Brian’s idea of war was Napoleonic, at any rate in tactics, with barricades in every street while a gas-masked Waterloo exploded from Clifton Grove to Gotham Village. Moulded by an addiction to Les Misérables, he saw wagons of paving-stones and sandbag-parapets blocking Denman Street and all approaches to it, while a higher blockade sealed each main road off from the country to stop tanks. His picture showed a tin-hatted soldier with rifle and bayonet running along the cobblestones of Radford streets, while Mr. and Mrs. Skelton and all the little Skeltons gazed anxiously up from the grill of their cellar grate. Then a bomb would fall and blow up a house, grey bricks shooting into the air, now coloured grey though they had been red before the explosion. Perhaps he, too, like Marius Pontmercy would go off with a rifle (a rifle picked up from a body in the street) to the barricades and fight the Germans and kill many men, saving the Skeltons, who, in the proscenium of his mind, still looked anxiously from their cellar grate at the soldier running up the street with bayonet fixed.
Then a container would fall — silently almost — and lay in the gutter, and after a few seconds a slit would open in its side and a yellow vapour spill out and ascend a few feet, then thickly spread. And Brian would put on his gas-mask (which miraculously appeared, for he did not have it a few seconds before) and clamp it over his face. If he saw someone without a gas-mask he would give it to him: for himself, he knew exactly what to do, which was to soak his white handkerchief in water that somehow appeared in the gutter, and lay it over his face. That would stop the mustard gas — or so Uncle Doddoe had told him.
And hadn’t his mother said there were to be trenches on the forest, as in the last war? He saw people wearing gas-masks filing into them as twin-plane aircraft came over to drop bombs — as he had seen them blasting the slum-dump ruins of Albion Yard. Then a change of scene as enemy — German, of course — soldiers came over the green-painted railings far away and advanced through mist towards the trenches, so that conveniently and from nowhere English soldiers streamed out to repel them, and Brian somehow mixed himself up with them and killed so many Germans with the rifle he carried that he was asked to organize a schoolboy battalion, of which he would be commander-in-chief.
“You won’t get a gas-mask.”
Through the glass partition of the next classroom, chairs and tables moved, feet shuffled, and orders were carried out. A report was passed from a daring observer: big boxes were being heaved in from outside and laid on tables. There was a smell of rubber. “Frenchies,” someone called, “that’s what they are”—as the words Large Medium Small were shouted time after time. Brian caught the note of jubilation that swamped the class: it was after ten and would soon be playtime, so that a rush for straws and milk could commence.
A second later he filled his underbreath mind with swearing, telling himself that he above all should have known that such freedom was too good to last: Mr. Jones walked in. Mr. Bates did not push the letter out of sight as he usually did, but left it lying on his desk and turned his chair to look at the small tight dynamite headmaster as he entered the room. There was no need to tell the boys to stop talking, for even the sea would fall silent at Mr. Jones’s shadow. He stood compact within a vacuum of silence, and Brian felt an itching behind his neck, but held his arm fast from scratching for fear of drawing notice to himself. Jim Skelton’s eye went into a winking match, but Brian did not take him up on it, seeing his lips curl up at one corner as if to smile. He’d better not make me laugh, the rotter. A lorry roared along the street and pulled up at the school door. The milk’s come, he guessed, but when he didn’t hear the clash of filled cases coming through the hall he assumed it was another load of gas-masks.
“They weren’t very quiet,” Mr. Jones said. Brian watched his plasticine pellet: if it rolled quick, he wouldn’t hit anyone; it if rolled slow, he was bound to.
“It’s hard to keep them quiet on a day like this,” Mr. Bates said as he casually slid the letter in his desk. Mr. Jones became sarcastic: “I feel sure you could have done better than that.”
“They’re excited.”
Picture-clouds of war plagued every brain, and the outposts of fear that preceded Mr. Jones as he walked among masters and boys had been neutralized by the overwhelming bomb of a question that smoked to varying shades in the hearts of boys and masters alike. “I still say there’s nothing to be excited about,” he snapped.
When is the old bastard going? Brian wondered. Why can’t he leave us to talk, or let Mr. Bates read summat good to us? If there’s a war I hope that old bastard’s the first to cop it, with a great big bomb (the biggest bomb in the world, if it can be managed) right on to his spiteful white loaf. Or maybe a Jerry will get him with a rifle when they start sniping from chimney-pots. You never know, these days.
“They wouldn’t be excited if they knew what war meant.”
“Boys never know what war means,” Mr. Bates said.
“It’s a pity they can’t be told then, and have some of this excitement drained from them.”
Mr. Bates’s eyes gleamed, as if about to water; he smiled to stop them doing so. “There’d be no cannon-fodder for the war after the one that’s about to start if that happened.”
Mr. Jones looked hard at him, then at the class. “Are they all here?”
“Ten are absent.”
“Too excited to come to school, even?” A few bold spirits began to whisper, and hisses passed from across the room like jets of escaping steam. “Silence!” he roared, his anaemic face flushing.
There was silence.
“What do you intend doing?” he asked Mr. Bates. “They can’t go on like this, war or no war.”
“I’ll probably read to them.”
Mr. Jones snorted. “Let me use your desk.” He moved aside and sat in a chair, a stack of Foundations of History rearing at the back of his head.
“I suppose you all know that they’re giving gas-masks out today?” Mr. Jones addressed them.
He knows bleddy-well we do.
“Any of you know what a gas-mask is like?”
Not yet, but we will.
“I’ll describe one to you. A word-picture of one.” Brian remembered: the first Jerry shooting from a chimney-stack ought to put one right into his four-eyed clock. “There’s a rubber facepiece, with a celluloid frame you can see through, and to this are attached straps that you pull back over your head to hold it on. Very neat and well thought-out. Now, under the chin is what’s known as a filter. This is what you breathe through. This is what makes the poison gas harmless before it gets to your mouth and nose. Simple, isn’t it? Any questions?”
No questions.
“I didn’t think so. You’ve all got heads made of putty. You wouldn’t think a putty-head would need a gas-mask, but it does.” A few crawlers laughed. Mr. Jones grinned at his own joke. “All right, putty-heads, I’ve told you what a gas-mask’s made of. Now I’ll tell you what it’s for. It’s to be used in case (or should I say when?) German aeroplanes drop poison-gas bombs on Nottingham.” He paused, possibly for questions, perhaps for some reaction, but they hadn’t heard enough.
“Anyone know what a black-out means?” No answer. “Well, putty-heads, it means that no lights of a city can be put on, that everything’s kept in complete and total darkness so that German planes flying above won’t know where they are. And at such times you’ll all have to go to bed early because there’ll be no sense playing in the streets when it’s pitch dark. And you’ll carry your gasmasks to bed with you, careful not to drop or damage them. If you do, then you’ll be in a fine fix when the bombs fall, won’t you? So you’ll take the gas-mask out of its cardboard box and place it by your bed for when the air-raid warning sounds.”