Telegram For Mrs. Mooney
Page 6
We passed through a small village, which was damaged when a bomb dropped smack in the middle of the town square, knocking down a large monument. I saw what was left of a bronze statue of a mounted horseman. Aside from knocking the bronze man from his horse, the bomb blew out the windows of the tavern across the street. You looked straight through them window frames and saw men sitting at long wooden tables, laughing and drinking beer, as though nothing had happened. There was a red phone booth knocked over and the phone must still of worked because a lady was bent over and was speaking into the receiver.
“Fortunately, most of us were in church that morning and no one was hurt,” said the driver. “No one but Lord Wellington, that is.” He chuckled when he said “Lord Wellington.”
“He weren’t liked around here, were he?” I said, not certain if I’d said it proper. The Sopwiths were in the Rolls, so it didn’t much matter.
“Lord Wellington? Why, we English worship the man. He’s a national hero. Put an end to Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo, didn’t he?”
Oh, that Lord Wellington—the statue.
“Have many German bombs dropped around here?” I asked, electrified that I was now in the thick of it.
“Not bad around these parts, laddy. Now, London is a different kettle of fish. Up in London they’re getting a pounding, no doubt about it. 40,000 souls perished in the Blitz, most of them Londoners—that’s more than in this whole parish.”
I tried to picture 40,000 souls but it was impossible not to think about their bodies too: bloody and blown up, missing limbs, crushed faces. I had to shake my head violently to get the picture to leave. Meanwhile, the driver kept on talking:
“In London people are spending more time sleeping in the Tube stations than comfortable in their own beds. My sister had to send her four boys down to stay with the wife and me, and we’ve our hands full, what with them running around and mucking about. I’ll be glad when this blooming war is finished and we send ’em packing.”
I asked how far it was to London. I’d be making my way there to find Daphne and enlist her help.
“Couple hours drive, is all,” said the driver. “That’s where Jerry wants to drop the bombs. I think when one falls around here, it’s just slipped out early. No one’s taken deliberate aim at Wellington in, I’d say, nearly 125 years.”
I knew he was making a joke and expected me to laugh. But the picture of those 40,000 bodies snuck back into my head and my laugh came out like a sneeze.
“God bless,” he said.
We followed the Rolls as it turned off a main road and down a narrow lane lined with old trees that got planted perfectly spaced from one another. The branches joined up over the road, forming a leafy tunnel. It reminded me of the Midtown Tunnel, the one that now connected Long Island to the city.
“Warfield Hall, the seat of Lord and Lady Sopwith,” said O’Reilly, pointing his nose 38 degrees northwest. My fertile imagination had done me dirty, because perched up on a hill was a house like the ones they got up on the north shore of Long Island— houses so big they give them names instead of numbers. There was one like it in Westbury, built by a fella named Phipps, who sold the steel beams we Irish lugged up to the top of skyscrapers and welded into place. Warfield Hall didn’t resemble a castle one bit and probably had no dungeon. Funny, but I was a little disappointed.
We pulled up to the front of the house and Lord Sopwith exited the Rolls, coming alongside the truck to give his instructions to O’Reilly. “We can’t lose our young charge, and so as long as he’s our houseguest, perhaps he shall enjoy spending his days in the library.” He asked O’Reilly to step out of the truck so they could have a word in private. Then looking in my direction, he said in a whisper, “Might be best to lock him in, what?”
“With pleasure, my lord,” said O’Reilly.
Looking at me Lord Sopwith said, “You do like to read, I noticed. Might want to try your hand at Wordsworth. Or Coleridge.”
Realizing an escape from a library would be a cinch, I looked as cheery as possible. “Oh, I’m a regular bookworm, sir.”
“Well then, that’s settled. Just don’t eat any of my first editions.” With that, he leapt up the stairs, taking three at a time. Dignified, they call it.
