Whistling in the Dark

by Shirley Hughes

  Audrey dissolved into tears again, and Joan felt desperate. Everything seemed to be conspiring against them today, and being delayed by an air raid at this juncture was more than she could bear. Mum would be frantic with worry. But at that moment there came a shout from behind them.

  “Just a moment, officer!”

  A private car had pulled onto the kerb and a man jumped out. It was Mr Russell! He greeted Joan and Audrey briefly, and, to his eternal credit, did not waste time on asking them what on earth they were doing in this part of Liverpool. He simply addressed himself directly to the air-raid warden, showing his identity card.

  “These two young ladies are neighbours of ours. I’m on my way home with my wife, who just came off an eight-hour shift as a van driver. I think they might be safer if we gave them a lift home with us, out of the danger area. I don’t mind driving through this, and I’ve been told that the Mersey Tunnel is still open.”

  The harassed warden hesitated, but only for a moment. He had a great many other people to think about.

  “All right, sir – it might be best if you will take full responsibility for getting them home. I’m consigning them to your care. Understand?”

  Joan and Audrey, clutching their packages, had jumped in the back of the car almost before he had finished speaking.

  It took some time for Mr Russell to manoeuvre a way through the traffic, but with some skilful driving, they were soon on their way. It was only then that Audrey had recovered enough to explain, with tears in her eyes, their whole disastrous errand. “They wouldn’t let me near the dock,” she told them. “Wouldn’t let me see Dai. And he’s going away again soon.”

  Mrs Russell listened sympathetically. She was particularly concerned about their mum being ill.

  “Please don’t tell her where we met,” said Audrey. “I mean, that we were in Liverpool. She’d only get upset.”

  “Of course. I won’t say a word about it if you’d rather I didn’t,” Mrs Russell said. “The most important thing is to get you back as soon as possible so you can look after her. This alert might be a false alarm – they often are. But there may well be another Blitz tonight and we must get you out of here before then. I tell you what, why don’t you let us deliver those parcels to our local Red Cross dressing station? We can run them over in the car. Then you can get straight home.”

  “Oh, Mrs Russell – would you really?”

  It was very dark by the time the Russells dropped the girls back at their front door. “Send your mother our love. I hope she feels better soon,” Mrs Russell called after them.

  Brian was in the hall. “Whatever took you so long?” he said. “Mum’s asleep. I made her a hot drink, but she wouldn’t eat anything. Good job she hasn’t woken up or she would have started doing her nut about where you two had got to.”

  Joan and Audrey were both too exhausted to explain their terrible day all over again. Luckily Brian hadn’t seen Mr Russell’s car.

  “Is Judy still at the Hemmings’?” asked Audrey, changing the subject.

  “Yes,” said Brian. “I rang them earlier and they’ve offered to have her for the night.”

  “Thank goodness for that,” said Joan. The thought of getting Judy to bed would have been the last straw. All three of them trailed dejectedly into the back room.

  “Is there anything for supper?” Brian asked. “I’m starving!”

  CHAPTER 13

  It took a week for Mum to fully recover from the flu and regain her usual energetic drive.

  “I was wondering,” she said to Joan one evening over the washing up, “about that Polish girl at your school – the one you told me about. Ania, wasn’t it? It must be very dull for her, living with that old lady. Why don’t you ask her over here for tea one day?”

  Joan’s heart sank. She felt sorry for Ania, but she didn’t really want to make friends with her. Ania had settled down in the class, up to a point, and had even managed to keep her head down enough to keep clear of Angela Travis and her gang most of the time, but it was still almost impossible to get a word out of her outside the classroom. All Joan wanted to do was to let well alone.

  “I could make a cake,” said Mum. “I’ve got some icing sugar and margarine saved up and some dried egg powder. Do ask her. It would be a kind thing to do, surely, to offer her a bit of hospitality?”

  There was no arguing with this. So after school the following Friday afternoon, Joan and Ania walked back to Joan’s house together. Joan had tried to get Doreen to come too, but she had cried off.

