I’m here, I told the breeze. Let blackbirds take my words to her, wherever her ghost was now.
A flash of movement behind me. A face at a window? Gone.
As soon as I was out of sight of the house, I ran; I couldn’t help it. My shoes scuffed up grit, my braids flew out behind me. Not from danger or towards safety, just running for the sheer fun of it – amazing! I only slowed down when I reached the humpback bridge over the river. Water flowed silver. Some pooled in a pond edged with emerald grass.
Years ago there’d been a boy who fed the ducks. I remembered him. Except that couldn’t be true, because who’d give their bread to birds when they could eat it themselves? Thanks to Sophie Rover I was now fuelled by big slabs of bread and butter, and a daily lunch of something called meatuntooveg, which was slices of meat with a mound of mashed potatoes, floods of thick gravy and a mush of greens. All that, followed by pudding. I could almost feel my body growing every night. I got too cramped under the bed and decided to sleep on the mattress. Being comfortable was nice, in a strange way.
In the village I got my bearings quickly enough. Left past the bridge was a clump of yew trees and a church spire. Ahead of me, next to the pond, was a triangle of grass, the police station, a pub – called the Clock Tower – and the village shop.
The sign above the shop window read: A&E Oakley. Grocer’s – Post Office.
I was glad I’d spent time with the British Red Cross nurses in Berlin, getting used to the language. German I’d learned at school before the war; Czech and Polish at home from birth. Then, in hiding, my mother had taught me French and English. I could still feel the faint tickle of her fingertip, tracing letters in my palm. A is for Apple, B is for Blackberry …
In front of Oakleys’ shop were rows of wooden crates, each full of a different type of vegetable. There was also a red post box. It matched the red telephone box on the triangle of grass. My heart quickened. I’d come to Summerland for … I wasn’t quite sure what for now. Justice? Safety? A reunion? What if I did some hunting instead of just waiting for something to happen? There was a telephone book in the phone box. When things had got bad in Berlin, people ripped directories into squares for toilet paper. Then we had to use pages from the few books that hadn’t already been burned for fuel. Frau Trautwein suggested sheet-music squares in the toilet, but my mother had objected. I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t exist.
I nipped into the box and flipped the flimsy pages, looking for a name I’d buried for years. It began with g, like g for glove and G for Gant’s. I ran my finger down a page of surnames. G … G … G …
No Golanski.
He was dead. I knew it.
He couldn’t be dead! He was my papa – large and warm and full of life. He’d taught me to whistle on grass stalks and had folded paper boats for my bathtub. Except it had been so long since I saw his face I had probably just invented memories of a papa while alone in the dark of the wardrobe, where there was no grass and no baths. Lots of fathers died in the war – why should mine be any different? Just because I desperately wanted him to be alive, that didn’t mean it would happen. Why was I even holding out hope? Was he worth it? Hadn’t he abandoned us anyway? Left us to suffer alone? Left me in this mess? The pig! He was alive and he didn’t care about me. I’ll find you, he said. What a lie. He wasn’t even looking for me. Fine. I’d get addresses. Write letters. Find him first. And then …?
The knife was still in my sock.
I fingered a few bars of music against my leg to collect myself before crossing the green to the shop. A bell tinkled as I opened the door. A group of people turned to say hello, then fell silent. A gigantic woman behind the counter – Mrs Oakley? – beckoned me forward. She had a flour-white face and a pinned-up lump of hair like a loaf of bread.
‘Our Ribble said there was a foreigner at the big house. Looks like he was right. German, are you? I’d spit if wasn’t unhygienic. Germans everywhere these days, like a ruddy invasion! There’s half a dozen prisoners working at Home Farm and I don’t know how many else up Old Rory’s place. Get out of here. I won’t serve you.’
The other customers nodded or tutted or just stared.
A man in a brown apron – Mr Oakley? – smiled, but warily, because his wife was big and cross. ‘Now then, Enid, it’s not likely this pretty lass is out to start World War Three, are you, pet?’
Mrs Oakley sniffed. ‘You know what happened to my dad – gassed by the Germans in the first war. Never been right in the head since.’
I thought I heard Mr Oakley mutter, ‘Runs in the family.’
