Shooting Apples

We were eating our tea when the air-raid siren went off, the lazy whooping sound turning the fried bread to sawdust in my mouth. I look up and catch Harry’s eye: he understands how much I hate the sirens. He quickly wipes the last of the Spam from his plate.

‘I’d best be going love; they’ll be needing me up at HQ.’

I should be used to this by now; if he’s not at the metal works he’s with the Home Guard: doing drill, air-raid precautions, helping with search and rescue: but I’m never quite ready to let him go.

He’s already put his gas mask in its haversack over his shoulder and his tin helmet is dangling from its leather strap in one hand. He ruffles Peter’s blonde hair and smiles.

‘You look after your mum, you hear? I’ll be back soon.’

He puts on the helmet and Peter looks as though he might burst in to tears.

‘Where are you going, Daddy?’ he asks in a tiny voice as Harry goes to take his rifle from the cupboard.

Harry gives me a conspiratorial wink. ‘I’m off to shoot some apples off a tree,’ he replies, the innocent lie uncomfortable on his lips. ‘Now promise to be a good boy, and I might bring you one back.’

Peter nods quickly and seriously.

Harry gives me an affectionate kiss and a goodbye hug - clumsy because of his tin helmet – and he picks up his rifle and is out the door in a moment.

‘Be careful…I love you’, I call to his retreating back as the door slams and his boots clomp downstairs. I hear him wheel his bicycle across the hall and out the front door. I drop the plates in the sink. I can’t hear any planes: surely that is a good sign?

‘Come on Peter, get your things. We’re going down the Tube.’

He scampers off and puts on his jacket and picks up his Mickey Mouse gas mask. I put on my scarf and good blue coat (my only coat now, after last November, and shabby with these dreary years of coupons). I take Peter’s hand and we run down the two flights of Mrs. Paxton’s cracked linoleum stairs to the street.

There is a crowd making their way along White Hart Lane to the Underground. People are laughing and chatting as they hurry: if it wasn’t for the urgency they could be walking to a football match. I wish that we had our own house again, with our own Anderson shelter: we rent furnished rooms at Number 22 and as lodgers we are not allowed to share with the family. Maybe after the war Harry and I will have our own house again…

If there is an after the War, pipes up the familiar, spiteful voice in my head. I bite my lip and hold onto Peter’s hand more tightly and break into a trot. In the blackout I narrowly avoid a lamp-post that lurches out at us like a Friday night drunk. We swerve and miss it by an inch.

‘Ow, you’re hurting!’ he cries and tries to pull his hand away.

We run into the curved red-brick womb of Wood Green station. There are twenty or thirty others making their way down the stationary wooden escalator quickly and calmly, despite the wailing sirens.

If there is an after the War, the traitorous voice echoes again as we descend. We will live out the rest of our days like this – the constant fear of raids and night-time dashes to the shelter, the endless bombing, never ever having quite enough sleep and the permanent hunger that our rations do not ever quite allay.

The musty Tube smell laced with an undercurrent of tobacco smoke wafts up from the platforms to meet us. It’s a comfort, signalling temporary respite from the banshee sirens and their promises of death and destruction. I see Hilda from next door-but-one at the bottom of the escalator and wave.

Hilda is prematurely old - forty-five going on sixty - and decked out in her habitual uniform of bottle-red hair, ancient fur coat and tired, sagging high heeled shoes. She is carrying a neatly folded rug under one arm and has a determined air: she looks prepared to sit out the raid even if it were to take all night. I look again at the rug and the voice in my head tells me that I am a bad mother; Peter’s favourite blanket was forgotten in the rush to leave.

She waves back. We meet at the bottom and turn left for the down platform, where Hilda unfolds her travelling rug by the long-redundant chocolate machines and gestures for us to sit down. I notice there is a streak on her left leg from where she’s applied the imitation stockings haphazardly and wonder if I should say something. I decide against it.

‘Evening, Hilda,’

‘Evening Flo. That bloody Hilter, another blimmin’ raid. I ask you?’ Hilda calls Hitler “Hilter” and talks about him as if he were a spiteful neighbour; his nightly bombing raids on London a personal affront.

