Isobel's Story

by Jennie Walters

  I’d reckoned without him. Early the next morning, I woke to the noise of a hailstorm outside. Could hailstones be quite so loud and scratchy? Wrapping a blanket round my shoulders, I staggered over to the window and looked out. He was standing down below, dark hair spilling over the collar of his jersey and white teeth shining as he smiled up at me, his hand drawn back to throw another shower of pebbles. ‘Isobel, come down! We must have a last walk.’

  I struggled into some clothes, hastily brushed my teeth without any water and crept down the stairs to meet him. We were both laughing a little to be out so early, with not another soul in the world, as we set off towards the house in the grey, early-morning light. Then he said seriously, ‘I am so sorry because of your grandmother. You will miss her very much, I think.’

  ‘Yes, I will. But at least she died here, where she was happy, not miserable in London.’ It was amazing how I could talk to him about anything.

  ‘You will not be miserable in London, though. You have your friends there, and lots of studies to do, and I shall write to tell you what happens at Swallowcliffe. Do you know my mother comes here soon?’ He took my hand and swung it along in his. ‘So many things I must thank you for. Sissy tells me about this meeting last night and what you say. I think there cannot be another girl as Isobel in all of England.’

  ‘So you do like me, then?’ I asked shyly. ‘I used to think you didn’t.’

  ‘But of course I like you,’ he said. ‘No, I love you! You are the little sister I never had.’

  Have you heard the expression, ‘the bottom dropped out of my world’? Until then, I’d never really understood what it meant. Now I did. That awful, sinking sense of being cast adrift, of flailing about in search of solid ground beneath your feet and finding none, of not knowing the first thing to do or say.

  ‘Oh, Isobel,’ Andreas said gently, seeing my face. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’m fine.’ I turned back towards the lodge, burning with shame, hating myself for being so young and stupid. How could I possibly have fallen in love with someone who thought of me as his little sister? Why hadn’t I realised that Andreas would never look at me in the way Dr Hathaway looked at Mum? My eyes blurred as I stumbled over potholes in the drive. He should never have come! If only I’d gone back to London without seeing him, my world would still be intact.

  He caught up. ‘There will be somebody for you one day, I know, somebody who is a better person than me.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ It was a relief to feel angry enough to shout at him. ‘Can’t you see you’re only making it worse?’

  And that was how we parted. Me, hurrying for home with tears pouring down my face and him, standing at the first bend of the drive - probably staring after me, though I didn’t turn around to look. Pitying me, for certain.

  Later that morning we went back to London on the train and I began studying for my School Certificate, trying not to think about Swallowcliffe or Andreas Rosenfeld. Schoolwork was a help: I buried my head in my books and studied like never before, from first thing in the morning until late at night. My friends mostly left me alone (probably thinking I’d turned into a real swot) but that was all right - I was too miserable to feel lonely and couldn’t be bothered to try and fit in. Sometimes I’d go with my brothers to the Mickey Mouse club at the Odeon on a Saturday morning, or shopping at Woolworth’s in the afternoon, but most of the time all I did was prepare for the exams. I couldn’t even spare the energy to wonder about Mum and Dr Hathaway, although a letter arrived on the doormat every few days postmarked Edenvale and I guessed he was writing to her.

  ‘Whistle while you work,’ the boys sang, ‘Mussolini made a shirt, Hitler wore it, Chamberlain tore it, whistle while you work.’ War was coming soon, everyone knew that. Mum told me the council was making plans to evacuate city schools into the countryside, teachers along with the children. She was making plans, too, though we didn’t discover what they were until the holidays had almost begun. On the evening after my last exam, she sat the three of us down and told us that she’d given in her notice at the school and paid our last month’s rent: we’d be moving down to Swallowcliffe at the beginning of the summer holidays.

  ‘You’ve been nagging me for so long to live in the country that I’m sure you’ll be pleased,’ she said. Stan and Alfie were already jumping all over the kitchen, waving their arms in the air. ‘There are good schools for all of you and we can rent the gate lodge for as long as we want. The boarding school is up and running and I’m going to teach there. Isobel? You are pleased, aren’t you?’

  I didn’t know. At one time, this would have been my dearest wish, but now the thought of having to see Andreas every day was hard to contemplate. And yet, to live at Swallowcliffe, to be a part of the school … what could be more wonderful than that?

  And so here we are, the four of us snug in the gate lodge. The boys started school a couple of days ago and so did I: the county school in Hardingbridge. I passed my School Certificate with flying colours so now I’m going on to Highers. ‘You might want to teach one day, like me,’ Mum says, and perhaps I will. Over the summer holidays, I spent a lot of time helping out at the Hall. The Swallowcliffe School for Refugee Children, that’s what it’s called now. Not all the children are Jewish: some have parents the Nazis don’t like because they’re Communists, or people who’ve spoken out against Hitler. The Hall is full of iron bedsteads and we have more than thirty children sleeping up in the attic, as well as those in the bedrooms; twelve came from Poland last week but most have already been in this country for a while, staying at other hostels. There are English conversation classes, games outside and music all the time. The house is full of laughter and noise, despite the sadness that hangs over everyone and sometimes has to break out. Gran would have loved it and Lord Vye seems delighted. He and the children have settled into the Dower House with Sissy and Mr Huggins, and a new housekeeper we haven’t met yet; Lady Vye comes and goes like she always did.

  Last week, the Swallowcliffe children gave a concert in the village hall and everybody came; they had to perform three encores and the audience wouldn’t stop clapping. Mr Prior’s been giving the school twenty pounds of sausages a week since the beginning and the children take it in turns to go out to tea with people like the Murdochs, Mrs Olds and Miss Hartcup. The dire predictions made by the man from London haven’t come true so far.

