In My Wildest Dreams by Leslie Thomas Page A

I remained unworried and stood whistling through my teeth as any eight-year-old boy can and does. Abruptly, the anguished greengrocer turned and gave me the most frightful whack around the ear with an earth-bound potato. 'Stop that whistling, boy!' he shouted into my upset face. 'I can't stand you whistling, boy! It will all have to stop soon!'
    He was right, in a way, because one of the first edicts to come from the British Government at the outset of the noisiest period in history was the banning of noises. There were to be no whistles, hooters nor, eventually, tolling bells, either.
    After the boy with the stutter had filled in the details of the Prime Minister's speech for me in the street, I went into our end-terrace house, with its pebble-dash, red bricks and lingering single dog rose over the path and found my mother more disgusted with Edward Lyndoe than with Hitler. Her soothsayer, blindly believed every week in the pages of the People newspaper, had been found to be a false prophet. At first, she was inclined to put the blame on Chamberlain rather than Lyndoe. But in the end it sank in; not only had she lost faith and face, but also her housekeeping money, because she had backed his forecast with the same misplaced intuition that had led her to wager on Frank Davies on the fairground airship. Somewhere there was a streak of recklessness.
    The war, contrary to most expectations, brought few immediate sensations. In fact there was a widespread feeling of being short-changed. Most people had forecast heavy bombing, and possibly a gas attack, within hours. My father returned from sea a few nights after the declaration, this being a time of truce for my parents. The final truce, as it happened, because they soon launched into a period of bitter hostility that made the first year of the greater conflict appear even more placid. My mother, looking quite mystic, carried a candle because the blackout curtains were not drawn across the window when my father arrived. Within a moment a policeman and an officious air raid warden were pounding at the door demanding to know why we were signalling to enemy bombers. There were none within several hundred miles at that time and, seeing that my father was a sailor home from the sea, they said they would not press charges but that we would have to blow the candle out. When they had fussed off, my father, holding forth in the dark while my mother hoisted the blackout blinds, announced that, if he had only had two white feathers on him, he would have presented one each to the policeman and the air raid warden.
    He was ever caustic about what he considered to be the cowardice of the civilian services, particularly the police force, for which he had little time, although its members sometimes had time for him. His own activities ashore during the first two years of the war were, perhaps needless to say, not without drama. After being torpedoed twice in the open sea and surviving in a lifeboat, he returned home one black night, breathing bravery and brandy. Deciding that my mother might think twice about letting him into the house, he chose to drop into the air raid shelter in the garden to await daylight. There were four feet of water in the shelter and, stepping into the void beyond the door, he plunged right into it. After cheating the Atlantic he came close to drowning on dry land. There was also a period when he worked ashore, on Newport Docks, although it was brief. He wept openly with other men at being rendered virtually homeless by the destruction of the Dock Hotel by German bombers. 'Wanton,' he muttered, damp-faced as he viewed the wreckage. 'Wanton.'
    One night when he was working on the docks he somehow came into possession of a couple of dozen kippers and bore these home at dawn as a triumphant addition to our rations. My mother, for once, was pleased, but worried about the police. To spread the good fortune, or perhaps the evidence, she distributed some of the fish to