The Romans weren’t normal, I said to myself.
‘Hilda is not normal,’ said my mother when she heard about the incident with the cup of water and the baby.
‘There are other things than being normal,’ said my father.
Hilda had news. She stood in the playground, hidden by a bevy of girls. She was crying. One of the girls gave her a hankie.
‘My big brother Alan has been captured,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘He’s a prisoner of war.’
We crowded around, mouths open.
‘The army told us,’ said Hilda. ‘My dad got a letter.’
Hilda was not allowed to bring this letter to school, but she told us what it said. Her big brother was on a farm in Italy. He wasn’t locked up in a cell, but he was still a prisoner. He had to work on the farm, growing vegetables, but not for money. And he wasn’t allowed to leave.
‘He’s a slave,’ said Hilda. ‘They won’t let him go till we win the war.’ A brief look of alarm crossed her face. ‘But that will be pretty soon,’ she said, regaining confidence.
‘What if we don’t win the war?’ I asked my mother.
My mother stood at the kitchen table, making scones, rolling the dough out with an empty milk bottle across a blanket of flour, which fell silently, like fine snow, down onto the floor.
‘It could be worse,’ said my mother finally. ‘We just have to be patient.’
Patient. Patient. That meant pretending. It was like the clock on the wall. It said ten past ten, yet we all knew this wasn’t true. It wasn’t ten past ten, it was ten past nine.
At the cinema when the projector broke down in the middle of the film jig jag jig, the picture would stutter and come to a stop and everything would go black. After a pause, people would start to boo and whistle, children would stand up on their chairs. I would look up at the ceiling of the theatre, lit by dim orange lights. The curling plaster was like cream on top of a beautiful cake. Then the film would start again and everyone would settle down and the story would go on as if nothing had happened.
Everyone knew the Germans were winning and soon the Japanese would arrive and we would all be killed, but most of the time we all pretended it wasn’t happening. There were only those very quiet moments – when someone, or something, laid a frozen hand on my neck.
CHAPTER IX.
SINGAPORE fell. Down down down fell Singapore, like a great wall, slowly tumbling into the bright blue sea. Where was Singapore? We were not quite sure, but we knew it now belonged to the Japanese.
‘Boys and girls, Singapore has fallen,’ said the headmaster under the trembling flag.
There was not a sound in the playground. Far away in the zoo on the hill, even the elephants and lions fell silent.
‘Here come the Japs,’ muttered Hilda as we stood in line. ‘Told you so.’
‘We must be brave,’ said the headmaster. ‘We must all do what we can. We are only small, but each small person can play his part.’
What could we do? The headmaster looked afraid. He wondered himself.
‘We can pray,’ he said.
Prayer was not enough for Hilda.
‘The boys made a newspaper,’ she told me. ‘Typed up on proper paper. They’re going to sell it to raise money for the war.’ She stamped her foot. ‘We must do something like that. We could make something. Or put on a concert. Something!’ She flung out her arms. ‘Everyone must do something!’
Her eyes were rich with plans. Her whole body shook with ideas.
The boys in the flute and drum band began to play as we marched into our classrooms. The tune was ‘Men of Harlech’:
’Tis the tramp of Saxon foemen,
Saxon spearmen, Saxon bowmen,
Be they knights or hinds or yeomen,
They shall bite the ground!
Inside, our teacher sat at the front of the room in her teacher’s chair, with hunched shoulders. Light came in the tall cobwebbed windows, light from far away. For a moment, she seemed to forget we were there. She stretched out her fingers and put her face in her hands. Her hair was short and thick and round her neck she wore a silver locket. We wondered what was inside it. We never asked.
We sat and waited until our teacher took her hands from her face and stood up, and we began the day, as always, by chanting the Lord’s Prayer followed by our times tables. We prayed, we chanted. The King on the wall looked down on all our small bowed heads, smooth and scruffy. Above him the clock ticked.
But it was not the real time.
CHAPTER X.
