Suddenly, school starting the next day was exciting rather than awful.
The Ratcliffs and Bishops trooped home, carrying the tire like a big-animal trophy from a safari hunt. Bobby and Charles led. As they emerged from the woods, they sang a song from a popular Donald Duck cartoon playing in the movie houses. It was full of red-white-and-blue sass and spite, making fun of German oompah-pah bands to ridicule those who’d blindly followed Hitler and his racist beliefs to become Nazis.
“Don’t forget to add the raspberry after Heil!” called out Bobby.
The boys put their hands under their sweaty armpits and pumped their arms up and down in popping slaps, or stuck their tongues out and blew to make loud farting sounds to replace the Nazi Seig Heil salute.
“When der fuehrer says we is de master race
We heil (BLAT), heil (BLAT) right in der fuehrer’s face.”
They nearly split their sides with laughing after each fake fart—even Wesley.
12 September 1943
Dear Dad,
I have started ‘high school,’ as the Yanks call it, and I am back on a team! I jolly well miss cricket but I shall make do with ‘football.’ By the way, the name itself is daft. Over here they call the real football ‘soccer,’ and the closest they come is kick-the-can. No, their football is more like rugby, although Americans wear helmets and shoulder pads to play it, Dad! For all their guff about how strong they are, they would never survive our rugger scrums.
Still, I keep that opinion to myself because Bobby is the quarterback, the player who pretty much commands the team. So many seniors left school early to join the service, he recruited me to play tight end. I run wide for passes. Blokes on the other team try to knock me to the ground and hold me there. (Mum would not like it.) But if I catch Bobby’s pass and cross the goal line, I am a hero!
Speaking of heroes…May I come home now? The Richmond Times-Dispatch writes that the Blitz has finally quieted a bit and the Yanks have better control over the Atlantic. Cargo ships leave Hampton Roads and Newport News for England almost every day. Fewer are being torpedoed. I wager a captain would take me as a junior crew member. I am ever so much taller since last you saw me—five whole inches. Do not forget, I turn fifteen this spring. I could fight incendiaries with London’s fire brigade like you do, Dad. I hate having nipped out when my chums are toughing the war at home.
I do not mean to complain. Mr and Mrs Ratcliff are very kind, and we do have a good laugh with the brothers. This weekend, we raced wheelbarrows down the farm’s lane. I put Wes in mine and Bobby put the twins in his. Ron was the flagman to start us. You will not believe what happened! The lane is shaded by walnut trees, and a black snake fell off the branches, smack-dab onto Wes! It had been lurking up there waiting for some unsuspecting squirrel. A doozy of a serpent—six feet long! Nothing like it in England except maybe Nessie. But the brothers turned it loose because it keeps mice out of the crops.
Of course, Wesley set off blubbering about it. Honestly, he does go on. Do you know he still stows Joey under his pillow? If the brothers find him with a stuffed koala bear, he will catch all manner of grief. They are good hearts, but a tough lot, farming and all, you know.
Yours, Charles
Chapter Two
“There!” Charles stuck a red thumbtack into Sicily. He took a step back from the world map he’d hung on their bedroom wall to admire his trail of pins. “Now we’re talking.”
Wesley stopped fanning himself with a Superman comic book. The brothers shared an attic room under the gabled eaves of the Ratcliffs’ green tin roof. Even though the white clapboard farmhouse was shaded by oak trees, they sweltered in warm months. That September afternoon the temperature had spiked back up to ninety, and their rotating circular fan only did so much good. But it was the only place for them in the three-bedroom house. The four American brothers were crammed together in one big bedroom on the second floor. Patsy, being the only girl, was given a small room to herself, and their parents occupied the last one.
Wesley tossed the comic book and stood to look at the map more closely. “We’re doing better now, aren’t we, Charles?”
“Quite!” Charles grinned at him. He pointed at the black-and-white photograph of Winston Churchill he’d pasted on the sloping ceiling. In it, Churchill made his famous V for Victory sign. “The Prime Minister showed us how to stand tall, all right. Remember what he said after Dunkirk, when France fell and we ended up facing Hitler all by ourselves?” Charles lowered his voice to a growl: “‘We shall not flag or fail.…’”
Wes joined him: “‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.…We shall never surrender!’”
