The War that Saved My Life (9 page)

Well, she had me there. I didn’t know what to say, so I stuck my tongue out at her. She bared her teeth in response, like a tiger. Cor.

Meanwhile Miss Smith was saying, “What allowance?”

It turned out she was getting paid for taking us in.
Nineteen shillings a week
! Nearly a whole pound! If she hadn’t been rich before, she was now. I let out a deep breath. I could quit worrying over what my shoe had cost, and how much food we ate. Mam didn’t earn anything like nineteen shillings a week. Jamie and I could eat all we wanted on nineteen shillings a week.

“I can’t believe you didn’t know that,” the iron woman said. “Surely I explained—”

“Oh,” Miss Smith said, with a little laugh, “I wasn’t listening to a word you said.”

As we continued down the street, Jamie subdued but still whimpering, I said, “That’s three pounds sixteen shillings a month, miss. You could take in more of us and get rich.”

Miss Smith scowled. “Thank God I’m not reduced to that.”

All this time, in secret, I’d been messing with Butter. What Miss Smith didn’t know I was doing, she couldn’t forbid.

The Tuesday that she stayed in bed I sat on him for the first time. I coaxed him to stand beside the stone wall, then climbed the wall—wobbling, without my crutches—and threw my bad leg across his back. I grabbed his mane and scrambled, and there I was, astride him. The smell of him rose up around me, and his coat felt warm and prickly against my legs.

He walked forward, his swinging steps moving my hips along with him. I held on to his mane for balance. I tried to steer him, but it didn’t work, and before long he dropped his head to graze. I didn’t mind. I sat on him most of that morning, until I grew hungry myself. Then I slid off him and went in to eat.

The next day my legs felt wobbly. All stretched out in a new way. I didn’t mind that either. It was nothing like as bad as walking.

The stables had a storeroom attached. It had been locked, but Jamie’d found the key under a rock near the door. Inside was all sorts of stuff I guessed had to do with Becky and her horses. I went looking for straps like I’d seen on the pony who raced our train, and found boxes full of leather pieces, some of them buckled together. I pulled them out and examined them.

If you pick up a bridle, which is the leather stuff that goes around the horse’s head, by the wrong piece—by the noseband or the cheek piece, say, instead of the headstall—it doesn’t look like anything that could go onto a horse. It just looks like a mess of leather. So at first I couldn’t make sense of anything. Finally I found a sort of square thing on a shelf. It had pieces of paper covered in writing I couldn’t read, and partway through had a drawing of a horse’s head with the leather pieces fastened round. I studied it and the leather bits until I understood.

That afternoon, when I tried to bridle Butter, I must have been using tack that fit one of Becky’s bigger horses. I got the headpiece over his ears, but the metal bit hung below his chin, and the part that should have wrapped around his head wrapped around his nostrils instead. He snorted and ran off, trailing the reins. It took me half the afternoon to catch him, and that was with Jamie’s help.

On Thursday afternoon, when we got home from shopping, I tried a smaller bridle, and everything worked a treat. Butter came to me when I called. I fed him a piece of dried porridge from my pocket. I put the bridle on him, and it fit. (I didn’t know the words then: bridle, bit, reins, cheek piece or headstall. But I know them now. And the thing with the pieces of paper and the picture of a bridled horse was a book. My first.)

Anyway, there stood Butter, bridled, and me, ready. When I climbed onto him he sighed, and went to put his head down to graze. I yanked on the reins, and he threw his head up, startled. That was better. I kicked him a bit, because I’d discovered this would make him move. He walked forward. I pulled on one side of the reins, and he turned. I pulled on both, and he stopped. It was all easy, I thought. I thumped him hard with my legs, to try to make him run. He threw his head down, bucked, and tossed me over his ears. I landed on my back in the grass.

Jamie ran to me. “Ada! Are you dead?”

I scrambled to my feet. “Not a bit.”

I got back on and Butter tried it again. This time I kept his head up, and he couldn’t buck, not exactly, so he jumped sideways and got me off that way instead. I thunked my head on the ground and went dizzy for a moment.

“You can have a turn,” I said to Jamie.

He shook his head. “I don’t want one. I don’t think he likes it.”

I considered this. Butter might not like it right this moment, when he was used to eating all day long. But he’d like it later—later, when we were running, out in the open, soaring over stone walls. He’d like it then.

I liked it right away. Falling off didn’t scare me. Learning to ride was like learning to walk. It hurt, but I kept on. If Miss Smith wondered why my new blouse was covered in grass stains, or how my new skirt got a rip near the hem, she never said a thing. She just sighed, as usual, and threw the shirt into the wash boiler and mended the rip with a shiny metal thing like a toothpick and a piece of thread.

“Why does she make that noise?” Jamie asked at night. He imitated Miss Smith’s sigh. It wasn’t a noise Mam ever made.

I shrugged. “She doesn’t like us. She didn’t want us, remember?” I tried not to make much work for her, so she wouldn’t force the iron woman to take us back. I washed the dishes, and made Jamie dry. I went along with the baths and the hair-brushing, and I got Jamie to cooperate too. I even made him eat the strange food, though the only way to do that was by threatening him.

