A Coin for the Hangman

by Spurrier, Ralph

  Henry & Madeleine

  Bradford on Avon 1939

  It had been an exceptionally cold day in February 1939 when Henry first saw Madeleine. The class had been called in from the playground for the first lesson and the white fan-tails of frost were still on the inside of the windows, yet to be melted by the heat from the wood stove that had been lit just half an hour before. Mrs Brown, the form teacher, walked into the room holding the hand of a small girl whose features were hidden by her lowered head and bobbed hair. They both stood at the front of the class of children who were now all standing by their desks.

  “Good morning, children.”

  “Good morning, Mrs Brown, and God Bless You,” the chorus of thirty voices chanted.

  Mrs Brown smiled and waited until the scraping of benches and desks had finally settled into silence as they all sat down.

  “Thank you. Now, I have a little announcement to make. We have a new girl here who is going to join the class today. Her name is Madeleine Reubens and she has come to us all the way from Austria. Does anyone know where that is?”

  One hand went up. Mrs Brown had already guessed whose it would be.

  “Henry, would you come up here and point to where Austria is on the map?”

  As Henry left his bench, someone murmured loud enough for half the class to hear “Fatty know-all.” Henry walked over to the large map that adorned the wall next to the blackboard and put his finger straight on the country coloured mauve in the centre of Europe. As he turned towards the class, he caught a glimpse of Madeleine’s face as she watched him point at the map, but she quickly turned back and lowered her head.

  “That’s correct, Henry, just below Czechoslovakia and Germany, and above Italy.” Henry stood behind the new girl as the teacher announced: “Madeleine doesn’t speak any English yet but we are all here to help her, aren’t we?”

  A hesitant chorus greeted the teacher’s request. “Yes, Mrs Brown.”

  Henry could see the whole of the class from his vantage point on the dais and he looked at the faces of his classmates, many of them still wearing the knitted balaclavas that they had worn to school that frosty morning. To him they looked so stupid, peering out from the woollen circles, their ruddy noses and cheeks glowing in the gradually warming air. Not for the first time he felt a growing distance from the rest of the class.

  “Henry,” Mrs Brown turned to him, “would you take Madeleine and have her sit next to you? You’re the best reader in the class, so please share your books with her while we sort out some of her own.” She turned to Madeleine, instinctively and unnecessarily raising her voice: “Go with Henry, please, and sit next to him.” She indicated Henry and Madeleine turned slightly and looked up at him.

  Henry saw a little girl with dark eyes, circled with the heavy shadows of unhappiness and seemingly lost to this world, wearing a soft pink cardigan over a coarse, grey dress that hung loosely from her thin shoulders, and boots that looked too big for her feet. Instinctively, he took her hand and walked back to his desk. Smiling, he patted the bench and pointed for her to sit, making sure that she sat on the end of the bench and not between him and his desk partner. There was something intrinsically fragile, bird-like almost, about this girl and Henry had already decided he wanted to keep her for himself.

  Some of Henry’s contemporaries can still vaguely recall Madeleine – “a Jewish girl, wasn’t it?” – although an equal number will say they have no remembrance of her at all. It would seem that Henry’s attempts to shield Madeleine from the rest of his classmates proved fairly successful and after an initial interest in this strange girl from a country in Europe most of them hadn’t heard of, Henry and Madeleine were left alone. From the staff-room, Mrs Brown would look out onto the playground and more often than not see the two of them together, Henry turning the pages of a book and chatting away to the little girl who looked so tiny against his large frame. As the weeks went by she noticed that the frightened child had become one who would smile occasionally and that, imperceptibly, the dark circles under her eyes faded and disappeared.

  By the end of summer term Madeleine’s reading and understanding of English had improved so much that Mrs Brown had called her to the front of the class to give her the gold star for “most improved pupil of the term”. As Madeleine returned to her desk, Mrs Brown’s heart melted at the sight of Henry beaming in delight as she sat back next to him, their heads almost touching as they both looked at the gold star pinned to Madeleine’s dress, Henry’s finger running over the bright brooch.

