An old woman sat in a rocking chair, miraculously preserved even though the house it came from had crumbled, clutching a cage with a budgie in it. Incredibly the bird was chirruping. The woman smiled at Georg as he passed, as though all that mattered was her chair and her bird.
He turned another corner, then thrust his hand into his mouth.
Another pile of rubble spilled across the street.
For a second he thought it was their block of flats, then he saw it was the block next door.
Bits of brick and lengths of wall; smashed tables; a chair standing upright as though someone had put it there; a bundle of rags he hoped were clothes or towels, not what remained of a human.
There was too much debris to get to the door of their own building. He watched as men with stretchers carried people away, more men shovelled rubble, and others dug, calling out to see if anyone was still alive. He wanted to help but these men seemed to know what they were doing. He would only get in the way.
His mouth was dry with brick dust. He could feel it clogging his nose as he breathed too.
‘George! Thank goodness.’ A shadow ran to him out of the red-flamed darkness. It was Aunt Miriam. She hugged him to her black work coat, then coughed, her throat rough from dust and smoke too. ‘I couldn’t get back before. Are you all right?’ She stepped back. ‘Is that blood? George!’
‘It’s not mine,’ he said tiredly. He knew he should be afraid because their building had so nearly been destroyed. He knew he should be grateful that Aunt Miriam was safe, that he was safe too. But it was as though all feeling had seeped away with Elizabeth’s blood.
Aunt Miriam held him close as they looked at the rubble. She didn’t have to say, ‘If that had been our building, if we had been inside, we would be dead.’ Hiding under the stairs would not be enough.
‘Where have you been?’ she said at last.
‘Railway station.’ He didn’t mention Elizabeth. Somehow he knew he would never speak of her, as long as he lived.
Aunt Miriam nodded. ‘People aren’t supposed to go there. Three of them were bombed tonight.’
‘People were killed?’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t say how many. Lots, he thought dully. People at his station would have been killed if a bomb had hit them too, despite being underground. The fat woman who had danced, the younger one who had led him to what she had thought was safety.
‘It was stupid to go there then?’
‘No,’ she said wearily. ‘Hardly anywhere is safe if you get a direct hit. The shelters only protect you from debris.’
He thought of the blood and dirt on the corrugated iron. Sometimes, he thought.
She didn’t ask him any more questions. He was glad of that. She didn’t tell him to be careful either. Aunt Miriam might not know much about children, but she knew what they were capable of. She respected him. She knew he would do what he had to.
‘I’m sorry, I shared our bread with the people in the underground,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Aunt Miriam. She hugged him again.
The glass was broken in their windows. The clock’s glass was broken too. They pulled the blackout curtains across, though there was so much flame that Georg thought the bombers would find their way back easily. The whole of London was a torch now to show the pilots the way. They swept the glass up, taking care not to be cut by the splinters. Georg ached with shock and weariness, but he knew the glass was too dangerous to leave. If he got up in the night, barefoot in the blackout, he might forget it was there.
At last the floors were clear. Miraculously there was still water in the taps — the pipes must not have been hit. They took it in turns to wash. He tried not to see the red water swirl down into the basin. He would never see Elizabeth again. Now even her blood was running down into the pipes …
‘Your hands!’ said Aunt Miriam, as he came out of the bathroom in his pyjamas.
He looked at them vaguely. One was blistered, the other a bit red. ‘I must have burned them,’ he said.
Aunt Miriam glanced at him swiftly, but said nothing. She fetched the first-aid kit, and spread salve over his hands, and then a light bandage. It looked white against his skin. White, like Elizabeth’s socks, like Papa’s face, his blood, Elizabeth’s blood, red on the grass. Death came from the sky, from a plane, or you flew to it through a window.
‘Go to bed,’ said Aunt Miriam softly. ‘I’ll bring you some cocoa.’
‘I don’t want any.’ He didn’t want to ever eat or drink again.
