A Childs War Read Online Free Page B

copper had performed its function with the soap flakes and blue bag and what seemed endless rinses. All the washing had to be mangled in between the rinses. The garden was thirty feet long, and that allowed for a single washing line between two posts to cope with one family’s washing. Now that there would be more washing, the ex-naval personnel on the Saturday after the first wash-day that involved both the Pattersons and the Rylands and in anticipation of the next, rigged lines and tackle until the garden faintly resembled the shrouds of Nelson’s flagship in their imaginations. In fact there was much amusement with a couple of signal flags that emerged from Graham’s souvenirs at the inauguration of the lines. It was regretted that neither of the two chiefs had or knew how to use a bosun’s pipe.
    During the early days at the house Alex liked the garden. It was still warm enough to play outside and quite safe there. Since his mother knew he was all right, she left him to his own devices, which he liked even more. He also had an assortment of 00 gauge Hornby railway lines and rolling stock that John had grown out of, but he was not allowed to touch his valuable locomotives. There was also a small wooden tunnel and a length of station platform. Since Alex could not remember having gone to a real main line station at any time, these mysterious objects made him more imaginative than he would have been had he merely accepted them as replicas.
    Upstairs was a prohibited area for him, apart from the room he slept in at first and the bathroom. This was a decision partly affected by the fact that on the second day in the house he fell down the stairs from top to bottom, crashing round the bend at the top end, and making his chin bleed again. He saw the point of this ban himself and for some days pretended to be asleep while he was being read to downstairs, all ready in his pyjamas and dressing gown, so that he would be carried up to bed when the time came. Stairs to a nervous four-year-old are not unlike a pile of sand to a stag beetle. The bedroom that he and Edna used at this time was the middle one of three. Graham and Joyce had the front one. The one at the back that looked over the garden was John’s, and one morning after a night of rain, he looked out to see that his rails and carriages had not been brought in when Alex had finished with them the evening before. The next day, all they would let him have to play with outside was an old pie dish, which he filled with mud. Edna saw him from the scullery window as he was about to eat what he had imagined himself cooking with a garden trowel he had found in the unlocked shed. So they locked the shed and frowned at him.
    Edna became more and more exasperated with Alex, and told George endlessly in bed about his wrongdoings, wasting precious time on the second night of the week-end by complaining, thinking that Alex was asleep. He persisted with the pretence of being asleep because his mother made him feel vulnerable with her complaints to his father. After their talking had stopped, he found it very puzzling when his parents appeared to be moving rapidly against each other. Fortunately for all three of them, he did fall properly asleep by the time he might have asked any awkward questions, and in the morning he had forgotten about it along with all his other dreams, pleasant and unpleasant alike.
    On Sunday morning, the two families settled round the kitchen table for breakfast. Alex was pleased that last night’s diatribes about his misconduct had not changed his father’s attitude towards him. George seemed anxious to draw Alex into the conversation that went on and he did his best to respond though there was not much he could say. He listened with amusement as George gave fictitious characters to his fellow passengers on the coach on Friday night, claiming that one of them was Funf, the German spy from Tommy Handley’s wireless programme. The