The Adoption

by Anne Berry

  My dad grunted sullenly, snatched the papers and studied them for several minutes. I took the opportunity to hastily appraise the monsters who had come to labour on Bedwyr Farm, the monsters who might have thrown the grenade, pulled the trigger, or plunged the knife that ended our Brice’s life. The spokesman, Jonas, I estimated to be in his early thirties, broad across the chest but with a slim waist, his hair shaved close to his skull and fair. His eyes were greyish green but he kept them lowered, not once meeting mine. His friend was even leaner, and younger, his features gentler, kinder, his hair white blond with a touch of red in it. And his eyes … his eyes were blue, the blue of morning glory, and they did meet mine and held them for a long moment. Then Dad was shouting orders and the Germans were following him.

  For the first few months, Dad didn’t like me ever to be alone with Faust and Engel. He refused to call them by their first names. And when I asked him how I should address them, he said that I shouldn’t as I’d have no cause to talk with them. His suspicious eyes tracked their every move, waiting for them to flatten us with the tractor, or jump us from behind and string us up with rope from the barn rafters, or smash our brains out with a shovel. He mumbled we should keep alert in case they tried to rob us, as if we had anything worth stealing. It was as though they were invisible to Mam though. She didn’t use any name for them, first or second. She sent me out with a bit of bread and cheese or bacon rinds for them at lunch, and a mug of tea. But that was it. When she gave me the food she just jerked her chin in the direction of the fields. If it was raining they ate in the shelter of the barn. I knew she couldn’t bring herself to wash up their plates or their mugs, so I did it. They left them at the back door and I rinsed them, dried them and put them away.

  And nothing did happen. They didn’t try to murder us. They arrived on time every day, kept their heads down, spoke only to each other in German in subdued voices, or in English to answer a question, or query a direction. They were always well mannered and deferential, worked very hard and never complained. They didn’t make any attempt to break down the wall between us. It was there and that was it. But we all felt the benefits of them coming. They undertook the heaviest tasks automatically, digging, lifting, loading and unloading. Three times Jonas mended the tractor when it broke down. He said he knew about engines and if Sir, that was what they called Dad, would permit him to, he thought he could fix it. At first Dad was scathing. But when the only alternative was putting Jessy our horse to the plough, he relented and let him have a go. When he did it and the engine began to purr and chug again, I think secretly Dad was impressed, though he didn’t say so, or thank Jonas either.

  We’d taken in an evacuee in the autumn of 1944, Tilley Draper, from Bethnal Green in London. She was twelve years old, with a fluffy head of peanut-gold hair, slightly cross-eyed, her irises a vivid green. And she had a snub nose and the cheeriest smile I think I’d ever seen, apart from Mam’s – and I didn’t see that any more. She slept in Brice’s room, and helped in the kitchen mostly and around the house. She proved a tonic for Mam, and company for me, a little sister, kind of. During the days she couldn’t be serious for more than five minutes, which was terrific. She worried about her mam in London, and her dad who was a sailor in the navy. Sometimes she woke in the nights and came to me, and we had a bit of a cry together. But in the morning it was as if it hadn’t been. She dried her tears, put on her valiant smile and came to breakfast humming, an example to us all.

  It was the day one of the cows got stuck in the mud that something altered. We’d had a dreadful spate of wet weather. Torrential rain for weeks. I made a joke at breakfast about us having to build an ark. But only Tilley laughed. One of our fields slopes down very steeply in the corner furthest from the farm. And there’s a bit of a ditch and beyond that a stream. Well, it gets awful muddy there, like sinking sand Dad says. He fences it off when cattle are grazing that land. Only this March day one of the cows had broken through and got stuck in the boggy ground. We tried everything to get her out, but she just kept on sinking further down. The rain was sheeting horizontal and the poor beast was lowing and lowing, neck all stretched and roped with straining muscles, her eyes wild and rolling with panic. Piteous it was.