  Mum had done her very best with the tea. She had even got hold of some chocolate biscuits, an almost unheard-of luxury these days. Ania ate ravenously and thanked Joan’s mum politely many times between mouthfuls. After tea, conversation stalled somewhat.

  “Would you like to go for a walk while I clear up?” Mum suggested. “Or would you rather listen to a comedy show on the radio?”

  Ania preferred the first suggestion. “Radio I do not like,” she explained. “They talk so fast and I do not understand well the jokes.”

  So she and Joan set out. For some time they walked in silence, heading towards the promenade for lack of anywhere better to go. It was chilly, and there were very few people about. The tide was out, and the big bank of clouds that had built up over the faraway Welsh coastline was the same colour as the estuary mud.

  “You must get awfully sick of walking around here,” Joan said at last. “I mean, there’s not much to do, is there?”

  “I am – what is the word? – accustomed. Yes, accustomed,” answered Ania, simply. “I have stayed in so many places – more that I can count. Miss Mellor, the lady I live with now, does not wish me to be at home with her in the daytime. And…” She paused and then went on, “Neither do I wish to be with her.”

  Ania plodded on, looking carefully at her feet. There was a long silence before she began to speak again. This time it was in a very low voice, and it was as though a floodgate had suddenly burst open inside her, and her words poured out very rapidly. “My home I remember very well. Our house, our village.”

  “Your village in Poland?”

  “Yes. Where we live − my mother, my father and me, and my grandmother too until she die. We work very hard, we grow our food, we have a cow, we have plenty to eat. We live well until the soldiers come.”

  “Nazi soldiers?”

  “Yes. They come in trucks. They take all the Jewish people, all families living there. Many Jewish people live in our village. The soldiers pull them out of their houses, and line them up in the street. We are Christian Polish people, not Jewish. But my father try to help our Jewish neighbours, the Wartskis. He hide them and their children in our barn at back of house. The soldiers search the barn and they find them.” She hesitated, then said, “So they take them, and my father also. Put him in truck with the others. Then they shoot our dog. Shoot him in the street because he bark and try to follow my father. Then my mother and I run away. We run out of house at back, across the field, into forest. The soldiers come after us, but we hide. Soon they stop looking and go away.”

  Joan took a deep breath. She couldn’t think how to respond to this sudden, devastating revelation.

  “Did you go back?” she asked finally.

  “Yes,” said Ania. “We are too frightened at first. So we wait until dark, then we go back. We find the truck quite gone. The truck taking my father. Gone. We do not know where. We find our village – what is the word? – all spoiled, all broken, many houses burned. Our house still there, but all our things smashed. My mother and I know we cannot stay there. We fear too much that the soldiers will come back. So Mother look and find the box that my father hide under the floor, next to fireplace. Still there. The box with the money he save, and my grandmother’s gold chain and her ring. My mother, she put them in a little bag around her neck. Then we put on warm clothes and take what we can carry and leave our home. And we start to walk.”

  Joan and Ania had come to a standstill, leaning
on the railings and looking out towards a final burst of blood-red sun dropping down below the Welsh coastline.

  “Where did you go?” asked Joan.

  Ania said, “We walk for many days. I do not know how far we walk. My mother say we must get to her brother’s house. There we will be safe. There are many other people on the road like us. Some have carts. Sometimes they let us ride, but not often, because they too have all their things, and children also. So we walk until we reach the railway station. Many, many people there. When the train come, we must push and fight to get on. We journey on the train many hours. We have little food and no water. If the train stop, we get off and run to fill our water bottles at the tap by side of track. One girl in our truck, she get out to … to…” She blushed.

  “To relieve herself?”

  Ania nodded. “But the train move on and we must leave her there. Her father and mother scream, try to stop the train. But they cannot. The girl is lost, left there by the railway.”

  “Did you reach your uncle?”

