Secrets of a Charmed Life (7 page)

Emmy forked out a watery slice of meat and slapped it on top of one of the slices of bread. Juice spattered on the counter. “Brilliant idea, Mum. So very fair to Julia.”

Mum rose on unsteady feet and yanked on Emmy’s arm, forcing her to look at her. More meat juices erupted from the tin in Emmy’s hand and speckled the floor.

“That’s right. It
is
a brilliant idea. It’s my brilliant idea. Julia deserves to have what is rightfully hers. Just like we all do. Just like you do, Emmeline.” Mum let go of her arm. “And I intend to see she gets it.”

Emmy watched as her mother kneeled down and used the handkerchief wet from tears and whiskey to mop the meat juice off the floor.

“They obviously know where you live, Mum. Do you
really think you will be able to keep these people from seeing Julia until you have what you want from them?”

Mum rose to her feet in one swift movement. “Is that what you think? That this is about what I want? When has anything ever been about what
I
want?”

Emmy turned back to the sandwiches. “That’s all it ever is,” she muttered.

Mum pulled at Emmy’s arm again, more gently this time. Her calm touch surprised Emmy.

“You’re wrong, Em.” Mum reached up to touch her daughter’s face and Emmy involuntarily flinched. Mum tenderly tucked a curling wisp of hair behind Emmy’s ear. “Someday I am going to prove it to you.”

For a moment, there was no age difference between the two of them, no crossed purposes, no opposing forces. They were just two women trying to chisel a happy life out of a giant hulk of rough-edged circumstances.

Then the moment passed. Mum pulled the letter from her pocket, held it over the rubbish bin, and saw that Emmy was watching her. She shoved it back inside the pocket and sat down again.

“There’s a designer who wants to teach me how to make patterns for my wedding dresses,” Emmy said a moment later. “He’s Mrs. Crofton’s cousin. He wants to see a couple of my sketches. He might mentor me in exchange for some hours working in his studio. He designs costumes for the West End, Mum.”

Mum furrowed her brow in consternation. Emmy could see that her mother was forming a response that Emmy would not want to hear.

“I’m nearly sixteen. Practically an adult,” Emmy said, already in defense mode.

“Nearly isn’t is, Em. You’re not an adult yet. Not in the eyes of the law.”

“But I know I can handle the extra work. Even when school starts in September. I can handle it. I’ve only a year left, anyway.” Emmy’s voice was rising in pitch and volume, and she tempered it to prove she was the rational adult she was claiming to be. “It’s not going to be a problem, Mum.”

“School isn’t starting in September.”

“What do you mean? Of course it is,” Emmy said.

Mum picked up the other envelope that had come in the day’s post and held it out.

Emmy wiped her hands on a dish towel and then took it.

The stationery was crisp and smelled of ink and importance. The return address was the school’s. Emmy sensed as soon as her fingers touched the paper that the letter would change everything that had happened that day. Her eyes caught the words “invasion” and “safety.”

“You and Julia are being evacuated to the countryside, Emmy,” Mum said. “They’re serious about it this time. You’re leaving London next week. All the children are.”

THE
first time London’s children had been evacuated, nearly a year earlier, Mum had flat-out refused to send Emmy and Julia away. Her attitude then had been that there wasn’t a war, not on English soil, anyway, and she was not going to put her daughters on a train to God-knows-where. Emmy remembered her saying as much to their teachers at school, Thea next door, and anyone else who asked why Julia and Emmy were still in London. Emmy also remembered seeing something else in Mum’s eyes besides the defiance. Mum had felt it wasn’t in her best interest to send them off into the countryside, but for reasons Emmy was unsure of. There seemed to be more to Mum’s refusal than just outward unwillingness to be parted from her daughters.

There was no precedent for London being emptied of her children; no previous war had demanded it. The
last time there had been an exodus for safer homes was during the plagues, and then it was only the rich who fled the cities. The adversary this go-around was not a disease but legions of army planes carrying bombs. It was an astounding concept that Germany could strike England by air and subdue her without even setting foot on her soil. But Mum had scoffed at the idea that the only way to ensure Emmy’s and Julia’s safety was to entrust them to strangers.

“You and Julia aren’t going anywhere,” she had said when the letter had arrived in August 1939, advising her to prepare her daughters for evacuation. When the other children in the neighborhood trudged to school carrying suitcases and gas masks, their weeping mothers trailing after them, Emmy and Julia had stayed home and played checkers. Some mothers, who had looked down their noses at Mum the day before, apparently hopped over the police cordon at the train station and snatched their children back before they boarded. Those who bravely waved good-bye got postcards from billeting officials a week later advising them of where and with whom their children were living. Emmy found out after many of her classmates started coming back to the city that foster parents arrived at designated churches and community centers in rural villages to look over the trainloads of London children and then they chose the ones they wanted like buyers at an auction. One of Julia’s six-year-old friends had been parted from her older brother because, so the story went, he could work a field and she could not. That little girl still had nightmares six months later. In the end, it had all been for nothing. The doomsayers who foretold that the Luftwaffe would flatten London had been wrong.

