Pennies For Hitler (8 page)

It was fun, being with other boys again. But the boys left for their tea without even telling him their names and for some reason they never came back to the park.

Part of him missed having friends. Mostly he tried not to think about what he missed, in case it all came tumbling in.

No letter came from Germany; no telephone call either. Every day when he came back from the library he hoped Mutti might be sitting in the foyer, waiting, in her flowered dress and the green coat. But she never was.

The library was the heart of his days now. Aunt Miriam had
told the lady — the librarian — that same story she had told people in the building: that he had been sick and was still not strong enough for school, and that his Swiss mother was abroad and could not return. He thought he sounded more English now. He listened to the wireless, mouthing the words, as soon as it came on in the morning and at night while he was waiting for Aunt Miriam to come home.

Sometimes they were hard words for a German boy to repeat. The English on the wireless spoke of the Nazi menace, the German threat. Sometimes they spoke of the treacherous Hun.

That’s me, thought Georg. I am the Hun.

He read Aunt Miriam’s newspaper too. There were things that were hard to understand, even when Aunt Miriam explained them; they were frightening too.

The government was giving ‘Anderson’ air-raid shelters to everyone in London and other cities that could be bombed. There was a photo and a diagram of the shelters, to help people work out how to put them together. The shelters were made of corrugated iron and looked no bigger than a bed. People had to bury them in their gardens, so they could hide in them when the bombs fell. Corrugated iron wouldn’t stop a bomb but, if you were lucky, the dirt you piled on top of it might.

We have no garden, thought Georg. Where will we go if bombs come?

Mutti had sent him to England — so
far
— to be safe, but the newspaper made it sound as if there was no safety, not even here.

In May the paper said Hitler and Mussolini of Italy had signed a pact, to say that they would fight together if there was war.

He looked at a map of the world in the library that day, and stared at the pink splodges all over it. Canada, Australia, India,
Burma, so much of Africa. It was hard to understand. England had the biggest empire on earth — there was more pink than any other colour. How could it be in danger, even from Germany and Italy combined? Of course Germany had the Führer, while England only had Mr Chamberlain, whose voice was as dry as English toast. The German army and navy were the biggest in the world. German soldiers were the best in the world too. He hesitated at that. Were they really? Or was that what he’d been told? Were they the best like Jews were bad?

He asked Aunt Miriam that night. She sighed and slipped her shoes off as she sat down on the sofa. ‘Get me a cup of tea, George, there’s a lamb.’ The days in her office were even longer now.

He made the tea carefully, one spoonful for Aunt Miriam and one for the pot, taking the pot to the kettle and not the other way around, so the water would be hot when it poured onto the leaves. He was proud to be able to make tea now. Adults in Germany drank coffee, but he had never made it; he never went into the kitchen except when Lotte was making Kugelhopf and let him lick out the bowl.

Aunt Miriam sipped the tea gratefully, then dunked in her Garibaldi biscuit. The English ate biscuits from packets, bought at the shop, instead of cakes made at home. At least Aunt Miriam did.

At last she spoke. ‘People say the sun never sets on the British Empire, and that’s true enough.’ She smiled briefly. ‘Yes, it is the biggest in the world. But we don’t have nearly as many soldiers as Germany. Nowhere near as many aeroplanes or ships, and certainly nothing as massive as Germany’s battleship, the
Bismarck
. Germany has been preparing for this war for ten years; and England has done nothing in that time.’

‘Nothing?’

She shrugged. ‘Not enough then. England hoped to negotiate a way to avoid a war. I hoped too. But lately, well, war is coming for us whether we want it or not. If we don’t fight we will be ruled by Hitler and his Brown Shirts.’

People who hate Jews, thought Georg, but he didn’t say it.

‘But England will win? The empire will fight too?’

‘The empire will fight.’ She shook her head. ‘However, the empire isn’t like it looks on the map, George. India has millions of people but very few soldiers, even though they’re good ones. Australia looks big but it’s mostly desert and there aren’t a lot of people. Canada too has more forests and lakes than people. Africa — well, Germany has colonies there as well.’

‘So Germany might win a war,’ said Georg slowly.

