by Judith Kerr
There was a shuffling sound followed at length by a click. The door opened a crack and an ancient tear-stained face peered out.
“…never had my food refused before,” it quavered. “And then to be shouted at on top of it…eighty-two years old and still trying to do my best …” The corners of the mouth turned down and more tears ran down the wrinkled cheeks.
“Now Fraulein Pimke,” said Aunt Louise, cunningly inserting an arm through the crack and drawing her through the door (very much, thought Anna, like extracting a snail from its shell). “What would the Kaiser say to see you weeping like this?”
Fraulein Pimke, deprived of the shelter of her room, blinked and looked confused, and Aunt Louise weighed in quickly while she had the chance.
“I didn’t mean to shout at you,” she said. “It’s just that I was taken aback. When I found that the butter ration had gone on the kippers. And then, when the maids gave notice…Fraulein Pimke, you’re the only one I can rely on!”
Fraulein Pimke, slightly mollified, blinked at Anna. “Who’s this?” she said.
Aunt Louise saw her chance and took it.
“A bomb victim!” she said firmly. “A little victim of the London blitz!” She caught sight of the handkerchief round Anna’s hand and pointed to it dramatically. “Wounded!” she cried. “Surely, Fraulein Pimke, you cannot let this child go without her dinner!”
By this time she had somehow manoeuvred the group towards the kitchen door, and Fraulein Pimke went in like a lamb.
“Thank you, thank you!” cried Aunt Louise. “I knew I could count on you – the Professor will be so pleased!”
Then she led Anna back into the drawing room which was now filled with people in evening dress. Anna’s lack of sleep was catching up with her and after the terrors of the previous night everything was beginning to feel like a dream. She was introduced to various people, most of whom seemed to be related to the Professor, but it was difficult to remember who they all were.
There was a little cross-looking woman who was the Professor’s sister and two boys younger than Anna who might or might not be her sons. But what was a man dressed in a silk suit and turban doing there, and was he really a maharajah as someone seemed to have said? She was uncomfortably conscious of her trousers and old sweater, but a red-haired woman in a black dress kindly told her that she looked very nice and even appealed to her husband for confirmation, and he said something about the battlefront and asked her what it was like being in the blitz.
It turned out that no one in the house had spent a night in London since the beginning of the air raids, and they asked her endless questions as though she were some strange creature from another world. The maharajah, if he was one, kept saying, terrible, terrible, and how did people survive, which was silly, thought Anna, for what else could you do if you had no choice, and an old lady with an ear-trumpet said, “Tell me, my dear, is it true that there is a great deal of noise?”
Dinner, served sulkily by Inge and Lotte, was unbelievably good and with her stomach delightfully full, Anna almost fell asleep during the ritual listening to the nine o’clock news which followed it.
The Professor put a proper bandage on her cut hand, which everyone insisted on referring to as a wound, and by this time the dreamlike quality of the evening had so far taken over that she was not in the least surprised when Fraulein Pimke appeared in dressing gown, slippers and hairnet to kiss everyone good night. “Was the dinner good?” she whispered to each guest, and even the maharajah said, “Yes,” and let her kiss his hand.
Anna was almost staggering on her feet when at last Aunt Louise took her to her room. It was clean and pretty with new sheets on the bed. Outside the window there were trees and a great calm sky. No bombs, no planes, no noise. Mama and Papa…she thought as her head sank into the pillows, but she was so tired and the bed was so soft that she could not finish the thought and fell asleep.
It was bright daylight when she woke up. For a moment she looked in astonishment at the white walls and flowery curtains. Then she stretched out again in the bed with a marvellous sense of well-being. She felt as though she had just recovered from a severe illness – it must be having slept all night without interruption, she thought. When she looked at her watch she found that it was nearly noon.
She got up quickly, putting on her skirt instead of her trousers (but it had been difficult to wash anything in London and it did not look much better) and went downstairs. The drawing-room was empty except for the old lady with the ear-trumpet. When she saw Anna she smiled and shouted, “A great deal of noise, eh?”
“Yes, but not here,” Anna shouted back.
Outside the French windows she could see grey clouds moving across the sky. With luck Mama and Papa would have had a fairly quiet night. She was not hungry and anyway it was too late for breakfast, so she went outside.
The wind was strong but not cold and whirls of leaves skimmed across the terrace in front of her. At the end of the terrace was what had been a lawn, but now the damp grass coiled round her calves and even her knees as she walked through it. It was a very large lawn, and somewhere about the middle she stopped for a moment with the wind blowing round her face and the grass swaying below her. It was like being at sea and, perhaps because she had had no breakfast, she felt almost giddy with the motion.
Beyond her the grass sloped down towards a row of trees and when she reached them she discovered a stream running beneath them. She squatted down to look at it, and just as she did so the sun came out and the water, which had been mud-coloured, turned a bright greeny blue. A small fish appeared, hardly moving above the sandy bottom and very clear in the sudden light. She could see every shiny scale fitting round the plump body, the round, astonished eyes, the shape of the delicate tail and fins. As it stood among the currents, it looked sometimes green and sometimes silver and its spade-shaped mouth stretched and shrank as it opened and closed. She sat staring at it, almost feeling it with her eyes, but she must have moved, for it suddenly darted away, and a moment later the sun went in and the stream turned brown and dull again.
