Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  The boys clung to Mother while I stepped onto the train with the case, turning to offer Father a brave salute, seeking out free seats that faced each other. I sat down, saw my family through the window, potbellied, waistcoated Father shooing them off the platform and up into the carriage. His eye found me and he nodded as the train began to move and the boys settled themselves down. In the last moment that I saw my parents they were small and old and standing very close to one another. As the train picked up speed I saw the picture repeated along the platform: countless huddles of old people in dark clothes, watching the train filled with their children accelerating away from them. Our carriage hit the tunnel with a smack of air and I had begun my first journey without my parents.

  We changed at Baker Street. The next train was more crowded and there were many more adults, some of whom were fat and loose somehow and squashed onto seats all together, men and women. We squeezed our way among them. One group began to sing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ the instant the train pulled off, as though the movement were a signal, and they were passing around a hipflask, man to woman to man, no one so much as wiping the rim in between. It was like stepping with Father into the working men’s club off the lane behind Charlotte Street: all heat and cigarette smoke and off-kilter laughter.

  We were still searching for seats as the train started out of the station, knocking us off balance. Only singles remained. I eyed a narrow space next to a woman’s wide behind and sat, reluctantly. The woman’s soft flesh at the hip sank against me immediately. The boys sat opposite each other a few rows along, next to a couple of airmen who smoked continually. I watched them for a long time but they never appeared to fish for cigarettes in their pockets or even to light them. Geoffrey and Benjamin stared at them openly, and then at each other. They could not believe their luck, damn them. My neighbour ate an egg sandwich. The airmen ruffled the boys’ hair and conjured coins from behind their ears. A conductor went along the carriage closing the blackout curtains, turning off the overhead lights. We were approaching the end of the tunnel, leaving London, or at least its dense, homely core.

  I closed my eyes. Mustn’t sleep, I told myself. Must count the stations. The singers had started up on ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. Benjamin was laughing, a snort and a high-pitched squeal. I tried to picture the countryside beyond the blackouts and remembered dimly the Rhondda Valley, my beginnings in Wales. The older children in the village heaping me and my brothers into an old pram and letting it run down a hill until we all fell out in a pile at the bottom laughing, and the walk with Mother to the school in the next village across a field peppered with sheep droppings. The world silent and white one morning, the window frame piled high with snow, the roofs and trees iced thickly by some huge fat-armed cook.

  I bobbed for some time at the rim of sleep, not wanting to fall against the soft-hipped woman. Surfacing, I forced my eyes open. The carriage was dark and felt cooler, more spacious. It had thinned out and the boys were sitting opposite me, holding the curtains aside, their curly heads jammed up against the glass. I edged back the curtain on my own side and great cracking showers of light flashed up trees, farmhouses, lines of hedgerow, a bus in a field, its row of windows reflecting the fireworks. The boys’ faces too flashed yellow and then slipped back into the dark.

  ‘Is it Guy Fawkes?’ Benjamin asked Geoffrey sleepily.

  ‘They’re shells, dropped by the Hun,’ he replied.

  ‘I thought they only shelled London,’ I said quietly. The maze of lanes we had left behind us, the thick buildings, seemed far safer than these open fields.

  ‘Are the shells filled with fireworks?’ Benjamin wanted to know. ‘I love them!’

  I remembered the sigh of the crowd on Guy Fawkes’ Night from before the war, which Benjamin had only heard about, never seen with his own eyes, at Regent’s Park, the whizzing catherine-wheel, the crackling of the fire around the Guy. The memory was old, there were only little pieces of it left. Older now. Still there though, still bright little fragments.

  We had no Guy Fawkes now. Everyone was supposed to stay at home when it was dark with their blackouts closed no matter what night of the year it was, but they didn’t in town, I heard them beneath our window, singing and fighting. Weird sounds sometimes that you couldn’t place as entirely human. We were only allowed out if there was a raid, to go to the tube. That was the only time you could breathe night air. It tasted different: cooler, sharper, laced with something adult. They spoke to each other differently, at night, as though we could not hear them.

  The train slowed. The last of the passengers, dim bulky figures pulling cases off racks, were standing and shuffling towards the doors. I knew that we needed the last stop, that this was the end of the line.

