When We Were Warriors

by Emma Carroll

  Tilly smiled. ‘You don’t have to, son. I know exactly what you mean.’

  *

  There weren’t any ghosts inside Frost Hollow Hall, either. The woman who’d been visiting sad, homesick children in the night wasn’t a mysterious, restless spirit, but Miss Barrington herself. Little Sadie told them the news almost as soon as they got back.

  ‘How do you know it was her?’ June was amazed. ‘Did she tell you?’

  ‘Sort of,’ the girl replied. ‘Last time she came, I put my torch on.’

  ‘Good work!’ Stan said.

  ‘She’s proper nice, she really is,’ Sadie gushed. ‘We shouldn’t have been scared of her, she’s only trying to be kind.’

  Stan was puzzled. ‘But why come in the middle of the night? It’s all a bit secretive, isn’t it?’

  ‘She’s awful shy, that’s what she is,’ Sadie said. ‘Says sausage dogs are easier than people.’

  ‘I don’t think Lobelia’s that easy,’ Maggie piped up.

  ‘Miss Barrington came to me when I was having a bad dream one night,’ June confided. ‘What about you, Sadie? Were you having nightmares?’

  ‘I was crying.’ Sadie nodded. ‘Every night I got upset she’d come and hold my hand.’

  ‘But I thought she didn’t want us here,’ Stan said, still confused. ‘We were told to keep away from the East Wing, and from her. The army made her take us in, remember.’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t realise she liked children until she met some,’ June suggested, then glanced sideways at Stan. ‘None of us asked for this situation, did we? But sometimes people can surprise you.’

  They also discovered from Tilly that Miss Barrington and Miss Potter lived together in the East Wing with the dogs that Miss Barrington often called her ‘fur family’.

  ‘Who’d have thought it, eh? The baronet’s daughter and my girl from the village,’ Tilly said, cackling with laughter. ‘A Barrington and a Higgins, together at last!’

  Clive Spencer, meanwhile, kept a respectful distance from Stan and his sisters. He probably never found out about Stan’s double dealing, but he accepted with surprisingly good grace that the girls’ team had won the game of dare. When the postman arrived one day with letters from home, he waited in line for his, just as excited as everyone else. It seemed that even show-offs got homesick.

  The letter from Mum was short, but very cheering. Her leg was coming out of plaster next week, and once that was done she’d catch the bus down to visit them.

  ‘I’ve missed you all so much,’ June read out. ‘The house can be replaced, never mind that, but you lot can’t be. Wherever we live next, as long as we’re together, it’ll be our home. Perhaps we can get ourselves a pet too.’

  ‘Oh! Can we have a dog?’ Maggie pleaded.

  June looked at Stan, who shrugged. ‘I don’t mind. I quite like them these days.’

  Returning to the letter, June grinned at something scribbled at the bottom. ‘Oh ace! She’s promising to take us for fish and chips when she comes!’

  Maggie whooped. Stan licked his lips. After weeks of rubbery porridge and bone soup, the thought of haddock, chips and the biggest pickled onion in the jar made his mouth well and truly water. He’d waited long enough.

  OLIVE’S ARMY

  1

  It was typical of my sister Sukie to shock the living daylights out of us.

  ‘By the way,’ she said one Sunday afternoon as she was trimming my little brother’s hair. ‘I’m getting married.’

  Cliff twisted round so fast he was lucky not to lose an ear. Thankfully, I was at a safe distance from the haircutting scissors, and lowered the book I’d been reading. ‘Married? What, to Ephraim?’

  Sukie laughed. ‘Oh, Olive! Of course to Ephraim, you great ’nana!’ like I was the stupid one, when only yesterday she’d claimed marriage was for idiots.

  Yet I’d heard her saying it – it was impossible not to, living as we did, with Ephraim in his lighthouse. Sound had a way of travelling between each floor. She and Ephraim had been arguing about whether Hitler could still invade Britain, like people had been fearing these past couple of years.

  ‘It won’t happen now,’ Ephraim assured her. ‘He’s too busy fighting on the Eastern Front.’

  ‘Huh!’ Sukie replied. ‘I’d put nothing past him. Well, he can try it. I’ll be ready.’

  ‘You’d fight, would you?’

