The War That Saved My Life

by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

  “He hasn’t,” she said. She rubbed the end of Butter’s nose. “You’ll hurt him if you aren’t careful. You’ll scare him, and that’ll put him off jumping forever. Not to mention what it might do to you.”

  She should talk about hurting the pony. Ignoring him until he was practically crippled. He’d been better as soon as his hooves were trimmed. Better the very next day.

  “Yes, I know what you’re thinking,” she continued. “But I know what he needs now and I won’t hurt him again. You know what you need now too, because I’m telling you. You get on over to Fred Grimes.”

  So I went on over to see Fred in the stables behind Maggie’s house. He agreed to watch me ride, and help me, for a bit of time after his lunch two days a week. In exchange I’d work for him the rest of the afternoon. Susan gave me a map she’d drawn, and showed me how to trace my route on it, so I wouldn’t be lost again. I tied my crutches to the back of the saddle so I had them for doing chores.

  Fred taught me to kick less. He taught me to use one leg only to ask for a canter, so that I didn’t have to get bounced by the trot. He tried to teach me to post to the trot—to rise and fall to the motion smoothly, without bouncing—but that was hard with only one stirrup. He taught me more about steering, and when he was happy with my progress he set up little poles in the field beyond the stable yard and had me practice going over them. It was a long way from jumping the stone wall. Fred said I wasn’t to try that on Butter until he told me I was ready.

  Stephen White’s colonel sent another invitation to tea. I declined. “Idiot girl,” Susan grumbled.

  Meanwhile the war had become an endless stream of pamphlets the government sent through the mail. How to wear your gas mask. Why to carry your gas mask. How not to get hit by a car in the blackout. (You could carry a flashlight, if you covered over the glass with tissue paper; you should paint curbs white so the people driving the cars could see them.) Why you should give the government your excess pots and pans. (They wanted to make planes from them. Susan refused to do it. She said she had exactly as many pans as she needed. This made Jamie so upset that eventually she relented, and gave him an old nasty chip pan to turn in.)

  There weren’t any bombs. What there were was German submarines, circling all of England, trying to blow up any ships heading in or out of her harbors.

  This was a big problem, Susan said, because England didn’t grow enough food. Most of the food English people ate was shipped in from other countries. Already there was less food in the shops, and what was there cost more, though Susan said some of that was because the summer was over. We wouldn’t see as many fresh fruits and vegetables until next spring.

  You never saw anyone more interested in fruits and vegetables than Susan. We were all the time having to eat strange things. Brussels sprouts. Turnips. Leeks. Peaches, which I loved, but also prunes, which I didn’t. Prunes came in cans and were slimy going down.

  Every week that went by without bombs, more evacuees returned to London. Even the ones living with Lady Thorton had gone. In the village Lady Thorton fussed about it, but she couldn’t stop parents from sending for their children. “London will be bombed,” she insisted.

  Mam never wrote, so Susan was still stuck with us. When I said so she gave me an odd look. “Your mother’s smart to keep you here, where it’s safer,” she said. “But I wish she’d answer my letters. I find her silence hard to understand.”

  By the start of November so many children had returned to London that Jamie’s teacher left too. His class was combined with the other primary class. His new teacher didn’t think he had the devil in him. She said so. She didn’t care at all if he wrote with his left hand.

  He still wet the bed.

  I thought it was mostly habit by now. Susan had a rubber sheet to protect the mattress, but she was tired of cleaning the regular sheets. I was tired of waking up to the dampness and the smell. Neither of us said so to Jamie. He was ashamed, I knew.

  Lady Thorton wanted Susan to join the Women’s Volunteer Service, the WVS. She came to tea and told Susan she needed her help.

  “No one needs my help,” Susan said. “Besides, I’m busy taking care of these children.”

  Lady Thorton cut her eyes at me. Jamie was at school, but I’d come in from the pasture to have tea. It wasn’t one of my days for helping Fred. “This one doesn’t seem to need much care,” Lady Thorton said.

  “You’d be surprised,” Susan said.

  I felt cross. I didn’t need her. Plus, she still spent part of each day lying around, staring at nothing. I said, “It’s not like you have a proper job.”

