by Helen Peters
What if these nightmares weren’t just dreams, but premonitions?
And every time, I would stuff the questions back into the box.
I had no idea what day it was any more. I lived in a trance-like state, randomly sleeping, waking and dreaming.
Then one day I woke feeling absolutely ravenous. Aunty Rose was thrilled when I walked shakily down the stairs and said I was hungry. She immediately went to work preparing a feast of eggs, fried tomatoes and toast. While she cooked, she filled me in on the progress of the war. The RAF was destroying Hitler’s Luftwaffe every day, she said, in the skies right above us.
“There’ve been some terrific dogfights. Frank’s been beside himself with excitement. We couldn’t believe you slept through it all. I was in a terrible stew the first few times over whether to wake you and make you come to the shelter, but I asked the doctor and he said it was better to let you sleep. In any case, everybody round here ignores the sirens these days. Bert’s been helping with the haymaking, and they all just put their steel helmets on and carry on working. As long as somebody’s holding the horses, that’s all they’re worried about.”
I felt strength flowing back into me with every mouthful of breakfast. The RAF was destroying the Luftwaffe! Perhaps everything would be all right. Perhaps Britain really would win the war and my parents could come to live in England after all.
“Molly’s gone to the village on some errands, and Frank’s in the woods with his friends,” said Aunty Rose. “They’ll be so happy to see you up and about again. They’ve been ever so worried. That Miss Johnson will be pleased to hear you’re better too. She’s been calling in every day to see how you are.”
I was amazed. “Has she?”
“She brought you a letter too. I’ll fetch it in a minute. She said it’s an invitation to tea at Ashcombe House. Molly and Frank too, apparently.” She shot me a curious look. “What have you three done to get yourselves invited to tea at Ashcombe House? I asked those two about it but they wouldn’t say a word.”
“I took Colonel Ferguson some eggs,” I said. “He must have really liked them.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
An Unexpected Meeting
On the following Saturday afternoon, Molly and I found ourselves sitting in the deep leather armchairs on either side of a crackling log fire in Colonel Ferguson’s room. Frank was perched on a stool by the hearth. Miss Johnson was there too, not taking notes this time, but sitting on a dining chair that had been drawn up next to the armchairs. On a little table by the fire was a cake stand filled with mouth-watering biscuits and buns. The colonel and Miss Johnson must have used up all their sugar coupons for this.
“I know it’s not really the weather for a fire,” Colonel Ferguson said, “but Miss Johnson said you’d been in rather a state of shock, Anna, and the best cure for shock that I know of is a good strong cup of tea, plenty of cakes and proper toast made on the fire.”
He went into the inner office and returned with a loaf of bread on a wooden board. He sawed the bread into slices, took a brass fork with a very long handle from a hook by the fireplace, speared a slice of bread on the fork and held it close to the flames. I had never seen toast made on an open fire before and I watched, fascinated, as the bread turned golden. Colonel Ferguson inspected it, pronounced it satisfactory, took it off the fork and turned it around.
“I think you deserve the first slice, Miss Schlesinger,” he said, when the other side was done. He buttered it, put it on a plate and held it out to me. He must have been saving all his butter ration too.
“Thank you,” I said. I put the plate on my lap, aware that nobody else was eating yet.
“Well, don’t be polite, girl. Eat it while it’s hot.”
He stuck another slice of bread on the fork. “Next one’s for you, Miss Dean.”
I took a bite of my toast. It was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten. The creamy saltiness of the butter melting into the crunchy surface of the toast, with its slight hint of wood smoke, and then the soft sponginess of the bread between the crunchy surfaces – it was the taste of paradise.
It wasn’t until we’d finished the wonderful tea that Molly asked the question she’d been wondering about all week.
“Colonel Ferguson, are you going to tell us what’s happened to the man?”
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” called the colonel.
The door opened and Mr Rivers came in. He flashed a broad smile at us. It was the first time I’d seen him properly smile.
“Good afternoon, Anna. How nice to see you again. And you must be Molly and Frank.”
They stood up, and Mr Rivers shook their hands. “Very pleased to meet you,” he said. “I hear you did an excellent job of fooling our man.”
Molly beamed, but Frank went bright red and shifted his eyes to the carpet.
“Don’t look so mortified,” said Mr Rivers. “You did a foolish thing by repeating sensitive information, but you more than made up for it by your actions afterwards.”
Frank glanced at him, as if to check that he meant what he said. He seemed reassured.
“Thank you, sir,” he mumbled.
Colonel Ferguson looked up from his toast. “Miss Dean was wondering what’s happened to Peter Smith since last Saturday.”
Mr Rivers gave Molly a very serious look. “His real name is Gerhard Hoffmann. He was one of the most dangerous and ruthless Nazi spies operating in Britain. He planned to bomb this encampment and then, when he learned that the Prime Minister was coming to inspect the troops, he planned to kill him, too. He would have had no hesitation in killing you, Anna, and frankly I’m amazed that he didn’t. The fact that you managed to stop him from killing both you and the Prime Minister is a testament to your incredible bravery and presence of mind.”