“Well done!” Charles applauded Wesley’s recitation. He turned back to Churchill’s image. “Now that we Allies have taken Sicily and landed at Salerno, we’ve got Hitler’s Italian pals out of the fight at least. Maybe within the year, we can move up the boot of Italy and push the Nazis back over the Alps!” Jokingly, Charles saluted Churchill’s round, jowly face.
In their bedroom, Charles tended to drop the American persona he was trying so hard to perfect and be unabashedly British with Wesley. He’d hung up a Union Jack flag, models of RAF Spitfires, and photos of their parents, plus the king and prime minister. Over Charles’s bed was a picture of his school cricket team. Their father, a geography teacher, coached it.
Instinctively imitating his father’s teaching specialty, Charles had been tracking the progress of the Allied armies on his large map. He’d agonized over British defeats—retreats from Greece, Crete, and island after island in Southeast Asia. Finally, that spring, the tide had turned, starting in North Africa with the defeat of Rommel, Hitler’s “Desert Fox” tank commander.
Charles continued, more to himself than to Wesley: “If the Russians can survive Hitler’s siege of Leningrad, and if the Americans can finally invade France, and if the Allies can take all of Italy, we should be able to squeeze Nazi Germany from three sides.” He put his hands on his hips and cocked his head, looking at his maps like an army general planning a campaign. “The operating word here is if we can do all those things,” Charles muttered.
It wasn’t looking so great in Russia, for instance. The Nazis had blockaded Leningrad for more than three years. And nobody knew when the Allies would attempt a land invasion of occupied France. American and British pilots were flying near-suicide missions over Europe to bomb Nazi ammunition factories to “loosen things up” before a beach landing of ground troops could be dared. The air forces were losing planes right and left. Patsy’s sweetheart, Henry, had written that flyers averaged only fifteen missions before their planes were shot down.
It was beginning to feel like the war would go on forever, that evacuating “for the duration” meant he and Wesley might be permanently stranded in the States. He wasn’t sure he could stand that. Even though he and Bobby were good mates and he was enjoying high school, Charles was antsy to return to England and do his part. Several of his old school chums had become nighttime air raid wardens. Charles feared some of them called him a coward for evacuating to the U.S.
He reached over to the dresser he shared with Wesley to pick up his souvenir lump of shrapnel. He tossed it back and forth between his hands like a ball as he mulled things over. Back home, after air raids, he and his mates had emerged from their backyard Anderson shelters and searched for smoldering bits of flak from London’s antiaircraft cannon. Charles even had a shard of a Nazi warplane, a knife-sized piece of red metal—probably part of the Nazi Iron Cross painted on Luftwaffe planes. He’d found it down the street from his house after a horrible night of bombs and fires, a tiny remnant of one of the few Nazi raiders the London ack-ack antiaircraft guns had stopped.
For a moment his mind flew home, wondering what his street looked like now. He tried to walk it in his memory, replanting all the rosebushes that had been charred, rebricking the fences that had tumbled down, to make the lane peaceful again. Charles felt his throat tighten and shook h
is head to rid himself of the image of destruction.
“Yes, a big if,” he repeated, going back to his analysis of Allied strategy of trying to surround Hitler’s strongholds. “Unlike the Yanks, we know firsthand how big a fight the Nazis will put up, don’t we, Wes,” he murmured.
“What did you say, Charles?”
Charles turned away from the map to look at his brother, about to repeat his worries loudly enough for Wesley to hear. But he stopped himself. Wesley’s mop of blond curls and peaches-and-cream complexion gave him a typical British appearance but also emphasized how young he was, reminding Charles that as much as he needed to talk out his concerns, his younger brother wasn’t emotionally ready to hear Charles’s worries that the Allies might fail.
“Oh, nothing.” Charles put the blackened lump down. “Say, don’t you have lessons to learn?”
Wesley sighed. “Yes. I have to memorize the forty-eight states and their capitals, although it won’t be much use when I get home. I worry about not knowing my British geography.”
“I know,” said Charles. “I should have finished translating Virgil by now, and this high school doesn’t even offer Latin. Their one teacher of it is off with the navy. How the deuce does Dad expect me to win entrance to Cambridge?”
