The War that Saved My Life (27 page)

The Local Defence drilled with broomsticks because they didn’t have rifles. Stephen said the colonel had donated his guns from when he fought the Boer War. They were fifty years old and full of rust. “Useless,” Stephen said. “But it made him feel better.”

We had to queue for groceries every day now. Meat was on ration and a lot of other things were hard to find. Onions were so scarce they might as well have been solid gold. No one had realized that all England’s onions were imported until they couldn’t be imported anymore, and onions took a long time to grow from seed.

In the middle of May, Hitler invaded France. The British Army had over 370,000 soldiers stationed there. They fought, and the French fought, but the Germans pushed them back and back. Then came June, and Dunkirk. Later, people called it a miracle, but in our village it felt like a disaster.

We woke to a vicious pounding on the door. Jamie clutched me. “Invasion?” he whispered.

My heart thumped in my ears. Should we hide? I was ready to push Jamie under the bed when I heard Lady Thorton yell from downstairs, “Susan! Get up, we need you! We need everyone!”

While Susan flung on her WVS uniform, I clambered down the stairs. Lady Thorton stood in the open doorway, breathing hard as though she’d been running even though her automobile was waiting in the drive. “What’s happened?” I asked.

“A ship just docked in the village,” Lady Thorton said. “Full of soldiers. From Dunkirk. And they were strafed on their way across the channel.” She yelled up the stairs. “Susan!”

“Coming!” Susan hustled down, stuffing her hair beneath her WVS cap. She paused in the doorway and put her hand on my cheek. “You’ll be okay?” she asked. “Both of you?”

“Yes,” I said. I put my arm around Jamie and we watched Lady Thorton reverse her car in a whirl of dust. “It’s not an invasion,” I said.

Jamie looked up at me. “Strafed,” he said.

Strafed meant shot at from above, by an airplane. I took a deep breath. “Yes,” I said.

We’d listened with dread to the radio the night before. The British Army had retreated so far that it was now trapped against the ocean, near a French port called Dunkirk. The water was so shallow near the beach there that the Royal Navy, trying to rescue the soldiers, couldn’t bring big ships close. The man on the radio had asked anyone with a small boat, one that could go close to shore, to loan it to the navy for getting the men away.

I’d seen our village’s fishing boats. They could maybe carry a dozen men. I tried to imagine 370,000 men climbing onto boats a dozen at a time.

It couldn’t happen. There would never be enough boats. If the Germans were strafing them, they would all die.

“I’ll make breakfast,” I said, putting on a cheerful face for Jamie’s sake.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

“I’ll make
sausages
.” This brought a smile.

The sausages tasted odd. War sausages. Mostly oatmeal, I thought but didn’t say. I wondered what sort of meat was actually in them.

We did the dishes and got dressed. We could hear planes taking off from the airfield, one after another. Dozens of planes. We went outside to watch them. They flew out toward the ocean and didn’t come back.

“I want to go talk to the pilots,” Jamie said.

“Not today,” I told him. “They’re busy.”

He nodded. “They’re strafing the Germans.”

We stood watching the planes for a little while. I itched to be useful, like Susan. I knew I could do something.

Jamie looked at me piteously. “We can’t just stay here,” he said.

“No.” Suddenly I knew what we could do. “You’re going to go to Fred’s,” I said. “You’ll help him in my place. I’m going to the village.”

Jamie started to protest, but I cut him off. “I’m a junior WVS member,” I said, making it up on the spot. “Lady Thorton expects me to do my duty, like a soldier. I expect you to do yours.”

Jamie’s eyes widened. He nodded.

“And you’ll stay with Fred until Susan or I come for you,” I said. “He’s to feed you, and if we don’t come tonight you’re to sleep there. Tell him I said so.”

Jamie nodded. “Can I take Butter?”

“Of course.” He rode Butter around the field often enough. I helped him saddle and bridle the pony.

After that I put on my sky-blue dress. I plaited my own hair. I stuffed a pillowcase full of the cloth scraps Susan was supposed to be sewing into bandages, and I took my crutches and set off for town.

I saw the newsreels later. They didn’t upset me, not when I’d already helped Dunkirk soldiers firsthand. But those newsreels showed a lie. In them, the soldiers evacuating Dunkirk looked tired, but happy. Under their tin hats their faces were dirty, but their eyes shone bright. They grinned and waved and gave thumbs-ups to the camera. Stalwart British fighters, heroic and grateful to be home.

Maybe there were soldiers like that somewhere. The ones in our village were shot, dead or dying; others were sick from the long terrible retreat, the days without food or water.

The men on that first ship who could walk had carried their severely injured comrades into the town hall, the place where I’d stood on evacuation day, waiting for someone to choose me.

When I got to town I saw a woman in a WVS uniform go inside the hall. I followed, pushing open the door.

I gagged. The smell of blood hung across the room like a heavy iron fog, but worse than that—people don’t tell you, they don’t write about it and they don’t put it in the newsreels—when men are horribly injured, they lose control of their bowels. They mess themselves the way babies do. The stench made my eyes water and my stomach churn.

The whole room was filled with wounded men on stretchers. I saw Dr. Graham working among army medics and the WVS. I saw Lady Thorton, her face streaked with blood. I saw Susan, who looked up and saw me. “Get out of here,” she barked.

