And perhaps Mr and Mrs Lawrence were also naive—though Ronnie could not have indicated this to them—in their impressions of conditions in London, including the state of repair of many a public telephone box.
Mr Lawrence, all in the cause of doing his bit, had signed up as an air-raid warden. He had a uniform and a helmet and every other night, alternating with another local warden, he went out into the dark to keep watch. Yet the truth was that even while London and other cities suffered, hardly a bomb fell in their part of the country. Ronnie would sometimes feel that Mr Lawrence’s warden’s uniform was a hoax—merely a costume he dressed up in. The whole thing seemed a bit of a fraud. And Eric Lawrence himself would retain from his time as a warden the principal memory of an uncanny nocturnal peace. While he patrolled, looking for offending chinks of light, he would gaze up at a sky (from which all hell was supposed to fall) that, because of the blackout, was lit by a spectacular display of stars.
He could grasp no better than Ronnie that whole swathes of London might be on fire.
Ronnie began to attend a local village school—Mrs Deane would not have to fear that her son’s education was being neglected—and while he was there both Mr and Mrs Lawrence sometimes went into Oxford, again in the interests of doing their bit. When he was a little older he would come to understand that they served on ‘committees’ and were even part, in a small way, of the setting up of a thing called Oxfam, to help refugees. It came as something of a shock to be reminded that that was what he was, in a manner of speaking: a refugee.
Ronnie himself would get taken into Oxford—it wasn’t so far—to be shown around. It was a special place. It had a thing called a university, and, what with his starting at the village school, Mr and Mrs Lawrence could now make the joke that Ronnie would always be able to say that he had ‘been to Oxford’, a joke which at first passed Ronnie by completely.
Oxford was certainly a special place, he had never seen anywhere like it, but what was particularly special about it, despite the sandbags round doorways and the soldiers drilling in college grounds, was that it would remain almost completely unscathed.
This too, during his early days as an evacuee, would make Ronnie think that the war must be some kind of fraud. Later, when he’d learnt other things that proved it was real, he learnt from Mr and Mrs Lawrence that there were factories not far from Oxford producing munitions. Yet still Oxford lay intact.
‘Oh yes,’ Mr Lawrence had said, ‘I used to work in one of them myself, during the last war.’ When he’d said it he’d given Penny Lawrence an odd smile, so that Ronnie had felt that some other hoax might be at work. But by this time he had acquired a quite developed sense that with Eric and Penny Lawrence anything might be the case.
All sorts of things began to emerge about them. Ronnie had never before had the opportunity to observe two grown-up people at close quarters, to see into their mysteries. It was perhaps that he’d grown up just sufficiently himself, and yet it was strange that the Lawrences could exert this fascination which he’d never felt with his own parents. His years as an evacuee were to give him many things, but almost from the start they gave him this curious sense of discovery and initiation.
It seemed that both the Lawrences had their ‘business’ to attend to in Oxford, and yet this was not their main or only occupation. It seemed that Eric Lawrence occasionally did work for other people—he was their ‘accountant’. Penny Lawrence had once confided to Ronnie that Eric was very good at figures, at sums, yet she said it as if it was only one and not the most important of his interests. And then of course he had his nights going out as a warden. It seemed that they were people who might keep changing into a variety of roles and thus they were not like his own parents of whom Ronnie was only ever able to say, if required, that his father was a sailor and his mother was a char. As if that was what they had to be eternally.
It emerged that Penny Lawrence had once had a grandfather who’d lived in Evergrene, in this house, so that Penny had come here often when she was small—‘When I was your age, Ronnie.’ Then when her grandfather had died he’d left it to her—to her and Eric, since they were married by then—because she’d always loved being there as a child and he wanted her to have it.
‘It was our windfall, Ronnie. Our blessing.’ Ronnie didn’t understand the meaning of either of these words, but he got the spirit of them and he kept the nice words—windfall, blessing—somewhere in the back of his mind.
Of course, Penny told him, her big brother Roy was miffed that she’d got the house—and lots of money besides—because she was her grandfather’s favourite. But then—Penny gave a thin little laugh—Roy had gone off to Canada anyway and was doing very well out there thank you, so what did he need a house in Oxfordshire for? And Penny laughed again.
Ronnie understood very little of this—he knew nothing of Canada and what did he need to know about this Roy?—and yet Penny told him these things as if he were a grown-up himself and might have appreciated them. At the same time he realised that though he was
