Bombs on Aunt Dainty

by Judith Kerr

  Mama made a sympathetic noise in her throat.

  “And I’m sure they’re going to break all the china, they’re such galumphing great louts,” said Aunt Louise. Then, quite unexpectedly, she flung her arms round Mama’s shoulders to cry disarmingly, “And I know it’s dreadful of me to fuss about it when people like you are staying behind in London and God only knows what’s to happen to us all – but you know, my dear, that I was always a fool, ever since you were at the top of the class in Berlin and I at the bottom!”

  “Nonsense,” said Mama. “You were never a fool, and even at school you were always the prettiest, most elegant …”

  “Oh yes I am,” said Aunt Louise. “Sam has told me so many a time and he knows.”

  As though settling the matter once and for all, she rang a bell by her side and the maid appeared almost at once with a silver tea-pot on a tray and little sandwiches and cakes. Aunt Louise poured out delicately. “I looked out a few things for you while I was packing,” she said. “I thought they might be useful.” Then she cried, “Oh, she’s forgotten the lemon again, I can’t bear tea without lemon, she knows that perfectly well! Anna dear, could you possibly …?”

  Anna set off obediently in search of a lemon. The flat was large and rambling, with the dust-sheets everywhere making it more confusing, and she got lost several times before she found the kitchen. There she discovered half a lemon in the huge refrigerator and by the time she had ransacked all the drawers for a knife and cut the lemon into slices, which she was sure were much too thick, she feared Aunt Louise must have lost all interest in her tea.

  She decided to try a different way back and after going down a passage and through a little ante-room found herself in the Professor’s study. The blinds had been drawn against the sun, so that you could only guess at the medical books which lined the walls. Her feet sank into the deep carpet and it was almost spookily silent.

  Suddenly she heard Papa’s voice.

  “How long does it take to act?” he asked, and Professor Rosenberg’s voice answered, “Only a few seconds. I’ve got the same for myself and Louise.”

  Then she rounded a bookcase and discovered Papa and the Professor on the other side. Papa was putting something into his pocket and the Professor was saying, “Let’s hope none of us will ever need it.” Then he saw Anna and said, “Hullo – you’re growing up. You’ll be as tall as me soon!” This was a joke, for the Professor was short and round.

  Anna smiled half-heartedly. She felt uneasy in this room, in the half-darkness, at finding Papa and the Professor so close together and talking about – what?

  The Professor looked at her with his sad black eyes which were like a monkey’s and said to Papa, “If things get bad in London send the girl to us. All right?” he added to Anna.

  “All right,” said Anna out of politeness, but she thought that even if things did get bad she would rather stay with Mama and Papa. Then she took the lemon to Aunt Louise and they all had some tea.

  When it was time to leave Aunt Louise handed Mama a parcel of clothes which she had packed up for her. (At the rate people were leaving London, thought Anna, she and Mama would soon have a vast wardrobe.) She hugged Mama several times and even the Professor embraced Papa and came down to the bus stop with them.

  Back at the Hotel Continental Mama opened her parcel and found that it contained three dresses and an envelope. In the envelope was a note which said, “To help you through the next difficult weeks,” and twenty pounds.

  “Oh God!” cried Mama. “It’s like a miracle! Anna, this will pay your hotel bills until you get a job!”

  Anna thought Papa might say that they shouldn’t accept the money or at least treat it as a loan, but he didn’t. He just stood by the window as though he hadn’t heard. It was very strange. He was staring out at the evening sky and fingering, fingering something in his pocket.

  She felt suddenly very frightened.

  “What is it?” she cried, although she really knew. “Papa! What did the Professor give you in his study?”

  Papa tore his gaze away from the sky and looked at Mama, who stared back at him. At last he said slowly, “Something I had asked him to give me – for use in an emergency.”

  And Mama threw her arms round Anna as though never to let her go.

  “Only in an emergency!” she cried. “Darling, darling, I promise you – only in an emergency!”

  Chapter Seven

  Three days later the French signed an armistice with the Germans and the only people left to fight Hitler were the English.

  London was curiously empty. All the children had gone, and so had many of the old people. There were air-raid warnings almost every day. The first few times everyone rushed for shelter as soon as the sirens started. At the secretarial school they filed into the cellar of the building which was damp and smelled of mice. At the Hotel Continental they went into the basement which was also the kitchen and stood about awkwardly among the pots and pans. But nothing happened, no bombs fell, and after a while people began to ignore the warnings and just go on with whatever they had been doing.

  Once Anna heard what sounded like a heavy piece of furniture being knocked over a long way off, and next day everyone said that a bomb had been dropped in Croydon, and once Anna and Papa saw two planes in a dog-fight right above the hotel. It was in the evening – the sky was pink and the planes were very high up so that you could hardly hear their engines or the rattle of their guns. They circled and dived and you could see little orange flashes and puffs of smoke as they fired at each other. But it didn’t seem real. It looked like some beautiful, exciting display, and Papa and Anna craned out of the window, admiring it, until an air-raid warden shouted at them that there was shrapnel dropping all over Bedford Terrace and to get inside.

