The One I Was (7 page)

‘Yes, but they like the train set and ping-pong, too.’

‘You need a proper goal, really.’ She frowned. ‘Not sure where we’d get such a thing.’

‘I could perhaps put a paint mark on one of the oaks, so.’ He drew a cross in the air. ‘If you say this is not a bad thing to do?’ He’d had this idea before but had never been able to find any paint. There was probably some in the basement, but Alice Smith guarded the place like a warden. And she wouldn’t approve of him defacing the Dorners’ trees.

Harriet Dorner looked at her watch. ‘I wonder if we have time to sort this out before your lunch is served. Let’s have a look.’

Funny how she knew what time their meals were, even though she was away such a lot. He followed her across the lawn. ‘I know what it’s like,’ she went on. ‘When I was
learning to fly I had to keep on doing things over and over again until they were perfect, until I could do them almost with my eyes closed. You have to be obsessive.’

He frowned at the unknown last word.

‘You have to want to do it very badly,’ she explained. ‘You’ll probably find it hard to get hold of paint, won’t you? Oh.’ Her eyes widened. ‘I’ve just had an idea. Stay there.’ She seemed to reach the house in a few long strides. He waited on the lawn. If one of the others happened to come upstairs and see him standing there they’d wonder what on earth was happening.

But she was back in mere minutes, holding something small in her hand. A little glass flask, he saw, with a black top.

‘Nail polish.’ She gave him a grin. ‘Arctic Rose, it’s called. I know your old Führer doesn’t approve of make-up for women, but it has its uses.’

She unscrewed the lid and painted a very pale pink cross on the bark of the old tree.

‘Looks better on the tree than it ever did on my fingernails. That’s your target.’ She gave the bark a pat of approval. ‘This old boy has seen it all. He’d have been a youngster when they fought the Battle of Trafalgar, Benny.’ She looked concerned. ‘Sorry, you probably don’t know what I am talking about.’

‘Oh yes,’ he assured her. ‘We have learned about Napoleon. And there was also Waterloo, where a German army helped you.’

Her gust of laughter made him blink. ‘Quite right, Benny.’

‘But please do not think I am admiring the Germans still.’

‘Lots to admire once. Your English is really very good.’ She reached inside a pocket and pulled out a cigarette case and lighter.

‘I work very hard on it.’ He must have looked serious because the lips holding the cigarette as she lit it were smiling at him.

‘I hope you have fun, Benny, as well as working hard.’

‘Yes, but other things are more important than fun.’

She turned her head to gaze back at the house. ‘That’s a hard lesson to learn so young.’ Her words sounded heartfelt. Surely if you were a grown-up you could choose to lead the life you wanted, even in warfare? She was flying planes, wasn’t she? Taking them from airfield to airfield to supply the RAF against Hitler as he moved across northwest Europe.

As though knowing what he was thinking she looked back at him. ‘Not that I’ve had to learn it myself, yet,’ she said with a smile that sent every atom in his body buzzing and brought a smile to his own face. ‘I’m lucky, my passion is useful for the country. Otherwise I’d be knitting socks and growing vegetables.’ She took a puff on the cigarette and raised a shaped eyebrow. Her eyebrows weren’t like other people’s: they were like punctuation marks expressing a view of life he wasn’t sure he understood. He smiled.

‘That’s better,’ she said.

‘Where did you keep your plane?’ he asked now, feeling bolder. ‘Not here?’ He looked towards the fields beyond the lake.

‘I had a little two-seater Hawk. I kept her at an aerodrome about five miles from here. She and I flew all over the country, further, sometimes. It was fun.’ She looked wistful.

‘Where is she now?’

‘I sold her when the war started. It was time to start trying my hand at more serious flying. Luckily for me I managed to persuade them to let me deliver Tiger Moths to training stations and hangars. That’s what I’ve been doing these last months. Freezing work, it’s been, in this bitter winter and spring. And the RAF men don’t always like us doing it.’

‘Because you are women?’

‘Yes.’ They looked at one another with an understanding: outsiders both. Benny felt a sympathy between them he couldn't have described, especially not in English.

‘But I am doing what I need to do,’ she said, very softly. ‘And when I return, tomorrow, this crisis will force them to use women pilots even more effectively.’ She smiled at the confusion on his face. ‘Effectively means better, Benny. They’ll have to let us fly all kinds of planes.’ Her chin jutted as she said it. ‘We will have earned that right.’

‘Yes.’ He knew
that
feeling well enough. He picked up his ball, feeling very strange, suddenly. ‘Perhaps I should practise now, before lunch is served.’

‘Alice Smith gets cross, doesn’t she, if you’re late for meals?’ All seriousness left her face and she looked as though she might almost wink at him. ‘Don’t mind Smithy, she’s a good sort, really. I’ll see you soon, Benny. In the meantime, keep working on that shot. And keep being obsessive about it.’

‘Sometimes people think it is strange to try so hard,’ he said.

‘The world depends on some of us refusing to be the same as everyone else.’

He watched her stride back towards the house.

*

‘She’d have liked seeing you work away at something, building real skill,’ I told Benny, seeing my grandmother through his eyes as she strode across the lawn. ‘She’d have liked you being yourself, even if it meant you stood out.’

He looked surprised. I wanted to kick myself: I sounded far too familiar with Harriet Dorner, a woman I wasn’t supposed to have known.

