Читать книгу Auto Da Fay - Fay Weldon - Страница 19

Germany was a long way away and it was hard to understand what the quarrel was about. But Hitler had ‘walked into Poland’ with tanks and guns and couldn’t be allowed to get away with it. We were shown maps. All the young men were to leave New Zealand to fight for ‘home’. This they would do with bayonets, guns and in hand-to-hand combat. They were to be put in the way of the Germans and meant to kill any they came across, unless the German said ‘I surrender’, in which case the German was put in a prison camp to stop him cheating and continuing to fight, until the end of the war. The end came when one side said ‘pax’. In the meantime it was permitted to kill German women and children by dropping bombs on them otherwise the German men would drop bombs on you. The rules of engagement seemed strange, and rather like a lot of playground games except people got killed.

We children were set to knitting balaclavas in khaki wool. We sang as we knitted.

Knitting, knitting, knitting, with a prayer in every row, That the ones we love, By God above, Shall be guarded as they go.

It was exciting to wonder about the young man who would actually wear this strange garment, and stare out of the holes we had left for the eyes. He would never know us, but we would know him. It was quite an erotic feeling, though we didn’t know the word or what it meant. I think we rather wondered, as we looked at the knubbly, crooked, khaki piles we had created, whether anyone would actually ever wear them, or what good it would do them if they did. Jane knitted perfect balaclavas, and was even allowed loose on the socks, but the rest of us weren’t.

We were sent out into the wheat fields at harvest time to look for ergot, a black fungus which would cause madness if you ate it, but which also made a blood-clotting substance useful on the battlefront. We were told not to lick our fingers if we found any. I found some, forgot and licked my fingers, but I stayed sane.

We marched about a lot in parades, waving little Union Jacks on sticks. I wished I was a boy, and not doomed to knit and wave flags: I longed to march off with the men. I was proud to be English: it was as if everyone was coming to my defence. It turned out to be true that if you didn’t bomb them they would bomb you – there were photographs in the newspapers of London burning. I felt with my mother then that it was my true home, and I wanted to be there if only for the excitement.

But death was real, not a playground game. I went into a corner shop to buy colour balls and the woman who ran it came out of her door crying. She had a telegram to say her son had been killed in action. I cried as well and held her hand and went home without the sweets. I felt the earth shake beneath my feet and knew that this time it was in my head: I could see that earthquakes and volcanoes were just an outer and visible sign of an inner state, what happened to you as you lived your life. Omens and presages, geological convulsions and emotional shiftings, sudden eruptions; everything inside and outside made the same patterns.

There was a shortage of tender young Canterbury lamb; New Zealanders were left with tough old mutton scrag. All the best cuts were shipped off to Britain. There was not a banana to be seen for five years. Oranges were a rarity. My mother’s copies of the New Statesman and Nation, which used to come in clusters of six, every six weeks, now came in clusters of thirty-six. Ships still braved the torpedoes and got through, but cargo space was booked for essentials.

In 1941 the Japanese entered the war and things took a turn for the worse. Singapore fell. Darwin was bombed. Japanese submarines were seen in Sydney Harbour. There seemed no stopping them. It was believed that they would swoop down and take New Zealand and use it as a base to capture Australia. New Zealand was defenceless: a nation of women, children and old men. The warrior caste was away fighting other people’s wars. The Japanese looted, raped, tortured, killed, everyone knew. Friends told my mother she must be prepared to kill her daughters to save us from a fate worse than death at the hands of the enemy. Instead she taught us to smile courteously and if spoken to by a Japanese man to reply – what was it, ‘konichiwa’? – I think so. What those troops could possibly want of us girls remained a mystery. There were air-raid shelters in the school playground.

Then suddenly US troops were everywhere. Their ships were in the harbour, handsome men in swanky green uniforms strolled up and down the streets. They had got to New Zealand with a week to spare. The Japanese called the invasion off. We were saved. But now we had to stay indoors after dark, for fear of marauding GIs, of whom everyone seemed to be unreasonably frightened. If you spoke to them they gave you chewing gum, which you were not allowed to have at home. It was one of the vulgar things from which good girls were protected: chewing gum, comics, jazz music on the radio, the company of rough soldiery. We might be poor, the enemy might be at the door, but we were cultured and would not give in to populism.

