‘I expect she’ll cheer up now she has you to order about,’ replied the social worker, at last letting go of my arm.
She smiled at me. Then she ruined it by adding ominously: ‘Do take care that Frau von Arnim isn’t allowed to hurt herself again.’
We had one last visit to the camp office. I was to be the Official Keeper of Documents, and there was a brief argument over my suitability for the job.
‘Miss Adair is perhaps rather, um, perhaps too young?’ said someone. ‘To be entrusted with such responsibility, I mean.’
‘I don’t believe the commander would approve,’ said another. ‘Not if she saw the girl herself.’
‘But she hasn’t seen the girl,’ protested Frau von Arnim, who was ready to leave.
What a stupid argument! I was sure it had nothing to do with my youth and everything to do with my skin colour.
I said, in my best English accent, ‘I should think it will be rather difficult for Frau von Arnim to manage her walking sticks and her papers at the same time.’
In the end I was put properly in charge, with sheepish excuses as the Society of Friends people avoided looking me in the eye. But they apologised by making a bit of a fuss over Frau von Arnim before she left, and me as well, feasting us with scones slathered in jam and butter. ‘There’s no rationing here!’ somebody told me. ‘People on the mainland are envious when they find out how well the detainees eat. But we can’t let it go to waste, can we? And we’re not allowed to send any foodstuffs off the island. You must guzzle as much as you can before you go!’
I studied the documents they’d given me so grudgingly. It said Johanna von Arnim on the old woman’s passport and her ration books and release papers. Hadn’t Nancy Campbell told me her aunt was called Jane Warner now? But everyone in Rushen Camp called her Frau von Arnim. I wasn’t sure how to keep her Germanness quiet, as Mrs Campbell said I should; or even what to call her.
*
The mainland ferry set sail for Liverpool, and I sighed with relief as I unwrapped the sandwiches I’d bought at a kiosk on the pier in Douglas. (Roast beef! I hadn’t tasted beef that wasn’t out of a tin since the war started.) Taxi, rail station, taxi, ferry, loading and unloading everything at each stop, helping Frau von Arnim in and out of vehicles and up and down from platforms – hauling all the travelling cases along with us again, hers full of record albums and mine full of books. There was the gramophone, too. We had to wear the furs; I felt like a trapper. Had Nancy Campbell suspected the fuss? She must have.
But at last I had a chance to breathe, with a long night at sea ahead. We weren’t in a cabin, but the ferry lounge was more comfortable than the train, and Frau von Arnim’s furs were incredibly warm and surprisingly light. I had never worn anything so soft. Johanna von Arnim sat straight and elegant in her own beaver coat and fox stole, with her back to the Isle of Man as we steamed away from it. Her thin powder-white hair peeped out beneath her fur hat, and her watery blue eyes gleamed as if they were wet.
‘Good riddance to that godforsaken place,’ she said abruptly. ‘Tell me, my dear, how does a Jamaican schoolgirl end up traipsing across Britain with a released German detainee?’
I swallowed. I hadn’t yet had to tell anyone about Mummy and Daddy being killed – my landladies were there when it happened, and it was nobody else’s business. Mrs Campbell hadn’t even asked.
‘I needed work,’ I said evasively.
‘No people of your own to go to?’
‘Not here,’ I said.
I bent over my cup of tea.
‘You’re dreadfully young not to have any people,’ said Johanna von Arnim.
I didn’t want to talk about it.
But I’d just make it worse for later if I was mysterious. It wouldn’t be the last time I’d have to tell someone, even if it was the first.
‘My parents were killed by bombs last month,’ I said. ‘In the same week. Not in the same place. My mother, she was called Carrie, Caroline Adair – she – she was riding in the front of a bus that fell into a crater when Balham tube station was bombed. You might have seen the pictures in the papers.’
‘No, we aren’t allowed newspapers,’ the old woman said gently. She cocked her head to favour her left ear, listening carefully over the ferry’s engines. ‘How terrible, and how unhappy you must be! Were you in the accident?’
