Listen for the Singing

by Jean Little

  “Why not call him Peter? That’s a nice name.”

  “I never knew a bird called Peter,” Mama said, studying the bird himself. “But I think maybe it suits him. Besides I was in love once with a boy named Peter.”

  “You were?” “When?” “Who was he?” “I never heard of this.” came from all sides.

  “He was my first love,” Mama sighed, rolling her eyes dramatically. Then she laughed. “He lived next door to us when I was eight. But he moved away on my ninth birthday and I never heard of him again. I wanted to name Rudi “Peter” but your father did not think it such a good idea. It is all right for the bird though, Ernst, is it not?”

  “Just right, if you like it,” Papa said.

  The bird suddenly sang again, four notes this time, without being invited to begin by Mama.

  “It is settled. Peter he shall be,” Mama said.

  Anna smiled to herself. She could not have her puppy. But she had learned last week that Peter was Mr. McNair’s first name.

  Chapter 19

  From the beginning, nobody in the Solden household had been able to stay uninformed about the war. And, with April drawing to an end, more of Papa’s predictions started to come true. Yet for Anna, April always remained the month she and Rudi bought Mama a bird for her birthday.

  May was the month when the war moved from the radio, the movie newsreels, and the headlines in the newspaper, right into their home.

  After he had written his examinations and helped celebrate Mama’s birthday, Rudi only waited ten days before he enlisted. Later, looking back, Anna realized that he managed to spend time alone with each of them during that short interval.

  He went to watch Fritz play basketball and they stayed up late talking. Anna, supposed to be asleep, listened to the rise and fall of their voices. It was easy to tell that Fritz was talking most.

  He took Frieda on a bike hike. She almost didn’t go, because something else came along that tempted her, and Anna was sick with envy for she would have loved to take Frieda’s place, only she couldn’t ride a bicycle because of her poor vision.

  He sat, in the evenings and on weekends, watching Mama mending and ironing, encouraging her to tell him stories of the days when they had all been children.

  Gretchen and he went to a band concert in the park. Anna asked if she might come too but Rudi said they probably wouldn’t be back before her bedtime.

  And he spent hours in the store with his father, helping enough so that Mama could take time off to do a thorough spring cleaning at home. There were often long gaps between customers, and the father and son spent them talking quietly or just sitting together.

  Anna, growing more and more uneasy, turned up there, wanting to be with them. But after only ten minutes, Rudi told her to go home.

  “Papa and I have things to discuss,” he said, “but I’ll meet you tomorrow after school and we’ll go for a walk and have time by ourselves. You should be able to understand me needing to be alone with Papa. You’ve wanted him to yourself all your life.”

  She could not deny that. So she left.

  He was there, waiting, when she came out of school.

  “What did your dear friend Mr. McNair have to say today?” Rudi asked, his voice teasing.

  Rudi was too smart. Anna blushed only a little.

  “We didn’t have math,” she said.

  Then they were in the park, the new grass under their feet, the sunlight falling on them through the thin screen of translucent new leaves.

  “Anna,” he said, “let’s sit down on that bench over there. I have to … I want to talk to you. There’s a thing I have to tell you.”

  “I don’t want to hear,” she said.

  But she went to the bench.

  And he told her that he was going to join the Navy that very night.

  She had no words to say. She sat, staring down at her hands gripped together in her lap.

  “I wasn’t going to tell anybody ahead of time but Papa,” he went on, as though he had heard what was in her heart. “Yet Papa … well, Papa understands but he seems so tired. And I think our house will be a sad place for a while. Mama … she will not know how to bear it. The others are grown up and away from her somehow, but you are the one she and Papa love most of all.”

  Anna looked up at him, blank astonishment taking the place of her misery for a moment.

  “I know,” he laughed. “When you were little, Mama thought you could do no right. But you have grown up so much, Anna. And you are kind. You see things the others don’t notice. So I just wanted to ask you to help them all, especially Papa and Mama.”

