The Caxley Chronicles (35 page)

The end of the conflict was now very close. Millions of leaflets demanding surrender were showered on the inhabitants of Japan. The last warning of 'complete and utter destruction' was given on August 5. On the following day the first atomic bomb was cast upon Hiroshima, and on August 9 a second one was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. Within a week the terms set out by the Allied Governments were accepted, and the new Prime Minister, Mr Attlee, broadcast the news at midnight.

Overwhelming relief was, of course, the first reaction. There were still a few places in the Far East where fighting continued, but virtually this was the end of the war. Soon the men would be back, and life would return to normal.

Sep surveyed the happy crowds from his bedroom window, and thought of that other victory, nearly thirty years earlier, when the flags had fluttered and the people of Caxley had greeted peace with a frenzy of rejoicing. Today there was less madness, less hysteria. It had been a long bitter struggle, and there had been many casualties, but the numbers had been less than in that earlier cruel war.

He remembered how he had stood grieving for his dead son amidst his neighbours' cheers. Thank God that his family had
been spared this time! He looked down upon the bronze crown of Queen Victoria below him, and wondered inconsequently what she would make of a victory finally won by an atomic bomb. The descriptions of its ghastly power had affected Sep deeply. Now that such forces were known to the world, what did the future hold for mankind? What if such a weapon fell into the hands of a maniac like Hitler? Would the world ever be safe again?

Four young men, aflame with bonhomie and beer, had caught each other by the coat tails and were stamping round Queen Victoria's plinth shouting rhythmically 'Victory for us! Victory for us! Victory for us!' to the delight of the crowd.

Sep turned sadly from the window. Victory indeed, but at what a price, mourned the old man, at what a price!

1945–1950

T
HE RETURN
to Rose Lodge was accompanied by the usual frustrations and set-backs. The decorators waited for the plasterers' work to be completed. The electricians waited for the plumbers to finish their part. A chimney was faulty. Damp patches had appeared mysteriously on the landing ceiling. The paintwork inside and out showed the neglect of six years of war and hard wear.

At times Winnie wished that she had stuck to her guns and refused point blank to return. But her mother's joy was not a whit dampened by the delays, and she threw herself with zest into the job of choosing wallpaper and curtaining from the meagre stocks available. Tirelessly she searched the shops for all the odds and ends needed to refurbish her home. One morning she would be matching fringe for the curtains, or gimp for a newly upholstered chair; on the next she would be comparing prices of coke and anthracite for the kitchen boiler. She was just as busy and excited as she had been years ago, Winnie recalled, when the family moved to Rose Lodge for the first time. Bertie had been quite right! Rose Lodge meant everything to their mother, and it was obviously best that she should spend the rest of her days there.

They moved from the market square on a blustery November day. Ragged low clouds raced across the sky. The Caxley folk, cowering beneath shuddering umbrellas, battled against the
wind that buffeted them. Vicious showers of rain slanted across the streets, and the removal men dripped rivulets from their shiny macintoshes as they heaved the furniture down the stairs and into the van.

But, by the evening, Winnie and her mother sat exhausted but triumphant one on each side of the familiar drawing-room hearth.

'Home, at last,' sighed the old lady happily, looking about her. It was still far from perfect. The curtains hung stiffly, the carpet had some extraordinary billows in it, the removal men had scraped the paint by the door and chipped a corner of the china cabinet, but she was content.

'And to think,' she continued, 'that Edward will be demobilised in a few weeks' time, and dear Bertie, and perhaps Michael, and we can all have a proper family Christmas here together. The first peacetime Christmas!'

'I wonder how Joan's managing,' answered Winnie, still bemused from the day's happenings. 'I hope she won't feel lonely.'

'Lonely?' echoed her mother, 'In the market place? Take my word for it, she's as right as ninepence with the flat to play with and her own nice new things to arrange. She'll thoroughly enjoy having a place of her own.'

'You're probably right, mamma,' said Winnie. 'Early bed for us tonight. There are muscles aching in my back and arms which I never knew I had before.'

By ten o'clock Rose Lodge was in darkness and its two occupants slept the sleep of the happy and the exhausted.

***

It was Joan who had written to Edward to ask if she and Michael might have the flat temporarily, and he was delighted to think of it being of use to the young couple. He had been offered a good post in the plastics firm, as he had hoped, and was already looking forward to finding a flat or a house somewhere near London and the job.

This suited Joan and Michael admirably. It was plain that the nursery school would close now that the war was over, despite the recommendations of the Education Act of 1944. Joan grieved at the thought, but numbers were dwindling steadily, as the men came back, and the evacuees moved away from Caxley. By Easter the school would be no more, and the Quaker meeting house which had echoed to the cries and mirth of the babies, tumbling about the scrubbed floor in their blue-checked overalls, would once more be silent and empty, but for the decorous meetings of the children's war-time hosts, the Friends.

She was glad, though, that she had a job to do, for it transpired that Michael's demobilisation would be deferred. He was now in Berlin, and his fluency in German was of great use. He had been given further promotion and asked to stay on until the spring, but he had Christmas leave and the two spent a wonderful week arranging their wedding presents and buying furniture for the future.

'None of this blasted utility stuff,' declared Michael flatly. 'I'm sick of that sign anyway. We'll pick up second-hand pieces as we go—things we shall always like.' And so they went to two sales, and haunted the furniture shops in Caxley High Street which offered the old with the new.

