The War That Saved My Life

by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

  Unless, I thought, my blood running cold, he was a spy.

  A spy! I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it. I always looked for spies from the hill. It was a habit. But that didn’t mean, despite the posters, despite the rumors, that I actually expected to ever see a spy. But yet—a single rowboat, so far out—where had he come from? Did he get dropped off by a submarine—a German submarine? If he wasn’t a spy, why was he headed toward the deserted beach?

  I heard Susan’s voice in my head. “Improbable,” it said. That mean not likely.

  Still, it was one of the rules: Report anything suspicious at once. I turned Butter down the face of the hill, weaving through brush and tall grass, trying to keep the little boat in sight. It disappeared from my view as I got lower, and I sped up, cantering along the road that led to the barricaded beach. I stopped Butter in a copse of trees just as the beach came into view.

  It was low tide, and the sand stretched out wide and flat for a mile along the shoreline. Right in the center of the sand, the man stepped from his rowboat. He carried a suitcase and had a rucksack on his back. As I watched, he shoved the rowboat back into the water. The sea was quiet. The boat floated high above the gentle waves, and began to drift sideways, following the shore.

  I swallowed hard.

  The man—an ordinary-looking man, at least from the distance—took something from his rucksack. He unfolded it and used whatever it was to dig a hole in the beach. He put the suitcase into the hole. Covered the hole with sand. Walked cautiously up the sand dunes toward the barbed wire. I couldn’t see what happened next, but suddenly the man was on the other side of the fence, walking down the road toward me.

  I turned Butter and galloped away.

  I could have gone to the airfield, but the police station was closer and I knew where it was: near the school, near the shop where I’d had tea. I kept Butter to a canter even over the cobblestoned main street. I pulled him to a halt at the station, wrapped his reins around the handrail, and hurried up the steps as best as I could. I didn’t have my crutches. “I think I found a spy!” I said to the first person I saw, a portly man seated behind a large wooden desk. “A spy on the beach!”

  The portly man turned toward me. “Get ahold of yourself, miss!” he said. “I can’t understand you the way you’re gabbling.”

  I grabbed the edge of his desk for balance. I repeated my words.

  The man looked me up and down. Particularly down, at my bad foot in its odd homemade shoe. I fought the urge to hide it.

  “How was it you saw this spy?” he asked. He had a little smile on his face. I realized he did not believe me.

  “I was out on my pony—” I began. I told the whole story, the hill where I always kept a lookout, the little boat, the suitcase buried in the sand.

  “On your pony,” the man said, nodding, his smile widening into a smirk. “Watch a lot of newsreels, do you? Listen to the scary stories on the radio?”

  He thought I was lying, or, at best, exaggerating. And now he was staring at my bad foot again. I felt a wave of heat climb up my neck.

  I thought of what Susan would do. I drew myself up, taller, and glared at the man, and I said, “My bad foot’s a long way from my brain.”

  The man blinked.

  I said, “I would like to speak to your commanding officer. The government asks us to report anything suspicious, and that’s what I am going to do. If you won’t listen, I want to talk to someone who will.”

  The second police officer took me more seriously. “We’ll go in the squad car,” he said. “See if we can find him.” He asked if I needed help getting to the car.

  “No, thank you,” I said. I walked as straight as I could manage, even though it hurt like crazy. The officer put me in the front seat beside him and together we started down the road. We’d hardly gotten out of town when we came across the man I’d seen, walking down the road with perfect ease. I pointed him out to the officer.

  “You’re sure?” the officer asked.

  For a moment I wasn’t. I hadn’t really gotten a close look at the man’s face. But he felt like the right person. I nodded. The officer stopped his car and got out. “Papers, please,” he said.

  “Really?” said the man, in perfect English with the accent Lady Thorton used. “Why ever for?”

  “Routine,” the officer said.

