Pennies For Hitler (15 page)

‘So the dragon decided to change into the scariest thing of all. A submarine!

‘It was long and grey, just like the dragon had been. It shot fire from its mouth, called torpedoes.’

The cabin was silent as they listened to his words. Heard how the dragon hunted its prey all over the grey ocean. No one could stop it, until a grey knight appeared: a British destroyer with smoke pouring from its smokestacks.

Silent through the battle, the two Joes sat side by side on an upper bunk. Harris was hardly breathing, intent on Georg’s words; and Jamie wore a half-smile as he watched what was happening.

The hate Georg felt towards the enemy trickled into him as he spoke, giving him the story. Their hatred for the dragon/U-boat was drawing them together: a nation of five boys in a cabin waiting for their enemy to be destroyed.

… and then the end, as the grey dragon sank down, down to the bottom of the sea, never to roar again, leaving ships to sail safely and happily to a land of sunlight and butterflies and bananas.

‘Is that true?’ whispered Harris at the end. ‘Has the destroyer killed the dragon?’

‘Maybe,’ said Georg. And it was true, perhaps. A tiny chance, but possible, that their destroyer or one like it, or a British plane, had already sunk the submarine that had tried to kill them. Perhaps now there was no enemy at all between them and safety.

Perhaps.

The two Joes were asleep minutes after the story ended; Harris slept too, with the first smile Georg had ever seen on his face.

Hating had helped.

Hating things together gave you comfort when you were scared. For the first time Georg felt a whisper of understanding how hating the Jews could help a nation desperate with war debts, its children starving, its grown-ups humiliated by the French soldiers marching along their footpaths.

He felt drained and strange and somehow more alive than he had for a long time. He and Jamie sat on Georg’s bunk and shared a bar of chocolate.

‘I’ve been saving it for something special,’ said Jamie. ‘Mum gave it to me. She’d been saving it too. I suppose this is as good as any. Be lots of chocolate when we get to Australia. And bananas.’ He glanced at Georg. ‘Why did you put in the bananas?’

Georg shrugged. He didn’t know where the rest of the story had come from, much less the bananas. The chocolate was good.

‘You know anyone who’s ever been to Australia?’

‘No,’ said Georg. ‘I knew a lady whose daughter and son-in-law and grandchildren live there. But she didn’t know much about it.’

‘I knew a kid who was sent to a farm up near Scotland,’ said Jamie. ‘They made him get up at four in the morning to milk the cows, and whipped him when he got it wrong. He said he had scars all down his back, under his shirt, where they’d whipped him.’

They were silent a moment. ‘Do you think that’s true?’ asked Georg.

‘Don’t know. Don’t think so.’ Jamie swallowed the last of his chocolate. ‘He never took his shirt off so we could see the scars. My dad’s a farmer. Chickens. I’ve got to collect the eggs before I go to school. Used to anyhow. Got up at six o’clock. I want to go
to a family in a town. One with a picture theatre.’ His voice grew eager. ‘And where I don’t have to get up till seven or even eight.’

‘I’d like to be on a farm.’ It was the first time Georg had allowed himself to think of what the family he was going to might be like. ‘With a dog and hens and … and rabbits. Do you think they’ll let us choose?’

Jamie snorted. ‘Grown-ups never let boys choose. I bet I’m stuck with a chicken farmer who wants me because I know how to mix up laying mash.’

‘I could ask Miss Glossop.’

Jamie considered. ‘She might know.’ He crossed over to his own bed. Georg stretched out the length of his bunk. He was drifting off to sleep when he heard Jamie’s voice again. ‘I’m glad you’re here. In this cabin, I mean.’

‘You too,’ said Georg.

He wondered if Jamie would have said that if he knew he shared his cabin with a German boy.

In the morning Harris’s sheets were dry.

Georg found Miss Glossop unoccupied on the night of the children’s concert, waiting for the girls to finish dressing up in costumes they’d made from each other’s clothes. ‘Miss Glossop?’

‘Yes, George?’

‘Do you know which foster people we’re going to? I mean, each one of us?’

‘Not yet. I don’t think it’s been decided, though the volunteer families have been selected. Why?’

