Bombs on Aunt Dainty

by Judith Kerr

  “They’ll be smashed to pieces!” Cousin Otto was saying triumphantly. “It’s just what the English have been waiting for. They’ll go in there and smash the Germans to smithereens. The French will help, of course,” he added as an afterthought. Cousin Otto had an infinite admiration for England. To be English to him was to be perfect, and he was quite upset when Papa disagreed with him.

  “I don’t trust Chamberlain,” said Papa. “I don’t believe the English are ready for battle.”

  “Aha!” cried Cousin Otto. “But you don’t understand them. Just because a man like Chamberlain appears not to be doing anything, doesn’t mean that he’s not organising it all secretly. That is the British understatement. No drama or fuss – and he’s fooled the Germans completely.”

  “He seems also to have fooled the British Parliament,” said Papa. “I understand they are trying to get rid of him at this very moment.”

  “Such a time to choose!” wailed an old Czech lady, astonishingly dressed in a tweed coat and flowery hat as though ready to flee from the Germans at a moment’s notice.

  Cousin Otto looked troubled. “Parliamentary procedure,” he said, comforting himself with the Englishness of the phrase.

  It was touching, thought Anna, that he should be so pro-English for he had, so far, not fared too well in his adopted country. In spite of two Physics degrees he had only succeeded in finding work in a shoe factory.

  “What I want to know,” cried the old lady, poking Cousin Otto in the chest with a bony finger, “is, who is minding the shop?”

  “Perhaps we should go upstairs,” said Mama.

  The Hotel Continental did not provide lunch on weekdays and they usually filled in the gap between breakfast and dinner with a snack in Papa’s room.

  Cousin Otto accepted gratefully. “I’m dying for a cup of tea,” he confessed as Mama went scurrying in and out with the kettle, cups and some buns she had stored in her room next door. He sat on Papa’s bed, drinking tea with milk like the English, and asked Anna if she had any messages for her brother, as he was leaving for Cambridge himself that afternoon in the hope of getting a job.

  “What sort of a job?” Mama wanted to know.

  Cousin Otto began to touch every bit of wood within reach. “Touch wood!” he cried. “In my own line. There is a professor of physics there – I was a student of his in Berlin – and he has asked me to come and see him.”

  “Oh, Otto, it would be wonderful,” said Mama.

  “Touch wood! Touch wood!” said Cousin Otto and touched the bits of wood all over again. It was difficult to remember, with his old-maidish ways, that he was barely thirty.

  “Well, just give Max lots of love and ask him to write,” said Mama.

  “And wish him luck for his exams,” said Anna.

  “Oh, I forgot,” cried Mama. “The exams must be quite soon. Tell him not to write – he’ll be too busy.”

  Papa said, “Would you give Max a message from me?”

  “Certainly,” said Cousin Otto.

  “Would you tell him –” Papa hesitated. Then he said, “I think that now the Germans have attacked, Max may want to volunteer for one of the fighting forces. And of course he must do whatever he thinks right. But would you ask him, please, to discuss it with the University authorities first, before he makes up his mind?”

  “But he’s only eighteen!” cried Mama.

  “It’s not too young,” said Cousin Otto. He nodded at Papa. “I promise I’ll tell him. And when I get back to London I’ll ring you up and tell you how he is.”

  “That would be most kind,” said Papa.

  Cousin Otto stayed a little longer, chatting and drinking tea, and then it was time for him to catch his train. Soon afterwards Anna went back to the Bartholomew’s. She had arranged to spend Saturday with Judy and Jinny. She had hardly seen them since their return from school and they had such a good time playing tennis and sunning themselves in the garden that they decided to spend Sunday the same way.

