Pennies For Hitler (12 page)

The man followed.

Half of Elizabeth’s house seemed to have been blown entirely away, leaving a space between the rubble of the two structures either side. Her paling fence was almost intact; he instinctively pressed himself against it as a beam crashed down in the wreckage next door, bringing a thunder of debris with it.

‘Watch out, lad!’ yelled the air-raid warden.

The thunder dimmed to a trickle, a
spat, spat, spat
of small bits of wood … or tiles … or toys. Georg hardly listened. What good would ‘watch out’ do? By the time you saw a beam fall it would be almost on you.

The red sky cast black shadows in a world lit by flame. It was as though a giant held a torch up so he could see. He stopped, staring at what had been a back garden. Now it was rubble.

It looked like a child’s pile of blocks, crushed in a temper. A flash of myrtle flowers peered up out of a crush of shattered tiles and splintered wood. The air was thick with brick dust.

The air-raid warden touched his shoulder. ‘Too late, lad. I’m sorry. Have you somewhere you can go?’

Georg nodded dumbly. He turned to follow the man back to the street.

And then he heard it. It was like a cat’s cry, sharp and weak. He heard the word: ‘Help.’

He turned back. ‘Where are you?’ he yelled.

‘Help! Please, please help!’ The voice was louder now. ‘We’re trapped down here.’

The air-raid warden was already blowing his whistle. ‘Got a live one!’ he yelled. ‘One, maybe more!’ He shook his head at Georg. ‘Rescue party will be here soon, lad.’

Georg thought of Elizabeth, down in the darkness of the buried shelter. No air to breathe, no light. Like it had been in the suitcase — though at least in the suitcase he had known that
the lid would open, if he only held on. At least he’d had holes to let in air. But down there …

The wreckage might fall further and crush her. Maybe she’d run out of air to breathe.

He ran forwards and grabbed a bit of wood, then cried out as it burned his hands: not badly, but enough to hurt. He ripped off his jumper, and used that to pad his hands as he pulled at the wood again.

‘Lad, leave it till the men get here —’

‘She might be dead by then!’ He tugged, but the beam was too heavy.

The man looked back towards the street, then up at the flames dancing in the sky. He grabbed at the beam too with his thick gloves.

It moved.

‘We’re coming, lady!’ yelled the air-raid warden. ‘Just you hold on. How many are down there?’

‘Two of us.’

It was a woman’s voice, not Elizabeth’s. But she must be down there too.

‘Me and a little girl,’ said the voice. ‘She’s hurt. You have to hurry. Please!’

‘Hurrying all we can, lady,’ said the air-raid warden. ‘Ah, here come the troops now.’

Georg looked around in relief — but they weren’t soldiers. These ‘troops’ were two more old men — one even had a walking stick — and a teenage boy with pimples. One of the old men carried a stretcher and the other a shovel. The teenager had a crowbar.

The shovel was no use against shattered brick and beams, but the crowbar was. The old men worked surprisingly fast, as
though they could read each other’s minds. One beam, another, and then the corrugated iron that had formed the roof of the shelter. It must have collapsed when the building fell on top of it, thought Georg. But the roof had still protected the people trapped inside.

‘Nearly there, love!’ yelled the air-raid warden.

‘Hurry. Please, hurry.’ The voice was a whisper now.

The two old men wrenched the last of the corrugated iron away.

The hole was dark. The pink sky cast shadows and no light here. The air-raid warden flicked on his torch.

At first Georg could only see dirt, dark dirt, then suddenly a flash of white. ‘There she is!’

Something moved: something dark as the dirt, because it was dirt-covered too. No, not just dirt, but blood. The figure rose up, the soil falling away, then gave a cry as the air-raid warden picked her up and laid her carefully on the ground. ‘Where are you hurt, love?’

‘My head. Elizabeth! She’s still in there! You have to get Elizabeth!’ It was the governess. She struggled to get up, but Georg had already scrambled down into the trench. He began to dig like a dog where he thought Elizabeth’s face would be, thrusting the dirt behind. Then suddenly there she was, pale in the torchlight, her eyes shut.

Elizabeth couldn’t be dead! She couldn’t. All at once her eyes opened. She blinked, and whispered, ‘Cold.’

‘Got a blanket here.’ One of the old men dropped into the trench beside him. ‘Soon warm you up, love. Now come on, let’s get you out of here. You, boy, take her legs.’

