The One I Was (2 page)

A middle-aged man wearing a smart black coat and clasping a bowler hat walked over to the table and stared at him.

‘Good afternoon.’ Benny stood up and spoke in his best English, deciding against a heel click.

‘Benjamin Goldman, sir,’ said a nearby youth worker in German. ‘Eleven, as you may know, from a small town near Berlin. Excellent school reports. His father was a successful businessman until, well, things took a turn.’

The middle-aged man observed him kindly for a moment, slipped a bar of chocolate across the table, murmured a farewell and walked away. Probably not impressed with Benny. None of the other English visitors came near him. He wasn’t sent to collect his possessions from the chalet so that he could go home with an English family. He ate his chocolate.

This indifference was a sign. He’d talk to one of the friendly volunteers, beg to be sent back to Germany. Plenty at home who’d jump at the opportunity to replace him.

The visitors left and supper was laid. While they were eating, someone read out a list of kids’ names over the megaphone. He paid little attention, knowing he had failed to impress this afternoon.

‘… and Benjamin Goldman,’ the man read out. ‘Please come to the table at the side of the hall.’

It took a second to realize that meant him. He forced himself to amble over to the table as though he wasn’t surprised or excited. Five other boys waited there. A youth worker sat behind the table with a clipboard.

‘Ah, Benjamin. Good news. They’re ready for you now at Fairfleet.’

Fairfleet? He tried not to let his confusion show.
Don’t draw attention to yourself.

‘The snow blocked the road and the bus couldn’t get through.’

The youth worker was speaking in German, but it might as well have been English for all his words meant.

‘You must be impatient to start your new life.’ The young man grinned. ‘Fairfleet will certainly be more luxurious than here.’

‘Don’t know much about it,’ he mumbled.

‘Your parents –’ the youth worker flushed, ‘the orphanage, were sent a letter with all the information. Perhaps it went astray?’

Best just to nod.

‘Fairfleet’s a large house in the countryside near Oxford. Lord and Lady Dorner are taking you in.’

Benny blinked.

‘There’ll be lots of fresh air and exercise.’

Hopefully not like a Hitler Youth camp back in Germany. Plenty of fresh air and exercise there. And songs. And kicks and blows behind the shower blocks if you weren’t enthusiastic enough.

‘Cheer up.’ The youth worker made a final tick on his sheet and stood up. ‘We’re running English lessons from tomorrow. You’ve got two days to learn a bit of the language.’

Two days. He took himself back to the chalet, lay on his bunk, thinking. Whatever Fairfleet was, it had to be better than here. But if he went along with events, he’d be even more caught up in the mess he’d made for himself. What was the alternative?

He needed to forget about all of it. Forget Rudi and what Rudi had done and the last time they’d been together.

Rudi and Benny: two friends who’d tried to sort things out, tried to beat the system, even though they were only eleven and most grown-ups were too scared to try.

They’d done their best, but it hadn’t worked.

3

By the following morning Benny felt calmer. He strolled around the camp, watching some of the younger kids playing on swings and slides between the fir trees. Someone had told him about an indoor amusement area and he found it. Table tennis and a badminton net. He’d thought he might be tempted to play some kind of game but found himself feeling in continued need of solitude. He slipped into the communal dining room, uncertain whether he was supposed to be here outside meal times. Someone had left a pile of old English comics on a chair.
Crackers,
the title said. Benny settled himself on the ground in a quiet corner and flicked through them. He could follow the stories all right: parents on your back about untidy bedrooms, daft teachers, naughty dogs: some of the words were easy to decipher. But most of it was baffling.

A bell rang. Lessons. He stood up, uncertain where to go. But the doors opened and children streamed in, chatting. Nobody seemed to notice Benny. A blackboard was pulled out. A woman in a suit came in and pointed to the chairs.

He sat down with the others. Someone handed him an exercise book.

The teacher wrote the words on the blackboard, pronouncing them as she did. Benny copied them onto the sheet of paper he’d been given, lips silently pronouncing the sounds, trying to make the ‘th’ sound the way the English spoke it.

