by Chloe Mayer
‘Urrrgggghhhhh!’
It was nearly at the exit.
‘Urrrgggghhhhh!’
Here it was! It burst outside, staggering crazily and looking around in the gloom. It was clutching charred bits of rubbish.
‘Urrrgggghhhhh KIDS!’ it screamed in a hoarse voice. Its mouth was a terrible black hole in its black hairy face.
I wasn’t laughing any more.
It threw down the sooty rubbish, once part of its nest but now just brittle scraps of black nothings. They lay scattered around its feet on the tracks.
It was wheezing and panting terribly; I could actually hear it from where I hid. I still desperately needed to pee but I didn’t move.
‘I’LL SODDING … I’LL SODDING … Urrrgggghhhhh!’
It hollered for a long time. I waited for it to stop. To go away.
Lightning made the sky flicker like a dying lightbulb. After a moment, there was an electric crack of thunder and I knew the rain was coming. Fat black clouds sat against the grey-woolly-jumper colour of the sky.
The Troll was still shouting down there on the line.
It would be pouring soon and it didn’t have a nest any more.
I felt a bit sick now. I wanted to be able to pee, then I wanted to go home, listen to my story, and forget all about this. I was tired of being out here, and I didn’t want to get wet, and I had a horrible heavy feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t understand.
11
‘Set out before it gets hot, and when you’re on your way walk nicely and quietly like a good girl and don’t leave the path …’
From Little Redcape (Little Red Riding Hood)
‘I really had much less wood at home than I’d initially thought,’ Annabel told the PoW, before he could express surprise at her being there again so soon. She had decided to implement her plan of being friendly to the prisoner. Funnily enough, she’d found herself thinking of him that morning.
The child was playing out somewhere, and she had done as old Dawson had suggested: come through the back. It wasn’t her intention that no one should see her – it was the ease of the shortcut, that was all.
‘That’s why I’m back,’ she said.
She had brought her trolley with her again but now felt stupid and vulnerable holding it. As a little girl she had once attended a schoolfriend’s birthday party and had found herself to be horribly overdressed and bearing a hugely ostentatious present compared to the other children. The sense of shame, and of having done so obviously the wrong thing, enveloped her now just as it had then.
‘Ah, of course, there is no problem.’ A sweet smile spread across his face.
He took her trolley from her and began to fill it. While she waited, she sat on his chopping block – an oak tree stump – and watched him work. It was a sunny day, although still not yet warm enough to go without a cardigan, and it felt nice to be outside. She could feel rough splinters digging through her thin dress into the backs of her thighs, but it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation.
She took out her cigarettes and lighter from her handbag. ‘Um … Would you like one?’ She held up the packet.
He turned to look back at her and made her laugh by tipping his head back and folding his hands together as if he was thanking God.
‘Thank you,’ he said, crossing over to where she sat. ‘It’s been a long time!’
He took her silver lighter from her hand, and she placed a cigarette between her lips and leaned towards him so he could light it for her. Then he lit his own, making her laugh again by closing his eyes in pleasure as he took in a deep lungful.
‘That’s really good,’ he said.
They smiled at each other.
He was so funny she didn’t really feel shy or awkward any more. ‘It’s Johannes?’
‘Hans.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Ah, you’ve never heard of it! It’s a little town: Mittenwald. It’s in Bavaria.’
‘Well, I expect you’d never heard of Bambury!’
He laughed and nodded and she felt pleased with what she’d said.
‘That’s true!’ He took another drag of his cigarette. ‘But here we are!’
‘Here we are.’
She pulled her legs up so she sat cross-legged on the tree stump. She thought briefly of Reggie – which was silly; she wasn’t behaving inappropriately. The skirt of her dress was long and floaty so she wasn’t being immodest.
‘Your English is very good.’
‘Thank you!’ He seemed pleased. ‘I studied it at university.’
‘What’s Mittenwald like?’
So he told her a little about the town, describing the pretty pastel-coloured houses, the paintings on the buildings, and how the area was known for making the sweetest-sounding violins.
She smoked as she listened to his soft voice describing his home far away.
‘You must miss it dreadfully,’ she said. ‘It sounds so lovely.’
He smiled and stamped out his cigarette. He’d finished it quickly.
‘Would you like another?’
He made another Thank God gesture.
‘Help yourself.’ She was still smoking her first cigarette so she gestured for him to pull out the packet and lighter from her handbag on the floor beside the stump.
‘How did you end up here?’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind me asking?’
He lit his cigarette and returned her lighter to her bag. ‘Ah! It’s a funny story!’
‘Funny?’
‘Yes – funny!’
And he told her the story of how he was captured. He made it sound amusing and acted it out. Hans and the rest of the infantrymen in his unit found themselves armed with just bayonets facing British tanks after the other German units nearby had all retreated.
He picked up the axe from the floor to mime holding his useless bayonet against the massive tank, and Annabel laughed as he pulled a funny face, dropped the axe, and stuck his hands in the air.
His jolly version of events made it all sound quite civilised. Not nearly so bad as Reggie made out.