Her shoes were gone, but it was easy to see the white socks. Georg grasped Elizabeth’s feet firmly, lifted when the old man
lifted, not far, just enough to get her free of dirt. The old man gathered her in his arms.

She seemed smaller than she had at school. Her head drooped onto the old man’s shoulder.

Suddenly the old man swore. ‘Bandages!’ he snapped. ‘Harry, look lively there.’

‘What is it?’ Georg tried to get closer. Strong hands pulled him away.

He gazed at Elizabeth, lying on the old man’s lap. The old man’s hands were black as they pressed against her neck. No, not black. Red. Even as he looked more blood dripped into the ground.

And then it stopped.

The old man gave a cry. He laid Elizabeth down on the dirt. He rubbed his hand against his eyes, leaving a smear of blood.

‘You can’t leave her there! She has to get to hospital.’

‘Shh, son. Shh.’ The air-raid warden put his arm around Georg’s shoulders. ‘Can’t help her now.’

‘But you have to!’

‘Bit of the corrugated iron must have ripped into her neck,’ said the old man dully.

‘She’s … she’s dead?’

‘Aye, son. I’m sorry. If we’d got to her earlier we might have saved her. Put pressure on the artery to stop the bleeding till it could be stitched. It were too late even when we got here, I reckon.’

The governess crumpled into a puddle of filthy clothes. ‘It was my fault.’

‘No, love.’ The old man’s voice was gentle. ‘You couldn’t see she was hurt, not down there in the dark. No one’s fault but Hitler and the Jerries. Not yours. Not anybody here’s.’

‘You wait.’ The teenager spoke now. ‘Tomorrow our planes will be over Germany. They flew to Berlin last week. We’ll get the Jerries back for this, you’ll see.’

Georg stumbled off into the blood-tinged shadows. Bombs on England. Bombs on Germany. Back and forth and back and forth, he thought, we hit you and you hit us and round and round again. It was like stubborn bullies in the playground.

He bit his lip to stop it trembling. He had to find Aunt Miriam. She was all he had now.

Chapter 15

Crashes shook the air — different crashes now, not the dull roar of bombs but long slow crumbles as buildings stopped trying to stay up.

People had already stretched tape across the worst bits, buildings that were likely to fall down or collapse further. He dodged the tape, tripping over bricks but somehow managing not to cut his hands on glass. His palms stung a bit from the burn, but not too much.

The streets looked almost like the hospital ward when he’d cut his foot, filled with people hurt, bleeding or sitting in shock: a strange hospital, with no walls and a red ceiling that pulsed fire. Bodies lay on stretchers. No, not bodies. These people moved, cried, screamed in pain. The real bodies were laid in groups: whole families, neighbours, friends lying together in death.

An old woman sat in a rocking chair, miraculously preserved even though the house it came from had crumbled, clutching a cage with a budgie in it. Incredibly the bird was chirruping. The
woman smiled at Georg as he passed, as though all that mattered was her chair and her bird.

He turned another corner, then thrust his hand into his mouth.

Another pile of rubble spilled across the street.

For a second he thought it was their block of flats, then he saw it was the block next door.

Bits of brick and lengths of wall; smashed tables; a chair standing upright as though someone had put it there; a bundle of rags he hoped were clothes or towels, not what remained of a human.

There was too much debris to get to the door of their own building. He watched as men with stretchers carried people away, more men shovelled rubble, and others dug, calling out to see if anyone was still alive. He wanted to help but these men seemed to know what they were doing. He would only get in the way.

His mouth was dry with brick dust. He could feel it clogging his nose as he breathed too.

‘George! Thank goodness.’ A shadow ran to him out of the red-flamed darkness. It was Aunt Miriam. She hugged him to her black work coat, then coughed, her throat rough from dust and smoke too. ‘I couldn’t get back before. Are you all right?’ She stepped back. ‘Is that blood? George!’

‘It’s not mine,’ he said tiredly. He knew he should be afraid because their building had so nearly been destroyed. He knew he should be grateful that Aunt Miriam was safe, that he was safe too. But it was as though all feeling had seeped away with Elizabeth’s blood.

Aunt Miriam held him close as they looked at the rubble. She didn’t have to say, ‘If that had been our building, if we had been inside, we would be dead.’ Hiding under the stairs would not be enough.

‘Where have you been?’ she said at last.