After lunch lessons became more relaxed. The same teacher took them on a walk through the slushy grass to the seafront, the wind fierce against their cheeks, the sea a leaden grey. Afterwards they returned to the amusement centre to learn the words of ‘Ten Green
Bottles’. A young woman taught them how to do the Lambeth Walk. They danced again after supper in the dining hall. A group of girls and boys performed the dance called the Hora. Benny watched for a while and then joined in.

They had to have showers later that night. He grabbed his towel and dashed off to the cubicle, standing under the warm water before the rest of his room-mates had even removed their socks. ‘Someone’s keen to get clean,’ a youth worker commented as Benny wrapped his towel around him. ‘Good for you, young Goldman.’

Another middle-aged man came for them on the Thursday. Not as smartly dressed as the bowler-hat man. He wore round spectacles and a tweed jacket. Dr Dawes, his name was. A university man from the town of Oxford, which wasn’t that far away from Fairfleet. He told them he was going to be their tutor at Fairfleet.

‘Go and fetch your luggage, boys.’

Of course the refugee Benjamin Goldman had nothing except a football and a satchel containing a single withered apple, two German exercise books with his name on them and a pencil box.

‘I need the lavatory,’ he called, running back into the chalet. He stuffed the exercise books under the mattress of his bed.

‘No suitcase, Benjamin?’ Dr Dawes was ticking names off a list in front of a shiny green charabanc. He lifted his head, showing mild irritation behind the glasses. ‘You’re supposed to have a change of clothes and underwear.’

‘There wasn’t time.’ He blushed. Some of the kids here had even brought toys with them. Benny tried hard not to think of the boxes of building blocks and construction kits he’d left behind. And his train set.

Dr Dawes pushed his spectacles back up his nose. ‘I remember your circumstances now. Forgive me.’ He leant towards Benny so that the others couldn’t hear. ‘Lord Dorner is
well-off and will ensure you have everything you need. He’s sponsoring twenty Jewish boys and girls, but you six are the only ones he’s taking into his own home.’

‘Why us?’ Benny wasn’t used to asking adults questions. At home it was generally safer to let them do any questioning. Safer still not to get yourself into situations where questions were demanded. But Dr Dawes didn’t seem to mind.

‘He asked for bright boys.’ The tutor gestured that Benny should climb into the charabanc. ‘Lord Dorner wants to educate you privately so that you can do well over here, perhaps even go to university. We had reports on you from the Jewish refugee council in your town.’

Benjamin Goldman had certainly been regarded as bright, working out the answers to sums before others had even copied down the questions from the blackboard. Sometimes other children had resented this. They’d muttered about sharp Yids. Like most of the Jewish kids Benjamin had left that school and taken lessons in a Jewish school set up in someone’s basement.

The charabanc journey to Fairfleet lasted most of the day because of the snow. Dr Dawes said this was because the roads weren’t good in winter, not like the new autobahns in Germany, he added.

At least this time nobody threw up.

In the afternoon the charabanc pulled off a small country lane into a driveway.
FAIRFLEET
, the sign said. The house itself was a white rectangular structure, one side of which was bathed in the last of the pink winter sunset.

‘Eighteenth century,’ Dr Dawes said proudly, as though it were his own home. ‘In the Palladian style. Small for its type,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘The owner captured a French ship in one of many wars against France. He won prize money for depriving the enemy of an
important vessel. Hence the name Fairfleet, the English word “fleet” meaning a group of ships.’

Hitler himself would like the sound of plunder like this from defeated enemies, Benny reflected.

The charabanc drove round to the back of the house.

‘Servants’ entrance,’ muttered David, the boy sitting next to him. A thin-faced, aproned girl of about eighteen stood at the door, arms crossed, frowning.

‘Thrilled to see us, isn’t she?’ David whispered.

Dr Dawes got out first and said something to her. The English he spoke sounded flowing yet precise and rhythmic. She answered in a sharp-pitched, jerky voice. Funny how the same language could sound so different.

They walked inside to a parquet-floored hall and up two flights of stairs.

‘Put your bags down here for now and wash yourselves in the bathroom on the right,’ Dr Dawes told them. ‘Supper in ten minutes. The kitchen’s in the basement, three floors down.’

The girl said something else, sounding like a crow.

‘Wash your hands properly before you come down,’ Dr Dawes translated. ‘Including your fingernails.’

