The Umbrella Mouse

by Anna Fargher

  ‘How much further is it until we get there?’ Pip asked with a drowsy stretch that made her ears pop on her head. Feeling restless yet exhausted, she struggled to get comfortable between Henri’s ears. Her mind was turning somersaults, wondering fearfully what was happening to Hans, Madame Fourcade and André in the camp.

  ‘It’s not far.’ The stag yawned softly with a shake of his antlers. ‘We will arrive very late tonight. Men hunt in these parts, so it’s not safe to leave before dark. We’ll continue our journey at sunset.’ His big brown eyes looked up at the little mouse wriggling on his head. ‘Try not to worry, little one, we’ll find our friends as soon as we can.’

  ‘How do you know the way?’ she asked, liking the sound of his voice. It was calm and comforting.

  ‘I have travelled these skies before, mon amie,’ Léon said. ‘I rested in this place when I escaped from the Nacht und Nebel camp.’

  ‘And I know of this forest’s smell. It’s famous among deer for its wild flowers – we enjoy eating them the most. I was born in Belgium in the wooded land that grows along the borders of France and Germany and although it’s far away, I can breathe in to find my way home. The Venteux Mountains to the south-east also have their own smell, and even if the wind is high and I struggle to find my way, I can use the sun and the stars as my guide.’

  ‘Like a compass?’ Pip said, fondly remembering Hans teaching her how to use the sky as one of her own.

  ‘Exactly.’ GI Joe smiled. ‘So if in doubt, follow your eyes and your nose, then you’ll always find your way home.’

  ‘But what if you don’t have a home?’ she asked with a mournful sigh, seeing the destroyed umbrella shop in her mind.

  ‘Then your suffering will teach you courage, mon amie,’ Léon said wisely. ‘But you must surround yourself with those that are good, who strengthen your heart for the better. Then the sadness inside you will not fall into darkness. Evil often feeds on those that have suffered the most.’

  ‘Like what happened to Hans? He had lost everything when Herr General found him.’

  ‘Oui. He is lucky that his heart is strong, otherwise the Goliath Rats could have changed it forever.’ His face softened, seeing her brow furrow. ‘Worry not, little one. Now you are with Noah’s Ark you are safe. Most of us have lost our homes too, but wherever we are, when we are together we are home.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Henri said gravely. ‘It was the worst day of my life when I lost mine.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Pip said, understanding his sorrow and tenderly stroking the top of the stag’s head.

  ‘I lived on the French bank of the River Meuse. Our forest was so dense, we thought it would be impossible for the enemy tanks to pass through,’ Henri said, shaking his head as his voice grew heavy with anger. ‘But those metal monsters stormed through it with their soldiers, tearing down our trees and ripping up our earth along a line they say stretched a hundred miles. Then the planes came, swarming above us in the sky like black flies, dropping bombs until there was nothing left. We never stood a chance. When they crossed the river and invaded France, I joined the Resistance so I could fight them from within.’

  ‘Blitzkrieg,’ Léon said, angrily twitching his speckled wings with cold, amber stare.

  ‘Like the Blitz in London?’ Pip said. ‘The bombs came every night for months.’

  ‘Oui. Nazi Germany’s “lightning punch”. They threw everything they had at us, but unlike Britain, we fell. It was our darkest day. They took our country – our home – from us. But we were not defeated. Madame Fourcade and I were the first members of Noah’s Ark. As a leader she has great courage, knowledge and understanding. I will never lose faith in her and we will not give up until our freedom is restored.’

  ‘And we’ve got a lot to thank you for,’ GI Joe cooed, nodding at the stag and the eagle. ‘Without the Resistance telling us where the enemy was hiding and sabotaging telecommunication lines, trains, roads and bridges, we could have lost D-Day.’

  ‘What was it like that day?’ Pip said with an inquisitive twitch of her nose. She had heard about the Normandy landings in the umbrella shop, but Mama and Papa had never wanted her to know too much of what was happening with the war.

