Sisterland

by Linda Newbery

  ‘So you think he should go on pretending?’

  ‘I think he should wait till he’s sure. Perhaps till he moves away from home. At least wait till he’s eighteen, till he’s more independent.’

  ‘And you?’ Hilly said. ‘Do you think it’s a disgrace to the family? Do you hope he’ll settle down with a nice Muslim girl?’

  ‘I’d prefer him not to be gay, yes. Not because I’m homophobic. I’m not as conservative as my parents. Not as Muslim, either. But Muslim enough not to want it for my brother. If he really is sure, then I’ll have to accept it.’

  ‘That sounds a bit grudging.’

  ‘Maybe. But you don’t see it the same way.’

  ‘Obviously not,’ said Hilly.

  Rashid gave her one of his wry looks. ‘I’d like Saeed to be happy. And that means not jumping feet first into trouble. But I can see you’re not convinced.’

  ‘I’m not sure. All I know is that Reuben was miles happier once his mum and stepdad knew, and stopped expecting him to have girlfriends. But then his parents aren’t so – I mean they’re more – more—’

  ‘Tolerant,’ said Rashid. ‘I think that might be the word you’re looking for.’

  This was what Hilly meant, though she did not say so. The bored-looking girl brought their order, coffee and toasted sandwiches. Rashid passed the sugar bowl; Hilly shook her head. Sitting like this, facing him across the table, was providing a good opportunity to study him. Eyebrows, shapely and expressive. Intelligent dark eyes. A humorous mouth that smiled easily. Skin the colour of – she searched for a comparison. Strong coffee? Wet sand?

  What would it be like to kiss him, be kissed by him? She found herself imagining it most powerfully, while he stirred his coffee; felt herself flushing. Oh, for goodness’ sake – he’s Saeed’s brother! We’re just having a conversation! But all the while they had been talking she had felt an unfamiliar sensation – of being flattered by his interest. He didn’t have to come into the shop. Didn’t have to suggest coming here. He must like me a bit. Mustn’t he? But does he know—

  ‘Look, Rashid,’ she said. ‘I think I’d better tell you about my sister.’

  She talked, he listened. It took some while.

  ‘I know,’ he said when she had finished. ‘Saeed told me.’

  ‘Told you—?’

  ‘About your sister and who she hangs out with. About them harassing him in here.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Your sister,’ said Rashid, ‘sounds a right little cow. If you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘She’s not really.’ Hilly, who had called Zoë far worse, felt a need to defend her. ‘I mean, I’m not making excuses. This isn’t really her. She’s so besotted with this vile Grant character, she can’t see what she’s getting into.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Can she see now? I think so.’ Hilly was less certain than she sounded. ‘But we’re not even on speaking terms, since I—’ Since I shopped her to WPC Jo, was what she meant. But she did not want to say this to Rashid. ‘Since,’ she finished lamely.

  He nodded, sipped his coffee. ‘You put the police on to her, and she had to come up with names? Reuben guessed, when he heard your sister had made a statement.’

  ‘Right. I grassed. Not good for sisterly harmony.’

  ‘I imagine not.’

  Hilly looked up at the clock. ‘I ought to get back.’

  ‘Yes, you ought,’ said Rashid.

  That’s it, she thought. I’ve blown it. He’s not likely to bother with a racist-fancier’s sister, is he? I should have said more. Or maybe I should have said less. But I haven’t told him anything he didn’t already know, have I?

  She stood up, reaching for the bill.

  ‘I’ll get this.’ He snatched it from under her outstretched fingers.

  ‘Shall we split it?’

  ‘No, let me.’ He reached into the back pocket of his jeans. ‘You can pay next time. I don’t want to tread on any feminist principles.’

  ‘Next time?’

  ‘I’m hoping,’ said Rashid, taking a note from his wallet, ‘that there might be a next time?’

  ‘What, in spite of my sister?’

  Rashid looked at her. ‘It’s not your sister I’m interested in.’

  ‘He said that?’ said Tessa, on the phone. ‘That’s it, then. He’s the one. Older than you, brainy, social conscience. What more can you want? Oh, and his own car—’

  ‘You’re leaving out the fact that he’s about to move to Oxford. He’ll meet all sorts of girls with social consciences and brains and looks as well. What hope have I got?’