  I jumped down onto the platform with my case, put it on the ground and turned to lift Benjamin down. Geoffrey sprang down after us, a dark agile figure, his own man already at eight. We looked around for our people. Black clusters of shapes hovered above the platform making voids against the sky, milky with stars.

  We walked in a huddle towards the station house. It was cold, even in summer, away from buildings. The groups of shadows murmured names as we passed: ‘Watson?’ ‘Miles?’ ‘Webster?’ When we were almost at the end of the platform Geoffrey said, ‘What if they’re not here?’ and I said, ‘Shhh.’ I thought I could hear it, our name in the dark: ‘Jacob?’ A woman’s voice. ‘Are you the Jacob children?’ A face loomed. My eyes had adjusted. She bent towards us, older than Mother, with a strong jaw and kind smile.

  I passed up my case, let my arms hang by my side, the inside of my elbow aching. The boys gathered around the woman, seeking out their new mother. She put an arm around Benjamin’s shoulder, he always was irresistible—juicy, sweet—if you did not know him, and led us through the dark waiting room, the same smell in its bricks as when you walked past a urinal at the park. Out onto the cool, black road.

  We trudged silently after the woman, Mrs Walton-Jones, towards nothing. It might have been ten or past midnight. There was not a gap in a curtain or a set of car headlights to break blackout. Around us people murmured as they walked along the road, their voices emerging close by from the dark. We drew near enough to the group in front to make out a pair of children being led by a man, perhaps a vicar, a pale collar showing above his pullover. All the thrill of movement had drained from my body. It would be better to be buried under a block of flats in London, surely, than in this wasteland. I concentrated on the long dark cylinder of Mrs Walton-Jones’s back, stayed as close as I could to it without stepping on her heels, so that I should not fall into a ditch and be lost in the night among rustling things till morning.

  The dawn found me kneeling on the dresser, leaning on the cold window, nose to the glass. It smelled like earth. Everything smelled of it. For the first time in my ten years I had slept in a room alone. The silence when I opened my eyes, the absence of breath and bodies shifting. I woke when it was still dark and had been up here ever since watching the sky grow lighter over the fields. Where were the boys? How did the house work? There were two staircases, one from the downstairs hallway which stopped at my door halfway up and then continued to a real attic, and the other off the kitchen, that must lead to everyone else’s rooms. A man of the house whom I had not yet met existed somewhere.

  Against the pale sky were lines of trees and shrubs with their tops cut off, all at the same height, so I could see beyond the garden with its tangle of roses and rocky herb patch to the fields beyond and the roof of a chapel down the lane. I stared at the lopped-off greenery, waiting for it to make sense, and then there was a loud drone and over the fields, perilously low, flew three of those fabulously clunky contraptions: biplane bombers. My heart stopped as I caught a glimpse of the bombers’ helmets from within the planes’ skeletons. They came by so low, the planes’ bellies just about skimming the hedges. Then they disappeared into a field, but I could hear the engine choking as it cut off out of sight. It was one of those
things one witnesses alone and has trouble verifying, even to oneself. But that was why the hedges had been shorn. There was proof.

  It was still early and so I sat on the stool at the dressing table and wrote in my diary. Usually I was forced to write it under the covers, or sitting on a bench in Bedford Square, where the boys would never think to look for me. There were chickens somewhere, in the garden below perhaps, and eventually banging and clattering from the kitchen, but between these walls, my walls, there was nothing, just the scratch of my pen and the creak of leather when I moved on the stool.

  Eventually there came the thundering of boys on the stairs, an abrupt thump on the door, Benjamin’s wicked laughter, and I quickly placed my notebook and pen in a drawer meant for powder or hairpins.

  ‘Come on,’ Geoffrey said. His face on the gloomy landing was bright and hopeful, not his usual expression of slightly dour calculation. ‘She’s cooking for an army down there.’