‘And I always said Joseph Summer would come to grief if he joined the RAF, even if he did look proper smart in his uniform, bless him. Ruddy Huns – using his plane for target practice.’
‘Poor lad,’ said Mr Oakley. ‘I remember him winning the last cricket tournament before the war, with that shot he put through the village-hall window. What a belter.’
‘I have a list, from Lady Summer.’ My accent sounded painfully un-English.
Mrs Oakley sniffed. ‘If you haf a leest from Lady Summer, then I suppose I’ll have to oblige. Put it on the counter.’
While her husband collected items from the shelves and tore strips of stamps from a big book, Mrs Oakley totted up numbers and wrote a tally in a ledger. She wasn’t done with her spite though.
‘You should be glad you Jews aren’t all in concentration camps still, and I don’t see why you’d be sent there if you hadn’t done something wrong. No smoke without fire, I say.’
I smiled at Mrs Oakley, wishing I could gut her like a fish for tossing out such horrible opinions. Smiling while feeling homicidal was one of my mama’s tips: Never draw attention to yourself. Never argue. Smile if it helps. Mutti did a lot of smiling in the Trautwein house so that we could both stay safe.
Mr Oakley handed me a parcel tied with string. He showed me to the door.
‘Don’t you mind my missus,’ he said quietly. ‘She has to put up with me and my nightmares. I’ve had a touch of bother since I got demobbed from the army earlier this year. I was one of the first lot of Brits into Belsen, one of them Horror Camps. The things I saw …’ His hand clutched my shoulder. His eyes were looking past me and into a memory. ‘We thought they were dead,’ he murmured. ‘We thought they were all dead. Then some of them moved …’
He pressed something into my hand. It was a twist of golden barley sugar.
You couldn’t tell what people were like. You never knew who’d help you, who’d betray you. Who’d understand; who’d condemn. I looked at the barley sugar. I suddenly felt guilty about all the secrets and lies I carried.
I still ate the sweet.
Two men stood smoking outside the Clock Tower pub. One nodded to his mate as if to say, That’s her. The other threw his cigarette end down and went inside to refill his pint glass. Were they local? Could they be spying on me? I hurried on, then … blackberries! A brambly hedge full of lovely fat fruit! I began to pick them, cramming them in my mouth. The only way to survive in bombed-out Berlin had been to eat the green shoots of weeds and glean whatever berries weren’t poisonous. When I’d eaten so many blackberries I felt sick, I filled my coat pockets with more and set off back to Summerland.
My way was blocked.
A gang of village children had gathered on the arch of the bridge and they were armed. A tall boy with hair slicker than duck feathers threw the first stone.
‘Varmint!’ he shouted.
There was a yelp. Their target was a scrap of a child cowering on the far side of the bridge, next to a rusty bicycle.
‘Varmint!’ echoed one of the girls, maybe the tall boy’s kid sister. Her stone missed the target.
A bigger, solid girl with a bob of yellow hair had a baby on her hip and a stone in her hand. Tugging at her skirt was a pudgy boy.
This big girl threw her stone, yelling, ‘Thief!’ She was a good shot. The target yelped again. Shifting the baby’s weight, the big girl reached down to find
another missile.
‘Thief thief thief!’ the whole gang chanted.
The pudgy little boy now had a stone in his hand too. ‘Feef! Feef!’ he sang.
I shoved my way among the kids until I was between them and their victim, too mad to speak English, yelling in German instead. ‘Stop right now or I’ll rip your scrawny little heads off with my bare hands and throw them in the river for the ducks!’
The tall boy laughed. ‘What’s this? Some Nazi dropped in by parachute? What do you care if some dirty flea-ridden gypsy gets what’s coming to her? Move!’
I faced him without fear. Take out the leader, win the pack.
The big girl suddenly flushed. ‘Come on, Colin, it’s not worth it. Andrew, put that stone down!’
‘I want to frow it!’ said the podgy boy.
‘I said drop it!’
The tall boy – Colin – stepped towards me. ‘If you weren’t a girl, and quite a dishy one too, I’d sock you in the face.’
Bam! My fist flew out. Colin reeled back.
‘My nose, my nose, she’s broken my ruddy nose, I’m bleeding! Ow!’
