Jay, Lizzie and the Tale of the Stairs

  Chapter 37

  Back to the Cupboard

  When Hanz and another man I hadn’t seen before put me back in the cupboard I wished I’d eaten more sandwiches as my stomach moaned noisily. Both Rosie and Lizzie had eaten some food. Lizzie had been given sandwiches but Rosie hadn’t, so they had had to share. I wondered why this was. Why was Rosie being punished so harshly for the fairly innocent crime of being nosey? Why did Dr Meen hate her so much that he wanted her killed?

  With nothing much else to do but sit I felt myself looking long and hard at Rosie again. She had used Lizzie’s handkerchief to wipe away some of the dirt and grime and now I saw that she had a doll-like complexion. She had rosey cheeks that she said she had when she was born. That’s why she was called Rosie. Her eyes were like dark pools of ink and when I looked at them I saw the dim light from the lamp reflected in them.

  I had seen those eyes before. I was sure now.

  “Is there another reason why those men are keeping you here?” I asked Rosie after a while.

  Rosie frowned and the shadows of her eyebrows met like bats at midnight.

  “Jay!” interrupted Lizzie but I was scared for Rosie. So I asked her again.

  “Think, Rosie. Is there any other reason why you might be here?”

  “Jay!” said Lizzie again in such a I know something you don’t tone that I turned to look at her, not a foot away.

  Lizzie sighed. “Rosie is a Jew, Jay.”

  “So?” I replied, turning down the corners of my mouth and shrugging.

  “Well,” continued Lizzie, “during the war the Germans didn’t like the Jews.” Lizzie looked at the space above my head and concentrated. “Just a minute. That’s not right.” Lizzie thought some more. “Dad also told me that not all Germans hated the Jews. Just the Nazis.”

  “I’ve heard of them,” I said, nodding.

  “I think they killed loads of Jews and, because of that, the Allies have just taken the Nazi bosses to court or something.” Lizzie then gave me a look that I can’t really describe. Then she said, “But no-one talks about it much,” and returned to pulling stitching from her shoes.

  There was nothing to be said. So we said nothing.

  Time passed slowly.

  Every now and then we had to use the bucket to go to the loo and we covered our eyes so as not to embarrass the person who was going. Luckily it wasn’t that often as we weren’t getting a lot to eat or drink. We heard people moving about the house. Distantly. Like mice. Despite our shouts no-one came. We started to notch what we thought was hours on the wood of the door with an old bent nail we found nearby. We were recording time but we couldn’t be sure if it was accurate or not. We worked out that just once a day Hanz and another big man in a suit gave us food and emptied our bucket. Usually the food was sandwiches and water - two sandwiches and two cups of cloudy water to be exact. The men gave the food and drink to me and Lizzie whilst Rosie just cowered away and covered her face with her hands.

  We shared our food and drink with her.

  When we got tired we tried to doze against the crumbly walls or the door. When it was quiet we could not only hear noises from outside but from underneath as well. If we listened hard we could hear banging and scraping, like something big was burrowing or building below us. It didn’t get any closer and sometimes it stopped. We could also hear a constant hum like electricity pylons. This never went away. Was constantly there. After a while though, we found that we had got used to it as we had to concentrate hard to hear it. But the humming didn’t stop and the digging only stopped for a while. Then it would start again.

  There was no doubt about it, there was something beneath us.

  We talked and eventually found out that Rosie had come to England from Holland before the war had started and that her Mum and Dad at 23 Dorset Street were not really her Mum and Dad. They were her Aunt and Uncle. It was true about her brother though. He had been killed in Europe during the war. Because he was a Jew Rosie wasn’t sure if he was a soldier or a prisoner before he’d died.

  I couldn’t understand it. I’d heard of the Nazis and we had looked at World War Two in Mr Butler’s history classes but I still couldn’t believe one type of human is better than another. This is what the Nazis believed, said Lizzie, that they were better because they were white and German. Lizzie said she didn’t know how many Jews had died during the war. Maybe dozens! Who knows? I closed my eyes and pictured the tanks and ships and guns we had seen in class, all in black and white. It did seem so old. Like it never really existed at all.

  I knew it did. I had come face to face with what we all believed was a real life German Nazi.

  In colour it was much more believable.

  Suddenly I was scared again and wanted to go home. Up until now we had got away with our ‘time skips’ and everything had been an adventure. Now I couldn’t see a way out of this and things had become ‘real.’ Real like the bits you don’t see in films.

  For example, after a day and a half Rosie’s legs started to hurt for no reason whatsoever. Neither me or Lizzie offered her help. We just occupied ourselves with picking plaster from walls and timber from the old door. Then Lizzie got crotchety because she had a runny nose again and Rosie had used her hanky to clean her face up with so it was dirty. She didn’t talk for what I marked up as two hours.

  We had started to fall out and the mood had become tense. So we kept picking, poking and scraping at the walls of our cell.

  Then a big bit of old grey plaster fell off the wall and landed in my lap and covered my clothes in dust.

  I looked at the mess and thought. Then I looked at Lizzie and, like in the cartoons, we both saw the penny drop.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Lizzie?”

  “Yes,” she said looking from the plaster to me and back again. “I am.”

  So I got the nail and scraped at the wall again. After a while another bit of plaster came loose. This had the shape of Africa and I was able to lift it off carefully. But it had taken a lot of scraping to get loose and my fingers were sore and were starting to bleed. So I stopped and it was quiet again. Quiet apart from the distant sound of what sounded like shovels and picks and that electric hum.

  “This is stupid!” exploded Lizzie after a while.

  “What’s stupid?” I asked, looking up. Rosie sat up too just as Lizzie made a grab for the nail.

  “Why didn’t we think of this earlier,” she said. “It’s my turn. We should work in shifts. You rest and I’ll scrape, and so on.”

  “Cool!” I nodded.

  “I wish it was,” said Lizzie scrabbling past me, “as far as I’m mattered it’s bloody hot in here!”

  So that’s how we started to think about escape. After a few hours we had got about four or five red bricks exposed. I had another go and found that the concrete or cement or whatever between them was dusty. I also found that, after a bit of scraping and digging, we could make holes around them. Then Rosie took a turn but she struggled so Lizzie had another go. By the time the food arrived we had made holes around some of the bricks and had even found another nail.

  We had hope.

  If only we could just make the brickwork weak enough to push out and a hole big enough to crawl through then we would have a chance.

  What we would do after that I didn’t have a clue.