Barbara Todd - Miss Ranskill Comes Home

‘Bet you killed masses of people.’ The boy’s cocoa-moustached lips grinned admiringly as he spoke, and he crossed his legs swaggeringly.

‘Shut up!’

‘But you said last time–’

‘Even a butcher wants a Bank Holiday.’

‘But you said –’

‘Will you shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I–’ Marjorie’s son turned to Miss Ranskill, ‘I don’t mind anything but the leaves.’ His light voice was raised in fury. ‘It’s the leaves that are so bloody awful – Sorry! It’s all nag and questions and tactfulness, and let’s give him a jolly time. And they make special things for you to eat and watch you eating it with a sort of Last Supper look in their eyes. And, just before you go off again, they pile on the heartiness and talk about all you’ll do on the next leave though they know what you know. If they’d only be ordinary about it: it is quite ordinary, at least it is to us. And then kids like that–!’

He was interrupted by the shrilling of a female voice.

‘Sissle! Sissle! Where are you, Sissle?’

‘That’s Mum,’ said the little boy.

Mum, so Miss Ranskill discovered when she had hurried the little boy up the stone stairs, was half angry and half tearful; and her anger was directed not so much against Hitler and the German bombers as against an unspecified body who had allowed her (Mrs Bostock) to suffer inconvenience. ‘They’ had left a piece of wire-netting lying about at the entrance to the ARP shelter so that her stockings had been laddered in two places – ‘and that’s qpons, mind you!’ ‘They’, being what ‘they’ were, would be most unlikely to refund the shilling she had paid for her seat in the cinema, although the siren had sounded halfway through the ‘Big Picture’, Desert Theme Song . ‘Ever so lovely it was. If we had our rights, they’d let us go back and see it all through tomorrow. Robbery, that’s what it was. And I’ve half a mind to go back now this very instant and give them a piece of my mind.’

‘Who?’ asked Miss Ranskill, and was answered by a dark look that made her feel responsible personally for all the happenings of the night.

‘We was all singing in the shelter,’ continued Mrs Bostock triumphantly. ‘It was “Roll out the Barrel” at first and then those of us that had been at the picture started up with the song Babe Fenelly sings when she’s sitting all alone in the desert, and she thinks her boy’s been killed, and all the while he’s lying gagged and bound be’ind a palm-tree with a nasty-looking Arab gettin’ ready to knife ’em.’

Mrs Bostock raised her voice and sang in a piercing tremolo:

Tears poured down Mrs Bostock’s face as she continued –

‘Ever so pathetic it was, and they kept on showing you close-ups of the young man’s face as he listened from be’ind the palm-tree. She was dressed in white.’ Mrs Bostock paused, and added: ‘ Pure white,’ as vehemently as if she feared that some doubting thought of Miss Ranskill’s might sully the film-star’s garments. ‘White, from top to toe. You ought to have heard us singing in the shelter – that ought to show Hitler something if nothing else does. He ought to be a fly on the wall in some of our shelters, that’s what he ought to be.’

‘Then we’d swat ’im, wouldn’t we, Mum?’

A small hand tightened its grip of Miss Ranskill’s and she remembered the child.

‘I think perhaps the little boy ought to go to bed now if it’s safe. I heard him crying and took him down to the cellar–’

But Mrs Bostock continued her story relentlessly.

‘These air-raids aren’t run like the Plymouth ones was, and it’s no use saying they are. We’d plenty of canteens there and the tea was ’ot, ’ot and strong. You’d think they put straw in it ’ere. Well, as I was saying, after the All Clear went, and they let us out, you’d think that was enough, but was it? Oh! no. You’d think They thought we ’adn’t ’ad enough, sitting like sardines singing in a damp shelter.’

What horror was coming next, wondered Miss Ranskill.

In the flashing light from the torch, waved so erratically by Mrs Bostock, her son’s face looked white and strained.

‘Do you think we should put him to bed: he’s not had very much sleep?’

‘He’ll not sleep if he goes now neither: too much excitement; he always was highly-strung,’ answered the mother. ‘Well, as I was saying, I’d gone right the length of Maddison Avenue when they turned me back for an unexploded bomb. I’d a gone on, mind you, if they’d not got ropes right across the road and a coupla ARP men guarding it.’

Even to Miss Ranskill’s unwarlike mind an unexploded bomb sounded dangerous and the attitude of its warders not unreasonable.

‘But perhaps–’ she began.

‘I’m not saying anything against the unexploded bomb, what I’m getting at is They ought to have put up a notice at the turn into Maddison Avenue, not let us walk all along and then turn us. They don’t think , that’s what’s the matter with them . I told them strite, I said, “You don’t think!” I said, “You can’t never be fathers yourselves. How would you like it,” I says, “if you was a mother and didn’t know if your boy was alive or dead and you was turned back by a notice that ought to have been set up a quarter of a mile back? And like as not,” I said, “thanks to you,” I said, “I’ll be too late to hear the last dying words of my little son.” Come ’ere, Sissle.’

But by now Cecil too was in tears, and he clung desperately to Miss Ranskill and wailed, ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’

‘’Ark at ’im!’ said Mrs Bostock, proudly, but making no attempt to comfort her responsibility. ‘’Ark at ’im, and no wonder! A lot They care! I knew just how he’d be when they turned us back in Maddison Avenue. I said, “he’ll be shouting for his Mum, screaming himself into a fit most likely.” A lot they cared!’

Encouraged more than ever he had been by the shattering of bombs, Cecil’s voice, raised more and more loudly, seemed to offend his mother’s ears.

‘Give over now,’ she threatened. ‘Give over at once or I’ll give you something to cry for as’ll make ’Itler seem soft.’

Miss Ranskill began to feel more and more a foreigner. Was there any truth in this strange island where laddered stockings, a lack of notice-boards and an illiterate song had more power to rouse emotion than death and destruction and the smashing of bombs! Had it been worth while to take the sea-lane to a wonderland where young men resented their leaves and their mothers kept up the conventions of the fifth form?

‘Come on, Sissle, we’d best go and see what the kitchen’s looking like. I come in by the side door, and I’ve not looked round yet. The light’s gone though, so if they think they’ll get ’ot breakfast sharp at eight, they’ll have to think again.’

Miss Ranskill would have returned to the cellar, but the boy’s fingers were clinging to her own and they tugged urgently as he followed his mother through the green baize door.

The kitchen, seen by electric torchlight, was fantastic, more like a half-witted property-manager’s idea of what a kitchen might look like after a raid than anything Miss Ranskill could have imagined in sanity.