  Every day, you wondered if the invasion would come. There were notices in the newspapers telling people what to do when it did. They were to stay in their homes – they must not panic and try to escape.

  “Like in France,” said the Frenchman from Rouen. “The people fled from the cities and blocked the roads, so that our armies could not get through. And then the Germans flew over them in their Stukas and machine-gunned them.”

  “Terrible,” said Mama.

  The Frenchman nodded. “The people were mad,” he said. “They were so frightened. Do you know, after Holland we put our German residents into camps because we did not know – some of them might be collaborators. But of course most of them were Jews, enemies of Hitler. And when the Nazis were coming, these people cried and pleaded to be set free so that at least they could hide. But the guards were too frightened. They just locked the Jews into the camps and handed the keys over to the Nazis, to do with them what they would.”

  Then he saw Mama’s face.

  His wife said, “Madame’s son has been interned,” and he added quickly, “Of course such a thing could never happen in England.”

  After this Mama was more desperate than ever about Max. All the appeals which had been made on his behalf by friends, teachers, even important professors at Cambridge, had come to nothing. They simply were not answered. Gradually people grew to feel that it was hopeless and gave up. Anyway, they all had their own worries.

  The only one still trying was the headmaster of Max’s old school. He wanted Max to come back there to teach. “It’s not much for a boy of his ability,” he told Mama, “But it’s better than being stuck in a camp,” and he continued to bombard the authorities with demands for his release. But so far he had had no more luck than anyone else.

  In the meantime, letters from Max arrived at irregular intervals, informative, matter of fact and sometimes funny, but always with the same underlying note of despair.

  Cousin Otto had arrived at the camp and they were sharing a room. He was very upset at having been interned and Max was trying to cheer him up. Food was a bit short sometimes. Could Mama send some chocolate? One of the internees had committed suicide – a middle-aged Jew who had been in
a German concentration camp before escaping to England. “He just couldn’t face being in a camp again – any camp. It was nobody’s fault, but we are all very depressed…” Cousin Otto was very low. The only thing that cheered him up was reading P. G. Wodehouse. “He reads late into the night as he can’t sleep, and I don’t get to sleep either because he will laugh out loud at the funny bits. I daren’t say anything for fear of making him depressed again …” The authorities were sending shiploads of internees to the Commonwealth and quite a lot had chosen to go, rather than face indefinite internment in England. “But not me. I still think I belong in this country, even though they don’t seem to agree with me at the moment. I know you’re trying all you can to get me out, Mama, but if there is anything more you can do …”

  The weather continued hot and dry.

  “Best summer we’ve had for years,” said the porter of the Hotel Continental. “No wonder Hitler wants to come here for his holidays.”

  There were battles now every day in the sky above England, and each night on the nine o’clock news the BBC announced the results as though they were cricket scores. So many German planes shot down, so many British planes lost, eighteen for twelve, thirteen for eleven. The Germans always lost more planes than the British, but then they could afford to. They had so many more to start with.

  Each night the porter switched on the old-fashioned radio in the lounge and the assembled refugees from countries already overrun by the Nazis stopped talking in their various languages and listened. If they could understand nothing else they could understand the figures, and they knew that they meant the difference between survival and the end of their world.

  In August the fighting in the sky came to a head. No one knew how many British planes there were left, but everyone guessed that they must be nearly exhausted. The American press announced that, according to reliable sources, the invasion of England would take place within three days. It became more difficult to ignore the air-raid warnings, for you wondered each time whether the sirens had been set off yet again by a stray dog-fight in the vicinity of London or whether this time it was something quite different.

  In bed at night Anna’s wide-awake dreams grew worse. She no longer saw the Nazis dropping from the sky above Russell Square. Now they had already landed and England was occupied by them. She was alone, for when the Nazis had come battering on the doors of the Hotel Continental Mama and Papa had swallowed what the Professor had given Papa that day in the half darkness of his study, and now they were dead. She was stumbling through a vast grey landscape all by herself, searching for Max. But there were Nazis everywhere and she dared speak to no one. The landscape was huge and hostile and unfamiliar, and she knew that she would never find him …

  In the daytime, she applied herself more assiduously than ever to her shorthand, and she was glad when one of the Germans in the hotel asked her to do some typing for him, so that even her spare time would be accounted for. He was writing a book on the nature of humour and wanted one chapter typed out so that he could submit it to a publisher who, he was convinced, would wish at once to have it translated into English. It was a good moment, said the German, to publish a book about humour, for everyone was clearly much in need of it, and once he had explained exactly what it was everyone would be able to have it.

  Anna thought the German was probably being over-optimistic, for the sample chapter struck her as very dull. Most of it was taken up with denunciations of various other authors who had thought they knew what the nature of humour was, but who had been quite wrong. She could not imagine people queueing up to read it. But she was going to be paid a full pound for the job and the manageress said she could use the office typewriter, so each day, as soon as she got back from secretarial school, she settled down to work in a corner of the lounge.