  ‘He wants to see you, doesn’t he? Don’t put yourself down. Is he as beautiful as Saeed, on top of everything else?’

  ‘Fairly,’ Hilly said, keeping a wary eye on the open door – phone calls were rarely uninterrupted. ‘Well – he’s one of those people you don’t specially notice at first, you just think, He’s OK, and then when you meet them again, and start to look properly, you think, Mmm, yes, he’s lovely, why on earth haven’t I thought so all along – d’you know what I mean?’

  ‘I knew it!’ said Tessa in triumph. ‘You’re in love.’

  ‘Tess! I am not in love,’ Hilly protested. ‘Not after one cup of coffee.’

  ‘Two cups of coffee! There was the one at the hospital. A hospital romance! Like something out of Casualty!’

  ‘Can this be the girl who goes on about fish and bicycles?’

  ‘Some bicycles are more interesting than others, obviously. So when are you seeing him again?’

  ‘Sunday. We’re going to do the Oxford tourist bit.’

  ‘Dreaming spires? Punting on the river? And what does Reuben think of all this?’

  ‘Er … Tessa, if you see Reuben before I do, don’t say anything, OK?’

  ‘What, you haven’t told him? But Reuben knows what kind of conditioner you use and the exact date your next period’s due. Why the secret?’

  ‘It isn’t a secret,’ Hilly said uneasily. ‘I just haven’t told him yet, that’s all.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Night of a Thousand Bombers

  Meanwhile, [Sir Arthur] Harris was impatient to test his techniques on a major city. On May 30th, he assembled every man and plane he could – including half-trained crews and obsolete bombers – and launched the R.A.F.’s first thousand-bomber attack, against Cologne. Reconnaissance reported that six hundred acres of the city were devastated.

  Angus Calder, The People’s War

  After more than two years of war, Sarah had almost forgotten that there had ever been a time without it. She had stopped expecting the war to end. It was the way things were.

  In the first few weeks it had seemed a bit like playing. There were trenches dug in the park and on the big grass area called the Racecourse; people wore all sorts of different uniforms and it seemed for a while that being at war meant marching in the street and parading and holding inspections. Each week, the local paper had photographs: the Salvation Army, the Home Guard, the Women’s Fire Service, all looking proud and selfconscious in their uniforms. There were underground shelters in the town, and lots of people built Anderson shelters in their back gardens. In Lansdowne Terrace and Shoe Lane, where the gardens were too small for Andersons, a line of brick shelters was built down the middle of the street.

  At school, the children had to keep their gas masks with them always; there were gas practices and air-raid drills. More newcomers had arrived at the school, London children. They were called East Enders and they had a different way of talking from the Northampton accents Sarah had become used to. Miss Munson called them evacuees. With children newer than herself and marked out by the way they spoke, Sarah felt less conspicuous. I’m an evacuee too, she told herself. Not refugee. Evacuee sounded less pitiful, less hopeless; evacuees would, eventually, go back home. But do I want to go back home? Sarah wondered. This was home now: Northampton, and Shoe Lane, with Auntie Enid and Uncle Donald. Although s
he could remember what her own parents looked like, she could no longer recall their voices. Her ears were tuned to English.

  Most of the boys at school were obsessed with aircraft. They pretended to be Spitfires in the playground; they fought off Messerschmitts, they engaged in furious dog-fights that invariably ended with the Messerschmitt plunging into the sea or bursting into flames. Often real aircraft were seen flying overhead. Lots of new airfields had been built around Northampton, Uncle Donald said, mostly for training. The main action was elsewhere. All through the first summer it had been farther south, in Kent and Sussex, the brave little Spitfires and Hurricanes fighting off the invaders. In autumn and winter the Luftwaffe changed its tactics, and bombed London. Coventry was bombed too, and Exeter, but mainly London. People spoke in shocked voices of the East End on fire, of St Paul’s Cathedral rising above the flames. Would the Luftwaffe reduce the whole city to rubble? Then what?

  ‘Your lot’ll be here soon,’ Frank Surman yelled at Sarah in the playground. ‘We’ll all have to speak Kraut.’

  But if the Germans came here—

  ‘They must not come! There would be another Kristallnacht, an English one,’ Helga predicted. ‘And we will be refugees again – no! It must not happen!’

