In November 1940, my polite English accent came in useful.
I was fifteen years old and both my parents were killed in a single month by German explosives, Mummy in an air raid and Daddy in a sea battle, thousands of miles apart. My school closed because of the Blitz even before Mummy was killed, but I was old enough that I didn’t need to stay in school anyway. Now I was stuck by myself in Mummy’s rented attic room surrounded by falling bombs. Our elderly landladies looked in on me and made sure I didn’t starve, but all I did in the first shocked horrible weeks after Mummy’s death was bury my nose in books whose orphaned heroines got happy endings.
I reread A Little Princess, Jane Eyre, and Anne of Green Gables, but my literary friends began to feel disappointing. They didn’t have to cope with air raids. Nobody was rude to them for being foreign. Sara Crewe was born in India and spoke Hindustani, but she still looked English. When people shooed her away it wasn’t because she was brown.
I had a bit more money than Sara Crewe or Jane Eyre or Anne Shirley, that was true. There was twenty-five pounds in Mummy’s post office account. But it wouldn’t last forever. I had to have something to do when it ran out, or I would end up living in an air-raid shelter on an Underground platform. The only person I could go to was Granny Adair, Daddy’s mother in Jamaica, and how was I going to get back to Jamaica, past the U-boats and destroyers? The City of Benares, full of evacuated children, was torpedoed by a German submarine in September!
I knew I couldn’t go back. We’d moved to England when I was twelve, and I knew, because of the dustbin of rubbish true facts in the back of my head, that I could not live with Granny Adair. I’d have to earn my keep there by picking up stones in her tiny field of sugarcane, or herding her goats. At best, taking in washing, which in the Jamaica bush means scrubbing sheets in the river and walking six miles with a laundry basket on your head. Three years in London had ruined me for such a life. No, if I am honest, it was Mummy’s fault, with music lessons and library books and her pretty tailored suits. Even in our Jamaican bungalow we’d had a piano and a veranda and a little garden of English roses. And we left Kingston because Mummy was afraid of the workers’ strikes and the Caribbean riots. Daddy grew up in the bush, but he went to sea when he was fifteen.
At fifteen! My age in November 1940. You can do that if you’re a boy – even a West Indian boy can do that. The rules won’t let any kind of girl do that. And I was a West Indian girl.
What can a West Indian girl do at fifteen?
A girl whose parents are both killed by enemy action and who burns, burns to fight back? A schoolgirl with no skills who stands in the street watching the vapour trails of the fighter planes and wants to be up there with them so badly that it hurts?
Some of those children on the City of Benares were rescued from the sea. They were the ones who hung on, who fought to stay awake in the cold water and who wouldn’t let go of the wreckage that kept them afloat.
I am like those children. Not the ones who sank. The ones who fought.
Rules are made to be broken, Mummy always told me. She believed that you can get away with breaking rules if you are polite about it, and underneath her cultured British charm my mother was the boldest of rule-breakers, a white Englishwoman who married a black Jamaican. But she was carefully polite. That’s how she got around our landladies in London, with harp music and flute music and smart, stylish hats. Mummy had always been there to protect me from the rules. Now I was going to have to break them on my own.
I had to find work. At my age it wasn’t going to be war work, but I had to pay rent and buy food. Sensible positions such as ‘salesgirl in record shop’ and ‘music teacher’s assistant’ weren’t the answer because time and again people made it clear they didn’t want to hire someone with a tropical complexion, even a pale one – light brown, dark brown, it was all the same to the English. ‘The Caribbean sun makes people lazy,’ explained one well-meaning person as she turned me away.
And Mummy had trained me so carefully to be polite that I thanked her as I left.
Afterwards I sat on a bench by the Serpentine and cried.
But then I found Nancy Campbell’s notice in the newspaper. Her old aunt Jane needed someone to look after her; I had to ring a number in Scotland to ask about it. And that was perfect, because over the telephone I was able to get around the rules by invisibly using my most practical, useful skill – my polite English accent.
