Rose Under Fire (6 page)

How utterly impossible it is for me to imagine – Felicyta’s mother and sister have been missing for
two years
. That was what Maddie was talking about on the train. She thought it was worse than being told someone was dead – not ever knowing what happened to them.

You can see why Felicyta is so angry at everything.

‘Fliss, how did
you
escape?’

She smiled a close-lipped, evil smile, only the corners of her mouth turning up, and said, ‘I stole a plane. OK, it was my own plane, but I did have to steal it! I was doing courier work for the Polish Air Force when the Germans invaded. I knew they would take over all communications aircraft, or destroy them, so I took this one myself. I flew to France. It took me three days, mostly flying in twilight, hiding the plane in woodland by day. France was still free then . . .’

It must have been in 1939. I was thirteen. I was in junior high school. I was
oblivious
to what was going on in Europe. Or anywhere except right where I was – Justice Field, Mount Jericho, Pennsylvania, the centre of the known universe.

Here is what I already knew about Felicyta’s sister – what I’d forgotten about hearing before. It happened just after I came to Hamble. I was sitting in the Operations room with a few other girls, waiting for the day’s ferry chits to be handed out. I was new enough to be shy and a little bit nervous about sitting down next to people I didn’t know, so I was sitting by myself – it was even before Celia had turned up.

The wireless was on, and because I wasn’t talking to anybody, I was listening to the radio. And it was this ugly story about a prison camp in Germany where they’d been running medical experiments on Polish prisoners, all women, mostly students – cutting open their legs and infecting them with gangrene, simulating bullet wounds, in the name of ‘medical science’ – to find treatments for German soldiers wounded on the Eastern Front. The BBC announcer read through an endless list of names that a former prisoner had secretly memorised when she knew she was going to be released. I was interested because the woman who’d memorised the names was an American citizen. It was compelling stuff – you couldn’t stop listening – but it was so absolutely awful that I couldn’t believe it, and I said so.

‘That’s got to be propaganda!’ I burst out. ‘You English are as bad as the Germans!’

‘You should read the
Guardian
,’ Maddie said. ‘It’s not all propaganda. The reports from the concentration camps are pure evil.’

‘Poisoning girls with gangrene?’ I objected. ‘It’s like trying to get us to believe the Germans eat babies!’

At that point Felicyta slammed her teacup down so hard she broke her saucer right in half, and stormed out of the room. The floor shuddered as the door thundered shut behind her.

Maddie thrashed her newspaper into submission and nodded towards Felicyta’s slammed door.

‘Her sister’s in a German concentration camp,’ Maddie explained in a level voice. She looked back down at the paper without meeting my eyes. ‘Felicyta thinks the Germans
do
eat babies.’

That was three months ago.

I am starting to understand why the Polish pilots are so fanatical about their hatred of the Germans. Thank goodness I haven’t got a ‘good old Pennsylvania Dutch’ name like Stolzfuss or Hitz or Zimmerman. Felicyta doesn’t know my middle name is Moyer, Mother’s maiden name, or that my grandfather still speaks old-fashioned Pennsylvania German sometimes. I will never tell her.

I can’t believe I have only been in England for three months – it seems like forever. And yet the war hasn’t really touched me. I haven’t lost my fiancé or my best friend or my mother or my sister. I’m not in exile. I have a home to go back to, and people waiting for me. I have an aunt who is going to take me to lunch at the Ritz and an uncle who sends me fuses!

But I am very glad that Kurt and Karl are only ten years old, far too young to be drafted, and that they are safe at home in Pennsylvania.

Hamble

Felicyta and Maddie came over to play cards with me at the Hatches’ last night, and there was an air raid. The siren doesn’t scare me at all when it first goes off – it sounds
exactly
like the hooter at the Volunteer Fire Company in Conewago Grove. I always think,
That’ll be a fire somewhere
–
I’m glad Daddy’s not on duty here
. Mrs Hatch shooed us out through the vegetable garden to get to the shelter. The house is on a high slope and as we stumbled over the cabbages in the dark, we got a frightening glimpse of half a dozen flying bombs travelling across the sky. All you could see were the red exhaust flames of their engines – from far away it looked like a line of glowing balls of fire moving slowly along the horizon.