  “Now, children,” Mrs Brown clapped her hands to catch the whole class’s attention. “Some of you will be joining the senior school in September where things will be much more serious.” She put on a stern face as if to emphasize the harder regime to come, but then smiled once more. “So, go out and enjoy the freedom of this summer and come back refreshed and ready to learn. Dismissed!”

  That summer did indeed prove to be idyllic in any number of ways, and especially for Henry and Madeleine. The weather records for that July and August of 1939 show an almost constant high pressure system settled over the south and west of England. Often people’s memory of that pre-war year are distorted by what came after it, perhaps even falsely dressing that summer with a perfection that was to disappear forever but indeed it was, as one resident of Bradford on Avon described it, “the last real summer for easy living”.

  Mavis Eastman was delighted at Henry’s new friendship, especially after the Mary Collins incident, which had isolated her son even more among his peers. Very few of the other children had ever bothered to spend much time with Henry and even those who came into the shop to buy sweets hardly acknowledged him if, by chance, he was sitting behind the counter. Madeleine seemed different though. She seemed so attached to Henry, they could have been brother and sister.

  The more she saw of Madeleine, the more Mavis wondered if it was too late to have another child. She was so sweet, so pretty, and it would be nice to have a girl to dress rather than the young man’s clothes that she was now forced to buy for Henry. The trauma of Henry’s birth had gradually faded but now she was over thirty and Arthur, at thirty-eight, seemed so set in his ways that she doubted he would ever agree to another child. Well, she could enjoy Madeleine while she was around and every day that summer, it seemed, the little Austrian girl would skip through the front door of the shop soon after 10 o’clock. Mavis would pack sandwiches and take a bottle of pop from the shop stock – even though Arthur would grumble that she was giving away the shop’s profits – and the two children would disappear for the day, always returning in time for tea. Sometimes, if they returned a little early and the shop was still open, Mavis would entertain the children with songs on the piano. For some reason, which Mavis was never to understand, they always asked for the Mandalay song and giggled behind her back as she launched into the chorus, they both holding the chord on the first syllable and laughing as Mavis improvised before they caught up with the rest of the song.

  One day they had come back from their day out and Mavis sensed something different about them both. A sudden shyness between them; what had before been open and laughter now was secret, almost sly. Whispering that stopped when she came in; Henry going to his room earlier at night to read, he said, so that she was left alone until Arthur came back from the pub. Henry had been her one constant companion for some years and now, in the subtlest and smallest of ways, she began to feel excluded from the life going on around her. She became prone to feelings of dread about a life that had begun to unravel with a future now quite unsure. Inexplicably and quite suddenly one August evening, as she sat alone at the kitchen table, she burst into tears.

  “Big lad, isn’t he, Mrs Eastman?” The woman in the shoe shop sat on a little stool in front of Henry, bent down over his right foot and pulled it into her lap so that she could lever on the highly polished shoe more easily. Henry felt a sudden flush of excitement as his stockinged foot lay between the woman’s thighs before she fina
lly managed to force on the new shoe. She repeated the exercise with the other foot, Henry intent on making sure he placed his foot in the same place, nestling next to what he guessed was the button of the woman’s suspender belt and imperceptibly moving his toes. She raised her head, catching Henry’s eye.

  “And still growing, eh?” If she winked at Henry it was so fleeting that he might have said it was just a blink of the eye but he was sure there was something else there. She turned to Mavis. “Looks as if he’ll be heading for a size 9 or 10 pretty soon.” She tied the laces on each foot and patted the sides of the shoes. “There. Let’s take a look in the pedoscope, shall we, and make sure these fit you properly. Over here.”

  Henry followed the woman over to a machine that sat in the middle of the shop, his feet encased in the new shoes feeling quite strange and bigger than ever.

  “Pop one of your feet into the hole there, Henry. You can look through the viewer here.” She tapped the viewer on the top of the machine. “Mrs Eastman, you can look through this one on this side. Just give me a few seconds to warm it up.”

