I know I shouldn’t say this. I shouldn’t even have thought it. But I did. When Dad arrived, when I saw it wasn’t an American jeep, I remember I felt a little disappointed. When I saw it was Dad I was happy, but I was sad too at the same time because it wasn’t Adie. That’s wrong, I know it is. But I am pleased my dad’s back here and alive and well. I’ve missed him so much. I know that now he’s come home we’re a real family again. He’s thinner than he was and he’s lost some of his hair (I won’t tell him that), but he’s still my dad.
I had to say good-bye to Dad before I went off to school this morning. He walked Barry and me to the end of the lane to meet the school bus, with Barry wearing his beret. He loves Dad’s beret. Dad was in his uniform again, the first time he’d put it back on since the day he’d arrived, and I was very proud of him when the other children saw him. He’s got three stripes on his arm, which means he’s a sergeant and can tell other soldiers what to do. I think I didn’t cry because I was even more proud than I was sad. He told me I had to be good. “I’ll be home again soon, Lil,” he said. “You look after your mum for me, and be good. The war’ll be over before you know it.” Barry handed him his beret. Dad ruffled his hair and we got on the bus. We ran to the backseat. Dad was getting smaller and smaller in the distance. Soon, all too soon, he was gone altogether. Then I did cry. But I looked hard out of the window so that no one would know.
It’s been so strange having Dad back home. Somehow there didn’t seem to be a proper place for him in the house. He spent most of the time with Grandfather and Uncle George on the farm, mending all the machinery, and a whole afternoon tinkering with the tractor engine with Barry, who loves getting his hands oily. Once he went off drinking in the pub with Uncle George and the others in the Home Guard, a sort of welcome-home party I think it was, but we couldn’t go of course because we’re not allowed in pubs. Mum was so happy when he first came home, but then I’d see her gazing at him out of the kitchen window, and I knew what she was thinking. As the days passed and Dad’s leave got shorter and shorter, we were all thinking the same thing. We didn’t laugh like we had before. We were just waiting for him to leave, so we couldn’t enjoy him being there as much as we should have. It hung like a shadow over us. Now he’s gone, and it’s as if he’s never been home at all. I’m going to pray for him every night he’s away, starting right now, I won’t miss once. Cross my heart and hope to die.
When we go to school now we see more and more soldiers, mostly they’re Yanks, but some of them are ours too. We see them in trucks and in tanks, we see them marching along. They’re putting up whole villages of tents all over the place. Every time I see a black soldier I look to see if it’s Adie or Harry. I haven’t seen Adie in ages now. I expect they’ve been doing lots more of their landing exercises. I know he’s all right because Uncle George said he saw him only yesterday on patrol with Harry along the perimeter wire. Uncle George said he’d asked them to come and visit us again sometime. I hope they do. I really hope they do.
The day of the Great Hot-Dog Feast. That’s what I’m calling today.
Barry and I were running up the lane, coming back from school. We were racing each other and I was winning, as usual, when we heard a car coming up behind us. It was Adie and Harry in their jeep. They said they were just coming to visit. Harry was carrying a bunch of daffodils. They gave us a lift home, which was good fun, but what happened next was supreme.
They were sausages really, but they called them hot dogs and they brought dozens of them. I’ve never seen so many sausages in my life. They said you just stick them between slices of bread and pour on tomato ketchup, and they brought that along too. So we had a great hot-dog feast, all of us together in the kitchen, and in the middle of the table were the daffodils Adie and Harry had given Mum. Barry said it was the best meal of his life. He ate six! And got ketchup all over his face. I could only manage three. But they were supreme!
We only mentioned Tips once, when Uncle George’s cat came in rubbing up against my leg and looking for a sausage himself. I told Adie what had happened, how Tips had gone off and about the hotel being blown up. He knew about the hotel, but he told me I wasn’t to worry. “She’ll come home,” Adie said. “That cat’s a real survivor, sure as my name is Adolphus T. Madison.” And I said I wasn’t so sad anymore because I hadn’t really thought about her since Dad came home, which was true.
