War Orphans

by Lizzie Lane

  A huge gasp of approval ran throughout the assembly. One or two girls muttered how much they hated liver and onions and semolina was not favoured by everyone.

  Joanna, so hungry she would have eaten the whole lot on one plate, promptly fainted.

  When she came to she was sitting on a chair outside in the playground. Miss Hadley was holding her hand. Joanna blinked at the cool touch of Miss Hadley’s palm.

  Her teacher smiled. ‘How are you feeling now, Joanna?’

  Her smile was so sweet she looked just like the angel on the Sunday school wall. Her hair was a lovely soft reddish colour. Her eyes were blue and beautiful, and she smelled fresh and wholesome. Yes, she was wearing makeup and perhaps a smidgeon of scent, but anyone could tell it had been put on fresh that morning. Elspeth could never be bothered to wash the night before so ended up with patchy skin and a stale smell in the morning.

  ‘I think I dreamed we were going to have dinner here in school. Was it a dream, miss?’

  Sally Hadley smiled. ‘No, Joanna, it was not. School dinners will be provided for all, although it’s really supposed to be restricted to those whose mothers are already out at work. However, Miss Burton has decided, and I agree with her, that many more women will be called to work shortly so all children who want it can have school dinners. Miss Burton believes in being prepared.’

  Sally glanced down at her wristwatch aware that Miss Burton was overseeing her class while she dealt with Joanna. Much as she wanted to help the little girl, she had to get back.

  ‘You fainted. Are you feeling better now?’

  Joanna nodded.

  Sally paused before asking the next question, already guessing what the answer would be. ‘Did you have any breakfast this morning?’

  Again Joanna nodded.

  ‘What did you have?’

  ‘A piece of bread. And some bacon fat.’ She was too embarrassed to tell her about the bite of bacon sandwich, and she supposed the humbug Paul had given her didn’t count.

  Sally tried to picture the meagre repast but couldn’t. ‘So you will have room for lunch?’

  A soft smile lit Joanna’s pale face. ‘I don’t mind liver and onions, miss. Or semolina.’

  ‘Does your mother make you them too?’

  Later, Sally would describe Joanna’s look to her father as old beyond her years.

  ‘She’s my stepmother. She mostly makes bread and dripping.’

  Sally recalled the blowsy blonde, her perfume fighting a losing battle with her body odour.

  ‘Never mind.’ Sally smiled in an effort to gloss over her anger and her pity. ‘At least you can look forward to a decent meal every day you’re at school. Now. Shall we go back to the classroom? It’s only an hour until dinnertime.’

  Joanna slid off her chair. Fearing the little girl might still be a bit wobbly Sally took her hand. The child would have at least one decent meal each weekday. Weekends and school holidays were a different matter, but hopefully Joanna’s circumstances might have improved by the time the long summer holiday came around next year. Perhaps her father might come home on leave and see what was going on, or a relative perhaps.

  ‘Do you have any aunts and uncles?’

  ‘No, miss.’

  The answer was as she had feared. In her heart of hearts Sally couldn’t see much changing in Joanna’s circumstances, just as she couldn’t see anything changing in her own father’s disposition. All she could do was hope that both of them would fare better in future.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The six puppies were ripped away from their mother’s teats and went into the sack first. The seventh had been exploring the outer reaches of the litter box and, being the strongest of the litter, had climbed over the edge.

  On hearing his mother’s yelps of alarm his little heart was filled with fear. He’d never been afraid before and his mother had never sounded so distraught.

  The other sounds he heard were equally as frightening: loud human voices and the tread of heavy feet, so heavy the floorboards beneath him shook and made his legs wobble. Not liking all this noise, he scooted behind a pile of sacks in the corner of the shed.

  The vibration from heavy footsteps advanced towards him. A voice growled with impatience.

  ‘Come ’ere you little whippersnapper! You ain’t gettin’ away from me.’

  A hand as rough as the voice snatched him up by the scruff of the neck. He struggled and yapped as he was shoved into the sack with his siblings. He heard his mother whining plaintively, then a yelp, the crack of something very loud, and then nothing.

  The inside of the sack was dark and smelled of something rotten and the puppies squealed with fear.

  Puppy number seven had landed on top of his brothers and sisters and felt the bodies of his siblings wriggling around beneath him. His heart raced but rather than expending energy as his brothers and sisters were doing, some ancient instinct inherited from wild ancestors came into play. Instead of wasting energy on struggling, that instinct told him to listen, to sniff, and to wait and see what would happen next.

  His nose, so much more sensitive than a human’s, twitched as above him a draught of fresh air came through a hole in the sack.

  Bracing his back legs against his siblings brought whines of protest, but his instinct to escape and survive was strong.

  The puppies tumbled about as the man carrying the sack gave it a violent shake. An angry human voice warned them to shut their racket.

  The sack bounced roughly against the man’s back and the puppies continued to tumble about as they were carried to their fate.

  The poor little creatures knew nothing about who this man was or where they were going. They only knew they had been dragged away from their mother.

  If they had been able to understand, they would know that the man was not their mother’s owner but a man employed to get rid of them all. The real owners did not have the heart for it, but this man had told them he would dispose of them painlessly. He had lied.

