by Maisie Mosco
Martin had been standing silently by the window. “Let’s hope we stay safe and well,” he said.
“Why shouldn’t we, you silly boy?” Miriam chided him.
He studied his bitten-down fingernails pensively. “Most of this family seem to wear blinkers, but they’re in for a shock. Some of the masters at our school are already taking ARP courses.”
“What does he mean?” Sarah inquired.
“They’re learning about air-raid precautions,” Martin said roughly and watched his grandmother turn pale. “You took us to hear Mosley speak, to increase our awareness of the Fascist threat to Jews, but it isn’t just Jews who are threatened anymore.”
“Hitler told Chamberlain the Sudetenland was his last territorial claim,” Abraham intervened.
“And anyone who believes it deserves all they get,” Martin declared.
“I agree,” Sigmund said.
“Because you’re a scaremonger and Martin takes after you,” Sarah accused them both.
Martin gazed out of the window at the dark bulk of the Welsh Chapel across the street and the baker’s shop on the corner where his mother sent him to buy bagels on Sunday mornings. He could hear the wind rustling the leaves of an evergreen in the garden and the distant hum of traffic on the main road that had lulled him to sleep at night when he was a small child. How peaceful it all seemed, but it was only an illusion.
He turned to look at the family. “There’s going to be a war I tell you.”
Part Two
Sticks and Stones
Chapter 1
“I haven’t had such a miserable birthday since I woke up with chicken-pox the day I was eight,” Marianne complained to Shirley.
“It’ll be mine soon, as well,” Shirley reminded her. “Mam and Dad were going to take me and Peter and Ronald to the State Café, as it’s on New Year’s Eve. But I don’t suppose they’ll be going themselves now there’s a war on.”
The two girls were tramping along the deserted high street of the Welsh village to which they had been evacuated.
“It’s like a dream, us being here, isn’t it?” Marianne said.
“To me it’s more like a nightmare.”
They turned left by the grey stone chapel and walked down the now familiar lane that led to the beach, past the minister’s long-johns ballooning on a clothes line in the blustery sea wind, behind a prickly hawthorn hedge.
Marianne thrust her hands into her coat pockets; even the thick woollen gloves Helga had knitted for her could not keep out the cold. “Martin was right,” she mused.
“What about?”
“Don’t you remember what he said to the family the day Peter and Hildegard arrived?”
“No.”
“You were too busy making eyes at Peter.”
“I was not!”
“You’ve had a crush on him right from the beginning.”
“Leave me alone, Marianne! Try being funny with someone else.”
Marianne gazed at the turgid ocean lashing the pebbles on the lonely stretch of shore at the bottom of the slope and smiled sourly. “Apart from Mrs. Ellis and the seagulls I never see anyone else.”
“If they had to evacuate me, why did it have to be with you?” Shirley expostulated.
“Ditto,” Marianne expressed succinctly. “I wonder who lives in that place?” she said glancing up at an old manor house that towered in solitary splendour atop a pine-clad hill.
“I shouldn’t think anyone does. It looks as if it’s crumbling to bits,” Shirley said practically.
But Marianne was affected by the sense of romantic times past which seeing it always evoked in her. “If walls could speak, I bet it could tell some stories,” she said thoughtfully. Then her shoes crunched on the pebbles as they reached the beach and the sight of the rusty barbed wire festooned along it to deter enemy invaders returned her to the gloomy present.
She would not have minded being here so much if they were able to attend school, but the one in the village would not take them; its pupils left when they were fourteen. Marianne had at first spent the days reading and scribbling, and Shirley had sat sketching. Now, they could only occupy themselves with these pursuits in the evenings. Even in bad weather, their landlady would not allow them to remain indoors during the day and they had to keep on the move.
Their fathers had rushed them to the village in David’s car the day war was declared, though both girls had protested. Ellis was the widowed sister-in-law of Sarah’s Welsh neighbours and had agreed to take Marianne and Shirley if it became necessary. They could have been evacuated with their schools, but their parents had wanted them to be together and had considered this more important than the continuance of their schooling.