  ‘D-Day.’ GI Joe cooed a troubled sigh filled with difficult memories. ‘Flying over the English Channel to France that night, strapped to my paratrooper’s chest, you couldn’t count how many boats and planes there were, carrying thousands and thousands of Allied soldiers. Every one of those vessels carried pigeons like me, because radio silence was imperative. The enemy could listen in to radio messages and know we were coming, but they couldn’t hear us flying our messages in the sky. We just had to outrun their falcons back to Britain and that’s no easy task, believe me.’

  Pip shuddered, remembering the falcon and the bramble bush.

  ‘I was strapped to First Lieutenant John Russell from Fox Company in the 101st Airborne Regiment, the best air assault team of soldiers there is,’ the pigeon cooed, proudly plumping his chest feathers. ‘His mission was to take out the Nazi gun cannons hitting our boys arriving at the beaches. Mine was to deliver their message back to England if they succeeded.

  ‘It was just after we flew over the Channel Islands when the flashing bullets and the missiles started flying at us, exploding like the biggest fireworks display you’ve ever seen. And we jumped right into that hornets’ nest! It was dumb luck not to have been shot and killed on the way down like so many others were – our parachute looked like Swiss cheese when we landed, it had so many bullet holes in it. It was scary as hell, but distraction will kill you and we had a job to do.

  ‘Once the boys cleared the gun cannons, they scribbled the good news on to a small sheet of paper, slotted it into the canister tied to my leg and released me into the air. Flying back to base over the beaches . . .’ The pigeon paused and closed his amber eyes with a grave shake of his head. ‘I’ll never forget it. The ocean was bleeding from the thousands of men who had been hit or killed. The water lapped at their bodies lying on the beach, some of them face down in the sand without their arms or legs. After I’d delivered the message telling Britain they’d won, I heard our soldiers battled until midnight that night. And they’re still fighting to this day, but you can be sure they’re gonna storm through Hitler’s front door in Berlin. Just you wait.’

  Pip didn’t know what to say. Only a few weeks ago, thousands and thousands of men had perished at the same place she and Hans had arrived on the Normandy coast. She thought of Peter and couldn’t imagine how terrified he must have been there. Nor could she comprehend how frightened Hans, Madame Fourcade and André must be at that moment, and she shivered, remembering what Lucia had said about torture before they left the hollow under the fallen tree.

  ‘How much longer will the world fight for?’ she said, feeling a knot of worry tying tightly in her stomach.

  ‘We all must hope and pray it will end soon,’ Henri said.

  ‘Amen to that,’ GI Joe cooed.

  With those last words, silence fell on Pip and her friends as they gradually drifted into a fitful sleep, feeling the weight of the night to come tremble uneasily in their hearts.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE CAMP

  ‘Wake up, Pip,’ GI Joe said, gently nudging her with his beak where she lay asleep, curled up on top of the stag’s head. She lifted her head groggily. ‘We gotta go.’

  Opening her eyes, she found a ghostly mist had crept over the lake, lingering on its surface like delicate clouds. Night had fallen and the frogs were softly croaking along the edge of the water, with black bats swooping and diving above them, feasting on insects in the shadows.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, shaking the sleep from her whiskers with a frown. ‘Why didn’t you wake me sooner?’

  ‘We were asleep too,’ Henri said, lurching forward to a stand with a shudder of his tail. ‘We travelled very far yesterday, we all needed the rest.’

  ‘Worry not, mon amie,’ Léon said,
spreading his broad wings. ‘The moon is not high yet and the Venteux Mountains are close. We will have our friends back with us soon and together, we will return to Noah’s Ark in the hollow!’

  Leaping from the tree branch, he burst into the night sky, closely followed by GI Joe. Henri cantered after the birds through the trees, with Pip tightly clutching the fur on the crown of his head.

  It wasn’t long before she felt the earth change beneath Henri’s hooves and he slowed, climbing the steep verge of the Venteux Mountains with his breathing becoming heavier. As they made ground, the full moon climbed into a clear starry sky and Pip looked over to the rich valleys filled with trees below, and gazed at the towering peaks, grazing the clouds in the distant gloom.

  A strange silence crept over the forest as the stag stopped wide-eyed, with his ears fixed ahead of him.

  ‘What is it?’ Pip said.

  ‘Over there,’ Henri whispered with a nervous shudder of his tail, ‘Look.’

