Bombs on Aunt Dainty

by Judith Kerr

  When she returned to the house one afternoon, Mrs Bartholomew was waiting for her. Anna had stayed on at the school after hours to do some typing and she was late.

  “My dear,” said Mrs Bartholomew, “I must talk to you.”

  Mei dea-r, thought Anna, automatically moving her fingers into position on an imaginary keyboard, Ei mus-t tor-k tou you. Lately she had developed this habit of mentally taking down in shorthand everything she heard. It had improved her speed and saved her from having to make sense of what she did not want to hear.

  Mrs Bartholomew led her into the drawing-room.

  “We have been advised by the American Embassy to return at once to the States,” she said.

  Wea hav bean ad-veis-d bei the A-me-ri-can Em-ba-sea tou re-turn at wuns tou the Stai-ts, went Anna’s fingers, but then something in Mrs Bartholomew’s voice broke through her detachment.

  “I’m so very sorry,” cried Mrs Bartholomew, “but we shall have to give up this house.”

  Anna looked at her face, and her fingers stopped moving in her lap.

  “What will you do?” asked Mrs Bartholomew.

  It was nice of her, thought Anna, to be so upset about it. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “I’ll go and stay with my parents.”

  ‘But will they be able to manage?” asked Mrs Bartholomew.

  “Oh yes,” said Anna airily. “And anyway, I’ll probably get a job quite soon.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs Bartholomew, “I hate doing this.” Then she picked up the telephone to explain to Mama.

  Mama always shouted when she was excited and Anna realised that of course she must have been hoping that the call would bring her news of Max. All the same, she wished that her sole reaction to Mrs Bartholomew’s news had not been so loud and accusing.

  “Does that mean,” cried Mama, and her distorted voice came right out of the telephone to where Anna was sitting across the room, “that Anna won’t be able to stay in your house any more?”

  Anna knew as well as Mama that there was no money to pay for her to stay at the Hotel Continental, but what was the use of shouting at Mrs Bartholomew about it? There was nothing she could do. Mama should at least have wished her a safe journey, thought Anna, and her fingers tapped out in her lap, shea shoud at lea-st have wi-shd her a sai-f jur-nea.

  The Bartholomews began to pack up their possessions and a growing pile of garments was put aside for Anna because Jinny and Judy would not need them in America. She carried them to the Hotel Continental with her own, a few at a time, on the tube, so as to save a taxi for the move. Mama had counted all their money – she had added what was left of Papa’s earnings from the leaflets to the few pounds she had managed, somehow, to save from her meagre weekly wage, and she had worked out that there would be enough to pay Anna’s bills at the hotel for three weeks. After that they would have to see. It was really no use looking farther ahead. In the meantime they did not spend a halfpenny that was not absolutely necessary and Anna hoped that the Bartholomews would not mind her staying at the house until the last moment.

  “Well, of course we don’t mind,” Mrs Bartholomew reassured her. “We’d love you to be here just as long as you can.”

  All the same, as the preparations progressed and more and more familiar objects disappeared into packing cases, it began to feel rather strange. Judy and Jinny still played tennis and sat in the sun and chatted, but they were excited at the prospect of going to America and sometimes it was as though they had already gone. When the day for their departure arrived it was difficult to know what to say. They stood outside the house in Campden Hill Square and looked at each other.

  “Promise you’ll write,” said Jinny.

  “And don’t let any bombs drop on you,” said Judy.

  Mr Bartholomew said, “We’ll be seeing you…” and then looked confused and said, “Good luck!”

  Mrs Bartholomew hugged Anna and murmured, “Take care of yourself,” and then climbed quickly into the taxi, dabbing at her face with her handkerchief. Then the taxi drove off and Anna waved until it turned the corner. When it had completely disappeared she began to walk, slowly, towards the tube station.

