The War that Saved My Life (14 page)

When we finished our tea we went back to the school. Miss Smith walked right into the building without saying anything. She marched down the hall and threw open the first classroom door. She didn’t knock. I caught up to her just as she sucked in her breath. I looked inside and saw what she saw.

The whole class, including Jamie, was working at their desks with pencils and paper. Jamie’s left hand was tied to his chair.

It was tied tight even though he already had a bloody welt on his wrist.

When I’d tied him up, at least I had let him go right away.

Miss Smith said, “What is the meaning of this?” in a voice that made some of the little girls jump. Jamie saw us. His face flooded red.

Miss Smith went to him and untied his arm. Jamie ducked. He ducked like he expected her to hit him, the way I ducked sometimes. Miss Smith said, “Jamie, I’m so sorry, I should have come sooner,” and put her arms around him. Jamie leaned against her. He started to sob.

All this time I’d stood frozen in the doorway. Most of the students sat frozen at their desks. The only sounds were Jamie crying and Miss Smith murmuring words I couldn’t quite understand.

The teacher unfroze herself with a jerk. She advanced on Miss Smith, eyes blazing. “I’ll thank you not to interfere!” she said. “Every time my back’s turned he’s using that hand of his. I won’t have it! I wouldn’t have to tie him if he’d obey me.”

Miss Smith held her ground. Her eyes glittered. “Why shouldn’t he use that hand?”

The teacher gasped. I didn’t recognize her, though I supposed she’d been on our train. She was an older woman with gray hair braided around her head, and round wire eyeglasses and a skirt that was too tight. When she gasped, her mouth went perfectly round, like her glasses. She looked like a fish. “It’s his
left
hand,” she said. “Everyone knows that’s the mark of the devil. He wants to write with his left hand, not his right. I’m training him up the way he’s supposed to be.”

“I never heard such rubbish,” snapped Miss Smith. “He’s left-handed, that’s all.”

“It’s the mark of the devil,” insisted the teacher.

Miss Smith took a deep breath. “When I was at Oxford,” she said, “my professor of Divinity, Dr. Henry Leighton Goudge, was left-handed. It is
not
the mark of the devil. Dr. Goudge told me himself that fear of left-handedness was nothing more than silly superstition and unwarranted prejudice. There’s nothing in the Bible against people using their left hands. We can write and ask him, if you like. Meanwhile you will allow Jamie to use whichever hand he prefers or I shall take action for the wounds he’s received.”

I hated when she spoke with such big words; I couldn’t follow it. Jamie’s teacher said, suspiciously, “When were you at Oxford?”

“I graduated 1931,” Miss Smith replied.

The teacher looked flustered, but she didn’t back down all the way. “You’re not to come into my classroom without knocking,” she said. “It isn’t allowed.”

“I won’t again so long as I have no cause,” Miss Smith said. She hugged Jamie to her, then stood. “I’ll be asking Jamie. I don’t want him ridiculed, looked down upon, or punished in any way for using his left hand.”

The teacher sniffed. Miss Smith stood, and guided me to follow her out. I wanted to wait in the hall to be sure the teacher didn’t immediately tie Jamie back up, but Miss Smith said we needed to leave. “I’ve knocked her pride a bit,” she said. “We need to let her get it back.”

I didn’t see why. I said, “I could have told them he hates being tied.” But I didn’t really understand why the teacher tied him, and I said so.

Miss Smith sighed. “Ada, which hand do you eat with? When you hold a fork?”

I held up my right hand. “This one.”

“Why? Why not use both?”

“This one feels better,” I said.

“That’s right. And Jamie eats with his other hand, his left hand. He always does. That hand feels better to him.”

I guess he did, but I’d never noticed. I’d never cared. “So?”

“So he’s learning to write now, and it’s much harder to write with the hand you don’t eat with. I’ll show you, when we get home.” She opened the main door of the school, and we went out. A chill wind swirled some dead leaves around the steps. “In the Bible the good people stand on God’s right, and the bad people stand on the left, before they get cast into hell. So some—people—”

“Idjits,” I supplied.

“Yes.” She smiled at me. “Some idiots think left-handedness comes from the devil. It doesn’t. It comes from the brain.”

“Like that man you were talking about,” I said.

“What? Oh, Dr. Goudge. Yes, he’s Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. Where I studied.”

“And he’s left-handed, like Jamie?”

Miss Smith snorted. “I’ve no idea. I didn’t read Divinity. I never met the man.”

She’d lied. I looked at her sideways. “So you didn’t go to Oxford,” I said. Wherever that was, whatever it meant.

“Of course I did,” she said. “I studied maths.”

We walked down the road. “Is a clubfoot like that?” I asked.

“Like being left-handed? In a way. It’s something you’re born with.”

“No, I mean, is it what that teacher said? A—a mark of the devil.” It would explain everything, I thought.

“Ada, of course not! How could you think so?”

I shrugged. “I thought maybe that was why Mam hated me.”

Miss Smith’s hand touched my shoulder. When she spoke, her voice was uneven. “She doesn’t—I’m sure it’s not—” She stopped walking and turned to face me. “I don’t know what to say,” she said, after a pause. “I don’t want to tell you a lie, and I don’t know the truth.”

It was maybe the most honest thing anyone had ever said to me.

“If she does hate you she’s wrong to do so,” Miss Smith said.

I shook that off. It didn’t matter, did it?

Leaves skittered around the tips of my crutches. My bad foot swung in the air. I started down the road again, and after a moment Miss Smith followed.

“Will you ride Butter when we get home?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said. “I still can’t make him trot.”