‘I’ll bring it anyway.’ She sat with him while he drank it, sipping her own, though he suspected she was no more hungry than he was. He felt better when he’d drunk it though. Aunt Miriam looked better too, even with the shadows black under her eyes.
‘Get some sleep,’ she said. ‘I have to be at work at seven.’ She looked at her watch. ‘In three hours’ time.’
‘They can’t expect you to come in after this?’
‘It’s war,’ she said simply. ‘We do our jobs or they don’t get done. If they don’t get done we lose the war. But you sleep as late as you can. Good night, George.’ She bent and kissed his forehead.
‘Good night,’ he said.
The bombers came the next night, guided up the river by the flames still burning bright from the day before. This time Aunt Miriam was with him as they struggled through the crowd down to the station, the refuge that wasn’t safe at all, but ‘better than nothing’, carrying a bag with a change of clothes, a Thermos of tea and sandwiches, as well as blankets and a pillow. ‘Just in case,’ said Aunt Miriam.
The all-clear didn’t go till early morning. He was asleep on the pillow by then, rousing blearily to follow Aunt Miriam out into the fire-lit night. It seemed almost normal now to step around bodies, to see women rocking back and forth, sobbing and covering their faces, old men wandering as though hoping somehow their bombed houses might appear miraculously untouched if they searched just a little longer.
‘Have you seen a little girl? Yellow hair ribbons.’ A woman clutched a rag doll, as though the child might sense its presence or it would call her to it.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Aunt Miriam.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said to a man and a woman who stood clinging to each other, their children holding their knees, staring at a shop and flat as they vanished in the flames.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as they stepped between stretchers of bodies laid out on the footpath waiting to be picked up. The dead didn’t hear, but Georg said sorry too. It seemed wrong to ignore them so soon.
Their block of flats still stood there. It looked different now, blank-faced. Men had come and boarded up the windows to keep out the wind and the dust. I’ll have to work out how to scrub the floor properly, thought Georg. There was dirt all through the flat now. Tomorrow, he thought. I’ll think about it then.
Once again Aunt Miriam made cocoa. They sat on the sofa together and drank it. It was almost cosy, the blackout curtains drawn in case a chink of light seeped between the boards. You couldn’t see the wood now, or the flames outside.
At last Aunt Miriam set her alarm for an hour’s sleep before she had to go to work. ‘Stay here tomorrow,’ she said to Georg before he went to bed. ‘I mean today. Don’t leave the flat unless the siren goes.’
He nodded, too tired to ask why.
She was gone when he woke up. He washed — they had filled bowls with water in case the taps stopped working, but it seemed the bombs still hadn’t damaged the water pipes.
He made toast for breakfast, with jam but no butter, in the dimness of the boarded-up kitchen. The paper said that there’d be sugar rationing soon. He would have liked to have a glass of milk, but even though that wasn’t rationed yet, of course the milkman hadn’t come. He had a glass of water instead, and turned the wireless on, then off. He didn’t want to listen to it now. He didn’t want to hear of horrors far away. His brain could only deal with here and today.
He had just washed up the dishes w
hen he heard the key in the lock. Aunt Miriam took off her hat and coat, then sank onto the sofa. ‘George?’ She patted the seat next to her. ‘George, I’m sorry. I have some news you won’t like.’
‘Mutti?’ His voice seemed hardly there.
She looked at him blankly. ‘No, nothing from your mother. There’s no way she can get a message to us now. No, this is something different.’
‘What?’
‘My office is being sent into the country. Tomorrow in fact. We’ve been given twenty-four hours to get our affairs in order.’
The country! No bombs. Chickens maybe. Cows. A dog, he thought. A cottage with roses and quiet nights.
‘Where are we going?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I can’t take you with me.’
‘What?’ He stared at her, unbelieving.
‘We’ll be living all together, the women in one room. I can’t take a child.’
‘I’ll be here alone?’ No, he thought. Not in the darkness of the blacked-out nights. He’d had a lifetime of darkness in the suitcase. He couldn’t stand to be alone in the black now.
