The War that Saved My Life (20 page)

I wanted Mam to be like Susan.

I didn’t really trust Susan not to be like Mam.

Susan took us back to see Dr. Graham. “I can’t believe it’s the same children,” he said. Jamie was two inches taller, and I was three. We were heavier too, and I’d grown strong from riding and helping Fred. With my crutches I could walk for ages without getting tired. We didn’t have impetigo, or lice, or scabs on our legs, or anything. We were the picture of health, he said. Then he took my bad foot and wriggled it. “Still nothing?” he asked Susan.

She shook her head. “I’ve invited her to visit for Christmas,” she said. “If she comes, I hope to convince her.”

“Who?” asked Jamie.

“Never you mind,” Susan replied.

I was hardly paying attention. My mind always wandered into its own corner when strangers touched me. Susan tapped my shoulder. “Does this hurt?” she asked.

I shook my head. My foot hurt, it always did, but Dr. Graham wiggling it didn’t make it hurt worse. I just didn’t like it.

“If perhaps you could do this, every day,” he said, twisting my foot as though unwringing a cloth, as though he could make it look more normal, “if she could gain some flexibility, that would only be a help for later on.”

“Special shoes,” I said, my mind coming back to me. “Fred said clubfoot horses had special shoes.”

Dr. Graham let go of my foot. “That won’t be enough at this stage,” he said. “I’m convinced you’ll require surgical intervention.”

“Oh,” I said, not having any idea what he meant.

“Still,” he said, “massage might help, and certainly can do no harm.”

It turned out he meant Miss Smith was going to rub and tug at my foot every night. We’d already switched to reading
Swiss Family Robinson
in the blacked-out living room after dinner, snug by the coal fire that didn’t quite heat our bedrooms upstairs. Now Susan sat on one edge of the sofa, nearest the lamp, while I sat on the other and stretched my feet onto her lap. Jamie and his cat lay by the fire on the rug.

“Your foot is so cold,” Susan said, the first evening. “Doesn’t it feel cold?”

I nodded. We were still keeping it bandaged, but the bandage tended to get damp and my foot was nearly always freezing. “I don’t mind,” I said. “When it gets numb I can’t feel it.”

Susan looked at me, puzzled.

I said, “When it gets numb it doesn’t hurt.”

She winced. “You could get frostbite,” she said. “That wouldn’t be good for you. We need a better plan.” In typical Susan fashion she set about making one. First she took one of her own thick wool stockings, which were bigger than mine and easier to slide over my inflexible ankle. Then she messed around with an old pair of slippers and a needle and thread, and pretty soon I had a sort of house shoe, with a leather bottom and knit top. It didn’t keep my foot completely dry, but it helped a lot. “Hmmm,” Susan said, studying the shoe. “We’ll keep working.”

She had her sewing machine going all the time now, three or four hours a day. She made bed jackets for soldiers from cloth the WVS gave her. She made a coat for Jamie out of an old woolen coat she said had been Becky’s. She went through a pile of old clothes and ripped them apart at the seams, then washed and pressed the cloth pieces and cut and sewed them into different things entirely. “The government calls it Make Do and Mend,” Susan said. “I call it how I was raised. My mother was an excellent manager.”

“Does your mother hate you?” I asked.

Her face clouded. “No. She’s dead, remember?”

“Did she hate you when she was alive?”

“I hope not,” Susan said.

“But you said your father doesn’t like you.”

“No. He thinks my going to university was a bad idea.”

“Did your mother think that?”

“I don’t know,” Susan said. “She always did whatever my father wanted.” She stopped pinning pieces of cloth together. “It wasn’t a good thing,” she said. “It made her unhappy, but she did it anyway.”

“But you didn’t do what your father wanted,” I said.

“It’s complicated,” Susan said. “At first he was pleased when I won a place at Oxford. Only later he said he didn’t like the way it changed me. He thought all women should get married and I didn’t do that, and—it’s complicated. Only I’m not sorry I made the choices I did. If I had it to do over I’d make them again.”

Susan made Jamie a pair of nice shorts to wear to church out of an old tweed skirt that had once been Becky’s. She recut the jacket that had gone with the skirt and turned it into a short heavy coat I could wear when I was riding.

