Wait for Me

by Caroline Leech

  “You gave him his dinner?” Lorna was startled.

  “Of course I gave him his dinner.” Mrs. Mack looked perplexed. “Why wouldn’t I? The lad has to eat if he’s expected to do a day’s work. Or should I be giving him gruel like he was in the workhouse? And a hunk of stale bread every Friday if he’s very lucky? Oh my goodness, but you’re a hard one.”

  “I’m not hard, I just don’t see why . . .”

  Mrs. Mack was looking at her steadily, one eyebrow raised as if Lorna’s words were simply proving her coldheartedness.

  “So where is he now?” Lorna asked instead.

  “They went over the back field after dinner,” Mrs. Mack replied, turning back to stir the stew. “One of the heifers got herself hooked onto the fence. And our Nellie’s getting the cows in for milking. She’ll likely be in begging a cup of tea before you can say ‘Where’s the shortbread?’”

  Sure enough, within minutes, Lorna heard the lowing of the dairy cows as they shuffled toward the milking parlor, as they did morning and night.

  Lorna went to the back door. Nellie was stamping along behind the cattle.

  Like Nellie, dozens of Land Girls were working on farms around East Lothian, doing the farmwork left by men called up to fight. When she’d first arrived from London, aged eighteen, Nellie had never even seen a cow before, but soon it was like she had been born into farming. Not only was she now a trained tractor mechanic, more importantly, Nellie had beguiled the cows into their best milk production in years and was clearly happier in Aberlady than she had ever been in London.

  Petite but buxom, Nellie was definitely the only Land Girl that Lorna had met who could wear the uniform of a thick green sweater and beige jodhpurs without looking like she was hiding a sack of potatoes up her shirt. And Nellie used her curves to great effect, by all accounts, in the pubs and dance halls on her nights off. She flirted unashamedly with local men and visiting servicemen alike and openly admitted that she was looking for someone who could offer her a better life after the war than she’d had at home in London before it.

  When Nellie caught sight of Lorna through the kitchen window, she waddled over as fast as she could in rubber boots at least two sizes too big for her tiny feet.

  “So what do you think?” Nellie said in a loud whisper.

  “About what?”

  “About the new chap, duckie. Didn’t you see him?”

  Lorna pretended not to understand.

  “For Gawd’s sake,” said Nellie, “that new young lad, the German, with the face, you know. That poor boy. What a mess! I could scarcely look at the poor blighter.”

  Lorna couldn’t think how to reply, but Nellie didn’t seem to need her to.

  “I don’t know about you,” Nellie continued, “but I’ll be locking my bedroom door at night, I will, if they’re going to let these Jerries roam around the place.”

  “They’re not roaming around,” said Lorna, unreasonably irritated even though she’d been thinking the same thing, “and he’s not going to be here at night. He’ll go back to the camp at night to be locked up again. At least, that’s what they said.”

  “Fingers crossed they keep those gates locked tight then, eh?” Nellie said. “I’ve been quite happy up to now keeping as far away from German soldiers as I can get.”

  She wandered back toward the milking parlor, slapping the trailing cows on their rumps to speed them up.

  “Good to know there’s one kind of soldier you’d stay away from, Nellie,” Lorna muttered to herself as she walked back to the kitchen.

  The next morning, as Lorna cleared up the breakfast dishes, the dogs began barking at an approaching truck. Knowing it must be dropping off the prisoner from Gosford, Lorna rushed to put her coat on and grab her schoolbag. She needed another look.

  The yard was murky as Lorna pulled the door shut behind her. The blackout curtains ensured no light escaped into the yard, and the early sun had not yet broken through the clouds that had rolled in overnight. As she put her gloves on, Lorna heard the cows stamping and Nellie cursing in the milking parlor.

  The truck’s tailgate slammed, and around the back of the truck came the German boy, an excited flurry of sheepdogs around his knees. He bent over and rubbed the dogs’ necks.

  Traitors! They didn’t greet her like that anymore.

