The War That Saved My Life

  “I was so sad the day you came—but it wasn’t about you. I was just sad. I didn’t think I could take good care of you. I didn’t think I could take care of any children.”

  “And you didn’t want to,” I said. “Especially us.”

  Susan said, “Ada, what’s this about really? The better you get, the worse you seem.”

  I shrugged again. It was scary, how angry I felt inside. At Susan, for being temporary. At Mam, for not caring about us. At Fred, for wearing the scarf I had knit him from his wife’s wool every day, as though it was something special, when I could see myself how I’d dropped some stitches and picked up others, so that the scarf was full of holes.

  At Maggie, for loaning me her copy of Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass when I told her how much I liked Alice in Wonderland. As though books were something you could just give out like yesterday’s newspapers. As though I would be able to sit down and read it as easily as she would. As though the letter I sent her when she went back to school, which took me hours and was full of scratches and misspellings, was anything at all like her letter back to me, written in ink with the curvy handwriting.

  At the war, for taking us away from Mam before she realized she loved us.

  At myself, for being so glad to go.

  “Ada.” Susan spoke slowly and clearly. “Right now you are here. I am not sending you or Jamie anywhere. You will both stay here. I will take care of you. You will have enough to eat. You are learning to read and write, and next year you will go to school. We will get your mother’s permission, and as soon as we do, we will get the operation to fix your foot. All will be well. Relax.”

  When she started to speak I almost went away, to the place in my head where I didn’t feel anything. But Susan tapped my arm, keeping me with her, and she put her hand lightly around my wrist while she spoke. I pulled my hand away, but I stayed where I could hear her. That’s how I heard the words “an operation to fix your foot.”

  Fix my foot? What on earth did she mean?

  Three days later I rode Butter to the top of the hill. I halted where we could see the sea, dark and violent and thrashing, where the wind whipped Butter’s mane against my bad foot, held as it was by the crook of the sidesaddle. The wind blew the wisps of hair around my face and made tears come to my eyes, and I could feel its coldness even through my warm coat and hat and mittens.

  No boats anywhere. No signs of spies. New towers built near the beach, and more barbed wire, and what looked like soldiers marching along the ocean’s edge. Our soldiers—if it were the Germans invading, the church bells would have rung.

  I rode slowly down the hill, through the village. The butcher standing in his shop door nodded his head to me. One of the women I passed smiled. Another waved. They saw me ride by every day. If they thought I should be kept locked up, at least they didn’t say so. They didn’t look disgusted by me.

  At home I untacked Butter and rubbed him dry. I fed him and combed out his tangled mane. I cleaned the saddle and bridle and put them neatly away. I took my time.

  Then I went into the house, where Susan was, and asked, “What does the word operation mean?”

  Susan took me back to see Dr. Graham so he could explain. He did not reexamine my foot. We sat in his office, all three of us, and he talked, and I listened.

  “First of all,” he said, “understand that we can’t proceed without your mother’s permission. At this point it would have to be considered elective surgery, and that’s why we’ve been waiting for her approval.” He glanced up at Susan. “You haven’t gotten it?” She shook her head.

  “Well, I have been reading up on the procedure,” Dr. Graham said. “It wouldn’t be me who would do the surgery, we’d have to send you to a specialist. I’ve written to one that I think would be best. He does say that you won’t ever have a normal foot. Please understand that. You could have if treatment had started early enough, but you can’t now. You won’t get a normally functioning ankle. But we could hope for a foot that looked normally positioned, that you could walk on with the plantar surface down.” He looked at me and added, “That means the bottom. What should be the bottom of your foot would be the part touching the ground.”

  I thought about this. “Would it hurt?” I asked.

  “You would be sleeping during the surgery,” he said. “We would give you special medicine to make you stay asleep, and you wouldn’t feel anything then. Afterward, yes, it would probably hurt. You’d need to stay in hospital for quite a long time too—probably several months. Your foot would be kept in plaster casts.”

