The hate Georg felt towards the enemy trickled into him as he spoke, giving him the story. Their hatred for the dragon/U-boat was drawing them together: a nation of five boys in a cabin waiting for their enemy to be destroyed.
… and then the end, as the grey dragon sank down, down to the bottom of the sea, never to roar again, leaving ships to sail safely and happily to a land of sunlight and butterflies and bananas.
‘Is that true?’ whispered Harris at the end. ‘Has the destroyer killed the dragon?’
‘Maybe,’ said Georg. And it was true, perhaps. A tiny chance, but possible, that their destroyer or one like it, or a British plane, had already sunk the submarine that had tried to kill them. Perhaps now there was no enemy at all between them and safety.
Perhaps.
The two Joes were asleep minutes after the story ended; Harris slept too, with the first smile Georg had ever seen on his face.
Hating had helped.
Hating things together gave you comfort when you were scared. For the first time Georg felt a whisper of understanding how hating the Jews could help a nation desperate with war debts, its children starving, its grown-ups humiliated by the French soldiers marching along their footpaths.
He felt drained and strange and somehow more alive than he had for a long time. He and Jamie sat on Georg’s bunk and shared a bar of chocolate.
‘I’ve been saving it for something special,’ said Jamie. ‘Mum gave it to me. She’d been saving it too. I suppose this is as good as any. Be lots of chocolate when we get to Australia. And bananas.’ He glanced at Georg. ‘Why did you put in the bananas?’
Georg shrugged. He didn’t know where the rest of the story had come from, much less the bananas. The chocolate was good.
‘You know anyone who’s ever been to Australia?’
‘No,’ said Georg. ‘I knew a lady whose daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren live there. But she didn’t know much about it.’
‘I knew a kid who was sent to a farm up near Scotland,’ said Jamie. ‘They made him get up at four in the morning to milk the cows, and whipped him when he got it wrong. He said he had scars all down his back, under his shirt, where they’d whipped him.’
They were silent a moment. ‘Do you think that’s true?’ asked Georg.
‘Don’t know. Don’t think so.’ Jamie swallowed the last of his chocolate. ‘He never took his shirt off so we could see the scars. My dad’s a farmer. Chickens. I’ve got to collect the eggs before I go to school. Used to anyhow. Got up at six o’clock. I want to go to a family in a town. One with a picture theatre.’ His voice grew eager. ‘And where I don’t have to get up till seven or even eight.’
‘I’d like to be on a farm.’ It was the first time Georg had allowed himself to think of what the family he was going to might be like. ‘With a dog and hens and … and rabbits. Do you think they’ll let us choose?’
Jamie snorted. ‘Grown-ups never let boys choose. I bet I’m stuck with a chicken farmer who wants me because I know how to mix up laying mash.’
‘I could ask Miss Glossop.’
Jamie considered. ‘She might know.’ He crossed over to his own bed. Georg stretched out the length of his bunk. He was drifting off to sleep when he heard Jamie’s voice again. ‘I’m glad you’re here. In this cabin, I mean.’
‘You too,’ said Georg.
He wondered if Jamie would have said that if he knew he shared his cabin with a German boy.
In the morning Harris’s sheets were dry.
Georg found Miss Glossop unoccupied on the night of the children’s concert, waiting for the girls to finish dressing up in costumes they’d made from each other’s clothes. ‘Miss Glossop?’
‘Yes, George?’
‘Do you know which foster people we’re going to? I mean, each one of us?’
‘Not yet. I don’t think it’s been decided, though the volunteer families have been selected. Why?’
‘I wondered … Jamie wants to go to a town, even though he comes from a farm, and I want to go to a farm.’
Miss Glossop gave a hint of a smile. ‘I think that could be arranged.’
‘Or could we — could we be together? Me and Jamie? I’d rather stay with Jamie than go to a farm.’
