The War that Saved My Life (22 page)

I knew Susan wasn’t real. Or, if she was a tiny bit real, sometimes, at the very best she was only temporary. She’d be done with us once the war was over, or whenever Mam changed her mind.

Maggie couldn’t come for Christmas dinner. She said she wished she could, but her brother was expected home from aviation training, and her father was coming from wherever he was doing secret war work, and they were all having their traditional Christmas. So of course she had to stay home. “It’ll be a miserable day,” she said. “Mum will be trying not to blubber over Jonathan, so she’ll be snippy with everyone. Dad’s wound up about Hitler and won’t talk about anything but the war, especially since there’s no hunting, and Mum
hates
talking about the war. The cook quit to work in a factory and the housekeeper’s an awful cook, and we’ve not got but one maid left, and no footmen in the house at all. So I’ll be scrubbing on Christmas Eve and Mum will be trying to help cook, and we’ll sit down in this big fancy room with cobwebs in the corners and eat horrible food and pretend to be cheerful and nothing,
nothing
will be like it used to.

“People keep saying it isn’t really a war,” she said. “Hardly anybody’s being bombed, hardly anybody’s fighting. It feels like a war to me. A war right in my family.” She gave me a sideways look. “You’re probably happy,” she said.

“I’m not happy because you’re miserable,” I shot back.

She shook her head. “Oh, of course not. Come on.” We were riding again, but this time we took a path Maggie chose, through woods down to the beach. We had to stay on the far side of the barbed wire, but we followed the road along the beach and watched the waves crash against the shore. It amazed me, how different the ocean could look from day to day.

Susan took an ax and made us go with her out into somebody’s field and cut down a little tree. It was not a tree that went dead in the winter. It had little green spikes on its branches instead of leaves and Susan called it an evergreen.

It was snowing, and the air was wet and cold. “What for?” I asked. Susan and Jamie lugged the tree home while I walked with my crutches beside them.

“Christmas trees,” Susan said, “remind us that God is like an evergreen tree—even in winter, never dead.”

“But you said the other trees weren’t dead either,” Jamie pointed out.

“Well, no, they’re not,” Susan said. “But they look dead. And Christmas trees are a nice tradition. Green in the midst of winter, light in the midst of darkness—it’s all metaphors for God.”

I ignored the word
metaphor,
but asked, “What’s Christmas got to do with God?”

Well. You would think I’d said something really odd. Susan gaped at me, mouth open, fishlike, and when she finally closed her mouth she sputtered, “Haven’t you been learning anything going to church?”

I shrugged. Church was hard to follow. Sometimes the stories made sense, but mostly they didn’t, and although the vicar seemed nice, I almost never actually listened to him. I might have liked the songs if I could have read them fast enough to actually sing.

It turned out Christmas was Jesus’s birthday. Jesus was the man hanging on the cross up in the front of the church—I already knew that part. So, easy enough. But then Jamie asked, “How did they
know
? When Jesus’s birthday was?”

Susan said, “Well. I don’t suppose they did know. Not absolutely.”

Jamie nodded. “Like Ada and me.”

“Right,” Susan said. “But we’ve got your pretend birthdays on your identity cards, so we’ll celebrate your birthdays on those days. Christmas is like that.”

Jamie said, “Was Christmas the birthday on Jesus’s identity card?”

“You stupid,” I said. “Jesus wasn’t in a war.”

“Don’t call him stupid,” Susan said.

“It was a stupid thing to say.”

“Saying something stupid doesn’t make you stupid,” Susan said. “Luckily for all of us.”

We took the tree into the house and set it up in the corner of the living room. Susan put a string of little electric lights in its branches. She went into Becky’s room upstairs and came out with a big box. She looked inside, blinked back tears, and shut the box again.

“Let’s make our own ornaments,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like that?”

How would I know? I could tell she wanted me to like it, and I didn’t want her to cry. It made me nervous when she cried. “Yes?” I said.

“Oh, Ada.” She gave me a hug with her free arm. I took a deep breath, and didn’t pull away. “These are the ornaments Becky and I put on our trees together. I’m not ready to have them out again.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?” she asked. “Really?”

I didn’t know what to say. Somehow Christmas was making me feel jumpy inside. All this talk about being together and being happy and celebrating—it felt threatening. Like I shouldn’t be part of it. Like I wasn’t allowed. And Susan
wanted
me to be happy, which was scarier still.

Ornaments were little pretty things you hung on a Christmas tree. Susan got out colored paper, and scissors, and glue. She showed us how to make snowflakes and stars. I worked hard to make mine as good as hers. Jamie cut his paper quick into ragged shapes. We hung them all up, ragged and careful both, and the tree did look pretty in the corner of the room. Bovril thought so too. He lay under it during the day, batting the lowest ornaments with his paws. Jamie wadded up some of the leftover paper, and in the evenings tossed it back and forth across the floor for Bovril to pounce upon.

I hated sharing my bed with a cat. Sometimes I woke with a tail in my face and there always seemed to be hair in the sheets. Jamie insisted he could only sleep if Bovril was tucked up with him, and Bovril, drat him, seemed to feel the same way.

It snowed again. When I rode Butter over to Maggie’s, snow balled up under his feet, and clumped in the bottom of his tail. The whole world was white and sparkling. Snow in London didn’t stay white for long.

Maggie’d been helping Fred every day since she’d come home, and on the days when I was there we all worked together. Fred had started me properly jumping now, little jumps, but not today because the snow was too deep.

“You know you’re supposed to get Susan a Christmas present,” Maggie said as we measured oats in the feed room.

“Why?” I asked. I’d heard about presents. I didn’t get them. I didn’t need to give them. I said so.

Maggie rolled her eyes at me. “Of course you’ll be getting presents,” she said. “Susan is nice to you. Not like some.”

I nodded. Some of the evacuees, those that were left, weren’t treated very kindly. Not because of anything to do with them, but because they’d been put with mean old hags who wouldn’t have welcomed Jesus himself. At least that’s what Jamie said. He talked to the other evacuees at school, and they were envious, they were, that they hadn’t been chosen last.

“So,” Maggie said, “you should get her something. It’s only right.”

“I haven’t got any money. Not any at all.”

“Don’t you get pocket money?”

“No. Do you?”

“Oh,” Maggie said. She chewed her bottom lip while she thought. “Well, you could find some job to do, and earn something. I suppose. Or you could make her something. She’d like that. My mum always likes it when I make her something.”

It was an interesting idea. I thought about it as I started home. Susan had been teaching me to knit so that I could knit for the soldiers, but so far the only thing I’d made had been a washcloth. It was a hideous washcloth, wider on one end than the other, with loopy stitches that looked nothing like Susan’s. Susan claimed it didn’t matter, because soldiers would be glad to have a washcloth no matter what it looked like. She also said knitting was like writing, or riding, or anything else: You got better the more you worked at it.

I could work at it, if I hurried. I turned Butter in the road, and, despite his protests, made him go back through the snow to Maggie’s house. Fred looked surprised to see me. “Trouble?” he asked.

“I need some wool,” I said.