  One evening she had just begun to type after supper when Mama cried in English, “Anna, we have a visitor.”

  She looked up and saw a thin man with untidy grey hair and a nice smile. It was Mr Chetwin, Max’s headmaster.

  “I’m afraid I have no news of Max,” he said at once. “But I happened to be in town and I thought I’d just drop in to tell you that I haven’t given up hope.”

  They all sat down together at one of the tables, and Mr Chetwin began to tell Mama and Papa to what government departments he had already written about Max and to what others he was still going to write, even though no one so far had replied. From this he got on to talking about Max himself.

  “One of the best boys I ever had,” he said, “though he would eat peppermints in prep – I remember having to beat him for that. But a brilliant footballer. He made the school team his first term, you know …”

  Then he remembered Max’s various successes at school – the scholarship after only two terms, so that there were no more fees to be paid, the major scholarship to Cambridge later – and Mama remembered all sorts of smaller successes that Mr Chetwin had forgotten, and Papa thanked him for all his kindness, and at the end of the conversation, even though nothing at all had changed, Anna noticed that Mama and Papa looked much happier than before.

  By this time people were crowding into the lounge for the nine o’clock news and an elderly Pole excused himself and sat down at their table. He eyed Mr Chetwin respectfully.

  “You are English?” he asked. Englishmen were rare in the Hotel Continental.

  Mr Chetwin nodded, and the Pole said, “I am Pole. But I wish very, very much that England shall win this war.”

  There was a murmur of assent from other Poles and Czechs nearby and Mr Chetwin looked pleased and said, “Very good of you.” Then all conversation was drowned by the deafening tones of Big Ben, for the porter had put the radio on too loud as usual.

  A familiar voice said, “This is the BBC Home Service. Here is the news, and this is Bruce Belfrage reading it.”

  The voice did not sound quite as usual and Anna thought, what’s the matter with him? It had a breathlessness, a barely discernible wish to hurry, which had never been there before. She was listening so hard to the intonation of each word that she hardly took in the sense. Air battles over most of England…Heavy concentrations of bombers…An official communiqué from the Air Ministry…And then it came. The voice developed something like a tiny crack which completely robbed it of its detachment, stopped for a fraction of a second and then said slowly and clearly, “One hundred and eighty-two enemy aircraft shot down.”

  There was a gasp from the people in the lounge, followed by murmured questions and answers as those who did not understand much English asked what the newsreader had said, and the others checked with each other that they had heard aright. And then the elderly Pole was leaping up from his chair and shaking Mr Chetwin by the hand.

  “It is success!” he cried. “You English show Hitler he not can win all the time! Your aeroplanes show him!” and the other Poles and Czechs crowded round, patting Mr Chetwin on the back, pumping his hand and congratulating him.

  His grey hair became untidier than ever and he looked bemused but glad. “Very kind of you,” he kept saying, “though it wasn’t me, you know.”

  But they insisted on treating him as though he personally had been out there and shot down a whole lot of German bombers, and when at last he left to catch his train, one of them called after him triumphantly, “Now Hitler must think from something else!”

  The trouble was, thought Anna a few days later, what would he think of? The fine weather had broken at last, heavy cloud had put an end to all air activity, and no one knew what would happen next.

  Anna had finally got to the end of the chapter on the nature of humour and had collected her pound which she planned to spend on a pair of trousers – a new fashion for women – and she and Mama were searching Oxford Street for a suitable pair.

  In spite of the clouds it was still hot, and each of the big stores they went into seemed stickier and more airless than the last. The trousers on offer were all too expensive and it was not until just before c
losing time that they found a pair that would do. They were navy blue and made of some unidentifiable substance which Mama said would probably melt at the sound of an air-raid warning, but they were the right size and only cost nineteen shillings, elevenpence and three farthings, so they bought them – Anna triumphantly and Mama wearily.

  Mama was depressed. She had had a letter that morning from Mr Chetwin full of kindness and concern for Max, but reporting no progress at all, and she was beginning to feel that this, her last hope, was going to fail like all the rest.

  They had to queue a long time for a bus and when it finally came she sank into a seat and, instead of admiring Anna’s trousers, picked up a newspaper which someone had left behind and began to read. The bus moved only slowly to save petrol and she had time to read the paper from cover to cover.

  Suddenly she cried, “Look at this!”

  Anna peered over her shoulder and wondered why a film review should have excited her so.

  “Read it!” cried Mama.

  It was a very sympathetic account of a film about the difficulties and disasters which beset an anti-Nazi family trying to escape from Germany. It was written not by a film critic but by a politician.

  “You see?” cried Mama. “They can be sympathetic when the people are stuck in Germany, but what happens when they get to England? They put them in internment camps.”

  She hastily folded the paper and crammed it into her handbag.

  “I’m going to write to this man,” she said.

  As soon as they got back she showed the article to Papa. At first Papa was not sure if they should write to the paper. He said, “We are guests in this country – one should not criticise one’s host.” But Mama got very excited and shouted that it was not a question of etiquette but of Max’s whole life, and in the end they composed a letter between them.