“They didn’t do this to the boys, did they?” Marianne flared thinking about it. “Just because we’re girls, they think our education doesn’t matter! And that we’ve got to chaperone each other!”
“How much money have you got left from this week’s spends?” Shirley asked her. “I’m starving and mine’s nearly all gone.”
Marianne fished in her pocket and found two shillings. “You paid for the cakes we bought yesterday, that’s why.”
Their parents had refused to send food-parcels in case it offended Mrs. Ellis and supplied them with cash to buy fruit and buns to supplement the landlady’s frugal fare.
“She’s a stingy old thing as well as a fresh-air maniac,” Shirley declared peevishly. “And in my opinion, the real reason she makes us stay out all day is she doesn’t want us under her flat feet.”
Marianne did not reply, just as Shirley had ignored her assertion that their parents treated them differently because they were girls. Their days were peppered with such outbursts and neither paid any attention when the other suddenly gave vent to her personal frustrations. Three months of each other’s undiluted company had brought them no closer than they had ever been.
“Why don’t we take off our coats and jumpers, then we’ll get pneumonia and they’ll have to come and take us home?” Marianne suggested desperately.
“Trust you to think of something so daft!”
“Your trouble is you’ve got no imagination.”
“And yours is you’ve got no common sense.”
“I’d rather be at home with pneumonia than stay here.”
“I’m surprised we haven’t got it already,” Shirley snorted. “From Mrs. Ellis washing our hair under the yard pump. When we get home, I’ll never want to set eyes on anyone Welsh again.”
“You’ll have a job not to, with Mrs. Evans living next door to Bobbie. And the Evanses are nice, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Shirley admitted reluctantly.
They squatted uncomfortably side by side with their backs resting against a sandbank and contemplated the sea. “If you’d said you never wanted to see this place again, I’d agree with you,” Marianne said dislodging an obtrusive pebble from under her behind. “But what you said about the Welsh – well, it’s the way some Christians are about Jews, isn’t it?”
“I’m not interested in having one of your boring discussions,” Shirley snapped.
“What would you rather talk about? Which of the seven frocks you’ve brought with you you should wear for our landlady’s bread-and-jam banquet tonight?”
Shirley leapt up and stormed off along the beach, her long red hair flying in the wind.
“I was just trying to make you realize something!” Marianne called after her, but Shirley continued walking and she scrambled to her feet and ran after her. “I’m going to tell you what it is, whether you’re interested or not, Shirley. Generalizations like the one you just made are odious.”
“Go and practise your big words on the seagulls!” Shirley flung at her.
“Not only odious, but absolutely disgusting,” Marianne went on. “And Jewish people are the last ones who should make them.”
“If they don’t come and take us home, I’ll drown myself in the sea. I’ve got to get away from you so
mehow!” Shirley shrieked. Then she tripped over a pebble and fell flat on her face.
Marianne tried to help her up but was not allowed to. “You just took the words right out of my mouth,” she said. “Except I was going to say escape, not get away.”
Shirley lay sprawled on the pebbles, listening to the tide rushing in. If her parents really loved her, they wouldn’t have abandoned her. And oh, how she loathed Marianne!
If we were Manchester Grammar boys, we’d be home by now, Marianne was thinking. Arnold and Martin’s school had already returned from its evacuation to Blackpool. Ronald and Peter were MGS boys, too, and she and Shirley had pleaded to be sent to Blackpool, so they could all have been together. But their parents had said the resort was full up. The boys are at home, but we’re still here! Marianne raged inwardly. And what for, when not one German bomber had so much as appeared in the English skies?
Shirley raised her head. “I think I’m having a hallucination, Marianne. Can you hear singing?”
“No.”
“Well, I can.”
Then Marianne heard it, too. A chorus of youthful voices drifting on the wind.
