Little Lake Part 1

Little Lake
Prologue

When you think of the Second World War what do you see? A destroyed London at the hands of the Blitz, an old steamer train full of hopeful faces of evacuees, or nothing, just emptiness, numbness, black?
When I think of the Second World War I see countryside, a cemetery full of old rotting gravestones with over grown weeds and flowerpots full of water and dead bugs. I see a school with creaky gates and red painted bricks; I see a large dip in the road full of rainwater that sprays over boys’ trousers as they ride past full speed on their yellow and blue bicycles, trying to act impressive. But I also see a gap in a large oak tree big enough to fit two people comfortably, I see this space in my mind and it reminds me of the Second World War because that was the place where my War ended.

I was thirteen when the war first broke out, I was living in London at the time and my parents had been awaiting the dreaded radio speech from the Prime Minister to announce the beginning of the War even though everyone knew that it was coming, but were to afraid to admit it. I remember the day clearly as my father hurried me upstairs out of sight as he listened to the wireless, I knew he was afraid because he said to me “Clarice Stitch you shall go upstairs this instant!” He was angry with me and had called me Clarice Stitch, two things that he never did as I have always been known as Clare to my family since I was a young baby.

Being thirteen years old and living in wartime was a strange thing, whereas before I was used to nice things and being constantly praised by my father at home and endlessly criticized at school by teachers and pupils alike due to daydreaming and the inability to understand other girls my age without feeling fake but after war broke out I stopped getting nice things and my father was not there to praise me, although the comments at school didn’t really change.

My brother, Arnold, and my father signed up for the army in 1940, my brother had turned eighteen in January and my father did not want to leave without him so they left together on Valentine’s day the next month. My mother and I were both shocked to be confronted with the reality that we would have to entertain each other as neither of us had really seen eye to eye, also we found that we had no immediate support of money as my father had to leave his wealthy job as a lawyer to sign up leaving us with only his army wages which were dismal in comparison to what my mother and I were used to.

My mother and I soon got into the routine of rarely speaking two words to each other whilst trying our best to not aggravate each other so that we could continue this routine effortlessly. This was not a difficult task to uphold as I preferred to spend my time in my room sketching in my beloved sketch pad where my salvation was found in the images of anything I pictured or imagined.

I would go to the movies at the Cineplex and sit alone staring at the screen sketching the actress’s faces just longing to be them so desperately! It was my secret shame to want to be a beautiful as a movie star but with shoulder length dirty blonde hair, muddy green eyes and an average body it was not to be!

Everything was of course different with rationing and lack of male beings around but my mother and I managed, at least for a while. Then The Blitz came. Anyone living in London at the time of The Blitz I expect will still have nightmares about it even fifty years later. You would wake one morning in the damp and freezing Anderson Shelter that you had rushed to the night before, feeling lucky to be alive, and you would go for a walk or even just step outside to see streets destroyed, pedestrians dead where they fell on the streets, the terror still on their faces, home’s blown to pieces and families wiped out all in one night.
It was horrible, but that was where my story first began, on the night of 12th of April 1941.

Spring 1941

It was a freak night when my mother invited me to come with her to see an acquaintance of hers house for tea after school. I didn’t feel like being separated from my mother, since we were still enduring the Blitz, so I accepted her invitation gladly.

At school when the siren had gone we were all huddled into the large school basement and told to sit and wait, the teachers would listen to the younger pupils hysterical uncontrollable cries and after half an hour of so it would become unbearable for them and they would introduce the school with some hymns to sing together.

Everyone would shakily start to sing lightly whilst I pushed my way through the crowds of students to a small corner where I would start to sketch something in my sketch book, something that I kept on my person at all times. I would mouth the words whilst drawing horrific images of burning buildings or speeding ambulances, the images that I knew I would see as soon as the air raid siren sounded the all clear. It wasn’t much difference at home except instead of hymns being hummed in the background my mother would instead sit and knit or play patience before getting into the bottom bunk of the Anderson Shelter and sobbing until she slept or until the all clear. I just listened.

The evening that we went to her friend’s house I couldn’t be asked to get out of my tatty school uniform, although I was polite enough to leave my sketch pad at home. My mother dressed up for the occasion in a posh blue frock and a pair of beige sandals. She considered high heels common and tart-like; my mother had very high opinions of things that I thought acceptable.

We had to walk to the friend’s house and it was a particular cold evening for an April day and my heels ached from the constant rubbing of my old black school shoes that were too small for me but irreplaceable because of the lack of clothing coupons!

Money was short in my family at that moment as my mother had refused point blank to get a job and she hadn’t realised how much she and my father had spent on the Christmas before he and my brother had left, it wasn’t even a spectacular Christmas!