Since the day I broke Susan’s sewing machine I’d refused to touch it, but Susan started to teach me how to sew by hand. She said it was better to learn that way first anyhow. She showed me how to sew on buttons, and I sewed the buttons onto all the bed jackets she made, and my jacket, and the flap on Jamie’s shorts.

At the WVS meeting, she told the other women that I had helped her. She said so, when she came home.

One day she rummaged around in her bedroom and came out with an armful of wool yarn. She got out wooden sticks. She looped the yarn around the sticks and pretty soon had made warm hats for Jamie and me, and mufflers, and mittens to keep our hands warm.

My mittens looked like they had two thumbs apiece. Susan showed me how one thumb-part went over my thumb, and the other went over my littlest finger. She had taken very thin scraps of leather and sewed them across the palms. “They’re riding mittens,” she said, watching my face. “See?”

I saw. When I’d first started riding Butter I’d held the reins in my fists, but Fred insisted I do it the proper way, threading them through my third and fourth fingers and out over my thumb. In these mittens I could hold the reins right, and the leather strips would keep the yarn from wearing away.

“I made them up,” Susan said. “They were all my own idea. Do you like them?”

It was one of those times when I knew the answer she wanted from me, but didn’t want to give it. “They’re okay,” I said, and then, relenting a little, “Thank you.”

“Sourpuss,” she said, laughing. “Would it kill you to be grateful?”

Maybe. Who knew?

The vicar came over on a Saturday with a gang of boys and built an Anderson shelter in the back garden for us. Anderson shelters were little tin huts that were supposed to be safe from bombs. Ours didn’t look safe. It looked small, and dark, and flimsy. The bottom half of it was buried in the ground, and you had to go down three steps to open the little door. Inside, there was just room for two long benches, facing each other.

Susan said we wouldn’t have been able to dig the hole ourselves, not if we worked all week on it. She took drinks out to the vicar, and said so. The vicar, sweating in his shirt sleeves, said it was his pleasure. They’d been putting up Anderson shelters all over the village. It was good work for the boys.

Some of the boys were evacuees and some weren’t. One was Stephen White.

He grinned and rested his shovel when I went over to him. “So you’re not busy every day?” he asked.

“I am busy,” I said. “I ride. I help Fred Grimes. I do things.”

“I just meant, you said you were too busy to come to tea.”

He used a dirty hand to push his hair away from his face, and it left a smear of mud on his cheek. Still, like me, he looked better than he had in London. His clothes were neat and clean, and he was taller.

Something about his grin made me feel I could trust him. “I wouldn’t know what to do at tea,” I said.

He shrugged. “Sure you do. Bet you have tea every night.”

“But that colonel—”

“He’s an old ducks, he is. You’d like him once you got to know him.”

“How come you didn’t go home with the rest of your family?” I’d been wanting to ask for ages.

Stephen looked uncomfortable. “The colonel’s mostly blind,” he said. “You’ve seen him. And he’s got no family, and when I first got here he was really feeble. A bunch of the food he’d been eating had gone bad, only he’s lost his sense of taste too, so he couldn’t tell, and so it made him sick, and his house was just awful. Bugs everywhere, and rats, and he couldn’t fix any of it.

“I cleaned the place up. The vicar’s wife taught me to cook, just easy things, and she brings us food sometimes too. She’s nice. And I read to the colonel, and he likes that. He’s got piles of books.” Stephen picked his shovel back up and started heaving dirt onto the top of the shelter. “Mum’s after me to come home. I’d like to go. I miss home, I do, but if I leave, the colonel’ll die. He really will. He’s got no one.”

Stephen looked around the muddy garden, at the house and stable and Butter’s field. “Pretty nice place here.”

“Yes.”

“Your mam ain’t come for you?”

“No. She doesn’t want us.”

He nodded. “Just as well. She shouldn’t’ve shut you up like she did.”

I shivered as the wind whipped higher. “It was because of my foot.”

Stephen shook his head. “Foot’s the same, isn’t it?” he said. “And you’re not shut up now. Come to tea sometime. The colonel likes having visitors.”

When everyone had gone I stood just outside the door of the shelter. I didn’t like it. It was dark and damp and cold; it smelled like Mam’s cupboard beneath the sink. Goose bumps rose on my arms, and my stomach churned. I didn’t go inside.