Somewhere Over England

by Margaret Graham

  Christoph had been eight for almost two weeks when Heine was released but he could not think of his son because he was too full of anger, too full of hate. Instead he watched the orthodox Jews walking and talking. He watched the non-Nazis discussing the war. He read his letters from Helen and received a food parcel from her which had been held up at the administration office run by Hauptmann Rusch, a Nazi. The food was rotten and smelt and Heine sat and looked out of the window, thinking of Helen, bombed, frightened, sending food she could not spare to the Camp where provisions were more than adequate. Thinking of Hauptmann Rusch knowingly destroying her gesture.

  He thought of her sending money each week. Money which she earned and he could not. His anger was so deep that he could no longer sleep or eat properly. The next day he walked through the country and ran in the sports field but still he could not rest. He thought of his father, so tired and old, so brave, and on 14 December he gave a lecture entitled ‘Democracy versus Totalitarianism’, in which he publicly castigated Nazism and everything it stood for.

  That night a stone was thrown through his window wrapped in paper on which had been drawn a skull and cross-bones. Willi swept up the glass and the other men helped while Heine burnt the paper but knew that nothing could erase its message. The death sentence had been passed, one which the Nazis gave to those they considered arch traitors to the Fatherland.

  CHAPTER 9

  Christoph lay in bed listening to the silence. There were no bombs, no aeroplanes, no ack-ack, no cold damp shelter, just a warm bed, a stone hot-water bottle at his feet, and silence. Each night the quiet lay like a blanket around him in this room with the sloping roof, the dark beams, the fireplace which was boarded up. Each night Laura kissed him, pressing the sheets and blankets tightly round his neck to stop the draughts. Each night he lay straight and still and safe and could not sleep because his mother was not there.

  The candle in the saucer flickered, shadows catching the dried flowers which hung from string wound around the nails driven deep and rusting into the overhead beam. Marian had given him a string bag full of vegetables when he left London. She had stood with his mother on the platform crying, but his mother had not wept. Her face had been still, her lips barely moving as she said goodbye, bending to kiss him, to hug him, pulling his arms from her shoulders when he clung, pushing him to the WVS lady who stood at the open door.

  Other children were all around, crying. He had not cried but he had clung again because he could not bear to leave her. She had pushed him again and her eyes had grown red and full and her lips had trembled as though she were cold. He had gripped her coat and still she had pushed and said, ‘Darling. I love you. You must be safe.’

  Her lips had not moved around the words, they had just gone on trembling and her voice had been thick and he knew it was with love. He moved away then towards the door and the fat lady, climbing up the step, smelling the train, the soot, the steam. Sitting on a seat that itched, sitting too close to a boy whose gas mask dug into his side, watching as the WVS lady lifted his case on to the rack, looking at the children who sat opposite, wanting to rip off the linen labels which had been pinned on at the collecting post outside the Town Hall. He knew none of the children. They did not know him, did not know that he was German.

  As he lay in the soft bed, Christoph pulled the sheet up around his ears. It was cold but warmer than the shelter where his mother would be. The light from the candle caught the flowers again and Christoph felt the string bag once more, full of vegetables and sandwiches, so heavy, cutting into his hand. He had not let go until they had been travelling for two hours because the pain had stopped his tears.

  He had shared his sandwiches with the fat girl who only had two of her own. She had travelled on with him and four others by bus to this village and was nice, but she smelt. He didn’t mind though because of her smile, and he would not let the others shout at her because Mary was his friend. She could throw stones that hit the targets and laughed when he pulled faces behind the teacher’s back. She didn’t ask questions about his parents or talk of her own like the others did all the time.

  At six the next morning Laura called him, but he was already dressing, pulling on the grey socks with diamonds down the side that his mother sent for his birthday. He lifted the blackout hardboard from the window and saw hoar frost whitening the stunted apple trees in the bottom orchard, stiffening the grass into frozen clumps and knew that today his knees would be frozen again.

