The War That Saved My Life

  I knew Mam had guessed at least part of my secret. I was getting stronger. She didn’t like it. As soon as she went out I got to my feet, and I made myself walk all the way across the room.

  It was late August already. I knew it wouldn’t be long before Jamie started school. I wasn’t as afraid of Jamie leaving as I had been, but I was dreading being alone so much with Mam. But that day Jamie came home early, looking upset. “Billy White says all the kids is leaving,” he said.

  Billy White was Stephen White’s little brother, and Jamie’s best friend.

  Mam was getting ready for work. She leaned over to tie her shoes, grunting as she sat back up. “So they say.”

  “What do you mean, leaving?” I asked.

  “Leaving London,” Mam said, “on account of Hitler, and his bombs.” She looked up, at Jamie, not me. “What they say is that the city’s going to be bombed, so all the kids ought to be sent to the country, out of harm’s way. I hadn’t decided whether to send you. Suppose I might. Cheaper, one less mouth to feed.”

  “What bombs?” I asked. “What country?”

  Mam ignored me.

  Jamie slid onto a chair and swung his feet against the rungs. He looked very small. “Billy says they’re leaving on Friday.” That was two days from now. “His mam’s buying him all new clothes.”

  Mam said, “I ain’t got money for new clothes.”

  “What about me?” My voice came out smaller than I liked. “Am I going? What about me?”

  Mam still didn’t look at me. “’Course not. They’re sending kids to live with nice people. Who’d want you? Nobody, that’s who. Nice people don’t want to look at that foot.”

  “I could stay with nasty people,” I said. “Wouldn’t be any different than living here.”

  I saw the slap coming, but didn’t duck fast enough. “None of your sass,” she said. Her mouth twisted into the smile that made my insides clench. “You can’t leave. You never will. You’re stuck here, right here in this room, bombs or no.”

  Jamie’s face went pale. He opened his mouth to say something, but I shook my head at him, hard, and he closed it again. When Mam left he launched himself into my arms. “Don’t worry,” I said, rocking him. I didn’t feel frightened. I felt grateful, that I’d spent my summer the way I had. “You find out where we have to go and what time we have to be there,” I said. “We’re leaving together, we are.”

  In the wee hours of Friday morning, I stole Mam’s shoes.

  I had to. They were the only shoes in the flat, other than Jamie’s canvas shoes, which were too small even for my bad foot. Mam’s shoes were too big, but I stuffed the toes with paper. I wrapped a rag around my bad foot. I tied the laces tight. The shoes felt strange, but I thought they would probably stay on.

  Jamie looked at me in amazement. “I’ve got to take them,” I whispered. “Otherwise people’ll see my foot.”

  He said, “You’re standing. You’re walking.”

  My big moment, and now I hardly cared. There was too much ahead of me. “Yes,” I said. “I am.” I glanced at Mam, who lay on the bed, snoring, her back to us. Proud of me? Not bloody likely.

  I slid down the stairs on my bottom. At the end of them Jamie helped me up, and we set out together into the silent early-morning streets. One step, I thought. One step at a time.

  It was interesting to be at ground level. The light was tinged pink, and a faint blue haze seemed to rise off the buildings, so that everything seemed prettier than it did later in the day. A cat streaked around a corner, chasing something, probably a rat. Other than the cat, the street was empty.

  I held Jamie’s hand on my right side, for support. In my left I had a paper bag with food in it, for breakfast. Jamie said we were supposed to be at his school at nine o’clock in the morning, hours ahead, but I’d figured the earlier we got away, the better. I didn’t know how long it would take me to get to the school. I didn’t want people to stare.

  The street was bumpy, which I hadn’t realized from my window. Walking was harder than in our flat. The shoe helped, but by the time I’d made it to the end of the lane, my foot hurt so badly I didn’t think I could take a single step further. But I did.

  “Turn here,” Jamie whispered. “It’s not far.”