  ‘’Course I would!’

  ‘You’d kill another human being with your bare hands? Even a German?’ Ephraim was getting angry, which was unusual for him.

  ‘Not my bare hands, no!’ Sukie bit back. ‘I’d use a garden fork! Or a kitchen one if I had to!’

  Things escalated. There’d been door-slamming, and furious feet stomping down the stairs. They made it up again by teatime, mind you. By then half the village knew they’d had a barney, which was how life was in Budmouth Point.

  When we’d come here almost a year and a half ago as London evacuees, it’d been tough. The locals were a suspicious bunch, not to mention Esther Jenkins as we knew her then, who I was convinced had accompanied us from London just to make life hell. All I’d wanted was to go home.

  Funny how things turn out.

  Nowadays, Budmouth Point felt as much our home as London. Esther Wirth, as was her proper name, was my dearest pal. The locals, who’d seemed so unwelcoming, were in fact some of the kindest, bravest people I’d ever met once you got to know them.

  While Cliff and I lived with Ephraim at the lighthouse, Sukie and Esther each had a room above the post office, which was owned by the postmistress, Queenie. The living quarters there were huge and rambling, and so old that the upstairs part didn’t have electricity. It was this I was thinking of now, because once people got married, they tended to live together.

  ‘Are you moving into the lighthouse?’ I asked my sister. If there was one thing I missed about London, it was us being together under the same roof.

  ‘Possibly,’ she replied.

  ‘It’d be the wasp’s ankles if you did,’ I said eagerly.

  Sukie hesitated. ‘Ephraim and I haven’t talked about where we’ll live yet.’

  ‘Oh.’ I suspected there was something she wasn’t telling us.

  Cliff, though, leapt to his feet. ‘If you marry Ephraim, he’ll be family, won’t he? And Pixie’ll be my sister in-law!’ Pixie being Ephraim’s terrier, though she was just as much Cliff’s these days.

  ‘Sit down! You’ve only got half a haircut!’ Sukie wailed.

  ‘And only half a story,’ I reminded her. ‘So you’d better tell us everything.’

  Sukie put down the scissors.

  ‘Ephraim doesn’t know about us getting married yet,’ she confessed.

  I stared at her. ‘You mean he hasn’t asked you?’

  ‘No, Olive.’ Sukie squared her shoulders, lifted her chin. ‘I haven’t asked him.’

  *

  Once we’d sworn Cliff to secrecy on pain of death, and Sukie had evened up his fringe, we let him go. Sweeping up Cliff’s hair trimmings from the floor, Sukie hummed jive tunes and kept saying how she couldn’t wait to see Ephraim’s face when she popped the question.

  I should’ve felt more excited than I did, but couldn’t shake off the argument I’d overheard yesterday. Though the threat wasn’t as severe now, a German invasion could still happen. Hitler had dug his heels in in France, and people kept saying Britain was next on the list.

  Would we really have to fight the enemy ourselves, with garden forks? Would Ephraim refuse to defend his home? Would he not fight for Sukie, for Pixie and the lighthouse?

  The thought troubled me. The Nazis had killed my dad. They’d shot Esther’s mum and taken away her brother. I’d seen the faces of Jews who’d fled Europe, only to turn up on Budmouth beach, still stunned with fear. If there was a very real chance of Hitler’s army coming here, then I couldn’t imagine for a moment standing back and letting it happen.

  We got snippets and updates from Q
ueenie, who knew far more about the war than was normal for a postmistress. What she told us only troubled me more; I almost wished she’d keep it to herself. If the Germans invaded through Devon and Cornwall, our army would fight them along a border called the Taunton Stop Line, where pillboxes and fences had been put up and ditches dug as defences. Basically, they’d get no further than Somerset. Which was all very well if you lived there, or beyond. Here to the south, in Devon, we’d be stuck with the invaders.

  This past year we’d been on alert. Razor wire ran all along the clifftops. A pillbox had been built on the high path between Budmouth Point and Tythe Cove: every day someone from the Home Guard trudged up there with his sandwiches and tea flask to keep watch.

  At night sometimes, when a ship went by, I’d wake up in a panic: was this it? Were the Nazis here? Then I’d hear Ephraim talking on the radio – cool, calm – and I’d turn over and go back to sleep.

