Let Me Whisper You My Story (12 page)

J
ACQUES WAS SEVEN
years old. He had an aunt and uncle in England who wanted to adopt him. They came to visit him on weekends at Hartfield. I saw them in the garden together. Lucky Jacques. He would leave Hartfield soon to be with a real family.

He had lived in cellars and once in a dirt hole in a farmer’s paddock. People here and there took pity, so he survived. This is what Greta told me. Greta knew everything about everyone, but I wondered what was true and what wasn’t. She fibbed so much that I didn’t know what to believe, and she never talked about her own real past life.

Jacques was the boy who threw up on the plane as we flew to England. He cried on the bus going to Hartfield. He had a thin face and didn’t smile. His dark hair fell over his eyes, and he didn’t push it aside. It seemed he didn’t see much in addition to not hearing. Was that the way he liked it? I wanted to talk so much and I couldn’t.

I sat opposite Jacques at the Sabbath service on Friday
nights, and at meal times. Greta sat beside me. The table was very long and old, maybe hundreds of years old. The food was really good, lots of fresh vegetables and sometimes meat pie, which I loved.

These Friday nights were hard for me. I tried to blank out from my mind pictures of invisible wine, the throwing of coiled bread across the table, Mama saying prayers over the candles. It was so painful. I was not the only one who suffered on Friday nights. The Hungarian girls cried, haunted by memories too.

Martha had deliberately sat Jacques near me. He couldn’t hear and I couldn’t speak. I stared at him, but he didn’t look back. Were we so much alike? How could one mute girl and one deaf boy help each other?

If food was rationed at Hartfield, we didn’t notice it, because it was so much more than we’d had in our homelands. Jacques ate as much as he could then stuffed any leftovers into his pockets.

‘Don’t do that, Jacques,’ Martha told him kindly. ‘England is on rations—you know what they are, food shortages because of the war. You must eat everything right away and not save food for later.’

She wagged her finger at him and he began to cry. He had to do it. He had to put some away. There might not be any later. He’d been this way since the Red Cross had found him.

I wanted the eating and the service to end quickly. I could hardly wait until the prayers were said, the last bit of food eaten, so I could go to the living room and watch the children play board-games, or just read my way through simple English books then go to bed.

After weeks of pleading, Martha stopped asking Jacques not to stuff his pockets with food. About the same time, he suddenly stopped doing it all by himself. The bread he’d been storing under his pillow turned mouldy and began to stink and the strawberry jam was covered with ants. Greta told him off. ‘Stop it. You have no more room in your stomach for food. And your bed stinks.’

If Jacques heard her, he didn’t show it. He looked at her carefully from under his thick fringe and seemed to finally accept that there was always more food coming.

Greta spoke only in English, even to me. ‘I want to forget German,’ she said.

The Hartfield boys played marbles on the smooth dormitory floor and football on the lawn. We girls played marbles too, but were considered too dainty to play football! We played hopscotch on the driveway and hide-and-seek in the woods surrounding Hartfield, had skipping competitions and read books about trees that had magic lands on the top of clouds. It was wonderful. We were children again.

One day Martha suggested that Jacques and I go for a walk together in the garden. We were such a silent pair that even our shoes on the grass were soundless. Birds hopped near us unaware we were there. I sat on the garden swing remembering my time in the Red Cross home and the girl’s face at the hospital window.

After a lot of hesitation, Jacques came over to me on the swing and limply pushed me. Silly boy, I thought. I can do this myself. I am not a child anymore.

I swung my legs up and down and Jacques moved back quickly. Up and down I went, climbing higher and
higher. The blue sky bobbed, or was it me? Jacques, who said so little because, it seemed, he couldn’t hear speech made squealing sounds at me. Isolated words streamed out of him, strung together with gaps like those between trees and rose bushes and open sky.

‘Too high,’ he wailed. In English too, so he had to be hearing something.

