The War That Saved My Life

  In the end, 330,000 British soldiers were saved. Winston Churchill called it England’s “finest hour.” It was hard, listening to him on the radio, safely home with Jamie once again, to think that there had been anything fine about the shiploads of desperate and dying men. But at the same time, I felt different. There was a Before Dunkirk version of me and an After Dunkirk version. The After Dunkirk version was stronger, less afraid. It had been awful, but I hadn’t quit. I had persisted. In battle I had won.

  Several days later, when Susan and I went into the village, I stopped at the pub to say hello to Daisy. “Oh, dearie,” said her mother, pulling me against her large bosom and kissing the top of my head. “I’ve sent her away,” she said. To Susan she added, “You’d better send yours too.”

  The village was evacuating its own children.

  Across the channel, Hitler’s army waited, less than thirty miles away. He invaded the Channel Islands, Guernsey and Jersey, which belonged to England.

  The Channel Islands surrendered.

  Kent, which was the part of England where we were, was the closest bit to the German Army in France. When Hitler invaded, he would land in Kent.

  Susan said nothing to Daisy’s mother, but later told Jamie and me not to worry. If our mother wanted us to go somewhere else, that was one thing, but until Susan heard from our mother, we were staying put.

  A few days later Lady Thorton came to try to make Jamie and me go. All the other evacuees and nearly all the village children were leaving. The WVS, Lady Thorton said, would find a home for us somewhere safe.

  “Their mother won’t know where they are,” Susan protested.

  “Of course she will,” Lady Thorton said. “I’ll see that you get their new address, and whenever she contacts you, you can pass it on.”

  Susan hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

  Lady Thorton’s nose narrowed the way it did when she was angry. “There will be an invasion,” she said, in a tightly clipped tone. “German soldiers in our streets, in our homes. War in our streets, quite possibly. The children should be as far away as we can send them. Margaret isn’t coming home this summer. She’s going straight to her new school.”

  I felt a pang of regret. I’d been expecting to see Maggie soon.

  Lady Thorton said, “You must send them away.”

  Beneath the regret came a bigger wave of emotion, coiling up, rising in my gut. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what it meant. I looked out the window and frantically tried to think of Butter.

  “. . . things worse than bombs,” Susan was saying.

  Lady Thorton shook her head. “War is no time for sentiment.”

  “Is it sentiment?” Susan asked. Her voice sounded far away behind the humming in my ears. Susan put a hand on my shoulder. “Look at them,” Susan said. “Look at Ada. If she gets put with the wrong person she’ll go right back to where she was.”

  I shook my head, struggling to stay with them, to hear them above my increasing panic. But Lady Thorton didn’t reply. When I risked a glance at her she was staring at Susan with an expression I couldn’t read.

  “She isn’t easy,” Susan said, “but I’ll fight for her. I do fight for her. Someone has to.”

  At last Lady Thorton spoke. “I see,” she said quietly. “I’m not sure you’re correct, but I see what you’re saying. But the boy—”

  “No,” Susan said. “Separating them would kill them both.”

  When Lady Thorton had left, Susan sat Jamie and me down beside her on the sofa. She said, “Listen. I am not sending you away.”

  She talked a long time after that. I heard nothing beyond the words “not sending you away.”

  The wave inside me flattened out. I could breathe again.

  “How do you feel about it?” Susan asked me.

  How did I feel? I had no idea. I didn’t know the words to explain. I was choking and now I can breathe.

  Susan waited for me to say something. I still felt dizzy, overwhelmed. I swallowed. “I guess I’d rather stay here,” I said.

  “Good,” Susan said, “because I’m not giving you a choice.”

  Susan had been right that all the green leaves and grass came back in summertime. The weather was glorious. Butter’s pasture reached his knees, and the vegetables in our Victory Garden thrived.