  Ahead, the forest cleared into a huge, barren rectangle. At each corner, a tall, timber guard tower loomed over the camp, each with eight small windows staring into the darkness and searchlights poised upon their frames. They were linked by a tall fence woven with a web of jagged metal fangs, and inside the enclosure, seventeen black outbuildings stood in two lines. At the far end, a long, narrow chimney loomed above the biggest building in the camp.

  ‘Stay here,’ GI Joe cooed softly, perching for a moment on the stag as Léon hovered above. ‘We’ll survey the area.’

  Climbing to the top of Henri’s antlers, Pip watched the birds soar upwards and disappear through the shadowy treetops. Staring into the clearing, her eyes fell on a row of wheelbarrows standing in the middle of the camp and the fur on the back of her neck stood on end. She listened to the leaves whisper in the wind.

  ‘Pssst,’ GI Joe whispered, now swooping over their heads with Léon by his side. ‘Regroup.’

  Henri slowly stepped backwards into the cover of the forest, never taking his eyes off the strange place ahead. The birds landed silently on his antlers.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Léon whispered, his gold eyes flicking between them. He pointed his speckled wing to the rows of black outbuildings behind the barbed-wire fence. ‘The human inmates of the camp are asleep in their barracks. When I was imprisoned here, they kept me in a dug-out hole in the ground under that one in the far corner, opposite the big chimney. The sharpest barbed wire, like the ones on top of the fence, are dragged over the hole, so no one can climb out and escape. Goliath Rats guard it too. I am sure Madame Fourcade, Hans and André will be there.’

  ‘Goliath Rats,’ Pip said. ‘Like the ones Hans told us about?’

  ‘They are savage, bloodthirsty devils,’ Léon said, twitching his wings with unease. ‘You must never let one come near you or it will be the last thing you do.’

  ‘How did you escape from them?’ Pip asked, fear drumming inside her chest as she spotted the shadow of an enormous rat creep beneath one of the outbuildings. It must have been twice the size of Hans and he was more than three times as big as she was.

  ‘For interrogations, they take you out of the hole and inflict terrible suffering until you give them the information they want.’ The eagle’s feathers ruffled around his neck with anger. ‘They tied me down and gnawed away at my legs, chewing them very slowly so I felt the worst pain possible. But I never surrendered and the moment they left me alone so they could decide the rest of my torture, I pecked through the snare they had trapped me in.’

  Pip’s eyes fell on Leon’s horribly crooked leg, deformed at the knee where his hooked beak had almost completely cut off his lower limb. Staring at the scars screaming across both his legs, she turned away in horror, seeing clearly where the Goliath Rats’ teeth had slowly ground through his flesh to the bone.

  ‘Don’t worry liddle lady,’ GI Joe cooed softly. ‘You won’t need to do anything like that. All you need to do is drag the barbed wire away from the hole. Then with some help, Madame Fourcade, Hans and André can climb out and escape.’

  ‘OK,’ Pip said, trying to stop her whiskers from trembling. ‘Put me down, I’ll run across the fence to the hole.’

  ‘It’s not that simple, mon amie,’ Léon said. ‘That fence around the camp is electrified. It will fry you alive if you touch it.’

  ‘But I’m small. I can squeeze under it.’

  ‘No, it’s dug into the ground – we can’t risk it. Even if you managed to pass through without touching the fence, Hans, Madame Fourcade and André are too big to do the same and you all need to slip through it as quickly as you can when you escape.’

  ‘Then how do I switch it off? Tell me where it is and I’ll do it now.’

  ‘You need to go to the control room over there,’ GI Joe cooed, pointing his wing at the building with the chimney at the far end of the camp. ‘The switch pulses with electric current, so you will know which one to press. I will fly you to the roof, then all you need to do is climb inside and disable it. And you must be fast. If a human or anyone else sees you, they’ll know the fence is not working and you won’t have time to escape through it with the others.’

  ‘Why can’t you fly us out?’

  ‘Because the guards will see you,’ Henri said, pointing his head of antlers. ‘Look at the towers at each corner of the camp.’ Pip turned her gaze and shivered with fear. On top of each one, a huge bird was silhouetted in the moonlight, guarding the gloom like gargoyles snarling on a church roof. ‘Those are the same sentry owls that captured Madame Fourcade, Hans and André. If they see you, they will capture you, if they don’t kill you first.’

