And then Ruthie remembered.
“Are we going back to the country? Are you sending me back to the country?”
Ruthie’s mother turned, and began to walk, away from Aspen Street, along the wide pavements of Commercial Road, towards the place where the car had disappeared.
“I’ll never let you go on your own again, Ruthie—I promise, never on your own again. You don’t want to go on your own to the country, do you, Ruthie?”
She didn’t have to think of the right answer this time. The right one was the same as she wanted to say.
“No. Not on my own. Not ever.”
“All of us, you and me and Leon, eh, boobalah? Just us. We’ll go to the country, and maybe they’ll find us a little place of our own, eh? You’d like that. We’ll have a little place of our own, with a real garden and we’ll grow things, and play in the sun in the country, and you’ll go to school and get a proper education again. You ought to get a proper education, because you’re a clever girl, and you need a chance.”
She stopped again, and held Ruthie’s hand very tightly, and stared down at her. “For you, it’ll be different. For you, everything good, eh, Ruthie? The war’ll finish, one day it’ll finish, and we’ll stay safe in the country till then, and one day for you it’ll be different. You’ll marry a marvellous husband and you’ll have a house and a car, all your own…”
“I’d like a car,” Ruthie said.
“And an education, remember that. An education. You could be—anything, anything at all. A doctor, maybe…”
“Like Lenny? Can girls be doctors?”
“Sure they can. You can. You’ll see. That’s why I did it, see? To get you an education in the country, keep you safe, you and Leon.”
They walked on. After a while Ruthie stopped thinking about having a car and driving it, and said, “Are we going to the country now?”
“We’re going to the Council…”
“They’ll send us to the country?”
“Yes. Listen, Ruthie. I want to tell you—sometimes, like I said, you do things because you got to. Even if you don’t want, you got to. So listen to me…”
“Yes. I understand,” Ruthie said again.
“We’ve been bombed out, you see? Bombed out last night in the raid. We tell them we lived in Chiltern Street where they got it, by the workshops there, and we got bombed out last night. We got nothing but what we stand up in, you see, Ruthie? So we got to be given some things to wear, some clothes for you and Leon, and for me, and we got to have some money, and we go to the country. They got to look after us. But you remember. We lived in Chiltern Street, we got bombed out last night, and we been with friends this morning, and now we want to be sent to the country. Don’t go answering questions, you hear me? Anyone asks you, you just say you don’t know, you don’t remember.”
“There’s my books that I swopped. And my crayons,” Ruthie said. “I made some pictures and I want them.”
“They’ll give you more, believe me they’ll give you more. I’ll tell them you lost all your bits of toys, God help you, and they’ll give you more. Only don’t go answering questions, you hear? We’re going to the country, right now, we’re going. I don’t go back to Aspen Street. Those lousy women they’ll drive me mad if I go back—easy for them, with their husbands that don’t go on the run, they’ll have it in for me because I shopped him. I don’t go back.”
And they walked on, down Commercial Road, towards the rest centre at the Council, away from Aspen Street and the women and Black Sophie’s shop, and the girls with their shiny eyes and bubbly giggles, and Festival Street and the school and the stalls in the market.
And as they walked away, the places and people disappeared. Ruthie knew that, knew they had gone, because she was never going back there to make them real again. Already she was forgetting, the way she always did. She crinkled up her eyes to see it, but it was hazy, Aspen Street was hazy and the people were hazy, without any faces because Ruthie was going away from them and they’d never be real again. But she could see Ruthie, there in the middle of Aspen Street, sitting on the kerb so that her knickers could get dry, a smaller than real Ruthie, with her gas mask round her neck and her little red book on her lap, drawing pictures of balloons. That Ruthie would always be there, the Ruthie who had come there at the beginning of the summer, that Ruthie would stay there for ever, in the place that was disappearing for ever.
The real Ruthie walked on, feeling her legs moving against her dress, feeling the heat coming up under her shoes, and she felt sad about the other Ruthie, left for ever in Aspen Street that wasn’t real any more. That Ruthie would never have an education or a car or be a doctor. Poor Ruthie, thought Ruthie. Poor Ruthie. She never even got a piece of glass for herself, a piece of lovely spiky glass with bright colours shining out of it in the sunshine. The poor thing had wanted it so much, Ruthie thought, she’s sitting there on the kerbstone wanting a piece of glass and she can never have it.
Above them, the barrage balloons turned softly and gently on their cables, the rainbows round their tails bright in the blue sky. But Ruthie didn’t look up at them. There wasn’t any reason to look. Soon they, too, like Aspen Street, like all of London, like the sirens and the raids and the guns and the noise, the smell of hot tar from the roads, the smell of herrings and cucumbers and onions from Mrs Cohen’s shop, all of it was going to disappear, because Ruthie was going away.
When we get there, to the country, I’ll make a map of it, the new country place, then that will be the real place, Ruthie thought. That will be nice for the country, when I make it a real place.
As they walked, she whispered to herself, “I was Ruthie Lee. I had black hair and brown eyes and I was Ruthie Lee. I was a little girl, and I was Ruthie Lee. And now I am Ruth Lee, a big girl, a friend to my mother and it will be different for me.”
And the picture of the little Ruthie Lee, sitting on the kerb in Aspen Street, disappeared from inside her head altogether, for ever and always, as Ruth Lee went to the country.
The Burning Summer Page 11