  The man raised his eyebrow as if it were all a joke, but reached into his pocket readily enough. He pulled his identity card out of a battered leather wallet. “I’m just on a bit of a walking holiday,” he said, indicating the rucksack on his back. “My ration card’s in there if you want me to fish it out.”

  He could not sound more English. He could not look more English. And yet—

  “Sir,” I said to the officer. He came over to the window on the passenger side, and leaned in.

  “I’m sorry, miss,” he said, shaking his head, “but I think you’ve—”

  I said, “His trouser cuffs are wet. And they’re full of sand.”

  No one went on the beaches anymore. No one ever. It wasn’t allowed.

  The officer’s smile disappeared. For a moment I thought he was angry with me, but I was wrong. The next thing I knew the man from the beach was handcuffed and bundled into the back of the car. He protested vehemently in his perfect English voice.

  Back at the station, patient Butter still stood tied to the porch rail. The officer told me to go on home. “We’ll handle it from here, miss.”

  I wanted to tell Susan, but I wasn’t sure how. I put it off so that I could think about it more. We were halfway through dinner that evening when the police knocked on the door.

  It was my second officer, and another. “We need to speak with your daughter, ma’am.”

  I got up quickly. Susan looked stunned. Jamie looked delighted.

  “We need you to help us locate the buried parcel,” my officer said. So I went again in a squad car, this time all the way to the beach. I showed them where I’d stood with Butter, watching, and I tried to show them where I thought the man had landed with his boat. The tide was high now and everything looked different.

  “We’ll have to get the army to dig it up anyhow,” the other officer said. “For all we know, the beach is mined.” He drove along the edge of the barbed-wire fence. We got out near where I thought the man had gone through, and walked up and down the road until we found a footprint. The officer marked it with a piece of cloth tied to the fence, and then took me home.

  I paused before I got out of the car. “Will you let me know what happens to the man?”

  The officers shook their heads. “It’ll be a secret, miss.”

  “Will you let me know if he really is a spy?”

  They looked at each other, and nodded. “But you’re to stay quiet about it,” one said.

  I nodded. “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” I said. I went in to make my explanations to Susan.

  She was waiting for me on the purple sofa. She listened to the whole story. Then she put her hands on either side of my face. She smiled at me, and she said, “Oh, Ada. I am so proud.”

  The very next afternoon, someone knocked on our door again. It was a police officer—not the one who had helped me, but the fat one who’d sat at his desk and thought I was making things up. “I need to apologize to your daughter, ma’am,” he said. When he saw me, he swept off his hat and bowed. “I should have believed you,” he said. “I’m sorry. A grateful nation thanks you for your service.”

  With great ceremony, he handed me an onion.

  The army had found the suitcase buried in the sand. It contained a radio transmitter, the sort spies used to send coded messages across the channel. The perfect Englishman really had been a spy.

  I became a hero. The RAF men at the airfield brought me chocolate; the WVS women pooled together a tablespoon of sugar each, and gave me a whole bag
. Daisy’s mother from the pub hugged me whenever she saw me, and every time I went into the village I was greeted with smiles and shouts of, “There’s our little spy-catcher!” or “There’s our good lass!”

  It was as if I’d been born in the village. As if I’d been born with two strong feet. As if I really was someone important, someone loved.

  Jamie made me repeat the story over and over again. “Tell me,” he’d beg. “Tell me your hero story.”

  Maggie wrote from her school. Ooh, I wish I’d been with you! I might have been, you know, if I’d been home.

  I wish you had been, I wrote back.

  You wouldn’t mind sharing the honors? she replied.

  I wouldn’t have minded at all. It would have been easier. Hero wasn’t a word I was used to hearing. The admiration was interesting, but the attention made me feel unsettled.

  “Say it again,” Jamie said, giggling. “Tell me what you told the first officer.”

  “He looked at my bad foot,” I said, “and I said, ‘my foot’s a long way from my brain.’”

  “And you were right,” Jamie said.