Aunt Miriam shut her eyes. Her face was hollowed with weariness. ‘I studied history at Oxford. Your father studied his poets. He studied dreams and words. I studied what people did and tried to understand why. Countries that begin wars rarely win them, George. Maybe because greed stops them seeing situations clearly. And maybe because only a certain sort of madman leads his country to invade another.’

‘But Hitler has already won in Czechoslovakia, in Austria …’ Though the Austrians didn’t fight back, he thought.

Aunt Miriam opened her eyes. ‘I didn’t say victory would be quick. Or easy. Ten years, a hundred … but we’ll win, George. We won last time, despite the odds. We’ll win again.’ Her smile looked almost sad. ‘Or perhaps I am like your father too. Perhaps I only see the patterns in history that tell me what I want to see: that our tiny island has a chance of winning, of defeating a country determined to persecute and kill many of its own people as well as outsiders.’

Ten years of war. A hundred. He glanced out the window and down to the street. A horse was dragging a cart piled high with rubbish. A man in filthy grey clothes called out, ‘Rag and bones! Bring out your rag and bones.’ The cart came in the evenings after people had eaten their dinner. Aunt Miriam had let him take down the chop and roast lamb bones last week, but there were none today. The man and the cart looked so normal. So safe. It wasn’t fair that the world could look safe while darkness hid around the corner.

It wasn’t fair at all.

He read the newspaper every morning after that; it was usually slightly crumpled after Aunt Miriam had read it over breakfast. Ten thousand Jewish women marched through the streets of a place called Palestine to ask the English rulers to let more Jews come from Germany to Palestine. But it seemed the Führer wouldn’t let them out, nor the English rulers let them in.

He wondered if they would let Mutti in to England if Papa wasn’t with her. Aunt Miriam would help if she could, but he didn’t ask Aunt Miriam what she thought. If he didn’t know for sure then he could still hope that one day — someday — there’d be a knock, a phone call, a flowered silk dress down in the foyer.

In August Hitler and Stalin of Russia promised not to fight each other. At least that was better than Russia promising to fight England too. The newspaper that day had an article about a new type of plane too: it had been invented in Germany and was called a ‘jet’. It went very fast by pushing out jets of hot gas.

For a moment Georg was proud of his country and then remembered it wasn’t his country any more.

Sometimes now Aunt Miriam’s women friends came round to supper. They all worked like Aunt Miriam, which disappointed him, as he hoped some might have children. The women wore skirts and jackets like Aunt Miriam did, and shoes with stumpy heels. They were women who knew things, like Aunt Miriam; and they talked about them too.

He listened when Aunt Miriam and her friends talked. He handed around cups of tea on a tray, just like Lotte had done. He bought a cake at the bakery and served it on little plates too. It wasn’t as good as Lotte’s Kugelhopf. The cream was thin and sweet and sort of rubbery, not like real cream at all. But Aunt Miriam’s friends smiled at him, and said how lucky Aunt Miriam was to have a nephew like him.

‘I know,’ said Aunt Miriam. He knew she meant it too.

He sat on a stool by the door, so quiet that they mostly didn’t notice him, so he could listen to them talk, to hear things that even Aunt Miriam might not tell a child.

They talked of the ‘Polish crisis’ and of how Hitler had offered not to fight England if the English allowed him to have the part of Poland called Danzig.

It had seemed so simple back in Germany. The Führer had to free the Danzig Germans from Polish rule! But here it wasn’t simple at all.

One of Aunt Miriam’s friends called Hitler ‘that frightful little man’. That hurt a little too, though he wasn’t quite sure why.

The library was better. The stories there were far away: boys battled boa constrictors in the jungles; and a girl called Dorothy was swept up in a tornado and taken to a land called Oz.

He took to going to the library earlier and earlier each day. It was shut at lunchtime, but one day when he was about to leave
the librarian asked if he would like to share her sandwiches. They were cheese and pickle, and she gave him a cup of milky tea, the first that he had drunk. He didn’t like it much, but drank it to be polite.