  The square was green and leafy and the chestnut tree at the bottom was covered with blossom. She remembered how, her first spring in England, Jinny had shown it to her and pointed out the “candles”. “Candles?” Anna had said. “Candles are only on Christmas trees,” and everyone had laughed. She could hear the plop of tennis balls from the courts where they had played only a few days before. When she reached the shop in Holland Park Avenue where they had always gone for sweets she stopped for a moment and looked in through the window. She was tempted to buy a chocolate bar as a sort of memento. But she would probably only eat it and then it would be a waste of money, so she didn’t. A poster outside the tube station said “Germans Reach Calais”.

  It was May 26th, exactly a fortnight since Whitsun – the day Max should have started his exams.

  Chapter Six

  At the Hotel Continental, Anna was allotted a small room close to Mama’s and Papa’s on the top floor.

  When they had first come to England and still had some money they had lived lower down where the rooms were larger and more expensive, but Anna liked this better. From her window she could see right across the rooftops with only the sky above, or down into the scrappy yard, four storeys below, where cats fought among the dust and the weeds. A church clock nearby chimed out the quarters and sparrows hopped and fluttered on the sooty tiles. She was so busy settling into her new surroundings that she almost did not notice Dunkirk.

  In a way it was quite easy to miss, even if one read the papers, which Anna didn’t, because no one said much about it until it was over. Dunkirk was a place in France on the Normandy coast, and at the end of May the retreating British army was trapped there by the Germans. Only the papers, trying to keep everyone cheerful, never quite said so in so many words. However, by fighting off the Germans and with the help of the Navy and the Air Force, nearly all the soldiers managed to escape back to England, and by the beginning of June the papers suddenly came out in triumphant headlines. “Bloody Marvellous!” said one, surprising Anna into reading it. She discovered that, apart from the Navy, thousands of ordinary people had crossed the Channel in tiny boats, again and again, to help take the soldiers off the beaches in the midst of battle. It was disappointing that what had sounded like a great victory was only an ingenious escape from defeat. But weren’t the English amazing, she thought. She could not imagine the Germans doing a thing like that.

  The Hotel Continental had become very crowded. In addition to the German, Czech and Polish refugees, there were now Dutchmen, Belgians, Norwegians and French. You never knew what language you were going to hear in the narrow corridors and on the stairs. The Swiss waitress who had come to London to learn English complained constantly, and after supper the lounge was like the tower of Babel.

  The streets, too, were in turmoil. Every day there were long crocodiles of children with gas masks slung over their shoulders, each with a label attached somewhere to its person, trudging in the wake of grown-ups who were taking them to the railway stations, to be sent out of London, to the safety of the country.

  Everyone was talking about the invasion of England, for now that Hitler was only the other side of the Channel he would surely want to cross it. To confuse the Germans when they came, names were being removed from street corners and Underground stations, and even buses lost their destination plates, so that the only way to find out where they were going was to ask the conductor.

  One morning on her way to the secretarial school Anna discovered a rusty car with no wheels and two broken bedsteads dumped in the middle of the grass of Russell Square. First she thought it was some kind of joke, but then the porter at the Hotel Continental explained to her that it was to stop German parachutists from landing.

  “Could they really land in Russell Square? There doesn’t seem room,” said Anna, startled.
r />   “There’s no knowing what they can’t do,” said the porter.

  Parachutists were an inexhaustible source of speculation. There were endless stories of people who claimed actually to have seen some, disguised as British soldiers, as farm workers or most often as nuns, in which case, according to the stories, they always gave themselves away by their carelessness in wearing army boots under their habits.

  Anna tried, as always, not to think about them, but sometimes in bed at night her guard slipped and then she saw them dropping down silently among the trees of Russell Square. They were never in disguise but in full uniform covered with black leather and swastikas which were clearly visible even though it was dark. They called whispered commands to each other, and then they set off down Bedford Terrace towards the Hotel Continental to look for Jews …

  One morning after she had been kept awake a long time by her imaginings, she came down late to find a stranger sitting at the breakfast table with Mama and Papa. She looked more closely and discovered that it was George.