As it turned out, I was wrong about an easy getaway, because the library windows faced out to the front drive. Dead center the chauffeur worked away waxing and polishing the Rolls, with all that chrome. A gardener trimmed the topiary lining a circular driveway. It’s time consuming keeping shrubs from looking shrubby, especially with a hand clipper. If only he had a gas-powered version, I thought—he’d be done and gone in a fraction of the time. My dilemma came down to gas rationing. It looked like I wasn’t going anywhere until sundown.
I eyed the windows and seen that the sashes were easy to open, so I just twiddled my thumbs waiting for darkness to set it. Then I found a book I’d always wanted to read: Robinson Crusoe. Found it smack in the middle of a section labeled “Romantic Poets,” where it shouldn’t of been. I settled myself in a wing-backed chair next to one of the windows. The room was warm and stuffy and I dozed off. A maid, not much older than me, woke me as she fumbled a tray into the library. On the tray was a stack of sandwiches which, funny enough, contained nothing but paper-thin slices of cucumbers. And just the thing I needed to take my mind off of my troubles: tiny cakes, each individually iced and decorated—filled with strawberry jam. Steam rose from a pot of tea. I poured some into a cup, but when I found only one sugar cube in the sugar bowl, I decided to pass. Rationing again, I thought. What I wanted was a soda, anyways.
When the maid returned to take the tray, she looked at the empty plates. “You’ve got an appetite on you, I’d say.” She was real Irish, as it turns out. Maybe I’d make her my accomplice.
“You know I’m in the library against my will, don’t you?”
“So I take it. I’m instructed to keep the door locked.”
“Any chance you’d be a doll and forget to lock up on your way out?” I said, faking an Irish accent. I winked. Hopefully that buttered her up.
“Don’t be daft! I’d lose my place and end up on the dole. And besides, they’re good to me here. Mrs. Balson is teaching me how to cook and bake. Matter of fact, it was me what made the very cakes you scarfed down. Pretty soon I’ll be advancing to soufflés and molded aspic. And I’m getting the inside scoop on housekeeping, too. Mrs. Balson, she’s getting on. Why, if she holds out long enough to train me up proper, she’s promised to recommend me to take her position. So there you have it: I’m going places and I’ll not have you interfering.”
“What about that O’Reilly? You don’t mind taking orders from a tyrant?”
“Mr. Seamus O’Reilly? He’s a pussycat. Takes a while for him to warm up to a body, that’s all. His bark is a lot worse than his bite.”
“Pussycats don’t bark,” I said. She grabbed the tray away, even though there were still a few cake crumbs I wanted to eat. As she left, she slammed the door and made a noisy job locking up.
I was let out of the library for supper but roughhoused down to the servant’s quarters by O’Reilly, who clutched my elbow the whole way. Mrs. Balson turned out to be a grey-haired lady who—by the look of her—enjoyed eating as much as cooking. A mutton stew bubbled away on the stove. I got a whiff of bread baking in the oven. And there was a nice apple pie cooling on a rack by the sideboard. It had one of them basket weave tops only professional bakers know how to do up.
“I’m ever so glad to have a child in the house again,” said Mrs. Balson. “Been quiet since our little Sopwith pup went off to America.”
The grub was good, and I shoveled it into my mouth. I didn’t know what the future would bring but imagined times of hunger and near starvation. And I’d escape out of a wide-open window and not have to squeeze myself out of a slit in a castle wall. I could afford the extra padding.
“How ever will I get by with my rations? Why, this boy is like to eat us out of house and
home, Mr. O’Reilly!” said Mrs. Balson.
“Don’t trouble yourself, Mrs. Balson. We’ll soon have him off our hands.”
“Is that so?” she said.
“It’s my understanding that someone is on the way from the orphanage to fetch him. He’ll be incarcerated there until his parents come and retrieve him…that’s if they ever do.”
I froze in place, with a fork full of mutton stew held mid-way between the plate and my jaw. I shifted my eyes between O’Reilly and Mrs. Balson.
“Get on! Her ladyship’d never allow that to happen and you know it. Those appalling orphan farms—and now when they’re so over-crowded with war orphans. Her ladyship wept all the way through Oliver Twist. Shook up she was. She’d never!”