  The stairs were narrow and dark but the smell of porridge was warm in the kitchen and so was the black-leaded stove which burnt with the logs he had helped Laura to bring in from the woodshed yesterday. She had said that it was good to have a man about the house and he had smiled, liking her grey hair which was wound round her head in a plait, her cheeks so red and full, her laugh which made her chin wobble. His mother would like her, he knew.

  He did not stop at the table but walked on through and out of the door, laughing as she flicked at him with the tea cloth. The latch was stiff and Laura called, ‘You can use the pot under the bed.’

  But he didn’t turn. He didn’t want to talk about things like that with her. He was not a baby. He was eight now. He closed the door behind him. She had baked a cake and sung ‘Happy Birthday’ on the first and it had almost not mattered that his mother was not there.

  He ran up the garden path, the cold air sharp in his nose and mouth, catching in his throat. He passed the outhouses, hearing first the pig in her sty, then seeing the sawdust outside the woodshed, hearing the hens in their shed. The latch on the door was frost-coated and his fingers stuck to it for a moment and he knew that the seat would be covered with ice again and shuddered. As he sat he could hear the hens calling, forever calling.

  ‘Wait for a moment,’ he called back. ‘Just wait.’

  Laura smiled and pointed to the sink as he returned, and he nodded, washing in cold water which felt warm to his frozen hands.

  ‘Give ’em a good rub with this,’ she said, passing him a rough towel. He wanted to sidle up and reach out towards the fire but she would not let him because it would give him chilblains. His mother had always told him that too, so Laura must be right.

  He sat at the oilcloth-covered table, smoothing it with his hands, wishing it was white, not black, watching Laura as she ladled porridge into a bowl. She passed it to him, the steam rising, curling bits of hair which were too short for her plait.

  He poured thick milk from the jug into the hole he had scooped in the middle and then she spooned honey on top with the same smile that she had used when he handed her the vegetables in the string bag. She had kissed him in front of the WVS lady who had brought him last of all to Laura’s cottage. How kind, she had said. How very kind. And it was only later that he had seen the long back garden filled with sprouts and potatoes, swedes and parsnips but he did not feel foolish because Marian had given him the only things she had and Laura had been pleased.

  He watched as she moved from the stove, carrying the kettle to the draining board, pouring boiling water on to the bran mash in the chipped enamel bowl, mixing it up with the old dented spoon. Her arms strained beneath her sleeves and her face grew red. She hummed. She always hummed, Chris thought as he took another mouthful of porridge and then stirred his spoon round and round until the honey and milk were mixed completely. She was a happy widow, not like his grandmother.

  ‘Are you a grandmother?’ he asked, licking his spoon.

  Laura did not turn from her mixture. ‘No. I had no children, but your dear mother works with my niece, young Joan. She is almost the same as a daughter to me and no doubt I shall one day be a great-aunt. When I’m wrinkled like a walnut,’ she laughed now, turning to him, her cheeks shiny from the mixing.

  ‘You’ll never be like a walnut,’ Chris said, running his finger round the inside of the bowl. ‘You’re like a plum.’ He wanted to lean against her, feel her arms around him because his mother wasn’t here but he was too old for that.

/>   ‘Look here, while we’re chatting away, those hens are getting hungry.’ She held out the bowl to him. ‘And don’t you be cleaning your porridge bowl like that. Your mother would have my guts for garters. Now be off with you.’

  Chris took the bowl, feeling the heat of the mash through the sides. ‘What about the potato peelings we roasted last night?’

  ‘I’ll bring those, but you put your coat on first. That’s a bad frost out there.’

  They fed the pig next, leaning over the pen door, watching the steam rise from the manure on the other side of the sty, watching the pig snuffle and breathe great belches of warm air. Laura pulled her jacket hood up round her head, tapping his shoulder. ‘We’ll clean Peggy out after lunch. Pigs are clean if you let them be. We’ll get her down to the orchard. She likes a bit of exercise.’

  Chris nodded. It was too early to go yet. He was meeting Mary down by the blacksmith. It was Saturday, no school.