‘’Where’s ‘arry tonight?’ she continues.

‘Daddy’s gone out to shoot some apples off a tree!’ says Peter proudly, jumping up and down on the spot. I wilt and wish Harry had never told him that silly story to explain the gun and tin hat.

‘’as he now?’ Hilda says to me, ignoring the child.

‘Yeah! And he’s gonna bring me one back if I’m good!’

‘Oh please behave, Peter, and be quiet.’ I sit on Hilda’s travelling rug and feel the exhaustion seep into my bones; it’s only half past seven but we could be here for hours. I groan quietly to myself, trying not to let anyone know how weary I am, how fed up I am of this war.

‘Really? Is that so?’ Hilda reaches into her furry, corseted bosom and pulls out a shiny ha’penny. She hands it to Peter.

‘You promise your Auntie ‘ilda you’ll be a good boy too?’ She smells of stale, meaty sweat and lavender water.

‘Yeah!’

‘Now do as your mum says and sit down quietly.’ There is a sharkish quality to her smile and I shiver.

The sirens have stopped but a few more people drift in and pick their way through the crowded platforms, carrying blankets and newspapers and sandwiches in greaseproof wrappers. I wonder who has the inclination, the courage, to make sandwiches when the sirens are howling. A dozen feet away, Ida Baggott from the greengrocers produces a pack of shiny playing cards.

‘Come on Flo, you want to join in a game of rummy?’ she calls to me. I feel sorry for Ida: barely twenty-one but six months a widow; her husband and three hundred others torpedoed somewhere in the North Sea.

‘Thanks, count me in.’ I reply and move over to where she and her mother are sitting, looking for all the world as if they were out for a picnic. Her mother holds court, stern and regal in her good church hat. There’s a chummy, clubby atmosphere on the platform but I can’t help worrying about Harry up there on the outside, watching out for fires and giving orders from his crow’s nest in the tower at St. Saviour’s.

‘Mum?’ Peter brings me back from my daydreams. ‘Mum, can I go and play with David? He’s got a gun!’

I look to my left and see Mary Hughes camped out a few yards further up the platform, wearing a flowered housecoat and hungrily suckling a Woodbine. Her six-year old son has a wooden toy gun and is running up and down the platform between groups of people, his ginger hair glowing in the twenty-watt light.

‘Pow! Pow!’ exclaims David as he shoots.

‘Alright, but stay where I can see you.’ Peter runs off without a backward glance.

‘It’s your go, Flo,’ says Ida.

I lay a card down on the blanket in front of me, barely registering what it is. Ida and her family are chatting aimlessly about this and that and nothing in particular: about the weather; about who saw who in the Co-op today and what so-and-so said about the price of tea; about who’s got a pair of nylons from you-know-where and is no better than she ought to be. I am jealous of their easy companionship and feel like the odd one out, excluded from their close-knit group. I wish I was somewhere else, anywhere but here.

Then there is a distant rumble: it starts quietly as if sacks of coal were being tipped into a far-away cellar but the coal-noise gets louder and louder and is quickly followed by the sound of breaking glass and crumbling bricks. Some people sitting close to the walls and on the stairs call out in surprise from the noise and the fall of scurfy flakes of plaster disturbed by the bomb blast. Leaning up against the walls is bad enough because you can feel every vibration from the bombs and long-range guns but the stairs are worse: if you’re late and there’s no room on the platform you have to spend the whole raid sitting bunched up like bags on the escalators. I’d rather sit in the middle of the platform and pretend to play cards; ignorant of what’s happening, hoping everything will be alright and that there will be no houses missing from terraces like lost teeth, no empty sightless windows and no wallpaper flapping like flayed skin from exposed upper floors.

My hands begin to shake as I think about what’s been hit, who has been killed. I wonder if this is how it starts, losing one’s mind – no shrieking and wailing, just this numbness, this formless quiet anxiety, this feeling of utter hopelessness and despair that the war will never end. I hunch further into my best blue coat and take a deep breath to try and pull myself together.

A shout goes up from further down the platform, near the exit; they have heard more of the explosion than those of us deeper in the station.