  Fred found an old bicycle in one of the sheds at Thorton House and fixed it up for Jamie to ride. School had closed for good, since most of the children were gone, so Jamie came with me every day to help Fred. The former gardener had proved useless around horses, frightened of them and therefore inclined to smack them around. He’d been called up anyhow; Fred was alone again. Lady Thorton had sold two horses, and put down three more who were past being ridden, but that still left a lot of work to do. The best pastures had been taken over for crops. The government sent Land Girls to take the place of the enlisted male farm workers. They moved into the old stable boys’ apartments, but they only helped with the farming on the estate, not the horses. “Horses aren’t important these days,” said Fred.

  Jamie was finally permanently and completely banned from the airfield. They were too busy to have him around. Planes took off in bunches all day and all night. We could see them high in the sky, tiny specks patrolling the channel. Watching, waiting, for the invasion that would come.

  I struggled to fall asleep in the long, bright summer nights. Jamie and Bovril snored in unison, loudly. One night, when the noise grew too much to bear, I crept downstairs to the slightly darker living room. Susan sat on the sofa, her legs curled beneath her, staring into nothing. It was not the deep sad staring from the year before. “Can’t sleep?” she asked when she saw me.

  I shook my head. Susan patted the sofa beside her. I walked across the room and stood in front of her, my good foot and the crutch tips deep in the plush rug, the toes of my bad foot barely brushing the ground.

  “Everyone still thinks I should send you away,” Susan said.

  I nodded. Lady Thorton said so often. I went to Susan’s WVS meetings sometimes, to help sew, and Lady Thorton made a noise in the back of her throat every time she saw me.

  “Part of me does agree,” Susan continued. “I know they mean well. But I also understand now why some of the mothers from London took their evacuated children back so soon. Some things you’ve got to face as a family.”

  Hitler was in Paris. He could be in London next week.

  “For the longest time,” Susan went on, “I thought I was neglecting you. I didn’t take care of you the way my mother took care of my brothers and me. My mother watched me all the time. She always kept me neatly dressed. She ironed my shoelaces. She would never have let you run wild the way I have.

  “But now, when I look at you, I think I didn’t do so badly. I think you wouldn’t have liked being raised the way my mother raised me. What do you think, Ada?”

  I sat down on the sofa. “I never know,” I said. “When I’m not thinking, everything’s clear in my head, but as soon as I try to look at it I get confused.” I leaned against the back of the sofa.

  “I understand,” Susan said. “Sometimes I feel like that too.”

  I leaned my head against her, the tiniest bit. She didn’t move. I leaned a little bit more. She put her arm around my shoulders, so that I was nestled against her. As I drifted into sleep I thought I felt her lips brush the top of my head.

  The first air raid was worse than Christmas Eve.

  It came the second week of July. It had been a hot day, so we had kept the windows wide open and the blackout down. For once I’d fallen into a sound, dreamless sleep.

  Whoop-WHOOP! Whoop—WHOOP! Whoop-WHOOP! The sirens at the airfield wailed, louder and louder. You’d have thought one was in our bedroom. Jamie jumped up, scrambling to keep hold of Bovril, who thrashed and scratched in an effort to get free. I grabbed my crutches. Susan came flyi
ng in, her dressing gown flapping. “Hurry, hurry,” she said.

  I couldn’t hurry. Going downstairs took time. My hands shook. I wouldn’t be fast enough. I would be bombed.

  Jamie ran ahead, but Susan waited for me. “It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t panic.”

  Across the living room, out the back door. Jamie ducked into the Anderson shelter and stuffed Bovril into his basket. The cat howled. He sounded like a baby screaming in pain.

  I stood at the door of the shelter. I’d never yet gone inside. I hated it, it scared me, it was so much like the cabinet under the sink at home. The one with the roaches. I could never see them or stop them.

  “Ada,” Susan said, behind me, “MOVE.”

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go inside. Not into that damp shelter, that smelled exactly like the cabinet. Not into that darkness. Not into that pain.

  The siren wailed. Jamie shouted, “Ada, hurry!”