  “Yes,” said Susan. “She was.”

  Of course, the part that was frightening was that there had been an actual spy. A real spy. Sent to make the invasion easier. When the air raid sirens started up again it was hard not to be very afraid.

  “But you caught him,” Jamie said.

  “I caught one spy,” I said. “One.” The sirens had started earlier than usual that evening, while we were still eating; we’d carried our plates to the shelter with us.

  “An’ now he’s dead,” Jamie said, chewing with his mouth open. “We took him out to a field, lined him up, and pow!” He mimed firing a gun. I flinched.

  “Probably not,” Susan said. “I asked.”

  Jamie narrowed his eyes. “What’d we do, then?”

  “Nobody will say for sure.”

  I picked through the boiled potatoes on my plate. Susan had left the peels on, because peeling potatoes wasted food and we weren’t allowed to waste food in wartime. I didn’t like the peels. England had a lot of potatoes; we were supposed to eat them every day.

  “Probably turned him,” Susan said. “Made him a double agent. That means the government would force him to send false messages back to Germany, with that transmitter of his.”

  “They’d make him tell lies,” I said.

  “Yes,” Susan said.

  Jamie scowled. “I wouldn’t do that. If the Germans caught me—”

  “I would,” I said. “If he doesn’t lie, they’ll shoot him. I’d lie if I had to.”

  Now sometimes the German planes attacked in daylight. If they were far away Jamie and I stood in the field and watched them, shielding our eyes against the sun. The planes looked like swarms of insects buzzing in circles in the sky, until one plummeted, leaving a trail of smoke. From such a distance I couldn’t tell the English planes from the German ones, but Jamie could.

  “One of ours,” he’d say, or, “One of theirs.”

  Sometimes we could see the puff of a parachute opening, as a pilot bailed out. I always hoped for that puff, even when the plane was German.

  Two of the pilots who had come for Christmas dinner had died. When Jamie found out, he cried himself to sleep. I thought of their faces, how they’d laughed and played with Jamie. Unlike Jamie, I hadn’t remembered their names. I’d been too upset, that day, about my green dress.

  I understood why I’d been upset on Christmas. I’d felt overwhelmed; I really couldn’t help myself. But now, thinking back, it seemed a little silly to be unhappy about a dress when the pilots were dead. If I had it to do over, I would at least have learned their names.

  England lost planes every day. Germany lost more. New planes flew into our airfield from the north of England. New pilots came straight from their training fields. They went up every day, and not all of them came back.

  We had to win this battle, Susan said, or we would lose the war. On the radio Prime Minister Churchill said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” It meant the pilots were saving us all. It meant they were the only thing keeping the Germans away.

  September came. I quit attracting so much attention in the village. A week ago British planes had attacked Berlin: The first time we’d taken the war onto German soil. Fred cackled in delight. “We’ll show ’em now.” A small piece of a damaged German plane had come down on the edge of one of Thorton’s wheat fields. Fred gave it to me to take to Jamie.

  “How do you know it’s German?” I asked, turning the scrap of metal over in my hands.

  “I saw the bugger,” Fred said. “He was heading back over the channel, trailing parts of his airplane as he went.”

  It was bad training to let Butter run when he was close to home, but that day I did it. I felt so happy. The sun was warm, I couldn’t see planes or hear sirens, and Jamie would be so pleased to have the chunk of German plane. Butter galloped happily, his ears pricked. I’d been practicing my jumping all summer, and even though Fred hadn’t given me permission yet, I knew we were ready. Instead of slowing Butter for the pasture gate I turned him toward the stone wall, and urged him forward.

  He flew it. We’d jumped the wall at last.

  Across the field I could see Susan standing in the back garden with Jamie and an adult I didn’t know. I kicked Butter on, flying down the field. “Jamie!” I yelled. “I brought you a piece of a Messerschmidt!” I pulled Butter up and patted his neck, laughing. “Did you see us jump?” I asked Susan. “Did you?”

