A Childs War Read Online Free

waiting for George to open the Anderson shelter while there were noises in the sky, which Edna told him were fireworks going off, though he could not remember ever having seen real ones (This was the same idiom as she would use many years later to try to reassure a grandchild that thunder was caused by someone moving grand pianos in the sky). One of the fireworks appeared behind a large shadow and was followed by a great explosion a few streets away. Neighbours, who were also in their gardens on their way to their shelters, were asking anxiously of each other: “Ours or theirs?” or “That must have come down over Merton way!” - words which may as well have been said in Mandarin for all the sense they made to Alex both at the time and when his mind was sending them up again to disturb his traumatized sleep as a result of his painful chin. He heard the agonizingly mournful wailing sound of the air-raid siren in the final dream before he woke up and when he did, he found it metamorphosed into his mother’s voice as she tried to soothe him by singing to him:
    Do you want the moon the play with
    Or the stars to run away with?
    They’ll come if you don’t cry . . .’
    He had never liked that song, especially its nonsensical and unbearably distressing chorus that went, ‘Lulla lulla lulla lulla bye bye’. When he heard her singing it he began to cry. Great sobs came out of him and he was inconsolable while Edna became more confused and unable to be calm herself, because she too had been ground down by the same ordeals as he had in these last weeks. Joyce, with her arms round both of them together, eventually brought calm, but she realized it was the calm of exhaustion rather than recovery.
    Not long afterwards, Graham came over from the dairy and his son John arrived home from school. At teatime good things were prised from carefully garnered pre-war tins and put on the table for them to eat. Joyce made sure that there was enough whisky in Edna’s teacup for her to fall sound asleep in the front room after the meal, while she put Alex to bed, now self-promoted to an aunt. She made him laugh by telling him funny things and then reading to him out of a dog-eared story book found by John and illustrated with black and white line drawings of lovely trees. These images, still sombre but beautifully so, took over from the earlier ones in his mind as he fell into restorative sleep. When his mother came to her bed three hours later he was sound asleep. During the night he woke up and needed a pee. He found the china pot and gratefully relieved himself, then returned to bed and slept again. This time, his dream was of lying on the crown of a tree with his injured face held up towards therapeutic and happy sunlight.
    He woke to hear his mother as she sat up in bed and took the teacup she was offered, saying to Joyce,
    â€œHow lovely it was to be able to stay in bed all night!”
    The trees that lingered in his waking memory disappeared at her next sentence:
    â€œI hope George was all right at home.” Then his chin started to hurt again, only worse than before.
V
    In a few days’ time, with his chin getting better and his mother a little less inclined to tell him off for everything he did, Alex found he was enjoying himself. He liked his new surroundings and the family with whom Edna and he found themselves living. Edna had given Graham avuncular status towards Alex to go with his wife’s new rôle. He was a stocky, jocular, easy-going man with a small moustache, grown after he had left the Royal Navy, and greased down hair, worn short in the fashion of all ex-servicemen. John emerged as admirable because his toys and games were interesting to the four-year-old, though careful prohibitions were issued about touching anything for which specific permission had not been given. Sharp words were to be said on the rare occasions when Alex did so. Nevertheless, Alex soon found in John