Lizzy May – Chapter 22
V for Vengeance
Summer 1979
Well, Pauly, it’s been a long time since we had one of our chats. I’ve missed them. I thought you might have lost interest.
Busy? Yes, we both have, I suppose. What with all the family goings-on, and your exchange partner from Germany, and all. I had the funeral of an old friend to go to, last week. Not the first this year. It’s an unavoidable result of getting on in years, I’m afraid.
As for what your cousin Steve told me, maybe I over-reacted and said some hasty things. You’re growing up, after all, and you need to find your own way in life. Make your own mistakes, if that’s what they are.
Can we put that behind us, do you think?
No hard feelings?
Good.
Now, did I ever tell you about moving to Elstree, after we were bombed out in the Blitz?
I did? Ah, well, let’s see … Did I tell you about keeping the rabbits and the chickens?
Really? My memory must be getting worse. How about the time the Doodlebug landed in the reservoir?
No? Well, that was in early ’44 …
Ah, but wait a minute.
I haven’t told you about your Dad coming into the world, have I?
So we need to backtrack, then, to June 1942.
I was already forty-one, and that was considered quite ancient in those days, for a first baby. Old gossips and know-it-alls like Mrs Young shook their heads and tutted, and we began to worry that there might be complications.
Still, everything seemed to be fine. I was in the best of health; my doctor said the pregnancy was progressing normally; and after much discussion, we decided on a home birth with the local midwife in attendance.
Actually, we were lucky to get a midwife at all. The maternity hospitals in the City had all been evacuated, and many of the staff found themselves redeployed to treat war casualties.
There were big emergency maternity homes set up in the country, for evacuees. Often the Government commandeered stately homes and the like. But these took even more of the scarce midwives and doctors away from their regular practices.
I wasn’t going to lie around in some big draughty maternity ward surrounded by strangers, barked at by bossy nurses and prodded by officious doctors. Not if I didn’t have to.
After all, I’d been born at home myself, and back then before the Great War, it had been the normal way of things.
So to cut a long story short, your father came into the world one fine day in early June, 1942, in our bedroom in Alcea, and we named him Christopher John. John for Percy’s father, and Christopher just because we liked the name.
As you know, he turned out alright. Rather well, I think.
I’d looked after plenty of children by this stage, from infants to teenagers. There’s nothing like having your own child though, to make you realise how little you know about bringing up a brand-new human being.
Percy’s last child had been born towards the end of the Great War, so the birth of little Christopher John was as thrilling and novel an event for your grandfather as it was for me.
He turned out to be a wonderful father.
Men of his generation were often aloof from their families. It was seen as their role to be an authority figure, austere and strict and uninvolved in the day-to-day realities of childcare.
I think many of them suffered with that, to be honest with you. As did their wives and children.
Not Percy, though. He insisted on being involved in every way, and resented it bitterly when his work for the Prudential took him away from home, as it often did.
It could have been to do with the fact that he was already in his mid-fifties: getting towards more of a grandfather’s age than a father’s, with two adult children of his own already. He knew this would be his last chance at fatherhood – and didn’t want to miss a moment of it.
The War was still grinding on, of course. It felt a lot further away, though, out in the quiet Hertfordshire countryside.
I found my love of gardening during those later wartime years. You may remember that my father had been a nurseryman, a professional gardener in his youth, as had all his family. So working the soil and tending plants runs in our blood, Pauly.
The produce from our garden helped to vary our diet. If you were depending on what was available in the shops, your meals would have been very dull indeed.
Percy meanwhile discovered a passion for fishing. He’d learned the basics while he was in the RAF, at Cranwell, but he’d had little time for it since, with his ambitious work schedule and equally ambitious partying.
Now, work was either very busy or very quiet, and we had no social life to speak of.
The quiet periods left him time to befriend the reservoir keeper down at Aldenham Reservoir, to take out one of the heavy, flat-bottomed punts and find the best spots to catch pike and perch.
He soon became quite a good fisherman, and his catches were a welcome change from rations, I can tell you.
Ah yes, the Doodlebug.
That’s what we called the V1 flying bombs. They were one of Hitler’s ‘Vengeance Weapons’. An unmanned aircraft with a jet motor, and nearly a ton of high explosive in the nose. The Nazis sent them over from France and Belgium: untargeted, flying in a straight line until they ran out of fuel.
They’d drone away, and when you heard one, you’d stop what you were doing and listen. You couldn’t help it. When the droning stopped, that was when you really worried, because the thing was about to fall out of the sky. It really was quite unnerving.
And deadly. If you were unlucky enough to be standing where it fell, you’d be blown to Kingdom Come. The craters they left were huge.
So anyway, there we were, out in the garden at Alcea, one Saturday morning, Christopher, Percy and I, and we heard that horrible droning.
‘Uh-oh,’ we thought. ‘Here comes trouble.’
The blessed thing flew straight over our house. We saw it clear as day, and we were praying: ‘Don’t stop. Please don’t stop.’ The Youngs were out in their garden too, peering up anxiously.
It had just flown a couple of fields further when the dreaded silence came: the motor had cut out. An anxious pause seemed to last hours, then came the most tremendous explosion. A column of thick, grey smoke rose into the blue sky.
Percy hopped on his bike and pedalled off to see where the bomb had fallen, and whether there were any casualties who needed help.
It turned out the only casualties were his beloved pike and perch.
The thing had blown a great hole in Aldenham Reservoir, and there were dead fish floating everywhere. Peter the reservoir keeper was already out in his punt, scooping them up.
So the whole of Elstree was eating fish for a week. What we couldn’t eat fresh, we tried smoking. In the end, we could hardly bear the smell or the taste of smoked pike.
Coming up:
This Friday in Tales from the Wood: An early morning fishing trip is a chance for Pauly to reflect on a difficult year. (Paid subscriptions.)
Next Tuesday in Lizzy May: D-Day comes, and Percy and Lizzy May lose contact with George in his POW camp.