‘Gwenno,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t ever, ever, put one of those caps on. I did once – just the once – and, do you know what? I thought – it suddenly seemed – as if I was all covered in grey fur …’
Her head dropped on the pillow, and she was asleep.
I put the bottle back in the cupboard.
Later in the night, I was woken by a sound and put my hand out of bed, feeling for the torch. My hand met teeth. Quicker than thought, I snatched it back.
Next door in the kitchen I could hear bumps and thuds and snarls. Pulling on my corduroy pants, I ran in and switched on the light.
Tomkin was at bay, facing two big grey rats who were snarling and squeaking and making running darts at him. They had him cornered.
I grabbed the kitchen chair, swung and bashed at the rats with it; managed to stun one of them and, with the leg of the chair, poked and shoved it though the balcony door and over the edge of the balcony.
The other rat had scurried off along the passage. Going after, I saw it nip nimbly through the hole in the boarded-up door.
So I went back to Mum, who was awake and trembling.
‘Come on, Mum,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to get up. We’re not stopping here. It isn’t safe. We’ll go round to Mr Schaefer’s house. I’ve got the key to his new door.’
That was what we did, carrying Tomkin in his basket. We slept on rolled-up carpets in his library. Not for too long, though. After maybe a couple of hours, we were woken by a bang.
And what a bang! It made the noise of the buzzbombs seem like the tap of a bone spoon on a soft-boiled egg. For five minutes after, our ears buzzed and we clung to each other in total terror.
‘What was that?’ whispered Mum.
And I said, ‘It must have been that new thing you were telling about – the new thing that Hitler was going to send.’
Next day we found that I was right. It was the rocket they called the V2.
The V2s ploughed deep into the ground and did much, much more damage than the flying bombs. The things people think up! Though nothing to what they have now.
Luckily, not long after, the Allied armies fought their way to the launching pads where the V2s were sent off, and put a stop to them.
But the one we heard had landed harmlessly, in the area that was already clear, behind Percy Mansions. The authorities said that nobody had been killed.
Except some rats, perhaps.
Elsie Tarn was found next day, in the courtyard in the middle of Percy Mansions, where the dustbins were emptied. She had two broken legs and concussion. Nobody could understand how she got there. She was taken off to hospital in Stoke Newington and we lost touch with her. We heard the police had let Albert go, for lack of evidence, but after leaving the station he was never seen again.
I had my own ideas about what had happened to him.
A dirty old felt cap, found in the yard near Elsie, was thrown away.
When Mr Schaefer come home, I talked to him about it all. (I never talked to Mum. But she got better, after a while, and became almost her old self again. Specially after Dad came out of the forces.)
‘Man thinks himself so much better than the other animals,’ said Mr Schaefer, ‘in that he invented language, music and art. But in other ways he is worse, because he hoards. And he does things out of malice. Animals don’t do that.’
He quoted a bit of a poem that he had made up.
‘Lions, in pride and speed
Hunt and kill from need
Man, in shame and blame
Piles treasure out of greed.
‘When we do something of which we have cause to be ashamed, Gwenno, we revert to animals. Do you understand?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. And then, ‘Do you think Albert and Elsie turned into rats?’
‘Perhaps they always had been rats. Perhaps they came out of that deep, buried place,’ he said.
Anyway, that area has had tons of concrete poured in, and a high-rise block built on top. The new Rumbury Civic Centre.
London is a different town now.
But I reckon people are still much the same.
Eva Ibbotson
I was born in Vienna many years ago and when I was a small girl Hitler began rounding up all the people he didn’t care for – Jews and gypsies and democrats – and sending them to camps where most of them died.
My own family and close friends all escaped and made happy new lives in Britain but I had a small cousin called Marianne, aged seven, who vanished with her family and was never heard of again.
She must, I suppose, have perished along with millions of others, but I have never quite stopped wondering about her, and sometimes I’ve imagined that somehow, somewhere, she was still alive. It seemed so terrible that I, who was the same age, should find safety in my new country and that she should disappear into darkness. And because I’m a writer I have thought of many ways in which her story could after all have turned out to have a different ending.
‘A Place on the Piano’ is one such story – the events I have described did happen – mothers did save their babies by throwing them out of trains … and perhaps, who knows, my little cousin Marianne was one such child, and lived.
A PLACE ON THE PIANO
I always thought the war would end suddenly but it didn’t – it sort of dribbled away. Six months after I stood with the other boys in my class outside Buckingham Palace – yelling for the king and queen because we’d defeated Hitler – the barrage balloons still floated like great silver grandfathers over the roofs of London. The park railings were still missing, St Paul’s cathedral stood in a sea of rubble and there was nothing to be bought in the shops.
My teacher had explained it to me. ‘Wars are expensive, Michael,’ he said. ‘They have to be paid for.’
Rationing got tighter – you still had to have coupons for clothes and fuel. Worst of all was the food. You could hardly see the meat ration with the naked eye, and some very weird things were issued by the government for us to eat. Tinned snoek, for example. Snoek is a South African fish and when Cook opened the tin it turned out to be a bluish animal with terrifying spikes, swimming in a sea of gelatinous goo – and the smell was unspeakable.
