by Lore Segal
Toward the end of the summer, Mrs. Hooper took Dawn and Gwenda and me downtown to the Air Raid Precaution headquarters to be fitted for gas masks. We put on the black, ugly masks with their flat snouts; we looked strange and monstrous to each other. For the little children there were Mickey Mouse masks with blue snouts and pink, floppy ears, which didn’t fool them. They howled in terror at the close, evil-smelling rubber over their faces. The experience jarred Mrs. Hooper, and on the way home she kept asking me if I thought there was really going to be a war. I said no, there was not; Hitler would never go to war once he realized the Allies meant business. Mrs. Hooper was relieved. I must know—after all, I came from over there.
War was declared on September 3rd; we heard of it over the wireless, and Mrs. Hooper had hysterics and began to tremble and sent Gwenda and me to fetch Mr. Hooper quickly from his allotment down by the river. We ran all the way. “War!” we shouted, coming in sight of Mr. Hooper squatting near the little corrugated-iron tool shed on his length of land, which was striped with rows of tomato plants, carrots, lettuce, and beans. “Mum says you got to come home, it’s war!” cried Gwenda, arriving breathless and in terror.
Mr. Hooper straightened up. “Charlie!” he yelled across to a fellow weeding at the far end of the neighboring allotment. “War!”
“Which?” shouted Charlie, putting his hand behind his ear in a pantomime of not having heard.
“WAR!” yelled Mr. Hooper, with his hands cupped into a megaphone before his mouth.
“OH!” Charlie shouted back, and nodded his head in pantomime of having understood and went back to his weeding.
Mr. Hooper sent us home, saying he wanted to get his beans picked before it started raining and he’d be along in a little bit.
But it didn’t look to us as if it were going to rain. It was marvelous how the sky continued blue in spite of the war. The sun was high and hot, and we walked back slowly. Albert had got home, and there was dance music coming out of the wireless, as usual. I was comforted. Wartime seemed much like any other time, except that we carried our gas masks in cardboard boxes on a string around the neck wherever we went.
School had begun. Gwenda and I came and went together, though she was two classes ahead of me. On the first morning, we had louse inspection. I presented my head graciously; it must be clear to everyone that this was not meant for me. There was one teacher who taught all subjects, and I remember feeling that she had nothing new to tell me. I turned to reading. I read under the desk all day. I read all evening and in bed at night and brought my book to breakfast. “Whose is this?” Albert would ask, without looking at me and holding the book between forefinger and thumb as if it were some unpleasant object he had found on his chair.
Shortly before the Christmas holidays, a yearly examination was held at the Central School and both Gwenda and I won scholarships to the County School. My parents welcomed this change in my fortunes with enthusiastic pride—my father cried tears; my mother went in and told Mrs. Willoughby. The Hoopers reacted with a different sort of pride. They weren’t going to have any kid of theirs, they said, going to school along with a class of girls she didn’t belong to.
Full of indignation, I commiserated with Gwenda, but, to my surprise, she shared her parents’ view. “Ma and Dawn, they went to the Central School,” said Gwenda.
“But don’t you want to go to a better school,” I said, “where they teach Latin and you can go to the university? My Uncle Paul went to the University of Vienna until the Nazis threw him out. He was going to be a doctor. I’m going to the university.”
“I’m going to get married,” said Gwenda. “Dad and Albert didn’t go, and Albert works in the gasworks, and my dad got elected secretary to the union.”
“Do you like Albert?” I asked parenthetically.
“Yes,” Gwenda said. “He belongs in our house.”
We were sitting together in a hole we had made in the privet hedge at the bottom of the garden. I looked out over the grounds of my new school—at the playing fields, the tennis courts, the trees grouped around the outdoor stage, and the ample building along the top of the hill. I would not believe that Gwenda could really feel different from me about things, and I said, “Don’t you think that’s nice?” and watched her face with curiosity.
“It’s wicked,” said Gwenda. “All that for just a few girls.”
“But it’s nice,” I said. “And the girls in their green uniforms, don’t you think they look nice?”
“They’re stuck-up,” said Gwenda. “I like the girls at the Central School. They’re my friends.”