  Most of the Sunday papers carried pictures of Winston Churchill, who had become Prime Minister instead of Chamberlain, and there were several eye-witness accounts of the German invasion of Holland. Huge numbers of Nazi parachutists had been dropped from aeroplanes, disguised as Dutch and British soldiers. To add to the confusion, Germans who had been living in Holland for years and whom no one suspected of being Nazis, had immediately rushed to their aid. The Dutch were fighting back and the French and the British were on their way to help them, but clearly the Germans had a strong foothold. There was a map of Holland with thick arrows breaking into it from Germany and an article headed “If Germany Captures Dutch And Belgian Coasts”, but, said Jinny, the Sunday papers always exaggerated and it was no use minding them.

  Monday was hotter and sunnier than ever and when Anna arrived at the Hotel Continental to spend the day with Mama and Papa it seemed a pity to waste such lovely weather indoors.

  “Couldn’t we go to the Zoo?” she asked on a sudden inspiration.

  “Why not?” said Papa. He was feeling cheerful because Winston Churchill had been made Prime Minister – the only man who understood the situation, he said.

  Mama was worried about how much it would cost, but then she too found the sunshine irresistible and they decided to be extravagant and go.

  It was an extraordinary day. Anna had not been to the Zoo for years and she walked round in a daze, looking. The sand-coloured and orange tigers with their black stripes which seemed to have been poured over them, peacocks with unbelievable embroidered tails, monkeys with elegant beige fur and tragic eyes – it was as though she had never seen any of them before. And giraffes! she thought. How could anyone have invented giraffes!

  She looked and looked, and all the time some other part of her mind was being careful not to think of the map on the Sunday papers and of the Nazi horror seeping out of Germany into other parts of Europe which had, until now, been safe.

  They stayed until late afternoon and, by then, Anna’s mind was so full of all she had seen that it no longer needed any effort to forget about the war. It was as though those long hours in the sun had changed something, as though everything were suddenly more hopeful. Mama and Papa, too, were more light-hearted. Papa had discovered a creature in the Small Cat House which looked, he said, exactly like Goebbels, and all the way home in the bus he imagined it making speeches in German to the other small cats and inspecting them for signs of Jewishess. He kept Mama and Anna laughing and they arrived back at the Hotel Continental tired and relaxed, as though they had been away on a holiday.

  The lounge was dark after the sunlit street and it took Anna a moment to focus on the porter who looked up from his desk as they came in.

  “Someone rang you from Cambridge,” he said, and she wondered why Max should telephone rather than write.

  Papa lingered for a moment, glancing at a newspaper that someone had left lying on a table, and the porter observed him. “Nothing in there,” he said. “But it’s bad – I’ve heard the radio.”

  “What’s happened?” said Papa.

  The porter shrugged. He was a little discouraged man with a few hairs carefully arranged in stripes across his bald head. “The usual,” he said. “It’s all up in Holland. The Nazis are everywhere and the Dutch royal family have escaped to England.”

  “So quickly!” said Papa, and the feeling of having been away on holiday slipped away as though it had never been.

  Just then the telephone rang. The porter answered it and said to Anna, “For you – from Cambridge.”

  She rushed to the telephone cabin and picked up the receiver.

  “Max?” she said – but it was not Max, it was George.

  “Look, something awkward has happened,” he said. “I don’t quite know how to put it, but Max – he’s been arrested.”

  “Arrested?” What had he done? Anna thought of undergraduate pranks, getting drunk, knocking off policemen’s helmets, but surely Max would never…Stupidly, she asked, “You me
an by the police?”

  “Yes,” said George and added, “as an enemy alien.”

  “But they don’t arrest people for being enemy aliens!” cried Anna. “And anyway he isn’t one. We lost our German nationality years ago. He’s just waiting to become naturalised British.”

  “I know, I know,” said George. “We told them all that, but it made no difference. They said they were interning all male enemy aliens in Cambridge and his name was on the list.”

  “Interning?”

  “Yes,” said George. “In some kind of camp.”

  Anna suddenly felt quite empty, as though it were pointless even to go on talking.

  “Are you still there?” said George anxiously and continued, “Listen, everyone here has made an awful fuss. Me, his tutor, the College – everyone. Bill got so wild at the police station that they threw him out. But we can’t move them. It’s a Government order. Bit of a panic, if you ask me, after what’s been happening in Holland.”