“Persistence,” Miss Smith said. “That’s what Lady Thorton says.”

I’d asked. Persistence meant to keep trying.

The very next day, before Jamie went to school, Miss Smith took us to the post office to register for our identity cards. It was a war thing. We would all get cards to carry with us, so that if the Germans invaded, the government could tell who was German and who was English by asking to see our identity cards.

They could also tell because the Germans would be speaking a different language. That’s what Miss Smith said. While we stood in line, she explained that all over the world people spoke different, not just different the way I sounded different from Miss Smith and Maggie, but different like actual different words. Jamie wanted to hear different words, so Miss Smith told us some. She said they were in Latin, the only other language she knew. “But it’s a dead language,” she said. “Nobody speaks it anymore.”

Clearly this wasn’t true, since she just had been speaking it, but I didn’t say so. Jamie asked, “If we kill all the Germans, then their language will be dead. Bam!” He pretended to shoot a German.

Miss Smith pursed her lips, but we’d gotten to the front of the line, so she didn’t reprimand him. Instead she told the registry man her name, her birthday, and that she wasn’t married and didn’t have a job.

Then she pushed us forward. “Ada Smith and James Smith,” she said. “They’re living with me.”

The registry man smiled. “Niece and nevvy, are they? Must be nice to have family staying. I can see the resemblance, sure enough. The girl has your eyes.”

“No,” Miss Smith said. “They’re evacuees. The surname is just a coincidence. I don’t know their birth dates,” she continued. “It wasn’t on their paperwork, and the children couldn’t tell me.”

The man frowned. “A great big lass and lad like that, and they don’t know their own birthdays? Are they simple?”

I stuck my right foot behind my left, and stared at the floor.

“Of course not,” Miss Smith snapped. “What an ignorant thing to say.”

The man didn’t seem put off by her tone. “Well, that’s very nice, I’m sure,” he said, “but what am I supposed to put down on the form? The government wants proper birth days. There isn’t a spot for ‘don’t know.’”

“Write down April 5, 1929, for Ada,” Miss Smith said. After asking me how much I could remember about Jamie being a baby, she’d decided long ago I must be ten. “For Jamie put February 15.” She looked down at us. “Nineteen thirty-three,” she said. “We’re pretty sure he’s six years old.”

The man raised an eyebrow, but did as she told him.

“What’s all that mean?” I asked, when we were back out on the street.

“Birthdays are days you get presents,” Jamie said gloomily, “and cake for tea. And at school you get to wear the birthday hat.”

I remembered Miss Smith asking us about birthdays, when we first came to her, but I’d never heard about a birthday hat. Turns out it was a school thing. At Jamie’s school his teacher posted birthdays on a big calendar, and when it was your birthday you wore a hat and everybody made a fuss over you.

When Jamie’d said he didn’t know his birthday, his class had laughed at him. He hadn’t told us that.

“But now we have birthdays,” Jamie said contentedly. “What you told the man. I’ll tell teacher this afternoon and she’ll write it on her calendar.” He smiled at Miss Smith. “What was it?”

“February 15, 1933,” Miss Smith said.

“It’s not your real birthday,” I said.

“Close enough,” Miss Smith said. “February 15 was my father’s birthday. Jamie can use it.”

“Is your father dead?”

“No,” Miss Smith said. “At least, not so I’ve heard. I think my brothers would tell me. It doesn’t matter if Jamie shares. There are only 365 days in the year, and there are a lot more people in the world than that. Lots of people have the same birthdays.”

“But it isn’t Jamie’s real birthday,” I said.

“No, it’s not.” Miss Smith turned and bent over so she was looking directly at me. “When I find out your real birthdays, I’ll change your identity cards. Okay? Promise.”

“Okay.” I didn’t mind a temporary lie. “How do you find out?”

Miss Smith’s nostrils narrowed. “Your mother knows. When she answers my letters, she’ll tell us.”

Could be a long time, then. I doubted I’d ever go to school and wear a birthday hat, but still— “Will we have cake for tea on my birthday? On the day you told the man?”

“Yes,” Miss Smith said. A sudden look of sadness washed over her face, then disappeared so quickly that if I hadn’t been looking right at her, I never would have seen it.
Sadness
? I thought.
How did I know that was sadness? And why would Miss Smith be sad?

“That was Becky’s birthday,” Miss Smith said. “It’ll be nice to have a reason to celebrate the day again.”

“That’s a lie,” I said. I wasn’t angry about it, but it was one.

“Oh.” Miss Smith forced a laugh. “It is and it isn’t. It will be hard for me, but I’d like very much to be happy again.”

Stephen White and his colonel invited me to tea. They sent me a proper invitation, written out, by post, and Miss Smith handed it to me without opening it. I stared and stared at the marks on the paper, but I couldn’t make sense of them. Neither could Jamie, no matter how hard he tried. “The writing’s wiggly,” he said. “Not like in books.”

So I had to ask Miss Smith, which made me angry. She read it out—tea, Stephen and the colonel, Saturday, October 7—and all the while I grew angrier and angrier that I couldn’t read the words myself. Miss Smith looked up at me and laughed. “Ada, what a face!” she said. “It’s your own fault. I’m happy to teach you.”

Easy for her to laugh. What if I tried and found out I really couldn’t learn?

“I’ll write back an answer for you,” Miss Smith said. “You want to go, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t want her having to write for me.

“Why not? You’ll have something nice to eat, I’m sure, and Stephen’s your friend. The colonel’s an old man, but he’s kind and has some interesting stories.”