‘This time they’ve gone too far,’ she said, and she tried to give it to the cat, who sneered and turned away.
I knew quite a lot about rationing because I was a sort of kitchen boy. Not that I worked in the kitchen exactly; I’d just won a scholarship to the grammar school, but I lived below stairs in the basement of a large house belonging to a family called Glossop, where my mother was the housekeeper. We’d lived there, in London, all through the war.
I remember the snoek particularly because we were just wondering what to do with it when the bell went and my mother was called upstairs.
When she came back she looked really happy and excited. ‘Little Marianne Gerstenberger has been found. She’s alive!’
It was incredible news. Marianne had been thrown out of a cattle train when she was a baby. It was her own mother who had done it. She’d been rounded up with some other Jews and she was on her way to a concentration camp when she found a weak place in one of the boards behind the latrine. She got the others to help her work on it to make a small hole. And then she bundled up the baby, and when the train stopped for a moment she managed to push her out on to the track.
We’d heard a lot about bravery during the last six years of war: soldiers in Burma stumbling on, dying of thirst; parachutists at Arnheim, and of course the Spitfire pilots who had saved us in the Blitz. But the story of Marianne caught us all.
‘To do that,’ said my mother, ‘to push your own baby out on to the track because you knew you were going to your death …’
At first my mother had tried not to speak of what had happened when Hitler went mad and tried to exterminate the Jews. But my school was the kind where they told you things, and I’d seen the newsreels. I’d seen the bodies piled up when the Allies opened up the camps, and the
skeletons which were supposed to be people. Marianne’s parents had both perished, but now, as the news came through from the Red Cross in Switzerland, it seemed that the baby had survived. She had been found by a peasant family who had taken her in and was living in East Germany, close to the border with Poland.
‘They’re going to fetch her,’ said my mother. ‘They’re going to take her in.’ And there were tears in her eyes.
‘They’ were her employers – the Glossops – who lived in the house above us and who she served. The Glossops were not Jewish, but Marianne’s mother had been married to the son of their Jewish business partners in Berlin. Glossop and Gerstenberger had been a well-known firm of exporters.
‘They’re going to adopt her,’ my mother went on. She didn’t often speak warmly about the Glossops, but I could hear the admiration in her voice.
‘She’ll live like a little princess,’ said Cook. ‘Imagine, after being brought up with peasants.’
Everyone agreed with this: the kids in my school, the people in the shops, the tradesmen who came to deliver goods to the basement. Because the Glossops, weren’t just well off, they were properly rich. Their house was the largest in the square, double-fronted – and furnished as though the war had never been. To go up the service stairs and through the green baize door into the house was like stepping into a different world.
Mrs Glossop and her mother-in-law had spent the war in a hotel in the Lake District to get away from the bombs; and her daughter, Daphne, who was ten years old, had been away at boarding school, but the house had stayed open because Mr Glossop used it when he was in town on business, which meant that the servants had to keep it ready for him whenever he wanted.
So my mother and I went upstairs most days to check the blackout curtains and make sure the shutters were closed and none of the window panes had cracked in the raids – and I knew the house as well as I knew the dark rooms in the basement where we lived, along with the cook and old Tom, the chauffeur–handyman.
I knew the dining room with its heavy button-backed chairs and the carved sideboard where they kept the napkin rings and the cruets which Tom polished every week. I knew the drawing room with its thick Turkish carpet and massive sofas – and I knew old Mrs Glossop’s boudoir on the first floor with the gilt mirrors and claw-footed tables – and the piano.
I knew the piano very well. I remember once when I was upstairs helping my mother I heard a V1 rocket cut out above me, which meant I had about half a minute before it came down and exploded – and without thinking I dived under the piano.
It was an enormous piano – a Steinway Concert Grand – but I’d never heard anybody play it. It was a piano for keeping relations on. On the dark red chenille cover which protected it were rows of Glossops in silver frames: old Glossops and young ones, Glossops on their horses and Glossops in their university gowns. There were Glossop children in their school uniforms or holding cricket bats, and there were Glossop women in their presentation dresses ready to go to court. There was even a Glossop who had been knighted, and as I lay there, waiting for the bomb to fall, I wasn’t in the least bit scared – I didn’t feel anyone would dare to destroy a whole army of Glossops, and I was right. The rocket came down three streets away.
And now Marianne Gerstenberger, who was just seven years old, would have her own place on the piano, and be a Glossop too.
The preparations for Marianne began straight away, and we all threw ourselves into the work. It may sound silly, but I think it was then that we realized that the war was well and truly over, and that good things were happening in the world.
‘We’ll put her in the room next to Daphne’s,’ said Mrs Glossop – and she gave my mother a list of all the things that needed to be done. New curtains of pale blue satin to be sewn, and the bed canopied with the same material. A white fur rug on the floor, the walls repapered with a design of forget-me-nots and rosebuds, and a new dressing table to be lined with a matching pattern. Furniture was difficult to get – you had to have coupons for almost everything – but when you own three department stores the rules don’t really apply. The Glossops had always had everything they wanted, and that included food. Parcels from America had come all through the war and they were coming still.