  “Yes,” said Anna because it seemed to be expected of her.

  “Max was hoping – I don’t know how much use it would be – that perhaps your parents could do something. Exams start in two weeks and he thought perhaps if they knew someone who could explain to the police…He’s only taken his law books with him, almost no clothes.”

  “Yes,” said Anna again.

  “Anyway, I promised to let you know at once.” George sounded suddenly depressed, as if it had in some way been his fault. “It’s all a mess,” he said. “I’ll ring again if I hear anything.”

  Anna roused herself. “Of course,” she said. “Thank you very much, George. And thank you for all you did. I’ll tell my parents at once.”

  That would be almost the worst part of it.

  Chapter Five

  Explaining to Mama and Papa about Max was just as bad as Anna had feared. Papa said almost nothing, as though Max’s internment were only part of a huge catastrophe that he could see rolling towards them, towards England, perhaps towards the whole world, and that he was helpless to avert. Mama shouted and got excited and would not be calmed. Why hadn’t Max explained to the police about Papa? she asked again and again. Why hadn’t the College done anything? Why hadn’t his friends? When Anna told her that indeed they all had, she simply shook her head disbelievingly and cried, “If only I’d been there! I would never have let them take Max away!”

  The nine o’clock news brought an announcement that all male enemy aliens in southern and eastern coastal areas had been arrested and were to be sent to internment camps. (“If only Max had come to spend Whitsun in London!” cried Mama.) Anna had not realised that Cambridge was in a coastal area – it must be just on the edge. Presumably these were the parts of England most vulnerable to attack. The announcer went on to say that the government understood the hardship to innocent people that might result from its action, but that it was hoped to alleviate this in due course. This was cold comfort and the rest of the news was no more encouraging. At the end there was an interview with the Dutch royal family, who had escaped from the Nazis by the skin of their teeth, and a quote from Churchill’s first speech as Prime Minister. “I can offer you nothing,” he told the House of Commons, “except blood and toil and tears and sweat.”

  The next day the Dutch army collapsed.

  Anna heard the news at the Bartholomews’ that evening.

  “That’s lousy!” said Jinny. “I’m sure now they’ll get all worried again about air raids and they won’t let our school come back to London!”

  Judy agreed. “I don’t think I could bear to go back to that place in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Well, you may not …” began Mr Bartholomew and suddenly looked at Anna and stopped.

  “Pa!” cried Judy. “You mean we might go back to the States?”

  “Oh, how do we know what’s going to happen,” said Mrs Bartholomew. “Your father’s business is here and obviously we’d only leave if things became really serious, so let’s not even talk about it.” She turned to Anna and asked, “Did you hear from your mother today? Has she had any more news of Max?”

  Anna shook her head. “We don’t even know where he is,” she said. “Mama rang the police in Cambridge, but they’re not allowed to tell us.” The call had cost over two shillings and Mama had been full of hopes that she might be able to speak to Max, but the police would only say that Max was no longer in their charge and that he would, in any case, not be allowed to receive or send any messages.

  “I’m so very sorry,” said Mrs Bartholomew.

  “His exams are quite soon,” said Anna. She kept thinking of the law books Max had packed instead of clothes.

  “I believe they’ve even interned some of the professors,” said Mr Bartholomew, and added, “Everything’s in chaos.”

  The weather continued very hot and made everyone irritable. When Anna went round to the Hotel Continental on Wednesday after her secretarial course she found Papa depressed and Mama in a terrible state of nerves. They had been trying to contact anyone who might be able to help about Max, or at least advise them what action to take, but their acquaintances were few and no one seemed to know.

  “There must be something we can do!” cried Mama and listed, yet again, her various forlorn hopes. If one wrote to the College, to the University, if George asked again at the police station…Her tense, unhappy voice went on and on and only stopped at the ringing of the porter’s telephone. Then she sat with her hands clenched in her lap, willing him to tell her that it was for her, that it was news of Max. But the only call that came was from Otto’s mother, to say that Otto, too, had been interned, and so had the professor of physics who had invited him to Cambridge.