‘I wondered … Jamie wants to go to a town, even though he comes from a farm, and I want to go to a farm.’

Miss Glossop gave a hint of a smile. ‘I think that could be arranged.’

‘Or could we — could we be together? Me and Jamie? I’d rather stay with Jamie than go to a farm.’

He wanted to ask if the Joes and Harris could stay with them too, but that might be too much for any family. And already Miss Glossop was shaking her head. ‘Only one child per family. So many want to help the British Children’s Appeal, you know. It wouldn’t be fair to give one family two and have another family miss out completely.’

As though we are parcels, thought Georg, thank-you presents for a colony that sends its army to help the English war. What about that is fair to us? But he didn’t say anything. If Miss Glossop said there was nothing she could do, there was no point.

Chapter 17

AUSTRALIA, OCTOBER 1940

Australia crept up at them, out of the grey ocean. One afternoon there was nothing but white-capped sea and a sky swept clean by the wind and as blue as a balloon. The next morning when they marched along the corridor and climbed the companionway to physical jerks there it was: a stretch of dull khaki in the distance, like the land had been painted with camouflage colours too.

The air smelled of warmth and soil, not just the tinny tang of sea.

None of the children and few of the adults on board knew which route the ship was taking, or when they would land, or even what part of Australia this was. ‘Loose lips sink ships’ the posters stated. What you didn’t know a German spy couldn’t find out. Were they looking at the pointy bit at the top, or one of the big curved sides? It wouldn’t be the big flat bit in the middle of the bottom edge called the Nullarbor Plain, thought Georg, as the encyclopaedia had said that was desert.

Now, at least, the portholes could be opened. Fresh air gusted into stale cabins. At night, thin beads of light could shine onto
the blackness of the sea — they were so far from Europe that there was no longer any need to hide from enemy bombers or U-boats.

Day after day they waited for the ship to head in to port. Green land turned to yellow, red and then far-off cliffs glimpsed only once through Miss Glossop’s binoculars. Georg was pretty sure that was the Nullarbor Plain because it didn’t have any trees on it, and the encyclopaedia had said Nullarbor meant ‘no trees’, but he didn’t tell anyone, in case he was wrong, or in case he was right too, and was giving secrets away.

The land turned green again.

The six weeks of surging across the ocean hadn’t seemed as long as the next three days. But at last, at the children’s dinner at midday, one of the chaplains made the announcement.

‘We’ll land in Port Melbourne at quarter past nine tomorrow, or thereabouts.’ He grinned as the noise rose, and for once didn’t call for silence. As the chatter died down he continued. ‘Half of you will be going to families there; the rest will go on to Sydney. But you’ll all have a chance to see Melbourne. There’ll be a bus tour up to the mountains in the morning and then a special afternoon tea. After that the following children will meet their foster parents.’

He picked up a clipboard. The children seemed suddenly to turn into small statues as they waited to hear what would happen to them. The chaplain began to call out the names. They were in alphabetical order: ‘Adams, Estelle; Bateson, Samuel; Carrington, John …’

A few kids clapped their hands when they heard their names, glad that at least now they had a solid destination; they hadn’t been forgotten in the confusions of war. Others smiled at friends. But most were quiet. Grown-ups had put them on this ship and
they had accepted that. Now they accepted this without a murmur too.

Jamie’s name was called. Georg gave Jamie a nudge with his elbow. It didn’t mean good or bad: just an acknowledgement that he had heard.

Harris’s face lit up when he heard his name. Georg wondered if the boy thought his mum might be already here in Melbourne, or his gran, whether he even understood he would find only a family of strangers. But there was no point frightening Harris any more than he had been already.

The chaplain had got to ‘Norland, Donald’ when Georg realised that ‘Marks’ would not be called. He was in the group that was sailing on to Sydney. He listened as the rest of the names were called out.

One Joe’s name had already been called, and then the other was too. Georg tried not to let his feelings show on his face.

All the others in his cabin were bound for Melbourne. Once again he’d be alone.

He hadn’t thought that he’d have to face his foster family without any of his new friends. Yet part of him was glad that he still had a few days of the orderly ship world, especially now that the danger of torpedoes or bombs had vanished down here at the end of the world.