  Another step, and my bad foot twisted. I fell, gasping. Jamie knelt beside me. “You could crawl,” he said. “S’nobody watching.”

  “How much farther?” I asked him.

  “Three blocks,” he said. He added, “Blocks is the buildings in between the streets. We’ve got to cross three more streets.”

  I measured the distance with my eyes. Three streets. Might as well have been three miles. Three hundred miles. “Suppose I’ll crawl a bit,” I said.

  But crawling on the street was a lot harder than crawling in our flat. My knees were calloused, of course, but the stones hurt, and the trash and mud weren’t pleasant either. After a block I took Jamie’s hand and hauled myself upright.

  “How come you don’t walk, when you can?” Jamie asked.

  “It’s new,” I said. “I learned it this summer, while you were out.”

  He nodded. “I won’t tell,” he said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. Already the world seemed huge to me. If I looked up at the tops of the buildings I felt dizzy. “We’re going to the country. Nobody minds if I walk there.” Of course that was a lie. I didn’t know anything about where we were going. I didn’t really even know what the word country meant. But Jamie gripped my hand tighter, and smiled.

  The school was a brick building with an empty yard surrounded by a metal fence. We made it inside and I collapsed. We ate bread dipped in sugar. It was good.

  “Did you take Mam’s sugar?” Jamie asked, wide-eyed.

  I nodded. “All of it,” I said, and we laughed out loud.

  The air was chilly now that we weren’t moving, and the ground felt damp. The roar of pain in my ankle subsided into a deep throbbing ache. I looked up at all the unfamiliar buildings, the scrolls and fancy brickwork, the shingles, the window frames, the birds. I didn’t notice the woman walking across the yard until Jamie poked me.

  She smiled at us. “You’re here early,” she said.

  One of the teachers, I supposed. I nodded and gave her a big smile in return. “Our dad dropped us off, before he had to go to work,” I said. “He said you’d take good care of us.”

  The woman nodded. “And so I will,” she said. “Would you like some tea?”

  When we got up, of course she noticed my limp. Limp, nothing, I was staggering, lucky to have Jamie to catch me. “You poor thing,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I hurt it,” I said. “Just this morning.” Which was true enough.

  “Will you let me look at it?” she asked.

  “Oh, no,” I said, forcing myself to keep moving. “It’s getting better already.”

  After that it was easy. It was the most impossible thing I’d ever done, but it was also easy. I held on to Jamie, and I kept moving forward. The yard filled with children and teachers, the teachers organized us into lines. I wouldn’t have been able to walk the half mile to the train station—I was mostly done in—but suddenly in front of me was a face I recognized. “That you, Ada?” said Stephen White.

  He was the oldest of the White children; there were three girls between Stephen and Billy. The whole bunch of them had pulled up and were staring at me. They’d never seen me other than through my window.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  Stephen looked surprised. “I didn’t think you’d be coming,” he said. “I mean, of course you’ve got to get out of London, but our mam said they had special places for people like you.”

  My mam hadn’t said anything about special places. I said, “What’dya mean, ‘people like me’?”

  Stephen looked at the ground. He was taller
than me, older, I figured, but not by much. “You know,” he said.

  I knew. “Cripples,” I said.

  He looked back at my face, startled. “No,” he said. “Simple. Not right in the head. That’s what everybody says.” He said, “I didn’t even know you could talk.”

  I thought of all the time I spent at my window. I said, “I talk to you all the time.”

  “I know you wave and jibber-jabber, but”—he looked pretty uncomfortable now—“we can’t ever really hear you, down on the street. We can’t make out what you’re saying. I didn’t know you could talk normal. And your mam says as how you’ve got to be kept locked up, for your own good.” For the first time, he looked at my feet. “You’re a cripple?”

  I nodded.

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Walked,” I said. “I couldn’t let Jamie go alone.”

  “Was it hard?” he asked.