‘Of course not. I’ll make sure you’re safe.’
‘How …?’ Realisation came slowly. ‘I’m to be evacuated?’
To a stranger, he thought. Up in Wales maybe. One of the boys who had briefly been at the church school had been sent to Wales. They spoke another language there, and it was cold. The boy knew another boy who had been beaten when he couldn’t bring in the sheep, but one of the girls said her foster family had been nice, just strange.
‘Not to the country. Not here, anyway.’ Aunt Miriam tried to find the words. ‘I’ve managed to get you on a ship going to Australia.’
‘Australia?’ He stared. The pink splodge on the map at the bottom of the world! Where Mrs Huntley’s daughter lived. Where there were butterflies and … and what else? The English had sent convicts there long ago, and now they played cricket and some had black skins and boomerangs.
‘But … but why?’
‘George, things are going to get worse in England. Much worse. Most people have no idea how bad things will be. This bombing is going to go on and on. The Germans could invade at any time. There are stories of what happens when they invade countries — what they do to Jews, even to children. Australia is far away. As far as you can go across the world.’
‘I know,’ he whispered.
She tried to find a smile. ‘You’ll be safe there. In England there are so many evacuees, it’s hard for people to cope. But over in Australia there are lots of families who really want to help. One ship has taken children there already. All the reports say they are settling in well.’ She hesitated. ‘I have a new passport for you. I told the official your old one was damaged in the blast. It’s only a little change — you are “George” now on your passport too.’ Just one letter changed, he thought. An ‘e’ to make me English for the Australians.
‘Australia,’ he said again. It was hard to get to England from Germany. Impossible for Mutti or Papa to get to Australia in war-time. No way even to let Mutti know where he was.
‘I can’t look after you,’ said Aunt Miriam quietly. ‘Even though I’d like to.’ He thought that almost was true. ‘But my job is important. Every job is important if we are going to win this war.’
He was silent for a while. She let him think. Aunt Miriam wasn’t good at some things but she was good at giving you time to think. At last he asked, ‘When do I go?’
‘The boat train leaves at two o’clock this afternoon. I don’t know when the ship sails — things like that aren’t public any more in case a spy tells the enemy. But I think it will be tomorrow or the day after.’
She stood up. ‘You’d better pack your suitcase — all your clothes and your passport. There’ll be other papers to fill in that you’ll need to keep to give to your foster family too. Toothbrush, soap. A book.’
‘Only one?’
She tried to smile. ‘The list said only one. I don’t think they’ll notice if you take more. Just one suitcase though.’
He had hoped he would never have to touch the suitcase with its tiny holes again. Now once again it would be his companion on another uncertain journey.
It had seemed so far from Germany to England. He thought of the vast stretches of blue on the map between England and Australia. How many submarines crept stalking beneath those waves? Storms, whales … The ocean was frightening. But he knew that those who stayed here faced worse dangers.
‘Can we say goodbye to Mrs Huntley?’
‘Of course,’ said Aunt Miriam, still trying very hard to smile. ‘Of course.’
Already it seemed strange to be going to a train station when there wasn’t a raid to shelter from. They walked across the park to the library first, Aunt Miriam carrying his suitcase. They had reached the pond when Aunt Miriam stopped.
The library was gone.
In its place was a heap of rubble, just like any other heap of rubble. A few pages fluttered about, but apart from that you’d never have known it had been a library, and not a house or shop.
‘It must have been hit last night,’ said Aunt Miriam tightly. ‘Mrs Huntley would have been at home.’
In her shelter in her backyard, thought Georg, with her husband and the photos of her children and grandchildren. But not with her dog.
He hoped that the shelter had kept her safe, but there was no way to find out, not this afternoon.
There had only been two nights of raids so far. What would London be like if the raids went on for weeks, or months? No Aunt Miriam at the flat. Now no library either. Mutti, Papa, home, even Elizabeth. Would everything he ever loved vanish?
