by Moya Simons
I nodded. Although I loved the way Greta talked with such enthusiasm, I wondered about her. We were the same age, yet Greta seemed much younger than me. Would the endless chatter drive me crazy in time?
Still, it had advantages and took my mind off other things. Memories of my family constantly flooded my thoughts. Where were they? Were they alive? They had to be. How could I carry on without them? The Red Cross would find them, but Europe was filled with lost people now.
I carefully folded the world’s longest scarf and put it under my pillow. I thumbed through Miri’s journal, deciding that the time had come for me to put it aside. I’d try hard to get on with my life here, to make the most of things, and sometime in the future, I’d give the journal back to her.
Memories of
white clouds
and bright sunlight
bouquets of flowers
remind me
the world can still be beautiful.
THE NEXT DAY we explored the grounds of Hartfield House with Martha and Peter. There were carefully manicured garden beds with deep red and pink roses and grass so evenly lush that it didn’t look real. We ran around the gardens and to the fringe of the woods nearby. I saw a rabbit behind a tree and tried to catch it. It twitched its nose and hopped away.
A dog suddenly barked. Children who had been laughing ran, some screaming, to the house. ‘It’s all right,’ Martha called out. Some of us knew that dogs sniffed out Jewish families from hiding places, that they were set upon Jews. It would be a long time before any of us could approach dogs, let alone pat them. I knew that I’d been lucky. Dogs did not frighten me. Just soldiers.
We never saw the dog again. Martha told us later that it had been taken away. She explained patiently that not all dogs were vicious, and that one day she would bring a puppy to Hartfield House for us to play with. Some children flinched and turned away. Martha bit her lip and talked about something else.
‘FROM TOMORROW WE shall be learning and talking only English,’ Peter told us one bright blue day when we’d been at Hartfield about four days.
This was good news for the others, but not for me. I couldn’t talk. Still, I could learn. I would understand English in no time, but I wouldn’t be able to practise my speech. I really wanted to talk again, and in my mind I begged Papa to let me speak.
I really need my voice now, Papa.
Martha put an arm around me while the other children talked to each other or made signs to be understood and giggled together. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said in German. ‘Your voice will come back. I’m taking you to see a top doctor. Be hopeful.’
‘THERE’S ABSOLUTELY NOTHING wrong with her vocal cords.’
‘So, what is it? Why can’t Rachel talk?’
I was sitting on a chair in a doctor’s office. Martha sat nearby while my throat was prodded and probed.
I listened carefully as they talked away in English. I’d been having English lessons for four weeks. It wasn’t a long time, but it had become the common language for all of us. Because of this, we learned quickly. Already I could understand some of what the doctor and Martha said, and guess enough of the rest for it to make sense.
‘You know, Doctor, I spoke to her in German last night and she was slow to react.’
‘She’s not the only child at Hartfield who wants to forget their old language. Does she ever cry? Laugh? Make sounds? Scream?’
‘I’ve heard her scream in her sleep,’ Martha said, her voice lowering to a whisper.
‘What do you dream then, Rachel?’ the doctor asked. He didn’t expect a reply so he didn’t wait for one.
I dream of Mama and Papa and Miri, my cousins, my aunt and uncle, I wanted to tell him. I dream of Gertrude and Freddy and I wonder if they are all right.
The doctor leaned back in his chair, tapped his pen on the desk and studied the wall opposite as he concentrated. ‘I have another child refugee patient. He can’t hear, though there’s nothing wrong with his ears. You know him: that boy named Jacques. I think the sound of bombs around him in France frightened him so much he just stopped hearing.’
‘What are you saying, Doctor?’
‘I’m suggesting that the children spend time together. They might open up to each other, having been through similar experiences.’
‘You think they can help each other? How can a mute girl and a deaf boy help each other? Still, we have to try something, anything, if these children are to be healed.’