He wanted to ask if the Joes and Harris could stay with them too, but that might be too much for any family. And already Miss Glossop was shaking her head. ‘Only one child per family. So many want to help the British Children’s Appeal, you know. It wouldn’t be fair to give one family two and have another family miss out completely.’
As though we are parcels, thought Georg, thank-you presents for a colony that sends its army to help the English war. What about that is fair to us? But he didn’t say anything. If Miss Glossop said there was nothing she could do, there was no point.
Chapter 17
AUSTRALIA, OCTOBER 1940
Australia crept up at them, out of the grey ocean. One afternoon there was nothing but white-capped sea and a sky swept clean by the wind and as blue as a balloon. The next morning when they marched along the corridor and climbed the companionway to physical jerks there it was: a stretch of dull khaki in the distance, like the land had been painted with camouflage colours too.
The air smelled of warmth and soil, not just the tinny tang of sea.
None of the children and few of the adults on board knew which route the ship was taking, or when they would land, or even what part of Australia this was. ‘Loose lips sink ships’ the posters stated. What you didn’t know a German spy couldn’t find out. Were they looking at the pointy bit at the top, or one of the big curved sides? It wouldn’t be the big flat bit in the middle of the bottom edge called the Nullarbor Plain, thought Georg, as the encyclopaedia had said that was desert.
Now, at least, the portholes could be opened. Fresh air gusted into stale cabins. At night, thin beads of light could shine onto the blackness of the sea — they were so far from Europe that there was no longer any need to hide from enemy bombers or U-boats.
Day after day they waited for the ship to head in to port. Green land turned to yellow, red and then far-off cliffs glimpsed only once through Miss Glossop’s binoculars. Georg was pretty sure that was the Nullarbor Plain because it didn’t have any trees on it, and the encyclopaedia had said Nullarbor meant ‘no trees’, but he didn’t tell anyone, in case he was wrong, or in case he was right too, and was giving secrets away.
The land turned green again.
The six weeks of surging across the ocean hadn’t seemed as long as the next three days. But at last, at the children’s dinner at midday, one of the chaplains made the announcement.
‘We’ll land in Port Melbourne at quarter past nine tomorrow, or thereabouts.’ He grinned as the noise rose, and for once didn’t call for silence. As the chatter died down he continued. ‘Half of you will be going to families there; the rest will go on to Sydney. But you’ll all have a chance to see Melbourne. There’ll be a bus tour up to the mountains in the morning and then a special afternoon tea. After that the following children will meet their foster parents.’
He picked up a clipboard. The children seemed suddenly to turn into small statues as they waited to hear what would happen to them. The chaplain began to call out the names. They were in alphabetical order: ‘Adams, Estelle; Bateson, Samuel; Carrington, John …’
A few kids clapped their hands when they heard their names, glad that at least now they had a solid destination; they hadn’t been forgotten in the confusions of war. Others smiled at friends. But most were quiet. Grown-ups had put them on this ship and they had accepted that. Now they accepted this without a murmur too.
Jamie’s name was called. Georg gave Jamie a nudge with his elbow. It didn’t mean good or bad: just an acknowledgement that he had heard.
Harris’s face lit up when he heard his name. Georg wondered if the boy thought his mum might be already here in Melbourne, or his gran, whether he even understood he would find only a family of strangers. But t
here was no point frightening Harris any more than he had been already.
The chaplain had got to ‘Norland, Donald’ when Georg realised that ‘Marks’ would not be called. He was in the group that was sailing on to Sydney. He listened as the rest of the names were called out.
One Joe’s name had already been called, and then the other was too. Georg tried not to let his feelings show on his face.
All the others in his cabin were bound for Melbourne. Once again he’d be alone.
He hadn’t thought that he’d have to face his foster family without any of his new friends. Yet part of him was glad that he still had a few days of the orderly ship world, especially now that the danger of torpedoes or bombs had vanished down here at the end of the world.
Another part of him wanted to get it over with. He had hoped for the faint chance that even if he couldn’t go to the same family as Jamie, they might be placed in homes nearby. Even being near the Joes or Harris would be something familiar.