  Benjamin was tugging at my hand and we tumbled down the twisting staircase to the hallway and into the vast sunlit kitchen with its broad stove and long oak dining table. At one end was the mythical figure known as Mr Walton-Jones, egg-like head appearing briefly above his newspaper with a little grin, blushing faintly. I sat down opposite the stove the better to observe Mrs Walton-Jones across the clear, waxed table, now that she was illuminated by daylight. There was that square jaw, but when she turned to offer me eggs she had such pretty, soft eyes that her face was not too mannish in spite of her shortish hair, broad shoulders and brisk, heavy way of moving about the place, hefting a log into the range from the basket alongside, stirring eggs. Everything she did was quick and purposeful, unlike the unfolding dream of Mother’s movements around the kitchen.

  ‘The village school is quite adequate,’ she was saying as she lined up plates along the counter. ‘Our boys attended until grammar school so I’m sure it will do for now.’

  She placed dinner plates in front of us, thick wedges of toast piled high with glistening, creamy eggs. Astonishing. Didn’t they have rations in the country? But I had heard chickens. The real treasure was on Mr Walton-Jones’s plate: a pile of bacon, at least four thick, streaky rashers. We stared at them. He began to eat and then looked up, saw our eyes on him.

  ‘Lord! I’m eating bacon right in front of you. You probably view me as some kind of heathen.’ His knife and fork hovered above his plate. He looked at his wife who was busy filling the sink with water.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re actually allowed bacon. When there’s enough to go round.’

  ‘Gracious,’ Mrs Walton-Jones said, turning off the tap, ‘how modern. Are you sure?’ We nodded, the boys a little too vigorously. I gave them a stare. ‘Well, there’s plenty here. The farmer is very generous. He butchered a pig last month and we’ve all been eating ham like it’s going out of style.’ She looked at me, a pan of enormous uncooked rashers in her hand. ‘Are you absolutely certain it’s all right, dear? I wouldn’t want to get in trouble with your mother and father.’

  ‘It’s really quite all right.’ I tried to look at her face rather than the meat in the pan. Cook it! an inner voice commanded. Cook it now! We had not had bacon for as long as I could remember, and strictly speaking while Father allowed it, secretly, in a roll with egg at Harry Hendy’s Big Corner Café, Mother would have been horrified. We knew what the bacon in the pan would taste like though. Exactly the same as the salty, smoky aroma filling the kitchen.

  Mr Walton-Jones looked up from tucking bacon away into his mouth, knife and fork poised over the next rasher. ‘You speak rather well, children.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Well, it’s just that . . .’ He looked at his wife. ‘Weren’t we given to understand they were only recently from abroad? Refugees?’

  ‘Yes, well,’ his wife replied. ‘That doesn’t appear to be the case. Are you Russian Jews, children? That was what we were told.’

  I stared at her. I had never in my life heard the word ‘Jews’ used by a gentile in a way not intended as an insult. ‘Father was born in Russia, and so was Mother’s mother. And they are both—Jewish. We were born in the Rhondda Valley, in Wales. We are British.’

  Mr Walton-Jones continued with his breakfast. His wife turned and let the pan fall heavily on the stove where it began instantly to hiss. ‘Yes, anyway, school. Hannah, if things go on for a while, we may need to talk to your parents about a proper girls’ school. You could catch the train to Uxbridge in the morning with Peter.’ If I am still here when it’s time for grammar school, I thought, looking out the window at the sorry lopped-off foliage, I fully intend to run away. There was only so much that quiet bedroom could make up for. ‘Are you Russian Jews, children?’ Honestly.

  The schoolhouse was just at the end of the lane leading out to the fields from the Walton-Joneses’ house, in the building I had earlier mistaken for a chapel. The boys dawdled over bees and ladybirds in what was left of the hedgerow. Benjamin wanted a piggyback but a group of children were coming along behind us, so I refused. As the children reached us I saw that there were more behind them. They stared openly as they passed, as though they were cows and we their only entertainment for the day. I wondered if they were a little slow. Uniform appeared to be optional, some wearing grey shorts or pleated tunics and some boys wearing miniature versions of what their fathers would wear in the fields, dull brown trousers and shirts, the girls in homemade floral sundresses. I felt a little stiff suddenly in my boater and pressed pinafore from St John’s.