  I said, “Yes.”

  An odd expression passed over his face, one I didn’t understand at all. “Everyone feels sorry for your mam,” he said.

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  Stephen said, “She know you’re gone?”

  I would have lied, but Jamie piped up, “No. She said Ada was going to get bombed.”

  Stephen nodded. “Don’t worry about walking to the station,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  I didn’t know what he meant, but one of his little sisters smiled up at me. “He gives me rides,” she said.

  I smiled back. She reminded me of Jamie. “Okay, then,” I said.

  So Stephen White piggy-backed me to the station. The teacher that had given me tea thanked him for helping. We marched in a long line, and the teachers made us sing “There’ll Always Be an England.” Finally we got to the station, which was overflowing with more children than I knew existed in the world.

  “Can you get onto the train all right?” Stephen asked, setting me down.

  I grabbed Jamie’s shoulder. “’Course I can.”

  Stephen nodded. He started to herd Billy and his sisters into a group, but then he turned back to me. “How come she keeps you locked up, if you’re not simple?”

  “Because of my foot,” I said.

  He shook his head. “That’s crazy,” he said.

  “It’s because—because of whatever I did, to make my foot like that—”

  He shook his head again. “Crazy.”

  I stared at him. Crazy?

  The teachers started yelling then, and we all climbed onto the train. Before the noon church bells rang, the train began to move.

  We’d escaped. Mam, Hitler’s bombs, my one-room prison. Everything. Crazy or not, I was free.

  The train was miserable, of course. Most of the children weren’t glad to be leaving like I was. Some cried, and one got sick in the corner of the car. The teacher assigned to our car fluttered around, trying to clean up the mess and stop boys from fighting and explain for the third or tenth or hundredth time that no, there weren’t any loos on this car, we would just have to hold it, and no, she didn’t know how much longer, no one even knew where the train was going, much less how long it would take.

  No loos, nothing to drink, and we’d eaten all our bread. I poured sugar onto Jamie’s hand and he licked at it, like a cat. Meanwhile the world moved outside the windows, faster and faster. If I let my eyes unfocus, the scene blurred and ran past me. If I looked hard at one thing it stood still while I moved my head, and it became clear the train was moving, not the world.

  The buildings ended and suddenly there was green. Green everywhere. Bright, vibrant, astonishing green, floating into the air toward the blue, blue sky. I stared, mesmerized. “What’s that?”

  “Grass,” Jamie said.

  “Grass?” He knew about this green? There wasn’t any grass on our lane, nor nothing like it that I’d ever seen. I knew green from clothing or cabbages, not from fields.

  Jamie nodded. “It’s on the ground. Spikey stuff, but soft, not prickly. There’s grass in the churchyard. Round the headstones. And trees, like that over there.” He pointed out the window.

  Trees were tall and thin, like stalks of celery, only giant-sized. Bursts of green on top. “When were you in a churchyard?” I asked. What’s a churchyard? I might have asked next. There was no end to the things I didn’t know.

  Jamie shrugged. “St. Mary’s. Playing leapfrog on the tombstones. Rector chased us out.”

  I watched the green until it started to blur. I’d been up half the night, making sure we didn’t oversleep, and now my eyelids began to settle, lower and lower, until Jamie whispered, “Ada. Ada, look.”

  A girl on a pony was racing the train. She was actually on top of the pony, sitting on its back, her legs hanging one off each side. She held bits of string or something in her hands, and the strings were attached to the pony’s head. The girl was laughing, her face wide open with joy, and it was clear even to me that she meant to be on the pony. She was directing the pony, telling it what to do. Riding the pony. And the pony was running hard.

  I knew ponies from the lane but had only seen them pull carts. I hadn’t known you could ride them. I hadn’t known they could go so fast.

  The girl leaned forward against the pony’s flying mane. Her lips moved as though she was shouting something. Her legs thumped the pony’s sides, and the pony surged forward, faster, brown legs flying, eyes bright. They ran alongside the train as it curved around their field.