He gestured for Wesley’s homework. “Here, want me to test you?”
“Really? You don’t mind?”
“Not at all. The only reading I have is for English Literature and I’ve already studied all the books on the syllabus.”
“Smashing!” Wesley handed Charles a list he’d written out for homework. “See how far I can recite. I need to spell them correctly, too.”
“Right-o.” Charles stretched out on his bed in the stream of the fan.
“Alabama, Montgomery. A-l-a-b-a-m-a, M-o-n-t-g-o-m-e-r-y.”
Charles nodded, thinking back on the capitals he’d had to memorize at Wesley’s age—Bombay, Nairobi, Johannesburg—places that were part of the British Empire.
“Kentucky, Frankfort,” Wesley was continuing. “F-r-a-n-k-f-o-r-t.”
“F-u-r-t,” Charles interrupted.
“No, Charles, it’s not like the German city. It’s o-r-t.”
“Rubbish.”
“No, truly.”
“He’s right, Chuck,” Bobby had climbed the stairs without Charles hearing him over the rattle and whirl of the fan and was leaning against the doorway. He grinned at Wesley. “I didn’t realize you were so good at spelling, Wes. You know what? You should enter the county spelling bee. Bet dollars to doughnuts you’d win. Patsy won it when she was your age. I tried to keep up the tradition, but failed miserably!” He laughed. “And we can’t count on Ron to keep up the family tradition either. He’s my brother and I’d clobber anyone else who said this, but sometimes I think Ron was standing behind the barn door when they handed out brains—for schoolwork anyway. So, you need to enter it for us. We’d be mighty proud if you brought that trophy home again.”
“Gee, thanks, Bobby.”
Wesley beamed.
Charles had watched Bobby have that effect on countless boys, especially on the football team. Bobby had a confident friendliness and an ease with giving out compliments that, generally speaking, Brits didn’t. Charles had come to really appreciate that about some Americans. He’d also marveled at the fact Bobby didn’t seem to mind that he and Wesley occupied the attic room which Bobby could have claimed for himself as the eldest Ratcliff brother. Charles would try to replicate that kind of instinctive generosity when he got home to England.
“Came to tell you the bathroom’s yours now, Chuck,” said Bobby. “Then I need your help candling today’s eggs to check for bloodspots before crating them, okay? We’ve got a passel to deal with. The hens are in fine form.”
“Shore ’nough,” Charles answered in an exaggerated Virginia drawl as he grabbed his towel.
Laughing, Bobby and Charles bounded down the stairs together.
12 September 1943
Dearest Mummy,
How is Hamlet? Are you able to spare him a soup bone these days? I wish I could send some of our food. Nothing posh, but quite tasty. Pancakes with maple syrup are smashing!
The new school term has started. It is perfectly AWFUL. I have been skipped ahead to seventh grade because of being ‘so advanced.’ Everyone is almost two years older and so much BIGGER. The worst is Ron is in my class because he had to repeat the grade! Our teacher, Miss Darling, thinks because he brought in an old tire for salvage that Ron is some natural-born leader. She put him in charge of our class’s war efforts. It has quite gone to his head. He bullied one poor chap into stealing his mother’s girdle to bring in for our rubber collection!
Even worse is studying the American Revolution. Was King George III really such a tyrant? It is quite hard being British when the teacher goes on about the Boston ‘massacre’ and ‘lobsterbacks’ gunning down a crowd of ‘innocents.’ Now Ron has got everyone calling me ‘the Tory.’
I wish Charles were around at recess. But he has entered high school and larks about with older boys and tries to sound American. He even calls himself “Chuck.”
The heat is BEASTLY. It is hard to breathe until nighttime during American summers. But then fireflies light up in the grass. Have I told you about fireflies? They twinkle! They drift through the air to the trees and light them up in flashes through the night. We catch them and they crawl about, blinking on our fingertips. Sometimes I pretend I have caught little shooting stars.
But there are also terrifying things here too, Mummy. The other day an ENORMOUS snake fell out of a tree right on me. It tried to wrap itself around my throat, just like Kaa in The Jungle Book. If Charles had not pulled it off, I might be D-E-A-D now.
