A short story about Aberdeen children at war
Why Does Milk Turn Nasty?
It probably wasn’t magic. Is there any such thing? But when Jeanie, Sandie and Pegs worked the light, strange things would happen.
I was just a six-year-old kid. I understood little, or nothing of the occurrences of the Summer of 1940. Not at the time, anyway.
There was a war going on. I learned that from the radio, and whispered conversations that adults have around children. Some folk known as the Jerries were furious with the people of Aberdeen for some reason. Each night, they sent aeroplanes to fly over our city and drop bombs.
The rubble created by the blasts became fantastic places to scramble over. Sometimes, the bombs would burst a water main, leaving a geyser streaming into the warm blue sky. We’d strip to our shorts and dance in the fountain. It was hard to understand why people hated these jerries, as aside from their kid-friendly landscaping, we got loads of days off school because of their antics.
After one particular house got bombed, the usually friendly Jeanie chased us away from scrabbling about on Mrs Baron’s place. She didn’t explain why we weren’t allowed to play there; Jeanie just kept repeating that the barons didn’t go to the shelter that night. To where they disappeared was never explained to me. Dougie Baron used to be my mate. It was pretty rude of him to leave without saying goodbye or anything. Jeanie told me later he went to a better place, so I suppose it turned out okay.
Oh yes, I was telling you about Jeanie and her ARP squad. I liked her and the other women, Pegs and Sandie. During the day, Pegs worked at the butcher’s, and smelled of cold meat. When hungry, I’d follow her to work. If the wind was in the right direction, the scent would take the edge off the hunger pangs, briefly. I asked, but she wouldn’t let me lick her.
Sandie wondered down to the factory at six. She was filling in for her husband, Bob. Bob was off fighting somewhere. Bob was always fighting about something. Gossip on the street said Bob was a nuisance with a drink inside, but when he didn’t come home from this scrap, he was suddenly a hero. I tried to get Mum to explain that to me, but she didn’t appear keen, so I gave up asking. Sandie, who was always nice to me, stayed sad until the day the light replaced Bob.
I saved the best ‘til last, though. Jeanie worked in the sweet shop at the top of our road. She finished work at four, and if you caught her on her way home, she would give you sweets. Mum didn’t have money for sweets back then, so Jeanie was the most popular woman in the neighbourhood. By the time she reached her tenement door, Jeanie would sometimes have a dozen kids in tow.
According to older boys, and the young men left behind by the army, Jeanie wasn’t pretty. On hearing them discuss her one day, I rushed off to tell her that if they were correct, and she was destined to be a spinster, I would be one too. I had no idea what a spinster was, but it sounded pretty exciting to me. Thinking she would appreciate my offer, I somehow managed to make her cry. I worried she was mad at me, but after dabbing her eyes dry, she ruffled my hair and told me I would one day be a lady killer. I hope that doesn’t come true. I’m afraid of the sight of blood.
Often, Jeanie liked to tease us, pretending that there were no treasures in that magical, tartan bag, but as she reached her house, she would stop and ask if we’d been good. Most days, I’d behaved, as there really weren’t a lot of opportunities not to. On the few that I’d maybe been nicking apples or playing on the railway line, I just lied, and she gave me a liquorice shoelace, anyway.
Oh, yes. You’re waiting to hear the magic bit/. Well, it all started in late July. It was a fine day. Warm enough to hear the crickets creeking in the baked grass next to the railway line. Me and Scottie caught six. I managed to persuade him not to eat them that day. We took the lid off the jar, setting the wee beasties free, when it was time to go home for supper.
When I got in, Mum despatched me up to the chipper to ask Mr Sutherland if his chips were tasty that day. Baldy Sutherland sent me back to Mum with four wrapped in a page of last week’s Press and Journal. After sampling them, she scrabbled through the folds of her worn leather purse, handed me fourpence and hastened me back to buy two bags. We had my favourite that night: chip butties. Mum was a really good cook.
Well, where we stay, it doesn’t really get very dark in July, but the Jerries paid us a visit anyway, apparently. I say apparently, as it was way past my bedtime, and I was asleep. Mum must have carried me down, for, when I woke in the morning, I was swaddled in a blanket, sprawled over the bench within the Anderson shelter that hunkered in the communal back garden.
Outside, quite a hubbub was going on. Some occurrence dragged the folk out of their tenements and into the back gardens.
“It was like magic,” one woman from three doors up proclaimed.
“Nothing of the sort,” Old Bert said as he sucked on the pipe that seldom had any tobacco in it.
“They just froze when the girls caught them in the light,” Antie Bea chipped in. Auntie Bea wasn’t really my aunt, but she lived across the road. Mum and her would hang out the window most days and discuss life. If Mum wasn’t home any day that I got back, I knew just to go over to Bea’s, and similarly, we would often end up with Carrol, her daughter, when Bea was at her work. If staying over, Carrol and I would share a bed, just as Mum and Dad did before he went off to sea. So, it seemed appropriate that we agreed to marry. I think we have to wait until we are ten, though.
A day after all the fuss about Jeanie’s magic spotlight, things died down. What was getting called “The midnight miracle” at the start was quickly forgotten when the butcher finally had sausages for sale again. The women of the area had hoarded their ration tokens, and the pensive queue outside Old Man McKay’s shop wended around the block. A half dozen of the local lads stood and mocked the women in their pork-fuelled excitement, but the mirth stopped as they drooled, silently staring at those who walked out with a bag in their hands. It was as if the shoppers held the crown jewels.
Sorry! I’m off script again.
