Authors: Jean Hill
Their kitchen had a small range that needed regular coating with black lead polish that was applied with stubby brushes. His greatest pleasure was making toast on winter evenings when his mother would open the small door in the front of the range. Tom would sit on a small three-legged stool and hold an old brass toasting fork with a thick slice of bread speared upon it as close as he could manage to the red embers. A large Victorian coal scuttle housed lumps of shiny black coal and a bent iron fender served as his foot rest.
‘Take care luv, don’t get too close, you could burn yerself,’ Ruth would caution him.
‘Cors not, I ain’t daft,’ he would respond. ‘Fink I’m silly?’ ‘There’s not much butter with this ’ere rationing but there’s some dripping from that scrap of a joint, a bit of salt on that should be good, I think,’ his mother said and they savoured the companionship of eating together even if Tom did sometimes singe the toast. Charred edges did not worry them as a good scraping with a kitchen knife was all that was required to make the bread edible and that was part of the enjoyment.
Most days, when he was not in school, Tom would trundle round the rough grey concreted backyard on a rusty old second-hand scooter his mother had bought for the princely sum of three pence from a friend who was glad to get rid of it. With the shelter placed in the centre his route was now limited but he did not care. It was his road and in his imagination he was in a car speeding along. He forgot the horrors of war for a short time as he hooted and tooted or sang to himself.
‘Concrete is better for kids to play on,’ the landlord had pontificated on the day they that moved in, but did not admit that the maintenance for him would be simpler. Small borders of stiff London clay clung to the edges of the concrete yard. Tom’s mother filled these with dahlias, stocks and marigolds in the summer but now that the Anderson shelter had been erected they were overshadowed. The roof of the shelter was covered with earth, ugly and bare, spurned even by weeds. Tom longed for a green lawn, soft and comfortable to play on, and he promised himself he would have one when he was grown up and he had a house of his own. He looked forward to that. Tom grazed his knees on the rough spiky concrete and had numerous pale pink scars as a result.
Robert had built a small rectangular concrete fish pond in a corner of one of the borders in which resided Tom’s only pet, a fat shiny goldfish named Cecil, which was chosen with care in a local pet shop and carried home with pride in a jam jar. It was coveted by Tiger, a wily old tabby cat that lived next door, but the fish was a survivor, defying air raids, local cats and the chemicals from the concrete that could have killed him. His gold shiny scales would glint in the hazy sunshine, that is on the days when the rays managed to penetrate the London smog. The only tree, a common purple lilac, small and stunted, occupied a space next to the pond and Tiger would perch precariously on one of the lower branches and watch with feline patience for any activity, his green slanted eyes glittering with animosity and grey striped hunter’s body poised for action. His long tail would twitch as he savoured the idea of a delicious fish treat.
‘Wretched ol’ cat, who does he think he is?’ Tom would grumble. ‘Clear off you rotten old moggy.’ Tiger hissed and sometimes moved up a branch or two but refused to abandon his post. He could wait.
Tom dipped his fingers in the small pond to touch the fish but the swift and slippery body always eluded him. He had planted seeds in the soil that bordered the pond, tipping them out of small paper packets before covering them lovingly with stiff lumps of dark reddish brown London clay. A few of his favourites, tobacco plants and purple and pink stocks, did straggle, thin and weak, along the edge of the pond during the summer months. The conditions were miserable but they lifted bright heads towards the grey sky and basked in any sunshine that penetrated it. Smog from factory chimneys and coal fires was at its most troublesome during the winter months when a swirl of moisture-laden wind bamboozled its way through their clothes and crept with insidious determination into their bones.
‘Mum,’ Tom urged many times in a begging tone that petered into a whine, ‘can my fish go into a bowl and come into the shelter with us? It can’t be nice in that dark slimy ol’ pond when a raid’s on.’
‘No ducks, ’e’s better off where he is,’ his mother retorted. ‘No room for blessed fish bowls in that there shelter.’
After further months of heavy raids and whole nights spent in the Anderson shelter Tom emerged one morning to find the small pond littered with pieces of dark grey metal shrapnel. His beloved fish was floating on his back with eyes wide, glazed and lifeless.
‘Wot a rotten war,’ he cried out, fighting back his tears. ‘When I’m grown up I’ll be a soldier and fight. I’ll pay those Germans back.’