  “Would I be able to wear shoes?”

  His eyes smiled, even though his mouth did not. “Yes,” he said. “When everything was healed, you would.”

  I thought of something else. “Who pays for it?” I asked. It cost a pile of money to stay in hospital.

  Susan and the doctor exchanged glances. “We’ll deal with that problem when we come to it,” Dr. Graham said. “I’m sure there are charities we could get involved.”

  Susan and I walked home silently through the blustery freezing wind.

  “What are you thinking?” she finally asked.

  “He said if I’d started treatment early, I could have had a normal foot.”

  “Yes,” Susan said. “Most babies born with clubfeet have them fixed right away.”

  “All the way fixed?”

  Susan put her hand on my shoulder. “Yes. All the way.”

  I could have always lived outside the one room. I could have been like Jamie, running fast. I said, “I thought you kept writing to Mam because you wanted to get rid of us.”

  Susan said, “No wonder you were angry.”

  I felt fragile, not the way I had when I’d exploded on Christmas Eve, but the way I’d felt the next morning, when the only thing that kept me together was Jamie’s smile. Jamie’s and Susan’s smiles.

  At home I sat at the table while Susan put the kettle on. “Do you want to go ride?” she asked. I shook my head. I drank the tea she put in front of me. I pulled my plait over my shoulder and studied the blue ribbon at the end of it. Then I pulled off the slipper shoe Susan had made, and pulled off my stocking, and looked at my foot. The awkward U-shaped ankle. The tiny toes that curled up, not down. The rough calluses where my skin had torn open and then healed, over and over again.

  Susan said, “It’s not your fault.”

  I said, “I always thought it was. I thought I’d done something wrong.”

  “I know,” Susan said.

  “It’s disgusting,” I said.

  Susan said, “I never thought so.”

  I searched her face to see if it was a lie. She looked at me steadily. She said, “If you feel very angry, go outside and throw something.”

  I didn’t feel angry. I felt sad. So sad I could get lost in the sadness. But when I finished my tea, I got out paper and a pencil, and in my very best handwriting, wrote a letter.

  Dear Mam, it said, please let them fix me.

  I waited for a reply.

  Twice a day the postman dropped letters through the slot on the front door. Twice a day I went to look. Susan said it would take at least two days for the letter to get to London, and two days for an answer to come back to us, but ten days passed and still there was nothing.

  “I bet they aren’t delivering letters in London,” Jamie said. “Because of the war.” I could tell by the look on Susan’s face she didn’t think that was true.

  On the twelfth day a letter I recognized fell at my feet. My own. Return to sender was scrawled across it. No longer at this address.

  “She’s moved,” Susan said, turning the unopened envelope over in her hands. “She lives somewhere else now.”

  Susan said perhaps Mam had a new job and had moved to be closer to it. She said perhaps the government had requisitioned our flat. She said there w
ere a number of reasons that Mam might have moved that didn’t mean she’d abandoned us, and she, Susan, would make inquiries through the WVS. Someone in London was bound to know where Mam had gone.

  “What happens to us?” Jamie asked, wide-eyed.

  “You stay with me,” Susan said, “just like you do now. Your mam knows where you are. She knows you’re safe.”

  “What happens when the war’s over?”

  Susan took a deep breath. “Your mam will come and get you.”

  “What if she doesn’t?” Jamie insisted.

  “Don’t worry,” Susan said. “I’ll make sure someone always takes care of you.”

  “I’ll take care of him,” I said, suddenly furious. “I took care of him before, not Mam.” I hated—I hated—oh. Even in my head I still couldn’t say I hated Mam. Even now. If I could get my foot fixed, maybe she’d be different. Maybe she’d love me. Maybe she would.

  “You did a good job taking care of Jamie,” Susan said. “But it was a big job, and you shouldn’t have had to do it. So now you can relax. I can take care of you. You don’t have to fight so hard.”