  By noon, Dad declared there was nothing for it but to shoot the creature and butcher her where she lay. He was setting off to fetch his gun when Thorston said he had an idea, and would Dad let him have a last go before he shot her. Dad shrugged as if he didn’t care one way or another. Thorston and Jonas put their heads together, and the next thing they’d brought the tractor over and ropes from the barn. Thorston stripped off his jacket and his shirt, then jumped down into the mud with the struggling cow. It was dangerous because one of her back legs was still free and kicking about, and it was fearful slippery. Jonas threw two lengths of rope down to him. Dad stood looking on, frowning, shaking his head and driving back the other cows who’d come to investigate what was going on. Curious creatures cows are. We were all drenched and trembling with the cold. But even with the noise of the rain, which mercifully was easing off now, I could hear Thorston talking to the heifer in German, gentling her and stroking her back. Somehow he managed to get the ropes under her, to either side of her belly. Then he tossed the ends up to Jonas, who tied them to the tractor’s towing hook. Our eyes met just before he clambered up the bank. He was as brown as a Negro, head to foot plastered in mud, and those melting blue eyes peered up at me. I wanted to laugh. But not a mocking laugh, look you, just because it was funny. Though I wanted to cry a bit too. I was so frightened he’d fail, and that Dad would fetch his gun and the cow would be dead.

  Thorston didn’t ride on the tractor with Jonas. He was too filthy. Jonas put it into gear and started to drive away very slowly. The rope whipped taut and mud splattered on my cheeks. You could see the wheels grinding in the sodden earth, and smell the burning petrol. The cow started up her lowing again, louder now, more panicky, and then all of a sudden more and more of her appeared. The tractor moved, slow and steady, and the cow was pulled from the mud like a stopper from a bottle. As soon as the animal could, she got a foothold and began scrambling up the bank. She was filthy too, though the rain was already washing them both off. Thorston undid the ropes. She heaved herself up the last few steps, then ambled off to join the herd none the worse for her encounter. All my dad did was nod curtly at Thorston, and tell him to go and clean up.

  That night I lay in bed thinking about it, about the way he had talked to the panicking beast, his determination to save her, the sound of his voice like balm on a sting. Afterwards, I began taking notice of the way he looked up at the sky as if it was speaking to him, the way the wind flattened his hair, the way on the hottest day when we were wracking hay he stripped to the waist and the sunbeams slid over his torso. And I felt his blue eyes on me, fastening on me, looking at me in the way he did the shifting skies. I imagined touching his skin, tasting him, what his lips would feel like pushing against mine, what it would be to have him pull me out of the numbing, back-breaking quagmire of this war. I imagined him jostling my five slumbering senses, making them stand to attention tingling with life, making my blood burn.

  I waited for Brice’s ghost to come wailing at me through the nights, telling me what a wicked sister I was, how I was betraying him with my lustful longings. But he didn’t. He was dead, see. I’d thought I was dead, too. But I wasn’t. I was alive, starved for the sensual, beset with cravings I didn’t know I had. I very nearly told Tilley one night when she came to me, but then I changed my mind. I s’ppose I knew deep down what a taboo it was to hunger after a German, a soldier who’d probably killed one or more of our boys.

  When the war was over and Tilley went home, I missed her dreadful. I really did. I thought we’d revert back to how it was, that the shops would fill up, that rationing would cease, that I might even get to go back to school, pick up where I left off. But things seemed just as hard, only there wasn’t Tilley’s giggling to make it bearable. By then we’d go
t so accustomed to having Jonas and Thorston about the farm that Dad had stopped watching them so much. You could say he’d got so as he trusted them. He still didn’t call them by their first names though.