  The puppies kept up their whining and howling, squirming against each other as they fought for air.

  The man muttered. ‘Shut yer bleedin’ noise.’

  The puppies neither heard nor understood. Terrified for their young lives, they cried and whined their hearts out.

  There was a shifting of breeze as the sack was swung through the air. The puppies at the bottom of the sack screamed as they impacted with something hard. The man, nervous their yelping would be heard before he finished what he had to do, swung them against a brick wall.

  The yelping became less as some of them were already dead or too injured to survive. The puppy at the top of the heap and closest to the man’s hand had escaped the worst of the impact. The breath was knocked out of his little body, though only for a moment. The same instinct as before kicked in. Keep small. Keep quiet. Keep immobile. But he was scared. Very scared.

  Preferring not to be seen, the man waited until it was dark before picking the spot where he would throw the sack into the swirling water. It wasn’t a wide stream but deep enough to drown the puppies in the sack. Hopefully the flow would suck the puppies down before the sack got caught in eddies and floated downstream.

  Once he was sure, he swung the sack around his head and let it go. The splash of it hitting the water was enough confirmation that he’d done his job.

  ‘And now for a pint,’ he said cheerfully, fingering the ten-bob note in his pocket as he walked off whistling a merry little tune.

  He failed to see that the sack had jammed in deep water, between stepping stones the kids had placed in order to ford the stream more easily. The top third of the sack had flopped onto one of the stones. He was long gone by the time those puppies still clinging on to life at the bottom of the sack had drowned. Only one remained alive.

  That lone survivor whimpered. He was wet, frightened and alone. He knew from the silence that his siblings were dead.

  The hole in the sack became wider, ripped open by a sharp edge on the rock.
He poked his nose out, sniffing the fresh air, smelling water, plants and the tangy whiff of creatures he did not recognise.

  A sly and curious rat slid into the water close by. A duck quacked just once before resettling for the night.

  The hole was big enough for the puppy to poke his nose through. His brothers and sisters were dead, but his survival instinct was strong and he was an intelligent little chap. He would not join them.

  Outside the rat circled, waiting for the opportunity to investigate further, but he held back. His keen sense detected movement plus the unmistakeable scent of man, always a threat to the likes of him.

  The puppy barked sharply. The rat retreated. Now was not the time. When the scent of man diminished, along with what little life was left in the sack, he would come back, keen to feed on whatever was left.

  Bracing his little legs against the dead bodies of his brothers and sisters, the puppy shoved his nose further into the hole.

  The ripped sacking cut into his muzzle. Much as he tried to push his way through it just wasn’t wide enough.

  Tired and wet, he pulled his muzzle back and then began chewing, his sharp little teeth ripping at the sacking, turning it from a small hole into a bigger one.

  His teeth were sharp and he went on chewing for as long as he could until he became too fatigued to continue, then he rested and would begin again.

  The hessian sack was strong, but although he only had milk teeth, he chewed his way through driven by fear and the will to live. Scrabbling with his front paws and pushing with his rear legs, he steadily hauled half of his body out of the sack.

  All around him was darkness and the strange sounds of night creatures. He sniffed again and barked at something he saw in the water. Whatever it was moved away at the sound of his bark.

  Scared and tired he lay spent on the rock, unable to chew any more. He was just a puppy. He needed to sleep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The rain had stopped and a rainbow arched from the green slopes of the Novers, a hilly expanse where sometimes ponies grazed, to the gasworks in Marksbury Road.

  Joanna sat hugging her knees beside the Malago, the shallow stream that ran at the bottom of the expanse and disappeared into a culvert in St John’s Lane.

  Never had she felt so miserable. Paul tried to cheer her up but to no avail. Disappointed that he had failed to move her, Paul got to his feet. ‘I’m off with Lenny Scott to see if we can find any conkers. Want to come?’

  She shook her head.

  The reflection of the sky on the water made her think of heaven. Hopefully there was a special one for cats where there were no dogs and Lottie would be fed cream and kippers. She hadn’t tasted cream herself for a very long time, though she had eaten the occasional kipper.

  ‘I’ve got a kipper for you,’ Mrs Allen from next door had said to Joanna that morning as she’d wandered past. Joanna had declined, too upset to eat. Not only was her beloved Lottie no more but her stepmother had accused her of telling tales to ‘that toffee-nosed bitch from your school’.

  Joanna had denied doing any such thing, but had earned a smack around the back of her head all the same.

  The sudden splash of something entering the water caught her attention.

  A rat? She knew there were plenty around here and even more over towards the gasworks.

  She looked around in case Paul was still close by, but he was off to find conkers with Lenny Scott and the other boys. Even at this distance she could see that his hands were tucked his pockets, his elbows poking through the holes in his jumper.

  Joanna considered herself as brave as a boy, but still wished he was here just in case it was a rat. She didn’t like rats. She’d heard they would bite if cornered and attack anything small enough to eat. She hoped she wasn’t small enough to eat.

  There was no movement among the reeds in the water or in the grass growing thickly on the bank. The only thing that drew her attention was the pondweed streaming like green hair in the water’s flow.