Shirley heaved herself up and peered through the sea mist. “I’m definitely having one, if you can’t see what I can. Look behind you. Over there.”
Marianne turned around and gaped. A vast circle of boys and girls were singing and dancing the Horah at the far end of the beach. “They’re real all right,” she said to Shirley. “But what are they doing here?”
Shirley raced along the beach to find out. The Horah was danced and sung by Zionist Youth Movements and a familiar sight to a girl who was a member of Habonim.
By the time Marianne reached them, her cousin had broken into the circle and was singing and dancing with them.
“Who are you and what’re you doing in this place?” a sturdy, bespectacled man who was with them asked the two girls when the ring of exuberant youngsters broke apart from sheet exhaustion.
“We were going to ask you the same question,” Shirley smiled and explained their presence.
Marianne was listening to the boys and girls talking together in German but would have known they were foreign from their appearance. They had a certain look about them she had noted in Peter and Hildegard, though she could not have described it in words.
“Are they refugees?” she asked the man, who had said his name was Dov.
“What else?” he sighed, and she experienced a surge of shame because she had been feeling sorry for herself.
“We’re living in that manor house on the hill,” Dov said. “It isn’t the essence of comfort, to put it mildly. It’s stood empty for ages, but beggars can’t be choosers and we’ve done wonders with it, considering.”
“Why haven’t we seen you before?” Shirley inquired. “We come to the beach every day.”
“This is the first time we’ve been down here. We only arrived last week, and it’s taken us till now to make the house habitable and settle ourselves in. But now we’ve met, why not come and see us?” Dov smiled. “We’re having a Chanukah party tonight and you’re welcome to join us.”
They thanked him for the invitation and watched the boys and girls head back towards the manor.
“I wish he’d asked us to have dinner with them,” Shirley said. The only time they had tasted meat since leaving home was on the three Sundays their parents had visited them and brought some brisket sandwiches.
“How do you know they keep kosher? Peter didn’t used to, did he?”
“The boys wouldn’t be wearing yamulkes otherwise. Some of them were very good-looking, weren’t they?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“You never do.”
Marianne thought Shirley was boy-mad but refrained from saying so. They had quarrelled enough for one morning and at least had something pleasant to look forward to tonight.
When they returned to Mrs. Ellis’s cottage for dinner, their usual thin slice of cheese, two pickled onions and half a tomato awaited them on the table, on two small blue plates that were part of a set on the Welsh dresser.
The two china dogs that sat one on either side of the slate hearth seemed to be scowling at them as always and Marianne wondered what they had to scowl about when they spent their days cosily by the fire.
Mrs. Ellis was dishing up a pork chop and some potatoes and leeks for herself and put her laden plate to rest on the slab beside the sink whilst she filled the utensils with water from an enamel pail.
The girls waited for her to sit down at the table. They were not allowed to do so until she did.
“And where have you been till this time?” she inquired in the soft, lilting voice that did not match her nature. “Twelve o’clock sharp is dinnertime in this house.”
They watched her lower her black-garbed bulk into a chair.
“Sit down then, indeed to goodness! What are you waiting for?”
They seated themselves opposite her, in their regular chairs, as they had been instructed to do on their first day here. Mrs. Ellis’s regimentation knew no limits.
“It’s only five past,” Shirley said, glancing at the squat black clock with a white face that reminded her of Mrs. Ellis. She gazed down at her uninviting repast. “And our dinner won’t get cold.”
Mrs. Ellis had just folded her hands to say grace and Shirley’s pointed remark washed over her. Her skin was as thick as her iron-grey hair was sparse, but Shirley was determined to provoke her.
“Why can’t you give us something hot to eat, in this weather?” she asked when the woman had thanked God for what they were about to receive. “A boiled potato, for instance? Like you’re having with your chop.”
