The War That Saved My Life

by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

  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 helpe
d 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.

  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.

  “Aye,” Fred said, nodding, as though girls rode to him through snowstorms all the time, needing wool. He disappeared into the stables, and I heard him clop up the stairs to the rooms in the loft where he lived. He came down carrying a cloth bag printed in bright flowers. “It’s the missus’s knitting bag,” he said, thrusting it at me. “It’s full of wool. All sorts. You can have it.”