  She help Papa? Mama maybe. Although that, too, seemed impossible. But Papa was the tower of strength on which she had always leaned. Papa helped her. Now things were different somehow, but she could not imagine herself helping Papa.

  Rudi again seemed to read her thoughts. He reached out and took her hand.

  “This war has hurt Papa more than any of us can guess,” he said. “He does not talk of Aunt Tania but he thinks of her always. And he loves both Germany and England. And now he will be afraid for me.”

  “Then stay!” Anna cried, her voice choked and fierce. “He has enough trouble. I can’t help. You mustn’t go.”

  He replaced her hand carefully in her lap and stood up.“I have to,” he said simply. “I know it will hurt him. But I have to. I can’t explain it so you will understand … Anna, do you remember Herr Keppler?”

  For a moment, she had no idea what he was talking about. Then she did remember. Herr Keppler had been the new headmaster in their school just before they had left Germany. He was a Nazi. He had been a cruel man, and once he had not let them sing a song, a song about freedom. How they feared him! How helpless he made them feel! She remembered something else too, something she had remembered when the letter about Aunt Tania’s arrest came: Gerda Hoffman, a girl in her class, whose father had just disappeared one night while his family were waiting for him to come home to supper — Gerda with her wounded eyes who had also vanished but who had appeared in Anna’s dreams for months.

  “Yes, I remember,” she said.

  “Well, that’s why I’m going,” he said. “So the people like Herr Keppler won’t win. And so someone will help all the Aunt Tanias. Say you’ll help, Anna. Say you’ll do everything you can. Promise me.”

  She was crying now and she did not even try to stop. But she nodded her head and then stood up as tall as she could beside him.

  “Have my handkerchief,” he said.

  She blew her nose loudly. It was such a familiar, ordinary sound that it cheered both of them. She wiped away the tears and did not let others fall.

  “Why are you going in the Navy?” she asked, keeping her voice as steady as she could. “Paula’s cousin went in the Army.”

  “Well, maybe I’m a bit mixed up about it all still,” Rudi said. “But I don’t want to have to fight inside Germany ever and I don’t want to have to drop bombs on Frankfurt. There are other people there besides Herr Keppler. He’s probably off somewhere in a uniform.”

  “I don’t think so,” Anna said. “He bullied children. I don’t think he was truly brave.”

  She did not know how she managed to eat supper without anyone asking her what was wrong. Papa looked at her but he knew. Watching Rudi making jokes, complimenting Gretchen on the cabbage rolls, getting the whole family to laugh, stiffened her spine. She passed her plate for more apple dumpling.

  After supper, Rudi left them.

  Mama, seemingly her normal busy, self-sufficient self all through the previous weeks collapsed within minutes after he had gone. The next morning was Sunday and she stayed in bed, refusing to attend church with the rest. She had always been the person who saw to it that nobody ever missed a church service, unless he or she were seriously ill, so it seemed strange and wrong to be sitting in their usual pew without her. When Gretchen went to call her for lunch, Mama kept her back turned and said she had already eaten.

>   “But she can’t have,” Gretchen said. “Nothing’s gone.”

  “She must be ill,” Papa said. “I’ll go and talk to her.”

  When Papa came out of the bedroom, he looked more anxious than before.

  “She says she’s not sick,” he reported, “but she won’t talk to me except to tell me not to call the doctor. She is missing Rudi, of course, but lying in there alone is so unlike her. I don’t know how to reach her.”

  Anna heard the words and knew that both her parents needed help. But what could she do? Nothing, whatever Rudi might think. She went up to her own bed and sought escape in a new book she had got out of the library. It was called How Green Was My Valley and was written by Richard Llewellyn. She loved the poetry of it and the people but today, even Huw Morgan’s magic storytelling could not free her from worrying about Mama and missing Rudi.

  The next morning, Mama got up and went to work as usual and everyone felt relieved. She continued to eat little and remained mostly silent, but nobody felt much like talking anyway. At least she was back with them.