  Then I recognized the woman standing beside her.

  Mam.

  Mam.

  I didn’t know what to think. I steadied Butter in front of the garden wall, my hands on the reins, and looked at her. She looked back at me, shading her eyes with her hand. Her expression, of mingled anger and disinterest, didn’t change. “Hello,” I said.

  She scowled. “Who’re you?”

  She didn’t recognize me.

  I dismounted Butter, landing carefully on my good left foot. I untied my crutches from the back of the saddle and swung myself forward, over the garden wall. “I’m Ada,” I said.

  Her expression turned to outrage as she realized who I was.

  “What the ’ell’s this?” she said. “Just who do you think you are?”

  Jamie was holding Mam’s hand. Jamie looked so hopeful.

  “Coming in on a pony!” Mam said. “Like little Princess Margaret, are you now?”

  “I learned to ride,” I said. “I go sidesaddle so it doesn’t hurt my—”

  Mam thrust a battered envelope under my nose. “And this,” she said. “What’s the meaning of this, eh?”

  I looked. It was one of Susan’s letters. It was her handwriting on the envelope.

  “Want some kind of operation, do you?” Mam said.

  My heart leaped. “They can fix my foot. The doctor said—”

  “Like ’ell they can,” Mam said. “Isn’t nothing going to fix that foot. First I get a letter says now I have to pay the government for taking my kids away, nineteen shillings a week and the government wants me to pay—”

  “No one will make you—” Susan interjected.

  “—and then here’s this. Sent to the wrong place, just got it, I did, and what is it but someone with the bloody cheek to be tellin’ me what to do with my kids. And then here you are, all dressed up, sittin’ on a pony, nose in the air, actin’ for all the world like you’re better than everybody—”

  “No, Mam,” I said.

  “—like you’re better than me.”

  “No, Mam.”

  “Come on,” Mam said. “We’re goin’ home.”

  Susan tried to argue. Mam turned on her and glared. “You’re tellin’ me where I can take my own kids? You? A lazy slut
in a fancy house—” Mam went on from there, telling Susan off every possible way.

  I felt myself grow cold, distant, far from all of them. My mind folded in on itself. But no, I had to stay present, I hadn’t taken care of Butter. I started back to the pasture. “Where do you think you’re goin’?” Mam said.

  “I need to untack Butter. He can’t stay with his saddle on.”

  “Like ’ell! Come back here, we’re catching the next train.”

  I still moved toward Butter. Mam walloped me, caught me straight between the shoulders with a hard blow. I hadn’t expected it, and I flew forward, scattering my crutches and scuffing my palms in the dirt. Jamie cried out. Tears came to my eyes. I’d forgotten what being hit was like. I staggered to my feet.

  “I’ll take care of Butter,” Susan said.

  “C’mon, Ada,” Mam said. She had her hand on Jamie’s neck, so I couldn’t see his face. She marched him toward the side gate.

  “Wait!” Susan said, turning back. “They need their things.”

  “They don’t need nothing,” Mam replied. “Dressed up like toffs. You’ve done them no favors, lettin’ them get above themselves. They don’t need no things, not where they’re goin’.”

  Susan ran into the house anyway. She came out carrying her copy of Swiss Family Robinson. “Take this,” she said to Jamie, thrusting it at him. “It’s yours.”

  Mam eyed the book suspiciously. “He don’t want that,” she said. “What would he do with that?”

  “I don’t want it,” Jamie echoed. His hopeful expression had vanished; he looked petrified. “I don’t!”

  “No,” I said. “He doesn’t.” Don’t make him take it, I silently begged Susan. It’ll be worse for him if you do.

  Susan looked at me. Her face went blank. She slipped the book under her arm. “I’ll keep it for you, Jamie,” she said. “Ada, I’ll take care of Butter. I promise. I won’t let his feet grow long again.”