people out of whose mouths came the words you were going to learn to read enclosed in speech bubbles. For Alex, there was no challenge in this since for as far forward as he was able to turn without Miss Hill seeing him do it, he could read all the words anyway. One or two others did find it difficult to read the simple words out loud: “Run, Nat, see the fun”, but Alex had to wait until page fifteen before he found a fence he could not jump. He felt it was better not to appear to have more than average fluency when his turn to read aloud came, because Miss Hill might subscribe to the strong body of adults who did not like children to seem to know very much until they had personally told it to them.

Twelve o'clock came and the children ran from the school door, not having dared to run in the corridors because strict orders against doing so had been issued. Their mothers were at the school gate and Edna's crimson hat feather was conspicuous among other headgear to be seen. Alex was taken away from the gate with the utmost rapidity. The other mothers seemed to know each other, but Edna saw no reason to involve herself with them. It was Alex's day for causing offence. All he could say to Edna was,

“I wish I had a young mother.”

This did not, in the idiom used by Edna, make for happiness. Lunchtime was passed in an atmosphere of hostile tension. Alex, caught between the devil and the deep (another of his mother's favourite sayings), was glad when the minute hand on the clock registered a quarter past one and he was led back to the school gate to be herded with the others back into classroom.

A new exercise book had been set in each child's place and the first thing Miss Hill did after she had received the required chorus in reply to her saying “Good afternoon, Class One,” was give out a sharpened pencil to each of her charges. As she did this, Alex had the opportunity to observe this new principal participant in his life. She was in her thirties, bespectacled, with hair curled in a ring all round the crown of her head as was fashionable at the time. She was wearing a straight grey skirt into which a satin blouse was tucked. This shiny blouse became an object of fascination for Alex for the next few minutes and something remembered at intervals for a long time thereafter. Its surface drew attention to her underwear, the shape of which could be seen below her high collar. Of greater interest to Alex was what went on below that. From her neck to the waistband of her skirt, there was a vertical row of large, shiny, flat buttons and on either side of it a shape jiggled about independently each time she moved in a way that was infinitely fascinating. When she came near him, bending down to give him his pencil, a beautiful smell was added to what he had been intently watching and one of the shapes lowered itself near his face, making him feel luxurious.

This sense of well being was removed as soon as it had been granted.

“Take your pencils in your right hands, with the thumb and forefinger opposite each other a little way from where the pencil has been sharpened, as you see me do,” said Miss Hill to everyone, standing before them behind her desk.

Two problems were created for Alex: first, he could not see her hand on her pencil because Michael Ritson's head was in the way and second, he always held his pencil when he was drawing at home in his left hand and did so now.

Miss Hill turned to the blackboard, substituting pencil for chalk. “Now,” she said, “You must copy the shape I am going to put up, starting at the bottom of the shape as I do, and finishing at the top of it.”

She wrote the letter J.

“After you have written it once, fill the top line from left to right in your books with the same shape.”

Alex began. His left hand served him very well in drawing the shape. Isabel complained in a whisper that he kept on nudging her elbow with his as he worked. He was protesting that he could not help it when Miss Hill called out,

“Stop talking there! I can see you, Alexander.”

Then the heavens descended about his ears. The forms he so much admired came dancing towards him, but for no friendly purpose. Distaste was imprinted on the teacher's face as she wrenched the pencil from his left hand and inserted it in his right.

“Now, do as you have been told, and stop distracting your neighbour.”

This was even more confusing because Alex understood his neighbours to be the Wilson family who lived at number 58 and Mrs White who lived at number 54. It took a long time for him to realize that the neighbour in question was Isabel, who looked at this moment, he was pleased to see, sorry for him.

He tried to reproduce the letters with his right hand, but they were very inferior to the ones he had already supplied and he was grieved that his craftsmanship had been so scorned. After issuing exhortations and rebukes to other members of the class, Miss Hill came back to see what he had done.

“Those are not good shapes, Alexander, but you must go on making them with your right hand because you will never be allowed to use your left as you make your way in life. Try to improve on them in the next few minutes and at least keep them with their feet on the line.”

The next few minutes were more and more frustrating, with the pencil constantly slipping between his thumb and finger and the shapes becoming more and more disappointing to one who for a long time now had enjoyed making shapes on paper at home. His father would not say, “Not bad at all,” about what ranged across the page now. He also found that the pencil, an indelible one, made purple marks where his tears had fallen. The next half hour was spent in intense misery and playtime gave little relief because the others in the class were quite proud of their achievements with the “walking sticks on the line” as Miss Hill called them, whereas Alex who until then had the confidence of someone who enjoyed drawing, now had the despair of having been told, “Unless you write with the proper hand, you will never get anywhere in life.”

In the final three quarters of an hour of afternoon school, during which Miss Hill read a story called “The King of the Golden River”, the like of which normally he enjoyed, all Alex could do was feel sorry for himself. He shut out the story from his mind and concentrated instead on how miserable he was and how lonely.

The final act of the school day seemed entirely meaningless to him and served only to underline his unhappy sense of isolation. Miss Hill told the class to stand for a prayer. With the bright sun of three-thirty in the afternoon during permanent British Summer Time gleaming through the high windows, she read from a little prayer book:

‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night...'

Alex was not very much experienced in praying with others and picked up the sense of corporate wartime fear. There was plenty of danger about. Although no bombs actually fell here, the siren went off frequently enough as other people had to brace themselves for whatever they would find when they came out of the shelters after the all clear. Yet what was uppermost in his mind was what his father had said to him before he left to catch the coach on Sunday, “Learn all you can at school: if you've had an education more things are possible for you.” On the showing of the last two hours, there were no possibilities for Alex's self-advancement at all.

He proceeded out of the room near the end of the last file as the initial of his surname demanded, followed by James Vaughan and Roy Wheeler. As the door was reached, they pushed past him, and he was the last one through the door. A backward glance gave him a glimpse of Miss Hill sinking into the chair behind her desk and resting her head on her arms. None of the children in her class yet knew that she was new this term, sent to replace a male teacher who had been called up, or that she lived in Didcot whence she intended to travel on the train each day since she looked after her elderly parents there, or that she had been kept up most of last night as a result of bombs, jettisoned from an enemy plane hit by anti-aircraft fire while attacking the West Midlands and off course, falling on the street where she lived. Her satin blouse was her Sunday best, kept in a different place from the chest of drawers containing her everyday wear that was soaked by the fireman's hose being used next door after bomb blast had taken out her bedroom window.

Edna was imitating an ostrich at the gate, stretching her neck over the heads of the other mothers as she looked for Alex who seemed to be taking a long time coming out of the building. She became annoyed when she saw him. The other children ran to their mothers with tales of new things on their lips, but Alex was moving slowly with his mouth turned down at the corners to make the face that often encouraged George to say to him, “Give us a ride on your lip!”