by Moya Simons
Greta didn’t answer, but from the bleakness of her expression I understood that some questions are better not asked.
The children at the local school were kind to us in front of the teachers. After all, they had listened at assembly on our first day at school about the ‘poor Jewish refugee children, who have surely gone through unbelievable horrors before coming to our fine country’.
Well, I totally hated forced kindness. So I was grateful when I was shoved in the corridor, or someone pulled a face at me. I didn’t want to be a ‘poor refugee’. My belly was full. I didn’t need their charity. Besides, England still had its own food shortages. Everyone got coupons to buy food in short supply like butter and eggs. So if I was shoved, I shoved back. If someone pulled a face at me I pulled one back. If someone imitated my funny German accent I grinned. I wanted to be the same as all the other children.
Timothy, one of a pair of freckle-faced, red-haired twins, deliberately tripped me up in the school yard. He tripped everyone up, and he’d treated me just like another school-mate. I tripped him back, and before you could say ‘Bomb Hitler’ we were racing around the playground, squealing insults at each other.
‘Stupid German refugee,’ he yelled.
‘Dumb English pig,’ I yelled back.
Our teacher, Miss Wetherby, caught up with us. ‘Timothy, stop right there.’ She grabbed him by his collar. ‘You must not be unkind to Rachel.’
‘But I called him a dumb English pig, Miss,’ I interrupted. ‘I’m to blame too.’
The teacher looked confused. Meantime, Timothy’s twin, Tony, came rushing over. The two stood side by side, looking identically confused. They did some quick movements, scrambling themselves between the teacher and me, and then stood side by side again.
‘I don’t know which one insulted me,’ I told Miss Wetherby.
‘Own up.’ Miss Wetherby frowned at them. ‘Which one of you called Rachel a name?’
‘Him.’ The twins pointed at each other.
‘It’s all right, Miss. I don’t mind being called names. It makes me feel like everyone else,’ I told her.
Miss Wetherby’s glasses slipped down the bridge of her nose. ‘You like being insulted, Rachel?’
‘I don’t mind at all. As long as I can insult someone back.’
Miss Wetherby stared at the identical twins who stared identically back at her, then she looked at me and at our three grinning faces.
‘All of you, stop insulting each other at once,’ she said in a firm voice. She didn’t look angry, just thoroughly confused. ‘Rachel, your ribbon’s undone.’ She shook her head and walked away.
After that I played with the twins all the time and I was even invited back to their house to meet their parents. Parents? A mother and a father?
I wore a red dress with three striped bows down the front to go out to dinner. I wore my long hair in two bunches, my best dark shoes and white socks. I’d been thinking about the way I looked, and longed to dress more like the young adult I was becoming. A flared skirt maybe, my hair pulled back in a ponytail, like I’d seen on American movies in the small cinema in the village.
The whole family came in their dark Ford car to pick me up from Hartfield House. I waited out the front with Martha. ‘Have a nice time,’ she said to me, and she leaned over and kissed me goodbye.
The twins’ home was a small two-storey detached house with a slate roof and a hedge for a fence. It had a verandah and a stained-glass panel in the front door. There were rows of flowers in the garden, and the earth around them was dark and rich.
I walked awkwardly behind their parents into the hallway, then watched, also uncomfortably, how the family acted with one another. The mother put on a frilly apron and went to the kitchen to prepare dinner. The father put his coat on a coat rack. He said, ‘Come right through, love,’ to me, and his dark eyes were warm and friendly.
This was a father. Not Papa, but a father. He watched his sons play football at the weekend and gather tadpoles from the pond. On Sunday, he, his wife and their children went to the local church. The twins’ mother helped out at the school. She had shoulder-length hair curled at the ends, and sang songs to herself. There was a family dog, a collie called Winston, and a black and white cat called Clementine. There were window boxes with geraniums and lavender and rose bushes in the back garden.
The family chatted happily to one another as they ate meatballs and mash.
