All this was just a small part of the chaos that seemed to reign at that time. Not the chaos of war, the kind I remembered from the trenches at Ypres in 1917, but the chaos of government bureaucracies trying to organize the country for war.
Anyway, I was fortunate enough to become a Special Constable, which is a rather grandiose title for a sort of part-time dogsbody, and that was why Mary Critchley came running to me. That and what little reputation I had for solving people’s problems.
‘Mr Bashcombe! Mr Bashcombe!’ she cried. ‘It’s our Johnny. He’s gone missing. You musht help.’
My name is actually Bascombe, Frank Bascombe, but Mary Critchley has a slight speech impediment, so I forgave her the mispronunciation. Still, with half the city’s children running wild in the streets and the other half standing on crowded station platforms clutching their Mickey Mouse gas-masks in little cardboard boxes, ready to be herded into trains bound for such nearby country havens as Graythorpe, Kilsden and Acksham, I thought perhaps she was overreacting a tad, and I can’t say I welcomed her arrival after only about twenty of my allotted forty winks.
‘He’s probably out playing with his mates,’ I told her.
‘Not my Johnny,’ she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. ‘Not since… you know…’
I knew. Mr Critchley, Ted to his friends, had been a Royal Navy man since well before the war. He had also been unfortunate enough to serve on the aircraft carrier Courageous, which had been sunk by a German U-boat off the south-west coast of Ireland just three days before. Over five hundred men had been lost, including Ted Critchley. Of course, no body had been found, and probably never would be, so he was only officially ‘missing in action’.
I also knew young Johnny Critchley, and thought him to be a serious boy, a bit too imaginative and innocent for his own good. (Well, many are at that age, aren’t they, before the world grabs them by the balls and shakes some reality into them.) Johnny trusted everyone, even strangers.
‘Johnny’s not been in much of a mood for playing with his mates sinsh we got the news about Ted’s ship,’ Mary Critchley went on.
I could understand that well enough – young Johnny was an only child, and he always did worship his father – but I still didn’t see what I could do about it. ‘Have you asked around?’
‘What do you think I’ve been doing sinsh he didn’t come home at twelve o’clock like he was supposed to? I’ve ashked everyone in the street. Last time he was seen he was down by the canal at about eleven o’clock. Maurice Richards saw him. What can I do, Mr Bashcombe? Firsht Ted, and now… now my Johnny!’ She burst into tears.
After I had managed to calm her down, I sighed and told her I would look for Johnny myself. There certainly wasn’t much hope of my getting the other twenty winks now.
It was a glorious day, so warm and sunny you would hardly believe there was a war on. The late afternoon sunshine made even our narrow streets of cramped brick terraced houses look attractive. As the shadows lengthened, the light turned to molten gold. First, I scoured the local rec, where the children played cricket and football, and the dogs ran wild. Some soldiers were busy digging trenches for air-raid shelters. Just the sight of those long, dark grooves in the earth gave me the shivers. Behind the trenches, barrage balloons pulled at their moorings on the breeze like playful porpoises, orange and pink in the sun. I asked the soldiers, but they hadn’t seen Johnny. Nor had any of the other lads.
After the rec, I headed for the derelict houses on Gallipoli Street. The landlord had let them go to rack and ruin two years ago, and they were quite uninhabitable, not even fit for billeting soldiers. They were also dangerous and should have been pulled down, but I think the old skinflint was hoping a bomb would hit them so he could claim insurance or compensation from the government. The doors and windows had been boarded up, but children are resourceful, and it wasn’t difficult even for me to remove a couple of loose sheets of plywood and make my way inside. I wished I had my torch, but I had to make do with what little light slipped through the holes. Every time I moved, my feet stirred up clouds of dust, which did my poor lungs no good at all.
I thought Johnny might have fallen or got trapped in one of the houses. The staircases were rotten, and more than one lad had fallen through on his way up. The floors weren’t much better, either, and one of the fourth-formers at Silverhill had needed more than fifteen stitches a couple of weeks before when one of his legs went right through the rotten wood and the splinters gouged his flesh.
I searched as best I could in the poor light, and I called out Johnny’s name, but no answer came. Before I left, I stood silently and listened for any traces of harsh breathing or whimpering.
Nothing.
After three hours of searching the neighbourhood, I’d had no luck at all. Blackout time was seven forty-five p.m., so I still had about an hour and a half left, but if Johnny wasn’t in any of the local children’s usual haunts, I was at a loss as to where to look. I talked to the other boys I met here and there, but none of his friends had seen him since the family got the news of Ted’s death. Little Johnny Critchley, it seemed, had vanished into thin air.
At half past six, I called on Maurice Richards, grateful for his offer of a cup of tea and the chance to rest my aching feet. Maurice and I went back a long time. We had both survived the first war, Maurice with the loss of an arm, and me with permanent facial scarring and a racking cough that comes and goes, thanks to the mustard gas leaking through my mask at the Third Battle of Ypres. We never talked about the war, but it was there, we both knew, an invisible bond tying us close together while at the same time excluding us from so much other, normal human intercourse. Not many had seen the things we had, and thank God for that.
Maurice lit up a Passing Cloud one-handed, then he poured the tea. The seven o’clock news came on the radio, some rot about us vowing to keep fighting until we’d vanquished the foe. It was still very much a war of words at that time, and the more rhetorical the language sounded, the better the politicians thought they were doing. There had been a couple of minor air skirmishes, and the sinking of the Courageous, of course, but all the action was taking place in Poland, which seemed as remote as the moon to most people. Some clever buggers had already started calling it the ‘Bore War’.
‘Did you hear Tommy Handley last night, Frank?’ Maurice asked.
I shook my head. There’d been a lot of hoopla about Tommy Handley’s new radio programme, It’s That Man Again, or ITMA, as people called it. I was never a fan. Call me a snob, but when evening falls I’m far happier curling up with a good book or an interesting talk on the radio than listening to Tommy Handley.
‘Talk about laugh,’ said Maurice. ‘They had this one sketch about the Ministry of Aggravation and the Office of Twerps. I nearly died.’
I smiled. ‘Not far from the truth,’ I said. There were now so many of these obscure ministries, boards and departments involved in so many absurd pursuits – all for the common good, of course – that I had been thinking of writing a dystopian satire. I proposed to set it in the near future, which would merely be a thinly disguised version of the present. So far, all I had was a great idea for the title: I would reverse the last two numbers in the current year, so instead of 1939, I’d call it 1993. (Well, I thought it was a good idea!)