  Even in this light, it was clear he was young for a soldier, barely older than some of the lads at school, so maybe eighteen? Nineteen at most. The knitted hat he wore over his shaved head was pulled lower on the left side, and his uniform was hidden now under some brown coveralls. Familiar brown coveralls, with an elbow patch and a torn pocket.

  Lorna recognized them suddenly as Sandy’s. Had the prisoner stolen them? No, that was silly, he wouldn’t be wearing them around the farm if he had. Which meant that her dad, or perhaps Mrs. Mack, must have given them to him. What right did they have to give away her brother’s belongings when he was gone? And to a German, no less.

  As he walked toward the barn, he rubbed his hands together, his fingers fine-boned, almost delicate. Not the hands of a farmer, and certainly not hands that were used to the frigid air of Scotland in February. Lorna noticed he had no gloves, so at least Dad or Mrs. Mack hadn’t given him a pair from the boys’ bedrooms. The enemy didn’t deserve to be warm, no matter what Mrs. Mack said, and no matter what injuries he’d suffered.

  He stuffed his hands deep into his pockets and hunched his shoulders up to his ears. He looked . . . was forlorn the right word?

  In spite of herself, Lorna suddenly felt almost sorry for him.

  As the truck reversed, she stepped out of the shadows, her school shoes clicking on the cobblestones. The German saw her, and for a second or two, neither of them moved.

  A frown creased the skin on the right side of his forehead, and as before, Lorna found herself mesmerized by the dreadful damage to his face.

  Then embarrassment overcame fascination, and Lorna looked down at her shoes, still muddy from the day before. When she looked up, the frown had smoothed out, but the tug at the right side of his mouth was there again. That same sneer. Except, today, it did look more like he was trying to smile. Tentative, perhaps, but still, it lightened his face, filling out the gaunt flesh of his right cheek, though the left remained tight and static. He gave her a nod, and instinctively, Lorna nodded back, feeling suddenly shy.

  Why should she feel shy, though? It was her farm, after all, and he was the stranger. She needed to be assertive.

  “Good morning,” she said, raising her voice as her father had done. “I. Am. LORNA. ANDERSON.”

  She drew out the sounds of her name, making every letter clear. She pointed her finger to her chest.

  “Hello,” the boy said, touching his own coveralled chest with one long finger. “I. Am. PAUL. VOGEL.”

  He pronounced his words as clearly as she had, almost mimicking her. His English words were clipped and short.

  “Hello,” Lorna replied.

  He bowed his little bow again.

  “Em . . .” Realizing she wasn’t sure what to say next, she hoped the poor light might cover the flush that was creeping up her neck.

  The German stayed silent. Clearly he was waiting for her to speak. There was no sign of the smile now. But none of the frown either.

  “Em . . . ,” she repeated, glancing up at the lightening sky.

  When she looked back at him again, his gaze was intent upon her and the smile was back, drawing Lorna’s attention away from the burns. Its curve led her from his mouth up to his eyes, which sparkled.

  Lorna suddenly felt furiously guilty about noticing that. Surely noticing an enemy’s sparkle was tantamount to treason. She was betraying John Jo and Sandy and Gregor and all the others by even noticing such a sparkle, wasn’t she?

  And anyway, what right did this prisoner have to be smiling and sparkling at her?

  At that moment, “Yoo-hoo!” rang across the yard. Mrs. Mack appeared through the gates to the lane, carrying as always
her big carpetbag and waving her umbrella at them before heading toward the house.

  Lorna straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin.

  “I have to go to school now,” she said slowly, pointing imperiously in the direction of the village and then at her school tie. “To school.”

  The prisoner nodded.

  “Ja,” he said, “zur Schule.”

  She nodded. “Yes, to shool, I mean, school.”

  He smiled again, or at least, that’s what it looked like. “I hope that you have a very good day, Fräulein Anderson, and that your teachers are not too . . . strict?”

  He spoke slowly and deliberately, seeming to taste each word, and his voice lifted at the end as if to question whether he had used the right word.

  Lorna stared at him.

  “You speak English!”

  “Yes, a little.”

  “But why didn’t you say so?”