As we reached the end of the relatively short walk, mother and i walked down a street of tenements and knocked on a small detached house. We were greeted by a slim fashionable young lady called Caroline. To say that she was a friend of my mother’s was saying too much, Caroline was an ex-wife of an ex-friend. He had been an adulterer and my mother was highly against adultery as it is one of her commandments in her bible, my mother had had a religious upbringing although she had never thrust it upon Arnold or me, she still kept her beliefs.

Caroline was a boisterous young woman who greeted us kindly and loudly. Caroline didn’t seem remotely affected by her divorce which had only happened a short time before we visited, she even joked about it.
Caroline was the sort of woman that I aspired to be but my mother would deeply disapprove of, she wore high heels and make-up, she was single with no intention of finding another man and she was an independent woman. It was obvious to me that my mother disliked Caroline or at least frowned upon as she smiled and nodded at the right times whenever Caroline spoke to her but her acknowledgements were well rehearsed and disinteresting so Caroline and I spent most of the evening talking.

I liked Caroline a lot and she seem interested in me, I told her of my love for art and movies and she and I held a long debate of our favourite movie heroines, I loved Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz but she said she held no patience with her and preferred Scarlet O’Hara from Gone With The Wind but I had the opposite opinion. It was a very light and festive creative discussion but it got on my mother’s nerves as she didn’t have the slightest idea what we were talking about!

When it was time to leave Caroline held us back for another half an hour until my mother utterly insisted that we had to leave since it was half past eight and already pitch black outside. Caroline understood and bid us farewell very kindly.

As soon as we were out of ear reach of the tenements my mother let out her opinions of Caroline mostly since she had been holding them in since we had arrived there. She commented on Caroline’s size, her money, her appearance, her divorce and most of all wallpaper which my mother called tacky and common. I just nodded and smiled, mimicking my mother’s choreographed routine to perfection!

My mother’s ill fitting shoes were the only thing echoing on the concrete pavements as we passed people silently, unacknowledged as we past. Some of the lanes were surprisingly empty as mother and I strutted home as fast as we could. She dragged me persistently through derelict avenues passing broken up houses and destroyed shops which barely stood all around us, a common sight during the Blitz of London, and we were nearing home. Just a few more blocks I thought, a few more blocks. However we were not destined to return home that night.

The air raid siren shrieked as my mother and I were passing Baker Avenue, we both stopped and stared at the sky instinctively. I heard my mother catch her breath and the skipped beat of my heartbeat as the screeching alarm hurt my ears. An old lady about to pass us in the avenue dropped her shopping and ran in the direction of the nearest tube station. A couple near us embraced passionately for half a second before following the little old lady quickly, timidly staring at the sky. I watched them as my mother watched the fog filled evening sky petrified of what was about to drop from the black clouds.

I realised that she would not move of her own accord and found myself impulsively running with my mother’s hand glued into mine securely, I would not let go. We ran to the tube station and saw many people huddling and murmuring together frightened just as much as my mother.

The air raid warden was calm and polite shuffling the people into the tube station steadily with a booming voice as the first bombs dropped on the city with a deafening crash, the ground shook and the sky split with evil looking golden light and red.

We were in the queue for the entrance and as the bomb landings grew nearer and nearer I was pushing people aside to get through as quickly as possible. I was pushed and shoved and sworn at and screamed at but I never let go of my mother’s hand, and eventually we were inside the crowded badly lit tube station, already packed with hundreds of people from separate stations who had walked along the tracks looking for a space to rest for the remainder of the night. The gate closed with a loud thud as the metal grate closed and the air raid warden whistled loudly scattering people away from the entrance and down the stairs to the main section of the tube. We were safe.

The atmosphere in the station was awful, young children were crying into their parent’s shirts and dresses as their parents were as white as ghosts shaking and staring ahead with tears in their naked eyes petrified of what might happen before the night was out. They all tried to reassure their children but as they spoke with words of softness and faith they could barely conceal their horrid worries because their voices were so cracked and sore from the large lump in their throats from the fright they held inside them.

I quickly found a spot on the platform to sit down at and I slumped against the dirty curved wall declaring the space as my own before anybody else tried to sit down in my place. My mother was standing before me and I had to pull her arm several times before she sat down beside me next to an old man and his son and a middle aged woman.

As my mother sat she placed her arm around my shoulders and pulled me into her side, worried for me and herself. I didn’t resist her hard grip as I knew that this would not help to ease her anxiety and I found that I actually felt comforted in her embrace, it was the first time she and I had actually been so close for a long time.