‘Sorry the servings are small, love. Let’s hope they stop the food rationing soon. We’re not badly off, though. We’ve got a nice little vegetable garden going.’ The twins’ mother smiled. ‘Now, when I was a girl we’d have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding when guests came over. One day we’ll have it again too.’
I remembered twisted turnips and shrivelled potatoes, thin soup and crusts of bread, hollow eyes and bony arms.
‘This is wonderful,’ I said.
‘How are you finding England?’ the father asked me.
‘The twins told me the Red Cross is looking for your family,’ said the mother.
‘Tell us about Hartfield House. Do you sleep in bunk beds? Does anyone snore?’ one of the twins said.
I answered all their questions easily. I loved England, and yes, the Red Cross was looking for my family. Nobody watching would have seen me squirm or noticed the relief I felt when I was asked about the problem of snoring children in the dormitory. It was good to be able to talk about something trivial like burying my head underneath my pillow to block out the sound of snoring.
Often we children from Hartfield House walked into the local village. We cut through a lane and ate sweet blackberries growing wild in tangled bushes, and arrived at Hartfield with blackberry faces and blackberry tongues.
‘Here come the blackberry children,’ the lady at the cake shop called out as we passed by. She handed out scones to us with jam and cream. All the village people were kind. The locals didn’t care about our religion, our customs or our stories. We were just children—refugees from the great war in Europe. Often complete strangers stopped us and asked, ‘And how are we today?’ Sometimes their English confused us. ‘How are you kids doin’?’ the postman asked, laughing as we passed him on his rounds of the village. What did that mean? Doing what? When we didn’t understand what a word meant, we would just smile. I had found that a smile speaks all languages.
At weekends at Hartfield we had visitors. People came out to see us, to speak with us in the beautiful grounds and sometimes to take us on outings. Slowly, in this way, children were adopted, and left Hartfield forever.
The first to go was the baby of our group, Sarah. A couple spent a few hours with her one Sunday and she sat on the woman’s lap, chewing her jumper. We waved Sarah goodbye a week later.
Occasionally families took me outside into the grounds for picnics. I sat on the sloping grass with them, with their children if they had any, and answered questions in halting but good English. I didn’t like it. I felt like I was up for sale. I didn’t want to be anyone’s new child. I had a family already. Still, I wanted to be wanted. Sometimes the families asked to see me again; sometimes they didn’t. When they didn’t want to see me again, I fretted and wondered what I’d done wrong.
I spoke to Martha about my feelings.
‘It’s like when you go shopping. You don’t buy everything in the shop. They need to make sure that whichever child they choose will fit in best with their family.’
Martha had not meant it but her words were very disturbing, for they implied that if families did not want me, it was because I was not coiled bread highly desirable for the Sabbath. That I was not strawberry jam on toast. I was something lesser. Shrivelled vegetables sold to Jews in the war.
Greta had no luck at all finding new parents. Maybe prospective parents were put off by her royal connections. Her so-called aunt and uncle never turned up, although I would have been astonished if they had.
‘They are so, so busy,’ Greta said one Sunday, kicking at a cl
ump of dried earth as we walked in the garden. ‘He is an engineer, currently designing a bridge in Africa. She has seven children under the age of five to care for. They’ll come soon.’
Greta found a loose stone and kicked it with great force, so that it soared like a rocket across the meadow.
‘The husband and wife who took me out on Sunday really wanted a cute little girl. They babied me a lot. I’m almost thirteen. I didn’t give them the answers they wanted to hear.’
‘Your aunt and uncle aren’t real, are they, Greta?’ I said to her, and I tucked her arm in mine. ‘It’s all right. Really.’
Greta fiddled with the buttons on her cardigan. ‘I don’t understand you at all, Rachel. Of course they are real. They are as real as the bombs that dropped, and people being put in gas chambers to die, and children with empty stomachs. My aunt and uncle are real.’
