The War that Saved My Life (28 page)

Several days later, when Susan and I went into the village, I stopped at the pub to say hello to Daisy. “Oh, dearie,” said her mother, pulling me against her large bosom and kissing the top of my head. “I’ve sent her away,” she said. To Susan she added, “You’d better send yours too.”

The village was evacuating its own children.

Across the channel, Hitler’s army waited, less than thirty miles away. He invaded the Channel Islands, Guernsey and Jersey, which belonged to England.

The Channel Islands surrendered.

Kent, which was the part of England where we were, was the closest bit to the German Army in France. When Hitler invaded, he would land in Kent.

Susan said nothing to Daisy’s mother, but later told Jamie and me not to worry. If our mother wanted us to go somewhere else, that was one thing, but until Susan heard from our mother, we were staying put.

A few days later Lady Thorton came to try to make Jamie and me go. All the other evacuees and nearly all the village children were leaving. The WVS, Lady Thorton said, would find a home for us somewhere safe.

“Their mother won’t know where they are,” Susan protested.

“Of course she will,” Lady Thorton said. “I’ll see that you get their new address, and whenever she contacts you, you can pass it on.”

Susan hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

Lady Thorton’s nose narrowed the way it did when she was angry. “There
will
be an invasion,” she said, in a tightly clipped tone. “German soldiers in our streets, in our homes. War in our streets, quite possibly. The children should be as far away as we can send them. Margaret isn’t coming home this summer. She’s going straight to her new school.”

I felt a pang of regret. I’d been expecting to see Maggie soon.

Lady Thorton said, “You must send them away.”

Beneath the regret came a bigger wave of emotion, coiling up, rising in my gut. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what it meant. I looked out the window and frantically tried to think of Butter.

“. . . things worse than bombs,” Susan was saying.

Lady Thorton shook her head. “War is no time for sentiment.”

“Is it sentiment?” Susan asked. Her voice sounded far away behind the humming in my ears. Susan put a hand on my shoulder. “Look at them,” Susan said. “Look at Ada. If she gets put with the wrong person she’ll go right back to where she was.”

I shook my head, struggling to stay with them, to hear them above my increasing panic. But Lady Thorton didn’t reply. When I risked a glance at her she was staring at Susan with an expression I couldn’t read.

“She isn’t easy,” Susan said, “but I’ll fight for her. I do fight for her. Someone has to.”

At last Lady Thorton spoke. “I see,” she said quietly. “I’m not sure you’re correct, but I see what you’re saying. But the boy—”

“No,” Susan said. “Separating them would kill them both.”

When Lady Thorton had left, Susan sat Jamie and me down beside her on the sofa. She said, “Listen. I am not sending you away.”

She talked a long time after that. I heard nothing beyond the words “not sending you away.”

The wave inside me flattened out. I could breathe again.

“How do you feel about it?” Susan asked me.

How did I feel? I had no idea. I didn’t know the words to explain.
I was choking and now I can breathe.

Susan waited for me to say something. I still felt dizzy, overwhelmed. I swallowed. “I guess I’d rather stay here,” I said.

“Good,” Susan said, “because I’m not giving you a choice.”

Susan had been right that all the green leaves and grass came back in summertime. The weather was glorious. Butter’s pasture reached his knees, and the vegetables in our Victory Garden thrived.

Fred found an old bicycle in one of the sheds at Thorton House and fixed it up for Jamie to ride. School had closed for good, since most of the children were gone, so Jamie came with me every day to help Fred. The former gardener had proved useless around horses, frightened of them and therefore inclined to smack them around. He’d been called up anyhow; Fred was alone again. Lady Thorton had sold two horses, and put down three more who were past being ridden, but that still left a lot of work to do. The best pastures had been taken over for crops. The government sent Land Girls to take the place of the enlisted male farm workers. They moved into the old stable boys’ apartments, but they only helped with the farming on the estate, not the horses. “Horses aren’t important these days,” said Fred.

Jamie was finally permanently and completely banned from the airfield. They were too busy to have him around. Planes took off in bunches all day and all night. We could see them high in the sky, tiny specks patrolling the channel. Watching, waiting, for the invasion that would come.

I struggled to fall asleep in the long, bright summer nights. Jamie and Bovril snored in unison, loudly. One night, when the noise grew too much to bear, I crept downstairs to the slightly darker living room. Susan sat on the sofa, her legs curled beneath her, staring into nothing. It was not the deep sad staring from the year before. “Can’t sleep?” she asked when she saw me.