Already I could see what some of the women were doing—peeling away the soldiers’ pants and cleaning their naked backsides. They wouldn’t want me helping with that. I nodded to Susan and slipped back outside.

The street was full of less-injured men. Townspeople directed them into the pub, the library, any building with open space. Men stumbled, collapsed, cried. “Miss,” said one, looking up at me. He sat on the curb with a blood-soaked leg held stiff in front of him. “Water?”

I went into the pub. It was full of soldiers and people from the village. If anyone noticed me, they didn’t care. I tossed my crutches and pillowcase behind the bar, found a pitcher and filled it, grabbed a mug, limped to the street, and gave the water to the soldier. He drank until the pitcher was empty.

I went back and forth, carrying water. Eventually the publican’s daughter, who seemed about my age, came out with a heavy bucket. “You stand here with the mug,” she said. “I’ll bring buckets back and forth.”

Soldiers clustered around me, reeking, stinking, filthy, their uniforms crusted with sweat and blood. They drank and drank. Cracked lips, haunted eyes. Another bucket of water, and another. The publican’s daughter brought more mugs, which I dipped into the buckets and passed around. When the flow of men who could still walk ceased—I later learned that if they could, they went on to the train station, and then to an army base north of us—I went into the pub, and tried to help the soldiers there. It was the same with them as in the hall: blood, filth, exhaustion. Daisy—that was the publican’s daughter’s name—and I went down the rows giving out drinks, water first and eventually tea. Back and forth, back and forth down the rows.

It seemed impossible that all these men could come from one ship, even if it had been a big ship. When I said so to Daisy, another villager cut in, “We’re on the third or fourth ship by now. They’re unloading wherever they can dock, and going back for more.”

Sometime after dark Daisy’s mother insisted we rest in the kitchen. She sat us at a long table and pushed plates of food in front of us. “Eat,” she commanded.

Daisy sat unmoving. I was trying to will myself to pick up a fork when I saw something splash onto Daisy’s plate. I looked up. Tears streamed down Daisy’s face.

“None of that,” Daisy’s mother said. “Won’t help any.”

“But they’re dying,” Daisy said.

“No, they’re not. They look awful, but men can look much worse and still live. You’d be surprised. Eat and rest, or I’ll send you both to bed.”

We ate. “You’ve ruined your dress,” Daisy said.

I looked down. My sky-blue dress was covered with dark smudges and smears of grime. “It’s my favorite,” I said.

Daisy nodded. “It’s pretty.”

When we’d rested we went back out and made another round of tea.

One soldier looked up at me, his eyes very bright. “Miss?” he said. “Could you do me a favor, and write a letter for me? My hands feel a little numb.”

“Daisy will,” I said. My handwriting was still so slow and clumsy. I went to fetch Daisy, and some paper and a pen. We came back and the man’s eyes were closed.

He was
dead
.

He died, right there on the floor of the pub. He didn’t even look wounded—he wasn’t bleeding. One of the other soldiers undid his tunic, searching for a heartbeat, and there wasn’t any blood at all. But he was dead. The soldiers found a blanket and pulled it over his head.

I couldn’t breathe. Dead, when he’d just been talking to me. Dead, when he’d wanted to write a letter. A wave of grief washed over me. I started to go away in my head, to somewhere safe, to Butter or Jamie or wherever, but Daisy grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard, and I came back.

“It’s really a war now,” Daisy whispered. I nodded. One of the soldiers called for tea. Daisy and I brought it to him.

Most of the ships that docked at our village the week of the Dunkirk evacuations weren’t as bad off as the first few, but all of them contained at least some badly injured men. The ships arrived at all hours. We went from crisis to crisis; the hall never emptied. The Spitfires from our airfield took off and landed in waves, constantly, day and night, flying out to protect the troopships as much as possible. Meanwhile the entire village fed and tended the soldiers.

Before midnight on that first day, Susan found me at the pub. Daisy’s mother told her what we’d been doing. Reluctantly, Susan allowed me to stay in the village. Daisy’s mother said I could sleep at the pub, with them; the WVS was sleeping in shifts in their headquarters down the street.

“You’re a little girl,” Susan said. “You shouldn’t have to see all this.”

“I’m old enough. I’m helping.” I wanted to tell her about the dead soldier, but I was afraid she’d make me leave.

She gave me a long look. “Yes,” she said. “You are.”

The next morning Susan used the pub’s telephone to call Lady Thorton’s house and speak to Fred and Jamie. And then we carried on. Whenever Daisy or I grew too exhausted to continue, we crept back to the kitchen and slept on the bench by the door. When we woke, we went back to work. Everyone did. It was lucky Jamie was safe with Fred. Lucky we’d put Bovril outside, where he could hunt. Susan and I stayed with the soldiers. It was our turn to fight the war.

In the end, 330,000 British soldiers were saved. Winston Churchill called it England’s “finest hour.” It was hard, listening to him on the radio, safely home with Jamie once again, to think that there had been anything fine about the shiploads of desperate and dying men. But at the same time, I felt different. There was a Before Dunkirk version of me and an After Dunkirk version. The After Dunkirk version was stronger, less afraid. It had been awful, but I hadn’t quit. I had persisted. In battle I had won.