His voice sounded shrill, as if it had been cut into a thousand tiny pieces. There was no longer a reason for him not to hear as there was no longer a reason for me not to talk. Someone must have told him, ‘Close your ears, Jacques.’

I slowed down and studied his frightened face as he pulled me roughly off the swing.

One Sunday a box of toys arrived at Hartfield. A Jewish welfare society had sent it to us all the way from London.

Toys! We were children again and crazy with excitement. Our ages were not important. So many of us had missed out on childhood that we grabbed the toys, without asking, from the large box in the hall near the front doors. Martha told us sternly, ‘Put those back right away. Now, one at a time. In order of age. We shall start with the youngest. Do not choose anything that you may not want tomorrow.’

The youngest, three-year-old Sarah, grabbed a furry giraffe with a long tongue. Jacques, when it was his turn, pointed to a soft fluffy bear. He held it in his arms, and rocked his body to and fro. Then he raced out of the hallway.

Martha casually picked up a fire engine and her hand accidentally pressed a knob. The alarm was the same
kind of siren that made us run for bomb shelters. Children screamed and hid behind drapes or simply ran away. ‘Sorry, children,’ Martha said, stumbling nervously over her words as she turned the alarm off. ‘Come back and let’s all look at the other toys. We’ll return this one.’

As she bent to put the fire engine back in the box, I reached over and took it from her.

‘You want this, Rachel? But why? Apart from the noise, aren’t you too old for this?’

I gripped it tightly. I had an idea.

‘Rachel, if you want to keep it, we shall have to take off the alarm. I can’t have you frightening the other children.’

I nodded.

‘Why did you take that fire engine, Rachel?’ Greta asked later. She had chosen a sparkly bracelet and necklace. ‘A rich lady in London heard of my predicament and sent these just for me. See how they shine.’ She’d been lucky to get the bracelet and necklace as older girls had their eyes on them, and her lie was obvious but she didn’t care.

At dinner, Jacques and I regarded each other solemnly across the table. Greta talked to one of the Hungarian girls after dinner. Soon they were playing cards together. I took Jacques’ arm and led him to the dormitory. Silently, I showed Jacques my fire truck. He showed his fluffy toy, though he stared a lot at the fire engine.

I wound up the fire truck. It raced across the floor. Jacques sat cross-legged, fascinated.

Deliberately, I leaned forward and pressed the knob. The siren blared. It wasn’t a fire engine siren though, it was a thousand people scurrying in all directions, women
carrying babies across broken roads, the falling of buildings. Jacques put his hands over both ears, screaming.

What do you see, Jacques?
I silently asked him.
The march of Nazis? The tanks? What do you hear? The bombs falling? The thud of boots? The hail of bullets?

His voice, muffled, said, ‘Stop. Stop.’ I didn’t though.
Forgive me, Jacques.
I waited to see what he would do. He ran up and down the room and between the beds screaming: ‘Stop.’ Finally, he lunged at me, punching me in my cheek, then pulled the fire engine away. He threw it with great force against the wall. It broke and with that the sound of sirens stopped.

Ouch. My cheek hurt. It didn’t matter. I pointed to his ears.
Hah! You can hear.

Jacques saw my smile of victory and raised his fists. Then his face cleared. He touched his ears, running his fingers along them as if he didn’t quite know what they were. He sat beside me on the floor.

He breathed deeply in and out, in and out, and for the first time since I’d met him, pushed his hair away from his face and grinned.

‘You trick,’ he said slowly in English. He pointed to my mouth. ‘So, speak.’

Can I do this? Jacques did. Papa, is it all right? Papa, tell me to speak.

I cleared my throat and coughed a weak cough. There was a lot to clear. It was as if a huge cobweb had gathered there.

I pushed against the threads, gossamer-fine, diamond-strong. My voice was a single strand.

‘Papa.’

W
E BEGAN SCHOOL
in the local village. I tied a thin navy ribbon around my long dark hair and smiled at myself in the dormitory mirror. My face had filled out. My cheeks were flushed, and my hair, which had been brittle and thin, was thick and shiny again.