Elmwood acquired two new men teachers, Mr Stuart and Mr Reid. They were communists, conscientious objectors, and had chosen teaching as an alternative to prison. Mr Eggleton seemed not noticeably grateful for their arrival. Mr Stuart was flamboyant, large and hairy, and Mr Reid was small, angry and hollow-eyed. They took it in turns to give us blow-byblow accounts of the siege of Stalingrad: for five months the city fought off the German invader, prepared to starve rather than surrender. How innocent the times were: later it emerged that the citizens were forcibly kept inside the city by their own army, to score a propaganda point.

I quite fell in love with Mr Stuart, his descriptions were so vivid and his ideas so strange and complicated. But teachers were always far more impressed by Jane than they ever were with me. Indeed, Mr Reid mortified me by complaining about my untidiness, and asking me why I couldn’t be more like my sister Jane, who was always so neat. I felt as bad as did Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, wearing the nameboard, with ‘slattern’ written upon it for all to see. But Mr Stuart did look me up and down once and observe that I was quite a clever little girl for my age. I have a feeling that Mr Stuart was a Trotskyist and Mr Reid a Leninist.

We sent food parcels to my grandmother Isobel in England and she sent us clothes parcels in return. Jane and I viewed these with trepidation. She’d send combinations, cast-offs from nameless cousins, scratchy all-in-one flannel undergarments with flaps for personal functions, which fastened with little rubber buttons. If my mother decided the day was cold, we were obliged to wear them.

The ship on which my mother sent her latest manuscript was torpedoed. Her publisher’s offices in London were bombed. There was no spare newsprint for fiction anyway. That was the end of another dream. Now how were we to make our living? But the men were at war: women were able to take the jobs. They ran the farms and the industries: Mary Glover, wife of poet Dennis Glover, who ran the Caxton Press in peacetime but killed men in time of war, delivered our daily milk from an electrified float. My mother, who had been working as a typist in the Albion Wright advertising agency, took over when her boss was called up. She wore a little grey business suit, functioned perfectly if anxiously, kept the agency in profit, earned seven pounds a week – and once actually spent four pounds on a new suit.

In 1944 we had a special assembly in the Girls’ High School to celebrate the end of the war in Europe, VE Day. Some 400 of us were crammed into the assembly hall on the first floor. The building began to tremble and the floor to tilt. Earthquakes were not meant to happen in Christchurch but this quite definitely was one, and a bad one too. We continued with Henry Vaughan’s hymn to peace:

My soul, there is a country, Far beyond the stars, Where stands a wingèd sentry, All skilful in the wars…

But we sang shakily, an inch away from panic…The earthquake calmed, the building steadied. We were lucky. People trusted far more to luck then than they do today.

Still the young men did not come back from the wars: they were moved on to the Japanese front. The Japanese were not playing the same game as we were, or else the goalposts had moved. The enemy just would not say ‘pax’.

One day that same year my mother came home from work white faced. The Allies had dropped an atom bomb on Japan. It had destroyed a whole city, women, children, everyone. It didn’t seem the kind of thing our side did, but we’d done it. No one knew much about the effects of radiation: it was just a very big bomb. Simple loss of civilian life was enough to horrify. But at least very soon after that the Japanese said they were giving in, war stopped, and we celebrated VJ Day in school assembly, concluding with hymnody in proper spirit of vigour and triumph. ‘And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace…’

The great day came and the men came back from the war. Albion Wright took over the reins of the advertising agency: my mother was demoted to typing and making the coffee once again, and her wages were cut by half. Indignant at her treatment she handed in her notice, and took a job in the biscuit factory whose broken products I had eaten while at the convent. This earned her a couple of shillings more than had she stayed at the agency. She would come home from work with blistered fingers: her job was to lift hot biscuits from the oiled conveyer belt and place them on wire racks to cool. I was sorry that hostilities had ended.

And that was the course of the war for Margaret, Jane and Fay. After that flags went out of fashion, and we no longer marched in from school playgrounds but simply took our places at our desks when the bell went.