  Yet my own annoying doubt-voice was now whispering in my brain. Would Ephraim really not kill a Nazi to protect those he loved? Once, when a German pilot crashed near the village, I’d stood up for him, arguing that he was a person just like us. Was this any different?

  I didn’t know. But it was absolutely typical of Sukie to want to marry someone as complicated as she was.

  *

  ‘Ephraim might not even say yes,’ Esther pointed out, as we strolled home from school the next day.

  Arm in arm, we huddled together against the bracing wind that blew in Budmouth all year round, even on a hot summer’s day like this one. We’d just had a whole afternoon of algebra and equations, so it was a relief to be thinking about something else.

  ‘Don’t tell her I told you,’ I warned.

  Esther mimed zipping her mouth shut, which wasn’t something that came naturally to her. I trusted her with a big secret like this, though.

  ‘I think it’s really romantic. A proper love story,’ Esther said.

  ‘I just hope he’s brave enough if the Nazis come,’ I replied.

  ‘Why?’ Esther teased. ‘What would you do? Whack ’em over the head with a book?’

  ‘I’d like to think I’d fight,’ I said.

  Esther turned to me, serious now, the wind whipping her hair across her face. ‘Olive, when something that terrible happens, no one knows how brave they’ll be.’

  I sighed miserably: she was right. Esther knew all too well what happened when the Nazis invaded your country. It was why she’d come to England with the Kindertransport in the first place. And why her dad, in trying to be with her, had become a prisoner in an internment camp on the North Devon coast.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, leaning my head against her shoulder. ‘I didn’t mean to make you think of bad things.’

  ‘So let’s think of happy things instead,’ Esther suggested. ‘Like weddings.’

  ‘Do brides wear white at Jewish weddings?’ I asked.

  ‘If they want to. It’s all pretty similar really, except we have a rabbi not a vicar.’

  ‘And it happens in a synagogue not a church?’

  ‘Maybe. Or outside, under a chupah. It’s a canopy-type thing.’

  ‘Does the dad give the bride away?’

  ‘Sometimes. Or the mother.’

  I nodded. ‘I like the sound of that.’

  2

  Of course, Ephraim did say yes. It happened one night during supper and, though I’d been expecting it, it still took me by surprise. Sukie had come over to eat with us, bringing a big jam tart for afters.

  ‘Fetch the pudding, will you, Olive?’ she asked as she cleared the supper plates.

  She’d left it on the side, covered with a cloth. When I whipped it off, there it was – ‘Will You Marry Me?’ spelled out in pastry on the top. It gave me such a start I very nearly dropped it, which might’ve pleased Pixie, who was watching greedily, but would’ve ruined the surprise for Ephraim.

  For the rest of the evening there was a lot of kissing and hugging. Ephraim, who’d apparently once said he’d never get married, looked the happiest man alive. So did Cliff, who ate most of the tart when no one was watching.

  As for me, it was the moment I stopped listening to the doubts. Ephraim and Sukie were made for each other, any fool could see that. They were very dear to me, both of them, and to watch them together, so happy, made me warm-inside happy too. No Nazi invaders were going to ruin it.

  *

  Once Sukie and Ephraim got the licence and had their banns read out in church, the date was set for three weeks’ time. As always happened when there was something to organise, we gathered at Queenie’s kitchen table to drink horribly weak tea.

  ‘Would you believe the last time someone got married in Budmouth church was 1937?’ Mrs Henderson told us. She was small, round, tweed-clad and smelled slightly of goats, and since our time in Budmouth had become like a favourite aunt to Cliff and me.

  ‘Will it be in the church?’ asked Queenie. ‘Only, you know they won’t ring the bells, don’t you?’

  It was one of those wartime rules which meant Sunday mornings were very quiet these days. The bells would only be rung to warn us if the Germans were invading. And it wouldn’t be a lovely tuneful peal, but terrible, non-stop ringing.

  Thankfully, Esther moved on to more cheery matters. ‘Can I do your hair? Oh let me, Sukie!’

  ‘I’ll make the cake. You can do a lovely sponge with goat butter,’ Mrs Henderson told us. Cliff, who’d come along because he was bored, pulled a sick face, though I knew as well as he did he’d eat any sort of cake.