  ‘You meeting Mary, are you?’ Laura said as they moved to the woodshed to fetch wood in for the fire.

  ‘Yes, by the blacksmith. It’s warm and we like the smell and if I’m not there she just wanders about on her own because her lady doesn’t like her in the house, under her feet.’

  He looked at the pig again. Would his mother let him stay with someone like that? He knew she wouldn’t.

  He did not see Laura frown as he bent to pick up the spliced logs, loading four into the crook of his arm, not bothering yet to brush off the sawdust and splinters, but breathing in the clean smell of the wood. He followed Laura in, heaping them by the stove, then walked into the sitting-room, lifted up the willow basket from the inglenook and eased it through the door and back out to the woodshed.

  Laura was there already, bending and throwing logs into a bucket.

  ‘How are you sleeping now, Chris?’ she said, looking at him, rubbing her back with her hands.

  ‘Better,’ Chris said, leaning down now, throwing the logs into the basket as Laura moved away. Last night he had not lain awake as usual until the dawn came. Last night he remembered nothing after thinking of Mary laughing in the carriage which had no corridor as one boy had peed out of the window. He had not dreamt of the bombs either.

  ‘You bring that Mary back for lunch. It’s rabbit, and if the frost keeps up, we’ll have ice-cream as well.’

  He walked down the lane past Laura’s neighbour Mr Reynolds, who tied his trousers with string at the knee and came after dark every day to empty the night soil from the earth closet and put it on the ash pit beyond the orchard. For the tomatoes in the summer, Laura had said when Chris had thought the neighbour was a spy who came each night because his father was German. When she told him what Mr Reynolds was doing he almost wished he had been a spy instead, and knew that he would eat no tomatoes in the summer.

  He was glad it was Saturday but school was quite good. They were taught with the village children, not separately as most of the evacuees were. There were so few so far, Laura had said, and Chris hoped it would stay that way. It was nice and the village boys swapped baked conkers for spent bullets, flattened like mushrooms where they had hit the road. He had picked up pocketfuls in London and so had the other boys. Mary had shrapnel which his mother had not allowed him to bring because it could have sliced his skin. Mary had no mother or father and her sister did not care. He sometimes wished he had no father.

  He passed the cottages which were built of grey stone. The women hanging out washing nodded and waved. Would they if they knew what he was? He waved back, then walked quickly on. Were people shouting at his mother, cursing her husband, his father? Was she safe, were bombers dropping their loads now as he walked along safely, as his father sat writing letters safely? Chris kicked at a stone, his feet cold in his boots. He dug his hands into his pockets, his gloves not keeping his hands warm. Laura said that they thought his dad was the same as the others, a British soldier.

  He looked back at the women. Laura had also said there was no point in putting out washing today, it was too cold and there was no sun.

  He stopped at a gap in the houses, leaning on the stile. The trees were wild and free not like the club-like ones which lined the London streets. The fields stretched into the distance gently rising into a sloping hill. White frost streaked the brown earth and the straw stubble which lay in furrowed lines. The beetfields were further from the village.

  He kicked at the post and watched the ice in its cracks shatter and whiten. He kicked again then stood still. Ice covered the fence too and each head of dried cow parsley, each twig of the hedge, each blade of grass. The puddles in the road were thick with it.

  ‘I hate you, Daddy,’ he said and knew that he was speaking aloud because he could see his breath burst into the cold air. I hate you, Daddy, he said again, but to himself this time. I hate you for making me different, for making Mummy have to listen to people who shout. For making Mummy have to work in London while the bombs fall and you sit on an island and I stand here, safely. I hate you for making me lie, making me say you are a soldier, making me want the bombers to be hit by ack-ack but when they are I hate you again because I think of Grandpa and can’t cheer. He dug at the puddles with his heel, again and again until the ice was crushed and shattered.

  But I love you, too, he thought as he walked on and so he pushed the thought of his father away because it was too difficult, all just too difficult.