  A noise like the plane exploding. Bombs. Real bombs, here in Kent, German bombs everyone feared. Here in the cabinet under the sink—

  Susan picked me up and carried me down the stairs. The smell enveloped me. I could feel the cramped cabinet, the roaches. I could hear Mam laughing while I screamed.

  I screamed. Another bomb. More screams. From Jamie? From me? How would I know? The memory of the cabinet seemed real, seemed to be happening right at that moment. I could see the cabinet, feel myself being shoved inside. Terror enveloped my brain.

  Suddenly I felt something tight around me. A blanket, a rough wool blanket. Susan wrapped me in it the way she had on Christmas Eve, tight, round and round. “Shh,” she said. “Shh.” She put her arms around me and laid me on a bench and then half sat on me, squishing me between her backside and the shelter wall. “We’re all here, we’re safe,” she said. She took Jamie onto her lap. “It’s okay, Jamie, she’s just frightened. It’s okay.” Jamie whimpered. “We’re safe,” Susan said. “It’s okay.”

  The pressure of the blanket soothed me. Gradually I came back to the shelter, to Jamie and Susan. I stopped screaming. My heart didn’t pound so hard. I breathed the smell of the wool blanket, wet from my tears, instead of the shelter-cabinet dampness.

  From outside we heard another blast, farther away, and the ack-ack from the antiaircraft guns at the airfield.

  “We’re okay,” Susan said wearily. “We’re okay.”

  When the all-clear sounded two hours later, Susan and I were still wide-awake. Jamie had fallen asleep on Susan’s lap. She carried him back to the house. I walked beside her, trailing the blanket like a cape. We lay down in the living room, too worn out to climb the stairs.

  Late the next morning, when we woke, Susan said, “Ada, there will be more bombs. We will have to go into the shelter. You’d better get used to it.”

  I shuddered. I couldn’t imagine doing that again.

  “What set you off?” Susan asked.

  “Mam’s cabinet—the way it smells—” I made myself go somewhere else in my head, fast, before panic overwhelmed me. Butter. I imagined riding Butter.

  Susan tapped my chin. “We can change the smell.”

  She went to the market and bought aromatic herbs, rosemary, lavender, and sage. She hung them in the shelter, upside down from the edges of the benches, and their smell filled the little room even after they were crumbly and dry. I couldn’t smell the dampness anymore. It helped. I still panicked. Susan still always wrapped me in a blanket. But usually I could keep from screaming, and I didn’t actually see the cabinet in my head. It was still awful, but I didn’t frighten Jamie.

  That was important, because we went into the shelter nearly every night from that first time. The Battle of Britain had begun.

  Hitler had figured out he couldn’t land his invading army until he’d conquered the Royal Air Force. Otherwise, our planes would bomb his ships and troops while they were landing. Once he’d gotten rid of our planes, invading England would be easy. The Germans had a lot more airplanes and pilots than the British did. They had different kinds of planes, though, and their fighter planes had shorter ranges than ours. This meant that they could only reach the southeastern corner of England before they had to turn back for more fuel. They could only shoot our planes and bomb our airfields in Kent.

  The airfields were their main targets. Every plane they destroyed, whether in the air or parked on the ground, brought them one step closer to invasion; every runway they destroyed gave our pilots one less place to safely land. Our airfield was hit that very first day; the bombs ripped through two storage sheds and left craters the size of small tanks in the grass runways. Fortunately all the air crews found shelter. Once the all-clear sounded, the crews worked through the night, shoveling debris into the blast holes. By morning planes could safely land again.

  It was July, and the world was green and lovely. I rode Butter through fields of waving grass, up our hill to where I could see the blue sea glittering in the bright sunlight. Wild roses grew in the hedgerows, and the air felt heavy with their scent. The breeze blew and I could feel perfectly happy, except that now I always watched for planes as well as spies. They hadn’t come in daytime yet, but I knew they could.

  Susan didn’t like me riding out, but she didn’t want to forbid it either. Our home was so close to the airfield, I figured I was safer farther away. When I said so, she looked grim. “I should send you away,” she said.