  ‘What about the dress?’ Queenie asked. ‘Even if we all club together, we won’t have enough coupons for anything decent.’

  Sukie had already thought of that, and sketched out what she wanted on the back of an envelope. A very chic-looking dress that was definitely going to be the cat’s pyjamas.

  ‘And something similar for Olive and Esther as my bridesmaids,’ she said, looking at me. ‘That’s if you both fancy it?’

  Which we did. Very, very much.

  *

  The next couple of weeks passed in a whirl. Then finally, two days before the wedding, Mum arrived from London. We went to meet her off the four o’clock train – we being Sukie, Esther and me, and Cliff, who insisted Pixie needed a walk. The station was surprisingly busy so we had to stand on tiptoe to find Mum in the crowds. Everywhere you looked were kitbags and suitcases, trilby hats and army caps. Pixie thought it all good fun and kept trying to jump up at everyone who went by.

  ‘Keep that dog under control,’ Sukie warned us. But when Pixie lunged at a passing soldier, she was all smiles. ‘I’m so sorry, she’s got no manners.’

  ‘No problem, ma’am,’ the man replied.

  Hearing his accent, Esther and I clutched each other in delight: ‘An American!’

  The only place I’d ever come across American voices was at the movies. To hear one right in front of us made Esther and me go a bit giggly.

  ‘Oh stop it, you two!’ Sukie laughed.

  The soldier moved on. The crowd cleared a little, and there, coming towards us, was Mum.

  I’d not seen her since Christmas, when she’d still been recovering from Dad’s death and was so thin her clothes hung off her like a scarecrow’s. Today she was wearing a yellow summer frock that fitted perfectly. And she was smiling – a huge, beaming lighthouse of a smile. I was overjoyed to see her looking so well.

  ‘Congratulations, love.’ Mum wrapped Sukie into the tightest hug, only breaking away to give Cliff and me a lipsticky kiss, and Esther an affectionate tweak on her cheek. ‘A wedding in the family, eh? Isn’t it exciting?’

  Whilst we’d been greeting Mum, the station had got even busier. There were American soldiers everywhere now, streaming off another train in a sea of khaki uniforms and suntanned faces. They were so tall, so handsome, so healthy. It was like being in the front row at the pictures, only these were real soldiers, not actors, and they were here, right before our eyes.

  ‘The
y can’t all be here for your wedding, Sukie,’ Cliff remarked. ‘Can they?’

  ‘Of course not, you daftie.’ Sukie laughed.

  They were here for some reason, though, and it threw a shadow over things, rather. A train full of GIs didn’t arrive at Budmouth Point every day of the week. I just hoped they weren’t expecting trouble.

  *

  By Friday afternoon, everything was ready. Sukie, amazing as ever, had turned a pair of Mrs Henderson’s brocade curtains into her wedding frock and a bridesmaid’s outfit each for Esther and me. The cake, done with goat butter, turned out pretty well too, and by the time we’d decorated the church pews with seashells from the beach, things didn’t look too shoddy at all.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ Sukie declared, as we drank our final cup of tea at Queenie’s kitchen table that evening. ‘I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done.’

  It was one of those special moments. I felt warm and light and happy. Even the fact that Dad wasn’t here didn’t spoil things because we still had each other, and tomorrow was going to be brilliant.

  Then Esther chipped in with, ‘What’s Cliff done, exactly? Apart from eating all the biscuits.’

  At the end of the table, my brother was trying – and failing – to get Pixie to lie down and roll over. Hearing his name, he looked up. ‘What’ve I done?’

  ‘Nothing towards the wedding, apparently,’ I told him. ‘We should get you to read at the service or show people to their seats in church.’

  ‘I have done something, actually,’ he said, glaring at Esther.

  She smirked. ‘Like what?’

  He folded his arms, looking all smug. ‘It’s a secret. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow, won’t you?’

  3

  Later that evening, I called Cliff for supper.

  ‘Wash your hands!’ I shouted. ‘Food’s ready!’

  Cliff didn’t reply. He hadn’t appeared by the time I’d laid the table and cut bread. After searching indoors, I realised he was still down on the beach with Pixie.