“I wasn’t brave,” I said. “It just happened.”
“No,” said Mr Rivers. “You made it happen. Your courageous actions saved Mr Churchill’s life. The courageous actions of all three of you, in acting as go-betweens for Hoffmann’s coded communications, feeding him false information and playing your parts so perfectly that he didn’t suspect a thing, meant we were able to round up the whole spy ring before they could wreak any of the havoc they intended. Your actions have been exemplary. I only wish we could reward you properly, but, of course, I need hardly remind you that not a word of these events must ever be mentioned to anybody outside this room. That is of the utmost importance.” His eyes met all of ours in turn. “But I think you’ve realised by now the dangers of repeating national secrets.”
“Of course,” said Molly. “But what’s going to happen to the man?”
Mr Rivers’ face was unreadable. “You can leave that to us. Rest assured, he will be doing no more damage.”
There was another knock at the door. The colonel and Mr Rivers exchanged glances.
“Come in,” said the colonel.
A soldier stepped into the room and saluted. “Your guest has arrived, sir.”
“Thank you,” said the colonel.
The soldier left and the colonel turned to us.
“There is somebody here who would like to meet you, Anna. Would you all mind coming with me?”
With puzzled glances at each other, we brushed the crumbs off our laps and followed Colonel Ferguson along miles of wide, carpeted corridors. Mr Rivers brought up the rear.
We were led down a grand sweeping staircase, to what I recognised as the huge entrance hall where Molly and I had first stood almost a year ago. Outside one of the many doors that led off this hall, two armed soldiers stood on guard. They saluted to the colonel, then one of them rapped smartly on the door and we were ushered into a large, elegant drawing room.
“Colonel Ferguson, Mr Stanford Rivers, Miss Anna Schlesinger, Miss Molly Dean and Master Frank Dean,” the soldier announced.
A man got up from a sofa at the other end of the room. The hairs stood up on my arms. Molly gasped and Frank let out a little
squeal.
Walking towards us was Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain. I stared at him, trying to take in the fact that I was face to face with the man whose features I knew so well from countless newspaper pictures. The man the world was relying on to save us from Hitler.
He wore a pin-striped suit with a spotty bow tie, and a gold watch chain looped across his waistcoat. As he looked at us, his serious face, with the deep frown line between his eyebrows, broke into a smile that transformed him from a bulldog to a cheeky schoolboy.
He surveyed us with twinkling eyes. “So,” he said, “which one of you is Anna?”
To hear that voice, so familiar from his amazing speeches on the wireless, gave me goose pimples. I couldn’t speak.
“That’s Anna,” said Molly, gesturing to me. “She followed the man up to the stable loft and knocked his rifle into the yard.”
Mr Churchill fixed his gaze on me and held out his hand. Dazed, I held out mine. He shook it vigorously.
“Anna Schlesinger,” he said. “It is a very great honour to meet you.”
Then he shook Molly and Frank’s hands. “I’ve been told that you acted with great courage and presence of mind. Very well done, both of you. Very well done indeed.”
He turned back to me. “I gather that you came to England as a refugee from the Nazis, Anna?”
“Yes, sir,” I managed to say.
“Then it must have taken even greater reserves of courage for you to face a Nazi spy. You should be extremely proud of yourself.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
Mr Rivers gave us each a hearty handshake before Miss Johnson drove us home. Frank and Molly got into the car first. As I was about to get in, Mr Rivers took a silver card case from his inside jacket pocket, opened it and handed me a little card. On it was printed the name “Stanford Rivers Esq.”, a London address and a telephone number.
“Once you’re twenty-one,” he said, “if you’d like a job, just drop me a line.”
“Twenty-one? But that’s eight years away.”
“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about that,” he said with a completely straight face. “I’m sure you know perfectly well that the Secret Service doesn’t employ children.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Afterwards
I wish that was the end of the story. I wish I could finish it there, in that beautiful drawing room at Ashcombe House, the day we met Winston Churchill and the Secret Service offered me a job.
But it didn’t end there, of course. Life at the Deans’ house carried on, as normally as it could with the war raging in the air all around us. School started again in the autumn, with lots more evacuees from London now that the Germans were bombing the city almost every night. Occasionally I got taunted for being German: some of those children couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe that not all Germans were Nazis. I told Molly to ignore the taunts, but she always leapt to my defence, and there were huge fights in the playground. I kept out of them. There was enough violence in the world without me adding to it.
There was only one time I retaliated. On the first day of the autumn term, Billy Townsend came up to me on the school field.
“I’ve got my eye on you, Anna Schlesinger,” he said in what he clearly hoped was a menacing tone. “Everyone else might be fooled by you, but I’m not. I know you’re really a spy.”