I shook my head. Susan patted the sofa beside her. I walked across the room and stood in front of her, my good foot and the crutch tips deep in the plush rug, the toes of my bad foot barely brushing the ground.

“Everyone still thinks I should send you away,” Susan said.

I nodded. Lady Thorton said so often. I went to Susan’s WVS meetings sometimes, to help sew, and Lady Thorton made a noise in the back of her throat every time she saw me.

“Part of me does agree,” Susan continued. “I know they mean well. But I also understand now why some of the mothers from London took their evacuated children back so soon. Some things you’ve got to face as a family.”

Hitler was in Paris. He could be in London next week.

“For the longest time,” Susan went on, “I thought I was neglecting you. I didn’t take care of you the way my mother took care of my brothers and me. My mother watched me all the time. She always kept me neatly dressed. She ironed my
shoelaces
. She would never have let you run wild the way I have.

“But now, when I look at you, I think I didn’t do so badly. I think you wouldn’t have liked being raised the way my mother raised me. What do you think, Ada?”

I sat down on the sofa. “I never know,” I said. “When I’m not thinking, everything’s clear in my head, but as soon as I try to look at it I get confused.” I leaned against the back of the sofa.

“I understand,” Susan said. “Sometimes I feel like that too.”

I leaned my head against her, the tiniest bit. She didn’t move. I leaned a little bit more. She put her arm around my shoulders, so that I was nestled against her. As I drifted into sleep I thought I felt her lips brush the top of my head.

The first air raid was worse than Christmas Eve.

It came the second week of July. It had been a hot day, so we had kept the windows wide open and the blackout down. For once I’d fallen into a sound, dreamless sleep.

Whoop-WHOOP! Whoop—WHOOP! Whoop-WHOOP!
The sirens at the airfield wailed, louder and louder. You’d have thought one was in our bedroom. Jamie jumped up, scrambling to keep hold of Bovril, who thrashed and scratched in an effort to get free. I grabbed my crutches. Susan came flying in, her dressing gown flapping. “Hurry, hurry,” she said.

I couldn’t hurry. Going downstairs took time. My hands shook. I wouldn’t be fast enough. I would be bombed.

Jamie ran ahead, but Susan waited for me. “It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t panic.”

Across the living room, out the back door. Jamie ducked into the Anderson shelter and stuffed Bovril into his basket. The cat howled. He sounded like a baby screaming in pain.

I stood at the door of the shelter. I’d never yet gone inside. I hated it, it scared me, it was so much like the cabinet under the sink at home. The one with the roaches. I could never see them or stop them.

“Ada,” Susan said, behind me, “MOVE.”

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go inside. Not into that damp shelter, that smelled exactly like the cabinet. Not into that darkness. Not into that pain.

The siren wailed. Jamie shouted, “Ada, hurry!”

A noise like the plane exploding. Bombs. Real bombs, here in Kent, German bombs everyone feared. Here in the cabinet under the sink—

Susan picked me up and carried me down the stairs. The smell enveloped me. I could feel the cramped cabinet, the roaches. I could hear Mam laughing while I screamed.

I screamed. Another bomb. More screams. From Jamie? From me? How would I know? The memory of the cabinet seemed real, seemed to be happening right at that moment. I could
see
the cabinet, feel myself being shoved inside. Terror enveloped my brain.

Suddenly I felt something tight around me. A blanket, a rough wool blanket. Susan wrapped me in it the way she had on Christmas Eve, tight, round and round. “Shh,” she said. “Shh.” She put her arms around me and laid me on a bench and then half sat on me, squishing me between her backside and the shelter wall. “We’re all here, we’re safe,” she said. She took Jamie onto her lap. “It’s okay, Jamie, she’s just frightened. It’s okay.” Jamie whimpered. “We’re safe,” Susan said. “It’s okay.”

The pressure of the blanket soothed me. Gradually I came back to the shelter, to Jamie and Susan. I stopped screaming. My heart didn’t pound so hard. I breathed the smell of the wool blanket, wet from my tears, instead of the shelter-cabinet dampness.

From outside we heard another blast, farther away, and the
ack-ack
from the antiaircraft guns at the airfield.

“We’re okay,” Susan said wearily. “We’re okay.”