Pennies For Hitler (11 page)

There was no school of course. Georg made his bed, then washed up and swept the kitchen floor. The maid had left the flats to work in a munitions factory, so he and Aunt Miriam had to clean their home themselves now. The flat was starting to look grubby.

Neither Aunt Miriam nor Georg had ever scrubbed a floor before. They’d worked out how to set a fire, though it left them coal-stained and red-faced at first, but when Georg tried to scrub the kitchen floor it was still wet when Aunt Miriam came home, and even the next morning.

Maybe he and Aunt Miriam would try it together tomorrow, and maybe work out what to scrub the bath with as well.

He made himself a sandwich with the last of the plum jam and the bread crust, then walked past the sandbag walls in the park. Above him a giant barrage balloon floated back and forth on its
cables. The balloons were supposed to make it harder for German planes to fly over London.

There were no new books at the library these days — paper was precious, and few of the books that the government approved for printing were for children. He picked out some of his favourites to read again and put them in the string bag.

‘Going shopping?’ asked Mrs Huntley, looking up from her knitting needles. Once she would have been knitting jumpers for her grandchildren in far-off Australia, but now it was a khaki sock. All over Britain women knitted for the army.

‘Just to the baker’s. Would you like me to get your bread too?’ The line at the baker’s was even longer now.

She shook her head. ‘My hubby gets the groceries. It’s good when he can feel useful. It’s hard on him, so many men in uniform and him not able to join up. He’s talking about being an air-raid warden but it’s not the same. An air-raid warden doesn’t do anything, do they, except wander round the streets yelling, “Put that light out.”’

The line at the baker’s shop was even worse today. Georg started to read one of his books, inching forwards every time someone was served. The books in the string bag grew heavier, and his gas mask too. No one was supposed to go anywhere without their gas mask.

‘Two high tops, please,’ he said to the girl at the counter. The second loaf would be a bit stale by the time they ate it, but no one bought a single loaf any more, not when it took an hour to buy. Suddenly he remembered Lotte putting the basket of hot rolls on the table. Soft white bread, all soaked with butter. Cherry jam, bitter and sweet at the same time, and hot rich chocolate …

‘That’ll be sixpence,’ said the girl.

Loaves weren’t even wrapped in paper these days. He put them in his string bag. He had just reached the park when the siren went. It sounded like a wolf in pain: a howl that went on and on.

He had heard the siren before, but that was make-believe, to get ready for when it was real.

Now the real was here.

Women in headscarves or hats looked up, clutching each other. An old man swore, ‘B—— Huns,’ then tipped his hat to the ladies nearby and apologised, before hurrying down the street.

Everyone ran now, like ants when the school bully stamped on their nest. Georg stood with his gas mask and string bag with the bread and books in it. He was supposed to shelter under the stairs when an air raid came, with the doorman and the other tenants. But Aunt Miriam’s apartment block was still ten minutes’ walk away. Five minutes if he ran.

‘Come on, duckie! Run!’ A woman grabbed his hand and began to haul him down the street. ‘Can’t you hear them?’

There was a grinding engine noise far above them. Aeroplanes, thought Georg, as she half dragged him along. He peered up, but there were no planes to see. They must be still behind the buildings, out of sight. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Railway station. That Hitler can’t get us underground.’ She caught a look at his face. ‘Don’t you worry, duckie. Your mum and dad will find shelter too.’

Will they? wondered Georg.

The noises sounded like a giant in the sky. ‘Fee fifo fum,’ the giant had roared in the fairy story. ‘I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.’

He shivered. There were no giants. But still he gazed up, expecting enormous planes to soar across the sky.

And then he saw them. They looked tiny, not giant. Only two, though he could hear more, far off down the end of the street. They must be above the river … Even as he thought it, the air ripped into noise around him, something too loud to be a crash or a bang. Seconds later the ground shuddered, and shuddered again.

How could such small planes make the whole world shiver?

‘Hurry, ducks!’ urged the woman.

But it was hard to hurry in the crush of people. High heels, workmen’s boots, shop assistants’ sensible shoes, his own school shoes. He had a sudden vision of someone falling under those feet. Would anyone notice, or stop?