I looked at his freckled schoolboy face and I burst out laughing. After what I’d been through that summer, the idea that Billy Townsend could scare me was hilarious.
Billy flushed bright red. He looked embarrassed and furious. He turned to walk away.
“Maybe I am a spy, Billy,” I called after him. “But if I am, then I’m hardly likely to tell you, am I? And if I’m any good at it, then you’ll never find out whether I am or not, will you?”
Anyway, neither Molly nor I spent much longer at the village school. Miss Marshall managed to persuade Aunty Rose that we should both sit for the scholarship exams at the girls’ grammar school in the nearby town. We were absolutely thrilled when we both won scholarships.
Aunty Rose wasn’t quite so thrilled. She was worried about not being able to afford the books and uniforms.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll write a letter.”
She assumed I was writing to Bloomsbury House, but I had a better idea. I knew the Refugee Children’s Movement didn’t have much money and, in any case, even if they agreed to pay for my uniform, they certainly wouldn’t be able to pay for Molly’s. So I got out the little card Mr Rivers had given me and sat down to write to him.
A few days later I received a cheque in the post, enough to buy uniforms for both of us, plus all the books we would need. Aunty Rose was amazed by the generosity of the Refugee Children’s Movement.
It was about this time that I decided I wanted to become a doctor. I wanted to be able to save lives, to heal people, to be a positive force in the world. It seemed obvious to me that, with so many people determined to destroy life, the destructive people needed to be outnumbered by people who could make things better.
I kept this ambition to myself. I worried that if I told anybody, they would laugh at me, or think I was being big-headed to dare to imagine that I might be able to study medicine at university. But my secret dream was a constant incentive to work hard and make the most of the opportunity I’d been given. And how proud my parents would be!
My first thought every morning and my last thought every evening was of my parents, and what might be happening to them now. When they stopped answering my Red Cross letters, early in 1942, I managed to convince my waking brain that they had gone into hiding and were safe in a friend’s attic or cellar somewhere. My sleeping brain wasn’t convinced though, and there were many nights when I woke from a nightmare drenched in sweat, my heart hammering and a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
In June 1944, Allied troops finally invaded occupied France in the D-Day landings and fought their way across Europe to overthrow the Nazi regime for good. And then came the worst thing of all. As city after city fell to the Allies, the concentration camps were liberated and we finally began to learn the full truth of what the Nazis had done to the Jews.
Reports of unbelievable horrors started coming in. I forced myself to listen and read about it, but I could not allow myself to think my parents might have suffered like that. They must have managed to hide or escape. They must have survived.
I threw myself into my schoolwork. I worked non-stop, so that I had no time to think about anything else. I was in the Sixth Form now. The headmistress took a group of us who were hoping to go to the university on a day trip to Cambridge. For me, it was love at first sight. The ancient colleges with their perfect green lawns; the students on their bicycles, like scholarly crows with their black gowns flapping behind them and their bicycle baskets heaped with books; the beautiful river with the weeping willows trailing their branches in the water: it seemed to me the epitome of culture and civilisation.
From that day forward, my one ambition was to win a scholarship to study medicine at this magical place. And, unlike the desperate hope that my parents had survived the war, this was an ambition I had some control over.
After the Germans finally surrendered, in May 1945, we wrote to every organisation that might have information, but they had no news of my parents. We waited and waited for news. I pestered Bloomsbury House, but their enquiries produced no results. I wrote to our old neighbours and friends in Germany, everyone whose address I could remember. I received no replies.
And then, one day in January 1946, a letter arrived from Switzerland. It was from my Uncle Paul. He told me that both my parents had died in Auschwitz concentration camp, my father in 1943 and my mother just before the end of the war.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Back to the Present
Tears filled my grandmother’s eyes. She pulled a tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan and dabbed them away.
“I’m sorry, Da
niel,” she said. “It brought it all back.”
I leaned across and squeezed her hand. Mum had told me that Granny’s parents died in the war, but hearing it from her, and knowing everything else that had happened, was still a shock.
She smiled at me through her tears.
“I think I might need a little sleep now. Do you mind, darling? Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you anything else you want to know.”
When I went back the next day, Granny was her usual cheerful self again. She gave me a big hug and took me out to the sunny garden, where she had already set the teapot and a huge plate of biscuits on the table. The framed black-and-white photo of her parents was there too.
“It’s all such a long time ago now,” she said, once she had poured the tea and settled herself in her chair. “But it’s funny. The older I get, the more I find myself thinking about my childhood. It seems more and more important, somehow. Everything that’s happened in my life has been shaped by those first twelve years. I think about my parents every single day.”
She glanced at the photo, still in amazingly good condition considering it was almost eighty years old.
“That picture and their letters are all I have of them. They’re my most treasured possessions.” She smiled at me. “I talk to them every day, you know. I did that during the war and I never lost the habit.”
“Can I ask you something?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Your Uncle Paul – what happened to him after the war? Did you see him again?”