  “Because you did not ask. And I do not speak it well. But I will become better perhaps. Yes?”

  “Yes, of course . . . em . . . I mean, no.” Lorna swallowed and tried again. “I mean your English is very good, and I’m sure it will get better, while you’re here, talking, with my dad. Though he speaks Scottish English, really, not English English.”

  Lorna knew she was babbling, so she stopped talking before she said anything else embarrassing. But then there was silence, and Lorna hated silences.

  “So did you learn English at school?”

  “No. My uncle is a farm . . . a farmer . . . in Germany. The wife of my uncle is—or was—an English lady, and I take my holidays on the farm with him when I was a schoolboy. So I give help to my uncle with the sheep and my aunt gives me, gave me, lessons to speak English.”

  Although he looked frustrated at having to correct his grammar, Lorna had no problem understanding him. Then something else struck her.

  “So yesterday, when the sergeant who brought you here said you . . . called you . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to repeat it. “That is, you understood him?”

  The German shrugged.

  “I have heard more . . . worse, I think,” he said.

  From somewhere came a sharp whistle. The dogs’ ears pricked and they pelted toward the sound, vanishing around the corner of the barn.

  “I think that your father calls to me also,” said Paul. “Auf Wiedersehen, Fräulein Anderson. Good-bye.”

  He raised his hand in a wave, and without thinking, Lorna repeated the gesture.

  Stop! He shouldn’t be this friendly. She couldn’t be this friendly. He was a German, after all.

  “Wait!” she said. “I think you should know that people aren’t happy that Germans are working on our farms.”

  Paul said nothing.

  “I mean”—Lorna felt shaky under his intent gaze, but refused to be put off—“how could anyone here be happy about having a camp full of Nazis on our doorstep?”

  Paul stiffened.

  “Fräulein Anderson”—his voice was sharply polite—“I am German, yes, but I am not a Nazi. There is a difference, and one day I hope you understand that.”

  His eyes were flint hard. With a sharp click, Paul brought the heels of his boots together. Then he spun on his toes and walked smartly away, leaving Lorna reeling.

  As Lorna watched him go, Mrs. Mack came back out of the kitchen door, tying her apron strings around her waist. “So he’ll not murder us in our beds in the name of the Fatherland, then?”

  Lorna faced her, still rattled. “Did you know he speaks English?” she asked.

  “Aye, I did notice that.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you never asked.” Mrs. Mack was smiling at Lorna’s confusion. “He seems a nice enough lad, though.”

  “But he speaks English,” Lorna said, suddenly serious. “He might be a spy or something.”

  “Oh, I don’t think we need fret now, do you?” Mrs. Mack replied, crossing her arms under her bosom. “And what do you think our John is out there doing, knitting sweaters? All these boys are just doing what their countries ask of them. But this lad’s war is over now, and please God it will be over for us all very soon. What harm can he do stuck on this farm with us anyway? I trust him not to kill me in my bed, and I think you should too.”

  Mrs. Mack suddenly clapped her hands.

  “But we’ve no time for chatter. You’ve a lesson to get to, and I’ve a midden of a kitchen to clean. So get off with you!”

  Perhaps Mrs. Mack was right and Lorna was overreacting. Maybe.

  And actually, the prisoner had seemed quite nice, and not particularly threatening. Well, at least until she’d called him a Nazi. Yes, he was quite nice really. For a German.

  Four

  For the next few days, Lorna barely saw the prisoner. The truck dropped him off in the morning, but he had vanished from the yard by the time she left for school. When she got back home, he was away with her father in one of the far fields until he was picked up again in the evening.

  And that was fine. Lorna didn’t want to see him anyway.

  But even though she still felt queasy at the thought of having an enemy prisoner on the farm, she also found herself watching out for him, taking the longer route home, telling herself she was just enjoying the sunny and crisp winter weather. And she couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed when she didn’t see him.

  But really, not seeing him was fine.

  It was as if everyone else had forgotten he worked there. Mrs. Mack was no longer around in the afternoons because of her grandchildren, and Nellie had little to talk about except the “cute” new American airman she was “dating”—two of the new American words that Nellie used constantly these days.