I thought I even looked a little pretty. What would Freddy think of me if he could see me now? I missed him. I missed Gertrude too. They said they would write, but mail was so slow coming through from Europe.

The Red Cross was looking for Mama and Papa and Miri, for all my family. Soon, I’d know what had happened to them. That made me shiver. I hoped so much they were all right. Sometimes I envied Greta and the make-believe world she lived in. It was so like the world that I had created in my parents’ wardrobe, so easy to understand, though the other children made fun of her.

When we’d all spoken different languages it hadn’t been so obvious, but now it was.

Every child at Hartfield carried emotional scars but no-one spoke as much as Greta, and even though Martha
had told her, ‘Greta, you know this is nonsense, just settle down and get on with your new life,’ Greta stayed in her little castle with her make-believe famous friends, all of them wanting to visit her but none having time right now.

The school was an old stone building that dated back to the seventeenth century. There was an ancient school bell in the middle of the school yard attached to a rope that was wound around a loop on the pole. Old vines trailed around the stonework, and the classrooms had high ceilings, small windows and double desks.

Welcomed by the teachers and students at school assembly, we were put in different classes according to our ages and ability. All of us were behind in school work.

Jacques was put in second grade. His hearing was so good now, he said he could hear the lions roaring in London Zoo. I was put into sixth grade together with Greta and a French boy, Pierre, and a Hungarian girl, Eva. We were all twelve or thirteen years old, about a year older than the other children in sixth class. We were taken in groups to our different classrooms and shown to our desks. I shared a double desk with Greta. We shared an inkwell for our pens. English eyes watched us.

The neat English children, who had families, who were dressed in their navy-blue pleated school uniforms, looked us up and down. The boys wore navy-blue trousers and V-necked navy jumpers with white shirt collars. They had teasing faces. The girls appeared more curious. All the English children looked relaxed. They’d had proper childhoods. They’d climbed trees, and picked
blackberries and run free. We must have seemed a weird bunch to them.

However, some of these children, I’d been told, had lost their fathers in the war. They’d suffered too, but they were still protected by the rest of the villagers who were like family to them. We refugee children had come from different countries, had lost our families and had memories we couldn’t share even with each other.

As we sat down at our desks, some of the English children sent notes to their friends, or buried their heads in their school books and giggled. Pierre looked around the class. Something about the tension made him smile. He began to jiggle his shoulders, then laughed outright. The boy sitting next to him found Pierre’s sudden laughter and his jiggling shoulders hilarious, and he joined in. Then he hiccupped. A very recognisable squelching noise had everyone saying, ‘It wasn’t me.’

The air was sniffed and everyone in the class roared with laughter. The teacher banged her ruler on her desk, then her slight smile gave way to hearty laughter as well.

Another teacher opened the door to the classroom, saw the collapse of school manners and appeared startled. Then she must have realised that laughter is such a happy gift, the very best we can share. Smiling warmly she closed the door again.

Happy tears fell down my cheeks. A burning thought consumed me, however, behind the giggles: I want to learn. I want to be smart. I want to forget.

So I began to make up for lost time. My voice, still scratchy and thin from under-use, now formed English words, not German. Communicating with the other
children at school and learning the lessons was my first priority. I needed to speak English well, and quickly.

So I studied and learned. I loved school. Greta also picked up English amazingly quickly. ‘Of course, I ’ave an English background,’ she told me seriously. ‘My grandmother was British. Not ’alf. Through and through,’ she said in her broadest London cockney. She’d been listening to the wireless broadcasts and to a serial with London East Enders in it, with strong cockney accents.

‘I’ll be going up the apple and pears,’ she said to me one day after school. ‘The stairs, silly,’ she whispered when I looked at her questioningly. ‘I love cockney-speak. It’s poetry to me.’

‘Do you remember German, Greta? We don’t even speak it between ourselves.’

