The War That Saved My Life

by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

  I put the marriage certificate and the newspaper clipping back in the drawer, but stuffed the birth certificates into my jodhpur pocket, ready for the morning.

  Whoop-WHOOP. Whoop-WHOOP. Whoop-WHOOP.

  The sound came from the open window. Louder and louder.

  An air raid.

  I didn’t know where the shelter was.

  I didn’t have crutches. I hadn’t walked far on my bad foot for a long, long time.

  Jamie grabbed my hand in panic. The siren’s wail grew louder. “Come on!” I said.

  “Where?”

  I pretended I knew. “Down the stairs!” People were hurrying out of the flats, rushing down with bedding in their arms. I couldn’t slide down the stairs, not in the crowd, so I clutched the rail with both hands and went as fast as I could while people pushed past me. Jamie held on to my shirt, trembling. The siren began to wind down, its noise replaced by far-off blasts.

  Bombs.

  Out in the dark street, I couldn’t see where to go. I could hear people, but they seemed to be moving in all directions. Shouts echoed between the buildings. I grabbed Jamie’s hand and turned at random, moving as fast as I could. An open doorway, a stair going down—anything—

  A bomb exploded overhead. The streets rang with the sound of shattering glass. Far in front of us, toward the docks, the sky began to glow red. Fire. The docks were on fire.

  A building behind us exploded. The shock wave threw us into the street. My ears felt like they’d exploded too. Bricks rained down, and pieces of glass and rubble. I put my arms over Jamie’s head.He looked like he was screaming, but I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t hear anything.

  I scrambled to my feet, pulling him with me. There in front of us was an open door. Steps leading down. A shelter. Thank God.

  Strangers hauled us inside. Down the stairs to a basement room full of people, hot and damp. Concerned faces, lips moving, saying things I couldn’t hear. Hands holding us up, cradling us, offering us tea. Wiping blood from Jamie’s face. Wiping my face as well.

  People made room for us on the concrete floor. Someone wrapped a blanket around us. I hung on to Jamie. I would never let go of him, I thought. Never.

  Eventually we slept. In the morning an air raid warden roused us all. “The fires are getting closer,” he said. “We’ve got to clear everyone out.”

  I sat up. The docks had been on fire. But they were a long way off. Weren’t they?

  It wasn’t until the man answered me, saying, “All sorts of stuff is on fire, miss. The water mains are broken and they’re having a time getting the blazes out,” that I realized I had spoken. Then I realized I could hear. My ears still rang, but they were working again.

  I shook Jamie. He emerged from sleep like a rabbit from a burrow, a tiny bit at a time. “I want to go home,” he said.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  He was gray with dust from head to toe. Smears of red from his bloody nose still ran across his neck. His shirt was torn and he was missing a shoe. I supposed I looked as bad, or worse. “Come on,” I said.

  We emerged onto the ruined street, where gaps showed in the rows of buildings like missing teeth. A pall of dust and smoke choked the sunlight, but the street sparkled as though covered with stars. Glass. All the shattered glass.

  And coming toward us, picking her way through the rubble and debris, a small figure with frizzy blond hair poking out the sides of her hat. She looked like a thin, very determined witch. I stared, disbelieving. My voice dried up in my mouth.

  Not Jamie. “Susan!” he screamed.

  Her head snapped up as if yanked by a string. Her mouth flew open, and then she was running toward us, and Jamie was running, knocking into her, burying his filthy face in her skirt, and then I caught up, and before I knew it her arms were around me too. Her wool cardigan felt scratchy against my face. I put my arms around her, over the top of Jamie’s head. I held on tight.

  “Oh, my dears,” she said. “What a disaster. What a miracle. You’re all right. You’re both all right.”

  A restaurant near the train station was open despite having had its windows blown out. Susan ordered tea, then took us to the loo and tried to clean us up. “Where are your crutches?” she asked me. “Oh, Ada, your poor feet.” Despite my stockings, my feet were covered with cuts. “What happened to your shoes?”

  “Mam took them,” I said. “And then I couldn’t get to the shelter fast enough. Not before the first bombs fell.”

