The Girl With No Name

by Diney Costeloe

  It’s so stupid, she thought for the umpteenth time. I can remember her advice, I can remember what she looked like, I can remember her name. Why can’t I remember my own?

  It was as the Dawsons and Mrs Vicar came back downstairs that the doorbell rang. Mrs Vicar opened the door and there standing on the step was a tall thin woman, her hair scraped back into a bun, her expression strangely lifeless. When she forced a smile to her lips it didn’t reach her dark, deep-set eyes.

  ‘Oh, Miss Everard,’ cried Avril. ‘You’re here. That’s good. Charlotte is here in the kitchen waiting for you.’

  Charlotte turned to see the woman she was going to live with and her heart sank. She wanted to cry, ‘No! Please not with her!’ Her thoughts must have shown on her face because Miss Morrison said briskly, ‘Say hallo to Miss Everard, Charlotte.’

  17

  It was cold and dark as Charlotte followed the bobbing light of Miss Everard’s torch through the village. She set a good pace and Charlotte almost had to run to keep up with her, scurrying along, changing her suitcase from hand to hand as she went. At the edge of the village they turned up a narrow lane and came to a small house, set back from the road behind high hedges. Miss Everard paused at the gate, waiting for her new charge to catch up, and then led her up the path to the house.

  ‘Come in,’ she said as she opened the front door, ‘and wait here while I see to the blackout.’

  Charlotte stood, waiting in the darkness, as Miss Everard put down her bag and disappeared. Suddenly the house was flooded with light and Miss Everard reappeared in the hall. ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘I don’t know my name,’ Charlotte said, a trace of misery in her voice, ‘but I’m called Charlotte.’

  ‘Well, don’t just stand there, Charlotte,’ Miss Everard said testily. ‘Take your coat off and come into the warm.’

  Charlotte did as she was told and followed her hostess into the kitchen, where a solid-fuel stove just managed to take the chill from the air. This, Miss Everard attacked with a poker, riddling it violently before grabbing a hod of coke and pouring it in through the top.

  ‘Hadn’t gone out,’ she said, ‘so it’ll soon warm up in here.’ She turned and seemed to look at Charlotte properly for the first time.

  ‘Charlotte,’ she said, ‘the vicar’s wife tells me you’ve lost your memory. We’ll have to see if we can get it back for you. Come along upstairs now and I’ll show you your room.’ Miss Everard had an abrupt way of speaking, so that she always sounded irritable when she spoke.

  Is she always cross? wondered Charlotte as she followed her out of the kitchen.

  Miss Everard led the way up the stairs to a square landing, off which there were four doors.

  ‘This room’s yours,’ she said, opening one of them. ‘Used to be mine when I was a child.’ The room was chilly, with its blackout curtains already drawn across the windows, but it was neatly and comfortably furnished with a bed, a chair and table and a chest of drawers. A wardrobe with a long mirror on its door stood in one corner and under the blacked-out window was a broad window seat.

  ‘Bathroom’s next door,’ Miss Everard said, with a wave of her hand. ‘Now, why don’t you get yourself unpacked and then come down for supper. Turn off the light when you come.’

  Charlotte opened her small suitcase and took out the clothes she’d been given by Matron. They were few enough, but adequate, and she laid them carefully in the chest of drawers. She caught sight of herself in the mirror and paused in front of it for a moment or two, staring at her reflection. Staring back at her was a pale-faced girl with straggly dark hair and brown eyes, thin, almost skinny. Thin wrists stuck out from the sleeves of her red jersey and her skirt seemed to hang off her. The reflection startled her; there’d been no mirrors at St Michael’s, she hadn’t seen herself since before she was injured and she hardly recognised herself.

  Who am I? she wondered for the millionth time. Where do I come from?

  This had become her most recent question. She knew that she could speak both English and German, so perhaps she was German. Sometimes she caught herself thinking in German, but she tried not to. After all, Germany was bombing London, killing thousands, and she didn’t want to be German. But suppose she was. Why had she been in London?

