Other People’s Houses (17 page)

I began to wonder that Gwenda and Mr. Hooper should seem to be fond of me. I watched them. I intercepted their eyes looking at me and tried to imagine myself as I appeared
to them—and there I was with my sharp and narrow face. I studied Mrs. Hooper, too, and she puzzled me. Often when she spoke to me, she was looking nervously at Albert—and yet I didn’t think she really disliked me.

Early in 1940 a detective called at Illford House to check if my parents were friendly or spying aliens, and a month later my father was called before a tribunal, along with all male
“aliens of hostile origin.” Mr. Willoughby went with him and vouched for my father’s being friendly and having no explosives, inflammable materials, maps scaled more than one inch to the mile, or vehicles. Then he drove my father home.

In London the air raids had begun. Mr. Hooper and Albert dug a shelter in the back yard. I asked Mrs. Hooper if they were going to bomb us, and she said she was
sure she hoped not, but in the evening I heard her tell Mr. Hooper that they weren’t going to drop bombs. “They never would on us,” she said. “Would they, Fred?” She sat and watched him while he cut up his meat.

“No,” said Mr. Hooper. “Not on us. They’ll drop them all around us in a circle. Right, Lorry?”

“Tch, oh, Freddy!” Mrs. Hooper said. “I mean they wouldn’t bomb England once we show them
we mean business. We’ll send ours over and show them, and they wouldn’t dare.”

“You take a load off my mind,” said Mr. Hooper.

And so it was clear to me without benefit of doubt that the grownups knew no more about it than I did, and were as powerless as I to prevent it, and then I knew that the bombs were certainly going to drop.

It soon turned out that every alien over sixteen, male or female,
was hostile. Specified areas within a certain mileage of the east and south coasts were designated “protected areas,” and my parents had to leave the Willoughbys within twenty-four hours. The Committee offered a shelter farther inland, in which refugees could stay while they looked for other jobs, and on the way there my parents stopped off at the Hoopers’. Soon, my mother said, somehow or other,
we would all live together.

It was summer again. The lady from the church committee brought me a second-hand tennis racket. It felt elegant in my hand. I left it lying around in the kitchen for everyone to see. Albert picked it up and it felt powerful in his hand, and he swung it in the air. “Wheeough!” cried Albert. I think he would have liked to slug me with it, but instead he began to chase
Gwenda around the table. He had my green beret stuck on his head.

“Hey, that’s mine!” I said.

“Wheeoops!” yelled Albert.

“Albert, put that down before somebody gets hurt,” said Gwenda, with the table between herself and him.

“Dad!” Dawn cried. “Look what he’s doing!”

“Watch it!” said Mrs. Hooper, and the arm she raised to shield herself received the full blow of the descending racket. Mrs.
Hooper was suddenly sitting on the floor between the fireplace and the table with such a look of surprise that we all laughed, until we saw the pain in her face. Her arm hung limp and useless out of her sleeve. Gwenda and I began to cry. Mr. Hooper knelt by his wife and took hold of the disabled arm, and despite Mrs. Hooper’s screaming he wrenched it back into its socket and raised her to a chair,
where Mrs. Hooper sat holding her shoulder and rocking to and fro. Her face was white and tears still pressed out of her eyes, but she could move her arm, she said, and it was all right.

Albert had fled at the sight of what he had done and was walking round and round the scullery with a sulky, scarlet face. “Goddam tennis racket,” he said. I went and stood in the door. “You’re just like the Germans,”
I yelled, with my head hot and pounding and my heart bursting in pure relief. “You’re a Nazi!” I screamed, not because of what Albert had done to Mrs. Hooper, but because he had kept me in the subjection of fear all these months. Only now his teeth were chattering, and when Gwenda and Dawn kept going out on pretended errands for the poor sufferer, to give Albert baleful looks, I began to
wish they would leave him alone.

It seems to me that after that I was less aware of Albert and less affected by his presence.

One day I came back from school and Mrs. Hooper was home alone. She was nervous and kept wrapping her hand into her apron, and her chin was trembling. I made her sit down in Mr. Hooper’s armchair by the kitchen window. She told me how a great-aunt of Mr. Hooper’s, who
lived in an old-persons’ home, had got pneumonia and was quite ill. Mrs. Hooper began to cry.

“She’ll get better, won’t she?” I comforted.