  It was hard enough to cope with Susan. How would I ever cope without her?

  What if we got sent back home?

  I stared at the tips of my shoes. “I can’t leave Butter,” I said.

  Susan sighed. “You survived without a pony in London.”

  I lifted my gaze to look at her. I had survived. Maybe. Could I do it again? Back in that one room, I hadn’t known all I was missing.

  “I know,” Susan said softly. “It’s why I’m keeping you here.”

  “There’s things worse than bombs,” I said, remembering what I’d heard her say before.

  “I think so,” Susan said. “And Kent’s a big place, they can’t bomb every inch of it.” But she looked out the window toward the airfield, and her eyes creased with worry.

  Nights in the shelter, night after night. It was impossible to sleep through the explosions and the gunfire. Susan had a flashlight, but flashlights needed batteries, and batteries were hard to find. Instead she lit a candle inside a flowerpot, and by its dim light read to us. Peter Pan. A Secret Garden. The Wind in the Willows. Some were books she got from the library; others came from her own bookshelves. On his own, Jamie was reading Swiss Family Robinson over again. “We’re like them,” he said one night, as the candlelit flickered off the shelter’s tin walls. “We’re in our cave, safe and warm.”

  I shuddered. I had wrapped myself in a sheet, because it was too hot for a blanket. I felt warm, but not safe. I never felt safe in the shelter. “You are, though,” Susan said. “You feel safer in your bedroom, but you’re actually much safer in the shelter.”

  It didn’t matter how I felt. She made me go into the shelter every time the sirens wailed.

  Men came and removed all the signposts from the roads around the village, so that when Hitler invaded he wouldn’t know where he was.

  When he invaded, we were to bury our radio. Jamie had already dug a hole for it in the garden. When Hitler invaded we were to say nothing, do nothing to help the enemy.

  If he invaded while I was out riding, I was to return home at once, as fast as possible by the shortest route. I’d know it was an invasion, not an air raid, because all the church bells would ring.

  “What if the Germans take Butter?” I asked Susan.

  “They won’t,” she said, but I was sure she was lying.

  “Bloody huns,” Fred muttered, when I went to help with chores. “They come here, I’ll stab ’em with a pitchfork, I will.” Fred was not happy. The r
iding horses, the Thortons’ fine hunters, were all out to grass, and the grass was good, but the hayfields had been turned over to wheat and Fred didn’t know how he’d feed the horses through the winter. Plus the Land Girls staying in the loft annoyed him. “Work twelve hours a day, then go out dancing,” he said. “Bunch of lightfoots. In my day girls didn’t act like that.”

  I thought the Land Girls seemed friendly, but I knew better than to say so to Fred.

  You could get used to anything. After a few weeks, I didn’t panic when I went into the shelter. I quit worrying about the invasion. I put Jamie up behind me on Butter and we searched the fields for shrapnel or bullets or bombs. Once we came across an airplane shot down in a hops field. Soldiers had already surrounded it by the time we got there, and were keeping civilians away. “A Messerschmidt,” Jamie said, eyes gleaming. “Wonder where the pilot went.” The pilot had bailed out; the plane’s canopy was open.

  “Caught him,” one of the soldiers said, overhearing. “Prisoner of war. No troubles.”

  On a day in early August Susan went to a WVS meeting. Jamie was tending the garden—he loved it—and I took off on Butter for my daily ride.

  I went to the top of the hill. I paused, the way I always did, to search the sea and sky. No airplanes. No big boats. But then I saw something in the distance, something small on the surface of the ocean. A tiny boat, a rowboat, pulling for shore. I watched it, wondering. It was headed not for the town harbor, but for one of the barbed-wire sections of the beach. Was the person lost? Surely he knew better than to land where there were could be mines. I kept watching, frowning. The man—it looked like a man, I thought—in the boat continued to row straight for shore. Surely he could see the village from the water. Surely he knew it would be safer there.