Everyone talked about Dad a lot, and Mum told them she didn’t know where he was exactly, but maybe he’d be part of the invasion too when it happened, and how maybe they’d meet up in France one day. And we all did a cheers to victory, Barry and me with soda pop, which they’d brought along, and which is what they call lemonade in America. It’s nice, but not as nice as our lemonade. And the grown-ups did their cheers in beer, which Adie and Harry brought along too. They’d brought along the whole hot-dog feast, everything. Adie’s so tall he can’t stand up straight in the sitting room without hitting his head. He keeps knocking his head and laughing at himself. And when Adie laughs, everyone laughs, the whole house seems to laugh. They didn’t just bring us sausages, they brought us real happiness. Then they drove away into the darkness. Now that they’re gone the house seems empty and quiet. Barry’s been sick, but he says it was worth it.
There was a thunderstorm out at sea last night. It woke me up. I knelt upon my bed and watched the lightning from my window. Mum slept through it, so did everyone else, but I heard it. I didn’t imagine it. Tips used to hate thunderstorms. She’d burrow down in my bed and hide. But they never frightened me, until this one. Or maybe it was the sudden blackness and silence that followed it that frightened me. I don’t know. I hoped Adie and Harry weren’t out in it doing one of their practice landings.
In school today Mrs. Blumfeld read us a story. It was all about America. It’s called Little House in the Big Woods. I like it a lot, but the people in it don’t talk at all like Adie and Harry, not the way Mrs. Blumfeld reads it anyway.
Uncle George’s radio is broken again. All you can hear is whistles and crackling. He’s really cross but he still sits there all evening trying to listen to it, banging it from time to time, but all he gets is more whistling, more crackling. Barry and I got the giggles when Barry imitated Uncle George’s grumpy face, and Mum told us off.
I wish today had never happened, that I’d never woken up this morning. It was all perfectly normal to start with: breakfast with Barry and Mum, off to school, lessons, recess, lunch, more lessons, then the bus home. We walked into the kitchen and there was Adie sitting at the table with Mum. I knew there was something wrong at once. It was the first time that Adie had not greeted me with a smile. He looked up at me as if he didn’t want me to be there. Then he looked away.
It was Mum who told us. “It’s Harry,” she said quietly. “Adie came to tell us. He’s been killed.”
When Adie spoke, his voice was filled with tears. “We was told we gotta keep it quiet,” he said. “But I ain’t gonna keep quiet, not for nobody. There’s hundreds of us dead out there. What they gonna tell their folks back home? I tell you what they gonna say. Training accident or some such thing. But I was there and I know. I know what happened. I seen it with my own eyes. We had no way of fighting back, no way of defending ourselves. There were no one out there watching our backs, and that ain’t right. That just ain’t right.” He cried then and couldn’t go on. So Mum went on for him. She told us that three nights ago, the soldiers had been a few miles offshore in their ships, waiting to come in and do another practice landing on Slapton Sands, when suddenly out of nowhere came these German E-boats. The ships were like sitting ducks. They were torpedoed. They didn’t stand a chance. They were all sunk. Hundreds of men were lost. Some of the soldiers, like Adie, did get picked up — but Harry wasn’t one of them.
Mum gave him a cup of tea after that, and afterwards Barry and I walked him to the end of the lane.
“There’s something I wanna tell you,” he said. “Harry and me, we talked plenty. We
was talking one day about what we was doing over here fighting in this white man’s war. You know what he said? He said, ‘I know why I’m doing it, because we ain’t going to be no one’s slaves never again, that’s why. We got our freedom and we’re not gonna let no one take it away. We’re gonna keep it.’ That’s what he said. When I go over there to France, I ain’t gonna be fighting for no one’s freedom. I’m gonna be fighting for Harry, and they better watch out, because now I’m mad, I’m fighting mad.” And as he put on his helmet he managed a smile. “Harry got no family back home. He told me after we was here last time that he reckoned you were about the only white folks that ever treated him like family. Right now that’s just about how I feel too.” Adie walked away from us and never looked back.
As we watched I wanted to run after him and hug him to me and never let him go. I wanted to tell him I loved him and that I’ll love him to the day I die. Because I do. I love him more than lemon sherberts, more than mint humbugs, more than I love Tips or Mum or Dad, more than all of those put together. And that’s the truth.
On the way home I picked a daffodil. I’ve put it in my diary on this page. So it’ll always be here marking the day Harry died, and the day when I first knew I loved Adie.