Christmas Day was spent at Rose Lodge to please Mrs North.
Edward and Bertie, recently demobilised, were in high spirits. All the conversation was of the future and Winnie, surveying the Norths and Howards filling the great drawing-room, thought how right it was that it should be so. The immediate past was bleak and tragic; and, for her particularly, earlier years in this house held sad memories. She remembered arriving with Joan as a baby and Edward as a toddler to find her mother dressing the Christmas tree in just the same place as the present one. Leslie had left her, and the long lonely years had just begun. She often wondered what had become of him—the handsome charmer whose son was so shatteringly like him in looks—but hoped never to see him again. He had hurt her too cruelly.

One evening before Michael returned to Germany, Joan and he talked over their plans for the future. At one time he had thought of following up his Dublin degree with a year's training for his teacher's diploma, but now he had his doubts about this course.

'I don't think I could face sitting at a desk and poring over books again. The war's unsettled me—I want to start doing something more practical. I've talked to other fellows who broke their university course, or who had just finished, like me, and there are mighty few who have got the guts to return to the academic grind again. Somehow one's brain gets jerked out of the learning groove. I know for a fact mine has.'

He faced Joan with a smile.

'Besides,' he continued, 'I've a wife and a future family to support now. I must earn some money to keep the home together. We shan't want to stay in Caxley all our lives, you know, and we shall have to buy a house before long.'

'But what do you want to do?' asked his wife earnestly. 'I
do understand about not wanting to go back to school, I couldn't face it myself. But what else have you thought of? It seems a pity not to use your languages.'

'I wouldn't mind doing the same sort of thing that my father does—hotel work. Here or abroad. I'm easy. And perhaps, one day, owning our own hotel. Or a chain of them.'

His eyes were sparkling. He spoke lightly, but Joan could see that there was an element of serious purpose behind the words.

'Or I could stay in the army. That's been put to me. What do you feel about that, my sweet?'

'Horrible,' said Joan flatly. 'I've had enough of the army; and the idea of moving from one army camp to another doesn't appeal to me one little bit. And you know how
backward
army children are, poor dears, shunted from pillar to post and just getting the hang of one reading method when they're faced with an entirely different one.'

Michael laughed at this practical teacher's approach.

'I can't say I'm keen to stay myself,' he agreed. 'Six years is enough for me. We'd be better off, of course, but is it worth it?'

'Never,' declared Joan stoutly. 'Let's be poor and lead our own lives.'

And with that brave dictum they shelved the future for the remainder of his leave.

Meanwhile, Edward had been finding out just how difficult it was to get somewhere to live near London. He tried two sets of digs whilst he was flat hunting and swore that he would never entertain the thought of lodgings again. The only
possible hotel within striking distance of the factory was expensive, noisy, and decidedly seedy.

It was Jim, the son of his employer, who saved him at last.

'I've got a house,' he cried triumphantly one morning, bursting into the office which he shared with Edward. 'It's scruffy, it's jerry-built, but it's got three bedrooms and a garden. Eileen is off her head with delight. Now the boy can have a bedroom of his own, and the baby too when it arrives.'

Edward congratulated him warmly. Then a thought struck him.

'And what about the flat?'

'A queue for that as long as your arm,' began Jim. He stopped pacing the floor and looked suddenly at his colleague. 'Want it?' he asked, 'because if you do, it could be yours. The others can wait. I'll have a word with the old man.'

After a little negotiation, it was arranged, and Edward moved in one blue and white March day. A speculative builder, an old school friend of Edward's employer, had acquired the site a few years before the war, and had erected two pairs of presumably semi-detached houses, well-placed in one large garden. Each house was divided into two self-contained flats, so that there were eight households all told in about an acre of ground.

The plot was situated at the side of an old tree-lined lane and was not far from a golf course. A cluster of fir trees and a mature high hedge screened the flats from the view of passers by. The ground-floor tenants agreed to keep the front part of the garden in order, the upstairs tenants the back.

The rent was pretty steep, Edward privately considered, by Caxley standards, but he liked the flat and its secluded position
and would have paid even more for die chance of escaping from digs and hotels. He surveyed his new domain thankfully. He had a sitting-room, one bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom and a gloriously large cupboard for trunks, tennis racquets, picnic baskets and all the other awkward objects which need to be housed. He was well content.

He saw little of his neighbours in the first few weeks, and learned more about them from Jim than from this own brief encounters. His own flat was on the ground floor, and immediately beside him lived a middle-aged couple, distantly related to the owner, and now retired. Edward liked the look of them. The wife had wished him 'Good morning' in a brisk Scots brogue and her husband reminded him slightly of his grandfather, Bender North.

Above them lived a sensible-looking woman, a little older than Edward himself, who mounted a spruce bicycle each morning and pedalled energetically away. Edward had decided that she was an efficient secretary in one of the nearby factories, but Jim told him otherwise.

'Headmistress of an infants' school,' he informed him. 'Miss Hedges—a nice old bird. She was awfully kind to Eileen when she was having our first. And the two above you are secretaries, or so they say. I'd put them as shorthand-typists myself, but no doubt they'll rise in the scale before very long. Flighty, but harmless, you'll find.'

'And decorative,' added Edward. 'And much addicted to bathing. One at night and one in the morning, I've worked out. There's a cascade by my ear soon after eleven and another just after seven each morning, down the waste pipe.'

'Come to think of it,' said Jim, 'I believe you're right. Trust
a countryman to find out all the details of his neighbours' affairs! It had never occurred to me, I must admit.'

'It's a pity my grandmother can't spend an afternoon there,' replied Edward. 'She'd have the life history of every one of us at her finger tips before the sun set! Now, Jim let's get down to work.'