  She couldn’t take care of me. She talked about fixing my foot, but she couldn’t do it, not really. It was all just lies. And I wanted my foot fixed so badly. I was tired of it hurting. I wanted to be like a normal person. I wanted to walk without crutches, and I wanted to go to school, and I wanted to wear shoes on both feet. I never wanted to be locked up again.

  I hated crying, but I couldn’t help it. I sat on the sofa and sobbed. Susan held me to her. “I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I know.” She stroked my hair. “If it was emergency surgery,” she said, “if you broke your leg or if your life was in danger, I could give permission for that. But this is a big operation, and it is elective, you can survive without it. I can’t give permission. I’ve asked the WVS and I’ve consulted a lawyer, and without your mam’s permission we can’t have it done. I’m so sorry. We’ll keep looking for her. We’ll find her.”

  “I don’t want to just survive,” I said.

  “I know,” Susan said. “So you’ll have to figure out how to make that happen, without fixing your foot.

  “It’s hard,” she said, “but that’s the truth.”

  The winter turned fierce. Snow drifted over the fields and made it impossible for Butter to climb our hill. Even the ride to Fred’s was so wretchedly cold I dreaded it. I went every day now, for afternoon feed, because the winter work was too much for Fred. He didn’t watch me ride. It was far too cold for that. I put Butter in a stall and did chores with Fred as fast as possible, and then rode home. Water froze in the troughs. The horses ate mountains of hay.

  “It’s getting to be too much for you,” Susan said, when I came home with my toes and fingers numb, shivering so hard I couldn’t stop. “If Fred can’t manage, Lady Thorton will have to hire someone to help him, war or no war.”

  “It’s not too much for me,” I said. “I promise.”

  Susan insisted I would attend the village school next year. She borrowed all sorts of books from the town library and made me read them. If I couldn’t read a word, I was supposed to ask her what it meant. The more I read, the less I had to ask. She started me on math and history too.

  Our days went like this. Susan woke us in the dark and cold. We washed up and dressed as quickly as we could. Downstairs, Jamie tended the fire in the living room while Susan worked the range. I went out to give Butter hay. After breakfast Jamie washed the dishes by himself while Susan and I took the blackouts down. Then we had housework, reading, and sewing. Jamie played with Bovril on the rug. Lunch, school for Jamie, shopping for Susan, me helping Fred. More chores, then dinner. Susan would read out loud while she massaged my bad foot, and then we went to sleep under the mountain of blankets Susan had piled on our bed.

  Susan looked horrified when the first chilblains appeared on my bad foot. I shrugged. “I always get them,” I said. She shook her head at me and consulted Fred. He found a piece of stout leather meant for tack repair, and together he and Susan designed a sort of boot. I stepped my bad foot into it and buttoned it up the side. It was loose, so I could wear extra stockings, and Fred oiled it until it stayed dry even in wet mushy snow. That kept the chilblains from getting worse. They didn’t heal, however, which distressed Susan.

  “I don’t know why,” I said. “They’re not bad.”

  “They must hurt,” she said. I shrugged. They did, and the itching sometimes kept me awake nights, but I couldn’t do anything about it.

  “My foot always hurts,” I said. “I always get chilblains in winter.” Usually I got them on my hands as well.

  “Next winter,” Susan said, “we’ll stop them before they get started. There must be some way.”

  I looked at her. “Will I be here next winter?”

  She said, “It’s starting to look that way. The war’s not going anywhere.” She bought goose grease in the village and rubbed it on my sores.

  Stephen’s colonel invited me for tea again and this time I went. The winter was so bleak I was glad to have something different to do, and, anyway, I wasn’t as afraid of things as I had been.

  The colonel wore several cardigans layered over his waistcoat, even though his parlor was warm. He presided very grandly over a tea table set with scones and small ham sandwiches. “My dear,” he said happily, “we’ve saved up our butter ration for you.”

  They had. They had a whole little dish of butter along with jam for the scones. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Take plenty,” he urged.

  I took a tiny sliver.