Adie still hasn’t come back to see us again. I’ve been hoping and hoping every day. I wonder if he ever will. I can’t stop thinking of him walking away down the lane, and that maybe it’s the last time I’ll ever see him. Mrs. Blumfeld keeps saying the invasion must happen soon, any day now, she says — when the weather’s right. They’ve got to wait till the weather’s right. It’s rough out at sea today. I hope it stays rough forever, and then Adie won’t have to go on the invasion, and he’ll be safe.
I helped Barry and Mum birth a calf this afternoon. The calf was walking inside ten minutes. I’ve seen lots of lambs born, lots of calves, and each time it surprises me how quickly they can get up and walk on their wobbly legs. What takes us a year or more, they can do inside an hour.
Mum’s a bit down. It’s because she hasn’t had a letter from Dad since he left. We don’t even know where he is. We think he’s in England still, but we don’t really know. We were kneeling there in the field, watching the calf trying out his first skip and falling over himself, and Barry was laughing. But Mum and me weren’t laughing because our minds were elsewhere. If Barry hadn’t been there I think I’d have told her there and then: “I know what it feels like, Mum, to miss someone you really really love.”
I can’t tell Barry that I love Adie, that’s for sure, because he’s too young and he wouldn’t understand, and even if he did understand he’d be upset. He’s never said it, but I know he wants me to be his girlfriend. I never will be, not now. Barry’s more like a brother to me, more like a friend, a really good friend. With Adie, it’s different, so completely different.
Mrs. Turner has come to stay, Barry’s mum (she likes us to call her Ivy). Last Tuesday she just turned up out of the blue, to give Barry a nice birthday surprise, she said — that’s in two days’ time. She gave him a surprise all right. She gave us all a surprise. We got back from school and there she was sitting with Mum at the kitchen table, her suitcase beside her. She hugged Barry so tight and for so long that I thought his eyes might pop out, and she pinched his cheek, which I could see he didn’t like at all. She’s got lots of powder on her face and bright scarlet lipstick, which Barry’s always wiping off his face after she kisses him, and that’s very often. And her eyebrows are penciled on, not real, just like Marlene Dietrich in the films, Mum says.
Barry hasn’t said much since she’s been here, nor has anyone else. No one can get a word in edgewise. His mum never stops talking. She could “talk the hind legs off a ruddy donkey” — that’s what Grandfather says. And she smokes all the time too, “like a ruddy chimney” — Grandfather says that too. She’s nice though. She came with presents for everyone, and told us again and again how kind we’d been to look after Barry for her. All through supper tonight she told us story after story about the Blitz in London, about the air-raid sirens, running to shelters, and sleeping at night down in the underground stations. She talks in a “townie” accent just like Barry does, only a lot louder and for a lot longer. She’s very proud of her big red London bus. “I’m telling you. Ain’t nothing going to stop my number seventy-four from gettin’ where she’s goin’,” she said this evening. “’Oles in the road, busted bridges, tumbled-down houses. They can send over all the hexplodin’ doodahs they like. Will they stop my bus from gettin’ where it’s goin’? Not bloomin’ likely, that’s what I say.”
Barry tries to stop her talking from time to time, but it’s no use. In the end he just goes out and lets her get on with it. He spends even more time now out on the farm with Grandfather and Uncle George. Barry’s mum makes no bones about it: She doesn’t like the country one little bit, and farms in particular. “Smelly places. All that mud. All them cows. And the bloomin’ birds wakin’ you up in the morning.” Yesterday she was washing up at the sink with Mum after supper when all at once she burst into tears. “What is it?” Mum asked, putting an arm around her.
“It’s all that green,” she said, pointing out of the window. “It’s just green everywhere. And there’s no buildin’s, and it’s so empty. I ’ate green. I don’t know why, I just ’ate it.”
She hardly ever goes out, just stays in the kitchen, smoking and drinking tea. Mum likes her a lot because she’s good company for her and because Barry’s mum loves to help out. She likes to be busy, fetching and carrying, scrubbing floors, ironing and polishing. She’s black-leaded Uncle George’s stove for him so he’s happy too. Barry never actually says he wants her to go home, but I can feel he does. I don’t think he’s ashamed of her exactly, but you can tell he’s uncomfortable with her around. He either wants to be at home with her in London, or down here with us, but not both. That’s what I think anyway.