“I’m going to be friends with the girls at the County School,” I said. Gwenda and I sat close, comparing our snobberies. “What are you going to be, then, if you don’t go to the university?”
“I’m going to take typing in my last year,” Gwenda said, “and I’m going to be a secretary.”
“I’m going to be a painter,” I said. “And I’m going to travel. My Uncle Paul used to travel in Italy with his friends before Hitler. I’m going to have lots of friends. Poets, and people like that.” Gwenda listened with all her heart; her eyes glowed with enthusiasm while I roamed in my delicious future and picked and chose, like a child let loose in a sweetshop, until Mrs. Hooper yelled to us from the scullery to come and wash our hands and have our suppers.
“So who is going to get your new uniform?” Mrs. Hooper said. “I’m sure I don’t know what all they need up at that fancy school.”
Next day, I took my gas mask and went to see the lady of the Refugee Committee and told her, and she closed up the office and went shopping with me. She got me the green princesse-style tunic and green beret with the school emblem, and I never knew who paid for it.
“Yah!” said Albert. “Here comes Miss La-di-da.”
Albert loathed me. At Christmas, he gave me a game—a small one. For the rest of the family he had bought a collapsible snooker table, with balls and cues and chalk, which he played by himself throughout the holidays.
Christmas Day also happened to be Dawn’s seventeenth birthday, and Albert gave her a ring. After tea, he turned on the wireless really loud and stood behind Dawn’s chair and drummed out “A Tisket, a Tasket” with a flat palm on each of Dawn’s breasts. Mrs. Hooper began to carry the tea dishes into the scullery, and Gwenda left the room. I pretended to be drawing, but I looked in fascination at what Albert’s hands dared, and at Dawn, who allowed it. Her hands lay loosely in her lap, the right one cradling the left, which wore the ring. Dawn’s eyes stared straight before her with a look of patience.
With the beginning of the new term, I was inducted into the fourth form at the school on the hill, behind the Hoopers’ house. “Will you take care of Lore, here? She’s new,” said the teacher to a girl sitting in the front row. “Katherine will show you around. You sit here, and, Daisy, will you move to the empty desk in the back?”
“Ah, no!” said this Katherine. “Why does Daisy have to go?” She looked at me with a cold and insolent blue eye.
I talked to Katherine. I told her how I had come to the County School on a scholarship. Katherine looked back at Daisy and put her thumb to her nose. I decided she couldn’t have meant me, not with me standing there. I said, “I’m from abroad, and when I came to England I went to a Hebrew school, and after the first term I was top of the class.”
“Don’t you like it in the new school?” my mother asked the next Thursday.
“I do like it,” I lied. “I love it.” I spoke with enthusiasm about the courts and lawns and trees and a special room for art classes, with easels.
“It always takes a while in a new school to make friends,” said my mother.
“I’ve got plenty of friends,” I said, for I could not bear my mother to know that I was the kind of person who didn’t have. I had sneaked into Dawn’s and Gwenda’s room, where there was a small mirror on the wall, to try to understand what people saw when they looked at me. My eyes looked back, critical, anxious, and ove
reager. My nose had lost its baby roundness and was growing sharp, like my father’s. My face was small, made narrower by a mass of high-standing, tight light curls. (My mother wanted me to have my hair cut short, but I would not. I thought once it grew long enough it would also turn black and fine and silky and would fall in a tragic way about my face. Then I would look interesting and sad, and even Albert would feel sorry for me.)
I began to wonder that Gwenda and Mr. Hooper should seem to be fond of me. I watched them. I intercepted their eyes looking at me and tried to imagine myself as I appeared to them—and there I was with my sharp and narrow face. I studied Mrs. Hooper, too, and she puzzled me. Often when she spoke to me, she was looking nervously at Albert—and yet I didn’t think she really disliked me.
Early in 1940 a detective called at Illford House to check if my parents were friendly or spying aliens, and a month later my father was called before a tribunal, along with all male “aliens of hostile origin.” Mr. Willoughby went with him and vouched for my father’s being friendly and having no explosives, inflammable materials, maps scaled more than one inch to the mile, or vehicles. Then he drove my father home.