  The weed had fanned out over something surrounding what seemed to be a small rock in the middle of the river. On second thoughts, she decided it wasn’t a rock because it fluttered slightly, as if a piece of cloth had been caught there.

  Curious, she got to her feet, stepped closer to the bank and narrowed her eyes.

  Whatever the lump, rock or mound of cloth was, it seemed half in and half out of what she now guessed to be a sack. The object – whatever it was – anchoring it to a stone.

  The local kids had placed a series of flat stones at frequent intervals so they could more easily cross from one side of the stream to the other. Whatever this was had landed on one of those rocks. To Joanna’s eyes looked like a brown blob, shapeless, slick and still.

  Intrigued she sat down on a dry mound of reed and took off her shoes and socks.

  The stones were wet and moss covered, but she dug her toes into the wet slushy surface and made her way from one stone to the next.

  All around her was movement. The water formed chortling eddies and a small fish darted out from beneath the third stone. That was where she stopped. The first thought to cross her mind was that the brown blob she had seen was a dead rat. If so she would turn back immediately.

  But you don’t know for sure.

  Bracing both hands on her knees, she peered more closely. It was not a rat. The colour of the fur was too rich, not the dull brown of a river rat but copper-coloured, brown but tinged with a touch of dark red.

  The wet moss was cold beneath her feet and the next stone wobbled. Flinging her arms wide, she held her balance, her toes dug in to stop herself from slipping.

  The fourth and fifth stone were solid beneath her feet and gave her chance to see more clearly whatever it was on the sixth stone.

  Joanna gasped. All the pity she might have felt for herself evaporated at the sight that greeted her.

  The little lump was soft and soaking wet. There was a shiny black nose and one paw was crossed over the other.

  ‘A puppy!’

  The exclamation came out in a soft squeal. The puppy dog’s eyes were closed. The possibility that he might be dead frightened her.

  She stooped down on the stone she was standing on, her elbows resting against her knees. Should she touch him? She was almost afraid to do so. And what was he doing here? How come he was lying on a stepping stone in the middle of a stream?

  When she saw the sack again, she remembered what Paul had told her. Pets were not just being put to sleep, they were also being abandoned. People were being panicked into destroying those things they had once loved.

  Kneeling down in the wet moss, she stretched out her hand to touch the damp fur.

  ‘Poor thing,’ she whispered. ‘If only Paul were still here. We could sing a hymn for you.’ It didn’t seem right for just one person to sing a hymn.

  She didn’t doubt that the poor creature was dead, drowned in a stream where children played.

  ‘But at least I can give you a proper burial,’ she added softly. ‘Jesus will take care of you.’

  Joanna’s gaze wandered warily to the rest of the sack submerged in the water. Instinctively she knew there were more dead puppies in the sack. They too deserved a decent burial. Perhaps it might be best if she did run after Paul and get him to help. She couldn’t bear the job of burying them all by herself.

  Hot tears pricked at her eyes and she hardly noticed how hard she was biting her bottom lip as she ran her hand over the waterlogged coat of the puppy.

  How could people be so cruel? This horrible war was making people do horrible things that they wouldn’t contemplate doing in peacetime.

  Her tears grew more copious, running down her face and dripping off her jaw. Some of them landed on the tiny pink tongue protruding from beneath velvet soft flews.

  She was about to close her eyes and recite the Lord’s Prayer when she noticed something extraordinary. The tongue flicked. Another tear landed on his nose. The puppy sneezed.

  Joa
nna’s jaw dropped and she could barely breathe. Was it too much to hope that he might be alive?

  Taking a deep breath, she felt where she thought his heart must be. To her amazement something pulsed like the ticking of a clock beneath her fingers.

  He was alive! She could hardly believe it. He was actually alive!

  She looked around her. There was nobody about who might lay claim to him. Nobody to see her rescuing him from what would have been a watery grave.

  Sliding one hand beneath his head, the other beneath his rump, she picked him up, holding him close to her chest.

  The puppy whimpered as she tucked him beneath her coat. His eyes remained closed.

  Should she take him home? No. Elspeth would curl her lips, clout her around the head and throw him out into the street – or worse! Either that or the poor mite would go the same way as Lottie, her beloved cat.

  But what should she do with him?

  Joanna cast her gaze around her, seeking somewhere suitable to hide him.

  Away from here, she decided, tucking him further beneath her coat. Fear of losing what she had found made her secretive. She didn’t want anyone to know about him. Ears could be boxed and secrets shared betrayed. Even Paul, she thought to herself, I can’t even tell Paul. Nobody will know.

  Before she got too far away she took one last look at the sack left in the stream and shuddered. She would tell Paul about the sack and ask him to bury it. However, she had made her mind up to keep secret the fact that one puppy had survived. Nobody would know. Only her.

  She reached the rows of allotments adjoining the railway line at the bottom of the park. All manner of vegetables were presently growing, green shoots piercing the dark rich earth. It seemed deserted, most of the allotment owners were at work, and the few that were on the allotments were too intent on what they were doing to notice a small girl.