Women at War

by Jan Casey

  Nestled in between a square of four trees was a shelter built from long strips of tree bark and hung with old blankets and rugs. Three men, who looked like brothers, were trying to make the structure more sound. Gisela introduced them to her as her father and uncles and Annie to them as her friend. That made her heart feel heavy.

  ‘Where is your Mutti and your Tanten?’ Annie asked.

  Gisela shook her head and started to cry. Still trying to avoid touching the poor mite, Annie squatted down to her level and said, ‘What do you want me to do for you, Gisela?’ knowing full well there was very little within her power that could help.

  ‘Can you ask Herr Doctor to give me something to make my head stop itching?’ Gisela asked.

  Of all the things she could have requested – her mum, books, a dress, food, a clean bed, shoes, all she could think about was having her most uncomfortable present dilemma soothed.

  ‘Herr Doctor is dead,’ Annie told her in a gentle voice. ‘And all of his medicines have been lost in the air raid. But I will ask Frau Wilhelm if she knows of a cure for you. Alright?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Gisela said and looked down at the dirt covering her thin, summer sandals.

  ‘I will come back,’ Annie promised, raising her hand in farewell.

  She hadn’t gone far when she was startled by a rustle behind her. Ever wary that Dietmar might be lurking and waiting to grab her again, she gasped, turned and saw Gisela’s father. They both stood stock-still and sized each other up; Annie could see the pulse under the whiskers on the side of his neck hammering like a machine gun and she could feel that hers was a match for his. Through the slant of her eye, she looked around for a stick or branch she could use as a weapon.

  Then, in a hoarse voice he said, ‘Take her. Please.’

  Annie felt shocked and appalled. ‘I cannot do that,’ she said in an uncompromising voice. ‘She is your daughter.’

  ‘I have nothing to give her. She will die. I give her to you.’

  ‘But… But…’ Annie could not find the words to express her dismay. ‘I have very little, either, and she needs to be with you.’

  ‘What she needs is the chance to have a life. I give you my daughter so she can live.’

  He must have been able to see that she was horrified, but took a step closer and said, ‘I am begging you.’ There were tears in his eyes.

  Annie refused to continue the discussion, so started to run backwards, stumbled, turned from him and crashing through the forest, made her way home.

  ‘He is mad,’ Frau Wilhelm said. ‘How can we take care of another child when we can barely take care of ourselves? Perhaps you can take her to the Minster and ask the church to look after her?’

  Annie shook her head. ‘Her father could have done that, but he wants her to be with a family.’

  ‘What’s left of a family, you mean,’ Frau Wilhelm said.

  ‘A family nevertheless.’

  Frau Wilhelm sighed and found a fine-toothed comb and said that the best thing for head lice was to pull it through the hair and over the scalp every day. Then they would need to pick out each other’s lice and crack them between their fingernails. Herr Doctor used to give the patient something they could paint on their scalp, but that was gone now with everything else that might have helped.

  The next morning, armed with the comb, Annie made her way back to the forest determined to show Gisela and her father how they could treat each other’s infestation – that and nothing else. But each step of the way she doubted her resolve and felt as though what she was actually doing was condemning the little girl to death. Or worse. If her father and uncles became ill or died, she might latch on to someone dishonourable, like Dietmar who would abuse her or sell her to the Wehrmacht who would ruin her completely. For the rest of her life she would wonder what had happened to Gisela when she abandoned her and not knowing would be torture.

  If she had any indecision left when she arrived at the squalid camp, it disappeared when Gisela ran towards her, grabbed her hand and said, ‘Vati told me I am going to live with you.’

  ‘Where is your Vati?’ Annie asked.

  ‘They have all gone to look for food,’ Gisela said, but Annie could feel her father somewhere close by, watching and waiting. ‘Vati knows I will be gone by the time he gets back.’ She looked up at Annie eagerly.

  This time Annie took her hand and said in a loud voice, ‘Yes, Gisela. You are coming home to live with me, Frau Wilhelm and baby Walti.’