“And what would I boil it in for you, tell me that? Your parents gave permission for you to eat from nothing but the plates that have only been used for cake and bread and butter. My saucepans have all been in contact with meat. Like my dinner plates have.”
“You could buy another pan and a couple of plates for us,” Shirley persisted.
“And what would I do with them after you girls have gone?”
Shirley exchanged an exasperated glance with Marianne. They had asked their parents to bring some saucepans and crockery, but David had thought it best not to do so. “Better the devil you know; if she gets touchy about it and asks you to leave another landlady could turn out worse,” he had said.
“Eat up those pickled onions, Marianne bach. It’s wasteful to leave them,” Mrs. Ellis said, removing a blob of gravy from her whiskery moustache with a spotless handkerchief.
“It isn’t wasteful. You always put them back in the jar if we don’t eat them,” Shirley reminded her.
“I’m a thrifty woman and always have been.”
“You’re telling me! But we won’t be in to eat your thrifty tea tonight.”
“And what does that mean?”
“We’ve been invited to a party,” Marianne interceded hastily. If she left it to Shirley to explain, even Mrs. Ellis’s skin wouldn’t be thick enough to withstand the jibes and she wouldn’t let them go. “At the manor house. It’s a hostel for Jewish refugee children at present and tonight’s our Chanukah, that’s why the man in charge invited us.”
“Indeed, to goodness, did he?” Mrs. Ellis said.
Shirley glared at her. “Yes, indeed to goodness he did.”
Marianne could tell by the glint in the woman’s eyes that her cousin had finally made Mrs. Ellis’s hackles rise.
Their landlady’s retort confirmed this. “Back to the bombs it is for you, Miss, if I hear another word from you.”
“There haven’t been any, and I wish you would send me home.”
Mrs. Ellis managed to contain herself. “There’ll be no gallivanting for you girls tonight or any other night while you live under my roof, bach. I’m a God-fearing person and I promised your parents to watch over you like I did over my daughter Megan.”
“No wonder she left home when she grew up,” Shirley answered. “I wouldn’t h
ave waited that long if I’d been her.” She sprang up from her chair and ran upstairs, bumping her head on the fumed-oak beam above the doorway, as she often did.
“Please let us go to the party, Mrs. Ellis,” Marianne pleaded. “It’s a Jewish Festival, where they light candles,” she explained, appealing to the woman’s religious zeal, but found she had said the wrong thing.
“Like the Catholics and the pagans do, is it?” Mrs. Ellis pronounced sanctimoniously.
Marianne stared down at the two soggy, pickled onions on her plate. The low ceiling, that made even someone of her height feel tall, seemed lower than usual and the tiny room was suddenly shutting her in. Even the mixed smell of cooking and carbolic soap seemed stronger than usual and the tick of the clock louder, as if all her senses has been sharpened.
She glanced around at the unadorned, whitewashed walls and the speckless stone floor that Mrs. Ellis scrubbed twice a day, like she did the table-top and the surface of her dresser.
The bedroom the girls shared had the same too-clean and tidy look about it. Mrs. Ellis went in there and stowed away anything they had left lying around. Even their hair-brushes and books had to be kept in a drawer, as though it were a sin to let God see them.
That it was for God that Mrs. Ellis adhered to her rigorous standards Marianne had decided some time ago. Nobody ever crossed her threshold to see her over-immaculate home. But Marianne did not think God wanted people to be that way, to have no joy in their lives and fear Him as Mrs. Ellis did.
She watched the woman’s ill-fitting dentures masticating the last morsel of fat from her chop and wondered what Rabbi Lensky at the old Hassidic shul in Strangeways would make of her. The Sandbergs had been members of the Hassidic sect in Russia, and Zaidie Abraham still preferred to worship with the small congregation for whom religion was a pleasure and not a restriction. The rest of the family no longer went there, but Marianne remembered the joyous abandon with which the Hassidim celebrated the Harvest and Tabernacles Festivals. To a lesser degree, the more anglicized congregations did, too.