Mrs. Hooper shook her head vigorously. “No, she’s ever so ill. You know, with pneumonia at her age. I think I have to nurse her, see, and she may have to come and live here, and we d-d-don’t have a b-b-b-b-bed.”

I said, “Oh. Well. Maybe she can have my bed?”

Mrs. Hooper was crying so hard I put my arms around her. “Yes, I expect,” said Mrs. Hooper.

“Then where will I sleep?”

Mrs. Hooper cried harder.

“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “I can find somewhere to live,” and I rocked Mrs. Hooper on my chest, “and then I can come back, you know, when she’s better.”

Mrs. Hooper dried her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “And maybe anyway it would be better if
you lived with some people where their children go to the County School.”

I went downtown to tell the committee lady I needed a new home. She looked through the card index and said there was a family called Grimsley who wanted to take a refugee.

I went straight out to see the Grimsleys, who lived in an oyster-pink brick street of identical semidetached houses so new that the street was still
unpaved and the front garden was a square yard of churned, dried white mud. Mrs. Grimsley opened the front door, peering with a distracted air over my head for her two boys, who, she said, were playing somewhere out front. She must have been twenty-six or -seven, plump and fair, with a bland, round forehead so furrowed with embarrassment that I made her sit down and questioned her about the house
and family. Mrs. Grimsley seemed anxious to please. When I left, she asked me if I thought I would be coming to live with them, and I said, “Yes, all right.”

On the weekend, Gwenda helped me move. She put my suitcase on the back of her bicycle, and as we walked, we promised each other that we would be friends forever, and I would come over and visit her. I wrote my parents, who had got a new
place in Sussex with a Mrs. Burns-Digby, to give them my new address with the Grimsleys.

I remember, on the first evening Mr. Grimsley brought me home a bag of marbles. Marbles were the rage among the children in the street that season, and after supper, in the kitchen, he taught me how to play. I had beginners’ luck and won seven of his marbles from him, including a beautiful crystal miggie
with white marbling.

Mr. Grimsley was a very fair, very young man who rode to the factory on his bicycle every morning, leaving Mrs. Grimsley at a loss amidst her brand-new furniture and cheap, shiny fixtures. There were three Grimsley children. Sylvia was eight years old, a simple smiling child with her mother’s bland, convex forehead. She went to Central School. Seven-year-old Patrick was a
spastic who bumbled about the house with jerking, uncontrolled movements, squinting fiercely. Alan, the handsome, bright, angry five-year-old, kept setting fire to the plastic curtains in the brand-new bathroom. Mrs. Grimsley asked me whatever she should do with him, as we sat in the kitchen over our cups of tea. I said it was the bad habits they picked up in the street. In Vienna, I said, I had
never been allowed to play with the street children. Mrs. Grimsley said yes, that was right, but after supper Alan banged his fists on the closed front door, and poor Patrick tried to do it, too, missing the door altogether. Mrs. Grimsley opened it, looking guiltily at me, and said, “Just for a few minutes, before their bedtime.”

I knelt on the settee in front of the window with my forehead against
the glass, feeling my marbles around inside their bag, watching the children. I remember thinking, If I let go my hands on the windowsill, my head will go through the glass, and I let go my hands and heard the crash and felt the outside breeze about my head, and saw the windowpane like a collar around my neck, and howled. Mr. and Mrs. Grimsley came running, and in the street the children collected
to watch Mr. Grimsley carefully break off the jagged glass pointing at my throat and draw me, unhurt, back inside. I said, “You see, my hands slipped on the windowsill. I was leaning like this, you see, when I slipped,” and it seemed even to me that that was the only way it could have happened.

In school the girls continued to be beastly to me. In the afternoon I would run across the playing
field through the hole in the privet hedge to try and find my old community with Gwenda. I asked her to teach me some swear words, but she looked solemn and said she would not say them out loud. I said, “Why, they’re just a bunch of letters,” but Gwenda said she would not, not for anything. “Suppose someone said if you don’t say some swear words you can’t have your birthday party next week—wouldn’t
you say them?” Gwenda thought about this and then she said no, she would not say them for anything. I said I would; I would say them for nothing—it was just I didn’t know any. Gwenda was going to be fifteen, and she was taking shorthand and growing very pretty.

As I was leaving, I saw Albert watching Gwenda and me from behind the window of my old room. Gwenda said he slept there now. I asked
her if her father’s great-aunt was going to move in. Gwenda said no.