  “You see, it’s the same for everyone – a national emergency,” said Papa, but Mama would not listen.

  She had had a wretched day at her office. Instead of sorting Lord Parker’s innumerable bills and receipts, she had tried to telephone people she hardly knew about Max, all to no avail. In the end her boss had objected and she had had a row with him.

  “As though it mattered about Lord Parker,” she cried. “He’s dead, anyway. The only thing that matters is doing something about Max!”

  Papa tried to reason with her, but she shouted, “No! I didn’t care about anything else, but now it’s too much!” She stared accusingly at an innocent Polish lady who happened to be sitting at the next table. “Wasn’t it enough,” she said, “for us to have lost everything in Germany? Wasn’t it enough to have to rebuild our lives again and again?”

  “Of course—” began Papa, but Mama swept him aside.

  “We’ve been fighting Hitler for years,” she shouted. “All the time when the English were still saying what a fine gentleman he was. And now that the penny’s finally dropped,” she finished in tears, “the only thing they can do is to intern Max!”

  Papa offered her his handkerchief and she blew her nose. Anna watched her helplessly. The Polish lady got up to greet a man who had just come in and they began to talk in Polish. Anna caught the word Rotterdam and then some other Poles joined them and they all became excited.

  At last one of them turned to Papa and said haltingly in English, “The Germans have bombed Rotterdam.”

  “It is thought,” said another, “that ten thousand people were killed.”

  Anna tried to imagine it. She had never seen a dead person. How could one imagine ten thousand dead?

  “Poor people,” said Papa.

  Did he mean the dead or the ones who were still alive?

  The Polish lady sat down on a spare chair and said, “It is just like Warsaw,” and another Pole who had seen Warsaw after the Germans had bombed it tried to describe what it was like.

  “Everything is gone,” he said. “House is gone. Street is gone. You cannot find …” He spread his hands in a vain attempt to show all the things you could not find. “Only dead people,” he said.

  The Polish lady nodded. “I hide in a cellar,” she remembered. “But then co
me the Nazis to seek for Jews …”

  It was very warm in the lounge and Anna suddenly found it difficult to breathe.

  “I feel a bit sick,” she said, and was surprised by the smallness of her voice.

  Mama at once came over to her and Papa and one of the Poles struggled to open a window. A rush of cool air came in from the yard at the back of the hotel and after a moment she felt better.

  “There,” said Papa. “You’ve got your colour back.”

  “You’re worn out with the heat,” said Mama.

  One of the Poles got her a glass of water, and then Mama urged her to go home to the Bartholomews’, to go to bed, get some rest. She nodded and went.

  “I’ll ring you if we hear anything about Max,” Mama cried after her as she started down the street.

  It was awful of her, but when she reached the corner of Russell Square, out of reach of Mama’s voice, of everyone’s voice, she felt a sense of relief.

  By Friday, Brussels had fallen and the Germans had broken through into France. A French general issued the order, “Conquer or Die!” but it made no difference – the German army swept on across France as it had swept across Holland. Madame Laroche was too upset to come to the secretarial school and some of the students, especially the refugees, spent their time listening to the radio and running out to buy newspapers – but not Anna.

  Curiously enough she was no longer worried about the German advance. She simply did not think about it. She thought a lot about Max, wherever he had been taken, desperately willing him to be all right, and every morning at the Bartholomews’ she rushed to the letter box, hoping that at last he might have been able to write. But she did not think about what was happening in the war. There was nothing she could do about it. She did not read the papers and she did not listen when the news was on. She went to her secretarial school each day and worked at her shorthand. If she became good enough at it she would get a job and earn some money. That was why the Refugee Organisation had paid her fees and that was what she was going to do. And the more she thought about her shorthand the less time she would have to think about anything else.