I shook my head. This I couldn’t talk about – that I hadn’t been along. I hadn’t been there when it happened, I hadn’t been there when Mummy was taken away in the ambulance, I hadn’t been there when she died all alone in the hospital four days later. No one needed to know that. No one could fix that, and I didn’t want anyone to pretend to try.
‘My father, Lenford Adair, was a merchant seaman on a ship that was torpedoed three days after my mother died,’ I said carefully. ‘I didn’t find out until about two weeks later. Poor Daddy! I don’t know if he knew what happened to Mummy. I sent a telegram, but it might not have reached him. I can’t decide if I hope he did know, or if I hope he didn’t.’ I swallowed again. ‘Hundreds of men drowned. He hadn’t been let in the Royal Navy because he wasn’t born in Europe, but the German U-boats don’t seem to care whether it’s a navy or civilian ship they’re sinking—’
I choked on my words, my face and eyes burning.
‘I’m sorry!’ I gasped. ‘I didn’t mean it to sound like anyone who’s German—’
‘It didn’t,’ she said. ‘And the U-boats don’t. Well done, Lenford Adair! Those merchant seamen are just as heroic as the military seamen, even if they’re not in battle. I’m sorry they wouldn’t let your father in the navy. There’s nothing more frustrating than having an open door slammed in your face.’
It reminded me of what the social worker said: There’s nothing worse than knowing nobody wants you.
‘And grief is a burden you can never put down,’ said the old woman. ‘Though it gets easier to hide. I’ve been alone for three years. It doesn’t feel very long.’ She suddenly sounded stubborn. ‘It isn’t very long. It never stops hurting. You learn to bear the pain.’
‘Do you?’ I asked longingly, caught off guard by her intimacy and kindness.
She shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘It depends on where you are and what you’re doing.’
The social worker’s warning nagged in my head. Do keep a careful eye on her, won’t you? Do take care that Frau von Arnim isn’t allowed to hurt herself again.
We’d finished our sandwiches. The old woman drooped and was instantly asleep, snoring lightly against my shoulder.
I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t remember ever being so tired in my life. Johanna von Arnim’s sleek head pressed against me like a sandbag full of concrete. It hadn’t been easy, talking about Mummy and Daddy. I let the tears come quietly and didn’t make a noise. It was comforting to have the old woman’s head lolling heavy and trusting against my shoulder.
I thought it would be impossible for her to steal off and throw herself into the Irish Sea without waking me up, so I gave up trying to keep my own eyes open.
I recognised the drone of German planes even in my sleep. I dreamed I was standing in Balham High Road back in London, staring at the sky. It was blue and empty, and I wasn’t worried about being attacked. I was happy and excited, as if I were going to a party. I could hear the thudding engines all around and I held my breath, longing for the air battle to begin. I couldn’t wait to cheer on the Spitfires and Hurricanes as they cut up the sky with their vapour trails.
Then I remembered what the bombers would do to Mummy, and woke myself with a sob.
The engines were real. The German air force, the Luftwaffe, was bombing the Liverpool docks. The ferry lounge lights had been switched off, but the ship steamed onward, with a kind of grim determination that reminded me of Mrs Campbell on the phone.
I jumped up and peeked beneath the blackout curtains. We hadn’t far to go, but fire lit the low black land. The ship rocked, and I thought of U-boats and torpedoes. We were helpl
ess. Had Daddy felt this way, waiting for his ship to sink? I couldn’t believe it. He must have had a job to do, right up to the instant he was killed.
I thought I would choke to death with wanting to fight back, to join in, to make a difference, to do something.
Johanna von Arnim slept peacefully, snoring gently.
Well, she was my responsibility. Looking after her was my wartime job right now, and it was too bad if it wasn’t very exciting or even very patriotic. I sat down beside her again and sighed. It wouldn’t matter anyway if our ship sank on the way to Liverpool.
But mercifully it didn’t, and by the time we docked the raid was over. I hauled the cases and gramophone on to land as the all-clear sirens hooted. My wartime job was going to keep me fit, whatever else happened.
We spent hours in the city police station getting her registered, and then in the railway station at Liverpool Lime Street queuing to buy our tickets.