  Susan glared at me. Lady Thorton laughed out loud. Then Lady Thorton said, gesturing to the sewing machine still set up in the corner of the room, “We could use you to sew bed jackets for soldiers. All sorts of sewing, actually.”

  Susan shook her head. “You all don’t like me,” she said. “The women in this village never liked me.”

  Lady Thorton pressed her lips together. She set her teacup down. “That’s not true,” she said.

  Susan looked cross. “Don’t be patronizing,” she said. “Becky got along with your set because of the horses, but that’s all.”

  “You never gave anyone a chance,” Lady Thorton said. “Most of the village came to the funeral.”

  “Oh, the funeral! Bunch of nosy busybodies!”

  “I think you should make an effort,” Lady Thorton said. “You might be surprised. And—it’s good to be seen helping the war effort, don’t you agree? This isn’t the time to be isolationist.”

  I had been listening closely. I asked, “What’s that mean?”

  Lady Thorton said, “An isolationist is someone who doesn’t support the war. Someone who wants us to stand apart; someone who doesn’t care about things.”

  I said, “But she doesn’t care about things.”

  Susan looked like I’d slapped her. “How can you say that? Of course I do!”

  I shrugged.

  “Is feeding you three meals a day not caring for you?” she demanded. “No, don’t you look away. You look at me, Ada. When I confronted Jamie’s teacher—wasn’t that caring for him?”

  Who knew she’d get so wound up? I tried to look away, but she put her hand under my chin and turned my face back toward her. “Wasn’t it?” she insisted.

  I didn’t want to answer, but I knew she wouldn’t let go of me until I did. “Maybe,” I said at last.

  She released me and turned back to Lady Thorton, who was looking amused. “I’ll join,” she said.

  As soon as Lady Thorton left, Susan told me off. “What did you mean by complaining that I haven’t got a proper job? What sort of job do you expect me to have?”

  I shrugged. It surprised me, how she could go on buying food without working, even though she did get paid for taking us. “Mam works in the pub,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not doing that,” she said. “I did try to get a job, when I first moved here with Becky. No one would have me. Oxford degree or not. Any position I was qualified for was reserved for men. Can’t have a woman stealing a man’s job, now, can we?”

  I didn’t understand why we were having this conversation.

  “Oh!” she continued. “Me, in the WVS! All those wretched do-gooders! What nonsense.”

  “Why do soldiers need bed jackets?” I asked. I wasn’t sure what a bed jacket was.

  “Who knows,” Susan said. “They’re for hurt soldiers, I’d say. Ones that have to go to hospital.”

  I hadn’t heard of any hurt soldiers. “The ones that get blown up in the ocean fall into the water and die,” I said.

  “I suppose so,” Susan said, shuddering. “But there are different kinds of battles. Some hurt soldiers survive.”

  A few days later Susan got her WVS uniform. She put it on to go to her first meeting. She looked nice in it. She wore st
ockings, and leather shoes with heels. “Quit staring,” she said as she pulled on her gloves. “You could come with me. A junior member. Or perhaps a token evacuee.”

  I shook my head. While she was gone I thought I might try out the sewing machine. Or cook something. The weather was wretched; I didn’t want to ride. “Why are you scared?” I asked her.

  She made a face. “All those proper housewives! I don’t fit in. I never have.”

  “You’ve got the uniform,” I said.

  She made another face. “True. But it’s not the outside that counts, not with that group. Oh, well.” She went away to her meeting.

  I stayed home and broke her sewing machine.

  I didn’t mean to. I’d watched Susan using it, and it looked easy, and all I was trying to do was sew two scraps of fabric together, for a start. But the scraps sucked into the bottom part of the machine, and the needle ran up and down through it anyway. A bunch of thread came out of nowhere, snarling itself into a knot, and then the machine made an awful noise and then the needle snapped in two.

  I took my foot off the pedal. I stared at the tangle of thread and cloth, at the broken stump of the needle. I was going to get in awful trouble. Susan had been sewing every day since she finished our dressing gowns. She’d made herself a dress and made new shorts for Jamie. She loved the sewing machine.