I miss you ever so much, and things like the sound of London’s church bells. Does Big Ben still chime the hour despite being scorched by the Luftwaffe? Have you got our roof built back where it shattered from old Adolf’s bombs dropping on the street?
I try not to worry, but I haven’t heard from you for FIVE WHOLE WEEKS. Your last patch of letters must have been sunk by the Jerries. Do let me know you are all right.
Your loving son,
Wesley Bishop
Chapter Three
Wesley settled back in to study until Charles got out of the shower. Then he’d try to nab the bathroom himself. He’d have to move quickly. With nine people, the one bathroom was in constant use. And on a hot, dry day, everyone wanted to spritz off. Of course, showers in general were still a treat to Wesley. Like most British homes, their ancient London row house had only a bathtub.
Wesley forced himself to stop imagining a refreshing shower. He went back to his list. “North Dakota, Bismarck.” He stopped. “Dakota” was an Indian name, just like the Chickahominy River nearby. “What an odd thing to have a state named for Indians and its capital named for a German province.” The Bismarck also happened to be the name of a notorious Nazi battleship that had shelled cargo ships crossing the Atlantic.
“Boy, if I lived in Bismarck,” Wesley muttered to himself, “I’d change that name for sure. To something like…” His eyes searched the room for an idea and landed on the day’s newspaper funnies. “Tonto!” He struck on the name of the loyal Indian guide in the comic strip and on his favorite radio program, The Lone Ranger. “Yes! Tonto!”
Bored with studying, Wesley got up and stretched. With one arm up, like the Ranger when he waved his cowboy hat in good-bye, Wesley laughed and echoed the character’s departing line as he rode away on his white horse: “Hi-ho, Silver, away!”
He shook his head. Given Hollywood movies, he’d completely expected to see cowboys and Indians everywhere when he came to the States. Wesley had been so disappointed not to meet any on the streets of Richmond, the Ratcliffs had given him toy six-shooters and a holster for his first American Christmas.
Wesley looked back over his shoulder to make sure he was alone. Then he slowly opened the drawer of the desk he and Charles used. He’d recen
tly stashed the present there, telling himself he was too old for imaginary games. Oh, but he’d had such fun pretending with those guns.
Hesitantly, fondly, he pulled them out. Enough geography for the moment, he told himself. No one’s looking. Wesley strapped on the holster. Facing the window, his back to the door, he held his hands out parallel to his six-shooters, like a sheriff in a Wild West showdown getting ready to fire at some low-down, good-for-nothing gunslinger. Wesley took a few slow steps imagining the sound of spurs jingling as he moved. He snarled, “Git out of my town, you two-bit outlaw, before I string ya up.”
He smiled ruefully and was about to take the guns off and tuck them back in the drawer, when he heard: “What a baby! You still play make-believe?”
Wesley wheeled around. Ron was at the door.
“Wait till I tell the class. They’ll laugh you out of school, straight back to that stupid little island of yours. ‘Pip-pip, cheerio, and all that rot.’”
Wesley’s fingers twitched beside his play six-shooters. For a moment, he wished they were real. Bet Ron wouldn’t pick on him then! Why was it that he could never come up with a proper retort for Ron? Charles always did.
Ron entered the room and circled him. “Cat got your tongue?” Ron glanced back at the door, clearly timing his bullying to end before Charles came back. Then he spotted Wesley’s state capital list. “You did that already?” It wasn’t due until the end of the week. He snatched it up.
“That’s mine,” Wesley protested.
“Now it’s mine.” Ron folded it and stuffed it into the chest pocket of his overalls.
“Give that back!”
“Come and get it, runt.”
Wesley knew he’d never win a wrestling match with Ron. He also knew what Ron was going to do with that paper—he’d turn it in for homework as if he’d done it himself. “That’s cheating,” he cried.
“What you gonna do? Tell the teacher?” Ron closed in on Wesley and towered over him. Ron was lean and muscular, tall for his age, like Bobby was. But his hair was darker than his sibling’s, a bloodred almost, and his face typically carried a brooding scowl that made him slightly sinister in Wesley’s eyes.
Across a War-Tossed Sea Page 2