‘She can have my dolls – I don’t play with them any more,’ said Daphne, but Mrs Glossop ordered a whole batch of new dolls and fluffy toys and games from the store.
‘Of course she’ll be a little savage,’ said old Mrs Glossop. ‘We must be patient with her.’
She sent my mother out to get one of the napkin rings engraved with Marianne’s name and I imagined the little girl sitting in the big solemn dining room with all the Glossop ancestors looking down from the wall, carefully rolling up her damask napkin after every meal.
Actually, I knew exactly the sort of life Marianne was going to lead, because of Daphne.
Daphne didn’t speak to me much; she was not the sort of girl who spoke to servants. A year earlier I’d pulled off an Alsatian who was holding her at bay as she played in the gardens of the square, and got quite badly bitten, and while my hands were bandaged she was positively friendly, but it didn’t last.
Mostly Daphne was away at boarding school, but when she was at home she led a very busy life. On Saturday morning she put on her jodhpurs and Tom drove her to the park where she went riding – trotting down the sanded paths and greeting other children on well-groomed ponies. On Monday afternoon, she carried her dancing shoes in a velvet bag to Miss Bigelow’s Academy and learned ballet, and on Thursdays she did elocution with a lady called Madame Farnari.
Marianne would do all this – but not for long, because as soon as she had her eighth birthday she would be taken to a school outfitter to buy a brown velour hat and a brown gymslip and a hockey stick and go off with Daphne to St Hilda’s, where the school motto was ‘Play straight and play the game’.
‘When you think what that school costs, and the kind of children who go there – all those honourables and what have you – it’ll be a wonderful thing for the little thing,’ said old Tom, the chauffeur. ‘Mind you, she’ll have a lot to learn.’
As it turned out, we had several months to get ready for Marianne, because even the Glossops didn’t find it easy to get the passports and permits and papers that were needed to bring Marianne to Britain. Things were made more difficult because the village where Marianne now lived was in the part of Germany that was occupied by the Russians and they were very strict about who could come into their zone and who could not.
But at last a permit came through, allowing two people to travel to Orthausen and pick up the little girl. The permit was for a particular week in July and now my mother was sent for again. What’s more, she was asked to sit down, which was unusual.
‘It’s so awkward, such a nuisance,’ said Mrs Glossop to my mother. ‘But the permit covers the day of the royal garden party and I’ve been asked to attend. I simply couldn’t miss that – and two days later it’s Daphne’s prize-giving at St Hilda’s and of course I must go down for that.’
My mother waited, wondering why she had been summoned.
‘My husband would go and fetch the little girl, but he has the annual meeting of the cricket club and then a very important Rotary dinner in Aberdeen at which he’s been asked to speak.’ She bent forward and fixed my mother with a stern eye. ‘So I want you to fetch Marianne. It’s so convenient because you speak German.’
This was true. My mother had been studying modern languages at university when my father had married and deserted her, all in three months.
But my mother said she couldn’t leave me. This was nonsense, of course, but she said it very firmly. I think she felt that the Glossops should go themselves to fetch their new daughter – or perhaps she was nervous. Since my father betrayed her, she had looked for a quiet life – a life where the two of us would be safe.
‘Well, the permit is for two people. I don’t see why Michael shouldn’t go with you; we don’t have
to say that he’s only twelve years old.’
So it was my mother and I who went to fetch Marianne Gerstenberger, but before we left we were given some very important instructions.
‘Marianne has a birthmark on her arm,’ said Mrs Glossop. ‘Her mother wrote to us about it when she was born. It’s on her right arm and it runs from her shoulder to her elbow – and you must make absolutely sure that she does have that mark and in the right place. It’s one thing to adopt the daughter of one’s husband’s partner and another to take in any stray that wants a comfortable home.’ And she told us that though Marianne’s name had been pinned to her blanket, it was possible that in those frightful times the baby’s things had been stolen and given to some other child.
‘We will make sure,’ promised my mother – and two weeks later we set off.
It was quite a journey. Ordinary people hadn’t been allowed to travel all through the war and of course I was excited, crossing the Channel, getting a train to go through the Netherlands and Germany.
Or rather, five trains. Most of the rolling stock had been destroyed in Allied bombing raids. We stopped and started and were pushed out on to the platform and back in again. There was no food to be had on the train, or water, and I couldn’t help wondering if it was because she knew how uncomfortable the journey was going to be that Mrs Glossop had decided to send my mother instead. We went through towns that were nothing but heaps of rubble and countryside with burnt and empty fields. It was odd to think that it was we who had caused all this destruction. I’d thought of bombing as something that the Germans did.
We spent the night in a cold and gloomy little hotel on the Belgian border, and the next day we travelled east through Germany.
I asked my mother if this was the route that Marianne’s mother would have travelled on her last journey but she didn’t know.
We were going through farmland now: fields and copses and little villages. The houses looked poor and small but there were a few animals: cows and sheep. The peasants were struggling to get back to a normal life.
War Stories Page 18