  I couldn’t think what to do. My stomach roiled. I fled upstairs and hid in the spare room, the room still full of Becky’s things. I slid under the bed, deep into the corner. My mind went numb. I started to shake.

  Much later I heard Susan come in the front door. Heard her calling my name, heard Jamie climbing the stairs. He opened the door to our bedroom and shouted, “She’s not up here!”

  “She has to be.” That was Susan’s voice. “Her crutches are right by the stairs.”

  They called my name, over and over. Jamie ran outside. Ran back in. It grew darker. Finally Susan’s face poked under the edge of the bed. “You idiot girl! Why are you hiding?”

  I cringed against the far wall. Susan grabbed my arm and dragged me out. “What’s wrong? Who frightened you?”

  I threw my hands over my head. “I’m not going to hit you!” Susan shouted. “Stop that!”

  Jamie came into the room. “Was it the Germans?” he asked.

  “Of course it wasn’t the Germans,” Susan said. “Ada. Ada!” She had an iron grip on my wrists, pulling my arms down. “What happened?”

  “You’ll send me back,” I said. “You’ll send me back.” All that time under the bed my panic had grown worse and worse. I’d lose Butter. Freedom. Jamie.

  “I won’t send you back,” Susan said. “But you’ll tell me this instant what’s wrong.” She put a finger under my chin. “Look at me. Now, tell me.”

  I looked at her, but only for a second. I squirmed away from her grasp. Finally I gasped, “I broke your sewing machine.”

  Susan sighed. “Look at me,” she said. She tipped my chin up again. “You tried to use my sewing machine?”

  I nodded. Squirmed away. Looked at the ground.

  She tipped my chin up. “And you broke it?”

  I nodded. Looking her in the eye was nearly impossible. “It’s okay,” she said. “No matter what, it’s okay.”

  I couldn’t believe her. It wasn’t going to be okay.

  “You did do something wrong,” she said. “You should have asked me first. But you don’t need to be so afraid. I’m not going to hurt you because you made a mistake. Let’s go see how badly it’s broken.”

  She made me go down the stairs to the living room. The fire was lit and the room was growing warm. It turned out that I’d only broken the needle, not the entire machine. Needles wore out sometimes, Susan said, and you had to replace them anyhow. She had an extra needle, so she took the broken one out and replaced it. Then she removed the snarled mess of cloth and thread. “It really is all right,” she said. “Do you want to see what you did wrong?”

  I shook my head. My stomach hurt so bad. Susan pulled me over anyhow, and showed me how the machine worked, and how I’d needed to lever the needle into place before I started the machine running. “Tomorrow you can practice,” Susan said.

  “No thank you,” I said.

  She pulled me close to her, in a sort of one-armed embrace. “Why did you hide? Why were you under the bed?”

  Jamie had been hovering the entire time. “Mam puts her in the cabinet,” he said, “whenever she’s really bad.”

  “But why put yourself there, Ada? You didn’t have to.”

  So I can stay. SoIcanstaysoIcanstaysoIcanstay.

  “I’m not going to shut you up anywhere, no matter what, okay?”

  “Okay.” My stomach felt awful. My voice sounded very small. I could barely make my mind stay in the room with Susan and Jamie. I said, “I know I have to leave. Please, can Jamie come too?”

  “Ada!”

  Oh no. Ohnoohnoohnoohno. Without Jamie I would die.

  “I’m not going to send you away. Why would I send you away? You made a mistake. A little, small mistake.” Now both Susan’s arms were around me. I tried to squirm free. She held me tighter. “Did you really think I’d send you away?”

  I nodded.

  “Let me tell you something. When I was coming back from my meeting, I was thinking, ‘Maybe Ada will have made some tea.’ I was imagining how you’d have the lights on inside, and the blackout up, and I was thinking how lovely it was to have someone to come home to again. I used to dread going back to an empty house.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t make tea,” I said.

  “That’s not what I’m trying to tell you,” she said. “I’m trying to say that I’m glad you’re here.”