  That was the day Germany invaded Holland.

  Anna watched Mama pushing food around on her plate that night. Then, before anyone could break the leaden atmosphere, Klara Solden left the table, went into her bedroom, and closed the door. They all sat mesmerized, staring at the door shut in their faces.

  “She hardly spoke to me today,” Papa said. “She waited on people but said as little as possible. She must be sick with grief. I’ll take her something later.”

  They got through the meal somehow. Anna had homework to do. She kept busy till bedtime. But that night in bed, she began to wonder about her mother. Was Mama really so stricken? It was silly. Rudi had not even left Toronto yet. He was on a naval training ship in Lake Ontario, and before long he would be able to come home on leave. She knew how Mama must feel. Rudi was Mama’s firstborn and favourite child. Still, could it be that Mama just did not know how to stop acting tragic? Anna could remember times when she herself had sworn positively never to speak to Mama again or made some other rash vow. How soon she had wanted to break her own word and yet how difficult it had been to stop posing as angry or injured.

  Mama wouldn’t act that way though. She was not a child.

  Still, Anna wondered. And the next night, when Mama would not come to the table, Anna got up in sudden anger, filled a plate with food, put it and cutlery and a glass of water on a tray, and headed for that shut door.

  “She won’t eat it, Anna,” Gretchen said, looking wretched with worry.

  “Oh, yes, she will,” said Anna. And setting her jaw exactly as she used to do when she was nine years old and about to defy her mother, she marched into Mama’s room, Fritz jumping up to open the door.

  “Sit up, Mama,” she said, in a voice totally lacking in sympathy. “You’re going to eat your supper.”

  “Take it away,” Mama moaned. “Leave me alone.”

  “You ought to be ashamed,” Anna said. “Papa is getting pale with worry over you. Gretchen can’t eat. Rudi hasn’t had any letters from anybody because we are so anxious about you. He’s probably getting thin too, and all you can do is lie there and feel sorry for yourself.” She gulped in a deep breath and rushed on while her mood held. “I know it was hard when he first left but that’s over and everybody but you is trying to keep going. I think you’re just sulking by now and can’t stop — but you can EAT so sit up!”

  Her mother turned over and stared up at the youngest of her children.

  “Enough of that talk, Miss Anna Elisabeth Solden,” Mama snapped, her indignation a match for Anna’s. “Nobody is going to starve around here as long as I have a word to say. What is your Papa thinking of?”

  “You,” Anna said, turning, the tray still in her hands. “I’ll go tell Gretchen to set another place.”

  “You set it,” Mama called after her. “Setting the table is your job.”

  The others sat like sheep, staring, as Anna plunked the tray down on the sideboard and set her mother’s place with much banging of cutlery.

  “Wake up,” she said to them all. “Mama’s coming out here. Try to look alive.”

  Papa burst out laughing.

  “Bravo, Anna,” he said. “I thought that temper vanished years ago.”

  “Not when I need it,” Anna said.

  But suddenly she felt her knees wobble.

  Then a familiar voice spoke from behind her, not the sad voice they had heard since Saturday, but Klara Solden’s brisk, sensible one.

  “Set that child down on a chair, Ernst, before she falls over,” she said. “It’s not every day she gives her mother a good scolding. When you said I was sulking,” she went on, looking at Anna, “all at once, I knew you were right. Me, sulking! At my time of life. I can’t think where you ever learned to give a tongue-lashing like that?”

  She gave Anna a suspicious look.

  Anna gave back a demure smile.

  “From Papa, I think,” she said.

  The family, freed from tension, roared with laughter. Mama herself joined in. Papa had never scolded any of them, that they could remember, and she knew it as well as Anna.

  “Well,” she said, recovering, “now let us praise God, Ernst, that we are together and …” Her voice faltered. “… and ask his blessing on Rudi, wherever he is, and eat our supper, as Anna has ordered.”

  Anna, sitting next to Papa, felt strength coming back. She had wondered if she would ever smile again. Now she grinned at her mother.