  Miss Morrison had tried to come up with an answer for her. ‘It could be that you’re a refugee,’ she suggested. ‘Perhaps you’re Jewish. You could have been sent here to escape from the Nazis; lots of children were, you know.’

  But why had she been out on the street during an air raid?

  ‘Probably just bad luck,’ Miss Morrison said. ‘You don’t like going into the air raid shelter, do you? So perhaps you were caught in the street but wouldn’t go into a shelter. What do you think?’

  Charlotte didn’t know what to think. All she knew for sure was that she couldn’t remember, she’d been concussed and had broken her arm. The plaster had been removed just before she’d left London, but her arm still ached when she was cold and she cradled it against her now. Then she shrugged and turning off the light went down to the warmth of the kitchen.

  Downstairs she paused at the kitchen door. Miss Everard was busy at the stove, stirring something in a large saucepan.

  ‘Soup to warm us up,’ she said, glancing over her shoulder. On the table was the heel of a loaf and a wedge of cheese. Two places had been laid with plates, knives and spoons. ‘Glasses in the cupboard,’ she said, pointing towards a cupboard in the corner.

  Charlotte fetched the glasses and put them on the table. There was a water jug in the cupboard as well, so she took it to the sink and filled it. Miss Everard gave a nod of approval and then, lifting the pan from the stove, poured the soup into two bowls.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘let’s eat before it gets cold.’

  The soup was thick with vegetables, hot and delicious. Miss Everard cut two generous slices of bread and passing one to Charlotte, dipped her own into the soup. Charlotte followed suit, and for a moment or two they ate in silence.

  ‘Tomorrow is Saturday,’ Miss Everard said. ‘You and all the new children are going to a meeting in the church hall when everything will be explained to you, about school and the village and such. I’ll come with you so that we can plan how we’ll do things. All right?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Everard,’ Charlotte replied.

  ‘I don’t think you can call me that now you’re living here,’ Miss Everard said with a tight smile. ‘Miss Edie will do.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Edie.’

  Silence fell again as they finished the soup and ate their bread and cheese, then Charlotte, plucking up courage said, ‘The soup is very good, thank you, and the cheese tastes good, too.’ She had hardly spoken since she arrived and it was only now that Edie Everard noticed her accent. Certainly not the gentle West Country burr of the local area, but not the loud and to her ear, slovenly, accents of the earlier evacuees either; something harsher, more guttural. European, but not quick and light like the French.

  ‘You speak good English,’ she remarked. ‘Do you speak German as well?’ The question was sharp and Charlotte hesitated.

  That hesitation said it all as far as Edith Everard was concerned. She had been given a German child to foster, to have living here with her in her home.

  ‘You do, don’t you?’ she said, a sudden expression of hatred flickering across her face. ‘You’re German, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ came the simple reply. ‘I don’t know who I am.’

  Edith set about clearing the table, banging the plates together, clattering the cutlery. That vicar’s wife had foisted a German child on her, without so much as a warning. A sudden rage flooded through her as she filled the sink with water and began to wash up. How dare they do this to her? She, who had lost everything to the Germans in 1918. She could hardly breathe and her furious silence enveloped the kitchen, a thick fog of anger smothering everything, leaving Charlotte bewildered and afraid. Not knowing what else t
o do, she took a tea towel from the rail beside the stove and started to dry up the dishes as Miss Edie slammed them down on the draining board.

  ‘I think you should go to bed, now,’ Miss Edie said when at last she had regained control of her emotions. ‘I will see you in the morning.’

  Charlotte said nothing. She simply turned and went upstairs. As she lay in bed later she found she was shaking. She saw again the flash of hatred on Miss Edie’s face. People here in England hated Germans and she, Charlotte, almost certainly was one. As this thought came to her she realised that once again her thoughts had been in German. Tired as she was after the long journey from London, it took Charlotte a very long time to fall asleep, lying awake long after she heard Miss Edie come up the stairs, use the bathroom and close her bedroom door.

