On Sundays we wore white

Eileen Elias

Green Places

My escape to the garden began when I stepped out of the kitchen door, and into the little paved arbour Father had made, with the green and white striped tent to give shade in the summer-time.

The arbour was a family place, but it was the threshold to adventure. Big lilac trees screened it on one side, and the ivied trellis on the other, so that you couldn't see the neighbouring houses at all. And the tent made it even more private.

It was a simple enough affair, Father's tent; just an awning of green and white canvas fixed up on four metal poles. To him it was a place to gather and sit in, to have tea in the shade; but to a child it had a quality of its own, an atmosphere of romance I couldn't even start to explain. How could you explain, for instance, that the tent wasn't a tent at all, but an Eastern palace - one of those canvas palaces where the wind from the Sahara - was it the Sahara? my geography was never much good - billowed out the richly embroidered sides while princesses and sultans disported themselves within. When there wasn't a wind, little black boys in bright tunics swung palm-leaf fans above your head; you were the princess, of course; and strange Oriental music came from pipes and unknown instruments in the background. You only had to look up at the tent-poles, with those onion-shaped wooden domes on top, to know that this was truly Eastern. Ali Baba sat under onion-shaped domes like those; it was in my picture-book.

There weren't really any little black boys, of course, and the only fans we used were the fly-swatters for the wretched mosquitoes that in summer made those afternoons in the arbour intolerable. All the same, it was fun to dream.

When you sat there on a summer's day, soft sounds would drift in to the green and white tent; Gilbert's father mowing the lawn - whirr, whirr to the left, whirr, whirr to the right, with the mower heaving a kind of indrawn breath as it turned the corners. The long back gardens were all so close that you could hear the summer sounds right the way up the street; Walter's mother, leaning from her bedroom window and calling her unfortunate son -'Wall-eee! Wall-eee!'- how we used to tease him about that name! Bertie's father busy with some do-it-yourself job in the garden-shed; hammer, hammer, 'Bertie - hold it steady now,' hammer, hammer. Gilbert and Walter and Bertie were all my friends, and the sounds that came from their houses were cheerful and companionable. By contrast, poor Ethel next door had a stormy home, and we put our hands over our ears when her father, whom everybody called Jos, was in one of his rages. No wonder Ethel's mother looked so sad when she hung out the clothes on Monday mornings.

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No wireless set blared out to break the peace of those little gardens. Nobody had got one yet. Occasionally we would hear the churning of a gramophone; Jos next door had one, the kind with a horn, which he played in his more sociable moments; but the old records only came faintly from the cool depths of the house; no one would have thought of playing music in the garden.

Instead, we sat and talked; Father in his summer Panama hat his only concession to the weather, for he always wore the same immaculate shirt and tie, the same dark coat with the striped trousers. Open-necked shirts were not for him; a lazy fashion, he called them, and stuck uncomfortably to his wing collars and starched cuffs. Mother would be in one of her pretty Liberty cottons; every year we would take a trip up to the 'West End' to buy summer fabrics at Liberty's - tiny flower patterns in soft colours, which made the softness of Mother's dark hair and the gentleness of her face even more appealing. I loved to sit and watch her sewing, her needle plying in and out with regularity, her face bent above her work.

Aunt Jane, when she joined us after school, would sit with a book. She was a great reader. 1 would watch her too, with a trace of awe, for was she not a schoolteacher and didn't she know everything? I used to wonder why she bothered to read books. She must know everything in them already. Aunt Jane, being something of a career woman for those days, favoured a crisp blouse and a serge skirt. Privately I thought it must be very uncomfortable; but since the female world seemed to be divided into home people like Mother in Liberty dresses and career people like Aunt Jane in serge skirts, perhaps one had to accept one's uniform as one accepted one's status in life. What would mine be in the far-off future when I would put up my hair and wear long dresses and either marry or go to work. You could not do both!

Fear and Trembling

Strangely enough - or sensibly enough, if you consider it aright - the Great War, which broke out soon after my fourth birthday, hardly entered my consciousness at all as something to 'be afraid of I was safe in my little world, with Mother, Father, my brother and Aunt Jane. Having them, everything was all right. People talked over my head about bombs and air-raids, and we had our share of them; often I was awakened by the walling of the siren in the middle of the night, and would stand at the foot of my bed, clutching a blanket round my nightgown, waiting for someone to come and take me to the shelter which Father had made for us in the basement downstairs.

The shelter was a snug little place. It was barricaded with sandbags, and we children enjoyed the novel experience of sitting cosily inside, being read to from story-books, and drinking warm cocoa, with nobody telling us to go to sleep, although it was the middle of the night. Once the house rocked when a bomb fell near, but I felt only the excitement and none of the fear.

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I did notice, however, that the grown-ups' faces often paled when they opened the newspaper. I used to watch Mother scanning the casualty lists, as I later discovered they were, on the back page. and one morning in the kitchen I found her in tears.

To me, the war so far had been just one gigantic game in which everybody tried to score one better than the others - like Ludo or cards. Now I came to understand, suddenly, that it was something more; they were killing each other. It had got beyond a game.

But one thing stood out clear. 'Do the Germans cry as well?' I asked Mother; and when she nodded through her tears, I saw the answer definite and simple. 'Then why don't they stop?' I demanded. 'Why doesn't everybody stop?'

My mother, not trusting herself to speak, shook her head; and, alarmed by her unaccustomed tears, I said no more. But for years afterwards I still saw the issue in black and white, just like that; and strangely, that is how I still see it in the last resort. In a dawning way, it was the beginning of the personal pacifism which has remained with me to the present day, through the Second World War and beyond, and in the spiritual sense has led me to become a Quaker.

Only twice did the War strike a momentary fear into me, as I played happily in house and garden, and busied myself with the cares of my little world. One night I was snatched up from the comfort of our homely little shelter and carried through the street door, wrapped in a blanket, to watch a huge sausage of flame suspended unbelievably in the dark sky. It was the first of the Zeppelins to be brought down, and fell, as we learned later, in the grounds of a friend of ours at Northaw, near Potters Bar. For years we kept a piece of the blackened and scarred metalwork, which fell from the burning zeppelin, on the mantelpiece, as a memento.

For a moment I was desperately afraid; I did not know why. I was too young to realise that there were men up there, dying in the flames; but the tragedy of it somehow stabbed at my heart. The cold night, the crowds in the streets, the burning shape in the sky, filled me with terror, and I knew there was something momentous happening.

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