  She pressed her lips together, but didn’t speak. Back in our seats she continued to sit silently. A waitress brought us sandwiches and we began to eat.

  “How did you find us?” Jamie asked.

  “Your mother left her letters behind. One of them had her address on it. But that building—” She paused. “Well, it took a hit, I’m afraid. But some of the people who lived there had come back, were standing by the rubble this morning, and one woman thought she remembered seeing you going down the stairs.”

  Susan made a face. “She remembered passing you, because you were moving so slowly. So I hoped you’d made it to a shelter. I’ve been searching the shelters. I never realized there’d be so many.”

  I had a more important question. “Why? Why did you come for us, after you let us go?”

  Susan stirred her tea with a spoon, round and round, looking thoughtful. The restaurant had sugar on the table, but it was bad manners to take more than a bit. “You’ll find out,” she said at last, “that there are different kinds of truth. It’s true your mother has a right to you. I was thinking of that when I let you go.

  “But then I couldn’t sleep. I sat in the shelter with the wretched cat and I realized that no matter what the rules were, I should have kept you. Because it was also true that you belonged to me. Do you understand that? Can you?”

  I said, “We were coming back to you this morning.”

  She nodded. “Good.”

  A few minutes later she added, “I took the first train I could, yesterday. But it was so slow, and it stopped so many times, and then when the bombing started they wouldn’t keep going into London. We spent most of the night on a siding, and only pulled into the station at dawn.”

  She stopped talking. Jamie had slumped against the table. He was sound asleep.

  Susan held my arm as I limped to the station. She said, “You needed new crutches anyhow. You were getting too tall for your old ones.”

  I nodded, grateful I didn’t have to explain. Someday I’d tell her the whole story, what I’d said to Mam and what she’d said to me, but not now. Maybe not for a long time. It tore a hole through my heart just to think about it.

  The train to Kent was packed. Susan found a seat for me, but Jamie ended up lying down beneath the benches and Susan sat on a soldier’s bag in the aisle. The train moved in fits and starts; I dozed with my head against the wall. When Jamie had to use the toilet, soldiers passed him over their heads to the one at the end of the car, and back again when he was done.

  When we stumbled out of the station at our village, Susan waved toward the taxi parked by the curb. “Get in,” she said to me. “I’m not making you walk another step.”

  We drove through the quiet Sunday morning village and down Susan’s tree-lined drive. Suddenly, she gasped.

  I got out of the taxi, and saw what she saw.

  The house was gone.

  A direct hit from a German bomb.

  What seemed like half the village stood among the rubble, carefully lifting away bricks and stones. They looked up at the taxi.

  They saw us, and it was like when we saw Susan in London all over again, the astonishment on their faces. The fear turning to happiness, to laughter and smiles.

  Susan stood frozen, her hand covering her mouth.

  They rushed toward us—Fred, the vicar, Stephen White. The publican and his wife. The policemen
. Pilots. Lady Thorton threw her arms around Susan and burst into tears.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” she sobbed. “You never go anywhere—why didn’t you let anyone know?”

  A blur of gray fur streaked out of the rubble straight toward Jamie. “Bovril!” he shrieked.

  The pasture lay beyond the rubble. I tried to run, but after three steps Fred caught me. “He’s fine,” he said. “Your pony’s fine. He must have been on the other side of the field when the bomb hit.” Tears were coursing down Fred’s cheeks. “It’s you we were missing,” he gasped. “You we were digging for. The sirens never went off last night. We thought we’d lost all three of you.”

  Jamie bounced over to Susan, grinning. “We’ve been shipwrecked,” he said.

  Susan still looked stunned, but at Jamie’s insistence she stroked Bovril’s head. Then she put her arms around Jamie and looked directly at me. “It’s lucky I went after you,” she said. “The two of you saved my life, you did.”

  I slipped my hand into hers. A strange and unfamiliar feeling ran through me. It felt like the ocean, like sunlight, like horses. Like love. I searched my mind and found the name for it. Joy. “So now we’re even,” I said.

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