Georg glanced behind. Smoke puffed in black bursts into the sky. A tongue of flame licked upwards like it was trying to taste the clouds.

The air tasted strange. He wanted to cough, but forced himself to keep breathing so he could keep running with the woman.

Sudden terror struck him. Had the enemy dropped poison gas? He glanced around, waiting for people to start choking, to drop to the ground, waited to cough up blood like the air-raid warden had said.

But the cough stayed a tickle. People around him panted, even screamed, but didn’t choke.

How will we know when the poison gas drops? he wondered.

They had reached the railway station now. The crowd was even thicker here. People pressed down the stairs, bumbling and shoving each other. Someone screamed, and really did fall under the press of feet. Georg tried to see who it was, see if someone
had helped them up, but the crowd was too thick, the adults tall around him. When he looked back the woman who had been shepherding him into the underground station had vanished into the crush.

It didn’t matter. He let himself be swept down the stairs and out on the platform. There was more room here; the air was sooty from the long black tunnels on either side, but somehow fresher too. As they came down the stairs, the crowd began to disperse along the platform, settling themselves against grubby walls and cold tiles.

Georg found a piece of wall between a fat woman, wheezing like a vacuum cleaner and gripping a string bag just like his, and a smart-looking lady with a bird’s wing on her hat. He looked around, hoping to see someone he knew. The vicar, maybe, or Elizabeth. But Elizabeth must have her own shelter in her backyard, just like Aunt Miriam had a basement shelter at work. They are safe at least, he thought.

The crowd was strangely silent. Listening, thought Georg. Waiting. But we are too far down to hear anything here …

Boom!
It was more than noise. The underground platform shook and the air seemed to shudder, then whoosh away, as though it wanted to suck your eyeballs out.

He blinked to make sure his were still there, then touched his ears automatically. They rang from the noise. Funny, how you could hear your ears ringing with so much more noise around.

Women screamed. A baby began to cry.

Boom! Boom! Crash!
The sound was nearer now. The planes must be right above them. It was as though he could hear every stick of the buildings ripping apart. Giant booms that were the bombs, impact, then smaller ones and also great toppling thunders as he imagined buildings fall.

Another sound ripped through the air now. Guns. Ours or theirs? wondered Georg, and then realised that he was thinking like an English boy.

Our guns fighting the enemy. The enemy that is trying to kill us, kill me, kill the women on either side, Elizabeth, Mrs Huntley and Aunt Miriam. Mutti.

He hoped Aunt Miriam had made it down to the basement. What if she’d stopped to take one of her precious files? He hoped Mrs Huntley was safe too, that she had reached home and her Anderson shelter before the bombs began to fall. Hitler had tried to kill him before; he might already have killed Papa and Mutti too — he could admit it now, in this cold tunnel that smelled of trains, with the lights flickering on and off and the chorus of people’s cries. Death was real for all of them.

But now, for the first time, he knew — knew with his stomach and his heart — that the planes up there were flown by the enemy: that Hitler was the enemy. For the first time he felt the taste of hate.

Boom!
This one was even nearer. A child along the platform wailed. Someone began screaming, over and over …

‘Quite enough o’ that,’ muttered the fat woman next to him. She began to sing, her wheezy voice only just audible over the shouts and crashes.

‘
My old man said “Follow the van

And don’t dilly dally on the way …”
’

Someone laughed. ‘That’s right, auntie. Our boys aren’t going to dilly dally over Mr Hitler. They’ll show him what for all right.’

Everyone around had joined in the song now. Suddenly the whole platform was singing, except Georg, who didn’t know the words. He picked them up soon though.

The fat woman heaved herself up and went over to the clear spot near the railway lines. She lifted up her skirts, showing stockings rolled just above the knee. Her veins were a tracery of blue among the fat. She began to dance, a strange half-shuffle, half-tap dance. Her breath heaved like bellows.

‘That’s the stuff to give the troops, Ma!’ yelled a young man by the stairs.