‘Then what?’ she said.
He laughed, took a final puff of cigarette before stamping it out, and spread his arms wide. He seemed to indicate the whole of himself and everything around him.
‘What can I say? This is it! Now I’m here – a prisoner! I spend my days in an orchard cutting the dead trees!’
For some reason that made her giggle, and he caught it too, and then they both laughed and laughed at the ridiculousness of life.
The early June weather suddenly turned into a rainy, cold snap and she was back at the orchard a couple of days later. ‘We’ve had to use much more wood than usual,’ she told him.
‘Don’t apologise! I don’t get many customers. In fact, you’re already my favourite! It gets lonely out here.’
‘Yes, it must. So far from your family.’
‘Well, at least I have one friend. I will give you some extra wood!’
And that was how she knew he was kind.
‘Oh, hello again Hans – just taking a shortcut because I need to speak to Mr Dawson about something.’
‘Nice dress today, Mrs Patterson! You look so pretty.’
‘Oh … I …’
And that was how she knew he looked at her.
‘My goodness, Hans! Look at you lugging all that wood! How strong you’ve become from all the chopping!’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s true, Mrs Patterson!’
‘Oh, call me Annabel. Mrs Patterson sounds so … Well, we really have been getting through this wood, haven’t we? And it’s supposed to be summer now!’
‘Annabel.’
‘Yes. Or … or Annie.’
‘Annie.’
And that was how she knew it would be all right.
It was a little unconventional, she supposed, as she made her way home from the orchard one day: becoming friends with a PoW.
But it was just too intriguing to have a foreigner so near to her own lit
tle house in Bambury and not want to find out more about him. He was, well, exotic. Seeing him in the glade of the orchard chopping wood made him seem so different from bank clerk Reggie or her accountant father – the only two men she’d ever really known.
And yes – so what? – she sometimes came up with excuses to return to see him, but there was nothing really to fill her days, was there? Or his. Both of them were trapped in Bambury, when she thought about it.
She was going to see him so often – nearly every day – that now she always walked through the woods to get to the orchard from the back, where she was less likely to bump into someone from the village. Dawson had suggested it himself, she remembered gratefully, that first time she went to buy wood. Of course, he’d be aware from her bills how much wood she was buying, but she could explain it away easily to the old man and he wasn’t a gossip. It was some of the other villagers she was more wary of bumping into – a couple of people from the Home Guard, some of the women, or the elderly Bishop sisters who loved to spread rumours.
She wondered if she should start taking the boy with her occasionally so it didn’t look so unusual. In all likelihood, she didn’t really need to be so paranoid – not that she was actually doing anything wrong, really.
She might have considered avoiding the path in the woods entirely, but decided she had no choice but to stick to it because there were some old abandoned mine shafts in the hills of the forest that were said to be dangerous.
It was sometimes better to hide in plain sight, she thought – that is, it would be much harder to explain her presence to somebody if she were found in the middle of the forest – trying not to be spotted – than it would be if she were innocently pulling her trolley on the path on her way to collect some firewood. It was lucky the woods were so quiet though, because if anyone really thought about it, no one would need to buy firewood every day – even if it had been a bit of a chilly June so far.
But, in any case, the only person she saw sometimes on the path that ran through the woods was an old tramp who’d been hanging around the village in recent months. He’d probably lost his home in an air raid somewhere. She had nothing to fear from him – who would he tell, and who would believe him? And whenever she did occasionally see him up ahead on the path, he always veered back into the safety of the trees.
The days were getting warmer and there was little need for a fire these days. But still, Annabel went to see Hans.
There were many more PoWs now, she had heard. The numbers had swelled Bambury’s camp to almost full capacity, after a mission dubbed D-Day saw many more Germans captured by the Allies.
While many of the villagers were openly curious about the Germans – most had never met a foreign person before – nearly all were unfailingly polite should they encounter one.
Annabel had even seen the Bishop sisters – who never had a kind word to say about anybody behind their backs – nod their heads with a courteous ‘good morning’ when they passed a middle-aged German man making his way from one farm to another with a message that he carried purposefully in his hand.
On another occasion, Annabel had been in the Post Office when a German – who, judging by the furious pimples blazing on his face had probably added several years to his age in order to enlist – was running some errands for the old colonel who supervised the PoW camp. The manager had come over to serve the youth himself and asked friendly questions about his name and where he was from. He seemed excited by the boy’s halting, broken replies. The manager even tried out a German sentence or two – having learned some phrases in the Great War he explained – but the boy seemed not to understand and repeated ‘sorry, sorry’ in mortification. The manager, an elderly man with rheumatism beginning to turn the straight bones of his fingers into wavy paths with knobby rocks at the joints, kept trying to be understood. Judging from his conspiratorial air and wide grin, Annabel suspected he was trying to repeat some dirty slang he had picked up. Eventually, disappointed, he allowed the boy to be on his way with the stationery he had been sent in to buy.