MY BED was on the closed-off verandah at the front of the house. In the daytime, there was so much other noise that the sound of the ocean disappeared. But at night when I lay down to sleep it was there, endlessly moving water, slapping up against the shore. If I listened very hard I could hear the waves filling the rock pools as the sun slipped like a stone into the deep ocean.
Along the verandah wall was a long makeshift shelf, constructed from planks of wood and spare bricks. This was where my father kept his old schoolbooks. I liked thinking of my father reading them when he was a boy not much older than me. I liked to pull them out to look at them, turning the thin pages that were written on in pencil in old-fashioned schoolboy handwriting, scribbled silvery thoughts.
One of them was a long poem all about the end of Trojan War, thousands of years ago far away in Africa. My father told me the story, how the people had to escape the burning city in the middle of the night. How they were chased up and down the streets by soldiers with swords and shields, until finally they got away and then onto boats, sailing until they reached a whole new country and made a whole new life where they would be safe.
The book was full of words that looked just like English but weren’t. The poem was all in Latin, the language the ancient Romans used to speak. It’s two thousand years old, my father told me, but you don’t feel it, Columba, when you read it, you don’t feel it at all.
That night I lay with the book on my chest, quietly waiting for sleep to come. I listened to the murmur of my parents’ conversation and their footsteps down the hallway. Then further footsteps outside, crackling dry leaves on the stretch of front yard. Clawed footsteps, padding backwards and forwards. I drifted from wakefulness to sleep – the sudden drop, the mistaken step on a flight of stairs or on a pathway that wound along a cliff’s edge, the fall…
Tick tick tick. At school, every year a nurse came with a little watch. Each child lined up in a small, cold room for a hearing test. ‘Close your eyes,’ said the nurse, ‘and tell me when you hear the watch ticking.’
It was Ellery’s watch she held up in her hand. Ellery’s watch with its cracked face and silver band.
‘Now? Now? Now?’ said the nurse. ‘Now?’
Tick tick tick, the ticking in the air, in my ear, an insect crawling across a leaf. I was not sure – could I hear it? I nodded, I shook my head. The nurse wrote a note in her book with a thin red pencil. She sent me out and called for the next child.
But I did not go. I moved to the shadow at the back of the room, and watched.
The next child was Ellery.
‘Close your eyes, and tell me when you hear the tick,’ said the nurse.
Ellery closed his eyes and his lashes the colour of licorice curled over his paper-white skin. He listened for the watch as the nurse held it up to his ear, away from his ear, over his head, behind her back.
Tick tick tick.
‘Now?’ said the voice of the nurse. ‘Now?’
Ellery shook his head. The nurse tried again, she held the watch right next to his ear.
‘Now?’ she repeated. ‘Now? Now?’
The ticking was so loud! But Ellery shook his head even more firmly.
Suddenly he opened his eyes and smiled at me, hiding in the shadows. He knew I was there all along.
CHAPTER XI.
I WAS woken by a loud knocking on the front door.
‘Columba!’ called out Hilda. ‘It’s me!’
I
got out of bed and padded down the hallway to where my mother was standing in her dressing gown. Hilda was on the doorstep with a golden syrup tin strung around her neck and a shoebox with a Union Jack stuck on it under her arm.
‘Hello, Hilda,’ said my mother warily. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Selling rock cakes,’ said Hilda. ‘All money goes to the Empire. You know, War Savings Certificates.’
‘I see,’ said my mother. ‘Just a moment, then.’
She went to find her purse, although she did not as a rule like sweet things.
‘Look at them!’ said Hilda to me, lifting the lid of the shoebox. ‘I made them myself.’
I peered inside. The rock cakes did not look exactly appetising, but rather burnt and lumpy with smudges of currants. My mother returned and slid some coins into the slit that had been cut in the metal lid of the golden syrup tin.
‘Thanks!’ said Hilda, beaming. ‘You’re the first! Take whichever one you want.’
‘You have it, Columba,’ said my mother, quickly. ‘It can be your breakfast.’