Chapter Twenty-one
THERE WAS EXCITEMENT at Hartfield House. A sackful of letters had arrived. Many were from the Red Cross, that had been searching for our families. I couldn’t believe that all this had taken so much time, but Martha explained there were millions of displaced people and not just children. Husbands were looking for wives and wives were looking for parents. The list went on and on.
The letters from the Red Cross were read first by Martha and her assistants. ‘A lot of you don’t speak your own language anymore,’ she explained, ‘and I need Peter to translate the letters for us.’
It seemed strange that so many of us had forgotten our first language. I was to discover much later that this was not so unusual. Some of us associated the war and our countries of birth with the most horrible of memories and had ‘chosen’ to forget. This was particularly true of the younger children, who having had a much smaller vocabulary had replaced it with English and no longer remembered their native language.
I remembered German. Greta had chosen to forget it. Martha and Peter occasionally spoke German to new arrivals at Hartfield, and I listened in, but I did not speak it anymore. It was part of a past I needed to forget.
Hartfield House was so large that Martha had her own office. In it were cabinets filled with files on each child and their last known address. The office was panelled with dark wood, and on the walls were old paintings of rural England, small houses and large fields, grain being collected, peasants stacking hay. One by one, we were called into the office. Martha sat behind the large oak desk and Peter sat to one side.
Jacques went in first. He came out smiling. ‘Well, that was nothing new. I shall move in with my aunt and uncle next week. No-one else has claimed me so I can be adopted.’ He pushed his dark hair away from his eyes.
‘And your parents, do you know what happened to them?’ I asked. He became deaf again and walked right by me.
Other children were told of relatives who had finally been located in places as far away as South Africa and Australia. These children came away from Martha’s office with looks of wonder on their faces. Some children, however, left the office crying.
‘I’m scared,’ Eva told me as her name was called out. A few minutes later she emerged from the room jumping with excitement. ‘They’ve found my brother. He is twelve years older than me and he is living in America. Not far from Hollywood. I will be leaving to stay with him. My parents are gone. I’ll miss them forever, but at least I have my brother. A real brother.’
Greta was called in. She was gone for quite a time. When she came out her face was unreadable. She shrugged. ‘Nothing, no-one. I am lost, but any time now my aunt and uncle will be here and they’ll take me home with them. Though how they are going to manage with me and all their own children I don’t know.’ She yawned into the air, and broke into a small run. ‘I’m going outside.’
Finally, it was my turn. Trembling, I walked inside the office. ‘Sit down, Rachel,’ said Martha, closing the door behind me. ‘We have two letters for you, from Germany. This one is from someone called Freddy and his grandmother, Gertrude. I believe his family helped you when you were in hiding?’
Freddy. Freddy had written. Dear Gertrude too. ‘I knew they’d write. I knew they would,’ I said. Then I shook my head, for I had to ask the question that was haunting me. ‘My family?’
Martha’s face was unusually serious. ‘Rachel, my dear child, you know that many people died. Many innocent people. How wonderful that you were hidden. It’s good to know that people risked their lives to save you.’ Martha put on her glasses. As she leaned over the second letter in front of her, they slid precariously to the tip of her nose. She bit her lower lip then said, ‘I shall read to you what we’ve been able to discover through the Red Cross.’
Peter sat next to me. I knew, just looking at his face. I knew. Martha opened a neatly folded letter. I could see a crest on it. An official letter.
I don’t want to hear this. Don’t tell me. No. No.
‘It says, my dear Rachel, that your mama died in 1944 in a concentration camp; that your papa and sister have not been located but are presumed dead also. Also gone are your aunt and uncle and cousin Erich. Agnes is also presumed dead, although her name does not come up on the list for deaths in concentration camps.’
Hope, my small but all-important companion, had abandoned me. I had nothing left. ‘So, it is just me? I am the only one left?’
‘You are the only one we can be sure is alive, Rachel. Oh my dear, I am so sorry.’
‘Would you like me to read Freddy’s letter?’ Peter asked gently.
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to hear Freddy’s letter. You have made a mistake about my family. I can see them all so clearly in my mind. They can’t be gone.’