“How long do we have to stay here?” he asked.

“Dunno,” I told him. “’Til the end of the war, maybe, or ’til Mam comes to take us back.”

“How long ’til the war ends?”

“Couple weeks, I guess. Maybe longer.”

“I want to go home,” Jamie said.

He said that all the time, and I was tired of hearing it. I turned on him. “Why?” I said, nearly spitting the word. I kept my voice low, but rage I didn’t know I felt gushed out of me. “So you can do anything you want, and I can do nothing at all? So I can’t boss you? So I can be shut up in a room?”

His round eyes filled with tears. “No,” he said, in a whisper. “I don’t care if you boss me. And she probably won’t shut you up, now you’ve got crutches and all.”

“Everybody thinks I’m nasty, back home. They think I’m some kind of monster.”

“They don’t,” Jamie said, but he turned his face away. “They won’t.” He started crying in earnest, muffling his sobs in his pillow. “You’ve got crutches!” he said.

“Crutches don’t change my foot!” I said. “It’s still the same. It still hurts. I’m still the same!”

Jamie said, through sobs, “At home I know the words for things.”

I knew what he meant. I knew how overwhelmed I felt sometimes, going into a shop full of things I’d never seen before. “There’s nothing good at home,” I said. “You were hungry. Remember?”

“No,” said Jamie. “I wasn’t ever hungry. I never was.”

If he wasn’t, it was only because I gave him most of the food. “I was,” I said. “I was hungry, and I was alone, and I was trapped, and right now, no matter what, you have to do what I say. You have to stay here with me. I’m the person who keeps you safe.”

Jamie’s sobs slowed. He looked up at me, his brown eyes still brimming with tears. He rolled over onto his back and I pulled the sheet up to his chin. I patted his skinny shoulder. “Is this safe?” he asked.

It didn’t feel safe. I never felt safe. “Yes,” I said.

“You’re lying. I know you are.” Jamie flopped onto his side, turning his back to me. I lay flat on my back, breathing in the honeysuckle-scented air coming through the open windows. The curtains fluttered against the pale blue walls. I wasn’t hungry. I fell asleep.

The next time we went into town, we saw an enormous poster pasted to the brick wall near the train station. Jamie stopped to stare. “What’s it say?” he asked.

Miss Smith read it aloud, tapping the words with her fingers as she went, “‘Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution, will bring us victory.’”

“That’s stupid,” I said. “It sounds like we’re doing all the work.”

Miss Smith looked at me and laughed. “You’re right,” she said.

“It should be, ‘our courage,’” I said. “
Our
courage,
our
cheerfulness,
our
resolution, will bring us victory.”

“Absolutely,” Miss Smith said. “I’ll write the War Office and suggest a revision.”

I couldn’t tell if she meant it or not. I hated when I didn’t understand her.

“I shouldn’t underestimate you, should I?” Miss Smith went on.

How should I know? I scowled.

“Oh, come on, you cranky child,” she said, touching my shoulder lightly. “You can help me pick out the veg.”

Jamie was tugging on my arm. He pointed across the street, to Stephen White holding on to the arm of a very old man. Actually, I saw, it was the old man holding on to Stephen.

“A friend of yours?” Miss Smith asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s Billy’s brother.”

Miss Smith nodded. “You can go and say hello.”

I felt funny doing it, but I did want to know why Stephen hadn’t gone home with the rest of his family. I made my way across the street.

Stephen saw me. He stopped, and when he did the old man stopped too, turning odd milky eyes toward me.

Stephen gestured toward the crutches. “Good,” he said. “You should have had those before.”

I thought of him carrying me to the station, and my face went hot.

“Who’s this?” barked the old man. “Who’re you talking to? Somebody new?” He was looking straight at me, the old coot.

Stephen cleared his throat. “It’s Ada,” he said, “from our lane. Ada—”

The man said, crossly, “That’s not the way you do a proper introduction. Haven’t I taught you?”

“Yes, sir.” Stephen took a deep breath. “Sir, may I present Miss Ada Smith, from London. Ada, this is Colonel Robert McPherson, British Army, retired. I live with him here.”

The old man stuck one of his hands into the air. “And now you shake my hand, Miss Smith,” he said. “If you’re from the same place the boy’s from, nobody’s taught you proper manners either. You shake my hand, and you say, ‘Nice to meet you, Colonel McPherson.’”

I touched his gnarled dry hand. He snatched my fingers and shook them up and down. “Say, ‘Nice to meet you, Colonel McPherson,’” he ordered.

“Nice to meet you, Colonel McPherson,” I said.

“And it’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Ada Smith. If you’re a friend of Stephen’s, you must come around for tea.” He let go of my hand. I wiped it against my skirt, not because his hand had been dirty—it hadn’t—but because touching a stranger seemed like such an odd thing to do.

Stephen was grinning, as though he found the whole exchange funny.

“How come you didn’t go home?” I asked him.

“Oh,” he said, cutting his eyes toward Colonel McPherson, “Mam thought it better if I stayed here for a while.”

“No she didn’t,” I said. “She said—”

Stephen smacked me on the arm, hard. I glared at him. He nodded his head toward the old man, frowning. “What?” I asked.