  Miss Edie didn’t sleep easily either. The rage which had almost consumed her downstairs when she realised that the child was a German, had eased somewhat now. But the familiar ache, the one she had embraced and clung to ever since she’d received the telegram in August 1918, was still there, a part of her. She thought about Herbert as she did every night before she went to sleep. His picture, a faded sepia, stood on her bedside table, the last thing she saw at night, the first thing she looked at in the morning. Forever young, he smiled out at her, erect and proud of the sergeant’s stripes on his arm, his young face, with its neat moustache, as handsome as the day she had kissed him goodbye at the end of his leave. The day she had worn, for the first time, her engagement ring. Turning on the light again, she opened the drawer of her bedside table and pulled out the telegram still folded into its buff envelope, dog-eared and faded. She unfolded it and read again the fateful words...

  Regret to inform you that Sergeant Herbert Clapham of the Cheshire Regiment was Missing in Action, presumed killed 10th August 1918. Secretary of War extends his sympathy.

  How many times had she read it? It would be impossible to count. Herbert was never coming home to marry her. She would mourn him for the rest of her life.

  His body was never recovered. His name was recorded on the Menin Gate with thirty-eight thousand others, named but with no known resting place. Edith’s life had ended the day the telegram arrived.

  Oh, she still lived with her parents in Blackdown House, where she’d been born. She’d nursed her father when he’d caught Spanish flu in 1919 and died. She’d nursed her mother, who’d recovered, and she continued to care for her until the day she died in 1930, but Edith had never recovered from the loss of the man she loved. Something inside her had shrivelled up when she’d opened that telegram, and it had never blossomed again. She hated everything German. No longer able to enjoy the music of German composers, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, she refused to listen and thus denied herself a pleasure that she’d enjoyed since her youth. She had lived alone at Blackdown House ever since, cutting herself off from friends to live with her memories. Once a member of the church choir, she had ceased to believe in God; a god who could allow her Herbert to die and leave her alone in the wasteland of the rest of her life was no comfort to her.

  Her offer of a home for an evacuated child had been her first real act of unselfishness for years and now that had backfired. Who had she been landed with? A German child.

  Not the child’s fault, she had to admit, but whether the people who had brought her here chose to admit it or not, she, Edith Everard, knew that the child was German. She could tell.

  *

  The next morning dawned bright and cold. Charlotte, wrapped in a blanket in her unheated room, pulled back the curtains and, perching on the window seat, looked out. Below her was a carefully tended vegetable garden, with neat rows of sprouts and cabbages, and she guessed where all the vegetables in last night’s soup had come from. She didn’t know what any of them were, but it was clear that Miss Edie was obeying the instruction to dig for victory. Dig for Victory. Charlotte had seen that written up somewhere, not just on a poster – they were everywhere – but in huge letters. Where?

  She stared out across the country beyond the garden, undulating fields marked with hedges or stone walls and the occasional stand of trees stark against the winter sky. Tussocks of grass and patches of winter bramble caught the sunlight, while dips and hollows remained shadowed, a patchwork of winter colour. Sheep were grazing in several of the fields, some cattle stood together under the trees in another and away in the distance, she could just make out some farm buildings, grey stone with slate roofs as if they’d grown up from the limestone beneath them. Further off was a line of hills, hardly more than a smudge on the skyline. Charlotte had never been in such remote countryside before. It seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction. When they had driven up through the lanes from Cheddar the previous afternoon, the road had been between high hedges and she’d seen nothing to prepare her for the wide expanses she could see from here. There was something a little scary about so much space.

  As she sat on the window seat Charlotte wondered what was going to happen to her next. She knew Miss Edie had been angry when she realised that she, Charlotte, was German, but what was she going to do about it? If she’d had somewhere else to go, Charlotte would have packed up her suitcase again and left. But she had nowhere except out into the endless fields that surrounded the village.

  Miss Edie called her to come down for breakfast and dishing up a bowl of porridge set it down before her. It was clear that she had already eaten hers as the empty bowl lay on the draining board.