  She flicked a switch at the back of the machine and turned a dial a third of the way around the calibration. The machine hummed to life and a faint glow emanated from the hole by Henry’s foot.

  “OK. I think we’re all set. Let’s see if we have the right size for you, Henry.”

  Henry stood with one foot embedded in the machine in front of them and watched as his mother and the shop woman bent their heads and peered into their viewfinders. The bowed head of the shoe-shop woman was close enough for him to touch. Her blonde hair, curled into a tight bun on the back of her head, shone in the sunlight streaming through the shop window. A few stray strands had come loose, delicately floating adrift from the bun, like the catkins of a willow close by his and Madeleine’s encampment that dipped its lowest branches into the river. It looked so delicate and yellow, and as the two women were still intent on peering through the scopes Henry reached down and placed one finger lightly on the hair of the shop woman. He was surprised by the dense feel of the bun and wondered if it hurt to have your hair rolled up so tight.

  “What do you think, Mrs Eastman? That foot looks OK, doesn’t it?” The woman lifted her head quickly, banging Henry’s hand that still hovered over her. Instinctively she touched her bun and gave Henry a quick look.

  “Let’s have a peek at the other one, shall we? Change feet, Henry.”

  Once more they bent over the viewers and this time Henry bent down with them and looked through his own viewer. Silhouetted by a green glow, he could see the outline of his foot within the shoe. Wiggling his toes, he could even make out the bones of his foot, though, in a peculiar way, it didn’t feel like him.

  “That one looks fine as well.” His mother raised her head. “We’ll take these, thank you. No doubt we’ll be back before very long though. I just wonder when he’s going to stop growing.” She laughed as she dug around in her purse. “Costs more than me to clothe these days.”

  The shoe woman fussed around at the till, putting the new pair back into a box and writing out a receipt. “Best keep the old shoes, Mrs Eastman. You never know if they might come in handy, especially the way things are going.” She wrapped the box in brown paper, swiftly tying a noose knot from the ball of string that sat in a holder on the counter. “My hubby reckons we’ll be at war with the Germans again before the year’s out. Gives me the jitters, it does, just thinking about it. Lost my elder brother in the last one…” She tailed off, her voice suddenly catching on the memory.

  “Oh dear, I do hope not.” Mavis picked up the box by the string noose. “I can’t believe we will all be silly enough to go down that road again.” She turned towards the door. “Thank heavens Arthur’s too old and Henry’s too young.” She stopped herself, embarrassed, remembering that the woman had a grown-up son of eighteen. “Anyway, I’m sure it will come to nothing. All hot air and rattling of swords.”

  The woman stood to one side of the counter, tapping the ivory shoehorn in the palm of her hand.

  “Sometimes you feel so powerless to change anything. Do you know what I mean, Mrs Eastman? We do our best to muddle through but there’s always something to trip us up. Ruin everything.” She stuffed the shoehorn into the pocket of her overall and grimaced. “Let’s hope you’re right and it’s all comes to nothing. We can but hope, eh?”

  Henry stood on the over-bridge at Bradford on Avon station, kicking the iron stanchions with the brown boots that were already beginning to feel a little too small for him even though they were less than a month old.

  He watched as the train for Bath entered the station, coming to a halt just under his feet, the smoke from the chimney wreathing around the metal sides of the walkway and swirling into the canopy that ran the length of the over-bridge. The day was already beginning to feel warm even though it wasn’t yet gone nine in the morning. The sky was clear and the light had a vibrant brilliance to it that made Henry squint as he peered down at the engine and carriages. Although he spent quite a bit of time at the station watching the trains come and go, he had specifically come here this morning to see Madeleine. She had said that her foster mother would be taking her into Bath on the early train to get some new clothes for the school term. Henry was going to be moving up to the senior school but Madeleine, being a little younger, was to remain in the junior school for at least another year. The thought of it set up a flutter of panic in his stomach but Madeleine had promised that she would see him every day, would come into the shop whenever she could, and in holidays they would meet up as they had done this summer.