Chapter Nineteen
JACQUES WAS SEVEN years old. He had an aunt and uncle in England who wanted to adopt him. They came to visit him on weekends at Hartfield. I saw them in the garden together. Lucky Jacques. He would leave Hartfield soon to be with a real family.
He had lived in cellars and once in a dirt hole in a farmer’s paddock. People here and there took pity, so he survived. This is what Greta told me. Greta knew everything about everyone, but I wondered what was true and what wasn’t. She fibbed so much that I didn’t know what to believe, and she never talked about her own real past life.
Jacques was the boy who threw up on the plane as we flew to England. He cried on the bus going to Hartfield. He had a thin face and didn’t smile. His dark hair fell over his eyes, and he didn’t push it aside. It seemed he didn’t see much in addition to not hearing. Was that the way he liked it? I wanted to talk so much and I couldn’t.
I sat opposite Jacques at the Sabbath service on Friday nights, and at meal times. Greta sat beside me. The table was very long and old, maybe hundreds of years old. The food was really good, lots of fresh vegetables and sometimes meat pie, which I loved.
These Friday nights were hard for me. I tried to blank out from my mind pictures of invisible wine, the throwing of coiled bread across the table, Mama saying prayers over the candles. It was so painful. I was not the only one who suffered on Friday nights. The Hungarian girls cried, haunted by memories too.
Martha had deliberately sat Jacques near me. He couldn’t hear and I couldn’t speak. I stared at him, but he didn’t look back. Were we so much alike? How could one mute girl and one deaf boy help each other?
If food was rationed at Hartfield, we didn’t notice it, because it was so much more than we’d had in our homelands. Jacques ate as much as he could then stuffed any leftovers into his pockets.
‘Don’t do that, Jacques,’ Martha told him kindly. ‘England is on rations—you know what they are, food shortages because of the war. You must eat everything right away and not save food for later.’
She wagged her finger at him and he began to cry. He had to do it. He had to put some away. There might not be any later. He’d been this way since the Red Cross had found him.
I wanted the eating and the service to end quickly. I could hardly wait until the prayers were said, the last bit of food eaten, so I could go to the living room and watch the children play board-games, or just read my way through simple English books then go to bed.
After weeks of pleading, Martha stopped asking Jacques not to stuff his pockets with food. About the same time, he suddenly stopped doing it all by himself. The bread he’d been storing under his pillow turned mouldy and began to stink and the strawberry jam was covered with ants. Greta told him off. ‘Stop it. You have no more room in your stomach for food. And your bed stinks.’
If Jacques heard her, he didn’t show it. He looked at her carefully from under his thick fringe and seemed to finally accept that there was always more food coming.
Greta spoke only in English, even to me. ‘I want to forget German,’ she said.
The Hartfield boys played marbles on the smooth dormitory floor and football on the lawn. We girls played marbles too, but were considered too dainty to play football! We played hopscotch on the driveway and hide-and-seek in the woods surrounding Hartfield, had skipping competitions and read books about trees that had magic lands on the top of clouds. It was wonderful. We were children again.
One day Martha suggested that Jacques and I go for a walk together
in the garden. We were such a silent pair that even our shoes on the grass were soundless. Birds hopped near us unaware we were there. I sat on the garden swing remembering my time in the Red Cross home and the girl’s face at the hospital window.
After a lot of hesitation, Jacques came over to me on the swing and limply pushed me. Silly boy, I thought. I can do this myself. I am not a child anymore.
I swung my legs up and down and Jacques moved back quickly. Up and down I went, climbing higher and higher. The blue sky bobbed, or was it me? Jacques, who said so little because, it seemed, he couldn’t hear speech made squealing sounds at me. Isolated words streamed out of him, strung together with gaps like those between trees and rose bushes and open sky.
‘Too high,’ he wailed. In English too, so he had to be hearing something.
His voice sounded shrill, as if it had been cut into a thousand tiny pieces. There was no longer a reason for him not to hear as there was no longer a reason for me not to talk. Someone must have told him, ‘Close your ears, Jacques.’