Some leaves floated down from the trees above her and after a moment she got up and walked back towards the house. She could still see the fish in her mind. If one could paint that, she thought. The wind blew through her hair and through the grass and, suddenly intoxicated, she thought, and giraffes and tigers and trees and people and all the beauty of the world!
She found most of the house guests assembled in the drawing room and they all asked her if she was feeling better, except for the old lady with the ear-trumpet who was too busy peering through the dining-room door to see if lunch was ready yet. Aunt Louise, worn out with the domestic dramas of the previous night, was resting in her room, and the maharajah was nowhere to be seen.
The Professor was talking about the old days in Berlin.
“Grandmother’s birthday,” he said. “Do you remember how all the children used to come?”
His sister nodded. “She used to give them all presents,” she said.
“Thank God she didn’t live to see how it all ended,” said the Professor.
Then the door opened and the maharajah appeared, rather to Anna’s relief, for she half-thought she might have dreamed him. He was still wearing his turban but an ordinary dark suit, and everyone at once tried to speak English for his sake. Only the old lady with the ear-trumpet suddenly said loudly in German, “She used to serve the best gefilte fish in Prussia.”
Anna wondered whether the maids who had given notice would be serving lunch, but to her surprise they were both in the dining room, all smiles and attention. (She discovered later that Aunt Louise had simply raised their wages.) She sat next to the maharajah who asked her again about the air raids and told her that he had been so frightened by the first one that it had made him ill, and that the Professor had brought him out to stay in the country until he could get a passage back to India.
“You are my benefactor,” he said to the Professor, pressi
ng his hand.
“And of all of us in this house,” said the red-haired lady, and the Professor looked pleased, but in a worried way, and said a little later that it was awful how food prices had risen since the war.
Anna asked where the two boys were, and the Professor’s sister told her that they went to a grammar school in the nearby town but were not learning anything because all the good teachers had been called up.
“Nonsense, you fuss too much,” said the red-haired lady, which made the Professor’s sister very angry, and within minutes, to Anna’s surprise, everyone had been drawn into a fierce quarrel. Only the maharajah contented himself with saying, “Education is the finest jewel in a young man’s crown,” with which no one could disagree, and the old lady asked Anna to pass the gravy and quietly ate everything in sight.
On the whole, it was a relief when lunch was over and most of the house guests announced that they were going to their rooms to rest. From what? wondered Anna. It had begun to drizzle and she did not feel like going out again, so she wrote a note to Mama and washed some of her clothes in a laundry room she discovered beyond the kitchen.
When she returned to the drawing room it was still only half-past three and there was no one in it except the old lady who had fallen asleep in her chair with her mouth open. There was a magazine on a table and Anna leafed through it, but it was all about horses and in the end she just sat. The old lady emitted a faint snore. There was a bit of fluff on her dress quite close to her mouth and every time she breathed it moved very slightly. For a while Anna watched it in the hope that something might happen – the old lady might swallow it, or sneeze, or something – but nothing did.
The room grew slowly darker. The old lady snored and the bit of fluff moved with her breath, and Anna was beginning to feel that she had been there for ever when there was a sudden flurry of activity.
First Lotte came in with the tea trolley. The old lady who must have smelled the tea in her sleep immediately woke up. Aunt Louise, followed by the other house guests, appeared in her long velvet gown and drew the curtains and switched on the lamps, and then the two boys burst in from school. Their mother at once began to cross-question them. Had they learned anything? What about their homework? Perhaps Anna could help them with it? But they brushed her aside with a quick look of dislike at Anna, and turned on the radio very loud.
Aunt Louise clapped her hands over her delicate ears. “Must we have that frightful din?” she cried.
One of the boys shouted, “I want to hear Forces’ Favourites!”
Their mother, suddenly changing sides, said, “Surely the children can have some pleasure!” and at once everyone became involved in another argument which continued long after the boys had crept out to listen to their programme in the kitchen. Aunt Louise said they were spoiled. Their mother said that Aunt Louise, having no children of her own, knew nothing about it. The red-haired lady said that there was a terrible atmosphere in the house – you couldn’t breathe – and the old lady made a long speech which no one could understand, but which seemed to accuse some unspecified person of interfering with her sugar ration.
Anna could not think what to do, so she went over to the window and peered out into the dusk. The sun had not quite set and she could see that the sky was still overcast. If it was like this in London it shouldn’t be too bad. She thought of Mama and Papa getting ready for the night. They would be wondering whether to spend it in the cellar or to risk sleeping in their beds.
Behind her, a voice cried, “And it was just the same last week over the wellington boots!” and suddenly she wondered what on earth she was doing in this house, at this time, among these people.