  Sarah knew now that Kristallnacht, the night of breaking glass, was the name for that night that loomed so horribly in her mind, the night the bad men had come into the flat and taken her father away. Sometimes still she had dreams about them, the men in black uniforms who had stomped up the stairs and stood there looking around with disdain. One of them had swept his arm along the mantelpiece, knocking all the ornaments to the floor, and while Mutti had cried out with indignation the men had only laughed. Home, Sarah’s home, where she had lived all her life, was suddenly as fragile as a doll’s house, to be smashed by these cruel men for amusement. She had thought at the time that it was only her own home and those of her neighbours, but she knew now that it had been a terrible night of smashing and beating and burning. On that night, Helga had told her, the Jews of Germany knew that Herr Hitler and the Third Reich thought of them as less than human. ‘To them we were rats. Vermin,’ Helga said. ‘That is all we were. But here we are people again.’

  Sarah had been lucky. Her father had come home again, a few days later. She saw the change in him – he looked smaller, shrunken, with eyes that stared and jumped in his head. ‘Where did you go? Where did they take you?’ Sarah had pestered him, but all he would say was that it was a business matter. The SS had wanted to see him about a business matter. And a short while after, they had come for him a second time, wanting to do more business, and Sarah had never seen him again.

  She understood now that Mutti had kept the truth from her, thinking she was too young. Where was Mutti now? Vati? Where was Rachel? Where was safety?

  It wasn’t in France, she knew that. The German army was there now, and France was an extension of Germany. Rachel’s flight had not been far enough. Auntie Enid and Uncle Donald stopped talking about Rachel.

  Sarah had decided to make herself invisible. Luckily, Sarah wasn’t a name that drew attention to itself in England – unlike Helga. She worked hard at losing her German accent. She copied the local children’s sayings, listened to the way they pronounced their words; seasoned her language with Cockney. She could make Auntie Enid and Uncle Donald laugh by coming out with an almost perfect bit of gor’blimey, overheard in the playground and practised in her bedroom.

  Helga had gone up to the seniors now. Sarah had a new friend, a girl called Patsy in her own class, and although she saw Helga sometimes she no longer regarded her as her best friend. Helga was too Jewish, too German. ‘Speak in German!’ Helga urged, when Sarah obstinately spoke only English. ‘We must speak German! Yes, it is the language of Herr Hitler, but it is also our language. How are we going to speak to our mothers and fathers when we see them again, if we no longer speak the same language?’

  ‘Will we see them again? You said we wouldn’t,’ Sarah pointed out.

  ‘We must hope. We must always hope. We must not abandon them. We must keep the faith.’

  Sarah didn’t know what faith was. To have faith meant to be disappointed.

  Meanwhile there were the air-raid sirens and the bombings. ‘Don’t you worry. Northampton’s not important enough for them to bother with,’ Uncle Donald said confidently. ‘I bet we’ll hardly use those shelters.’ But there were nights spent huddled with the neighbours in the narrow brick buildings, listening to the ominous pause before an explosion, and wondering how much nearer it could get before the whole of Shoe Lane was smashed to rubble.

  Duston was hit, and a school in Rushden (a school! That provoked a thrill of could-have-been-me excitement, especially when the local paper reported that seven children had been killed) and St Andrew’s Hospital partially demolished. In the summer there was great excitement when a Stirling bomber crashed in Gold Street – at night, fortunately – smashing several shop fronts and leaving a trail of debris. The pilot was killed, but the rest of the crew baled out successfully. Patsy’s uncle, cycling home after his firewatching shift, fractured a leg when he was blown sideways by the blast; amazingly, he was the only civilian casualty. ‘Pity it weren’t one of Jerry’s kites,’ grumbled the boys in Sarah’s class. ‘I’d like a bit off a Messerschmitt or a Dornier.’

  Sarah wondered how all the boys were suddenly so expert in aircraft recognition. To her all aeroplanes were dangerous, especially if even Allied planes could plough without warning into town streets. She imagined the men who flew them – whether boys in blue or members of the more sinister Luftwaffe – as strong-jawed heroic types like the ones in the boys’ comic books, until Philip Baines’s brother came into school to give a talk, and stood in the assembly hall looking nervous and very young in his new uniform. He twisted his cap in his hands all the while he was talking, and had a slight stammer. By the end of his talk, Patsy was in love with him and said she was going to give all her pocket money to the Air Force Fund.