‘Railway station.’ He didn’t mention Elizabeth. Somehow he knew he would never speak of her, as long as he lived.

Aunt Miriam nodded. ‘People aren’t supposed to go there. Three of them were bombed tonight.’

‘People were killed?’

‘Yes.’ She didn’t say how many. Lots, he thought dully. People at his station would have been killed if a bomb had hit them too, despite being underground. The fat woman who had danced, the younger one who had led him to what she had thought was safety.

‘It was stupid to go there then?’

‘No,’ she said wearily. ‘Hardly anywhere is safe if you get a direct hit. The shelters only protect you from debris.’

He thought of the blood and dirt on the corrugated iron. Sometimes, he thought.

She didn’t ask him any more questions. He was glad of that. She didn’t tell him to be careful either. Aunt Miriam might not know much about children, but she knew what they were capable of. She respected him. She knew he would do what he had to.

‘I’m sorry, I shared our bread with the people in the underground,’ he said.

‘Good,’ said Aunt Miriam. She hugged him again.

The glass was broken in their windows. The clock’s glass was broken too. They pulled the blackout curtains across, though there was so much flame that Georg thought the bombers would find their way back easily. The whole of London was a torch
now to show the pilots the way. They swept the glass up, taking care not to be cut by the splinters. Georg ached with shock and weariness, but he knew the glass was too dangerous to leave. If he got up in the night, barefoot in the blackout, he might forget it was there.

At last the floors were clear. Miraculously there was still water in the taps — the pipes must not have been hit. They took it in turns to wash. He tried not to see the red water swirl down into the basin. He would never see Elizabeth again. Now even her blood was running down into the pipes …

‘Your hands!’ said Aunt Miriam, as he came out of the bathroom in his pyjamas.

He looked at them vaguely. One was blistered, the other a bit red. ‘I must have burned them,’ he said.

Aunt Miriam glanced at him swiftly, but said nothing. She fetched the first-aid kit, and spread salve over his hands, and then a light bandage. It looked white against his skin. White, like Elizabeth’s socks, like Papa’s face, his blood, Elizabeth’s blood, red on the grass. Death came from the sky, from a plane, or you flew to it through a window.

‘Go to bed,’ said Aunt Miriam softly. ‘I’ll bring you some cocoa.’

‘I don’t want any.’ He didn’t want to ever eat or drink again.

‘I’ll bring it anyway.’ She sat with him while he drank it, sipping her own, though he suspected she was no more hungry than he was. He felt better when he’d drunk it though. Aunt Miriam looked better too, even with the shadows black under her eyes.

‘Get some sleep,’ she said. ‘I have to be at work at seven.’ She looked at her watch. ‘In three hours’ time.’

‘They can’t expect you to come in after this?’

‘It’s war,’ she said simply. ‘We do our jobs or they don’t get done. If they don’t get done we lose the war. But you sleep as late as you can. Good night, George.’ She bent and kissed his forehead.

‘Good night,’ he said.

The bombers came the next night, guided up the river by the flames still burning bright from the day before. This time Aunt Miriam was with him as they struggled through the crowd down to the station, the refuge that wasn’t safe at all, but ‘better than nothing’, carrying a bag with a change of clothes, a Thermos of tea and sandwiches, as well as blankets and a pillow. ‘Just in case,’ said Aunt Miriam.

The all-clear didn’t go till early morning. He was asleep on the pillow by then, rousing blearily to follow Aunt Miriam out into the fire-lit night. It seemed almost normal now to step around bodies, to see women rocking back and forth, sobbing and covering their faces, old men wandering as though hoping somehow their bombed houses might appear miraculously untouched if they searched just a little longer.

‘Have you seen a little girl? Yellow hair ribbons.’ A woman clutched a rag doll, as though the child might sense its presence or it would call her to it.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Aunt Miriam.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said to a man and a woman who stood clinging to each other, their children holding their knees, staring at a shop and flat as they vanished in the flames.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as they stepped between stretchers of bodies laid out on the footpath waiting to be picked up. The
dead didn’t hear, but Georg said sorry too. It seemed wrong to ignore them so soon.

Their block of flats still stood there. It looked different now, blank-faced. Men had come and boarded up the windows to keep out the wind and the dust. I’ll have to work out how to scrub the floor properly, thought Georg. There was dirt all through the flat now. Tomorrow, he thought. I’ll think about it then.