War Stories

by Michael Morpurgo

  We had to change twice more on to branch lines, travelling on trains so old that we didn’t think they would manage to pull their loads. Then in the late afternoon we reached Orthausen.

  The village that Marianne lived in was not directly on the railway. The woman who found her must have carried her bundle a long way to her house. My mother and I now walked that road, trudging along the white dust village street with our bags and turning off along a track which ran beside a stream.

  Then, late in the afternoon, we crossed a small bridge and came to a wooden house standing by itself in a clearing.

  Marianne was sitting on the steps of the porch. She was holding a tortoiseshell kitten on her lap and talking to it – not fussing over it, just telling it to behave. She spoke in German, but I knew exactly what she was saying.

  She had thick, fawn, curly hair and brown eyes and she wore a dirndl, and over it a knitted jersey which covered her arms. When she saw us she put down the kitten and then she reached for the bag my mother carried and led us into the house.

  The woman who had found Marianne on the railway track was called Mrs Wasilewski. She was very pale with a screwed-down bun of fair hair and a tight mouth. To me she looked like a death’s head, so white and forbidding, and I was glad that we were going to take Marianne away from such a cold, stern woman. But Marianne went up to her trustingly and said, here were the visitors from England, and I realized that she did not yet know why we had come.

  Mrs Wasilewski offered us some ersatz coffee and slices of dark bread spread with dripping. Her husband was away, working in a sawmill in the north of the country for the summer, to earn some extra money. When we had eaten, Marianne turned to me and took me by the hand, and said, ‘Komm,’ and I got up and followed her.

  When somebody takes you by the hand and says ‘Komm’, it is not difficult to guess what they are saying, but it still seems odd to me that from the first moment I understood Marianne so completely, and that she understood me.

  The Wasilewskis had a smallholding, but the Germans had commandeered the horse at the beginning of the war and the Russians had taken the cow at the end of it. All the same, the animals that were left seemed to satisfy Marianne. She introduced me to the two goats – a white one, called Bella, and a bad-tempered brown one, called Sidonia, after a disagreeable lady who scowled at everybody in the church. She showed me the five hens and told me their names and the rabbits and the new piglet, honking in the straw.

  Actually, it was more than showing – she sort of presented them to me, giving me the animals to hold as if hanging on to a squawking chicken or a lop-eared rabbit must make me the happiest person in the world.

  It was far too late to try and make our way back that night – no one knew how the trains would run. Mrs Waslilewski – still unsmiling and gaunt – led us to a loft with two goose-down duvets on a slatted wooden board and we went to bed.

  I was sure we’d leave the next morning, but we didn’t. My mother helped Mrs Wasilewski with the housework and once again Marianne put out her hand and said, ‘Komm,’ and once again I came.

  She led me to a part of the stream where the water ran clear over a bed of pebbles. Both of us took off our shoes, but she kept on her jersey, and we walked along the river bed, dredging up bright and glittering stones.

  ‘Nicht Gold,’ she said, holding out a yellow-veined stone and shaking her head, but she was smiling. She didn’t want gold, I could see that. She wanted brightness.

  The stream was full of sticklebacks and newts and tiny frogs; all the creatures too small to have been stolen or pillaged in war.

  After a while a boy and a girl appeared – a brother and sister – and Marianne introduced me, carefully pronouncing my name in the English way I’d taught her.

  We came to a bridge where the current ran quite fast and we each chose a stick and raced it from one side to the other. I hadn’t done that since I was at infant school, but you can’t go wrong with Pooh sticks, and I found myself wondering if they played it at St Hilda’s.

  Mrs Wasilewski, still grim and silent, gave us lunch – pieces of salt bacon with beetroot and cabbage from her garden – and afterwards Marianne took me out and showed me the rows of vegetables, and picked a pea pod from the vine and opened it, dropping the shelled peas into my palm.

  All that day Marianne stretched out her hand and said, ‘Komm.’ She showed me a hedgehog asleep in the potting shed and a place where raspberries grew wild, and I made her a whistle out of a hazel twig. I’d brought my Swiss Army knife, and the whistle was a good one. They don’t always work but this one did.