  Jonas went back to Germany, back to his family. But Thorston stayed on. He said he didn’t have anyone waiting for him, that he was an only child and that his mother had died when he was twelve years old. His father was also dead; gassed in the First World War his health had never recovered. Thorston had no memory of him. He had been a baby when a respiratory infection had claimed his father’s life. His mother had remarried but he did not have a good relationship with his stepfather. He also told me that he came from East Germany, from Saxony, an area now under Soviet control, and that he was not sure what the future held for him there. He volunteered all this information piecemeal and without elaboration. He said he was content working the land, and that this was reason enough for him to want to stay, that he was even considering trying to immigrate, to make Wales his permanent home. I did wonder though if there was something more, something he was holding back, something which might explain his reluctance to leave Bedwyr Farm. He didn’t have to report to the camp any more though. The prisoner-of-war camps were gradually closing down, the functions of the buildings being reinvented. He was effectively a free man and, while he made his contribution to British agriculture, providing unpaid labour, his presence was tolerated by my dad. We cleaned up one of the outbuildings and he moved in there for a bit. It was much more convenient really, him being on the spot, for all of us. No travelling, see. And he was able to put in longer hours, which with Jonas gone was a bit of a blessing.

  We are having the bitterest of winters. Tonight I can’t settle for fretting about Thorston, all alone in that tumbledown outbuilding with the icy gales whistling in through the cracks in the windows. He stuffs them full of old newspaper but it still seems to slice in. I slip out after supper, leave Mam dozing by the fireside. Dad has braved the conditions to visit a neighbouring farm, the Mortimers. Their son, back from the Far East, has been taken bad with some mystery fever. I trudge through the snow to bring Thorston a flask of hot tea and a couple of extra blankets. I knock on the door and when he opens it the wind fair blows me in. He battles to close it behind me, quite a feat, and stands staring at me, sort of bemused, like he’s just woken up.

  ‘Bethan? Is everything all right?’

  ‘Oh yes. I brought you a couple of blankets and a flask of tea,’ I say, breathless with cold. I stamp the snow off my boots, offering him the small comforts.

  He is wearing his spectacles, wire-rimmed, and he looks so bookish and lonely. ‘That is most kind of you,’ he says, taking them from me. He sets the blankets down on the wooden bed he made for himself, and puts the flask on the small table in the centre of the room. I found him a spare mattress, and a box to keep his few things in, a couple of chairs and the table. There is an oil lamp placed there, casting eerie shapes on the wall. Outside the wind is having a fit of the heebie-jeebies, screeching and yowling. Heebie-jeebies! That’s an expression I learned from an American soldier when I was shopping in town. It means an extremity of nervous agitation coming over you. He told me so with a twinkle in his eye. We are walled in with heavy snow, mislaid in the amnesia of the whiteout.

  I wring my hands to try to get the circulation going again. ‘It’s so … ssso … cold,’ I stutter. Thorston takes them in his and rubs his own heat back into them. And the friction of his skin on mine, the pressure of his fingers is like the electric shock I got trying to lever a plug out of its socket once. And then he stops, but carries on holding them. He looks like a golden boy, his thick jumper, the lumpy knit of it, his skin, his hair. I can smell the cigarettes he smokes, and wool, and the male scent of him. Even his blue eyes seem gold. Our breaths mist the air, and they mingle and gleam, a spin of golden motes.

  ‘Would you like to stay and share the tea?’ he asks politely.

  ‘I’d better get back,’ I say but do not move. I slip my hands from his. My eyes stray to the table. On it lies an open notebook, a pencil, a penknife, some wood shavings and a small carved wooden horse, the hind legs unfinished. ‘Can I have a look?’

  He nods, hastily clearing a few folded clothes from off the two chairs. I sit down, my fingers exploring the smooth wood.

  ‘It’s not very good. My knife is blunt and I have not any talent,’ he excuses his craft, his tone self-depreciatory.

  ‘No, it’s so … so fine,’ I sigh, all the stiffness of my mind gone with the slide of the polished oak.

  ‘You judge this to be accept?’

  ‘Accept. Oh yes it is accept,’ I echo his faulty English as if it is the highest praise. His face lights up at the unlooked-for compliment. ‘It looks real, alive, just like Jessy.’

  ‘I enjoy to make things, to … to draw.’ He fiddles with an arm of his spectacles, adjusts it around his ear. ‘Mmm … if … if it had been different, I should like to have been an artist.’ He comes to stand beside me. I pick up the notebook. ‘I do not think those are accept. Not worth your attention.’