I reached in and picked up one of the rock cakes and bit it. It tasted strongly of bicarbonate of soda.
‘How many did you make?’ I asked, swallowing.
‘Tons,’ replied Hilda cheerfully. ‘And I can make more.’
I went quickly to my room to get dressed. It was already late. I grabbed my satchel and my mother handed me my lunch in a brown paper bag. Then Hilda and I left the house together for school.
Miss Hazel was standing on her verandah with a jug in her hand. When she saw us she put a finger to her lips, conspiratorially.
‘Can you keep a secret, girls?’ she hissed.
She didn’t appear to expect an answer. She ducked down out of sight for a moment, and I heard water trickling, like a leaky tap.
I guessed at once what her secret was. Miss Hazel was watering the plant, the special plant from Brazil. The plant she was not allowed to water any more, but was supposed to wait and watch it wither away and die. I didn’t tell Hilda. She was so patriotic, who knew what she might do? But personally I was glad Miss Hazel was breaking the law.
‘Do you want to buy a rock cake?’ demanded Hilda in a loud voice. ‘It’s for the Empire.’
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Miss Hazel, popping up again. ‘Let’s have a look.’
She came down to the gate. Hilda held out the open shoebox and her golden syrup tin.
‘Just give as much as you can,’ she said kindly.
Miss Hazel gingerly picked out one of the rock cakes.
‘I’ll keep it for my elevenses,’ she said, clearing her throat, and pushed a coin into the slot.
We left Miss Hazel and strolled off. The morning was warm, the cicadas sang and the pennies rattled in the tin around Hilda’s neck as she walked.
‘What’s Jewish?’ I asked, because Hilda did know everything, after all.
She put her head on one side, in a thinking pose.
‘Jews believe in God but they don’t believe in Jesus,’ she said in a definite tone.
‘So Christians believe in Jesus?’ I frowned.
‘Of course they do!’ replied Hilda, shocked.
‘But not God?’ I persisted.
For a moment Hilda hesitated.
‘What about Moses?’ I remembered what Miss Hazel had said.
‘Moses was a very wise man,’ said Hilda solemnly. ‘He wrote the Ten Commandments.’
We turned the corner into the street that led to school. It was overhung with trees and vines and smelled of fox.
I jolted. It was such a deep voice. It was the deepest voice I had ever heard. I turned and looked. It was coming from the man we knew to be Ellery’s father. He was next to the school gate, his hand wrapped around Ellery’s.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Hello.’
He did not look like anybody else’s father. His clothes were different, his coat, his hat, his beard and his drooping moustache.
‘I’m Columba,’ I said, feeling I had to say something.
said Ellery’s father, and he nodded and bowed and looked at Hilda expectantly, waiting for her to introduce herself. She held up her tin and her shoebox.
‘I’m Hilda,’ she said. ‘I’m collecting. Do you want to buy a rock cake for the Empire?’
repeated Ellery’s father, puzzled.
‘I’m raising money for War Savings Certificates,’ explained Hilda importantly. ‘My brothers are prisoners of war.’
‘I see,’ said Ellery’s father.
Now I was more used to it, his voice was still deep but less strange. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a silver coin and slid it into the slot in the lid of the tin. Clank.
‘Um, thanks,’ said Hilda, pleased. ‘Take a rock cake.’
‘Ah, no, thank you,’ said Ellery’s father. ‘I have already breakfasted.’
I had never heard anybody say ‘breakfasted’ before.
‘You could keep it for later,’ suggested Hilda. She pointed at me. ‘Her next-door neighbour did.’
‘In that case,’ said Ellery’s father, who was the most polite person I had ever met, ‘I will take one with great pleasure.’
He extricated his hand from Ellery’s fingers and lifted out a rock cake from the box.
‘Take two,’ said Hilda encouragingly. ‘One for Ellery too.’ Ellery was staring down at his shoes. In my house, my father cleaned all our shoes with a brush and wet shoe polish. I wondered if Ellery’s father shone Ellery’s shoes and ironed his clean and perfect shirts. I had never seen such a clean boy.