  We followed the other children into the school grounds and waited at the door until the teacher, Mr Bailey, appeared in front of us. My first impression was that this was an old man; I registered the halting gait of a tall adult pass us by as we waited. Then I saw with surprise that he was very young, almost like one of us, an older brother perhaps with smooth skin and an unlined brow. I saw in his profile a large sad eye in a face still slightly soft along the jaw and cheekbones, and that he walked with a cane. In London, young men who moved like the old meant only one thing. He caught my eye, saw my brothers behind me, a little silent group amid the others who shouted and pulled at each other, not noticing that he had arrived. ‘You must be the town children,’ he said, just loud enough for us to hear, while the others went on with their jostling. ‘Hannah? Geoffrey? Benjamin?’

  He gave us his mournful smile, leaning towards us, and a little jolt passed through my heart. One of his eyes did not move along with the other. It is glass! I said to myself, involuntarily squeezing the elbow of Geoffrey’s jacket, a little pit of horror opening up in my stomach. I caught myself. ‘Sir,’ I said in what I believed to be my discreet voice, ‘were you injured in France?’

  Well, I must have been speaking more loudly than I imagined, because the class fell quiet at my back. The teacher gave a little cough. ‘Egypt. Observant of you to notice.’ His accent was from the West Country. Well-spoken, but with soft edges to his words. He was the most romantic figure I had ever encountered. ‘Let’s go inside, shall we, children?’

  ‘Hannah!’ Geoffrey whispered, pulling his arm away from me with a jerk. Behind me, someone flicked my ear.

  I flinched, but refused to look. ‘What? I was right, wasn’t I?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to ask people that.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Mother told me.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t she tell me?’

  ‘She did. She told all of us. You weren’t listening.’

  ‘But how should we know he was in Egypt if I didn’t ask? Anyway, he didn’t mind. Adults admire a little spirit. Ask Father.’

  We were inside now, nudged in by the tide of children, hanging up our satchels on the hooks by the door with the others. There was only one room in the dark building and it smelled largely of sawdust, overlaid with a whiff of manure from the fields drifting in through the window. The teacher gestured to an empty desk to one side of the room, where the older children sat. Benjamin was quickly settled at the back o
n a communal table and was soon scribbling with a wax crayon on newspaper. He was beaming at a little girl with blonde curls. Geoffrey was looking around him from the other side of the room, where he was seated next to an enormous farm boy in a hand-knitted pullover. My brother wore a deep scowl. The bigger boy pinched his arm. Geoffrey leaned out from the desk, away from him. I saw myself rising from my chair, walking the breadth of the room in front of an astonished class and teacher, and slapping the giant simpleton, leaving his great jowl to tremble like a slavering bulldog. I would place my hands on my hips and say slowly: ‘I imagine it was you who flicked my ear, too, wasn’t it, you brute?’ I forced my gaze away from Geoffrey to our teacher, who now introduced himself wearily as Mr Bailey, for the benefit of the town children.

  Oh, that was a long day in my life. My shoe scuffing the floorboards, the slow intoning of the alphabet by the little ones, a song the children sang at home time, prompted only by Mr Bailey clapping his hands together once, saying, ‘Now, ready, children?’ I did not know the words of course and so I set my eyes on a row of jam jars filled with hollyhocks on the window ledge behind Mr Bailey. I wondered who had picked them. They trembled in the breeze, their petals shifting from light to dullness as the shadows of clouds drifted across the schoolyard and the children sang:

  Summer suns are glowing over land and sea;

  Happy light is flowing, bountiful and free;

  Everything rejoices in the mellow rays;

  Earth’s ten thousand voices swell the psalm of praise . . .

  I dared a glance at Mr Bailey’s face. He was staring out towards the door, beyond our heads. His lower lip creased at its centre briefly. He paused for a moment when they had finished singing, before telling us to collect our things, and that he would see us in the morning, bright and early. He seemed to gather himself before saying the ordinary, hopeful things that adults said to children all the time to jolly them along, to keep them unthinking and obedient. I felt that I would like to sit in a room with him and ask him questions about himself and his life for hours on end. I would know the story of his troubles, and he would feel better for having talked to me about it. If only I were not a child, I wrote later. Why must childhood go on for so long? I had read many books on all kinds of subjects. I would understand his story too. I had prepared myself for such things.