  At home, Annie and Frau Wilhelm scrubbed the little girl, picked over her hair, fed her a small bowl of soup, put her clothes with the rags and, after dressing her in one of Annie’s nightgowns, tucked her up in Oma’s old bed. Annie thought the worry of having another mouth to feed would keep her awake that night, but she slept better than she had done in ages.

  *

  Annie and Frau Wilhelm had been happy to have their house intact when so many others had lost theirs; now they found some comfort in the corner of their house that remained standing. They were reduced to living in one bedroom, part of the sitting room and a corner of the kitchen. They dug a hole in the garden to relieve themselves as the privy was in ruins and they washed when there was a bowlful of water from the taps.

  But it was a miracle they were alive. Annie went over and over the air raid in her mind, tormenting herself with how different it could have been. Frau Wilhelm had been on her way to the Minster when the raid started and she’d picked up Walti and run the remainder of the way with him in her arms. ‘Oh, how funny he thought it was,’ she’d reported. ‘Bouncing along next to my chest, pointing at the planes, laughing at everyone running. And minutes before I had almost turned back for a scarf. Thank goodness I…’ She’d shaken her head in disbelief.

  Annie had been with Gisela in a different woods to forage for food as she hadn’t wanted the little girl to catch sight of her father. But they had heard the planes overhead, a swarm of locusts destroying everything in their path. Smoke had gathered over the city, obscuring the rooftops so they had no inkling of what was being destroyed underneath. Even from that distance, the noise had been terrifying and they had cowered and covered their ears. It must have stirred up a memory in Gisela’s mind about her mum dying in the last raid, because she had clung to Annie’s skirt and cried for her mother. Annie’s first instinct had been to run back to Ulm to find Frau Wilhelm and Walti, but she’d steeled herself to think logically and stay where they were. Frau Wilhelm would protect little Walti. Her heart told her she would put his life before her own.

  As soon as she’d thought the danger had passed, she’d grabbed Gisela’s hand and dragged her along as she ran towards home. Crowds had appeared from the woods all going in the same direction.

  Streets that had been strewn with detritus from the last raid were now completely inaccessible. People with glazed eyes were wandering as if they had suddenly been planted in a place they had no recollection of seeing before. An old man, his vest in tatters, had lurched towards them and they’d scooted around him, only to see his ear hanging by a thread. A woman in a stained apron, with nothing on her feet, dragged one body after another from a bottomless heap. Against the remains of a wall, a man had sat slumped, his leg gone below the knee. But they hadn’t stopped; they had to find Frau Wilhelm and Walti.

  The pile of rubble that had been their house hardly registered as Annie took one look at it and refused to believe her beloved son and mother-in-law were inside. She and Gisela had held on tight to each other and, blocking out the stinging from their torn, bleeding feet, flown to the Minster. There, hunkering in the corner of a pew, they’d found a trembling Frau Wilhelm cradling Walti on her lap. Relief had flooded through Annie and she sank onto the kneeler in front of them, slowly and deliberately. Candles shuddering in waves of aftershock cast shadows on the walls, the boarded windows, their hollowed faces. Gisela had put her arm around Annie’s neck and with her other hand, stroked first Frau Wilhelm’s arm, then Walti’s.

  * />
  If she had only heard it the once she would not have been convinced, but it was repeated by so many different people she knew it must be true. Annie was out with Gisela and Walti scavenging for materials to use to breach their bombed house, when a woman joined them on their heap of bricks, clawed at her arm and said, ‘He is dead. It’s the truth.’

  Annie’s initial thought was that the woman had gone insane, but in a gentle tone said, ‘Who is dead?’

  Then it was the woman’s turn to look at Annie as if she was demented. ‘Hitler.’ She nodded and closed her eyes when she said his name. ‘Haven’t you heard?’

  ‘Let’s leave our pile here and collect it on the way back,’ Annie said to Gisela. ‘Come and hold Walti’s hand.’