  I couldn’t come down from my panic. It took me most of the night before I could really breathe. Susan made tea, and when I couldn’t swallow any, she didn’t insist. “I half wonder if I ought to give you a slug of brandy,” she said. “You’ll never sleep in the state you’re in.” She made me take a hot bath and she tucked the blankets tight around me. She was right: I lay awake half the night. But eventually I slept, and when I woke up, Jamie and I were still there. I could see Butter out the back window. Susan was frying sausages for breakfast and I could breathe again.

  Not long after that Jamie came home from school carrying the ugliest cat Susan and I had ever seen. Its filthy, matted hair might have been any color at all beneath the dirt. One eye was swollen shut. It glared at Susan and me out of its other.

  “I’m keeping him,” Jamie announced, dumping the cat into the middle of the kitchen. It swished its tail and hissed at us. “His name’s Bovril. He’s hungry.”

  Bovril was a hot drink Susan made for us most nights. It was nasty, but I’d gotten used to it. It had nothing whatsoever to do with cats.

  “You’re not keeping it,” Susan said. “Pick it up at once and put it out. It’s crawling with fleas.”

  “I am keeping it,” Jamie said. He picked the cat up—the cat went limp in his arms. “It’s my onager. My own onager. His name’s Bovril.” He began to go up the stairs.

  An onager was an animal from the Swiss Family Robinson book. Susan said onagers were like donkeys. You could ride them. They were nothing like cats.

  “Don’t you dare take that animal into your bedroom,” Susan yelled after him.

  “I’m not,” Jamie said, “I’m giving him a bath.”

  “Good Lord,” Susan said, to me. “We’ll have to call an ambulance. It’ll scratch him to death.”

  It didn’t. Jamie bathed the mangy cat and drowned its fleas. He brought it back downstairs wrapped in one of Susan’s best towels. He fed it part of his meat from dinner.

  “It’ll hunt for itself after this,” Susan said. “I’m not cooking for a cat.”

  “He’s a good hunter,” Jamie said, rubbing the cat’s head. �
��Aren’t you, Bovril?”

  Every night after that, Jamie fell asleep with Bovril curled in his arms. He never wet the bed again. By the end of the second week Susan was offering Bovril saucers of watered milk. “It’s worth it,” she told me. “Saves me washing all those sheets.”

  Susan tricked me into writing.

  Jamie was practicing his letters at the table in the evening after the dishes were washed. I sat down at my place and watched him. “Show Ada why you’re left-handed,” Susan suggested.

  Jamie grinned. He moved his pencil from his left hand to his right. Immediately the pencil started to skitter across the page. His letters went from small and neat to large and shaky.

  “You’re fooling,” I said, laughing at his grin.

  “I’m not,” he said. “I can’t do it in this hand.”

  “You try,” Susan suggested. “Try your left hand first.” She took a fresh piece of paper and wrote a few letters on it. “Copy that.”

  I tried, but it was impossible. Even when I used my right hand to hold the page steady, my left hand couldn’t control the pencil at all.

  “You’re definitely right-handed,” Susan said. “Move the pencil over, and you’ll see.”

  With my right hand, it was easy. I copied Susan’s letters and they looked almost as good as her own.

  “Well done,” Susan said. “You’ve just written your name.”

  “That’s my name?”

  Jamie looked over my shoulder. “Ada,” he said, nodding.

  Susan took the pencil back. “And this is Jamie,” she said. “And here’s Susan.” Then she gave Jamie the pencil. “Keep on with your work,” she said. “Ada, would you put on some more coal?”

  I put the coal on, but first, when Susan wasn’t looking, I slid the paper into my pocket. I’d borrow a pencil the next time she was out. I’d try it again.

  One afternoon near the end of November when I rode over to help Fred, he met me in the yard with a wide grin. “Come look what I’ve found,” he said. I dismounted, tied Butter’s head, unslung my crutches, and followed him to the door of the tack room. He showed me a strange-looking saddle on a stand. It had a normal seat, and one normal stirrup, but it also had two odd crooked knobs sticking up from the pommel. “It’s a side-saddle,” Fred said. “Must be twenty, thirty years old. Maybe more.”