I slowed down and studied his frightened face as he pulled me roughly off the swing.
One Sunday a box of toys arrived at Hartfield. A Jewish welfare society had sent it to us all the way from London.
Toys! We were children again and crazy with excitement. Our ages were not important. So many of us had missed out on childhood that we grabbed the toys, without asking, from the large box in the hall near the front doors. Martha told us sternly, ‘Put those back right away. Now, one at a time. In order of age. We shall start with the youngest. Do not choose anything that you may not want tomorrow.’
The youngest, three-year-old Sarah, grabbed a furry giraffe with a long tongue. Jacques, when it was his turn, pointed to a soft fluffy bear. He held it in his arms, and rocked his body to and fro. Then he raced out of the hallway.
Martha casually picked up a fire engine and her hand accidentally pressed a knob. The alarm was the same kind of siren that made us run for bomb shelters. Children screamed and hid behind drapes or simply ran away. ‘Sorry, children,’ Martha said, stumbling nervously over her words as she turned the alarm off. ‘Come back and let’s all look at the other toys. We’ll return this one.’
As she bent to put the fire engine back in the box, I reached over and took it from her.
‘You want this, Rachel? But why? Apart from the noise, aren’t you too old for this?’
I gripped it tightly. I had an idea.
‘Rachel, if you want to keep it, we shall have to take off the alarm. I can’t have you frightening the other children.’
I nodded.
‘Why did you take that fire engine, Rachel?’ Greta asked later. She had chosen a sparkly bracelet and necklace. ‘A rich lady in London heard of my predicament and sent these just for me. See how they shine.’ She’d been lucky to get the bracelet and necklace as older girls had their eyes on them, and her lie was obvious but she didn’t care.
At dinner, Jacques and I regarded each other solemnly across the table. Greta talked to one of the Hungarian girls after dinner. Soon they were playing cards together. I took Jacques’ arm and led him to the dormitory. Silently, I showed Jacques my fire truck. He showed his fluffy toy, though he stared a lot at the fire engine.
I wound up the fire truck. It raced across the floor. Jacques sat cross-legged, fascinated.
Deliberately, I leaned forward and pressed the knob. The siren blared. It wasn’t a fire engine siren though, it was a thousand people scurrying in all directions, women carrying babies across broken roads, the falling of buildings. Jacques put his hands over both ears, screaming.
What do you see, Jacques? I silently asked him. The march of Nazis? The tanks? What do you hear? The bombs falling? The thud of boots? The hail of bullets?
His voice, muffled, said, ‘Stop. Stop.’ I didn’t though. Forgive me, Jacques. I waited to see what he would do. He ran up and down the room and between the beds screaming: ‘Stop.’ Finally, he lunged at me, punching me in my cheek, then pulled the fire engine away. He threw it with great force against the wall. It broke and with that the sound of sirens stopped.
Ouch. My cheek hurt. It didn’t matter. I pointed to his ears. Hah! You can hear.
Jacques saw my smile of victory and raised his fists. Then his face cleared. He touched his ears, running his fingers along them as if he didn’t quite know what they were. He sat beside me on the floor.
He breathed deeply in and out, in and out, and for the first time since I’d met him, pushed his hair away from his face and grinned.
‘You trick,’ he said slowly in English. He pointed to my mouth. ‘So, speak.’
Can I do this? Jacques did. Papa, is it all right? Papa, tell me to speak.
I cleared my throat and coughed a weak cough. There was a lot to clear. It was as if a huge cobweb had gathered there.
I pushed against the threads, gossamer-fine, diamond-strong. My voice was a single strand.
‘Papa.’
Chapter Twenty
WE BEGAN SCHOOL in the local village. I tied a thin navy ribbon around my long dark hair and smiled at myself in the dormitory mirror. My face had filled out. My cheeks were flushed, and my hair, which had been brittle and thin, was thick and shiny again.