People’s alarmed and terrified faces and their intolerable shaking was more frightening than standing in the dilapidated streets of London because each face gave a sense of foreshadow which made me feel that we were about to be blown up or kill just like the people in Balham Station who thought they were safe but in the end were not! Each time a woman flinched at the sound of a falling bomb, I flinched. The cry of a baby alarmed at the sounds of London falling apart caused me to wince, the gasp of horror as a bomb landed nearby was enough to make everyone go silent!

The wall’s thumped and shook, dust fell on people as each bomb stirred the earth. I started to understand when every detail of a bombs departure would happen. First you could hear the clanging of the plane shaft opening as they prepared to drop the bomb and then the echoing creek as they did just that! I would then literally start to count to ten inaudibly and on the exact moment I said the number ten, there would be a split second of silence and then the massive explosion.

I tried to bury my thoughts and think of other things but so many subjects were connected to the war and to the Blitz that the only thing that stirred me from thinking of the metallic concoctions of chemicals above me was my father sing to Fred Astaire songs that came on the wireless one Saturday afternoon. I had sat in his chair in front of a fresh fire, getting soot on my face as I drew in my sketch pad listening to him sing in-tune perfectly hitting each note with perfection, the happiest moments of life that weren’t yet ruined by the war.

Nonetheless that was the worst night of my life; I had had air raids before but none as worse as that night. We had to stay in the station all evening cramped together like cattle in a field. The toilets were so far away with queues of people as long as the station platform would allow it and became more sanitary to do your business in a bucket or a bottle and the stench ravished the whole platform for the entire night and was intolerable, the sight unbearable and the panic was so strong that it could have been bottled and sold as perfume!

The warden had been very kind too all stranded people during the air raid, he gave my mother and I a spare blanket and also a cold cup of tea for my shaking mother as he manoeuvred his way around all the sleeping pedestrians and the screaming babies offering help where he could and reassurance to all those that needed it.
I rested my head on my mother’s legs for the whole night whilst she stroked my shoulder as reassuringly as possible. She couldn’t sleep but somehow I could, I was so fatigued with panic and fear that I dropped off at the count of seven whilst listening to the sick hard tune of a whistling bomb.

I dreamt a horrible dream that night. I saw a smashed up gravestones all over a cemetery and next to a particular grave stone there was a piece of piece of paper nailed into the dead emerald faded grass in the shadow of the headstone. It read- “Here lies Clarice Stitch, A daughter, a sister, alone.” I then saw my mother and father laughing beside the destroyed headstone. Arnold, with a bright smile highlighting his handsome complexion, joined them in their delight and tears of laughter. They were the ones that had destroyed the gravestones so effortlessly and without fear of the consequences. They beamed with excitement and animation! I started to scream in the dream; my brother’s red hair shook as he cackled louder, my mother and father’s grins turned even wickeder with each scream! It seemed that as I became more horrified in my dream the more I moaned in reality until my mother found the decency to wake me softly.

It was only a short time after I awoke that the all clear signal sounded and everyone breathed a large sigh of relief and song and laughter broke free in some very charismatic men through the tunnel. Another night had been survived for so many people and the relief was infectious, although most people were now started the fretting of whether other family members survived, as well as houses and business. The first part of an air raid had been survived but then came the second half.

People pushed and scrambled out of the tube station, we handed our blanket into the warden all neatly folded and correct, the warden patted me on the shoulder and my mother and I continued in our struggle to leave the station as quickly as possible. I was relishing the idea of sleeping in the softness of my bed, the taste of succulent food in my mouth and the patience and privacy of my sketch pad and pencil.

The smell of fresh air and seeing the basic necessity which was sunlight was enough to warm most people’s hearts when they left the stuffy tube station, however when we left the station there was nothing in the sky except huge black clouds that were drifting into the sky from a massive pile of burning bricks which were once houses; I could smell petrol and ash all around me as my mother pulled me through the now one-sided Baker Avenue. The sounds of Ambulance and Fire engines were all around us as they drove around the rubble like they were racing over hot coals, it was excruciating to witness and to hear but my mother was trying her best to get us away from the sights of such horrible destruction as soon as possible. She clasped my hand, both of us shaking, and we continued with our walk that we had started the night before, we were only ten minutes from home and this happy thought was enough to allow me to move away from the horrific sights of bodies being pulled from Anderson Shelters.

Through the streets of burning bricks and rubble my mother and I did our best to keep our heads down especially when the bright red fire engines, appropriately coloured, stormed past us making loud droning sounds as they swerved and skidded all along the petrol filled roads. Mother and I stepped over large puddles gathering on the side of pavements from where the tanks and hoses were trying to calm raging fires in a number of houses, and we pressed our bodies against any wall that remained whenever an ambulance drove past knowing that there desperation to get to accidents or to hospitals was much greater than ours.