  “Yes, yes. In the end, we reach him. We come to a big station, crowded with many people. One time I am pushed so I am … separate from my mother, and I shout. Then she is there again, and at last we reach my uncle’s house. There we rest. We try to make plan what to do. But my mother … my mother she is so tired. She start to be ill with fever.”

  Ania was silent then, staring out at the sky. There was another long pause before she spoke again. When she did, her voice had dropped to a whisper. “We could not get the medicine she need. We try to nurse her, to bring down the fever, but she get more and more ill. Not – how do you say? – not talking sense. And all the while people in my uncle’s village are leaving, taking their things…

  “After my mother die, and we bury her. My uncle say it is not safe for me to stay longer with him. He fear the same soon happen in his village as happen to us. So he find people who take me, with many other children, on another train. This one called Kindertransport. We cross frontiers. A long, long journey. And I come here, at last, to Liverpool. I stay in many places. And now I am here. With Miss Mellor.”

  Ania stopped talking and turned her face abruptly towards Joan. There were no tears in her eyes.

  “I tell you all this,” she said. “You are the first person here in this place I tell. Because you are kind to me. You and your friend and your mother also. You are not like Angela Travis. Or Miss Mellor.”

  Joan hesitated. Then, awkwardly, she put an arm around Ania’s shoulders. But Ania did not respond. She simply stood there, looking back at the watery horizon, which was now very dark.

  CHAPTER 14

  Ania hardly spoke again on their way back to Ashchurch Avenue. They said goodbye at the corner, and Joan listened to her footsteps echoing past the neat privet hedges, then heard her knock at Miss Mellor’s front door, which opened cautiously to admit her into a dim hall.

  As Joan walked slowly home, she was thinking a lot about Ania: about the terrible experiences she had been through and her bravery at putting up with her current situation. Joan felt much closer to her now that she had heard her story, and was rather ashamed that she had not taken more trouble to befriend her before.

  Joan had always been able to take the security of family life for granted – the in-jokes, the occasional rows and jealousy, people around to chat to in the evenings and back you up when things went wrong. She could hardly imagine what life would be like without it.

  She reached home only just in time before the air-raid siren started. Another raid on Liverpool tonight. And, as though a visit from the Luftwaffe wasn’t bad enough, Captain Ronnie Harper Jones was in the front room again, chatting to Mum. Joan managed to slip past without being spotted. Being treated to another airing of Ronnie’s views on refugees and foreigners in general was more than she could stand after her conversation with Ania.

  The bombing was particularly ferocious that night. All the family lay awake until the early hours listening to the ack-ack guns and the barrage of explosives pounding the Liverpool docks.

  Next morning they all slept late, and got up exhausted to find that a letter from Dai had arrived for Audrey. As usual, she clutched it tightly and ran upstairs to her room to read it in private. A long time passed before she reappeared with tear-stained cheeks to tell them the news. Dai had posted the letter just before being sent back to sea again without shore leave.

  “Not even twenty-four hours!” Audrey moaned. “He’ll be at sea again by now. But he says he’s going to think about me a lot when he’s on night watch, and he’ll write as soon as he can and post the letter when his ship docks, wherever that is. The name of the port will be censored, anyway, of course…” Her voice trailed off and she looked so forlorn that none of them knew what to say to comfort her.

  “Keep writing back, anyway,” Mum suggested, as cheerfully as she could. “And, look, why don’t you drop over to see Dai’s mum and dad today? I’m sure they could do with a bit of company, and they’d love to see you. You could take them some of the cake that’s left over from the tea I made yesterday for Ania.”

  “If Ronnie Harper Jones hasn’t scoffed it already,” said Brian bitterly.

  Mum ignored this.

  It was Saturday morning and Joan’s turn for collecting salvage again. As she was standing by the gate, waiting for Ross and Derek to turn up with the handcart, she wondered if she should ask Ania to join them. She was just thinking that they might walk over to Miss Mellor’s when Doreen and David came past.