I thought I even looked a little pretty. What would Freddy think of me if he could see me now? I missed him. I missed Gertrude too. They said they would write, but mail was so slow coming through from Europe.
The Red Cross was looking for Mama and Papa and Miri, for all my family. Soon, I’d know what had happened to them. That made me shiver. I hoped so much they were all right. Sometimes I envied Greta and the make-believe world she lived in. It was so like the world that I had created in my parents’ wardrobe, so easy to understand, though the other children made fun of her.
When we’d all spoken different languages it hadn’t been so obvious, but now it was.
Every child at Hartfield carried emotional scars but no-one spoke as much as Greta, and even though Martha had told her, ‘Greta, you know this is nonsense, just settle down and get on with your new life,’ Greta stayed in her little castle with her make-believe famous friends, all of them wanting to visit her but none having time right now.
The school was an old stone building that dated back to the seventeenth century. There was an ancient school bell in the middle of the school yard attached to a rope that was wound around a loop on the pole. Old vines trailed around the stonework, and the classrooms had high ceilings, small windows and double desks.
Welcomed by the teachers and students at school assembly, we were put in different classes according to our ages and ability. All of us were behind in school work.
Jacques was put in second grade. His hearing was so good now, he said he could hear the lions roaring in London Zoo. I was put into sixth grade together with Greta and a French boy, Pierre, and a Hungarian girl, Eva. We were all twelve or thirteen years old, about a year older than the other children in sixth class. We were taken in groups to our different classrooms and shown to our desks. I shared a double desk with Greta. We shared an inkwell for our pens. English eyes watched us.
The neat English children, who had families, who were dressed in their navy-blue pleated school uniforms, looked us up and down. The boys wore navy-blue trousers and V-necked navy jumpers with white shirt collars. They had teasing faces. The girls appeared more curious. All the English children looked relaxed. They’d had proper childhoods. They’d climbed trees, and picked blackberries and run free. We must have seemed a weird bunch to them.
However, some of these children, I’d been told, had lost their fathers in the war. They’d suffered too, but they were still protected by the rest of the villagers who were like family to them. We refugee children had come from different countries, had lost our families and had memories we couldn’t share even with each other.
As we sat down at our desks, some of the English children sent notes to their friends, or buried their heads in their school book
s and giggled. Pierre looked around the class. Something about the tension made him smile. He began to jiggle his shoulders, then laughed outright. The boy sitting next to him found Pierre’s sudden laughter and his jiggling shoulders hilarious, and he joined in. Then he hiccupped. A very recognisable squelching noise had everyone saying, ‘It wasn’t me.’
The air was sniffed and everyone in the class roared with laughter. The teacher banged her ruler on her desk, then her slight smile gave way to hearty laughter as well.
Another teacher opened the door to the classroom, saw the collapse of school manners and appeared startled. Then she must have realised that laughter is such a happy gift, the very best we can share. Smiling warmly she closed the door again.
Happy tears fell down my cheeks. A burning thought consumed me, however, behind the giggles: I want to learn. I want to be smart. I want to forget.
So I began to make up for lost time. My voice, still scratchy and thin from under-use, now formed English words, not German. Communicating with the other children at school and learning the lessons was my first priority. I needed to speak English well, and quickly.
So I studied and learned. I loved school. Greta also picked up English amazingly quickly. ‘Of course, I ’ave an English background,’ she told me seriously. ‘My grandmother was British. Not ’alf. Through and through,’ she said in her broadest London cockney. She’d been listening to the wireless broadcasts and to a serial with London East Enders in it, with strong cockney accents.
‘I’ll be going up the apple and pears,’ she said to me one day after school. ‘The stairs, silly,’ she whispered when I looked at her questioningly. ‘I love cockney-speak. It’s poetry to me.’
‘Do you remember German, Greta? We don’t even speak it between ourselves.’
‘German? What’s that, luv?’
‘Have you truly forgotten it, or are you just pretending?’