In London the air raids had begun. Mr. Hooper and Albert dug a shelter in the back yard. I asked Mrs. Hooper if they were going to bomb us, and she said she was sure she hoped not, but in the evening I heard her tell Mr. Hooper that they weren’t going to drop bombs. “They never would on us,” she said. “Would they, Fred?” She sat and watched him while he cut up his meat.
“No,” said Mr. Hooper. “Not on us. They’ll drop them all around us in a circle. Right, Lorry?”
“Tch, oh, Freddy!” Mrs. Hooper said. “I mean they wouldn’t bomb England once we show them we mean business. We’ll send ours over and show them, and they wouldn’t dare.”
“You take a load off my mind,” said Mr. Hooper.
And so it was clear to me without benefit of doubt that the grownups knew no more about it than I did, and were as powerless as I to prevent it, and then I knew that the bombs were certainly going to drop.
It soon turned out that every alien over sixteen, male or female, was hostile. Specified areas within a certain mileage of the east and south coasts were designated “protected areas,” and my parents had to leave the Willoughbys within twenty-four hours. The Committee offered a shelter farther inland, in which refugees could stay while they looked for other jobs, and on the way there my parents stopped off at the Hoopers’. Soon, my mother said, somehow or other, we would all live together.
It was summer again. The lady from the church committee brought me a secondhand tennis racket. It felt elegant in my hand. I left it lying around in the kitchen for everyone to see. Albert picked it up and it felt powerful in his hand, and he swung it in the air. “Wheeough!” cried Albert. I think he would have liked to slug me with it, but instead he began to chase Gwenda around the table. He had my green beret stuck on his head.
“Hey, that’s mine!” I said.
“Wheeoops!” yelled Albert.
“Albert, put that down before somebody gets hurt,” said Gwenda, with the table between herself and him.
“Dad!” Dawn cried. “Look what he’s doing!”
“Watch it!” said Mrs. Hooper, and the arm she raised to shield herself received the full blow of the descending racket. Mrs. Hooper was suddenly sitting on the floor between the fireplace and the table with such a look of surprise that we all laughed, until we saw the pain in her face. Her arm hung limp and useless out of her sleeve. Gwenda and I began to cry. Mr. Hooper knelt by his wife and took hold of the disabled arm, and despite Mrs. Hooper’s screaming he wrenched it back into its socket and raised her to a chair, where Mrs. Hooper sat holding her shoulder and rocking to and fro. Her face was white and tears still pressed out of her eyes, but she could move her arm, she said, and it was all right.
Albert had fled at the sight of what he had done and was walking round and round the scullery with a sulky, scarlet face. “Goddam tennis racket,” he said. I went and stood in the door. “You’re just like the Germans,” I yelled, with my head hot and pounding and my heart bursting in pure relief. “You’re a Nazi!” I screamed, not because of what Albert had done to Mrs. Hooper, but because he had kept me in the subjection of fear all these months. Only now his teeth were chattering, and when Gwenda and Dawn kept going out on pretended errands for the poor sufferer, to give Albert baleful looks, I began to wish they would leave him alone.
It seems to me that after that I was less aware of Albert and less affected by his presence.
One day I came back from school and Mrs. Hooper was home alone. She was nervous and kept wrapping her hand into her apron, and her chin was trembling. I made her sit down in Mr. Hooper’s armchair by the kitchen window. She told me how a great-aunt of Mr. Hooper’s, who lived in an old-persons’ home, had got pneumonia and was quite ill. Mrs. Hooper began to cry.
“She’ll get better, won’t she?” I comforted.
Mrs. Hooper shook her head vigorously. “No, she’s ever so ill. You know, with pneumonia at her age. I think I have to nurse her, see, and she may have to come and live here, and we d-d-don’t have a b-b-b-b-bed.”
I said, “Oh. Well. Maybe she can have my bed?”
Mrs. Hooper was crying so hard I put my arms around her. “Yes, I expect,” said Mrs. Hooper.
“Then where will I sleep?”
Mrs. Hooper cried harder.
“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “I can find somewhere to live,” and I rocked Mrs. Hooper on my chest, “and then I can come back, you know, when she’s better.”
Mrs. Hooper dried her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “And maybe anyway it would be better if you lived with some people where their children go to the County School.”