  Uncle Donald spoke proudly of someone called Bomber Harris. ‘He’ll turn the tables on Jerry, wait and see if he don’t. All these bombers aren’t being built for nothing.’

  First there were the Dam Busters. Then the Thousand Bomber Raid.

  The target was Cologne. Köln. Home.

  BOMBER COMMAND VICTORY, COLOGNE IN FLAMES, said the stands outside the newsagent’s. THE NIGHT OF A THOUSAND BOMBERS.

  Weeping inside, Sarah went to school exactly as usual. She said nothing to anyone, not even to Patsy. At playtime she went and cried secretly in the outside toilets, which smelled of wee and disinfectant. When she came back to the classroom she pretended that it was hay fever making her eyes red and her nose runny.

  Cologne. Köln. Home. What hope was there for Mutti and Vati? Bullied by Hitler’s SS, now threatened from the sky by the RAF. Sarah pictured the night sky full of bombers, patterning the darkness, wing-tip almost touching wing-tip. They would have dropped their bombs like spawning fish: deadly spawn that ignited fires and turned whole streets to rubble. How could anyone survive? She thought of her road, Lindenstrasse, named for its tall lime trees that filled the air with intoxicating scent in July. The lime flowers brought bees in such numbers that she liked to pretend the whole tree was humming. Once, she and Rachel had exclaimed over bees that lay drunk on the pavement, sated with nectar. She thought of the baker’s shop in Königstrasse, where Frau Klemper handed over breakfast rolls still warm from the oven. She thought of the cathedral, the market with its gaily-coloured stalls, the school two streets from home which she had attended until the new law said that Jewish children must go to separate schools. What was left? Any of it? None of it?

  ‘Oh, love.’ Auntie Enid understood why Sarah was downcast, refusing to speak. ‘Perhaps they’re not in Cologne, your mum and dad. Perhaps they’re somewhere else.’

  Somewhere else. Not somewhere safe, because nowhere in Germany was safe. And nowhere in France was safe for Rachel.

/>   We are refugees after all, Sarah thought, clutching a sodden hankie. All of us. Mutti, Vati, Rachel, me. Scattered in our different countries. Evacuees might go back, but not us. Where is there to go back to?

  ‘We must never give up hope,’ Helga said, with what was beginning to sound like obstinacy. ‘We must keep the faith, and then the faith will keep us.’

  Every time, though, every time Sarah admitted to the smallest stirring of hope, it was squashed by some new development, like a beetle under an SS boot. It was safer not to hope at all. Not to think.

  The only indulgence she allowed herself was to look at the photographs kept in the drawer of her bedside table. Rachel. Rachel and Sarah in the garden. The smiling faces came from another life, one she might have dreamed about, filled with gardens and picnics and humming bees, and skies empty of bombers.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Looking for Rachel

  Memory behaves strangely in the mind of a person with Alzheimer’s. Some may seem to have lost their power of recall, but just as frequently an Alzheimer’s sufferer may be quite overwhelmed by memories.

  Denise Lombard, Living with Alzheimer’s

  ‘So how does it feel,’ Rose said in the car, ‘being in the sixth form?’

  ‘OK. Much the same as before, only it’s nice to have smaller classes and free periods,’ said Hilly.

  ‘Remind me to fill in that form for you when we get in,’ said Rose, ‘about the history trip to Berlin. That sounds fascinating, I must say.’

  ‘Yes – it’s ages to wait though, not till next Easter.’ Hilly waited for her mother to pull out at the busy Sixfields roundabout before remarking, ‘I thought Dad wanted you to have a complete break today? Go out and enjoy yourself. Get away from everything at home. This isn’t what he meant.’

  ‘But it needs doing,’ said her mother. ‘I’ll feel better if we’ve at least made a start. We can’t put it off for ever.’

  Making a start meant beginning to sort out Heidigran’s house in Banbury; today was the first step, bagging up things for the Oxfam shop. Unwanted clothes, books, clutter. ‘It’ll make it easier,’ said Rose, ‘when we eventually do clear the place for selling, if we’ve already got rid of redundant stuff.’