For a moment the gang were just stunned, then Andrew – the podgy boy – pointed to the gore dripping from Colin’s face. ‘Blackberries!’ he sang. ‘Juicy ones!’ That made the others laugh.
The kid on the ground didn’t stick around to thank me for barging in. She scrambled to her feet, set her boots to the bicycle pedals and she was off – a blur of scabby knees and snot. Too small to sit on the saddle, her skinny arms tried to keep the handlebars straight. It can’t have helped that both tyres were flat, and some of the wheel spokes were bent.
One of the other kids made as if to chase her.
‘Don’t bother,’ said the big girl with the baby. ‘Nellie Varley’s got nits, and it’s not as if Joseph Summer is ever going to need his bike again, is it?’
That shut everyone up.
The girl hoisted the baby higher on her hip and looked me over.
‘Who are you?’
‘Brigitta Igeul.’
‘Brigitta Eagle? Ha, that’s funny! I’m Angela Goose. From the vicarage.’ Her pale hair swayed. She tucked it behind her ear. ‘This is Daisy …’ The baby blew bubbles. ‘And this is Andrew, my little brother.’
‘Not little!’ protested Andrew. ‘Is she a Nazi?’
‘She’s a maniac!’ said Colin, wiping blackberries and blood off his face. ‘Mind you, not a bad punch, for a girl.’
‘It floored you,’ said Angela airily.
‘I wasn’t expecting it. At any rate, it’s not how we do things here in England. We’re civilised.’ I stared at the stone still in his hand. He tossed it away and marched off, muttering, ‘Stupid foreigners. You wait – you’ll be sorry you threw that stone, German girl.’
‘That was Colin Oakley. He’s nice really,’ said Angela with a funny sort of sigh ‘And that’s his sister Poppy running after him. I suppose throwing stones isn’t exactly civilised. It just sort of … happened.’
I looked at the tracks of the bicycle. ‘The girl – Nellie?’
‘Her? Just one of the Varley rats. They’re thieves and poachers. Their dad, Roman Varley, practically lives at the pub, him and Uncle Tim. Hey, are you a Nazi? Silly question – you wouldn’t say yes even if you were. Where are you going?… To Summerland? Us too! Tea with Auntie Sophie. You’ve got blackberries, we’ve got apples … that means one of Sophie’s famous, unbeatable apple-and-blackberry crumbles! Andrew, get the fruit basket. Andrew, I said put that stone down.’
‘Plop!’ said Andrew happily as he dropped it in the river.
‘Now bring the basket. Honestly, boys, they’re impossible. At least baby Daisy is a girl. Why are you looking at me like that? She’s not my baby, you idiot. She’s my sister – aren’t you, you big fat dumpling? Weighs a ton. Why don’t you carry her for a bit?’
Without waiting for a reply Angela dumped the bundle of baby in my arms. Daisy smelled of soap and sour milk and warmth and love.
‘Look at your face! Like I’ve given you a live bomb! Mum always says girls are good with dolls and babies.’
‘I like babies,’ said Andrew, trying to hold my hand, even though I had a fistful of fruit.
Angela laughed suddenly. ‘I say, Brigitta, you didn’t half belt Colin! What a corker! That’ll bring him down a peg or two. Hope you haven’t really broken his nose – he’s kind of dreamy. I rate him a solid seven out of ten, even though his parents just run the shop. He called you dishy too!’ She glanced over at me. ‘I suppose you are – all dark and mysterious. I’m not jealous.’
‘You love Colin,’ piped up Andrew.
Angela rounded on him. ‘I do not. Don’t listen to him, Brigitta. He’s just a stupid kid.’
Listen? How could I help hearing? His voice was loud, but Angela’s was even louder – so piercing it echoed down the avenue to Summerland. People in London had probably stopped in their tracks to listen in too. Much of her English was lost on me, but from the way this Angela Goose had trusted me to hold her baby sister, I did work out I had somehow acquired a friend … and a friend who made sure I was sitting at the table with them when the apple-and-blackberry crumble came hot from the oven – all golden sugar and crumbs on top, syrupy fruit beneath.
A friend who laughed when I tried thick yellow custard for the first time.
A friend? Not what I’d expected at all.
Trust no one.