His mother found it difficult to comment on his outburst. The only thing she longed for was peace, not retribution. She heaved a long sigh and subconsciously rubbed the small silver crucifix that hung on a slender chain round her slim neck. She was not a religious woman but wearing the cross gave her some comfort. Her mother had given it to her when she was about five years old. She couldn’t remember much about her mother but she did recall her placing the crucifix around her neck, the cool silver links pressing against her skin, and the feel of her mother’s soft face as she kissed her cheek. She recalled too looking into gentle deep-set hazel eyes, pools of mottled brown, just like her own. Ruth was orphaned when she was just six years old and until she was fourteen lived in a council care home where she suffered a strict routine, harsh words, tatty cast-off clothing and a complete lack of affection.
‘Wot good will trying to pay ’em back do you son? Fink about it,’ she said, knowing that he was too young to understand. She found the whole thing bewildering and a five-year-old, well, what hope did he have? She understood that bitterness would not solve the problems of the world or control the ambitions of wicked men. Man was evil enough without her encouraging her child to become antagonistic towards others; in any case revenge and violence only produced the same response.
Ruth’s parents had died after contracting tuberculosis at a time when the disease claimed the lives of many young people. Pasteurised milk was not always available and it was often slopped with a ladle into a customer’s own jug by a milkman with a lack of personal hygiene who used a horse and cart full of grubby churns. The father she had never got to know was the first to became infected, then her mother. There were no modern wonder drugs or sanatoriums in Switzerland for them. Ruth had been told that she was lucky to be healthy and strong. She did not think that living in a council care home constituted good luck but a natural wit and more intelligence than she gave herself credit for, together with strong memories of a kind mother, ensured that she emerged almost unscathed.
When Ruth left the care home she was just fourteen and shared a miserable one-bedroom flat above a fish and chip shop with another girl she had met in the home. The smell of fish and chips frying in the evening assailed their nostrils and clung to their hair but the rent was low and they were in no position to complain. Ruth felt that she had been lucky to get a poorly paid job in a nearby sweet shop so that she could afford to pay for her share of the food and rent. She served the rich and prosperous members of the local community with boxes of delicious chocolates; the taste of such delicacies she could only dream about. If she was lucky the manager would, when in a generous mood, which was not often, give her a few broken sweets or pieces of chocolate. She had accepted her lot then without resentment, indeed she had known no other way of life, but the wartime restrictions now imposed on her, just when things had seemed so much better, made her angry and frustrated with an almost unbearable depth of feeling.
She met Robert Hands when she was sixteen and they married a year later. Robert, also orphaned, had been luckier than Ruth. He had been brought up by a couple of aunts who adopted him when he was twelve and later apprenticed him to a local baker. Ruth hoped and prayed that Tom, who was born a year after they married and christened Robert Thomas, but called Tom to distinguish him from his father, would never suffer the loneliness and deprivation she had endured as a child. She did not want to leave him as her parents had left her, but that possibility was becoming too real for peace of mind and that terrified her.
The playing field that used to be behind their backyard, where the local boys had enjoyed their Saturday game of football, was now filled with ugly hastily erected factory buildings composed of plain grey concrete block walls and slate-coloured roofs, in order to make shell cases. The poor but proud housewives who had considered it necessary to scrub and whiten their front steps and keep their homes shipshape, no longer cared. There were bigger issues to consider.
A lorry arrived one morning with workmen who removed the ornamental black iron railings from the front of Tom’s house.
‘They’re needed for the war effort,’ was the vague explanation. ‘They’ll soon be melted down to make munitions.’
Uneven stumps of metal were left and with no railings to support it the yellow privet hedge fell forwards onto the crooked paving stones of the path in front of the house.
‘What’s going to happen to the railings?’ Tom asked his mother.
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘They’ll probably be made into guns. I’ll ’ave to clip that damned hedge now,’ she spat out irritably. ‘What an ’orrible mess.’
Tom liked the idea that his railings would soon be turned into guns and hoped that they would used against those Jerries. Bang, he thought, another one dead!
