That morning when they arrived at the grocer’s there was the usual tired, cross-looking throng of housewives bearing string bags, irascible old gentlemen with leather ones, and the inevitable slate with the restrictive announcement: “No Matches. No Jam. No Bacon. No Tea. No Cheese. No Lard.”
“Tut, tut,” muttered Nannie. “No cheese again!”
“No tzeeze adain,” Jasper instantly repeated, but in ringing tones that might have indicated glorious news, and everybody laughed.
“Bless his heart,” said Nannie when she got home, “he does his bit as well as anybody.”
Alison was always ready enough to take care of Jasper, and was thoroughly trustworthy as regards letting no harm befall him; but she looked upon such “minding” in the light of “war work,” and her methods were somewhat austere.
She was annoyed that he should constantly interrupt mummy when she read aloud the latest war news from The Times by frivolous calls for admiration of his clock-work rabbit, and that mummy never failed to respond. And Alison was positively shocked that he could go on playing absorbedly with the said rabbit even when mummy read to them a letter from daddy in France.
She forgot that, for Jasper, daddy was chiefly known as a picture in a frame that stood on a table by mummy’s bed, whereof he kissed the glass, making a smudge on it, every night when he had said his prayers; whereas the familiar rabbit was furry and comforting to carry, and went across the floor in a succession of exciting hops when it was wound up.
After all, Jasper was but a very little boy.
As for Barbara, she followed where Jasper led. Barbara was no sort of use for minding. Yet she could devise most delightful games, and gave dolls’ tea-parties when all the vanished delicacies that used to grace such festivities before the war appeared again. So lavish was she with chocolate éclaires and cream buns and “white and pink sugar cakes” that Alison, the conscientious, was moved to expostulate, exclaiming: “What about the rationing, Barbara?”
“There’s no war in fairyland,” Barbara answered serenely, “and this is a fairy tea, so you can have as many lumps of sugar as ever you like.”