by Chloe Mayer
Annabel carried the tray through to the kitchen and set it down on the sideboard with a bang. She leaned against the work surface for a moment to compose herself, but jumped as her mother walked into the kitchen with the milk jug.
‘Forgot this,’ her mother said and set it down next to the tea tray before heading upstairs to the toilet.
Annabel filled the sink with scalding water and mercilessly plunged her hands into it again and again as she rinsed the china. Thank goodness no one had ever seen her with Hans, apart from that first time she met him, when Mr Dawson and the boy were there. And of course she and Hans had sworn each other to secrecy.
Her mother had come back down and she could hear her affectionately berating her father in the garden through the open door. She’d caught him napping in the sun and was now making him come inside so he didn’t get burnt. They came through the kitchen as they made their way to the sitting room, the boy following them as he laughed at his grandad getting in trouble.
When Annabel finished washing up, her hands were red and puffy-looking, steam rising from them before she enclosed them in a clean dishtowel.
She went through to find her father dozing. Since she couldn’t put the wireless on and risk waking him in a bad temper, there was nothing else for her and her mother to do but sit in silence. She had thrown out the papers and magazines when she tidied the house before they arrived, so in the absence of any activity, her mother settled back against the sofa and went to sleep too.
Daniel approached Annabel’s armchair.
‘I’m going to play out now,’ he whispered, lightly touching her bare arm.
He left the house and she saw his dark head through the window as he walked up the garden path to turn right towards the woods.
Annabel sat there for a long time, thinking, looking at the net curtains as they danced listlessly against the open window, undulating when they caught a breeze. And the three of them were still sitting like that, perhaps an hour or two later, when Daniel returned home. He called out as he opened the door, waking his grandparents, and came in flushed from the heat.
‘Time for another cup of tea,’ Annabel’s father said as he opened his eyes.
‘I’ll do it,’ her mother replied, stretching as she stood.
‘And what have you been up to, young man?’
‘I was in the woods, Grandad. Just playing.’
He’d returned earlier than Annabel would have liked and it made her feel tired. She always felt the need to perform at being a mother in front of her parents, because they’d been so horrified at the state of her after the boy’s birth.
‘How wonderful,’ she said. ‘Well, I hope you had a nice time.’
He nodded vigorously and came to hover by her armchair.
‘Well, I’m still not sure I like it.’ Annabel’s mother had returned from putting the kettle on the stove and she leaned now against the doorframe. ‘It sounds dangerous to me. It’s not like playing out on the streets in London where everyone watches out for everyone else’s children. I don’t like the look of those woods.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense, Elizabeth,’ her husband said. ‘Just because you’ve been in the city all your life, you’re frightened of the country. Daniel’s lucky to have all this on his doorstep. I’d have loved playing there with my friends when I was his age. We had a whale of a time whenever we managed to get someone to take us out to Epping Forest.’
‘I was only saying—’
‘I know, Mother.’ Annabel had decided to try to prevent both an argument between her parents and any anecdotes from her father. ‘But I really do think it’s all right. Children have been playing in those woods for ever. It’s practically what they were designed for – isn’t that right, Daniel?’
‘I’m a big boy now, anyway,’ the boy told the room, pushing back his hair, which was damp with sweat. ‘Mother knows I’m safe in the woods even when I stay out till it’s dark. Even when I stay out till it’s after ten o’clock at night!’
‘Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.’ She laughed nervously, but relaxed when her parents laughed too.
‘His shirt seems a bit tight, Annabel,’ her mother said, into the brief silence that followed. ‘Under the arms. Don’t you think?’
Annabel looked across at the boy. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘He grows so quickly.’ His clothes did look a bit on the small side, now she thought of it. And his hair was too long. She’d been taking her eye off the ball. It was so important to keep everything looking right.
‘Shooting up, aren’t you?’ her father said. ‘Like a beanpole.’
‘I’ve already spoken to a woman in the village, actually,’ Annabel said, thinking fast. ‘She’s going to give me some of her boy’s hand-me-downs that’ll fit him better.’
‘All right, I know when to mind my own business,’ Annabel’s mother said and went back to the kitchen to make the tea. Annabel followed her, and began transferring the now dry saucers and cups from the dish rack back to the tray.
‘Heard from Reggie lately?’ her mother asked behind her as they both returned to the sitting room.
Annabel laid down the tea tray and self-consciously smoothed down her hair. She tried not to think about her husband too much. It was too confusing.
‘He writes when he can,’ she said noncommittally. ‘I don’t get all of his letters by the sounds of it, but I think most get through.’
She poured milk into all of their cups and then the tea through its little strainer. Daniel was kneeling at the coffee table waiting for his own cup.
‘I don’t think he gets all of mine, either,’ she continued, ‘but it’s better than nothing, isn’t it?’
‘Sometimes they cut holes in Daddy’s letters when he says something like where he is or where he’s going.’
‘That’s the censor stopping information from falling into the wrong hands, young man.’
‘I know, Grandad.’
‘Goddamned Huns would stoop to anything.’
‘Father, please!’ Annabel said, sharply.
Her father looked surprised at her tone, then shocked them all by apologising for his language in front of the boy.