I was surprised at how quickly my plan worked. Nancy Campbell, whoever she was, seemed ready to snap me up straightaway.
‘You must be tidy, and able to make travel arrangements by yourself,’ she told me. ‘I’ll send the rail fare if you’re willing.’
It seemed too good to be true.
‘But haven’t you other people applying as well?’ I asked.
‘I’ll accept the first suitable candidate who wants the position. I’ve lost count how many lasses have rung me, then changed their minds – oh, twenty, at least. No one wants to be seen with Aunt Jane, and that’s the truth.’
‘Is she West Indian?’ I blurted, before I could stop myself.
‘No,’ said the Scotswoman. ‘She’s German.’
German!
‘She’s suspected of being a risk to national security,’ the woman on the phone continued grimly. ‘She has to be collected from an alien detainment camp on the Isle of Man.’
A risk to national security in an alien detainment camp!
Worrying I’d hang up on her, Mrs Campbell rushed to give me more information. ‘My aunt’s what they call “category C”, a low-risk prisoner. She broke her hip last summer, hillwalking at eighty-two, silly woman! She needs help getting about. Not heavy lifting, just minding … and keeping her out of my way, to be honest. I have the pub to manage, and I can’t look after an invalid. Aunt Jane is far too old to be locked up like a criminal anyway, though that’s her own fault for lying about her age – she told the policemen who arrested her that she was sixty! And how she pulled off such a devilish falsehood, I can’t tell you. I’ve a mind she wanted to be arrested – attention-seeking Jezebel! But the government’s releasing quite a few folk they detained earlier this year. Most of them are Jewish and not Nazis at all, and people aren’t happy about imprisoning folk the way the Germans do.’
Mrs Campbell paused for breath.
‘Why did they arrest her?’ I asked cautiously. ‘Besides her being German?’
‘She was a telegraphist. She worked five years in a wireless exchange in Berlin when she was a girl, sending Morse code, before she became an opera singer.’ Mrs Campbell added hastily, ‘But that was more than sixty years ago, in the 1870s. Before the telephone – plenty of young ladies did the same! It’s not as if she was Mata Hari, taking messages and spying in the Great War!’
A telegraphist and an opera singer! Morse code! I thought the old woman might turn out to be quite interesting. And I wasn’t scared of an old woman, even if she was German. I liked old women. I liked our landladies, who were kind to me when Mummy and Daddy were killed. I liked Granny Adair.
Mrs Campbell elaborated, ‘Aunt Jane’s no blood relation, you understand. She’s my father’s brother’s wife. They lived a wicked bohemian life, Uncle John and Aunt Jane, in the last century – Berlin, Vienna, Paris. She was famous the world over, to hear her tell it. Her real name is Johanna von Arnim, though she’s Jane Warner now.’
‘How is she? Can she walk?’ I tried to think of any information I needed before the money for the phone call ran out. ‘Did she live alone before she broke her hip?’
‘Yes, she had a flat in London,’ said Mrs Campbell. ‘Uncle John had a long lease on it which expired ten years ago, and afterwards the landowner rented it to them year to year. But Uncle John’s dead now, and Aunt Jane’s let the flat go and has no place to live. At eighty-two! What am I to do with an eighty-two-year-old invalid who’s made her living in music halls – put her behind the bar? Oh – and you must be quiet about her being German. The pu
b is next to a Royal Air Force base, and the bomber lads often come here when they’re not in the air.’
‘Does your aunt speak English?’ I asked.
Nancy Campbell huffed at the other end of the telephone line. ‘Aye, did I not say? She married a Scotsman – they kept a London flat for fifty years! Of course she speaks English.’
I took the job over the telephone without the desperate Nancy Campbell seeing me. She was easily persuaded when I told her that Mummy had been a music teacher, and that I could play the flute and the piano. Mrs Campbell thought her operatic auntie would like to have a musical companion.
So I filled a pasteboard suitcase with books and sheet music, and a larger one with all the winter clothes I could cram into it. I said goodbye to the landladies at Number 88, Gibraltar Road, in Tooting. Then I started on my first journey all alone across the British Isles.
