The War that Saved My Life (21 page)

Susan stocked the shelter with blankets, bottles of water, candles, and matches. She said air raid sirens would go off if enemy planes were coming to bomb us. We would hear the sirens and run into the shelter, and be safe.

“What about Bovril?” Jamie asked anxiously.

Bovril could come into the shelter. Susan found an old basket with a lid on it, and put it into the shelter. If Bovril was scared, Jamie could shut him in the basket.

“He won’t be scared,” Jamie said. “He’s
never
scared.”

Butter wouldn’t fit in the shelter.

It was cold now and dark came early. The color had leached out of the grass in Butter’s field, and he’d started to grow thin. When I showed this to Susan, she sighed. “It’s all the exercise you’re giving him,” she said. “He used to be fat enough he could winter over on grass.” She bought hay and we stacked it in one of the empty stalls. She bought a bag of oats too. Every day I took Butter three or four flakes of hay and a bucket of grain. He still lived outside. Fred said it was healthier for him, as well as being less work for us.

Back when the leaves had first started changing color on the trees, I’d been alarmed. Susan promised that it happened every year. The leaves changed color and fell off, and the trees would look dead all winter, but they wouldn’t actually be dead. In spring they’d grow new green leaves again.

Susan had gotten over being surprised at all the things we didn’t know. When she showed me how to cook or sew something, she always started at the very beginning. “This is a needle. Look, it has a little hole on one end, for the thread to loop through, and a point on the other end, so it can go into cloth.” Or, “Eggs have a clear part, called the white, and a yellow part, called the yolk. You break an egg by tapping it on the edge of the table, and then cracking it open with your hands. Only over the bowl, like this.”

Susan said winter usually made her feel sad and gloomy, the way she was when we first came. This winter, though, she was almost too busy to be sad. She had to shop and cook and clean, and do the wash—she was particular about the wash—and sew and go to meetings. But as the days grew shorter, she did seem sad. She made an effort for us, but you could tell it was an effort. She was always tired.

I tried to be helpful. I cooked, and sewed buttons. I went with her to the shops. I learned to hem bed jackets. Meanwhile I still helped Fred twice a week, and I rode Butter every day.

On a rainy cold Wednesday afternoon Susan sat slumped in her chair. I had finished washing the lunch dishes. Jamie had gone to school. The fire was burning low, so I added coal and poked it up a little. “Thank you,” Susan murmured.

She looked frail and shivery. She’d spilled a bit of potato from lunch down the front of her blouse, and not scrubbed it clean, which wasn’t like her. I didn’t want her staying in bed all day again. I sat down on the sofa, and I looked at her, and I said, “Maybe you could show me how to read.”

She looked up disinterestedly. “Now?”

I shrugged.

She sighed. “Oh, very well.” We went to the kitchen table and she got out a pencil and paper. “All the words in the world are made up of just twenty-six letters,” she said. “There’s a big and a little version of each.”

She wrote the letters out on the paper, and named them all. Then she went through them again. Then she told me to copy them onto another piece of paper, and then she went back to her chair. I stared at the paper. I said, “This isn’t reading. This is drawing.”

“Writing,” she corrected. “It’s like buttons and hems. You’ve got to learn those before you can sew on the machine. You’ve got to know your letters before you can read.”

I supposed so, but it was boring. When I said so she got up again and wrote something along the bottom of the paper.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“‘Ada is a curmudgeon,’” she replied.

“Ada is a curmudgeon,” I copied at the end of my alphabet. It pleased me.

After that, with help from Jamie, I left Susan little notes every day. Susan is a big frog. (That one made Jamie giggle.) Butter is the best pony ever. Jamie sings like a squirrel. And then some papers I kept, because they were useful, and I could put them on the kitchen table whenever I needed to leave Susan a message. It made her happier when she knew where we were. Ada is at Fred’s. Ada is riding Butter. Jamie went to the airfield.

He wasn’t supposed to, but he did. They’d gotten so used to him sneaking in under the fence that they hardly bothered to scold him anymore. “Only, if they say I have to leave, I have to leave right away,” Jamie told us. “If they don’t say so, I can stay and talk to them.” Planes fascinated him. He made friends with the pilots, and they let him sit inside the Spitfires when they were parked on the field.

Susan asked us how we usually celebrated Christmas. We didn’t know what to say. Christmas was a big day at the pub, so Mam always worked. She’d get lots of tips, and usually we’d have something good to eat, fish and chips or a meat pie.

“Do you hang up your stockings?” Susan asked.

Jamie frowned. “What for?”

We’d heard of Father Christmas—it was something other children talked about—but we didn’t get visits from him.