After a pause, Annabel’s mother continued with her questions.
‘But he’s doing all right, is he? Conditions aren’t too bad out there? Getting enough to eat and all that?’
‘Yes, yes, fine.’
In truth, it had been quite a while since Reggie’s last letter. She sometimes wondered if something had happened to him, but there was no telegram. And his letters had become much shorter with longer gaps in between, so that she couldn’t quite summon up genuine fear that he had been killed or gone missing in action.
‘I think the food’s not too bad, actually,’ she said as she passed round the tea. ‘That’s about all he can tell us. That and his problems with his ears. Sometimes the letters have had so many holes cut through them they look like paper snowflakes!’
That night, long after her parents had left, Annabel lay in bed and tried to sort through her jumbled thoughts.
There was a streetlight, now defunct, outside her window, and she had always enjoyed the warm, orange glow that beamed around the thin paisley curtains. She missed it terribly now all the lights had been shut down for the blackout. Her own blackout precautions, thick black cloth taped over the windows, sealed her in and wouldn’t allow even a chink of the cold blue light of the moon inside. The eerie darkness of the village unsettled her.
Annabel had never been in an aeroplane, but she had once seen aerial photographs of British cities in a magazine long before the war. She imagined how Bambury would have looked from the air. She imagined the photograph would have shown the village blazing with the whitish lights of indoor electricity, and yellower tones from the few houses that still used gas lamps and candles, and the orange lights she loved so much that delineated some of its streets. But tonight, from above, little Bambury would be as black as the surrounding woods, and even London and Cambrid
ge and Manchester and Liverpool – and all the other big cities that were photographed – would be dark tonight too. England and the rest of the British Isles were now as black as the night sea. It would be like looking at a dark hole where the country used to be.
The bright lights had all been snuffed out in a bid to blind the German pilots hunting for targets below.
She remembered, with something akin to nausea, the churning, sickening swirl of her emotions in the kitchen earlier that day after discussing the Nazis with her father.
But it was too hard to associate Hans with the Germans she heard about on the wireless. He was nothing like shouty Hitler and the frightening men of his government, and he was nothing like the stories of cruelty attributed to faceless German soldiers in the news.
How could he be evil? How could he be everything they said he was?
Then she considered what they might say about her. She had to admit to herself now that she was an adulteress. Poor Reggie seemed to be losing himself – but here she was, not only fraternising with the enemy, but loving him.
She threw herself over onto her stomach with a soft moan and buried her face in the pillow, then restlessly flipped over again. But no matter her position, she couldn’t stop the feelings that made her so uncomfortable. She remembered the hot flush of shame she had tried to scald away at the sink that afternoon. She couldn’t shake the images of her parents finding out about their filthy daughter. She would have to put a stop to this. She would tell Hans that it had to end. But he would try to convince her to carry on, so perhaps she should simply stop going to see him and leave him to work out that she was never going back.
No!
No. She couldn’t just abandon him like that. Whatever anybody else thought about the German soldiers, she was the only person in Bambury – maybe even in the country – who actually knew one of them properly and knew what he was really like. He was in all honesty the kindest, most understanding person she’d ever met. How could she even think of leaving him? She was in love with him.
She wished he were lying in bed next to her. He would make her see things the right way again. They would face each other, and whisper like children telling their secrets to one another in the dark. They would have the luxury of time, which would give them the luxury of lazy intimacy, not tempered by fear or the hands of her watch. And if they lived together they could make a real home, a place that would be a comfort and a salve. Then she imagined him in the camp barracks. Was he awake? Was he in bed, thinking of her before drifting off to sleep? Maybe he was dreaming about her. Or perhaps he was sitting on the floor, with the other PoWs, playing cards or dominoes.
She pulled the pillow over her face and wept.
16
‘But beware that you do not say anything about this to anyone. Keep your silence.’
From The Water of Life
After reading to me as usual, Mother went to her own room. I could hear her crying, which used to be quite normal but it had been a while since she’d done that.
When she left, I removed the blackout curtain so that the moonlight could fall across my bed, held back only by the branches of the magnolia tree in the front garden. I understood that we weren’t allowed to let any light seep out from our windows, but surely there was no harm in letting the light come in?
Grown-ups couldn’t sling a black cloth across the moon, much as they might like to.
I couldn’t think when it was too dark. I couldn’t see the edges of my room to tell if something was lurking in the inky black.
The silvery light coating my eiderdown and showing me what was there – just the bookshelves, just the Darlings sitting on top – reassured me and allowed me to concentrate. I climbed back into bed and turned my face to the moonbeams.
My shock at seeing my mother with Hansel inside the wood-chopper’s cabin was starting to wear off now. Until I saw that shed-kiss, that shared kiss, I had no idea that was going to happen. I wondered what secret, adult signs I must have missed somehow, despite all my spying on them. Now, suddenly, things had changed.
I thought of my Daddy and knew she shouldn’t be kissing Hansel. But Daddy seemed so far away again; I was struggling to remember his face. And I loved Hansel too. And I loved her. I understood it. This was the magic world – this was happening in the ancient forest; this wasn’t even vaguely connected to ‘real’ life with houses and banks and rules and schools.