  I saw a stone wall ahead of them. I gasped. They were going to hit it. They were going to be hurt. Why didn’t she stop the pony?

  They jumped it. They jumped the stone wall, and kept running, while the train tracks turned away from their field.

  Suddenly I could feel it, the running, the jump. The smoothness, the flying—I recognized it with my whole body, as though it was something I’d done a hundred times before. Something I loved to do. I tapped the window. “I’m going to do that,” I said.

  Jamie laughed.

  “Why not?” I said to him.

  “You walk pretty good,” he said.

  I didn’t tell him that my foot hurt so bad I wasn’t sure I’d ever walk again. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  The day got worse. It was bound to. The train stopped and started and stopped again. Hot sun poured through the windows until the air seemed to curdle. Small children cried. Bigger ones fought.

  Finally we stopped at a quay, but a bossy woman standing there wouldn’t let us out. She argued with the head teacher, and then with all the other teachers, and then even with the man running the train. The teachers said we had to be let out, for the love of mercy, but the woman, who had a face like iron and a uniform like a soldier’s, only with a skirt, thumped her clipboard and refused.

  “I’m to expect seventy mothers with infant children,” she said. “Not two hundred schoolchildren. It says so, here.”

  “I don’t care in the least what’s written on your paper,” the head teacher spat back.

  The teacher supervising our car shook her head and opened the door. “Out, all of you,” she said to us. “Loos are in the station. We’ll find you something to drink and eat. Out you go.”

  Out we went, in a thundering herd. The other teachers followed, opening the doors to their cars. The iron-faced woman scowled and barked orders everyone ignored.

  It was more noise and rush than I’d ever seen. It was better than fireworks.

  Jamie helped me off the train. I felt stiff all over, and I had to go something desperate. “Show me how to use the loo,” I told him. Sounds funny, but it was my first real loo. At home our flat shared the one down the hall, but I just used a bucket and Mam or Jamie emptied it.

  “I think I gotta use the boys’ one,” Jamie said.

  “What do you mean, the boys’ one?”

  “See?” He poin
ted at two doors. Sure enough, all the boys were going through one door, the girls through another. Only now lines snaked out the doors.

  “Tell me what to do, then.”

  “You pee in it, and then you flush,” he said.

  “What’s flush? How do I flush?”

  “There’s a handle, like, and you push it down.”

  I waited my turn and then I went in and figured it out, even the flushing. There were sinks, and I splashed water onto my hot face. A girl right in front of me—the shabbiest, nastiest-looking girl I’d ever seen—was using a sink in front of my sink, which seemed odd. I frowned at her, and she frowned back.

  All of a sudden I realized I was looking in a mirror.

  Mam had a mirror. It hung high on the wall and I never bothered with it. I stared into this one, appalled. I’d assumed I looked like all the other girls. But my hair was clumpy, not smooth. My skin was paler than theirs, milky-white, except it also looked rather gray, especially around my neck. The dirty calluses on my knees stood out beneath my faded skirt, which suddenly seemed grubby and too small.

  What could I do? I took a deep breath and staggered out. Jamie was waiting. I looked him over with newly critical eyes. He was dirtier than the other boys too. His shirt had faded into an indeterminate color and his fingernails were rimmed in black.

  “We should have had baths,” I said.

  Jamie shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

  But it did.

  At home, when I looked out my window onto the lane, across the street, three buildings to the left, on the corner, I could see a fishmonger’s shop. They got fish delivered every morning, and laid it out for sale on a thick cool piece of stone. In the summer heat, fish could go off fast, so women knew to pick through the selection carefully and chose only the freshest and the best.

  That’s what we children were: fish on a slab. The teachers herded us down the street into a big building and lined us up against one wall. Men and women from the village filed past, looking to see if we were sweet and pretty and wholesome enough to take home.