  Even the next day my mother said nothing about leaving. We slept on the floor; the work she was helping with was far harder than any that she did in England and Mrs Wasilewski still went round like a zombie, but my mother didn’t seem in any hurry to return.

  That day Marianne showed me her special tree. It was an ancient oak standing on its own on a small hill and it was the kind of tree that is a whole world in itself. There were hollows in the trunk where squirrels had stored their nuts; beetles sheltered under the bark and a woodpecker tapped in the branches.

  Marianne had not built a tree-house because the tree was her house. She explained this as we climbed up – and that it was in this house that she kept her treasures. They lived in a tin with a picture of cough lozenges on the lid, and she showed them to me, one by one. There was a tortoiseshell hair slide, a little bent; a bracelet made out of glass beads; a propelling pencil – and her most important possession: a small bear, carved roughly out of wood, which Mr Wasilweski had made on her last birthday. Then she took the whistle I had made for her out of her pocket and laid it carefully in the tin beside the other things, and closed the lid.

  But the best thing about the tree was the view. Because it stood on a knoll you could see the surrounding countryside for miles. Marianne pointed to a small farm and told me that the man who had lived there had been killed on the Eastern Front. He’d been a German, of course – maybe a Nazi – but Marianne’s face grew sad as she told me about him, which was strange because her mother’s people had been so horribly persecuted by men like him.

  If she was the child we thought she was …

  But in the opposite direction was a low, red-roofed house and she told me that the man who owned it had a litter of sheepdog puppies and he was going to let her have one. There was enough food now to keep a dog, she said joyfully; it was no longer forbidden.

  I didn’t say anything. She would never be able to bring a dog into England; the quarantine regulations were far too strict, and the Glossops said it wasn’t fair to keep animals in town. Even the cat we kept in the basement knew better than to make her way upstairs.

  Then on the morning of the third day my mother called me into the kitchen. Mrs Wasilewski was there, more silent and morose than ever. There was a bundle on the table: the blanket Marianne had been wrapped in, I guessed, when she was found on the track, and a few baby clothes. Mrs Wasilweski called Marianne to her side and she came. For the first time, she looked puzzled and anxious.

  ‘Wait,’ said my mother. ‘We must make sure we have the right child.’ And very gently she said, ‘Will you take your jersey off, Marianne, and your blouse?’

  Marianne looked at Mrs Wasilewski, who nodded. Then she took off her jersey and undid the drawstring of her blouse.

  Now she stood before us with both arms bare. From her shoulder to her elbow, her right arm was covered in a dark brown birthmark.

  It was exactly what the Glossops had described to us. Without a doubt, the child who stood before us was the child who had been thrown from the train.

  My mother and I looked at each other. Mrs Wasilewski stood like a ramrod, her mouth tight shut. Marianne, still puzzled, reached for her blouse and began to put it on.

  The room was very still. Then my mother cleared her throat and looked at me again. She looked at me hard.

  ‘What a pity,’ she said clearly to Mrs Wasilewski. ‘I’m so sor
ry. I’m afraid this is the wrong child. We can’t take her back with us – her birthmark is on the wrong arm.’ And then, softly: ‘She will have to stay with you.’

  The silence was broken suddenly by a gasp – followed by a kind of juddering sound. Then Mrs Wasilewski went mad. Her head dropped forward on to the table and she began to cry – but you can’t call it crying. She erupted in tears, she became completely drenched in them, her hair came down and fell in damp strands across the table. I have never in all my life heard anybody cry like that.

  When she lifted her head again she was a totally different woman; she was rosy, she laughed, she hugged my mother and me. And I understood what my mother had understood at once – that this woman who had made Marianne’s world with such loving care had been almost destroyed at the thought of losing her.

  In the train my mother said, ‘I think we’ll just say there was no birthmark. We don’t want any further fuss about left or right.’