That journey passed in a swirl of November leaves and rain outside moving windows: train to Liverpool, overnight ferry to the Isle of Man, and another train to Rushen Camp, grey and wet, in a seaside town surrounded by barbed wire. I kept my nose in a book or pressed against the window the whole way, being polite to everyone, ignoring the stares, avoiding looking at anybody – just the way Mummy had always done when we went out together.
The prison guards were social workers, Society of Friends volunteers, they said. A young woman wearing a patched cardigan, with her hair tied back in a school ribbon, led me up the stairs in a Victorian guest house converted into barracks. ‘Are you from East Africa, perhaps? You do speak English very well. Was it difficult to pick up?’
She was as nice as possible, but annoyed me by asking the same old stupid questions, which I answered politely as usual.
‘I’m from Jamaica. My mother was English.’
‘Oh, Jamaica, even further! Don’t you mind the cold? Here we are.’
She didn’t give me a moment to answer about whether I minded the cold or not. She knocked and opened a door.
‘On you go.’ She waved me ahead of her.
I stepped into the room and came face to face with Johanna von Arnim.
The old woman sat swaddled in a mothy wool blanket. There were no curtains in her small room, which was filled entirely by the chair and bed and wardrobe. The window glass was slabbed with dark blue paint and tape because of the blackout, so that German bombers wouldn’t see a light on the ground at night. The window was open to let in daylight, and the air inside was as cold and damp as outside.
Johanna von Arnim stared at the Friends volunteer with cool, pale blue eyes. Then she turned those eyes on me, and they widened in surprise.
I held my breath, ridiculously expecting her to say something in German.
Instead, she sang an English singing game.
‘“Who shall we send to take her away?”’
Her voice was amazing. It was a rich, fruity mezzo-soprano, perhaps a little quavery with age, but not at all weak or thin. The song filled the room. When she stopped singing, the air seemed to hum with the memory of it.
I used to play ‘Nuts in May’ too, outside my primary school in Jamaica, holding hands with my friends in a circle beneath the Bombay mango tree. So I sang to her in reply.
‘“You’ll have Miss to take you away!”’
My own voice embarrassed me. It sounded like a tin whistle following a golden flute.
The old woman’s parchment skin crinkled around those pale blue eyes into a silent laugh.
‘Here I am,’ I said. I held out my hand for her to shake.
‘Which corner of the British Empire do you come from, my dusky maid?’ she asked, shaking hands politely.
‘Jamaica. I grew up in Kingston,’ I said. ‘My mother was English.’
I waited for her to compliment my English or ask me if I was cold, but she surprised me.
‘Is that a flute you’re carrying?’ she asked. ‘Do you play?’
I’d left my cases at the camp headquarters, but I had the flute on its strap over my shoulder. ‘A bit,’ I said cautiously.
Mummy would have told her I didn’t like to practise. I didn’t want to admit this right away to a professional opera singer. Or to the only person who’d started out by showing as much interest in my flute as in the colour of my skin.
‘Frau von Arnim, this is Louisa Adair.’ The woman from the camp office introduced us. ‘Louisa can help you pack.’
‘I don’t want help packing,’ said Frau von Arnim. ‘My things are my own business. But I shall need assistance to get to the bank to collect my furs.’
‘Your furs are at the bank?’ I echoed.
‘Yes, of course, we’re not allowed locks. I don’t trust that damned Nazi Ella Fiesler across the passage, and there are three children downstairs who stain everything they touch. They’re not Nazis – they’re just children. I cannot keep their sticky paws off my gramophone. If that martinet of a commander would allow us to listen to the radio they might be less trouble, but as it stands, my gramophone is the only entertainment in the house. Open the wardrobe – you’ll see. Go on, girl, don’t stand there staring.’
Not only could she speak English, but her English was flawlessly proper. She sounded like a radio announcer. Like a duchess. Like the Queen.
She watched me as a cat watches a bird, hungrily. I opened the wardrobe.