Emmy and Julia weren’t the only children whose parents could not or would not bow to the notion that evacuation was the only course of action that made any sense. There was a set of parents just down the street from the Downtrees who kept their children back, and on the next block over, a couple more. The sisters and these other children had gathered at the home of one of the houses for impromptu lessons since the schools closed after the children left the city. But within a month, the schools had all opened again because most of the children had been brought back home. At the time, everyone had concluded that Britain would win the war on the fields of France and in the air over the English Channel.

But when Dunkirk fell some months later, the air raid sirens began to wail a little more often and the doomsayers began to raise the specter of a second evacuation of London’s children. Emmy gave it little thought. Mum had kept them back during the first one; she’d do the same if there was another.

Emmy had been happy to stay behind during the first evacuation.

And now she was insistent that she stay behind for the second.

But this time, Mum would not hear of it.

For half an hour Emmy argued with her.

Emmy was too old to be evacuated.

There was no real danger.

How did Mum know they would be safe just because they weren’t in London?

And the real reason, of course. Emmy had a job. And a dress designer interested in seeing her sketches.

Emmy was not going.

Mum had an answer for every excuse Emmy gave her. The letter in her hand said every child fifteen and younger was to be evacuated. The danger was genuine. The only safe place was in the country.

As for Emmy’s little job, as Mum called it, did Emmy really think there would be fittings for wedding dresses with the war looming for real now, overhead?

Besides, Julia could not go alone. Not after what they had seen happen to classmates the last time.

“You have to go with her,” Mum said. “We’re done talking about it. You’re going.”

“Please don’t make me, Mum.”

“It’s not up to me!”

“Yes, it is. You can do what you did last time. Just refuse to comply.”

Mum’s eyes had glossed shiny with emotion. “This time it’s different. You really must go, Emmy. It is for the best.”

Emmy wanted to grab her mother by the shoulders and shake her. Shake her until she told Emmy everything.

“The best for you, you mean,” Emmy said instead. “Now you can spend the night with whomever you wish, whenever you wish, and as often as you wish.”

Emmy waited for the slap across her face. She wanted it. She wanted to feel the sting of Mum’s reproach. She wanted the welt to rise on her skin and blossom crimson in front of Mum.

Mum raised her hand slightly and Emmy braced herself for the impact.

But the slap didn’t come. Mum lowered her arm and a second later it hung loose at her side.

“You and Julia are leaving on Wednesday,” she said.
“Don’t tell her about Neville. She doesn’t need to know right now and this is going to be hard enough. You have to go with her, Em. Hate me if you want, but you know I can’t send her away alone. You know I can’t.”

Mum turned and walked out of the kitchen.

Emmy felt as if she had been slapped anyway.

*   *   *

EMMY
dreaded telling Mrs. Crofton that she was being forced to leave London. For the next two days after Mum got the notice, she imagined herself arriving for work on Tuesday and telling Mrs. Crofton she was being evacuated. She pictured Mrs. Crofton replying that she would not be able to keep the job open until Emmy could return. Emmy rehearsed hearing Mrs. Crofton say that there was no way now to hide Emmy’s age from her cousin, and that Emmy would have to hope she could win him over when she was older, assuming he still had any interest. Emmy pictured Mrs. Crofton muttering she should never have hired Emmy in the first place. She didn’t want to keep hearing those words in her head, but they played and replayed over and over until it seemed like she had already told Mrs. Crofton and the dream was already dead. Everything about the situation seemed so ridiculously unfair. Emmy couldn’t completely blame Mum for the turn of events, but she needed to blame someone for the war and Emmy was angry at her mother for insisting she evacuate for Julia’s sake, as though Emmy’s own safety were not a consideration.

Mum came home Monday evening from a meeting at the school with a list of things the girls were to bring and not bring. Julia, excited to be going on a train to the country like some privileged heiress, was full of questions. She
was enthralled at the idea of spending the autumn at a country home and riding a horse—as if all country homes had one—and growing her own pumpkins and skipping stones over a pond and counting stars. Emmy had only one question. How long would the evacuation last? The year before, the children began returning within a month. She could only hope it would be the same this time around. She had to get back to London. This opportunity for her and her designs would not wait for her.

Wishes didn’t come true by wishing.

On Tuesday afternoon before work, Emmy took Julia next door to Thea’s as usual. Their neighbor was in the middle of getting together a box of supplies for her Anderson shelter, a hut of corrugated steel covered in earth and half-buried in the ground in her back garden.