At the end of their road there was a small park owned by the local council with lawns and neatly planted ornamental cherry trees whose branches became laden with pink and white blossom in the spring and harboured chirping fat brown sparrows. Tom thought the birds were beautiful. The park was a green oasis in the middle of the dirty dusty streets although a large grey barrage balloon was now positioned on a stretch of grass in the centre. A small tarmac area contained swings and a slide for the children, and beyond that, edging a busy road, several grim-looking factories had been built, their dirty tall chimneys puffing evil smells and smoke over the local neighbourhood, day and night. A sauce factory emitted strong interesting fruity smells that blew into nearby houses, depending on the direction of the wind, and another factory next to it housed printing machinery. Empty barrels that had once contained coloured inks were stacked outside and the hum from the presses could be heard several streets away. Behind the factories there were narrow roads containing small mean terraced houses, labelled ‘slums’ by Tom’s
mother, where the factory workers lived.
‘They’re a ruff ol’ crowd, those factory workers,’ she used to say in a loud voice before the war started and hurried past them, eyes lowered, as though they were not good enough to mix with her and Tom. ‘Ragamuffins, huh, that’s what they are. Keep clear of that lot, boy. I’m a housewife and proud to be one. Only the riff-raff work in dirty ol’ factories. Scruffy beggars some of ’em are.’ Now she was a factory worker herself, having been drafted to the local munitions factory by the local labour exchange, although she called herself a wartime worker. Tom was sure she was enjoying the company of her co-workers, despite her protestations.
‘They’re a nice crowd I work wiv,’ she assured Tom. Tom was confused but thought it best if he did not comment and preferred to play with his tin soldiers.
Ruth had not realized how lonely she had become. It was easy to live in London and not know one’s next-door neighbours. She chatted to a few of the other mothers at Tom’s school gates but did not have many real friends in their immediate neighbourhood having been born and brought up in the East End. East Enders in her view were great people, salt of the earth, despite the slums. A number of them had been immigrants who could not do much to improve their living conditions during the nineteen thirties. The pearly king and queen embodied a culture of which Ruth was proud. ‘It’s part of our ’istory,’ she never tired of telling Tom, who loved to hear stories about the pearly kings and queens.
‘Are they related to King George VI?’ he asked. ‘Good enough to be,’ his mother responded with pride. ‘It must have taken a long time to stitch those ol’ buttons on,’ he said with avid interest. In his bedroom he had a tatty old picture, brown and curling at the edges, of a pearly king and queen and he never tired of looking at it.
Tom’s primary school was designated to be evacuated to Russetshire which was assumed to be a safe area for the children and not a target for bombs.
‘Tom,’ his mother said, after much heartache and worry about whether she was doing the right thing, ‘I’m gonna let you go away for a while, to the country, with your school. You’ll be going to Russetshire, a country place where there’s fields with sheep and cows. You’re bound to love it ducks. You’ll have your school friends to keep you company, a comfy bed to sleep in and no bloomin’ air raids.’ At least she hoped not. The shelter was not healthy and she prayed that he would find a billet where he was welcome and could sleep in safety, although nothing was certain. They could be invaded. That did not bear thinking about.
‘Mum,’ the boy protested, ‘I want to be here wiv you.’ This was home and he had never heard of Russetshire. What did he want with silly cows and sheep? He had seen pictures of them in a book and that was enough. ‘I don’t wanna go Mum,’ he insisted and his young mother despaired.
Ruth wavered for a while but deep down she knew that to send her son to Russetshire was the right thing to do and Tom was evacuated to the small village of Enderly in Russetshire, a county in the south Midlands. The parting was tearful. The mothers waved a frantic goodbye at the local station. Ruth’s hazel eyes looked sunken in their sockets where dark smudges had formed underneath them through lack of sleep. With her head covered in the drab cotton turban most of the factory workers had donned like a proud uniform, she looked much older than someone in her twenties. Tom looked a pathetic little boy; his spindly legs protruded from short grey flannel trousers and knee-high woollen grey socks with a blue stripe round the tops that wrinkled and formed several odd bracelets. The bizarre outfit was topped by a shabby navy-blue serge school coat with shiny worn lapels, purchased in a local second-hand shop. A grey school cap, which was two sizes too large, completed his outfit and the peak protruded half way down his forehead in a way that resembled a bird’s beak. A gas mask in a cardboard box was slung across his shoulders and he clutched a small leather case containing a change of clothes, a few small toys and some sandwiches wrapped in crinkled greaseproof paper.