My understanding is that the miracle occurred when the girl’s light set upon a Jerrie one-eleven. I really don’t know why the Jerry bombers have numbers, but corporation buses do too, so I guess it may be the route they take. The number six bus can take you all the way to the beach, but my fiancé, Carrol, says the one-eleven comes from somewhere called Norway. My history teacher taught us that the Vikings came from there too. Hope I never have to go there.
Anyway, the One Eleven was diving to bomb our street as Jeanie, Pegs and Sandie caught it square in the beam. At only a couple of hundred feet from the ground, with the bomb door open, the screaming plane was silhouetted against the darkening summer sky, before they lit it up like an actor on the HM theatre stage.
Rumour has it that the light froze the plane in mid-air. Old Bert said this can’t have happened as it breaks the laws of nature, but Bert puts his bucket out the night before the bin men come, and I’m pretty sure that is against the law, too, so he’s not one to speak.
What happened next was only told to me five years later. Apparently, the young men on the plane hadn’t really discussed what they were about to do until Jeanie’s “love light” hit them. “Love light” were Gunter’s words, not mine. Carrol once asked if I knew what love was. I said no. She thought it had something to do with rabbits. I realise I am straying from the point again, but I like rabbits.
Okay, so something about rabbits happened, and even though the anti-air guns in the Milk Marketing Board yard were now firing at the illuminated bus plane from Vikingland, instead of dropping the bombs and getting away, it seemed a debate raged aboard the plane.
Gunter, Willhelm and Jurgen didn’t fancy doing any harm to anyone. While weaving, still in Jeanie’s spotlight, they agreed to turn out to sea, and drop their bombs in the water. Their problem was blonde-haired, blue-eyed Rudi. Rudi was the forward gunner, and he was a Nasty. I’m unclear on the details, but the jerries were having problems with Nasties back then. It eludes me why anyone would want to be described as a nasty, but by what I have been told, a couple of my teachers at school were probably members.
So, the story goes, Rudi is shouting and screaming at the others to do their duty to the Vaterland. Carrol says Vater means fart in German, and Mum clips my ear if I say fart too often, so we will skip over this part of the story, in case she reads it later.
The whole fart/rabbit debate comes to a sudden end when Nasty Rudi trips and instead of dropping a bomb on the milk silo, poor Rudi falls through the open bomb doors, smashing through the top of the tank.
So, bathed in Jeanie’s miracle love light, having lost an engine or two, Gunther, Willhelm and Jurgen decided they’d always wanted to visit Scotland, and instead of going home, they landed, rather carelessly by eyewitness accounts, without lowering their wheels.
By 1946, people always said, “isn’t it good that things are getting back to normal?” I was never sure what normal looked like, as the war raged for most of my life. I say raged, but for us, after the first couple of years, it was just something they interrupted Children’s Hour on the radio to talk about.
Now aged twelve, Carrol tells me we have to be sixteen to get married unless we move to somewhere called Alabama. In a strange coincidence, if you reach sixteen and single there, you are considered a spinster.
A couple of years before the war finished, Dad’s ship got lost, and he ended up in the same better place as Dougie Barron. Neither of them has ever sent a postcard, but then the mail has been patchy, so I live in hope.
Strangely, Mum seemed saddened by Dad’s good fortune. She also got really upset with me when I expressed the opinion that the many local women who lost their husbands were rather careless. I’m not sure what I did wrong; she gave me hell when I lost my schoolbag.
But you’re here to discover Jeanie’s outcome, of course.
It was a Saturday when the former searchlight squad of Jeanie, Pegs and Sandie bustled down the road to the dancing. They intended stopping at the pub on route for a sherry or two, when Jeanie noticed a group of men nervously loitering on the far pavement. Three were swamped by ill-fitting demob suits. The fourth, older gent was pointing across the street to Jeanie.
She tapped her friends on the shoulder.
“Hold up girls, I think we’ve got ourselves some dancing partners.”
“Bonnie Jeanie,” as Gunther insists on calling her, never did get the job as a spinster. Carrol says they won’t let me be one either.
Carrol’s hobbling dad came home, but only stayed a week or two. He told everyone that everything had changed, and then left. Apart from the bombed houses, I couldn’t see what he meant by “everything,” but I’ve already realised that adults talk in code. Auntie Bea now only ever refers to him as the bar steward, so I guess he works in a pub somewhere.
Jeanie still lives a few doors up, but she’s married to Gunther now. He says she caught him in her love light that night, and never let him go. It turns out they were writing to each other when he was in prison up in Shetland. Jeanie admitted those letters caused her no end of grief during the war. The police constantly interviewed her as a spy, but unless the Jerries were interested in the price of barley sugar, they were barking up the wrong tree there.
Wilhelm took Bob’s old job as Sandie’s husband. Turns out Wilhelm could play football. Football fans are quick to forgive, particularly if you can shoot from thirty yards, and so the fans of Fulham FC regularly chant the name of a man sent to kill them only a few years earlier.
Pegs and Jurgen bought the butcher shop after Old Man McKay retired. They now sell some rather strange German sausages with unpronounceable names. They’re a big hit with local women, as rationing of other foods is still in place, but no one ever thought to ration Bratwurst, or whatever it is called. A rumour goes around that it’s made with horse. I’ve never understood why people don’t eat horses. They always look so miserable. I think we would be doing them a favour.
And what of young Rudi? I hear you ask.
Some say he died on impact. Some insist he drowned in the milk. Others claim he lives there yet, and if you leave your milk out too long, he’s the reason it turns nasty.