There is only room for one camp bed in the Hatches’ shelter, because they built it themselves and it is tiny. The camp bed is ridiculously covered with a candlewick bedspread to make it seem cosy, and we all squeezed together on it to stay out of the mud. Fliss said to me, ‘Singing will not scare the bombs away!’

I’d been humming nervously, without realising I was doing it. I laughed. ‘It’s a Girl Scout camp song.’

‘Rosie is always singing,’ Maddie pointed out. I could feel her trembling next to me, and remembered how much she hates the bombs.

‘Sing properly if you’re going to sing!’ commanded Mrs Hatch. ‘Then we can all join in.’

So we sat in the underground shelter and I taught them camp songs. I sang ‘Land of the Silver Birch’ and ‘My Paddle’s Keen and Bright’ (again) and then I got bold and sang my ‘Modern Warrior’ poem to the same tune, and they beat time by clapping. And then I taught them ‘Make New Friends’. It’s easy, and we sang it as a round, again and again –

Kind of corny, but it seemed so appropriate.

There we were in the mud, singing so loudly that we didn’t hear the all-clear siren when it went! And Mr Hatch came home and broke up the party, hustling us all inside and tut-tutting about his wife being so easily corrupted by modern youth.

‘You might have at least been singing hymns,’ he chided her.

It was the best air raid ever.

Back in bed I started thinking about how I like to be in a crowd – it’s not like being best friends, or even a threesome, where sometimes two of you pair up and leave the other out. There’s always someone on your side when you’re in a crowd.

And then I started thinking about my combination birthday/Halloween party last year at our cottage in Conewago Grove, with Polly and Alice and Sandy and Fran – we all dressed up as the characters from
The Wizard of Oz
, with Polly as Toto, and told ghost stories on the sleeping porch by the light of jack-o’-lanterns. And now we have all graduated or gone to war (me) or married (Polly) or whatever, and we will never again be the team that won the Jericho County Girls’ Basketball Championship, or even play together probably.

It was the stupid candlewick bedspread’s fault! Mrs Hatch’s bedspreads
feel
the same as the ones Mother has out on the sleeping porch. Anyway, I had the candlewick on my bed pulled up to my chin last night and after I thought about the house party I started thinking about the sleeping porch – the thump and patter of squirrels running across the roof, the way the canvas awnings creak and flap, a trapped firefly blinking against the screen, the way the whole room shakes whenever anybody runs water in the bathroom on the other side of the wall –

I got so homesick I began to cry. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the sleeping porch!

It’s funny what sets you off. You miss people the most – really it is Polly and Alice and Sandy and Fran who I am lonely for – but it is the candlewick bedspread that makes me ache with longing to be home.

Hamble

Paris is free! It’s been a nerve-racking couple of weeks, watching the Allied forces inching along. We have a map we stick pins in to track the front lines. During the fighting in Paris there was no radio communication coming out of the city at ALL – nothing but rumours. The papers said the city was liberated and all the church bells in London were ringing to celebrate, and the next day the papers said, ‘Whoops, not yet!’ It wasn’t long before the real news came through, but it was like being on a roller-coaster waiting for it. Now the fighting is moving across the Seine and into Belgium.

The problem is that it’s getting harder and harder to get supplies to the front lines because the Germans are still hanging on to the ports at Calais, Le Havre, Boulogne, etc. They realise what a pain in the neck it is for the Allied forces to have to ferry fuel, food, spare parts, blood and bandages and everything else across to Normandy, and then truck it 200 miles north up this corridor between Germany and the French coast – especially with the train lines and bridges all blown up after the fighting (that is where Uncle Roger comes in, getting them to rig up temporary bridges in a hurry).

You can’t even fly directly into France without being shot at, and you certainly can’t unload a cargo ship. Le Havre is under siege. It is being pounded. We are doing it
ourselves.
The harbour there is taking such a beating that it will have to be rebuilt before it’s any use to us.