‘I’m sure Mrs Huntley is safe,’ said Aunt Miriam, in the too-firm tone that adults — even Aunt Miriam — used when they knew you’d never know if what they said was true or not. There was no time now to even try to find Mrs Huntley. What could he say if he did, except goodbye?
They turned back towards the station.
Chapter 16
They stood like a tiny army, almost a hundred boys and girls, some as young as four or five. He was one of the oldest; he was twelve now, though his two birthdays had gone unnoticed by Aunt Miriam.
There were no parents. Goodbyes had been said back at the station. Instead they stood silently, each in a coat, a hat, a scarf, with papers in one hand, a single suitcase in the other. Some of the little ones sobbed, but most stared dry-eyed and defiant, as though they dared Hitler to make them cry.
Around them soldiers bustled, sentries with rifles and bayonets to guard the port; and even more sailors in blue uniforms saluting, marching, purposeful. The few adults not in uniform had clipboards and showed their passes every few minutes as they marshalled the children towards the ship. There were grey-painted guns everywhere — giant ones, pointed at the sea and sky.
Georg glanced down at the strips of sea visible between the big grey ships. It looked oily, black and cold, like the darkness of the suitcase. He forced himself to look at their ship instead.
It was a big ship. Georg was glad. They were going to face a big ocean, with German U-boats below as well as bombers above. In front of their ship was the long grey destroyer that would accompany them beyond England, into the safety of the oceans beyond the usual shipping lanes where, the adults hoped, the circling U-boats and bombers wouldn’t find them.
The escorts lined them up in two rows. Two of the escorts were nurses, in white veils and blue dresses under white aprons. Two others were chaplains, in clergymen’s collars. The others were women in ordinary clothes. He supposed men couldn’t be spared these days to take children across the world. The women were neither young nor old. They looked a bit like Aunt Miriam, not in appearance, but in the way they dressed — sensible heels and thick skirts and leather gloves — and the calm competency with which they moved.
‘Come on, step lively,’ called the shortest of the chaplains. ‘Left right, left right. Let’s show the navy how Britis
h children can march.’
Georg thought the sailors had better things to think about than how well kids marched. None of them even glanced down as the escorts marched them aboard and then down the stairs, into a large room. Their names were called out, they were put in groups of five or six and then each group marched to a cabin.
There were six bunks in his cabin. He stared at the other boys. They stared back at him, and at each other. They’d been flung together by the mysterious workings of adults.
‘Now, I’m sure all of you will soon be friends,’ said their escort a bit too brightly. Her name was Miss Glossop, and Georg had the feeling she might be in charge of the whole shipment of children. She looked at her list, then back at them. ‘Now this is Harris. Harris is five.’ Harris had a sticky nose and swollen eyes. He knuckled away his tears.
‘This is Joe Pondley. You’re seven, aren’t you, Joe?’
‘Yes, miss,’ whispered Joe.
‘And Joe McIntyre, he’s eight. And George and Jamie, you’re both twelve, so that means you’re in charge of the younger ones.’
Jamie and Georg glanced at each other in hope and suspicion. We’re stuck with each other, thought Georg. At least Jamie didn’t look unfriendly.
‘Keep an ear out for the whistle,’ said Miss Glossop. ‘One sharp burst means get into bed, or lights out if you’re already in bed, or time to get up. Two long whistles means you have five minutes to make sure you’re dressed properly and come and stand in the corridor.’
‘What do we do then?’ asked Jamie.
‘Wait,’ said Miss Glossop crisply, ‘till someone tells you what to do. Three whistles means put on your warmest clothes and sturdy shoes and coat and grab your life belt,’ she gestured to the life belts on the wall, ‘then stand in the corridor.’
‘What happens then?’ asked Jamie again.
We sink into the cold dark sea, thought Georg.
‘Someone will take you to your lifeboat. But it’ll be just a practice,’ said Miss Glossop brightly. ‘We’ve the big ship to look after us, and then, well, it’s a big ocean. The enemy will never find us there.’
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