Nevertheless, the camp’s prisoners didn’t enjoy uniform cheerfulness wherever they went. Some of the children – all off for the summer holidays now – would occasionally dare each other to shout abuse at the men. From Hans, Annabel had learned that youngsters from the village would sometimes cycle up to Dawson’s farm to yell insults across the fields at the men before riding away. The Germans were using old-fashioned push ploughs because petrol was so scarce, and Hans described what his friends had told him; she could visualise how their faces would simply set, stoical, as they glistened with sweat and pushed the ploughs through the hard earth to the sounds of the children jeering.
Then, one day, Annabel saw one such incident for herself.
She was shopping in the High Street with the boy when she heard a commotion. She was just coming out of the butcher’s with her wicker basket and turned to see a red-haired boy screaming with every fibre of his being.
‘I’ll fucking kill you!’ he yelled, over and over again.
She gasped as she realised what he was saying, and heard shocked murmurs behind her in the shop. She looked to see who the little boy was shouting at and saw a new group of German prisoners being escorted to the camp in a trailer lashed to a jeep. It was as if the whole High Street was frozen in time; it was eerily quiet apart from the hoarse screams of the child and the rattle of the jeep’s engine as it passed by and eventually turned the corner. The Germans remained silent, but stared curiously at the child.
Annabel couldn’t remember the boy’s name (Mark? Martin?), but she vaguely knew his mother. She was a woman named Evelyn Moore who was friendly enough to Annabel, and had received a telegram a few days ago informing her that her husband Simon had been killed in France.
Evelyn’s son had clearly become deranged when he caught sight of the German soldiers in the street as he played out with his friends from school.
Although there were plenty of shocked villagers who saw what happened, no one came forward to tell him to pull himself together, and it was his horrified friends – boys his own age – who tackled him and were now trying to tug him away as the jeep disappeared from view. One hooked his arm around the boy’s neck and jerked him backwards, while others latched onto his clothes to help drag him away. But he fought to stand his ground and struggled to fight his way over to where the jeep had gone, with his red hair askew and falling all over his face. But the other boys had him firmly now and managed to lead him away – although his tearful, high-pitched screams echoed down the side streets as his friends tried to pull him home to his broken mother.
Annabel had to step backwards into the shop to avoid them as they passed, and Daniel scrambled behind her as if to hide.
The butcher, Mr Lupton, walked out from behind his counter and came to stand with Annabel and a couple of other customers in the doorway.
‘Goodness,’ Annabel said.
‘Poor lad.’ The butcher sighed and returned to his post. ‘Got a point though, doesn’t he?’
Annabel looked at him strangely – what an odd thing to say. She couldn’t think of an appropriate response so remained silent.
‘He was a good man, Simon Moore.’ He pulled a leg of pork closer and began to chop into it. ‘Some of those Jerries stroll about the village like they own it. They want to be careful.’
She nodded once, politely, and stepped into the street, which had suddenly sprung back to life.
It was hard to comprehend how some villagers could be filled with such anger and fear. Perhaps it wasn’t just sympathy for the crying boy, but support for his sentiments, that allowed him to behave the way he did?
Annabel thought how disconcerting it was to come across such hateful views towards the PoWs. After all, they were only grey-patch-wearing normal rank-and-file Jerries, not the high-ranking black-patch Nazis. Some people seemed not to be able to recognise that the prisoners in Bambury were just a collection of ordinary people; individuals. They seemed t
o have no understanding whatsoever that someone like Hans could be kind and funny and sweet.
She wanted to protect him.
12
‘Who’s that trip-trapping on my bridge?’ roared the troll.
From The Billy Goats Gruff
One Saturday, a couple of weeks after chasing the Troll away, I was reading The Billy Goats Gruff in the sitting room when I heard Mother rustling about in the hall. She’d not long finished speaking to Grandma on the telephone, which was always quite boring to listen to because all she said was, ‘Yes, everything’s fine … yes … yes, of course I’m cooking … yes … of course … yes.’ I was sitting sideways with my legs dangling over the armrest and now I scrambled to get up to see what she was doing.
I leaned against the door and watched as she put on her headscarf. She tended not to wear one, so I looked out of the little stained-glass window at the top of the front door to see what the weather was like outside. The branches of the magnolia tree on the front lawn were jiggling. It was breezy then, and she didn’t want her hair to be messed up by the wind.
She stood in front of the hall mirror and carefully tied the silk scarf under her chin. It was pretty. Pale lemon with pink roses. She had some beautiful ones with pictures and borders and flowers, but since the war had started she’d only worn her plainer scarves and clothes. People didn’t want to look too fancy. Which was silly because they still had all their nice clothes from before – it wasn’t as if they’d bought them new. I was happy to see she was wearing her prettier things again. She had a green silk scarf with a pattern of bright red roses and green vines. I loved that one. It made me think of the tangled thicket outside Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
She took her lipstick from her handbag on the coat rack and turned her lips red, using her finger to dab it onto her mouth, because it wasted less that way.
‘Where are you going?’
She finished applying her make-up, studied herself in the mirror, and dabbed on a little more. She was very beautiful.
‘To the High Street, then to buy some more wood so we have some ready for when the summer ends.’