I had my lunch with Aunt Edie in the Palm Court at the Ritz yesterday. Wow. It makes the Hotel Hershey look pretty minor league, which isn’t exactly fair. Thank goodness for my uniform. I wore the same clothes I wore to Maddie’s wedding (although I wore my other tunic, because the one I wore to Maddie’s wedding is not as sharp-looking as it used to be, due to flying bombs and bus floors). But you never feel out of place or underdressed in uniform.

Edie, of course, was very elegant. I don’t think she’s had any new clothes for a while either, but she gets everything remade by her own tailor and is always so stylish – she kissed me on both cheeks to greet me, and looked sort of slant-eyed at my hands because I wasn’t wearing gloves (they did
not
survive the doodlebug wedding adventure).

We didn’t talk about French cities being liberated – Edie will not discuss bloodshed and bombing while she is presiding over white linen and silver in the Palm Court at the Ritz! I told her about my last date with Nick.

‘I like your Nick,’ she commented when I’d finished. ‘So terribly earnest.’

I laughed. ‘That’s exactly the word I think of too. Did I tell you he proposed to me? He wanted to get married before he got sent off to wherever he is now. I know everyone is doing it and I hated to disappoint him, but –’

‘But it’s not a charm. He won’t be any better protected if you’re married to him, and if you’re really going to choose a boy yourself and you’re being sensible about what you do together, there’s no good reason to rush into marriage. You did the right thing, Rose darling.’

‘But I do worry about him,’ I said. ‘And if we were married, they would tell me right away if anything happened to him. They won’t do that for just friends.’

‘There’s something to be said for not being told right away,’ Aunt Edie mused. ‘But I prefer simply not to worry. I never worry about Roger. Do you worry about General Montgomery – or General Eisenhower? They’re just as likely to be killed as anybody, but you don’t think about it. Imagine Nick’s a general!’

And we both laughed this time.

‘Of course, Roger’s just as likely to perish of a heart attack, or flu. Or some nasty disease he picks up in the field. Oh – that reminds me, Rose. He wanted to know if your jabs are up to date.’

That drew a blank with me.

‘My jabs?’

‘Your inoculations. Tetanus and typhoid principally.’

‘Oh! We call them shots. Yes, I had boosters this spring, before I came to England. Why?’

‘Can’t say,’ Aunt Edie said coyly, folding her napkin in her lap. ‘Shall we have coffee instead of tea? I hear they have a supply of the real thing from the Americans this week.’

‘Oh wonderful Aunt Edie!’

My fingers are crossed because I know they are inoculating other ferry pilots so they will be ready to fly to Europe. But I’m not holding my breath because so far none of them have been girls. And to tell the truth, I am less enthusiastic about the idea of doing ferry work in Europe than I was. Because it all looks so horribly, horribly ruined. The pictures in the papers are unbelievably awful – it looks like earthquake damage. Whole streets are knocked down and the soldiers have to pick their way over rubble to get through the towns – I think I said before that it’s
we
who are doing the bombing. Allied planes are dropping thousands of tons of TNT day and night on our own cities. And on German cities too, of course.

I am going to confess something here that I can’t quite bring myself to confess to anyone aloud, and this is what it is. I am scared of the way the Germans are refusing to let go of anything. I am scared of the way they are clinging to the French and Belgian ports, even though they’ve been pushed out of most of the rest of France. There is something about it that spooks me. They’ve lost. They must know they’ve lost – that they’re on the run. It’s all so pointless. It shouldn’t take another year. But I bet it will.

It’s not desperation – there is something inhuman in it. That is what I find so creepy. Five years of destruction and mayhem, lives lost everywhere, shortages of food and fuel and clothing – and the insane mind behind it just urges us
all
on and on to more destruction. And we all keep playing.

Now Brussels is free, but more important, Antwerp too – a port in Allied hands at last! But actually the best news as far as I’m concerned was in the
Manchester Guardian
yesterday, read aloud by our
Guardian
addict the Honourable Mrs Maddie Beaufort-Stuart while we were waiting for our delivery chits. Here’s the news: RAF pilots are reporting that they can now fly the whole way across France without running into enemy aircraft!