  ‘The meeting in the church hall is at half past ten. I am going to work in the garden until then. You are to wash the dishes and clean the kitchen. I have made my own bed, you are to make yours. Do you understand?’ She had spoken in a strangely slow and deliberate manner as if afraid that her German charge wouldn’t be able to understand her.

  ‘Yes, I understand you very well,’ Charlotte replied. ‘You do not have to come with me to the meeting. I will pack my case and go to Mrs Vicar. Her sister goes to London today. I will go with her. You do not want me here and me, I do not wish to stay.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, child,’ snapped Edith. ‘You’ll do no such thing.’ She was taken aback at and not a little impressed at Charlotte’s confrontation. ‘I’m merely asking you to help with some of the chores, while I get on in the garden. Be ready to go at quarter past ten.’

  Charlotte washed up the few breakfast pots and then went back upstairs. She was just going into her room when she noticed the door of Miss Edie’s room was ajar and curiosity overcame her; pushing it wider she crept into the room and looked about her. It was much bigger than her own and had probably been that of Miss Edie’s parents when she was a child. It was furnished comfortably enough, but the furniture was old and shabby and it was clear that nothing had been done to smarten the room up for many years. The walls were papered with a floral wallpaper, but the colours were dim and in places the paper was torn. A threadbare rug covered much of the floor and the blackout curtains hanging on either side of the window had seen better days. Charlotte tiptoed over to the window and peeped through a gap in the curtain. In the garden below she saw Miss Edie, busy hoeing. Safe from interruption, Charlotte turned her attention back to the room. There on the table by the bed lay a book, a pair of spectacles and an old photograph in a silver frame. A uniformed soldier with curly hair stared out at her with smiling eyes.

  Who was he? she wondered as she picked him up for a closer look. A husband? A brother? A boyfriend? The photo looked quite old.

  There was nothing much else to see. The bed had been neatly made and Miss Edie’s dressing gown hung on a peg on the back of the door. Charlotte left the room, making sure that the door was left a little ajar as she’d found it. There was one more door on the landing and, wondering what was in that room, she gently turned the handle. The door was jammed or locked. Either way, it wouldn’t open. Charlotte went back into her own room and made her bed as she’d been told. She was still sorely tempted to pack her case and take it with her to the meeting in th
e church hall. She hadn’t lied. If Miss Edie didn’t want her here, she didn’t want to stay. She would ask Miss Morrison if she could go back to London with her, then she’d return and fetch her things.

  She went back downstairs and looked into the two other rooms. The one next to the kitchen was a dining room, rather dark, its heavy furniture covered with an overlay of dust. Clearly it hadn’t been used, or cleaned, for some time. The other door opened into a sitting room. It was furnished with shabby but comfortable-looking armchairs and could have made a cosy place to sit and read or listen to the wireless had the fire been lit. A piano stood against one wall and a bookcase full of books against another, but this room, too, felt cold and unused. These two rooms had no blackout curtains or screens and Charlotte guessed they didn’t need them, so seldom were they used. She was just investigating the cupboard under the stairs when she heard the back door open and, not wanting to be found prying, she beat a hasty retreat upstairs; by the time Miss Edie reached the landing, Charlotte was sitting on her window seat staring out across the Mendip Hills.

  Together they walked back into the village and arrived at the church hall just as it began to fill up with the evacuees and their hosts and hostesses. Mrs Vicar was at the door greeting everyone and as soon as Charlotte saw Clare she broke away and went over to say hallo.

  Clare was sitting next to a large woman wearing a cross-over apron and a scarf tied round the back of her head. Charlotte flopped down on her other side.

  ‘What’s your place like?’ she muttered.

  With a quick sideways glance to make sure Mrs Prynne wasn’t listening, Clare said, ‘Not too bad. Had some sort of stew last night. Weren’t too bad. Have to share a room with Sandra, Mrs Prynne’s daughter. Don’t like that, she snores something rotten. What about you?’

  ‘Got a room to myself,’ Charlotte admitted, ‘and the supper was good. She don’t like the Germans though.’