  “More than that,” he ordered, as though he could see me.

  I laughed. Stephen said, “She’s got loads, don’t worry,” and after that it was easy to relax and eat.

  Stephen said there was a new poster up by the train station. It showed Hitler listening to some British people’s conversation. “‘Careless talk costs lives,’” Stephen quoted. “That’s what it says on the newsreels.”

  Susan had taken us to see the film The Wizard of Oz, but she’d let me stay in the lobby during the newsreel. I said, “Jamie worries about spies, but I don’t know if they’re really real. The government’s so full of talk. How many spies do you think there are?”

  “Hundreds!” the colonel said. “They’re everywhere! It was spies that sunk the Royal Oak! How else could a submarine have gotten into Scapa Flow?”

  I knew that was what people said. “Yes, but—”

  “You think we don’t have spies right now in occupied France, in Germany itself? Of course we do! Stands to reason they’d have sent spies here.”

  I told him how I always looked out from the top of the hill, from where I could see such a long way.

  He nodded. “You keep a lookout everywhere,” he said. “I tell Stephen, pay attention to everything. You never know. One word in German, one false move—”

  Stephen, grinning, helped me to another scone. I grinned back. Posters or newsreels or spies notwithstanding, it was hard to sit in a warm parlor with snow falling outside, and really believe in the war.

  But by the end of January, German U-boats had sunk fifty-six ships in that month alone. Most were cargo ships trying to bring food and supplies to England.

  In February, the Germans sunk another fifty-one. The shops looked sparse, coal supplies ran low, and the weather bore down on us like a cold heavy weight. We went to bed earlier and slept later in the mornings, just to avoid the black misery, until, finally, the days began to brighten.

  Maggie came home briefly at Easter. She was shocked by how much work I was doing, and also by the state the stables and house were in. Her house, not Susan’s. “I’ve told Mum we’ve got to shut up most of the rooms,” she said. I’d learned that Maggie was twelve years old. Top of her form in her current school, though she’d move to a different school for older girls next
year. “Trying to keep on as we always have without enough staff is pointless. And Grimes must have help, or he’ll drop over dead. It’s not that you’re not wonderful,” she added, cutting off my protests, “but it’s ridiculous; you’ll drop dead too. She’s still paying a gardener. He can help Grimes, and we’ll turn the park into crops. We’re supposed to be doing that anyhow.”

  I nodded. Susan had hired the vicar’s gang of boys to dig up most of what was left of our back garden, and cut out the bushes in the front. We were planning a big Victory Garden, potatoes and turnips and carrots, Brussels sprouts and peas. Susan had already planted lettuce seeds on the dirt covering the roof of our shelter. Jamie was agitating for chickens, since eggs were getting scarce.

  “Most of the evacuees in town are gone,” Maggie added. “Mum said so. It makes her feel she hasn’t done her job properly. Do you think you’ll leave?”

  I shook my head. “Our mum thinks we’re safer here.” I’d written to Maggie several times over the winter, but not once had I been able to tell her about Mam’s disappearance. I didn’t want Maggie to see me as rubbish, easy to throw away. “Friday’s my birthday party,” I added. “Will you come to tea? We’re going to pretend I’m turning eleven.”

  Maggie already knew about my real birthday and my pretend birthday, but she still looked startled. “I thought you were eleven already,” she said. “You seem older than ten, even though you’re small.”

  This pleased me. “Really? Maybe you should tell Susan. Maybe we should pretend I’m twelve.”

  Maggie ignored this. “I’ll be glad to come to the party. Home’s dreadful, you can’t imagine. I’ve never liked school, but now home’s worse. Mum’s in a funk all the time.”

  Every time I saw Lady Thorton she seemed in constant motion, making lists, chivvying volunteers, commanding the WVS. When I said so, Maggie grimaced.

  “Yes, that’s her public face. In private she sort of slumps, and everything about her goes slow and dull. I didn’t know she’d gotten like this. When she writes me letters they come from her public side.”