  I catch my breath as I turn the gilded pages and see picture after picture of Bedwyr Farm, the animals, the sheep, the pigs, the chickens, the cows and Jessy the horse, from every angle. I study the trees and fields I know like my own body, the valley, the sky turning the land on its head, the changing seasons, and me … me … drawings of me. I pick up the book and inspect it more closely. Me at all my tasks observed in intricate detail. It is over three-quarters full. The last sketch is a portrait of my face, my strawberry-blonde hair loose for once and not bound up in a scarf. My eyes look wistful, distant, focused on something only I can see.

  ‘You are very gifted, Thorston. You have captured such a likeness.’ And the utterance is low with admiration and respect.

  ‘And you,’ he responds, his voice the rustle of corn cobs tousled by a breeze on a summer’s day, ‘you … you are most beautiful, Bethan.’

  He takes the book from me, closes it and places it back on the table. He pulls me to my feet, undoes the buttons of my coat and slides his hands inside it until his arms encircle me. My heart is jumping and every inch of me seems grated raw. I lean into him, my body craving his, wrapping him round here … and here … and here too. And then I know what it is to have our lips come together, to feel his energy sprint like a hare beyond the plodding tortoise of me, to have it tunnel into my belly, then lower … and lower. He undresses me under the coat. Then he lifts me, still folded in it onto the bed, and covers me with the blankets while he sheds his own clothes. He is molten gold, the lamplight ladling gold over the hollows and ridges and plains and arches of him.

  When he climbs in beside me, I try to remember who I am. You are Bethan Modron Haverd. You are the only surviving child of Seren and Ifan Haverd. Your country has been at war with Germany for almost six years. German soldiers killed your brother, Brice. You are lying naked in bed with a German soldier who might have shot your brother, who would certainly have murdered him if he’d had a chance.

  ‘I am Bethan Modron Haverd,’ I mutter. ‘I am Bethan Modron Haverd.’ But my identity lies under an avalanche, and the snow press beyond our little shack rubs out my name.

  ‘Schatz. Ich liebe dich, Bethan.’ His words scald my ear and make my reason deaf. Thorston kisses a fugue, light as clouds, into every cell of my body. I am floating into him. He is breathing into me. Who am I? I am snowmelt. I am the coming of spring. I am the conception of life. In some distant part of my senses this registers, as, with a momentary tear of pain, his seed sinks into the virgin earth of me.

  The times we lie together in the coming months may be counted on my fingers. I know a dreadful reckoning is coming. I sense the chemistry of me changing. I stare at the shivering pools of amber light flickering on the walls, and I follow our shadows making love. I know this is my entire harvest of happiness, these hours, these minutes, these seconds, spent here with him. There is the rough of the blankets, abrasive on my bare skin,
and me soaking up the scent of him like blotting paper, making him mine, and the song of the keening wind whistling away all caution. Soon I will have gambled all of myself, and the remainder of my days will be taken up with repaying the debt.

  Chapter 6

  Lucilla, 1995

  ‘The Homeless Child for the Childless Home’

  The Church Adoption Society

  (Founded in 1913 in Cambridge by Rev. W. F. Buttle, M.A.)

  Telegrams

  4A BLOOMSBURY SQUARE,

  BABICHANGE, LONDON

  LONDON, W.C. 1

  Telephone HOLBORN 3310

  21st April, 1948

  Dear Mr and Mrs Pritchard,

  We have heard of a little girl, although we do not have her full documents in our possession, and we are wondering if you would feel interested in her. If so, we could arrange for you to see her in the very near future and take her home if she appeals to you.

  The baby is Lucilla Haverd, born on 14th January, 1948. She weighed 7lbs 6oz at her birth and is now about 9lbs 7oz. Her medical report is satisfactory and Wassermann blood tests are negative.

  The baby’s mother is 20 years old, unmarried and lives at home helping on her father’s farm in Wales. The baby’s father is 26 years old and has been working on the farm for the last few years. He was a German prisoner of war. Both parents are said to be in good health. The baby has fair hair and blue eyes.

  We look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible, letting us know whether you are interested or not. We have to find Lucilla a home in the very near future, and it would be a great help to us if you could telephone your decision.