  Mary was waiting by the forge, the hem of her smock dress hanging down at the back. Her mackintosh hem was down too and her cardigan sleeves hung below the cuffs. Her wrists were red from the cold and her gloves had holes in the fingers. She waved and beckoned but he couldn’t run because it was too slippery.

  They stood beneath the awning and watched as Ted the smith talked to the carthorse. It was tethered to an iron ring in the wall. He nodded at Chris.

  ‘Come to see us again have you?’ he said as he reached down and lifted one large hoof between his knees, bending double, paring with the knife, his leather apron stained and burnt.

  He grunted as Chris nodded.

  ‘Got your postal order too, I reckon, my old boy,’ he said, his head down, his voice muffled as he eased back.

  Mary looked at Chris and then away but he caught her arm, pulling the postal order for sixpence from his pocket. ‘We’ll go to the shop afterwards. Mrs Briggs won’t say the sweets are all gone. Laura went in and told her that they should come out from under the counter. Sweets weren’t just for village children.’

  He smiled at her and was glad his mother sent him this each week for his pocket money and that there was enough for Mary to share. ‘And come to lunch. Laura said you must.’

  The smith was pressing a red-hot shoe on to the hoof and they heard it sizzle and watched the sweat run off Ted’s nose and down his face to his shirt. The heat from the fire reached them and warmed them. They moved closer. Ted lifted the shoe off and doused it in the water tank and the smell came up with the steam to mingle with that from the charred hoof.

  They waited until all four were done and then Chris moved to the grindstone near the wall and wound the crank, sharpening his penknife, though he seldom used it.

  They moved on then, to the bottom of the lane, shouting back at Tom and Joe who had moved down from London too. They waited for them, walking with them, sliding on the ice, passing the goat which was tethered by an iron ring to a thick stake in the middle of a field between Teel’s Lane and the crossroads. Chris pushed his hands into his pockets. He wondered if Mrs Briggs would be cross after Laura’s talk.

  The Post Office was open and smelt of spices and tobacco. It was dark after the whiteness of the frost and the mahogany counters gleamed. Chris asked for a quarter of gobstoppers after he had cashed the order, knowing he would get six and some liquorice. It was Mr Briggs in the shop today so it was all right after all.

  He passed the gobstoppers round and then they slid down Nag’s Lane, balancing, waving their arms, wobbling on the stream of ice. They did not speak much a
nd when they did they dribbled pink saliva and laughed. Joe told Chris how his foster-mother had rushed out last night to bring in the washing off the line in case a German bomber came and the whiteness guided him to her cottage.

  They laughed again but then walked quietly for a while, round the back of the pub where sometimes a packet of crisps could be found, unopened. There was none today and so they leaned against the wall, still not talking but thinking, because they knew the bombs were dropping on their homes in London whilst here people knew nothing of the noise and the dust and the screams.

  The village boys came then, kicking a football up the back lane and so they made up two teams and the village won 6–2, but it was five boys against four, Joe said, squaring up as Ted’s grandson laughed. But then they squatted, while Joe pulled out a Woodbine packet, squashed and flattened from his coat pocket, lighting up and talking of his father in the Army, waiting to kill some of those German bastards.

  ‘You shouldn’t smoke. You’re only ten,’ Mary said, taking another gobstopper from Chris, pushing it into her mouth, wiping her hand across her lips. ‘You only do it to look big.’

  ‘You don’t need to smoke to do that, do you?’ Joe said, drawing on the cigarette, blowing the smoke up into the air while the others laughed.

  Chris wanted to push him back so that he fell and pull his cigarette from his mouth, because Mary had flushed and dropped her head, and because Joe had called the Germans bastards. But he just pushed himself upright and walked away because Joe was much bigger and he was scared.

  He took Mary back for lunch, eating the pie slowly at first, watching Mary looking at the pastry and the meat, then the knife and fork until Laura showed her how to eat.

  ‘I only have chips at home and eat ’em with me fingers from the newspaper,’ Mary said, her elbows wide, her hands awkward. ‘My sister’s too busy. She’s got a job. It takes her out a lot, that and her boyfriend.’