Turning to me she said, “Tommy, you’ll find that book in the library, tearstains all over it. It’s Charles Dickens wrote it.”
Then she turned her shoulder to O’Reilly and huffed.
CHAPTER TEN
THE NEXT DAY, I JOINED LORD AND LADY for tea on the patio, where I was able to get the lay of the land. What a shock it was to see the English Channel right there in the backyard. With a decent spyglass, I might’ve seen France.
Sandwiches got put on the table, this time containing nothing but thin slices of hard-boiled egg and weeds. Lady Sopwith called it watercress but it seemed like weeds to me, and it took a dozen to fill my stomach. What made the job extra hard was that I was made to hold them with only my index and third fingers.
“I do hope, Tommy,” said Lady Sopwith, “that this isn’t all too trying for you. It’s admirable you want to rescue your brother, but you must see it’s quite impractical. Good to trust such things to the trained professionals. No doubt, Britain has many secret agents undercover all over Europe. Surely finding a missing RAF pilot is tops on their list of priorities, and—”
“Now Phyllis, remember loose lips sink ships, what?” said Lord Sopwith.
Lady Sopwith turned to me and winked.
Lord Sopwith gazed out at the Channel. “I say, fine day to be out on the water. Tomorrow it’s back to the drawing board for me, I’m afraid. No sense being cooped up in the library, Tommy. How would you fancy joining me? I’ve got a jolly fine powerboat. Maybe we’ll get in a swim.”
“That’s a swell idea.” I was sure glad for the chance to get outside even if it did include swimming.
The boat was a sleek racing boat. I watched as Lord Sopwith added fuel from a gas can he took from a boathouse. We boarded and he made sure I buckled my seatbelt. “She has a top speed of nearly 52 knots,” he said, as he pulled back the throttle and we jolted away from the slip. A knot is a nautical mile, I came to learn.
We anchored the boat in a quiet cove and I jumped right into the water and floated on my back. Lord Sopwith took a Cuban cigar from his pocket and lit it. Meanwhile, I did some quick math in my head and when I got back into the boat I said, “So that means a boat like this crosses the Channel in half an hour!”
“Hypothetically, I suppose,” he said, getting ready to jump in the water himself. “Although, one would want to go a bit slower.”
“Have you ever crossed the Channel in a boat?”
“Many times, young man. Many times. Of course, I’d prefer to cross in something larger than this.” He looked in the direction of France. His eyes got watery. Then he told me that in ’40, when there were more than 300,000 men to evacuate from France in advance of the approaching Germans, and very little time to do it, he sailed over in Endeavour. “Every seaworthy vessel in England was employed in that operation—anything that could float. Sad day it was too, with the Nazis getting ready to goose-step into Paris and under the Arc de Triomphe. Bloody, awful mess.”
“I hate all Germans,” I said. “Except for Mr. and Mrs. Fisch, my neighbors.”
“Well, I suggest you temper your feelings,” said Lord Sopwith. “There are plenty of good Germans, some dear friends of mine, who are conflicted about what’s happened to their country. Some are actively working against Hitler. Don’t be so quick to judge, young man.”
An hour on the water and I was beginning to look like a lobster—I have Irish skin with freckles—so I was glad when Lord Sopwith said it was time we head back.
As we hiked up to the house, I watched Lord Sopwith’s every move. I made small talk as I followed him into the house, the whole time asking questions about boats and fishing: fly-fishing, tackle and fishing lures, which way salmon ran—up stream or down? Lord Sopwith answered my questions without suspecting my real objectives. My trick worked. I saw him put the speedboat key on a bookshelf in his study.
“What do you say we clean up before dinner, Tommy? Won’t do to join Mrs. Balson’s table smelling like a fish, old boy.”
“No, sir, wouldn’t do at all,” I said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SO FAR, MY PLANS TO ESCAPE got thwarted at every turn. I’d been in England almost a week. Darkness made for the perfect escape from the library but, every night after supper, I was locked in a windowless attic room.