  She thought it best to go to the Minster and ask someone there if what the woman had told her was truth or rumour. But on the way she heard others shouting out the same information to each other. One man told another he’d heard it on the wireless. A crowd was dancing what looked like an impromptu hokey cokey. Rags were unfurled and waved out of what was left of windows. Then she allowed herself to believe it was true. A smile took over her face and her heart somersaulted. Taking the children, she raced for home. Without making a sound, the words played across her lips over and over again until she threw herself into the house and shouted to Frau Wilhelm, ‘Hitler is dead! It’s the truth.’

  Later that evening, Annie and Frau Wilhelm were cleaning the last few bits of serviceable crockery as best they could and stacking them on the coffee table that was now put to use in the kitchen. It had lost a leg in the bombing, but Annie and Gisela had fashioned a new one out of a tree branch and it was less wobbly than they thought it would be. Walti had tried to help, but they had to keep a close eye on him to make sure he stayed safe. The little fellow loved Gisela and followed her around saying something that sounded like, ‘Gisela, Gisela. Walti wants.’

  Gisela was never impatient with him, but treated him with fondness as if she were his big sister, which she was in every way except by blood. One, two, three she counted each spoonful she fed him and encouraged him to repeat the numbers after her – which he did in a little sing-song lisp. And she pointed out colours to him although now there wasn’t much to see except grey.

  ‘Do you think they will come for us?’ Frau Wilhelm asked. ‘Or will they think we colluded with the Nazis and leave us to die?’

  ‘They will come for us,’ Annie said. ‘They will understand we have been innocent civilians.’

  ‘Where do you think they will put us whilst they rebuild?’

  At that moment it hit Annie that she and Frau Wilhelm had never discussed what would happen when the war finished – all they had kept in their sights was what had, for years, been the elusive end. Now it was tantalisingly within reach and their peculiar situation meant they would have to make decisions about the future. Well, Annie had decided on her options but she supposed the time had come to share them with Frau Wilhelm.

  When they were sitting with their mending, Annie broached the subject and told her mother-in-law that she had been thinking about her earlier question. ‘I do not know where they will want to send us during the clean-up,’ she said, keeping her eyes on her stitches. ‘But I will stay in this shell of a house until Fred comes back. Because he will not know where to look for me otherwise.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Frau Wilhelm nodded and Annie was glad she took Fred coming back as a given, as did she.

  ‘Then he will want to go back to England to his Viola.’

  ‘That would be the best thing for him to do.’

  ‘And I will go with him.’ Annie put down her sewing and looked at Frau Wilhelm’s drained, gaunt face, tiny lines feathering out from her lips and eyes; unruly, greying eyebrows; a chipped, brown front tooth. But before she could find any words, Annie told her that she would be applying for her and Gisela to go with them. ‘Can you bear to leave and start over again in England?’ Annie asked. ‘I cannot imagine life without you.’

  Frau Wilhelm’s hands quivered when she reached for Annie’s and for an instant she was as she had been, before the war began and took its toll on all of them. The cloudy film lifted from her eyes and she smoothed her hair with her fingers. ‘I told you once upon a time,’ she said, ‘that I love having adventures and that has not changed.’ She sighed in a manner that could almost be described as contented. Then they both picked up their mending again, stopping periodically to exchange a grin.

  *

  There was a soft knock at the door, followed by a pounding. Frau Wilhelm and Annie exchanged a look, trying to convey their anxiety to each other without passing it onto Gisela who was up late waiting for her longer hair to dry.

  ‘Horst?’ Frau Wilhelm mouthed.

  Annie shrugged. Part of her longed to see him if only for a few minutes to let him know she was proud of him and so grateful that he rescued her from Dietmar. But a shiver crept up her spine when she wondered what he might want now. So many Wehrmacht soldiers were wandering the streets, wraithlike and aimless, looking for homes that had been flattened and families that no longer existed. She felt nauseous and wondered what she’d say or do if Horst and his comrades forced their way into the house and confiscated it for themselves.

  Gisela and Frau Wilhelm stared at her, looking for guidance and reassurance. ‘I will go,’ she said and mumbled something about someone losing their bearings and wanting directions.