The Downtrees’ flat was connected to Thea’s and six others so that their brick, two-story homes looked like one long house with the same front door repeated seven times over. Each of the narrow flats had a splash of lawn in the front and a tiny garden in the back. Brick partitions separated the gardens. The neighbors had little flower beds and tomato vines and pots of pansies in their tiny gardens. The Downtrees had a stone slab, overgrown hedges, and dirt. Thea had erected an Anderson shelter in her minuscule garden when she was told her cat would not be welcome in the public shelter the neighbors all shared in the cellar of the shoe repair shop at the end of the street. Her private shelter nearly filled the space from garden wall to garden wall. The Andy looked like a dog kennel made by someone who had no idea how to construct one and so the builder decided to bury the evidence of ever having tried. Mum thought it was hideous; Julia was plain terrified of it.

“Oh my goodness, do you still need me to take Julia today?” Thea’s eyes were shining with agitation. The news of the second evacuation had everyone on the street preparing for the worst, whatever that was.

“I still have to go to work today. It’s my last day—at least for a while,” Emmy said. “I’m hoping we’ll be back soon.”

Thea stared at Emmy as though she had spoken in a foreign language, one Thea didn’t understand.

“Soon?” she asked.

“Yes. I’m hoping this evacuation will be like the last one.”

Thea was holding a wicker basket filled with biscuits, tins of sardines, and bottles of soda water, but she set this down and told Julia, who was standing next to her, that the mother cat had moved the kittens into a bureau drawer and she should go see how cute they were. As soon as Julia had dashed upstairs, Thea turned to Emmy.

“Has your mother not told you how things are, Emmeline?”

Her tone made Emmy feel instantly young and uninformed, just like the child that everyone kept insisting she was. “What do you mean?”

“France is occupied and—”

“I know that,” Emmy interjected. It wasn’t as if she never read the papers or didn’t listen to the radio.

“Yes, but that means now the Germans can reach
us
. They can fly their planes right across the Channel from France. It’s not like last time. They’re saying the Germans plan to bomb London.”

“They said that a year ago.”

“Yes, but a year ago, the Germans didn’t have France.”

Now it was Emmy’s turn to stare at her as if she didn’t understand the language Thea was speaking.

“We’re on an island,” Emmy said. “The Nazis can’t roll in here with their tanks like they have everywhere else.”

“But that’s why no one can say how long this will last. I would hate for you to leave here thinking you’ll be back in a month. The papers say—”

Emmy didn’t want to hear any more. She was tired of everyone and everything deciding what was to become of everything that mattered to her. She cut Thea off in midsentence. “I have to go, Thea, or I’ll be late. Sorry. I’ll be back for Julia before six thirty.”

Emmy knew she had been abysmally rude, but she simply had to get away from Thea and her box of supplies for her bomb shelter, and from the fear in her eyes. She went back to the flat for the two sketches she had promised Mrs. Crofton and held them to her chest for a moment. These would keep her place, if not in Mrs. Crofton’s shop, then in Mr. Dabney’s future plans. They had to.

She headed for the bridal shop, passing sandbag walls on street corners that she and everyone else had been walking past for a year and hardly noticed anymore. Everyone on the sidewalk seemed distracted by unspoken ponderings as they dashed about without a word to one another, not even a tip of the head or a weak smile. It was as though the imminent departure of a quarter million children meant London was poised to lose her innocence and no one quite knew what to do on the eve of that loss.

Emmy arrived at Primrose Bridal and opened the door. The store was empty except for one young woman buying a veil.

And only a veil.

Emmy surmised from the conversation the woman
and Mrs. Crofton were engaged in that she was to marry on Friday morning at Saint Martin–in-the-Fields wearing the veil and a dress of white dotted Swiss that she had worn to a piano recital in April. Her husband-to-be was shipping out with his platoon on Saturday afternoon.

While Mrs. Crofton finished the transaction, Emmy went into the back room to see what hand-sewing was lined up for that afternoon, but the long table was empty. A few moments later, Mrs. Crofton joined her. She looked haggard, as if she hadn’t slept well or perhaps had eaten something for lunch that now roiled inside her.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Crofton?” Emmy asked.

She produced a wan smile. “Ask me that question when the war is over, Emmeline, and I might have an answer for you.” Mrs. Crofton looked down at Emmy’s hands. “You brought them.”

“Of course.” Emmy held the sketches out to her.

She hesitated for a moment before taking them. “Do you have something to tell me?”

The words startled Emmy, but a second later she was glad Mrs. Crofton had suspected she was to be sent away.

“My mother is making me leave. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Crofton. I had no idea this would happen when I took this job.”