One good thing is that she’s always teasing Uncle George, and no one else dares do that, about the holes in the elbows of his jacket, about how scruffy he looks. She sat him down a couple of days ago and cut his hair for him. She mended his jacket for him. And when Uncle George grumbles on as he does, about how he can never find anything these days with all of us living on top of him, how he used to have a bit of peace and quiet before we came, she just laughs at him.
“Go on,” she said (it sounded more like “garn”). “You’ll miss ’em when they’ve gone back home again, you know you will, you grumpy old codger you.”
Surprisingly Uncle George didn’t argue with her. He thought for a while and then he said, “Maybe I will, maybe I will.” I think he really meant it.
Barry’s eleventh birthday. Barry’s mum brought down his birthday cake. She’d saved up her ration coupons for weeks and weeks. “I made it special,” she said. And it was very special: fruitcake, with marzipan and royal icing with his name written on it in blue piping. Barry blew out the candles and closed his eyes to make his wish. Ivy had tears in her eyes and was trying not to cry. I think they were both wishing the same thing, the impossible: for Barry’s father to be coming home.
I’ll miss Barry’s mum when she goes tomorrow. I think we all will. She makes us smile. She turns off Uncle George’s crackling radio and we talk. She laughs a lot and never pretends. I like that. She means everything she says. I like people who mean what they say — a bit like Barry really. But I still wish she didn’t call me “ducky.”
Mum’s not been at all well. She’s been coughing a lot for days now. She’s very pale. The doctor came yesterday and said she had to have bed rest until she stops her coughing. Grandfather said that I could stay home from school and look after her for a day or two, and help around the house with the cooking and cleaning. Barry said he’d stay home to help too, but Grandfather wouldn’t hear of it and sent him off to school. Barry’s not very pleased. He shouldn’t grumble though. He’s had lots of days off from school to help out on the farm, specially at lambing time.
M
um had a letter from Dad today, so that cheered her up. He says he’s somewhere in the south of England. He can’t say where. Mum thinks he’ll be going on the invasion when it happens. Maybe he’ll meet up with Adie like we hoped he would. She keeps all his letters by her bed all the time, beside his photo.
This afternoon I went for a walk on my own up to the top of the hill. The larks were flying so high I could only hear them, but I couldn’t see them. I did see the buzzards, two of them, floating on the air over the trees, mewing. For a moment they sounded just like Tips. Then I looked out to sea and saw the ships in the bay, dozens and dozens of them. I’ve never seen so many. It’s the invasion. It must be. They’re not gathered there for nothing, are they? There’s one other thing I noticed today while I was up there. It wasn’t only the sounds of the countryside I could hear about me. There was always a dull droning. I couldn’t think what it was at first. Then I knew. It was the rumble of engines, jeeps, trucks, tanks. It was the rumble of war. I stood on the top of the hill with the wind blowing in my face, smelling the sea, and all I could think of was Adie. I said a prayer out loud, then I shouted it into the wind. “Please, God, let him come and see me before he goes to the war. Please, God. Please.”
We heard it on the radio. They’ve gone. The invasion began this morning. Adie’s gone. Dad too probably. D day they’re calling it. I don’t know why. We all knew something was going on before we heard it on the radio. Before dawn there was a distant thundering and roaring out at sea. Out of my window I could see flashes all along the horizon, and I knew then it wasn’t just another thunderstorm. There must have been thousands of guns firing at the same time. And when Barry and me ran up over the fields after breakfast and looked out to sea, we saw all the ships had gone. So it was no surprise when on the radio this evening it said that we had landed all along the French coast: Americans, British, Canadians, French, all sorts. Uncle George said we’d show the Germans now. He and Mum drank too much cider together and danced a jig around the kitchen to celebrate, and Uncle George’s mad dog danced too, barking his silly head off. To start with Barry and me sat and watched them. Everyone was laughing. Mum still coughs when she laughs, but she’s much better. But in the end we got up and danced with them. We did a conga round and round the table, till we all got puffed out. Then Mum gave Barry and me two mint humbugs each and some lemonade, to celebrate, and Uncle George and Mum had a whisky each and we all clinked our glasses. “To victory,” Uncle George said.