  The pounding came again followed by a deep voice. It was Horst, calling her name. ‘Annie, Annie. Open the door.’

  She pretended to fumble with the broken furniture they used for security. ‘Horst,’ she said. ‘Are you on your own?’

  ‘Annie,’ he commanded. ‘Do as I say. Now. I must see you.’ And then in a lower voice he said, ‘I mean you no harm.’

  Pulling open what was left of the door, Annie was taken aback to see nothing outside but the black night. This was not the time to be playing schoolboy pranks, she thought. Then she could see that Horst was standing like a statue at the end of the path. He moved, jabbed his finger twice at the ground in front of her, turned up his collar and made to hulk off into the shadows.

  ‘Horst, wait,’ she said as she bent down to what looked like a pile of rags on the ground. But the bundle shuddered and she plucked open what was left of a brown, ripped, muddy coat and there was Fred, her brother, on the verge of drawing his last breath.

  Disbelief, dread and elation hit her at once. ‘Frau Wilhelm. Gisela,’ she screamed. ‘Help us!’

  As they were lifting Fred’s poor, skeletal body into the house, Annie caught sight of Horst’s shadow slinking away. ‘Horst,’ she called out. ‘Twice you have done the right thing for us. I will never forget that. Or you.’

  He stopped for a moment and touched his hand to the brim of his cap, then he was gone.

  Fred was so diminished and frail that he took up a fraction of the space in Annie’s small bed. There were fresh wounds and old scars all over his body and something was very wrong with his left arm – it hung at an angle and he winced whenever it was moved by accident or out of necessity. Try as they might to get him to eat, he could not drink much nettle soup and gagged after three small mouthfuls. But that seemed enough to sustain him because his breathing became steadier and before he closed his eyes to sleep he whispered, ‘Annie.’ It was the sweetest sound she had ever heard.

  Annie stayed awake all night, staring at the brother who she told herself she had helped to keep alive with hope. Dawn broke pink and mauve and blue above their ruined city, and still she could not take her eyes from him.

  *

  By the end of May, Fred was well enough to come downstairs and sit, upright, in a cushioned chair. Walti loved him and took every opportunity to sit on his lap and pretend that his uncle’s whiskers scratched the tender skin on his palms. Gisela, shy at first, began to join in the games they played.

  Annie left them to it and went out for food but came back with chewing gum and stockings.
She tore open the packaging and told them about the American soldiers in their huge tanks and jeeps, throwing out treats to anyone who could catch. On the verge of hysteria, they laughed with the relief that came from knowing they had lived through the worst and that help was close enough to touch.

  26 July 1945

  I have dreamed about writing these words so many times, but now they are a reality. We are going home.

  17

  September 1945

  Viola spent months battling with the dilemma of whether to go back to London or the Cotswolds or to settle in Sorn. Lillian, David, Mum, Dad and George all got in on the act of convincing her to return, telling her that she would be better off close to family and friends who would help her and Freddie.

  She listed the pros and cons, considering each point in turn. For Freddie to be near her grandparents, uncle and two of her dearest friends would be good for the little girl and she deserved to get to know them and for them to spoil, advise, scold, feed and watch over her. And for Viola to have the comfort of knowing her family was close by, after yearning for them for so long, created a pull so strong that she could almost feel her heartstrings tauten to breaking point.

  Certainly there would be better prospects for her and for Freddie in England. She could go back to work there; here there was not much hope of that other than a few hours in the post office or behind the bar in the pub. In Sorn, there was one school for all the children up to leavers’ age; in London she would have the choice of a number of good establishments. And, as he had relented with such magnanimity, Dad would no doubt help with a private school like the one she had benefitted from.

  But there were other things that, at this moment in time, seemed more important. It was difficult to list them as she found it almost impossible to shape her feelings into words. When she walked through muddy lanes and around harvested fields holding Freddie’s hand, avoiding as best she could the all-pervasive sheep, she sometimes thought she had made material her vague thoughts, but then they would slip away again like the wispy threads of mist that so often hung over the landscape.