  Mr Tarver doesn’t live in Stone Martin any more. One night in the pub, Mrs Olds’ son Charlie told a friend that he’d seen the shopkeeper cycling away from the Hall when he was out rabbiting, on the night of the fire. Rumours started spreading and PC Dawes got to hear of them, but before he could ask any questions, Mr Tarver had gone. Eunice said he went to live with his sister in Eastbourne, but Sissy thinks she made that up for want of something to say. As for Eunice: she found a job in the biscuit factory in Hardingbridge, which apparently she likes much better than service or shop work. A new family have arrived to run the village shop and they’re friendly enough, although Mum thinks the shelves aren’t quite what Mr Tarver’s were.

  Stan and Alfie spent a lot of time with Tristan over the summer holidays and Dr Hathaway’s been teaching them to ride: one of his patients has ponies they can borrow. He and Mum go riding together every weekend and we sometimes have supper together, just like a proper family. That’s taken some getting used to but Mum is so happy, it rubs off on the rest of us. She sings around the house these days and she’s always smiling.

  So you could say that all those impossible things I used to dream about have come true. Except that Gran isn’t here any more and Andreas doesn’t love me the way I love him. I know he’s grateful - his mother arrived in June and maybe I had something to do with that - but gratitude isn’t what I want. It’s hard for us even to be friends at the moment, I feel so awkward around him.

  We’ll be friends again one day, though, I’m sure of that. With each day that goes by, I feel stronger in myself. ‘You’re
so young, Izzie,’ Mum said the other day, scooping me up in a hug. ‘You have your whole life ahead of you. Plenty of wonderful things to come!’ And this is such a beautiful, tranquil place to live. On a soft summer evening, Gran’s presence seems to be all around me. I’ll look down on the house from the Fairview Tower and imagine her there, sitting in her chair by the kitchen window, or hear her voice at unexpected moments inside my head. Whenever I see Mr Chadwick about the Hall, I think of her - and Iris too.

  Swallowcliffe has become a place of refuge, and only just in time. After so many months of waiting, it has finally happened. Hitler invaded Poland three days ago and yesterday, England and France declared war on Germany. The younger children haven’t realised yet what war means; the rest of us know there’ll be no more refugees sailing to safety across the English Channel. All the borders are closed now, and the terrible thing is, Andreas’s cousin Gisela is still in Germany. Despite everyone’s efforts, she couldn’t get out in time. Silence has fallen; there will be no more letters or parcels from home. All we can do is wait, and pray. ‘At least we can make these children feel wanted,’ Mum says, but what about the others, left behind?

  This morning Mum and I watched two little girls chasing each other through the sculpture garden. The sun shone on their hair and they were laughing, which sounded strange on such a sad day. ‘That’s something to hold on to,’ Mum said. ‘What if each of those girls grows up to have a family of her own? We must help those who are here now, Izzie, not torture ourselves thinking about what might have been.’

  The Hall is our sanctuary. Maybe in time the children we’ve taken in will learn to be happy here. Perhaps they’ll feel the love and laughter that’s echoed round these walls for so many years, besides the love their parents are sending from miles away. We did what we could, I suppose. But I can’t help asking myself, was it enough?

  Author’s Note

  Several people have helped in the writing of this book. I am particularly grateful to two of the original Kinder: Hermann Hirschberger, who so generously shared his experiences with me, and Lisa Vincent, who read my manuscript for accuracy and tone. Many thanks also to Wendy Whitworth and the Holocaust Centre, Beth Shalom (www.holocaustcentre.net); to Richard Drachman for granting permission to reproduce lines from his father Julian Drachman’s poem, ‘How Shall We Sing?’ (from Just Now, for Instance: A Retrospective Selection of Ninety Poems, published by Stinehour Press, 1969); to Randall Bytwerk, who has made a study of Nazi propaganda , www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa, for permission to reproduce his translation of Herman Esser’s writing; to Sally Holloway for telling me so much about London in the 1930s; to Rachel Grange and Jolanta Henderson for advising on dialogue; to Harriet Stallibrass, as ever, for her helpful comments.

  About the Author:

  Jennie Walters was partly inspired to write the Swallowcliffe Hall trilogy by visits to beautiful old English country houses, including Kingston Lacey in Dorset, Belton House in Lincolnshire and Castle Howard in Yorkshire. As a teenager, she spent two years in a cliff-top boarding school with wood-panelled rooms, a huge marble staircase and one of the largest collections of stuffed birds in England. Much later, finding a silver housekeeper’s châtelaine when clearing out her father-in-law’s flat whetted her interest in Victorian servants and their masters and mistresses, and prompted her to create a fictional country house of her own. Jennie lives in London with her husband, two cats and a dog, and has two grown-up sons.

  For more information on World War Two and the Kindertransporte, including personal stories from survivors, along with a fascinating insight into the world of English country houses and the families and servants who live in them, visit Jennie’s website – packed with original photographs, historical information and much more!

  http://www.jenniewalters.com

  NEW! Coming soon…

  Eugenie’s Story

  Eugenie, elder daughter of the aristocratic Vye family, is engaged on the most important task of her life: finding a suitable husband. Although beautiful and accomplished, she doesn’t have much of a dowry, for maintaining Swallowcliffe Hall in lavish style is eating up her father’s fortune. Her brother’s marriage to an American heiress has secured the Hall’s future, but Eugenie must play her cards carefully and avoid the faintest whiff of scandal if she is to become mistress of her own grand household. When disaster threatens, a hastily-arranged trip to Paris with her American relatives looks like the best way of preserving Eugenie’s good name – though dangerously charming young men are to be found everywhere.

  Letters home from Eugenie’s maid provide a different perspective in this delightfully witty account.

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Swallowcliffe Hall 3: Isobel’s Story

  About the Author