His father pulled out a handkerchief from the top pocket of his coat and wrapped the rock cake up in it.
‘Ellery and I will share it for afternoon tea,’ he said.
There was a little silence. It was time for the bell. I turned my head sideways and looked at Ellery’s watch, strapped around his wrist. His father saw me and smiled.
‘I’m afraid, children, Ellery keeps his watch to the old time,’ he said.
Old time?
‘What do you mean?’ asked Hilda, her forehead creasing in a frown.
Ellery’s father held up Ellery’s hand and showed us the watch face. The little hand was on the 1 and the big hand was nearly on the 12. One o’clock?
‘That is the old time,’ he said. ‘That is the time on the other side of the world, where we have come from. There it is now the middle of the night.’
The middle of the night?
‘You mean the night with the moon?’ said Hilda.
‘Yes,’ said Ellery’s father. ‘The night with the moon.’
‘It’s upside down!’ I said.
‘You are right,’ said Ellery’s father. ‘It is upside down there. And you see, it is winter, and very cold. Perhaps there is snow.’
‘Would it be snowing in Italy?’ asked Hilda, her face clouding over.
‘Perhaps,’ said Ellery’s father. ‘And when you look up at the sky, the stars are different.’
The stars? How could stars be different?
‘But it’s the same sky,’ I said urgently. ‘Isn’t it?’
Stars couldn’t change. Stars were like God, they shone on and on and nothing could touch them or hurt them.
At that moment, the bell began to ring with its slow clang. Ellery, who had been waiting in patient silence while we were talking, immediately stiffened his shoulders, readying himself for the ordeal of the day. He and his father bowed at each other. Then his father raised a hand to the three of us before walking briskly away.
The same sky, I thought, as we trailed into the playground. The same sad sky. But why did I think that? The sky was not sad, I reminded myself. The sky had no feelings, like the sun. It just looked down on us all and covered us all up, like a huge tent in the wilderness.
We heard the trumpeting of an elephant from the zoo on the hill.
‘I wonder what time it is in Africa?’ said Hilda.
CHAPTER XII.
WE SAT in our rows
of seats in the classroom. On the board our teacher was writing sums for us to copy down. The classroom was very old and the chalk dust floated suspended in the air like a glittering mist.
I sat at the back next to Hilda. She was tugging on one of her plaits with one hand as she copied down the sums with the other. She was probably thinking of how she would soon be adding up all the pennies and threepences and sixpences and even shillings, ready to save the Empire. She had managed to sell a rock cake to our teacher and had even, to all our admiration, marched into the headmaster’s office and turned her fierce gaze upon him. Another sale. The tin was getting heavier by the moment.
My exercise book was open on the desk in front of me. The inkwell was full and I held the nib ready in my hand, but I couldn’t copy the sums. The numbers made no sense to me. They were just lines and circles spread across the board. My mind was full of other things.
I was thinking about letters. About the blotted letters on the wispy paper that Hilda’s brothers wrote to their mother. About the letter the army wrote to Hilda’s father that she wasn’t allowed to show us. About Miss Hazel’s letters from Mrs Macadam in the Northern Territory and the parcel with FRAGILE written all over it. And about what Miss Hazel had said, about the little girl she knew from Europe with the eyes and the woolly socks, and the letters that had stopped coming…
Is that what had happened to Ellery? Had his mother stopped writing letters? Was that why he was crying that day, when his teacher had marched him through the hot playground to the headmaster? Had they told him there were to be no more letters?
Hitler killed her.
Scrape scrape scrape went the chalk on the blackboard. The teacher was busy and far away. I put down the nib and picked up my pencil and licked the lead. I turned to the back page of my exercise book and began to write:
Dear Ellery,
Wait – Ellery was not his real name. But what was his name? Nobody knew. I crossed out the first line with hard strong lines so you couldn’t read the words underneath and started again.
The Blue Cat Page 4