Chapter Eleven
All the days at the Professor’s house, Anna discovered, were much like the first one. There were long periods of boredom which she filled as best she could with walks and attempts to draw, interspersed with violent rows. Except for the Professor none of the house guests had anything to do except to wait for the next meal, the news, the end of the blitz, and as only the two boys ever seemed to leave the house, they all got on each others’ nerves.
It was extraordinary, thought Anna, what little things could start an argument – for instance the business over God Save The King. This cropped up almost every time the radio was on and seemed quite insoluble.
It began one evening when Aunt Louise leapt to her feet and stood to attention while God Save The King was being played after the news. Afterwards she told all the people who had remained seated that they were guilty of rudeness and ingratitude to the country that was giving them shelter. The Professor’s sister said her sons had reliably informed her that no Englishman would ever dream of standing up for God Save The King in his own home, and as usual there was a row and everyone took sides.
Anna tried to avoid the whole issue by arranging not to be in the drawing room after the news when God Save The King was most likely to be played, but the situation was made more complicated by the fact that Aunt Louise was tone-deaf. She was never quite sure whether any rousing tune she heard was really God Save The King or not, and once tried to make everyone stand up for Rule Britannia, and twice for Land Of Hope And Glory.
Then there was the great mystery of the sugar ration. This was started, needless to say, by the old lady who had been complaining for some time that her sugar ration was being tampered with, but no one took any notice until she gave a triumphant cry one morning at breakfast and said that she had proof.
To avoid arguments, the sugar rations, like the butter and margarine rations, were carefully weighed out once a week into separate little dishes, each marked with the owner’s name, and the dishes were put out by Lotte on the breakfast table for people either to eke out day by day or devour all at once in one greedy feast. The old lady had cunningly marked the level of her sugar with pencil on the side of the dish, and now here it was, a good quarter of an inch lower. Roused to suspicion, the others marked their sugar also and, lo and behold, next day both the Professor’s sister and the red-haired lady’s husband had lost some, though everyone else’s remained untouched.
The ensuing row was bitterer than any Anna had yet witnessed. The red-haired lady accused the two boys, the Professor’s sister cried, “Are you suggesting that they’d steal from their own mother?” which, Anna thought, showed a strange attitude, and Aunt Louise insisted that the Professor must interrogate the servants, as a result of which Lotte and Inge gave notice again.
The mystery was eventually cleared up. Fraulein Pimke, in the course of providing sweet puddings for dinner, had helped herself to the nearest dishes at hand. But so many unforgivable things had been said that almost no one was on speaking terms with anyone else for two days. The maharajah, as the only member of the household to remain aloof from the battle, found it very depressing. He and Anna walked glumly round the park under the dripping trees and Anna listened while he talked wistfully about India, until the cold autumn air drove them back into the house.
It was after the row about the sugar that Anna decided to return to London. She put it as tactfully as she could to Aunt Louise.
“Mama needs me,” she said, though Mama hadn’t actually said so.
Even so, Aunt Louise was quite distressed. She did not want Anna to go back into the air raids and also she thought it might upset Fraulein Pimke who had become used to seeing her about the house. And what about the maids, she said. If they really left she would need all the help she could get. But characteristically, just as Anna was beginning to feel rather cross, she flung her arms about her, crying, “I’m a fool, don’t take any notice of me,” and insisted on giving her a pound for the journey.
The Professor was not driving up to London that week, so Anna went by train, which took four and a half hours instead of the scheduled fifty minutes. She had deliberately not told Mama that she was coming because Mama and Papa had both urged her in their letters to stay in the country as long as possible, and she did not want to give them the chance to argue w
ith her.
As the train drew into London she could see gaps in almost every street where bombs had fallen, and there were no windows left in any of the houses backing on to the railway line. Paddington Station had lost all the grimy glass in its roof and it was strange to be able to see sky and clouds beyond the blackened girders. Some sparrows were fluttering in and out among them, swooping down every so often to the platforms in search of crumbs.
The streets were empty – it was early afternoon and everyone was at work – and, from her bus crawling along the Euston Road Anna noticed that weeds had begun to grow on some of the bomb-sites, which made them look as though they had been there for years. Altogether the city looked scarred but undramatic, as though it had become used to being bombed.
In Bedford Terrace almost half the houses had been boarded up and abandoned, but the Hotel Continental did not seem to have suffered any further damage and some of the windows had even been repaired. She found Papa in his room – Mama was still at her office – in the middle of typing something on his shaky typewriter.
“Why didn’t you stay in the country?” he cried, but since she was there and there was nothing he could do about it, he was clearly delighted to see her. Mama’s reaction, an hour or two later, was much the same. Neither of them seemed altogether surprised. Of course, thought Anna, they knew the Rosenbergs a good deal better than she did.
There were fewer people than ever in the hotel. The German lady, Mama told her, had not been able to stop crying after that very bad night in the cellar, and in the end a doctor had sent her to a charitable institution in the country where she would be looked after until her nerves recovered. The porter, too, had left, to stay with his brother in Leicester, and so had many of the staff and guests. The ones who remained looked grey-faced and weary, even though Mama and Papa insisted that since the changeable autumn weather they were getting quite a lot of sleep.