‘Identity documents, miss?’ the ticket seller asked, eyeing me suspiciously, when I finally got to the front of the line. I felt conspicuous in the fur coat.
Be polite, Lula, warned Mummy’s calm, comforting voice in my head.
I gave a false, bright smile. ‘Oh – yes, sorry! I haven’t had to show ID to buy a rail ticket before.’ Of course I hadn’t. No one has to. But I dug in my school satchel for my National Registration card anyway.
‘Please step aside so you don’t hold up the queue,’ said the ticket seller coolly.
My heart plummeted as I bit back rising anger. It is hard to stand your ground and politely break rules at the same time. Why hadn’t I parked Frau von Arnim with the luggage instead of shuffling everything along in the queue with us? If we lost our place I’d have to shift it all again—
The old woman reached over me with an official-looking booklet open to a smiling photograph of her own face. The ticket seller nodded and pushed the passport back.
‘Apologies, madam, I didn’t realise you were together.’ He smiled at her over my shoulder.
‘Well, we are,’ said Frau von Arnim. ‘Two singles for Stonehaven.’ She added in a friendly way, ‘We are visiting my niece in Scotland.’
My face burned as the horrid man thumped our tickets with the date stamp. I paid without saying anything.
‘Thank you,’ said the old woman as we turned away. But she might have been talking to me.
Afterwards we sat in the ladies’ waiting room, surrounded by our piles of luggage, until it was time for our train.
‘What did you show that man?’ I asked. I was supposed to help her with her papers, and here was something she’d kept to herself.
The old woman gave a slow, shy smile, as if she were the one who was a bit embarrassed this time. She handed over the booklet and let me look at it.
It was an ordinary British passport, more ordinary than mine, even, because mine says JAMAICA across the front below BRITISH PASSPORT. The smiling photograph pasted inside was definitely a recent picture of the person sitting next to me – at least, it wasn’t taken so long ago you couldn’t tell who it was. But the name read clearly, Jane Warner, British subject by birth.
It also said she was a musician. And it said she was born in Aberdeen, in Scotland, in 1868, ten years later than the date on Johanna von Arnim’s alien registration card.
‘You can call me Jane,’ said the old woman. ‘It’s what I call myself.’
I stared at the lying document, then looked up at the person who called herself Jane. The shy smile was gone. She watched me seriously, trusting me with a secret.
‘How did you get this?’ I demanded. It came out sounding very stern, and her thin shoulders cringed a little. Perhaps she was expecting me to take it away from her. That’s what they’d have done at Rushen Camp if they’d known about it.
‘It was my husband’s,’ she said defiantly. ‘I kept it when he died. It wasn’t until I was already locked up in that miserable place that I started fiddling with it. Of course they knew who I was, but I’ve called myself Jane Warner since the early thirties … And who doesn’t look forward to a better life ahead? I thought I should be ready if the chance arose. It was simple to fix – a razor and ink is all it took. Rubbing the raised stamp on to the photograph was the difficult bit.’
She was more of a rule-breaker than I’d realised.
‘You really ought not to use it,’ I scolded. ‘You could get into terrible trouble.’
She laughed. ‘What do you think they would do? Put me in prison? At my age? Imagine!’
‘It would be worse than the camp,’ I argued.
‘I was in prison for three weeks before I went to the camp, so I know what it would be like,’ she told me.
I gazed at the glamorous smiling face of the elderly, but younger, woman in the fake passport.
‘You don’t need to show identification papers to buy a rail ticket,’ said Jane Warner. ‘That man was a bully. He was bullying you.’
‘I know he was bullying me,’ I said. ‘People often do.’
I’d been saved by an old German woman! Suddenly I laughed too. ‘Stupid bossy official! Aren’t there enough rules already? I wish we could report him for making up extra ones.’
‘Never mind,’ said Jane. ‘There’s no danger to national security, and we have our rail tickets. If he goes on making up extra rules, the stupid bossy official may get himself in trouble without our assistance.’
I gave her back her husband’s doctored passport.
‘This is going to expire next year,’ I pointed out.