  “He’s right here in Toronto on the H.M.C.S. York,” she said. “Probably bored to death.”

  “I hope he sends a picture soon of him in his uniform,” Frieda said, “so I can show it off at school.”

  Mama sighed. Then she patted Frieda’s hand.

  “I always liked men in uniform myself, didn’t I, Ernst,” she said.

  Papa, smiling at his wife, nodded and then looked down at his youngest daughter so lovingly that she had all the reward she needed.

  I am trying, Rudi, she thought, and pulled her chair closer to the table so she could eat.

  Chapter 20

  Knowing Rudi was so close by made Anna almost forget that he would be leaving for Halifax in six weeks. Life seemed incredibly normal without him. She missed him most when it came time to study. She had not realized how many difficulties she had grown accustomed to taking to him.

  At the end of the first week, she took the pages he had worked on with her, with the big black numbers he had made, and went to Mr. McNair.

  “I was sorry to hear that Rudi had left school,” he said. “It is true then?”

  “He’s in the Navy,” Anna said. “But he waited till he had finished his examinations before he went.”

  “He’ll do well, that boy,” Mr. McNair said. “Now what is all this you’ve brought to show me?”

  When he looked at the pages, they explained themselves. But what would he do about them? Anna waited, tense, knowing how busy he was.

  “Come in right after four,” he said, handing her back the pages in a matter-of-fact way. “I don’t promise to be as good a tutor as your brother but we’ll see how we get along. Just remember, Anna, tell me when I go too fast or when you can’t see something.”

  She promised she would and hurried from the room.

  When she got home, she went straight to the bird cage and said to the bird, “Beautiful, wonderful, perfect Peter! You’re the best Peter in the world.”

  Gretchen looked at her in surprise as the little canary sang happily, pleased with the attention.

  “I didn’t know you liked him all that much,” Gretchen said. “Not that he isn’t a nice bird … but wonderful? Perfect?”

  “Peter understands,” Anna replied, grinning at her sister’s puzzled expression. “It’s just between him and me. He’s very understanding, aren’t you, Peter?”

  “Since you’re in such a marvelous mood,” returned Gretchen, “how about dusting the downstairs?”


  After three weeks, Rudi had a leave. He had to be back at the training ship by nine o’clock, so it seemed as though he was just there and gone. Still it was wonderful seeing him. He really and truly looked like a sailor. Anna had not believed he actually would, but there he was with his big middy collar, his bell-bottom trousers, his tie — “tied just so, I’m telling you!” — and a ribbon around his sailor hat. Mama was so busy gloating over him and feeding him and running to touch him and getting hugged by him that she did not cry till he had gone.

  In May, Germany occupied the Netherlands. In June, France was defeated. Britain seemed terribly small, set so close to Europe, but the words of Winston Churchill, Britain’s new Prime Minister, sounded throughout the Empire like a rallying cry. The Soldens heard them through Papa’s radio:

  “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …”

  Just before school ended, Maggie’s father, too, joined the Navy. “As soon as they attacked Holland, he told Mother he had to go,” Maggie reported. She and Anna were drawn closer than ever.

  Since Mr. Lloyd had typed her Easter exams in big type too, Anna was not surprised when her finals arrived in the same way on her desk. But she was startled when he called her out of line, halfway through the week, to tell her that he had marked her paper the night before and that she had received 82 in geography. His kindness to her, while never obvious to others, had remained constant and she beamed at him, even getting a small smile in return.

  She was troubled about it that night however. His persecution of other students with German backgrounds, though lower-keyed than on that first terrifying morning, continued. The rumour was that he had a twin brother who was killed fighting against Germans the day before the 1918 armistice was signed. She guessed Mr. Lloyd himself would not have been able to fight in that war because of his poor vision. So she understood a little how he must have suffered. But that was no reason for turning his hatred against students who had not even been born when his brother died. He was nice to her now. Why couldn’t he see that the others were all right too?