Her name was Mrs Huntley. She told him about her daughter, quite grown up now. She and her husband had gone to Australia, the big pink splodge on the bottom of the world, ‘where there are lots of butterflies, dear, and it’s hot even in winter. They like it there, but it’s a dreadful long way away. I never get to see the grandbabies at all. They send me photographs, of course, but it isn’t the same.’

Next day he brought his sandwiches down to the library, and hoped she would ask him to stay again. She did. She had made an apple teacake, and they had a slice each for lunch and for tea as well, before she closed the library to go home to make her husband’s supper.

Now if there was no one else in the library who needed their books stamped Mrs Huntley would take him around the shelves and show him books that he might like, even books in the ‘Adults’ room. A book on keeping bees, which was most interesting, one called
Birds of the Marshes
and one on keeping hens too. Georg thought he would like to keep hens. Or a dog. A dog that he could hug for warmth and comfort. A dog would curl up on the sofa with him, on the long nights while he waited for Aunt Miriam to come home.

But of course it was impossible in a flat.

‘I’ve found a place for you at the Gresham School,’ said Aunt Miriam one Saturday. It was omelettes for breakfast — a
supper dish at home but something the English ate in the morning instead — with grilled summer tomatoes and toast with jam.

‘It’s a good school — a bus ride away, but better than the local. Your English is good enough to pass muster now.’ She smiled at him, the abstracted smile that was the only kind she had these days. ‘You’ve done very well, all on your own. I’m proud of you. We’ll go and buy your school uniform today.’

It was a nice uniform: grey flannel pants, a dark blue blazer and a dark blue cap. He was glad now it was a day school, not a boarding school. He’d be able to see Mrs Huntley after school and there’d still be weekends with Aunt Miriam.

He put the clothes on in the evenings, alone in the flat waiting for Aunt Miriam to return. He looked in the mirror and tried to imagine himself doing maths and playing cricket with his friends. An English boy with English friends.

The chance of school vanished.

The Gresham School announced that in August it would evacuate all its students to High Martin Manor, in the country, away from any bombs that might fall on London.

‘I think it best,’ said Aunt Miriam carefully, ‘if you don’t go away with the school to the country. Not when you don’t know anyone.’

Not till I’ve proved I can fit in, thought Georg. Not till no one would suspect that I am German.

The uniform hung lonely in the cupboard. He had worn it so couldn’t send it back. He guessed that if he ever wore a school uniform he’d have grown out of this one.

He knew now just how much having a German nephew living with her might hurt Aunt Miriam too. Having an English father and an English passport made him English only as long as he sounded right.

He worked even harder on his accent. He read the newspaper over and over, so he’d know English things. He tried to imagine himself doing the things the children did in his English storybooks: sailing boats and building fires and playing at the seaside. But what was a sandcastle? Could you really build a whole giant castle out of sand?

They called it Operation Pied Piper in the newspaper. Over three short days three and a half million children had to leave England’s cities — cities, like London and Manchester and Liverpool, that might be bombed. They were taken by train or buses or even trucks west to Wales or to villages far from the coast.

‘Do I have to go?’ asked Georg.

‘Parents don’t have to send their children. But children need to be safe.’

‘Will you send me?’

She bit her lip. ‘I haven’t decided. Do you want to go?’

‘No.’ It wasn’t just that he was scared that strangers might find out he was German and put him in a camp behind barbed wire. Aunt Miriam and her flat and Mrs Huntley’s library were the only safe things he knew. Aunt Miriam mightn’t know much about children, but she was his.

She nodded slowly. ‘Very well. But if … if things get bad you may have to leave then. And …’ She hesitated. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, George. Don’t repeat it.’

Who would I tell it to? he wondered. To Mrs Huntley? To Mutti, in my dreams?

‘My office may be transferred out of London. Its work is too important to be lost to bombs.’

‘Where would we go?’

‘No one’s told me. No one has said anything official yet. Somewhere in the country: that’s all. Somewhere that doesn’t look like it would be worth a bomb.’

A cottage, thought Georg. That’s where his books said people lived in the English countryside. No one would think of bombing cottages. He imagined packing the dreaded suitcase again; it would be worth it to go to a cottage in the country. In books cottages had roses around the door.
Röslein, röslein, röslein rot
… Maybe they could have some hens. He might even be allowed a dog.