I often went to watch them after that first kiss. Hansel kept his promise to me; he never told her that he knew me too, and he never spoke to me about my mother. He didn’t want to get either of us in trouble with the other, and that made me like him more.
And the moment I saw their lips touch, I knew I’d never speak about it to them. Not to mention all that came afterwards, all the things they did and said, not knowing I was just the other side of the wooden boards of the walls. They thought it was their secret, but I knew it too, and that was my secret.
17
‘I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in.’
From The Three Little Pigs
There weren’t very many men left in Bambury any more, just the old, the lame, the feeble-minded. They were the ones who weren’t any good to the armed forces for one reason or another, and Annabel thought perhaps that was why some of them seemed so angry.
Their frustrations needed to be vented and, though there were not so many of them, these disparate men had banded together. They made much of being the ‘Home Guard’, which in theory meant they were another line of defence, but in practice meant harassing housewives about their blackout curtains, or the poor quality of their air-raid shelters. She’d read that some Home Guards in other parts of the country had been issued revolvers left over from the Great War, but none of these weapons seemed to have filtered through to the men in Bambury.
Naturally, these guards hated the Germans for turning them into impotent stay-at-home men without any sort of useful role to play. And, conveniently, there were quite a lot of Germans staying nearby for them to focus on.
Annabel was a little afraid of them.
They came round one day in mid-August, about six weeks after she and Hans had begun their affair, demanding an inspection of her garden. She recognised their leader, a man named Bernard Higgins.
‘Here about the regulations,’ Higgins said, without any preamble, as she opened the door.
‘I – I beg your pardon?’
She felt a stab of nauseating fear that they were there to arrest her or some such. How did they know? Had someone seen them?
‘Regulations. Your garden. If you don’t mind.’
‘Now?’
‘If you’d be so kind.’ He smiled. Higgins was in his late fifties. He was a powerfully built, stocky man, and Annabel saw that he was quite drunk with the petty power the Home Guard mandate had provided him.
The others – four of them – were peering at her behind him.
She opened the door to let them inside.
‘Just through here, is it?’ he gestured with his clipboard. Various forms peppered with tick-boxes were held in place by the rusty clip.
Annabel pushed back against the wall as they filed in. It was beyond her why they all needed to be here for this. A man she didn’t recognise brushed against the hall mirror, almost knocking it off its hook. He caught it in time and had the grace to give her a sheepish look.
‘Oopsie daisy,’ he said, pushing his black-rimmed spectacles further up on his nose.
Annabel glanced into the street as she closed the door behind them. She caught sight of one of her neighbours on the other side of the road, leaning against her own doorframe with her arms crossed. Annabel couldn’t remember her name, but they were nodding acquaintances. The woman was staring at her with narrowed eyes. She wasn’t sure if she too had just received a visit from the Home Guard, and was offering grim solidarity, or whether she had, in fact, suggested they visit Annabel’s house because she believed there had been some kind of infra
ction.
Annabel raised a hand uncertainly.
The woman nodded, just once, adjusted the patterned scarf tied around her head, and went back inside. Annabel hurried after the men, who were already opening the back door and making their way into the garden.
They looked ridiculous as they prowled around the lawn in their shabby suits with their proprietorial air.
Higgins had taken one member of the group straight across to the air-raid shelter and they made a great show of inspecting it with expressions that demonstrated just how serious their job was. The others, including the mirror man, were ambling around the perimeter of the wooden fence. They stopped at the far corner, murmuring in low voices.
Higgins’s companion was an extremely fat man who walked with a cane, despite only being in his late thirties or so. Annabel knew his name was Richard something-or-other and that he’d had several of his toes amputated as a result of diabetes complications. Reggie had pointed him out to her one day.
‘Did you know you can’t walk properly if you lose just one big toe?’ he’d whispered at the time. ‘You can’t balance.’
As she looked at the man now, she supposed that his disability was what prevented him joining up. He hobbled around after Higgins, struggling with the cane on the grass. He was sweating heavily but seemed to be taking his role very seriously. He was putting everything he had into examining the shelter.
Annabel hovered at the back door, watching the men go about their business. She hoped they wouldn’t need to go upstairs to check the blackout blinds. It was a bit messy up there.
‘Can I make any of you some tea?’ she called.
There were a couple of ‘no’s and a couple waved their hands dismissively. Higgins was evidently much too busy to reply.
She turned her attention to the three men at the far end of her garden. None of them was very old. She recognised Jimmy Dockett, who was about twenty-two or twenty-three. Although he looked big and strong and healthy, she knew he was epileptic. It was hard to believe that with no warning he could have a fit. She wondered how she would react, and what the others would do now, if he fell down in convulsions with froth bubbling from his mouth as he writhed on the lawn. She had once seen that happen in a doctor’s waiting room when she was a little girl. She remembered screaming and her nanny Missus Joan had rushed her outside the surgery immediately, so she never saw what they did to the man to make him stop. It was one of the most frightening things Annabel had ever witnessed and she began to wish fervently that Jimmy wouldn’t have a fit in her garden.
