‘I used to live in Lower Binfield myself,’ I told her. ‘A good while back, it was, before the war.’
‘Before the war? Well, now! You don’t look that old.’
‘See some changes, I dessay,’ said the chap in the Jug and Bottle.
‘The town’s grown,’ I said. ‘It’s the factories, I suppose.’
‘Well, of course they mostly work at the factories. There’s the gramophone works, and then there’s Truefitt Stockings. But of course they’re making bombs nowadays.’
I didn’t altogether see why it was of course, but she began telling me about a young fellow who worked at Truefitt’s factory and sometimes came to the George, and he’d told her that they were making bombs as well as stockings, the two, for some reason I didn’t understand, being easy to combine. And then she told me about the big military aerodrome near Walton–that accounted for the bombing planes I kept seeing–and the next moment we’d started talking about the war, as usual. Funny. It was exactly to escape the thought of war that I’d come here. But how can you, anyway? It’s in the air you breathe.
I said it was coming in 1941. The chap in the Jug and Bottle said he reckoned it was a bad job. The barmaid said it gave her the creeps. She said:
‘It doesn’t seem to do much good, does it, after all said and done? And sometimes I lie awake at night and hear one of those great things going overhead, and think to myself, “Well, now, suppose that was to drop a bomb right down on top of me!” And all this A.R.P., and Miss Todgers, she’s the Air Warden, telling you it’ll be all right if you keep your head and stuff the windows up with newspaper, and they say they’re going to dig a shelter under the Town Hall. But the way I look at it is, how could you put a gas-mask on a baby?’
The chap in the Jug and Bottle said he’d read in the paper that you ought to get into a hot bath till it was all over. The chaps in the public bar overheard this and there was a bit of a by-play on the subject of how many people could get into the same bath, and both of them asked the barmaid if they could share her bath with her. She told them not to get saucy, and then she went up the other end of the bar and hauled them out a couple more pints of old and mild. I took a suck at my beer. It was poor stuff. Bitter, they call it. And it was bitter, right enough, too bitter, a kind of sulphurous taste. Chemicals. They say no English hops ever go into beer nowadays, they’re all made into chemicals. Chemicals, on the other hand, are made into beer. I found myself thinking about Uncle Ezekiel, what he’d have said to beer like this, and what he’d have said about A.R.P. and the buckets of sand you’re supposed to put the thermite bombs out with. As the barmaid came back to my side of the bar I said:
‘By the way, who’s got the Hall nowadays?’
We always used to call it the Hall, though its name was Binfield House. For a moment she didn’t seem to understand.
‘The Hall, sir?’
‘’E means Binfield ‘Ouse,’ said the chap in the Jug and Bottle.
‘Oh, Binfield House! Oo, I thought you meant the Memorial Hall. It’s Dr Merrall’s got Binfield House now.’
‘Dr Merrall?’
‘Yes, sir. He’s got more than sixty patients up there, they say.’
‘Patients? Have they turned it into a hospital, or something?’
‘Well–it’s not what you’d call an ordinary hospital. More of a sanatorium. It’s mental patients, reely. What they call a Mental Home.’
A loony-bin!
But after all, what else could you expect?
3
I crawled out of bed with a bad taste in my mouth and my bones creaking.
The fact was that, what with a bottle of wine at lunch and another at dinner, and several pints in between, besides a brandy or two, I’d had a bit too much to drink the day before. For several minutes I stood in the middle of the carpet, gazing at nothing in particular and too done-in to make a move. You know that god-awful feeling you get sometimes in the early morning. It’s a feeling chiefly in your legs, but it says to you clearer than any words could do, ‘Why the hell do you go on with it? Chuck it up, old chap! Stick your head in the gas oven!’
Then I shoved my teeth in and went to the window. A lovely June day, again, and the sun was just beginning to slant over the roofs and hit the house-fronts on the other side of the street. The pink geraniums in the window-boxes didn’t look half bad.
Although it was only about half past eight and this was only a side-street off the market-place there was quite a crowd of people coming and going. A stream of clerkly-looking chaps in dark suits with dispatch-cases were hurrying along, all in the same direction, just as if this had been a London suburb and they were scooting for the Tube, and the school-kids were straggling up towards the market-place in twos and threes. I had the same feeling that I’d had the day before when I saw the jungle of red houses that had swallowed Chamford Hill. Bloody interlopers! Twenty thousand gate-crashers who didn’t even know my name. And here was all this new life swarming to and fro, and here was I, a poor old fatty with false teeth, watching them from a window and mumbling stuff that nobody wanted to listen to about things that happened thirty and forty years ago. Christ! I thought, I was wrong to think that I was seeing ghosts. I’m the ghost myself. I’m dead and they’re alive.
But after breakfast–haddock, grilled kidneys, toast and marmalade, and a pot of coffee–I felt better. The frozen dame wasn’t breakfasting in the dining-room, there was a nice summery feeling in the air, and I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that in that blue flannel suit of mine I looked just a little bit distingué. By God! I thought, if I’m a ghost, I’ll be a ghost! I’ll walk. I’ll haunt the old places. And maybe I can work a bit of black magic on some of these bastards who’ve stolen my home town from me.
I started out, but I’d got no farther than the market-place when I was pulled up by something I hadn’t expected to see. A procession of about fifty school-kids was marching down the street in column of fours–quite military, they looked–with a grim-looking woman marching alongside of them like a sergeant-major. The leading four were carrying a banner with a red, white, and blue border and BRITONS PREPARE on it in huge letters. The barber on the corner had come out on to his doorstep to have a look at them. I spoke to him. He was a chap with shiny black hair and a dull kind of face.
‘What are those kids doing?’
‘It’s this here air-raid practice,’ he said vaguely. ‘This here A.R.P. Kind of practising, like. That’s Miss Todgers, that is.’
I might have guessed it was Miss Todgers. You could see it in her eye. You know the kind of tough old devil with grey hair and a kippered face that’s always put in charge of Girl Guide detachments, Y.W.C.A. hostels, and whatnot. She had on a coat and skirt that somehow looked like a uniform and gave you a strong impression that she was wearing a Sam Browne belt, though actually she wasn’t. I knew her type. Been in the W.A.A.C.s in the war, and never had a day’s fun since. This A.R.P. was jam to her. As the kids swung past I heard her letting out at them with the real sergeant-major yell, ‘Monica! Lift your feet up!’ and I saw that the rear four had another banner with a red, white, and blue border, and in the middle
WE ARE READY. ARE YOU?
‘What do they want to march them up and down for?’ I said to the barber.
‘I dunno. I s’pose it’s kind of propaganda, like.’
I knew, of course. Get the kids war-minded. Give us all the feeling that there’s no way out of it, the bombers are coming as sure as Christmas, so down to the cellar you go and don’t argue. Two of the great black planes from Walton were zooming over the eastern end of the town. Christ! I thought, when it starts it won’t surprise us any more than a shower of rain. Already we’re listening for the first bomb. The barber went on to tell me that thanks to Miss Todgers’s efforts the school-kids had been served with their gas-masks already.
Well, I started to explore the town. Two days I spent just wandering round the old landmarks, such of them as I could identify. And all that time I never ran across a soul that knew me. I was a ghost, and if I wasn’t actually invisible, I felt like it.
It was queer, queerer than I can tell you. Did you ever read a story of H.G. Wells’s about