  Mama was in a state of confusion between happiness and distress, and as soon as she saw Anna she jumped from her chair.

  “Letters from Max!” she cried.

  George waved an envelope. “I got one this morning, so I brought it round,” he said. “But I see you’ve got your own. They must all have been posted at the same time.”

  “Max is all right,” said Papa.

  She began quickly to read.

  There were four letters, all addressed to Mama and Papa. Max had written them at intervals of a week or so and their tone changed gradually from indignant surprise at being interned to a kind of despairing resignation. He had had a bad time, being pushed from one temporary camp to another, often without the simplest necessities. Now he had reached his permanent destination which was better organised, but he was not allowed to say where it was. (“On the Isle of Man!” said George impatiently. “Everyone knows that’s where they’ve been put – why can’t they be allowed to say so?”) The camp was full of students and professors from Cambridge – so many that it might even be possible to continue with some of his studies. “So it’s not too bad,” wrote Max. But he clearly hated it. He hated being imprisoned and he hated being treated as an enemy, and most of all he hated being forced back into some kind of German identity which he had long discarded. If there was anything Mama and Papa could do …

  “We must!” cried Mama. “We must think of something!”

  “I’ll do anything to help, of course,” said George and got up to leave.

  Papa got up too. “Are you going backwards to Cambridge now?” he asked politely. His French was perfect, but he could never get his English right.

  George did not smile.

  “I’m no longer at Cambridge,” he said. “I got tired of fiddling with bits of Chaucer while Rome burns, as it were.” Then he said almost apologetically, “I’ve joined the army.” He caught Anna’s eye and added, “Ridiculous, isn’t it? English Youth Fights Nazi Hordes. D’you think I’ll be terribly, terribly brave?”

  A few days later it was Anna’s birthday.

  “What would you like to do?” asked Mama.

  Anna thought. She had already spent two full weeks at the Hotel Continental and did not see how they could afford to do anything, but Mama was looking at her expectantly, so she said, “Could we go to a film?” There was a cinema in Tottenham Court Road where you could get in at half-price before one o’clock. She added quickly, in case it was too expensive, “Or we could have a knickerbocker glory at Lyons.”

  Mama worked it out. The film would cost one shilling and three pence and the knickerbocker glory would be a shilling. She was looking in her purse, but suddenly she threw it down and cried, “I don’t care! You’re going to be sixteen and you’re going to have a proper birthday even if we are broke. We’ll do both.”

  “Are you sure?” said Anna.

  “Yes,” said Mama quite fiercely. “It’s your birthday and it’s going to be a nice day for you.” Then she said, “God knows what will have happened to us all by next year.”

  Papa said he did not want to come. He must have arranged it with Mama beforehand, thought Anna, for even in a fit of extravagance they could hardly have afforded cinema tickets and knickerbocker glories for three. So Anna and Mama went to see a film called Mr Deeds Goes To Town.

  It was about a young millionaire who wanted to give away his money to the poor. (“I wish he’d give us some!” whispered Mama.) But some other mean millionaires wanted to stop him and tried to have him declared insane. In the end he was saved by a girl journalist who loved him, and all ended happily.

  The leading part was played by a young actor called Gary Cooper, and both Anna and Mama thought it very good. Afterwards they went to Lyons and ate their knickerbocker glories very slowly, to make them last. They were a recent importation from America and consisted of layers of strawberry and vanilla ice-cream, interspersed with other layers of cream, strawberries and nuts, all served in a tall glass with a special long spoon. Anna had only eaten one once before, and knowing how much it cost, was a little nervous in case it wasn’t quite as good as she remembered – but as soon as she tasted the first mouthful she was reassured.

  While they ate they talked – about the film, about Anna’s shorthand course and the money she would earn when she had finished. “Then we’ll be able to go to the cinema every day,” said Mama, “and buy knickerbocker glories for breakfast.”