Later that day I heard Vera Baggs complaining that I hadn’t bought enough stamps at the shop. She wasn’t to know I’d hidden a few inside my one grey glove from Gant’s.
I’ll find you.
Victoria Sponge Cake
After a week of cleaning from attics to cellars, I knew most of the corners and corridors of Summerland house. By day I worked hard, fuelled by big plates of food. Sophie Rover made me so many cups of tea I peed rivers. Luckily there were fifteen military toilets in the kitchen corridor, so I could take my pick. After dark, while the living people slept, I crept through silent swirls of ghosts.
Airmen were everywhere. Some sprawled on ratty armchairs smoking, joking, playing cards. Some clustered round a dartboard set at the end of the ballroom, hung in front of an especially pompous portrait. The board had warped wires so the darts were firing off all over the place. Beer bottles chinked. Backs were slapped. It looked so much fun.
A young guy, jacket undone and shoeless, winked at me. Want to play? An open panelled door showed shelves crammed with board games and sports gear. He took out a cricket bat and tossed a red-grey ball in the air.
I smiled, but said no. I couldn’t bat a ghost ball anyway, even if I’d ever learned cricket. The thing I really wanted to play was the gorgeous grand piano. I dug my nails into my palms to persuade myself I couldn’t risk it. Not the noise, not the memories.
Each time I crept to Lady Summer’s study, the door was locked. I desperately wanted a look through her things. Maybe I’d find a photograph album from before the war – a clue for where to search, for the missing glove, for answers. One night the ghost with the cricket bat sauntered up, disappeared through the door and came out again, grinning. Breaking and entering was easy for the dead.
Saturday came around – the day the patient was to be delivered. Lady Summer came to check his rooms were ready. She was shaking with nervous energy.
I was cleaning a silver dressing-table set – a comb, shaving soap and cut-throat razor.
‘Careful with those. They belonged to my late husband.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘I had a friend once. A German girl. She always brushed her hair with a silver-backed brush, one hundred strokes a night. I never thought –’
I wasn’t to find out what Lady Summer hadn’t thought. Vera Baggs arrived with her usual Oh, am I interrupting? entrance.
‘Angela Goose from the vicarage is here, my lady. She’d like to know, did you want anything from town today? Mrs Goose is going in on the bus, but I can run any erra
nds you’d like, no trouble at all. My rheumatism isn’t so bad today and the rain may hold off.’
Lady Summer blinked. ‘No. Brigitta can do the errands. My son will need new nightclothes, and I don’t want her here when the ambulance arrives.’
‘I don’t want her here full stop,’ muttered Miss Baggs.
Like jam between sponge, I got sandwiched between Angela Goose and her mother on the bus into town. Mrs Goose obviously aspired to be elegant, but couldn’t help being homey instead, like a woman who sat through opera but who’d rather bob up and down to a brass band.
She caught me staring at the knobbly handbag hooked over her arm and patted it proudly. ‘Crocodile skin.’
I was thinking of a bus ride I’d had with Mama, when we still had money to pay for tickets and we were still allowed on public transport. It was in Warsaw, in Poland. We weren’t wearing yellow stars, as all Jews had to do by then. We were pretending to be normal human beings. I was in a dress. My hair was shorter, with a stupid ribbon bow at the front. A woman across from us kept staring and staring. She’d had a crocodile leather bag too. Mama decided we’d better get off the bus early. Filthy Jews, the woman hissed as we left.
We hadn’t been filthy. I’d washed behind my ears and under my fingernails and my shoes were polished. I asked Mama, What did she mean? That was when Mama decided we had to hide for real. She told me we were going to be smuggled into a Christian convent, where the nuns would look after us. I’d have to be a good girl – could I do that? Yes, Mama. Of course, Mama. I didn’t want to be dragged away to prison.
Angela prodded me in the side. ‘Hey, Dolly Daydream – you were miles away.’
Miles away and years ago. Would I pass for normal now?
Leaving the house that morning, I’d gone through the kitchen to the back door. There was another door apart from the big front portal which was always jammed shut, but only ‘proper people’ were to use that, not servants. Angela Goose had been waiting in the kitchen, cooing at baby Daisy in a basket near the range. ‘You’re so yummy I could eat you all up!’
Summerland Page 5