  ‘Yes.’ The train chugged on through what had once been enemy territory and was now just the great plain of central Europe. ‘I’m going back,’ I said. ‘Later.’ And then: ‘Not much later.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said my mother. ‘And I’m going on.’

  (And she did too. She gave up her job with the Glossops and went back to finish her degree. We lived in two small rooms and were very happy.)

  When we got back we were called up to the boudoir so that the old lady too could hear our story.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Mrs Glossop, when we’d finished. ‘It’s a pity, when we had so much to offer a child. But it doesn’t sound as though she would have fitted in.’

  And my mother looked at the piano, with its two dozen important Glossops in silver frames, and said no, she wouldn’t have fitted in. She wouldn’t have fitted in at all.

  Elizabeth Laird

  I lived in the Middle East for a while, years ago, because my husband, David McDowall, was working there. We were in Iraq for a spell, and then in Lebanon. A civil war was raging at that time, and I watched at first hand as the city of Beirut sank into ruins. My skin would crawl with fright when the guns opened up and fighter bombers screamed overhead.

  I’ve visited other parts of the Middle East several times since then, in particular the ravaged Occupied Territories of Palestine. Military occupation is an unbearable situation, terrible for the occupied and corrupting for the occupiers. This one has been going on for more than thirty years, and the pain increases day by day.

  David knows Palestine well. He was there in 2004. He met many different people, and saw and heard many terrible things.

  ‘Why?’ I demanded, when he had told me about some of them. ‘How can people deliberately kill other people? What makes soldiers, who probably love their mums and feed the birds, turn their guns on the innocent?’

  ‘Because they’re angry and afraid,’ said David, who had been a soldier once and knew what he was talking about. ‘Or they’re not used to power and it goes to their heads. Or they’ve suffered losses too, with friends killed and maimed, and they’ve learned to hate. They’ve stopped seeing their enemies as people like themselves.’

  We thought about this for a while.

  ‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he went on, ‘that someone told me, last year, in Palestine. A story that actually happened. It’s about a good man in a bad war …’

  LEILA’S NIGHTMARE

  The Israeli occupying forces were holding the cities of Palestine in a grip of steel. Tanks and armoured jeeps had been roaring through the streets, scattering everyone in their path. The Israeli soldiers, in their body armour and steel helmets, were jumpy and irritable. The Palestinians, angry, frightened and resentful, were trying to go on as normal, getting to work and to school, doing their shopping and visiting their friends.

  Six-year-old Leila was sitting on a wall outside her grandmother’s house in the city of Ramallah, kicking her heels against the sun-warmed stones. Behind her, in the house, the funeral of her mother’s old cousin had been going on for hours. Aunties, uncles and family friends had been visiting all day, sighing and shaking their heads. Now the rooms inside were hot and stuffy, and Leila, who had been kissed and patted by too many people, was tired and bored. She had slipped outside and was wondering how to amuse herself.

  She watched a cat leap daintily over a fallen lamp-post and called to it, but it didn’t come to her. She looked round at the sound of some children shouting out of a window nearby, but they were out of sight.

  The roar of an engine made her look the other way. An armoured jeep, full of soldiers, was approaching. Curiously, she watched it, then raised two fingers and gave the Palestinian victory sign, as she had so often seen the grown-ups do.

  The jeep slewed to a halt. Hearing the sound of squealing brakes, Leila’s Uncle Latif ran out of the house.

  ‘No, habibi!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t do that sign to them!’

  Soldiers were already climbing down from the jeep.

  ‘You! Terrorist!’ one yelled at Uncle Latif, grabbing him in an armlock. ‘Why are you teaching your children to insult us?’

  Uncle Latif struggled to get away. The soldier cuffed him to the ground, and then the others joined in.

  No one inside the house heard the sound of the soldiers’ fists and boots thudding into Leila’s uncle as they kicked and beat him. No one came.

  Leila stood, still as a stone, watching, her face drained of blood.

  At last, the soldiers stopped, piled back into their jeep and spurted off, down the road.