Then I had a desperate letter from my mother. Two policemen had come with a van and taken my father away. Mrs. Burns-Digby had telephoned all around, and it seemed that they were interning all male aliens of hostile origin over sixteen. Mrs. Burns-Digby had found out that the aliens from that part of the country were being held
in a transit camp in West Mellbridge, where my mother could not go because it was inside the protected area, and she was worried about my father, who had not been at all well. She begged me to go and see him.

I borrowed Gwenda’s bicycle and rode the twenty miles to the nearby town. The address my mother had given in her letter turned out to be an old school building that had been made into a
temporary camp. The playgrounds and tennis courts were fenced in with six-foot-high chicken wire, and there were men inside, walking up and down or standing in groups. They all looked as if they might be my uncles or great-uncles, but I could not catch sight of my father. Two soldiers stood guard at the front gate. Their feet, in huge army boots, were planted wide, and there was a good-natured look
about their scratchy, blanket-thick khaki uniforms, but they had bayonets mounted on their guns and I didn’t know if I was supposed to talk to them. I cycled two or three times around the compound and then headed back to Mellbridge.

It turned out that my mother had been misinformed. My father had been shipped straight north to the Isle of Man, where he met my Uncle Paul, who had come to England
the previous year, and many friends and relatives.

About this time Mr. Grimsley’s factory amalgamated with a munitions factory in Croydon; when the family moved, I went to live with Mr. Grimsley’s father and mother.

The elder Grimsleys lived opposite the railway in an old street of purple brick attached houses. The spanking-white step led through the front door straight into the parlor-living
room. The large square table filled the room completely, except for an armchair between it and the fireplace and a dark, heavy sideboard, covered with a lace scarf, on which stood a china dog and a scalloped china bowl that said “Greetings from Blackpool” and was full of pencil stubs, rubber bands, hairpins, and threepenny bits. The wallpaper was bottle green with chartreuse birds of paradise on
a hedge of wild rose, and there were many pictures: an oval wedding picture of the Grimsleys, circa 1880; photos of children (including a snapshot of a sailor son squinting his eyes against the sun, in an ornate gilt frame), grandchildren, and pets long dead; landscapes with cows and cottages with hollyhocks; Watts’s “Hope,” chained to her green ball, riding the green, chilly water; and a life-size
girl child in brown velvet with lace collar, her arms around a life-size St. Bernard dog.

In the armchair, quietly amidst this riot of neat objects, his head against a lace antimacassar, sat Mr. Grimsley, a delicate, frail old man who still made his predawn milk round with a little cart and pony.

Out in the scullery-kitchen, which also served as the family bathroom, Mrs. Grimsley, her lovely
white hair built up high like the Queen Mother’s and her soft, radiant smile showing ill-fitting, cheap false teeth, filled food bowls for the shaggy mongrel, the two tabbies, the parrot left by the sailor son on his last visit, and the canary that belonged to Pearl. Pearl, the skinny, pious, forty-year-old daughter, had thin hair and a pinched nose. She worked on the other side of town as a housemaid,
and when she had left Mrs. Grimsley began to put up the eggs and bacon for the sons who kept coming, clattering down the stairs from the attic where they slept in cots, dormitory style.

The first week after I came, they put in an extra cot for the Cockney evacue called Tony. Tony stole a threepenny bit from the scalloped china bowl from Blackpool and then said he hadn’t. I asked him to come into
the yard with me. I made him sit beside me on the back fence and talked with him. I said we were both living on the kindness of the Grimsleys. I said Pearl even went every night to sleep at the neighbor’s so I could have her room over the kitchen and it would be ungrateful to steal and lie to them. I tried to look deeply into his eyes, but his face was turned away from me. With a sheepish, half-laughing
look he jumped off the fence and ran, with his head down, to buck the youngest Grimsley boy, who was coming out of the back door. They fell down together, rolling and laughing on the ground.

The London air raids were becoming serious. Mellbridge lay in the path of both the British heavy bombers leaving on their nightly missions to Germany and the Germans, who flew over two hours later with their
different, foreign drone and were followed by searchlights and antiaircraft fire all the way to London and back toward the coast an hour after. In the early dawn, the British planes came home, flying in the same formations in which they had left in the evening. The Grimsley boys, Tony and I, and all the neighbors leaned out of the windows to count the gaps.