I went downtown to tell the committee lady I needed a new home. She looked through the card index and said there was a family called Grimsley who wanted to take a refugee.
I went straight out to see the Grimsleys, who lived in an oyster-pink brick street of identical semidetached houses so new that the street was still unpaved and the front garden was a square yard of churned, dried white mud. Mrs. Grimsley opened the front door, peering with a distracted air over my head for her two boys, who, she said, were playing somewhere out front. She must have been twenty-six or -seven, plump and fair, with a bland, round forehead so furrowed with embarrassment that I made her sit down and questioned her about the house and family. Mrs. Grimsley seemed anxious to please. When I left, she asked me if I thought I would be coming to live with them, and I said, “Yes, all right.”
On the weekend, Gwenda helped me move. She put my suitcase on the back of her bicycle, and as we walked, we promised each other that we would be friends forever, and I would come over and visit her. I wrote my parents, who had got a new place in Sussex with a Mrs. Burns-Digby, to give them my new address with the Grimsleys.
I remember, on the first evening Mr. Grimsley brought me home a bag of marbles. Marbles were the rage among the children in the street that season, and after supper, in the kitchen, he taught me how to play. I had beginners’ luck and won seven of his marbles from him, including a beautiful crystal miggie with white marbling.
Mr. Grimsley was a very fair, very young man who rode to the factory on his bicycle every morning, leaving Mrs. Grimsley at a loss amidst her brand-new furniture and cheap, shiny fixtures. There were three Grimsley children. Sylvia was eight years old, a simple smiling child with her mother’s bland, convex forehead. She went to Central School. Seven-year-old Patrick was a spastic who bumbled about the house with jerking, uncontrolled movements, squinting fiercely. Alan, the handsome, bright, angry five-year-old, kept setting fire to the plastic curtains in the brand-new bathroom. Mrs. Grimsley asked me whatever she should do with him, as we sat in the kitchen over our cups of tea. I said it was the bad habits they picked up in the street. In Vienna, I said, I had never been allowed to play with the street children. Mrs. Grimsley said yes, that was right, but after suppe
r Alan banged his fists on the closed front door, and poor Patrick tried to do it, too, missing the door altogether. Mrs. Grimsley opened it, looking guiltily at me, and said, “Just for a few minutes, before their bedtime.”
I knelt on the settee in front of the window with my forehead against the glass, feeling my marbles around inside their bag, watching the children. I remember thinking, If I let go my hands on the windowsill, my head will go through the glass, and I let go my hands and heard the crash and felt the outside breeze about my head, and saw the windowpane like a collar around my neck, and howled. Mr. and Mrs. Grimsley came running, and in the street the children collected to watch Mr. Grimsley carefully break off the jagged glass pointing at my throat and draw me, unhurt, back inside. I said, “You see, my hands slipped on the windowsill. I was leaning like this, you see, when I slipped,” and it seemed even to me that that was the only way it could have happened.
In school the girls continued to be beastly to me. In the afternoon I would run across the playing field through the hole in the privet hedge to try and find my old community with Gwenda. I asked her to teach me some swear words, but she looked solemn and said she would not say them out loud. I said, “Why, they’re just a bunch of letters,” but Gwenda said she would not, not for anything. “Suppose someone said if you don’t say some swear words you can’t have your birthday party next week—wouldn’t you say them?” Gwenda thought about this and then she said no, she would not say them for anything. I said I would; I would say them for nothing—it was just I didn’t know any. Gwenda was going to be fifteen, and she was taking shorthand and growing very pretty.
As I was leaving, I saw Albert watching Gwenda and me from behind the window of my old room. Gwenda said he slept there now. I asked her if her father’s great-aunt was going to move in. Gwenda said no.
Then I had a desperate letter from my mother. Two policemen had come with a van and taken my father away. Mrs. Burns-Digby had telephoned all around, and it seemed that they were interning all male aliens of hostile origin over sixteen. Mrs. Burns-Digby had found out that the aliens from that part of the country were being held in a transit camp in West Mellbridge, where my mother could not go because it was inside the protected area, and she was worried about my father, who had not been at all well. She begged me to go and see him.