The fat lady kicked up one foot, and then the other, showing an acre of pink bloomers. She curtseyed. The crowd cheered, laughing, but admiring too. They aren’t just cheering her, thought Georg. They are cheering themselves, cheering all of us, because we sing instead of sob.

The crowd swung into another song. The fat lady puffed her way back to Georg, and slid down the wall next to him again. She patted him on the leg. ‘We ’aven’t begun ter fight,’ she told him. ‘Keep yer pecker up, laddie. While we can sing there’s life. All we can do is carry on.’

It was night when the wail of the all-clear echoed down the railway tunnel nearly two hours later. He had shared his bread with the people around him — as well as dealing with hunger it had passed the time. He made his way slowly through the straggling crowds up the stairs.

Would there be anything left outside? What if all of London was rubble — broken buildings and cratered streets like in the photos of Spain and Belgium in the newspaper? One photo had shown children desperately seeking food in the wreckage. What if the flats had gone? What if the shops had burned down?

He stepped onto the footpath and stared around.

The world was still there. For a few seconds he looked at what remained — the baker’s shop, a café — and then he saw what had gone. Gaps like broken teeth spilled rubble onto the street.
It should have been dark, but instead the street was red, flame red, fire eating what had once been a butcher’s shop; there was an explosion as it found a kerosene heater.

Strangely, it wasn’t smoky. The flames fanned his face but the fire forced the air upwards in a strange hot wind, leaving the street clearer than he’d ever seen it, dappled in its black and red.

Far down the street a great spire of red sparkled against a pink sky. It was almost as though someone had built a great tower while he was underground. Of course this tower would last only until its fuel was gone.

He took a step, and then another. Suddenly he was afraid to see whether the flats were there. Glass shattered like broken biscuits under his feet. He looked again at the remaining shops and saw their windows were shattered, like broken eyes staring into the street.

He tried to avoid the glass at first then let it crunch under his shoes.

There were more screams now: different screams. They were screams of horror and of loss.

It
wasn’t
the world he’d left that afternoon. He looked at the white faces of the people around him and knew it wasn’t their world either. But, like the fat woman said, what could you do but carry on?

He turned the corner and stopped. A body lay in front of him. For a second he thought it was a person, then he saw it was a dog, one of those few whose owners had refused to put them down at the start of the war despite the official orders, feeding them bread and their own precious rations to keep their pets alive.

Until now. He wondered who had loved this dog. He wondered if they were alive to mourn its loss tonight. He bent down and touched its fur, to make sure it was dead, not just stunned and in
need of help. If it was hurt he could look after it — surely the doorman would let him look after a dog hurt in the bombing.

But the dog was already cold, despite the flames and the pink sky. It didn’t even seem injured. Somehow, that made it worse.

He stood up and began to walk again. The park was free of rubble, at least. Even the sandbags hadn’t fallen in the blasts. He was halfway across the park when he saw the other side.

Elizabeth’s house was crumpled rubble.

He hadn’t noticed before because there were no fires there, just darkness where it and the houses either side had been. He ran across the park and down the street.

‘Hey, laddie, where are you off to?’ It was an air-raid warden, an old man in a blue uniform and white crash hat. He grabbed Georg’s arm with hands like wrinkled grapes. ‘Can’t go any nearer, lad. It isn’t safe.’ He hesitated. ‘You live there?’

‘No. My friend does.’ It was true. Even though they had never spoken Elizabeth was his friend.

‘I’m sorry, lad.’ The man nodded at the wreckage. ‘Nothing could be alive in that.’

‘They had a shelter in the backyard.’ He didn’t know that for certain. But surely people who dressed their daughter in such clean white socks, and a freshly ironed tartan skirt, would make sure there was a safe shelter in the garden.

He began to run. The warden hesitated, then followed.

The street had vanished under bricks and shards of glass and other things that were just … things, their purpose lost. Georg scrambled over to what was still almost a bit of footpath. Elizabeth’s front gate was intact, still a pristine green despite the ruin of the house. For the first time Georg opened it. ‘Come on,’ he called to the air-raid warden. ‘We can get through here.’