As she went downstairs the tutor coughed and rubbed his nose. ‘Alice has worked hard to prepare for your arrival. She’s very efficient.’

‘Efficient is good,’ David said.

Dr Dawes gave a little smile.

The food at Fairfleet was more like what they were used to at home – better, actually, because there was plenty of beef in the stew. A cheerful woman in her forties served them, chatting kindly in the language they couldn’t understand.

‘You won’t be eating in the kitchen all the time,’ Dr Dawes translated. ‘Lord and Lady Dorner are away at present. And it’s warmer in here.’ Benny wasn’t sorry to be down in the kitchen. The saucepans hanging from the ceiling rack and the dresser with its crockery reminded him of home. Something hit him below the ribs, a pang so strong it felt like a physical blow. He concentrated on his stew.

Later he lay in the bedroom he shared with David and Rainer. Proper beds, not bunks. They looked new. Moss-soft rugs on the floor. Heating that seemed to permeate the parts of his body that had been frozen since the boat had docked at Harwich.

Sniff, sniff. David might be weeping under his blankets, Benny couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he just had a stuffy nose. Benny himself could weep too, but wasn’t going to. Not yet.

*

A scream filled Benny’s dreams. Someone was punishing a child and it was crying out. He sat up. Next to him David was also awake, rubbing his eyes. The two boys glanced at one another and tried to look as though the dreadful sound wasn’t freezing their blood.

‘It’s a bird,’ David said at last. ‘Not a human.’ As though to confirm what he had said, the bird screamed again. David smiled. ‘Reminds me of the noises you hear in a zoo.’

Someone pounded on the door and called out.

‘Time to get up,’ David said. ‘Come on, Rainer, lazybones.’

As he came downstairs, Benny noticed the view from the window. To one side swept a line of hills like the white back of a sleeping beast. A window on the opposite side of the first floor showed him the gardens.

‘They planned the house so there was always something to look at. You’ll have to look at the animal hedges later on.’

He stared at the tutor, who gave him his gentle smile.

‘Box trees clipped into the shape of a pig, fox, elephant and chicken. They call it topiary in English.’

After a breakfast of toast and boiled eggs, which everyone agreed was a great improvement on the porridge they’d suffered before, they went up to the specially furnished classroom on the ground floor. Six new wooden desks in two rows of three faced a blackboard. No photograph of Hitler on the wall, just a map of the world and a family tree of all the kings and queens of England.

‘That’s right, Benny.’ Dr Dawes nodded approvingly. ‘Familiarize yourself with all the history.’

The room smelled of new paper and fresh wood and overlooked the snowy lawn, which stretched out towards a small lake. Benny looked for the animal-shaped trees but couldn’t see them from this side of the house.

Dr Dawes coughed to get their attention. ‘This is all new and strange for you, boys,’ he said. ‘Let me explain what’s in store for you. Britain expects that you refugees – aliens, you’re unfortunately known as – will go into low-skilled work when you grow up.’

Benny had an image of himself ploughing fields or working down a mine.

‘But that’s not what Lord Dorner intends for you. He wants you to have the finest education the country can give you, if you’re up to it. You’ll have to work hard and make very good progress in English.’ The classroom door swung open. The girl Alice came in with a bucket of coke.

‘Soon you will be not only aliens but
enemy
aliens,’ Dr Dawes went on.

Alice looked at them through her sandy eyelashes, clearly regarding them as exactly this. Dr Dawes said something to her in English. She went to the stove, its door squeaking as she opened it. The acrid smell of the coke as she shovelled it in caught the back of Benny’s
nose. For a second he was in the kitchen at home. He jabbed the sharpened point of his pencil against his palm until pain drove out the memory.

‘It will be difficult,’ Dr Dawes continued, looking from face to face, ‘unless you adapt. These are some of the last German words you will hear in this classroom. All our lessons will be conducted in English.’

The boys sat up in shock, glancing at one another.

‘You need to think in English, speak in English, sound English. Then you’ll be accepted.’

Alice slammed the stove door as though in contradiction of the last claim. Dr Dawes didn’t seem to notice. ‘Eventually some of you may be called to fight Nazism as soldiers.’ He switched to English. ‘But for all of you, the fight starts now. In this classroom.’