  He watched as she stepped into the compartment of the first carriage and as she did so she looked up towards the bridge and waved. Henry waved back, happy that she had remembered his promise to be at the station that morning. As the train moved away from the station down the track towards Bath, Henry could see her head sticking out of the window, her slim arm signalling back to him all the while until the train disappeared into the distance round the bend towards Avoncliff and out of sight.

  He came down the steps on the up side of the platform and wandered towards the waiting room that had one of its doors propped open, presumably to let in some fresh air. The London-bound train had left ten minutes before and now both platforms were empty of any passengers. The only other person present was a porter hauling a trolley loaded with a large suitcase that had just come off the Bath train. Henry watched as the porter gingerly rolled the trolley down the platform slope, tugging back on what looked like a considerable weight to stop it running away from him. At the bottom of the slope he turned at right angles and wheeled it along the wooden crossing over the tracks. When he reached the slope to the platform he began to push hard to bring it back up onto the level, but Henry could see that the man was struggling to get any impetus on the upward slope. Running quickly down the platform, Henry saw there was a fine sheen of sweat on the man’s face and a bead trickled from under his cap and down the side of his ear.

  “Want a hand?”

  The porter took a moment to measure the size of Henry. He pulled out a handkerchief from a pocket and ran it across his forehead, tipping his cap so far on the back of his head that the peak stood straight up. From where Henry stood it looked like a black halo emanating from the porter’s head.

  “Just need a little more oomph to get this bugger up’pard. I’m buckling with this. Almost vell bakkards, dinnaye?” Henry smiled at the sound of the Somerset accent that always pronounced the first “f” of any word as “v” – just like Madeleine did. He had regularly heard “country talk”, as his mother called it, on market days when the farmers brought their stock into town, driving sheep and cattle into pens and shouting to each other in an indecipherable language.

  “Dunno what’s in it. Bloody heavy, I can tell ‘ee. Perhaps it’s a dead body, eh?” He laughed and put the handkerchief back in his pocket. “All right, my lad, you look gurt enough. You’m come round this side and push when aye gi
ves ‘ee the nod.”

  Henry joined him behind the trolley and grabbed hold of one of the handles and the crossbar. The porter braced himself against the other handle.

  “OK. You’m ready?”

  Henry nodded.

  “Right. Here we go then. Push!”

  The trolley and its suitcase began to move as they both dug their feet into the tarmac of the slope and pushed hard against the crossbar. Smoothly, the trolley’s wheels gathered pace and they were quickly up on the level platform and moving towards the ticket office store, next to the waiting room.

  “You’m got some push there, my lad. How old are you?”

  They had parked the trolley by the waiting-room door and Henry was rubbing the palms of his hands across the front of his shirt. “Eleven.”

  The porter took off his cap and ran his forearm across his brow. “What yo’ going to be when yo’ grow up?” he laughed. “The strong man in a circus?”

  Henry smiled. “No, I’m going to help my mum and dad run the sweet shop they own in Silver Street. Eastman’s. D’ye know it?”

  “Oh, you’m Arthur’s boy, are you? I knows about you.” The porter put his cap back on his head. “Fancy a jar of lemonade for your exertions? Deserved it? Lord knows I could do with one meself after this beast.” He banged the top of the case which stood at shoulder height.

  “Yes, thanks.” Henry watched as the porter disappeared inside the ticket office, wondering what it was that he “knew” about him. A couple of minutes later the porter returned with a large glass of milky water.

  “My ma makes this in bucketfuls and I always brings along a canister on hot days. Keeps me off the beer at lunchtime.” He winked and handed over the glass to Henry. “Look, I’ve got to sort out some papers and to get some luggage ready for the next Brissel train.” He peered up at the station clock. “And that’ll be here in about thirty minutes. You sup this in your own time and then just leave it here on the top of this case when you’m finished. Thanks for the push.” He placed his hand on Henry’s shoulder, hesitating for a moment as if to say something but then turned and went into the ticket office.