It didn’t look like a prison cell—Mrs. Balson made sure of that. She directed the chauffeur and the footman to carry up a nice feather bed and a side table with a good reading lamp. I was allowed to remove whatever books I wanted from the library, as long as they weren’t illuminated manuscripts. So for a while I made the best of it.
It was while reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens that an idea struck me like lightening. It was the Christmas theme done it: if fatso Santa could come down a chimney, couldn’t a beanpole go up one? That very night I dragged my duffel bag up the chimney, broke the chimney cap with a hammer, and was out onto the roof. Like Tarzan, I swung down the ivy vines covering the front of the house. Didn’t need a rope or nothing.
During my survey of the property I’d noticed, in the distance, train tracks coming to and from a village. The train, I figured, would take me to London. So I made straightaway for the village. With any luck, there would still be a train coming through that night. If not, there would be one first thing in the morning—hopefully, before anybody discovered I’d bolted.
Far from the village, I heard a steam whistle. I ran so fast, it caused a painful stitch in my side and my heart was beating like the drum in a marching band. I got to the station in the nick of time. The signboard over the platform said London. The doors to the cars were already shut and the train was beginning to pull away. I jumped onto a stair ledge and held tight to a handrail. As the train gained speed, I clung onto it for dear life. “Whoopee!” I yelled, as the conductor blew the steam horn and the train entered a tunnel. The sad thing was that my baseball cap flew off my head, lost forever.
I peered into the window and spied on the passengers inside a train cabin. It was dark outside and it was sort of like looking into a fishbowl. On one side sat a lady and a kid, on the other side, a man. The grown-ups were having a knockdown-dragout fight and didn’t notice that a boy was hanging from the side of the train. I watched in horror as the lady poked the man with a knitting needle—the man didn’t even flinch. Only their little girl was aware of me. Her nose was pressed to the window, her tongue slobbering the glass. I did likewise and crossed my eyes.
The train came into another station, slowing enough for me to crawl into the window. The man and his wife kept rocketing insults as I leapt past, into a long corridor. The little girl ran after me, and I said, “Scram!” When she kept on following me, I whirled around and turned my eyelids inside out so that I looked like a zombie. This did the trick: she burst into tears and ran back to her folks. I was free to look into each cabin until I found one that was empty. I stashed my duffel bag under one bench and myself under the opposite bench.
Two men entered the cabin a few minutes later. Even though I only seen their shoes, socks, and trouser hems, I knew both had on uniforms: one army and one Royal Air Force. The soldier asked for a cigarette, which he called a fag.
“Might as well call it a coffin-nail,” said the airman.
“Got eyes like a cat,” said the airman, taking a long and loud drag off his cigarette. “Runs in the family. My father was a sharpshooter in the Great War.” He said he was a rear gunner on a Bristol Blenheim and he’d flown twenty missions during the Battle of Britain and he’d shot down a dozen Messerschmitts. At least.
“What I wouldn’t do to trade places with you,” said the army man. “The only thing I’m flying is a desk in a windowless office in London—sending rations from one warehouse to another. Takes a brave man.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, there’s been plenty of nights over France I’ve dreamed about a desk job like that. And now that we’re making missions to Germany, well—”
“Awfully good of you to say. Where are you headed now?”
“I’ll switch trains at Waterloo for Victoria. I’m stationed down at RAF Rochford in Southend-on-Sea.”
Southend-on-Sea! I’d heard that name before. I’d found it on a map and circled it with a red crayon. Used a ruler to figure out exactly how far it was from Hempstead, New York: 3,549 miles, as a bird flies. Then I’d taped the English map to one wall and a New York map to the other. I stuck one of Mary’s pins in the Hempstead dot and one in the Southend-on-Sea dot. A black thread connected the two places and I had to duck every time I got into bed. I was so surprised to hear the mention of the place that I hit my head on the underside of the bench seat. This was an opportunity too good to miss. I jimmied out from under the bench.