  “Guess what!” said Doreen. “Ross and Derek went out on their bikes last night, right in the middle of the air raid! They did it for a dare – cycled all the way up to the top of Bidston Hill and watched the incendiary bombs falling on Birkenhead docks!”

  “Crikey!” said Joan. “Their mums must have had a fit.”

  “Ross’s mum was. She was worried stiff. Derek’s mum was out somewhere and didn’t find out until afterwards.” Doreen paused briefly, exchanging looks with Joan. They all knew the rumours about Derek’s mum, which were darkly hinted at by the catty gossipmongers who gathered for coffee at the Bluebell Cafe. Rumours the children were not supposed to hear, about how she went out to dance halls in the evenings with servicemen who were stationed locally while Derek’s dad was away serving in the army. Derek was often left alone at home, even when there was an air raid.

  It was a local scandal, never to be mentioned in the presence of the young, but, of course, they all knew about it. Joan seethed with anger on Derek’s behalf – they all did – and admired the way he maintained his air of cocky nonchalance in spite of everything.

  “Talk about brave!” said David. “I wouldn’t have had the nerve to go out in an air raid like that. But I’ll bet it was exciting!”

  The three of them walked in silence up the road and hovered on the corner.

  “Perhaps they won’t be coming today,” Joan said hopefully – she hated collecting salvage. But within minutes, there they were – Ross and Derek, trundling their handcart behind them as usual, but perhaps with an extra hint of a swagger. They parked the cart beside the pavement and paused to light up a couple of cigarettes, taking their time and keeping their audience on tenterhooks.

  “Tell us what happened!” said Doreen. “Did you really go out in the middle of the air raid?”

  “Yeah. It was great,” said Derek. “We could see the Jerry bombers overhead and all – and the flares. They were hitting the docks, all right. Fires everywhere.”

  “You’re crazy!” said Doreen. “You could have been killed.”

  “Nah.” Derek blew out a ring of smoke and looked at her out of the corner of his eye, carefully registering the impression he was making. “We were up on Bidston Hill. The bombs weren’t aimed anywhere near us. Well, not very near. But the noise was terrible, from the explosions and all – and the warehouses were burning.”

  “We’d have stayed longer, only the air-raid warden came up and chased us off,” Ross told them. “Livid, he was.
Thought he was going to burst a blood vessel. Shouted at us. Told us to get off home sharpish and stay in the air-raid shelter until the all clear went!”

  “And did you?” Joan asked.

  “Yup. But we had a scare on the way home, all right.”

  “It was dead spooky,” said Derek. “Pitch-dark because of the blackout. Couldn’t even have our bicycle lamps on either. And we were passing some bombed-out warehouses – weren’t we, Ross? – where there was a whole lot of rubble and broken glass thrown across the road. And that was where we saw them.”

  “Saw what?” Doreen asked.

  “Bodies. Lying all over the road. Some with no heads. Arms and legs all over the place.”

  Joan felt herself go cold with fear. She silently reached for Doreen’s hand.

  “Bodies?” murmured David. “How do you mean bodies? Were they all dead? Why wasn’t the ambulance there?”

  “No one was there,” said Derek. “Everything was still. None of them moving. I’ve never seen a dead person before, especially not in bits like that. We didn’t know what to do, did we, Ross?”

  “Scared me, I can tell you!” said Ross. “So we thought we’d better double back and tell the air-raid warden. He came along with us really quick as soon as we told him. But when we got back there, we were in for another shock.”

  “What? What happened?” Joan urged.

  “They weren’t stiffs. Not dead people at all.”

  “Not dead?”

  “Not real! Not live people. It was a clothing warehouse that had been blown up, see,” said Ross. “And all the clothes dummies − those models they put up in shop windows − they’d all got blown out in pieces all over the road.”

  Ross paused to enjoy the sharp intake of breath and stunned silence that followed. Very slowly, Joan released her pressure on Doreen’s hand.

  “My mum was doing her nut in when I got home,