Another part of him wanted to get it over with. He had hoped for the faint chance that even if he couldn’t go to the same family as Jamie, they might be placed in homes nearby. Even being near the Joes or Harris would be something familiar.

But packages couldn’t choose where they were sent.

None of them slept well that night. The ocean with its threat of waiting submarines had been terrifying. This was safety, yet somehow the next days of waiting until they would be claimed by strange Australians were even more frightening than the sea.

They took turns looking out the porthole as the ship sailed into Port Phillip Bay. The port looked like the one they had left, just fewer ships and not as smoky and the sun still too high up in the sky.

Georg marched up to the deck with the others; and stood in a line to shake hands with the captain and the first mate. He sat next to Jamie on the bus while their ship-mates sang English songs, trying to be what the adults expected them to be: happy at being safe on dry land, instead of scared of a land of strangers. They drove through the Melbourne streets lined with houses and gardens that looked strangely home-like, his own German home, not Aunt Miriam’s, as though Mutti could come out of one of those doors in her flowered dress and walk down the path.

‘Wish you were coming here too,’ said Jamie for the tenth time since their names had been called out.

‘Me too,’ said Georg, for the tenth time too.

The city centre looked like it could be part of London, except here there was clear, untaped glass in all the windows; there were no piles of sandbags, nor fires nor rubble. The faces on the street were white and there was no one wearing suits with convict arrows on them or carrying boomerangs, or even playing cricket.

It was only as they headed up into the hills that the land grew strange, the trees the wrong shape and the wrong colour, the spaces too wide with no hedges or stone walls neatly dividing them. He liked the hills better — even if the trees were wrong, the mist and the cold were familiar.

But they only stayed long enough to be marched to the toilet, and to eat the sandwiches that Miss Glossop and the others handed out. Some strange sickle-shaped leaves lay on the ground. Georg picked one up, thinking that he would dry it and send it to Aunt Miriam.

The bus journey back was more silent, no singing this time, each of them wondering what the afternoon would bring, new families or, at the very least, separation from friends.

The tea party was in a hall, with ‘Welcome’ on a big banner over the doorway. Trestles covered with different coloured cloths held sandwiches and small cakes with pink or white icing and pikelets with jam and bowl after bowl of sweets, though the Australian women called them lollies, which was confusing at first.

There were cream cakes too: small ones with their tops cut out and filled with whipped cream, then the tops replaced, standing up like wings.
Küchen mit Schlagsahne
.

Georg felt his throat burn. He’d be sick if he ate a cake with cream.

Then he saw the bananas. They sat at the end of one of the trestles, in a great long bunch. Georg had never seen so many before. He hadn’t known they grew in bunches either.

He ate seven, one after another, peeling the skin down like a monkey, and nibbling till each one was gone. He was eating the seventh when Miss Glossop called for those who were to stay in Melbourne to report to the other room.

So he wasn’t even going to see the people his cabin-mates were going to. He hoped they’d at least be kind. Georg looked around for the others to say goodbye, but the two Joes and Harris must have been near the doorway when the call came. They had already vanished. There was only Jamie. They looked at each other awkwardly across the trestles.

‘See you sometime,’ said Jamie at last.

Would they really ever see each other sometime? Or were they just like bits of driftwood, coming together then floating off across the sea of war? Would Jamie have still been his friend if he had known that Georg was German? He doubted it.

They had shared so much, even if some of it was built on lies. There was too much to say: things that couldn’t be said even if he’d had the words. He wished, suddenly, desperately, that there was just one person he could tell his secrets to. ‘I … I hope your family is nice. I hope they are kind to you,’ he managed at last.

‘Yours too.’

It would have been good to hug, but you didn’t hug another boy. Instead he waved as Jamie marched back, his head high, a small soldier doing his part in the war.

Georg was the only one in the cabin now. He liked having a room to himself again, though he missed the others more. Everyone I like vanishes, he thought. Or maybe it’s me that keeps on vanishing. Even the refuge in Australia was only till the war was over. Or maybe not for that long, if they didn’t like him, or changed their minds, or found out that he wasn’t an English boy called George at all.