‘I’ll worry about that next year,’ said Jane.
I rang Mrs Campbell from the red telephone kiosk by the bus shelter on the Aberdeen road. That was as far as we could get to the village of Windyedge without having to walk, and Mrs Campbell said she’d arranged for someone to come in a car to collect us.
It felt like the end of the earth. I remembered, in a flash, a time when I’d been very small, following a path in the bush behind Granny Adair’s tiny ramshackle house, and suddenly everything seemed strange. I was alone among the giant ferns and banana trees and huge Anansi spiderwebs, and I panicked. I wasn’t lost – I shouldn’t have been afraid. But I was terrified. I turned around and ran screeching back down the path to Granny Adair’s familiar shack and henhouses.
I felt a bit like that now. Only the bus shelter, the telephone kiosk, and a small postbox sunk in a stone wall showed it was the twentieth century. All around were brown winter fields dotted with sheep, a brown hillside wreathed in low clouds, and unhappy blackthorns stooped by sea wind. There weren’t even any signposts. They’d all been taken down to confuse the Germans if they invaded. Smoke rose from the invisible village down the lane, almost a smell of tobacco, because they were burning peat, not coal – just as they’d done for thousands of years. Beyond the smoke stretched the sea, the cold North Sea.
But Mrs Campbell had said there was an aerodrome nearby, for a Royal Air Force bomber squadron. The airmen came to her pub. Perhaps I’d see some of them there, young British men returning from combat over the North Sea.
The longing I felt when I watched an air battle swelled up in my throat again until it was drowning me. What in the world was I going to do here, or learn to do here, to help win the war? Looking after Jane Warner would keep me from starving, but it wasn’t going to lead to anything else, was it?
My chest grew tight with the same kind of panic I’d felt in the green strangeness of the Jamaica bush.
But I couldn’t turn around and run screeching home this time.
Neither one of us could.
Volunteer Ellen McEwen:
There’s always someone telling you to move on if you’re a Traveller. There’s always someone calling you dirty or sly, or slamming a door in your face. Filthy sleekit tinker. That’s what I live with, and not just me, but all my family too. Then the war came along and gave me a chance to be someone different.
It wasn’t that folk changed the way they felt about us, mind. It wasn�
��t some la-di-da virtuous ‘fighting a common enemy’ rubbish. It was just that once I was in uniform, folk couldn’t tell where I’d come from.
The war began when I was eighteen, and my twin brother and I joined up at the same time early in 1940. Euan went for a soldier and was sent to France, but a lass like me wasn’t going to have to shoot at people. I became a driver for the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service. I was proud to do it, and I had steady wages I could share with my mam and dad if they told me a post office to send it to.
When I finished the training course and was assigned to be the driver for an RAF aerodrome, no one at my new RAF base had the least idea where I’d come from. Scotland, aye, that was clear, but the English erks and airmen didn’t know I was a Traveller. I became a gadgy dilly like the other girls, living under a roof and wearing a uniform, and no one but me kent I’d rather be sleeping in a camp tent.
And I kept quiet about it.
At first it wasn’t on purpose. But when I realised folk weren’t bothered about me, I was careful not to let them know. A fresh start. No need to stir up trouble, aye? There was no women’s barracks at RAF Windyedge so I was billeted at the Limehouse, Nancy Campbell’s pub in the village, and she didn’t bat an eyelash over me staying there. She was just the crabbit sort who wouldn’t take well to a fiery-haired, long-legged Scots Traveller lass staying under her roof, but she tolerated me well enough. It was grand being tolerated instead of shunned.
Better than that, at the airfield and in the pub, it was grand being liked by the RAF lads and trusted by their commanders. It’s true that Jamie Stuart knew who I was. We were both at RAF Windyedge late in the summer of 1940. But he was an old friend and didn’t give my game away. He had his own posh family that he tried to keep quiet about, being the laird’s son educated at Eton and all that. My mam and dad used to camp on his grandad’s land.
We were lucky to be close by, and I missed him when 648 Squadron went up to Shetland – I worried about him the way I worried about my own twin brother.
The Enigma Game Page 3