‘German? What’s that, luv?’

‘Have you truly forgotten it, or are you just pretending?’

Greta didn’t answer, but from the bleakness of her expression I understood that some questions are better not asked.

The children at the local school were kind to us in front of the teachers. After all, they had listened at assembly on our first day at school about the ‘poor Jewish refugee children, who have surely gone through unbelievable horrors before coming to our fine country’.

Well, I totally hated forced kindness. So I was grateful when I was shoved in the corridor, or someone pulled a face at me. I didn’t want to be a ‘poor refugee’
.
My belly was full. I didn’t need their charity. Besides, England still
had its own food shortages. Everyone got coupons to buy food in short supply like butter and eggs. So if I was shoved, I shoved back. If someone pulled a face at me I pulled one back. If someone imitated my funny German accent I grinned. I wanted to be the same as all the other children.

Timothy, one of a pair of freckle-faced, red-haired twins, deliberately tripped me up in the school yard. He tripped everyone up, and he’d treated me just like another school-mate. I tripped him back, and before you could say ‘Bomb Hitler’ we were racing around the playground, squealing insults at each other.

‘Stupid German refugee,’ he yelled.

‘Dumb English pig,’ I yelled back.

Our teacher, Miss Wetherby, caught up with us. ‘Timothy, stop right there.’ She grabbed him by his collar. ‘You must not be unkind to Rachel.’

‘But I called him a dumb English pig, Miss,’ I interrupted. ‘I’m to blame too.’

The teacher looked confused. Meantime, Timothy’s twin, Tony, came rushing over. The two stood side by side, looking identically confused. They did some quick movements, scrambling themselves between the teacher and me, and then stood side by side again.

‘I don’t know which one insulted me,’ I told Miss Wetherby.

‘Own up.’ Miss Wetherby frowned at them. ‘Which one of you called Rachel a name?’

‘Him.’ The twins pointed at each other.

‘It’s all right, Miss. I don’t mind being called names. It makes me feel like everyone else,’ I told her.

Miss Wetherby’s glasses slipped down the bridge of her nose. ‘You like being insulted, Rachel?’

‘I don’t mind at all. As long as I can insult someone back.’

Miss Wetherby stared at the identical twins who stared identically back at her, then she looked at me and at our three grinning faces.

‘All of you, stop insulting each other at once,’ she said in a firm voice. She didn’t look angry, just thoroughly confused. ‘Rachel, your ribbon’s undone.’ She shook her head and walked away.

After that I played with the twins all the time and I was even invited back to their house to meet their parents. Parents? A mother and a father?

I wore a red dress with three striped bows down the front to go out to dinner. I wore my long hair in two bunches, my best dark shoes and white socks. I’d been thinking about the way I looked, and longed to dress more like the young adult I was becoming. A flared skirt maybe, my hair pulled back in a ponytail, like I’d seen on American movies in the small cinema in the village.

The whole family came in their dark Ford car to pick me up from Hartfield House. I waited out the front with Martha. ‘Have a nice time,’ she said to me, and she leaned over and kissed me goodbye.

The twins’ home was a small two-storey detached house with a slate roof and a hedge for a fence. It had a verandah and a stained-glass panel in the front door. There were rows of flowers in the garden, and the earth around them was dark and rich.

I walked awkwardly behind their parents into the hallway, then watched, also uncomfortably, how the family acted with one another. The mother put on a frilly apron and went to the kitchen to prepare dinner. The father put his coat on a coat rack. He said, ‘Come right through, love,’ to me, and his dark eyes were warm and friendly.

This was a father. Not Papa, but a father. He watched his sons play football at the weekend and gather tadpoles from the pond. On Sunday, he, his wife and their children went to the local church. The twins’ mother helped out at the school. She had shoulder-length hair curled at the ends, and sang songs to herself. There was a family dog, a collie called Winston, and a black and white cat called Clementine. There were window boxes with geraniums and lavender and rose bushes in the back garden.