  ‘Wait,’ she said with a scowl. ‘If they’ll see me when I fly out, why won’t they see me when I fly in?’

  ‘Because I am going to distract them,’ the eagle said, his golden eyes glowing with determination. ‘It should give you enough time to turn off the switch and run to the hole. Once you have released the others, you can escape together through the fence.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, staring at the control room and taking a deep, nervous breath. ‘Let’s do it.’

  ‘Remember to keep your eyes wide open and on the ground,’ GI Joe cooed. ‘If the Goliath Rats see you, you will all be finished. Léon’s diversion will buy you some time but we can’t say how much.’ He hopped from the stag’s antlers to the base of his neck and, turning to Pip, a proud smile drew across his face. ‘Are you ready, liddle lady?’

  ‘I’m ready.’ She nodded, but as she stepped towards him, she felt her limbs tremble with fear.

  ‘I will meet you on the other side of the fence behind the chimney,’ Henri said, turning to watch her climb up GI Joe’s outstretched wing and clamber on to his back. ‘It’s as close to the hole as I can get so it won’t be far for you to run. Then I will take us all home to the hollow.’ His tail shuddered nervously. ‘Good luck, young Pip.’

  ‘Thank you, Henri,’ she said with a lump in her throat. ‘We’ll see you soon.’

  GI Joe leaped into the air from the stag’s back. Silently weaving in and out of the trees along the edge of the camp, they soon reached the branches behind the chimney. Swooping upwards, they waited there, watching with thumping hearts as Léon flew from the cover of the trees to the middle of the enclosure. Powerfully flapping his wings, the eagle landed on a wheelbarrow with a loud squawk, his golden eyes gleaming fiercely in the gloom.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ESCAPE

  The four eagle owls hooted in alarm and swivelled their heads with their ear tufts standing on end. Their orange eyes furiously narrowed as they spotted Léon obnoxiously shrieking on the wheelbarrow, pecking and clawing at its metal tray. Spreading their enormous wings, the owls leaped from their lookout posts one by one, gliding silently through the air with their cruel beaks and talons malevolently glinting in the moonlight. Gasping with horror, Pip held her breath as the first owl neared Léon’s speckled head, gleefully hopping from wheelbarrow to wheelbarrow as if he did n
ot know the danger he was in.

  Screeching with murder, the owl opened its claws, eager to gore the eagle’s flesh and taste his blood. But at the last moment, Léon leaped into the sky, leaving the owl’s talons snapping on nothing but air. Screaming with rage, the four owls furiously gave chase, swiftly dodging and weaving through the sky. Léon was leading them to the far end of the camp, away from the chimney and into the forest beyond.

  ‘It’s working!’ GI Joe whispered with triumph, watching the last flash of the owls’ feathers disappear in the distance. ‘Let’s go.’

  Jumping from the tree branch, they flew silently over the fence, which was humming with electricity. They glided past the tall chimney, silhouetted in the light of the full moon.

  ‘Get ready to jump,’ the pigeon whispered, now slowing above the control room, clearly lit with two gas lamps hanging on either side of the door. With every second, the roof loomed closer and Pip’s chest thundered at the sight of a man moving in the approaching window. GI Joe glided downwards, grazing the top of the building. ‘Three, two, one – GO!’

  Pip leaped from his back. Hitting the roof with a rolling bump, she desperately grappled for a hold to stop her tumbling to the ground below. Latching her claws on to the edge of the roof and shivering with fright, she watched the last glimpse of the pigeon vanish into the nearby trees and drew a deep breath.

  Below her, the muffled sound of men talking seeped from an open window. Carefully peering over the edge of the roof, she found the corner of the window frame jutting outwards. Wrapping her tail on the corner of a roof tile, she shuffled on her stomach and dangled over the open window before lowering herself to the upper edge of the frame. Craning her neck downwards to see into the room, she saw two men holding papers. One wore a long white coat and the other a sage-green uniform. Standing side by side, they organized newly arrived boxes of supplies from the train, stacked against the opposite wall.