  Uncle Latif lay still for a moment, then he slowly pulled himself to his feet. Blood dripped from his nose, one eye was half closed, and he clutched at a broken rib.

  ‘Monsters!’ he muttered over and over again, as he staggered back into the house. ‘They’re not human beings. They’re monsters!’

  ‘Monsters!’ repeated Leila under her breath. She could feel a shudder run through her, a cold feeling that went deep inside. She hadn’t realized that the Israeli soldiers were monsters. She hadn’t known that they weren’t actually human beings at all.

  She crept into the house, squeezing between a group of large old aunts, and hid behind a sofa.

  I’m probably safe here, she told herself, trying to think out what might happen if the monsters burst into the house. They probably wouldn’t find me here.

  Leila’s nightmares started after that. Night after night, nameless, faceless beings kitted out in military clothing haunted her, chased her, imprisoned her. Carefully, she studied the small flat she had shared with her mother since her father had left to work abroad. She drew a map of the flat in her mind. There were safe places – under beds, in cupboards, behind chairs; and dangerous places – near windows, within sight of the front door, and on the balcony outside the kitchen. When she heard military vehicles outside, or the sound of soldiers shouting through loudspeakers, or gunfire in the distance, she would rush to whichever hiding place was nearest, and no amount of coaxing, no promises or threats, would lure her out until she was sure that the monsters had gone.

  ‘Don’t be so scared, habibi,’ Samar, her mother, kept saying to her. ‘You’re safe here with me. I won’t let anyone hurt you. You know that.’

  Leila stared back at her mother, knowing it was useless to answer.

  You don’t understand, she was saying inside her head. You don’t know what monsters can do. You don’t know what I saw them do to Uncle Latif. What I see them doing, every night, in my dreams.

  Samar was a schoolteacher, and thought she knew the minds of little girls, but she could only watch helplessly as Leila withdrew further and further into her own world. She did her best: holding Leila’s hand tightly as she walked her to school; talking to her gently, trying to distract her as they went through an Israeli checkpoint; pretending she didn’t notice the stiffness of Leila’s body or her rapid, shallow breathing as they passed the helmeted soldiers.

  And then one hot summer’s night Israeli troops burst into the flat, on
one of their routine searches. Leila, clutching her giant stuffed bear, which she always hugged tightly when she was in bed, had fallen into the first deep sleep of the night. She woke with a shuddering start when the banging came on the door. She lay trembling in fear as the door splintered with a crack and the soldiers rushed in. Then came raised voices from the sitting room next door. She heard Samar cry out, ‘There’s no one here, except me and my daughter. My husband’s away. Please, I beg you, don’t go in there. The child’s terrified enough already. You don’t know what you’ll do to her!’

  Leila covered her head with her sheet and made herself as small as possible, but the combined size of her small body and her fluffy bear made an impressive mound in the middle of the bed. The soldier ripped the covers off, and Leila stared up into the face of her nightmare. The man’s helmet cast his face into shadow. All she could see were his eyes, looking down at her, the light glinting on the gun that dangled from his hand and the pieces of strange equipment strapped to his flak jacket. She opened her mouth in a long, silent scream.

  The soldier tossed the blanket over her again.

  ‘Sweet dreams, baby,’ he said carelessly, and went out of the room.

  Now Leila knew that there was no safe haven, not even at home, where she could hide from the monsters. She redoubled her precautions. Every walk to school was a battle with terror. Every bedtime she had to fight away her panic. The picture of the soldier in her bedroom, the non-human of her imagination, was in her mind all the time. She could tell no one about it. People would only soothe her, lie to her, tell her not to worry.

  The only way she could communicate her fear was with her crayons. Always good at drawing, she now spent hours bent over the pages of an old notebook, meticulously recording the terrors of her mind.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with the child,’ Samar said, as she sipped coffee with her sister-in-law one autumn day, when the cool winds of winter were already sending dust-devils spinning down the city’s cracked pavements. ‘All our children have seen terrible things, God knows. Why is she so much more petrified than the others?’