  And conversations with her father were rare events. He would knock twice on her bedroom door in the morning to make sure she woke up, but was gone before Lorna got downstairs. In the evenings, he came into the house in time to eat his meal in silence as he read that morning’s Scotsman. Then, with a cup of tea or sometimes a small glass of whisky, he sat in his chair by the fire and listened to the evening news bulletin on the BBC.

  However, after almost a week of not talking about the German, Lorna realized that she did want to talk about him after all. She wanted to find out why her dad didn’t seem in the slightest bit worried that he was there, and to ask if her dad knew how he had got the scars across his face. But how could she bring up the subject?

  One evening after she’d cleared away the dishes, Lorna sat down with her dad to listen to the wireless. She tried to look casual by counting the rows in the woolen scarf she was knitting for the Red Cross collection as she waited for the news bulletin to be over.

  For weeks now, the radio news had been full of the Allies’ progress through Europe, chasing back the Germans from France, Belgium, and Holland. That evening’s bulletin reported on more successful bombing raids by the British and American air forces on German cities like Chemnitz, Dresden, and Magdeburg, as well as the destruction of a major bridge over the River Rhine at a town that sounded to Lorna like it was called Weasel.

  As the news announcer moved on to more political news from London, Lorna decided she could ask her father now. But, as he so often did, her father had already dozed off in his chair and she didn’t have the heart to wake him. Lorna wrapped the wool around her needles and tucked them away in her knitting bag. Quietly she took the glass from her father’s hand and put it on the table beside him before she tiptoed upstairs.

  As she brushed her hair in her bedroom, Lorna tried to put the German out of her mind, but the trouble was, he wouldn’t go.

  He’d even appeared in her dreams. The first time, his damaged face had reared up at her and she had run from it, screaming, waking herself as she did. Another night, she hadn’t seen his face at all, but she still knew he was there, watching her. In one dream, she’d clearly seen his face as it would have been, or as it might have been, pale-skinned and clean—and handsome—and then he had be
en wearing a British sergeant’s uniform like John Jo’s.

  And last night, he hadn’t been wearing anything. . . .

  Lorna shook her head, pretending to herself that she wanted to rid her mind of that image, and settled her head onto the pillow. Sleep took a while to come.

  And it wasn’t as if she were the only person obsessing about the German. Iris seemed even more fascinated by him than Lorna.

  Lately, if they walked down to the shops or to the beach after school, Lorna knew it would only be a minute or two before Iris brought him up.

  The next day was no exception.

  “So what’s your German been doing?” Iris asked, as Lorna knew she would.

  Lorna pulled her coat more tightly round her and tucked her chin into the loops of her scarf. They were walking along the edge of the beach, shadowing the winding Peffer Burn, which snaked its way through the mudflats and sandbanks near the village.

  “I haven’t seen him,” she said, “and he’s not my German.”

  This sent Iris into a lecture about why Lorna should be interested, and what if the prisoner sabotaged the farm, which was what William said was bound to happen. And William also said that . . .

  Lorna wasn’t really listening. Mrs. Mack had often said that Iris could talk the paint off a gatepost, so Lorna knew that as long as she nodded every so often, soon enough the “Threat from the German” lecture would wind down and the “Wonder of William Urquhart” lecture would begin.

  Iris suddenly crouched down to retie her shoelace, without once pausing her flow of chatter. Lorna stopped too, and gazed out over Aberlady Bay.

  It was a relatively calm day for February, but still freezing cold. The low sun was reflecting off the receding tide, making Lorna shield her eyes with her hand. The dunes of Gullane Point were bathed with golden light, and the exposed sands of Aberlady Bay were striped with ripples and dotted with wading birds, oystercatchers, and curlew, which darted around the huge concrete antitank blocks lining the shore. As an extra barrier to an invasion, an array of tree trunks had been sunk upright into the sand like the rib cage of some rotting dinosaur, but beyond them, Lorna could see fat-bellied seals lounging in what little sunshine was left, oblivious to the chill wind blowing across the water and the looming threat of the war.