There was the gramophone, and next to it was a stack of records higher than my knees. Gowns bloomed like hibiscus and oleander on the rail, pushed to the back so she could reach the gramophone.
‘Well, Louisa, now you’ve met Johanna von Arnim, help her to her feet,’ said the young woman from the camp headquarters. I thought she must be evaluating me.
I clasped Frau von Arnim by the forearms and braced my heels while she pulled herself up. She was a good deal heavier than she looked.
‘The coat, and then the sticks – ugh, dreadful things, I look like an old spider,’ said Frau von Arnim. ‘And my bag beneath the pillow. The passbooks are behind the notes for one of the Django Reinhardts, I forget which.’
‘Pardon?’
‘In the record album,’ she explained impatiently. ‘At the bottom, beneath the frocks. That damned Nazi Ella Fiesler would never pick up a jazz record.’
Frau von Arnim got down the stairs by herself. I was relieved that she could manage stairs, but goodness, they seemed to take forever – she did them one at a time. The volunteer and I came down behind her. I carried her walking sticks, wondering if I should have gone first to break her fall if she went plummeting forward.
‘You must have very strong arms,’ I said.
‘I have, girl,’ she agreed.
And then a long plod to the bank, where we collected a mountain of furs. The Society of Friends woman came with us, watching how I got on. Frau von Arnim, frowning with hostility, examined each piece of fur and signed for it.
‘I shall be withdrawing my savings, as well,’ she announced with queenly pomp.
That was more complicated, and the bank manager took her into a private room to sort it out.
This left me alone with the detainment camp volunteer.
She grasped my arm and pulled me away from the bank manager’s office. She glanced about to be sure none of the clerks were listening, and then she spoke to me quickly, with her voice carefully lowered.
‘Thank you for coming for Frau von Arnim,’ she said. ‘She should have been released over a month ago, and frankly she ought never to have been sent here in the first place. It really is too bad! She’s well aware of why it’s taken so long for her niece to find someone to help her travel. There’s nothing worse than knowing nobody wants you.’
I nodded. I thought I understood that.
‘Do keep a careful eye on her, won’t you?’ said the social worker. ‘That fall she had on the cliffs was providential, if you ask me. We think she was planning to throw herself over the top when she made it to the edge.’
It took me a moment to realise she was serious.
Oh, he
avens, did Nancy Campbell know that about her aunt? If she did, she’d been a bit secretive about it.
‘Frau von Arnim has always been very unhappy here,’ the camp volunteer explained, seeing my wary expression. ‘The Rushen Camp women are allowed to go about the town freely, to the shops and the cinema and such, but Frau von Arnim would keep doing things we had to put a stop to. Bathing in the sea naked – at her age! Playing records at three o’clock in the morning, purposefully hiding library books when they were due to be returned. Tossing out other people’s post! She’d say it was an accident, but she always picked out the ones belonging to people she didn’t like. And then there would have to be consequences, so she wasn’t allowed on the beach, or to the library, or to speak to the postman, and we had to move her three times in four months, and her gramophone got taken away for a bit … just constant scrapping with everybody. And it always ended in us having to treat her more and more like – like—’
I was sure she was going to say more like a prisoner, but she surprised me.
‘More and more like a very elderly woman indeed.’
The social worker paused. She had me by the arm, as if she expected me to try to escape. She searched my face, no doubt wondering if I understood her.
I thought of Frau von Arnim’s whacking great lie about her age. I put that together with what I’d seen of her in the past hour: stubborn, independent, regal and elegant, with a voice like a nightingale and a cupboard full of jazz records. She was still looking for adventure. Perhaps when she was arrested she imagined a few nights in prison before someone discovered how old she was – perhaps she imagined she would charm her guards with song, and then there might be outraged news headlines about her brave spirit and the injustice of her arrest, and people would remember her operatic past. Retired, perhaps, but not old.
A rule-breaker, just like Mummy.
Just like me.
‘And now that she can’t walk properly, of course she does have to be treated like an old woman,’ the social worker finished.
‘I expect she’ll cheer up once she’s off the island,’ I said.
The Enigma Game Page 2