A Childs War by Richard Ballard Read Free Book Online Page A

rooms on board ship that his father talked about to him. How he did miss his father - and worried about him too. Even a four-year-old knows what happens when large buildings are knocked down with people in them and George spent his working days underneath one such large building. Alex could not persuade himself that bombers were only active during the night and had forgotten that George was often doing maintenance work in the store at the time the Luftwaffe infested the skies over London.
    He was very tired when he was at last brought home and made a decision that remained with him for life over the lunch that Joyce set before him. He would not eat fish however many of the children who were starving in China would like to have it instead of him. He did not know where China was and did not know any of the children who lived there. He did remember other children though, with whom he used to play in the quiet street from time to time at home, and gave himself some solace by thinking about them. There was the boy a little older than himself who one day, at the end of a game of oranges and lemons, brought out an axe from his father’s shed, coinciding with the chant, and advanced towards Alex, making great slashes with it as the others all sang:
    â€˜Here comes the candle to light you to bed:
    â€˜Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!’ which would have become a reality if Edna had not seen what was happening through the front room window and rushed out to protect him. Afterwards, she went to denounce the aggressive boy to his parents.
    Edna now wanted to send Alex to bed as a punishment for refusing good food and offending Joyce; Alex wanted to go to bed himself because he was tired out after the walking he had been made to do and Joyce wondered whether she had done the right thing in being so generous as to take her husband’s friend’s wife and child in. However, there was no bed for him to go to because Joyce had lit a fire in the living room for herself and Edna to sit by and so he went out into the garden and told himself how unhappy he was for a good hour until it was too cold to remain there. Towards evening, he was told off again when it was found that he had pulled several ferns out of the earth where they grew under the living room window. His defence that he thought they might have been weeds cut no ice with his Medusa of a mother. She would have preferred a stone child at that point. Garden gnomes don’t tear up other people’s plants.
V
    George was late in his arrival that weekend. He had left the store behind time and had missed the coach he usually caught in the early evening. He found there was another one at nine o’clock and when it came in at Victoria Coach Station he sat on it to read the newspaper and doze off. The air-raid warning sounded but he did not want to lose his seat and did not go to the shelter as some of the other passengers did. The raid was close by and the blast damaged the glass roof of the coach station. When he did get to Oxford in the middle of the night, he was still very alarmed indeed. He kept on telling his wife and his friends who had anxiously waited up for him, how he had sat there listening to the glass crashing down onto and around the coach, wondering if this was where he was going to meet his end. When the all-clear sounded he had lent a hand to sweep a path for the coach to get out on to the road. He tried to repeat the story again and again and it took a drink-induced sleep to make him calm down.
    By the morning the memory of his fear had become an exciting story to tell his son and, having sensed that Edna would like a break from looking after Alex, he decided that he would take him out for a walk. He asked Graham to tell him a pleasant route that would occupy an hour or two. Graham suggested Binsey Lane as far as the Perch and the river, so he got Alex into his coat and cap and, at Edna’s insistence, put on the woollen leggings she