‘The bus depot’s been hit!’ an old man calls out with schoolboy glee.

How do these people know what’s happened? No-one’s come in or out of the station for fifteen minutes, it’s all speculation; idle gossip. Careless talk costs lives: don’t these people know anything?

‘Where’s Harry tonight?’ asks Ida, interrupting my thoughts.

‘Up at the church with the rest of the platoon, he went out as soon as the siren went. No drill tonight: they’ll be helping with the rescue teams.’ I struggle to keep my voice from betraying my worry.

‘You’re lucky,’ sniffs Ida’s mother. She nods tightly and puffs her chest. ‘A Reserved Occupation,’ she says carefully, pronouncing the capital letters with distaste. ‘Some people aren’t as fortunate,’ she continues, looking at her daughter for emphasis.

The formless anxiety bubbles up and boils over into a hot rage. I throw down my cards and turn on Mrs. Baggott.

‘He tried to join up but he’s had rheumatic fever. They wouldn’t have him!’

‘Oh, leave her alone, mum,’ chips in Ida, but her mother has built up a head of steam.

‘A proper husband would’ve had you and that poor boy evacuated after you got bombed out,’ she continues, warming to her theme. ‘Not have him stay in London. Anything could happen to the little mite - London’s no place for kids these days.’

‘Don’t you dare talk about my son and my husband like that!’

I’m dimly aware that I am shouting but I feel detached and dream-like as if it’s someone else’s voice instead of mine. I can’t remember the last time I shouted at anyone, let alone Queenie Baggott, the duchess of Wightman Road.

She tuts and rolls her eyes. ‘Well, there’s no pleasing some people,’ she huffs. ‘I was only trying to help.’

I stand up awkwardly on shaking legs. My face is hot with humiliation and my head is full of the terrible things I want to say to her but nothing will come out. I’m not sure who is more surprised when I slap her – just once – across the face.

There is a sudden, momentary silence. The slap cuts through the hubbub of the crowd and echoes around the tiled station. Two old men on the bench begin to jeer and heckle and Ida begins to scream. I flee sobbing back to the safety of Hilda’s rug and she is there waiting with a half-bottle of brandy she has conjured up. She pours a long measure into a tin mug and I gulp it down and to try and block out the parakeet screeching from the Baggotts. I’m still crying and hiccupping and calling for Harry when the doctor from the First Aid station comes over and gives me an injection. Hilda wraps me with her fur coat and I go under in moments.

***

Around midnight, the all-clear sounds and Hilda wakes me with a tepid cup of Red Cross tea. The platform is almost empty now, and Peter is asleep at my side, burrowed under the fur and sucking his thumb.

‘What happened?’ I mumble. My mouth is sticky and dry and I have a headache.

‘Nothing much, after the bus depot copped it. What a waste of an evening, I could’ve earned meself a few bob tonight.’

I stand up stiffly from the rug and brush some dirt from the hem of my dress. Despite the morphia headache my mind feels light and fresh and airy.

‘You take care of yourself, girl’, says Hilda maternally, donning her moth-eaten coat.

‘Thank-you, I’ll do my best.’

I gently shake Peter awake and help him on with his jacket: he’s still drowsy and it’s awkward, as if I were dressing a doll. I take his hand and we walk up the escalator to the street. It’s been raining: the street smells damp and sooty from the incendiary bomb at the bus station but there is very little damage: the glass in the butcher’s shop is cracked but the houses are all intact and I am thankful that no-one is hurt.

We turn the corner into our street and I see Harry wheeling his bicycle towards the house. I run towards him and we embrace in the street: after this evening I no longer care what the neighbours might think. I feel weak with relief.

‘Are you both alright, love?’ he asks. All I can do is nod.

In the linoleum safety of Mrs. Paxton’s hallway Harry fumbles with the pannier on the back of his bike and produces a banana. A banana! I haven’t seen one since before the War.

‘Look what I’ve brought,’ he beams.

‘Where on earth…?’ I begin.

Peter looks at the banana, confused. ‘But you promised me an apple, daddy!’ he wails.

Harry and I look at each other and begin to laugh.