I stumbled out of the room. I ran to the dormitory, buried my head in my pillow and cried into the world’s longest scarf. Miri’s journal fell from the scarf. I picked it up from the floor and read the words on the open pages:
One day I shall fly
I shall soar
Above the roar
Of guns and death
There is a place
And I’ll find it
Oh, Miri, I thought. Among all your sorrows you still had hope.
I fell asleep with the open journal across my stomach and the scarf under my head and didn’t wake until lunchtime when the noise of the other children in the dormitory startled me. Greta shook me.
‘Try to buck up. That means “cheer up”. My English is growing every day. Martha told me about your family. I know it’s a shock, but we have each other. You are my sister. I am yours.’
I sat up, cradling the journal, pushing Greta’s arm away.
‘Stop it, Greta. How can you understand? Anyway, what with the royal family and your aunt and uncle, you have nothing to worry about.’
‘You stop it, Rachel. Look at you. Do you know how lucky you are to hold your mother’s scarf and see those beautiful lines of knitting that she did with her own fingers? To read your sister’s words as if she was sitting beside you? Those are memories you can touch and hold. I can’t do that. I make memories. So what’s wrong with that?’There was a crack in her voice.
‘Nothing, nothing, Greta. I’m sorry.’
‘I have a wardrobe too, you know. Like the one you told me about. It’s in the woods, past the boundary fence of Hartfield, near the edge of the stream. There’s a big oak tree. It must be hundreds, no, maybe thousands of years old. I bet if it could talk it could tell a tale or two. There is a hollow in its trunk, just big enough for me to fit. That’s my wardrobe. My safe place.’
I nodded, hardly taking in anything she said.
‘I worked out where you are on the world’s longest scarf. You were the youngest in the family, so your mama chose this pink strip just here.’ Greta held up the scarf, pointing to about fifteen rows of pink knitting, between large sections of red and blue. ‘See, that’s you, Rachel. You with your pink bows. The little one in the family.’
I looked at it, astonished. I’d thought that maybe Mama had just run out of pink wool, for it w
as the smallest stripe on the scarf, but when I looked at that fine knitting I changed my mind. No, there I was, Mama’s skinny little one, fifteen rows in the world’s longest scarf.
I slunk unwillingly off my bed, put the scarf and journal under my pillow, and went with Greta to the dining room. I wasn’t hungry, but Greta linked arms with me and repeated, ‘We are each other’s family now.’
‘AND SO YOU have no…’
‘…parents?’ finished Timothy.
Both twins’ faces were flushed under their thousands of freckles.
‘Here, catch this.’ Tony threw a ball to me. I tossed it back with a punch to it. ‘So, is it true…about your family?’
‘Yes, it looks like my whole family’s gone.’
I tripped. The lightness of my words shocked me. How could I say this so casually when my heart was breaking?
‘Clumsy, Rachel.’ Timothy bent down and pulled me upright. I rubbed a scraped knee. The school bell went and we filed up in class lines.
I couldn’t tell Tony and Timothy how I really felt. I couldn’t tell anyone.
Greta caught up with me on our way to class. ‘Eva leaves for America and Hollywood tomorrow. What a dream. She will meet famous movie stars, even Clark Gable, I’m sure, and tell them about us and maybe they will adopt us. Wouldn’t it be something if we could both be adopted by the same movie star?’
‘What about your aunt and uncle?’
‘It seems that they are so busy, so tied up with all their children. You can imagine how heartbroken they are that they can’t take me in, but I accept it.’ She shrugged and her eyes were unreadable. ‘We would have a swimming pool, servants, and might even get a role in the movies if we went to Hollywood. What do you think, Rachel?’
‘I think you should write books about great adventures, but in the meantime be careful. You don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.’
Greta looked at me from the corner of her eye. ‘I know the difference. I have always known the difference.’ She walked ahead to the classroom, then turned suddenly, her face distorted by a scowl. ‘You know what’s real. Can you tell me that you prefer real life? Haven’t you ever preferred your dreams?’