I said, “What do you usually do?”

Her face went soft, remembering. “The Christmases when Becky was alive we’d have a big dinner with some of our friends,” she said. “Roast goose, or turkey. In the morning we’d exchange presents—we always had a little tree, and we’d decorate the windowsills with holly—and then we’d have something wonderful for breakfast, hot sticky buns and bacon and coffee, and then we’d just laze around until it was time to start making dinner. On Boxing Day Becky would go hunting.

“When I was little, my family all went to midnight services on Christmas Eve. My father would preach. The church always looked beautiful in the cold candlelight. Then I’d go to sleep—such a short sleep!—and wake up to my stocking filled with little presents at the foot of my bed. The bigger gifts were downstairs, under the tree. Mother cooked a huge meal, and all the aunts and uncles and cousins came...” Her voice trailed away. “We’ll do something nice,” she said, “for your first Christmas here.”

“Can Mam come?” Jamie asked.

Susan put her hand on his head. “I hope she will,” she said. “I’ve invited her, but I haven’t gotten a reply.”

“I’ll write to her,” Jamie said.

“You don’t have to,” I told him. It seemed risky. If we reminded Mam that we were here, would she come and get us?

“We need to talk to her about your foot,” Susan said.

“Well, I’m not writing,” I said. I had memorized the alphabet, and was starting to understand how the letters should sound, so that I could read even words I hadn’t seen before. I could write, a bit. But not to Mam.

“You don’t have to,” Susan said, her arm around me.

The shops filled with the most amazing things: oranges and nuts and all sorts of candy and toys. Susan said people were determined to have a happy Christmas despite the war. She herself ordered a goose, since Jamie and I had never had one, and then she invited some of the pilots from the airfield to come eat it with us, because the goose was too big for the three of us alone. I invited Fred, but he said he always went to his brother’s house and he didn’t like to break tradition. “But thank you kindly,” he added.

So I invited Maggie.

It seemed right to me that if Jamie got to have pilots, I should have a friend to dinner too. Besides Fred, and maybe Stephen, Maggie was the only friend I had.

She came back from her school the week before Christmas. We rode together up the big hill, where the wind was blowing hard and we could see down to the barricaded beach. Maggie was different, stiffer and more standoffish than she’d been the day I rode her home. She looked elegant on her pony, with her leather gloves and her little velvet cap.

I put my hand up to shield my eyes. Riding up the hill had been my idea. “I always check for spies when I’m up here,” I said. “We’re supposed to, you know.” We were told so by the government men on the radio. Nazi spies could be dressed as nurses, or nuns, or anything.

“I know,” Maggie said crossly. “I’m not stupid.” Then she added, “Why didn’t you write back to me? I asked you to.”

I hadn’t known she’d asked me. Fred hadn’t read me that part of her letter. And while I’d had another couple of goes at reading it, Maggie’s handwriting was curly with the letters run together. I couldn’t make out the words.

I was ashamed to admit this. “I’ve been very busy,” I said.

She flashed me a look of hurt and anger. I understood, suddenly, that she’d been waiting for me to write back, waiting and hoping for a letter. I didn’t know she felt that way about me.

I took a deep breath. “I’m just now learning to write,” I said. “And read. So I couldn’t write back yet. I’m sorry. Next time I’ll try.”

Instead of looking horrified by my ignorance, she looked mollified. (Susan taught me that word, and I loved it.
Mollified.
Sometimes when Jamie was cross, he had to be mollified.) “I didn’t think of that,” she said. “I thought you just weren’t interested. But wouldn’t Miss Smith have helped you? She would have written down what you wanted to say.”

She would have, if I’d asked. “I didn’t want to ask her. I don’t like her helping me.”

“Why ever not?”

“I don’t want to get used to her,” I said. “She’s just someone we have to stay with for a little while. She’s not, you know, actually real.”

Maggie looked me up and down. “She seems real to me,” she said. “I saw you the day you got off that train. You looked like you’d already been through a war. Then you looked better the day you helped me. And now! Sidesaddle on a pony, and fancy clothes, and not so skinny your bones show. Your eyes are different too. Before, you looked scared to death.”

I didn’t want to talk about it. There weren’t any spies in view, nor any ships, and Butter was tired of standing in the wind. “Race you to the village,” I said.

Maggie won, but not by much, and I stayed in the saddle the whole time even though Butter galloped faster than he’d ever gone before. We followed Maggie’s pony over two fallen logs—little soaring jumps, my first. By the time we pulled up on the outskirts of town, both ponies blowing hard, Maggie’s hair had come loose from its plait and her cheeks were bright red. She was laughing. She’d forgotten I ever looked scared.