But packages couldn’t choose where they were sent.
None of them slept well that night. The ocean with its threat of waiting submarines had been terrifying. This was safety, yet somehow the next days of waiting until they would be claimed by strange Australians were even more frightening than the sea.
They took turns looking out the porthole as the ship sailed into Port Phillip Bay. The port looked like the one they had left, just fewer ships and not as smoky and the sun still too high up in the sky.
Georg marched up to the deck with the others; and stood in a line to shake hands with the captain and the first mate. He sat next to Jamie on the bus while their ship-mates sang English songs, trying to be what the adults expected them to be: happy at being safe on dry land, instead of scared of a land of strangers. They drove through the Melbourne streets lined with houses and gardens that looked strangely home-like, his own German home, not Aunt Miriam’s, as though Mutti could come out of one of those doors in her flowered dress and walk down the path.
‘Wish you were coming here too,’ said Jamie for the tenth time since their names had been called out.
‘Me too,’ said Georg, for the tenth time too.
The city centre looked like it could be part of London, except here there was clear, untaped glass in all the windows; there were no piles of sandbags, nor fires nor rubble. The faces on the street were white and there was no one wearing suits with convict arrows on them or carrying boomerangs, or even playing cricket.
It was only as they headed up into the hills that the land grew strange, the trees the wrong shape and the wrong colour, the spaces too wide with no hedges or stone walls neatly dividing them. He liked the hills better — even if the trees were wrong, the mist and the cold were familiar.
But they only stayed long enough to be marched to the toilet, and to eat the sandwiches that Miss Glossop and the others handed out. Some strange sickle-shaped leaves lay on the ground. Georg picked one up, thinking that he would dry it and send it to Aunt Miriam.
The bus journey back was more silent, no singing this time, each of them wondering what the afternoon would bring, new families or, at the very least, separation from friends.
The tea party was in a hall, with ‘Welcome’ on a big banner over the doorway. Trestles covered with different coloured cloths held sandwiches and small cakes with pink or white icing and pikelets with jam and bowl after bowl of sweets, though the Australian women called them lollies, which was confusing at first.
There were cream cakes too: small ones with their tops cut out and filled with whipped cream, then the tops replaced, standing up like wings. Küchen mit Schlagsahne.
Georg felt his throat burn. He’d be sick if he ate a cake with cream.
Then he saw the bananas. They sat at the end of one of the trestles, in a great long bunch. Georg had never seen so many before. He hadn’t known they grew in bunches either.
He ate seven, one after another, peeling the skin down like a monkey, and nibbling till each one was gone. He was eating the seventh when Miss Glossop called for those who were to stay in Melbourne to report to the other room.
So he wasn’t even going to see the people his cabin-mates were going to. He hoped they’d at least be kind. Georg looked around for the others to say goodbye, but the two Joes and Harris must have been near the doorway when the call came. They had already vanished. There was only Jamie. They looked at each other awkwardly across the trestles.
‘See you sometime,’ said Jamie at last.
Would they really ever see each other sometime? Or were they just like bits of driftwood, coming together then floating off across the sea of war? Would Jamie have still been his friend if he had known that Georg was German? He doubted it.
They had shared so much, even if some of it was built on lies. There was too much to say: things that couldn’t be said even if he’d had the words. He wished, suddenly, desperately, that there was just one person he could tell his secrets to. ‘I … I hope your family is nice. I hope they are kind to you,’ he managed at last.
‘Yours too.’
It would have been good to hug, but you didn’t hug another boy. Instead he waved as Jamie marched back, his head high, a small soldier doing his part in the war.
Georg was the only one in the cabin now. He liked having a room to himself again, though he missed the others more. Everyone I like vanishes, he thought. Or maybe it’s me that keeps on vanishing. Even the refuge in Australia was only till the war was over. Or maybe not for that long, if they didn’t like him, or changed their minds, or found out that he wasn’t an English boy called George at all.