  “And for lunch and for tea,” said Anna. When she got to the bottom of her glass she scraped it out so assiduously with her spoon that the waitress asked if she would like another. This made both her and Mama laugh, and they strolled back contentedly to the Hotel Continental.

  On the way they met Papa, who had been sunning himself on a bench in Russell Square.

  “How was the film?” he asked.

  “Marvellous,” said Anna.

  “And the other thing – the knickerbocker splendour or whatever it was?”

  “Marvellous too,” said Anna, and Papa seemed very pleased.

  It was a pity that the news of the fall of Paris had to come through that evening. Everyone had been expecting it, of course, but Anna had been hoping against hope that the French would manage to hold out until the next day. If it didn’t happen on her birthday it wouldn’t be quite so bad. As it was, it seemed somehow as though it were her fault. She thought of the French family who had befriended them when she and Max and Mama and Papa had first gone to live in Paris after leaving Germany, of her teacher who had taught her to speak French, of the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysées, which she had passed every day on her way to school, of the chestnut trees and the people drinking in cafés and the Prisunic and the Metro. Now the Nazis had taken possession of it all and France, like Germany, had become a black hole on the map, a place you could no longer think about.

  She sat next to Papa in the lounge and tried not to cry because, after all, it was worse for the French. There was a middle-aged couple from Rouen staying in the hotel and they both wept when they heard the news. Afterwards the husband said to Papa, “It is the end,” and Papa could find no answer.

  A little later he got up and went to the telephone, and when he came back he told Mama, “I’ve spoken to Sam and he’ll see me tomorrow. And Louise said, could you and Anna come as well.”

  “Are you ill, Papa?” asked Anna.

  Professor Sam Rosenberg was a doctor and though his wife Louise had been at school in Germany with Mama, and Anna could not remember a time when they had not known them, they did not usually see them without some reason.

  “No, I’m not ill,” said Papa. “It’s just something I want to talk to him about.”

  The Rosenbergs lived in a vast flat in Harley Street with a porter and a lift and a brass plate on the door. When Anna rang the bell a maid let them in, deposited Papa in the waiting room and led Anna and Mama along a passage filled with packing cases to Aunt Louise’s boudoir.

  T
his too was in a state of upheaval. There were dust covers over some of the pretty velvet chairs, an open packing case stood in a corner and a gilt mirror had been taken down and was leaning against the wall, half-smothered in wadding. In the midst of it all Aunt Louise was sitting in her silk dress and pearls and with her hair beautifully curled, looking distraught.

  “My dear, it’s all so awful!’ she cried in German as soon as they came in. “We have to pack up everything – Sam has taken a house in the country, he says it will be safer there.”

  “Where in the country?” asked Mama, embracing her.

  “Buckinghamshire, I think – or perhaps it’s Berkshire – anyway, it’s miles from anywhere, and he’s going to close up this flat completely except for the consulting room and drive up to see his most important patients only.” She drew a deep breath, looked at Anna and said, “How are you?”

  “All right, thank you,” said Anna indistinctly.

  Aunt Louise with her delicate features and beautiful clothes always made her feel uncomfortable. Also it was Aunt Louise who, admittedly with the best intentions in the world, had persuaded Miss Metcalfe to take Anna into her school.

  Aunt Louise smiled. “Still at the awkward age,” she cried gaily to Mama. “Never mind, they all grow out of it. And how are those charming American friends of yours?”

  Mama explained that the Bartholomews had gone back to America and that Anna was now living at the Hotel Continental.

  “Oh dear, how difficult for you!” cried Aunt Louise, but it was not clear whether she meant the financial aspect or simply the fact that Mama had someone in the awkward age living with her.

  “It’s all such a rush,” she wailed. “Sam says we’ve got to be out of London in two days, or he won’t be responsible, with the French collapsing the way they have. And you can’t get anyone to move the furniture – so many people have had the same idea. Do you know, I rang up eleven different firms before I found one which could do it?”