The family chatted happily to one another as they ate meatballs and mash.

‘Sorry the servings are small, love. Let’s hope they stop the food rationing soon. We’re not badly off, though. We’ve got a nice little vegetable garden going.’ The twins’ mother smiled. ‘Now, when I was a girl we’d have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding when guests came over. One day we’ll have it again too.’

I remembered twisted turnips and shrivelled potatoes, thin soup and crusts of bread, hollow eyes and bony arms.

‘This is wonderful,’ I said.

‘How are you finding England?’ the father asked me.

‘The twins told me the Red Cross is looking for your family,’ said the mother.

‘Tell us about Hartfield House. Do you sleep in bunk beds? Does anyone snore?’ one of the twins said.

I answered all their questions easily. I loved England, and yes, the Red Cross was looking for my family. Nobody watching would have seen me squirm or noticed the relief I felt when I was asked about the problem of snoring children in the dormitory. It was good to be able to talk about something trivial like burying my head underneath my pillow to block out the sound of snoring.

Often we children from Hartfield House walked into the local village. We cut through a lane and ate sweet blackberries growing wild in tangled bushes, and arrived at Hartfield with blackberry faces and blackberry tongues.

‘Here come the blackberry children,’ the lady at the cake shop called out as we passed by. She handed out scones to us with jam and cream. All the village people were kind. The locals didn’t care about our religion, our customs or our stories. We were just children—refugees from the great war in Europe. Often complete strangers stopped us and asked, ‘And how are we today?’ Sometimes their English confused us. ‘How are you kids doin’?’ the postman asked, laughing as we passed him on his rounds of the village. What did that mean? Doing what? When we didn’t understand what a word meant, we would just smile. I had found that a smile speaks all languages.

At weekends at Hartfield we had visitors. People came out to see us, to speak with us in the beautiful grounds and sometimes to take us on outings. Slowly, in this way, children were adopted, and left Hartfield forever.

The first to go was the baby of our group, Sarah. A couple spent a few hours with her one Sunday and she sat on the woman’s lap, chewing her jumper. We waved Sarah goodbye a week later.

Occasionally families took me outside into the grounds for picnics. I sat on the sloping grass with them, with their children if they had any, and answered questions in halting but good English. I didn’t like it. I felt like I was up for sale. I didn’t want to be anyone’s new child. I had a family already. Still, I wanted to be wanted. Sometimes the families asked to see me again; sometimes they didn’t. When they didn’t want to see me again, I fretted and wondered what I’d done wrong.

I spoke to Martha about my feelings.

‘It’s like when you go shopping. You don’t buy everything in the shop. They need to make sure that whichever child they choose will fit in best with their family.’

Martha had not meant it but her words were very disturbing, for they implied that if families did not want me, it was because I was not coiled bread highly desirable for the Sabbath. That I was not strawberry jam on toast. I was something lesser. Shrivelled vegetables sold to Jews in the war.

Greta had no luck at all finding new parents. Maybe prospective parents were put off by her royal connections. Her so-called aunt and uncle never turned up, although I would have been astonished if they had.

‘They are so, so busy,’ Greta said one Sunday, kicking at a clump of dried earth as we walked in the garden. ‘He is an engineer, currently designing a bridge in
Africa. She has seven children under the age of five to care for. They’ll come soon.’

Greta found a loose stone and kicked it with great force, so that it soared like a rocket across the meadow.

‘The husband and wife who took me out on Sunday really wanted a cute little girl. They babied me a lot. I’m almost thirteen. I didn’t give them the answers they wanted to hear.’

‘Your aunt and uncle aren’t real, are they, Greta?’ I said to her, and I tucked her arm in mine. ‘It’s all right. Really.’

Greta fiddled with the buttons on her cardigan. ‘I don’t understand you at all, Rachel. Of course they are real. They are as real as the bombs that dropped, and people being put in gas chambers to die, and children with empty stomachs. My aunt and uncle are real.’