´óÏó´«Ã½

PART 5 (Read "Farthings from Heaven" at www.housers.net)

One day, on my return to the office, Mr Wesson tells me that he’s been offered a better job as London manager for a group of Middle East newspapers. He doesn’t understand a word of Arabic, but that doesn’t seem to worry him. Ferguson is to take his place as manager. After two weeks in the post, Ferguson gets his call up papers. Now Rawlings is in charge. Then he leaves to join the Merchant Navy. Miss Franklin offers me the job as Manager of the Voucher Department. Not that she’s got much choice. So I accept. From messenger to manager in less than eighteen months. To help me I have Alan Pavey, a boy of my own age. Dashing, full of beans. Between the two of us we run the whole affair better than it’s ever been.
After D-day, London suddenly becomes empty. All those uniforms, foreign tongues and American accents gone like magic. We still see them of course up there on the screen at the pictures: parachuting down over France; their tanks crashing through enemy defences; dropping depth charges out at sea; flying their formations of B17’s deep into German skies. Difficult to imagine they’re the same young weather beaten faces that once populated the Strand, chewing gum, eyeing the girls. Later on there are pictures of what they’ve set free: the contoured ranges of rubble where people once lived; pinched, hungry faces, almost too tired to raise a smile; the living skeletons of Belsen, so awful you must turn your head away in shame.
Victory took so long to arrive that we’d already taken it for granted. In the meantime we’d had to cope with the usual bombs, rockets, blackout, no sweets, no coal. So when the news went round that the war was at last over, people just shrugged their shoulders, gave a sigh, and carried on as usual. At least they did at G.S.Royds. I go to the window in the hope of seeing cheering crowds delirious with happiness. But there wasn’t. They weren’t. Then, with a vivid flash of memory, I see the newsreels of New York in presidential triumph: cavalcade of open topped cars, outriders of motor cycle cops; a sea of waving arms and banners; a snow storm of white ticker tape drifting down from the sky scrapers. Inspired, I pull out all the bottom copies of the newspaper files, from Ashby-de-la-Zouch Courier to Yeovil Gazette. Frantically rip them into little pieces. Stack them up into a heap two feet high. Stagger with it up eight flights of stairs to the roof. Rest it on the stone balustrade. Look over. Down onto the buses, taxis, people walking past, just as if this were like any other old day. Why isn’t everyone doing whatever they’re supposed to do after six years of misery? Releasing those feelings that everyone must be having, yet too reserved to show? Well I’m going to do my bit. Give a signal that it’s time to rejoice. Release a symbolic shower of paper to flutter gently down from the skies. So I push my pile of torn up voucher copies over the edge. It stays in a solid lump. Drops eighty feet, straight down. Hits the pavement like a sack of potatoes. Missing a man, just walking along, by inches. If it had struck him on the head, it would have broken his neck. So much for war — and peace.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.