He didn’t bother trying to talk to any of the others at breakfast, or in their free time after dinner. Most of the children his age who were heading to Sydney were girls; and they had already formed their own small groups. Besides, why make a new friend now, when in a few days you’d be wrenched apart?
The coast drifted by, the same anonymous green, with blue hills or maybe mountains in the distance.
It only took a day and a night to sail to Sydney. Georg felt the ship change course and ran to the porthole.
Cliffs! Tall craggy brown ones, streaked with seagull droppings, with more of the gumtrees on top.
He wished he could go up on deck. You could see only glimpses of the world from a porthole. Even as he thought it the whistle went twice.
He dashed for the door — no need for a coat here — but some of the girls had made it out of their cabins before him. They grinned at him, not because they were first but in companionship. Seconds later Miss Glossop appeared. She was smiling too.
‘Forward march!’ she called.
It was the fastest march they’d ever made. Miss Glossop didn’t make them keep time today. Up the companionway, into early-morning sunlight that seemed brighter than he’d ever known it. He ran onto the deck with the others and gazed around.
The ship wallowed as it changed direction between two giant cliffs, ragged and rocky and brown and topped with green. Behind them the sea was green and choppy. And in front of them …
Sydney Harbour gleamed. It was blue, not green, as though it was a sister to the sky. Every wave looked like it was tipped with the sun. Houses sprawled down between trees to the harbour edged with smooth brown rock, but there were coves too, as though this harbour was a mighty hand with a hundred fingers, each with tiny beaches at the end, and fishing boats tied up and bobbing on the water.
It looked like a city. It looked like forest and beach too. A ferry bobbed by, so close the passengers waved and cheered as they steamed by. Georg reckoned that any ship that made its way to port these days was a triumph against the enemy.
There were ships everywhere. Not just the tiny ferries with green trim and big funnels that criss-crossed the harbour as though they owned it, but pale grey ships — small ones, big ones — though none as big as the destroyer that had accompanied them for a while from England. One ship passed them only a hundred yards away. The sailors waved to the child
ren on the deck too.
Georg thought of the grim and silent sailors on the day they had left England. These sailors looked like they still knew how to laugh, had spare minutes to wave to children.
It seemed to take forever for the ship to sail to the wharf, but not long enough either. He could have stared out of the harbour forever, grasping the rail, smelling the scents that were almost familiar from Melbourne — the smells of strange trees — and a special scent that seemed to be the harbour’s own.
But they weren’t allowed to see the ship being tied up. The whistle blew again. They lined up obediently and went below.
Georg sat on his top bunk, his legs dangling. He’d packed last night. Even his pyjamas were folded in the suitcase. He almost felt affection for it. It was his last link to Mutti, to home and England and Aunt Miriam. He had now even grown out of the clothes he had worn from Germany.
He’d read his books a hundred times. So he just waited, staring out of the porthole, which wasn’t interesting as all he could see was the side of a big grey ship, with not even a porthole near enough to see into. The cabin was stuffy after the sunlight outside. He almost wished there were lessons or physical jerks today. He supposed the escorts wanted their charges to look as neat as possible when they arrived.
At last the whistle sounded for breakfast. He waited in the corridor, marched up to the dining room and sat at a table of girls — they had been allowed to sit where they liked after Melbourne, not only with their cabin-mates. Even though he hadn’t made friends with any of the girls he didn’t want to sit at a table by himself.
‘No tour today then,’ said the oldest girl, spooning up her porridge. Her name was Elizabeth, but Georg never used it. It would hurt to say that name now.
‘How do you know?’
She shrugged and went on eating. ‘No time. If we was going to have a tour they’d have let us get off this morning.’
At last the whistle came to ‘fall out’. He gathered up his suitcase and his coat — it wouldn’t fit in his suitcase and it was too hot to wear it — then joined the others as they stood at attention outside their cabins. Even the littlies knew how to stand at attention now.
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