‘I mean, she must have worked very hard to become one of the first women pilots in the war,’ I went on, hastily. ‘It can’t have been easy.’ People had been more chauvinistic in the forties.

‘So it was just you boys and Dr Dawes in the house most of the time?’ It must have been a very male, very intense kind of atmosphere.

‘And Alice Smith. She became more of a housekeeper than a maid during the first years of the war, before she went to work in a factory.’

I bent my head so he wouldn’t see the concentration on my face.

‘But even Alice couldn't manage when disease broke out. That would have been the late spring of 1942? No, a year later. Two of the other boys fell ill. Diphtheria. Harriet came home to help nurse them.’

‘A frightening disease.’

He nodded. ‘Indeed.’

He started telling me about that long-ago early summer, how the diphtheria had hung around the village. And I listened, finding a curious release in hearing these stories as though I were a stranger.

10

1943

At Fairfleet they’d thought themselves safe from disease, separated as they were by half a mile from the village. But, as Alice Smith pointed out, those boys were always taking themselves off to kick a ball around on the village green with the local boys, or hanging round the village shop, vainly hoping that sweets might reappear. All sorts of opportunities for germs to insinuate themselves inside the precious walls of Fairfleet. Alice looked concerned, probably on account of the extra work any sickness would cause her.

‘Don’t worry, Benny,’ Dr Dawes, the tutor, said, noticing the anxiety on his face.

But how could Benny not worry? Dr Dawes didn’t know what had happened in those last days in Germany.

The doctor came up to the house and Dr Dawes and Benny waited for him on the landing of the second floor.

‘There’s little doubt, I’m afraid.’ He came out of the bedroom, rolling down his sleeves. ‘At least the older boys are away at the moment.’

Ernst and Richard were at a Pioneer Corps training camp. Peter was spending a fortnight with a distant Jewish cousin in Oxford.

Which just left Benny.

He followed the two men downstairs. ‘One of those lads is quite ill,’ the doctor said when they reached the ground floor. ‘The other one is through the worst of it now.’ He seemed kind enough but never seemed to remember their names.

‘Keep, erm, this young fellow out of the way.’ The doctor nodded at Benny.

‘There was diphtheria in our town in Germany.’ The words fell out before Benny could stop them. An image of a boy coughing and gasping for breath flashed across his memory. He clutched the banister.

‘Eh, what’s that, boy?’ The doctor, who’d been replacing his hat, looked at him sharply. ‘Did you have someone in the family with diphtheria?’

‘A school friend,’ Benny said.

‘Well, you look hale and hearty enough. They’ll be signing you up if the war goes on long enough.’

‘Benny’s barely fifteen,’ Dr Dawes said gently.

‘Tall for his age, isn’t he? I must say, I always think of you Jews as being bookish, indoor kind of chaps.’ The doctor guffawed. ‘But you look as though you’d do well in a rugger match. Do you like rugger, boy?’

‘I prefer football,’ Benny said.

‘Do you, by Jove?’ The doctor turned to Dr Dawes. ‘And barely a trace of an accent. Could pass as one of us. Never understood this anti-Semitism business. I mean, some hook-nosed, straggly-bearded youth in a black cap might make you stare at him, but a lad like this?’ He patted Benny on the shoulder.

‘Prejudice is indeed a mysterious beast.’ Dr Dawes opened the front door to let him out.

Alice Smith had been waiting on the staircase while they saw the doctor out, arms folded into their customary expression of interrogation.

‘Am I to put Benny into a room on the first floor by himself then?’

‘Probably a good idea.’ The apology for the extra work was audible in Dr Dawes’s voice.

‘More trouble for me if he goes down with the diphtheria too,’ she admitted, grudgingly.

Dr Dawes went up to see the invalids.

For the first time since he’d left Germany four years ago Benny was alone, unsupervised. Unobserved. He felt curiously light. He could go and read in the library, but there was always a chance Alice Smith would come in to dust and tut at him for being in her way, or for reading while it was so sunny outside. Perhaps he’d go outside and kick his ball around. But then she’d probably come out to chide him for not getting on with something more useful.

Benny jangled the coppers in his pocket and thought of his sweet coupons upstairs. There was a chance that the village shop might have fresh deliveries. Not that he could remember seeing chocolate or bulls-eyes for months and months now, probably longer. He ambled down the drive towards the lane. It was a clear, sunny day and he didn’t miss the classroom.

There was a new girl in the shop, Rainer’d told him before he fell sick. Not quite a stunner, but worth a look. Before today Benny had had no intention of going to peep at her. It felt as though he were Rainer’s stand-in. And yet something in him stirred at the thought of the unseen girl.

And it was better than hanging around at Fairfleet and feeling the anxiety sweep downstairs from the sickroom.

11

The shop met Benny’s low expectations. He walked round the shelves slowly, just in case there was something more exciting than the usual drably labelled tins and jars. Unbidden, an image of a cake shop at home wound itself around his mind. He must have been tiny, out shopping with his mother. They’d stopped to buy a tart for lunch. While his mother was paying he ogled the rows of chocolate-and-marzipan beetles at his eye level at the glass counter. She noticed his round eyes and bought him one. His mother had been like that: kinder than most of the other mothers, a believer in enjoying life.

‘Hello.’ A girl came out of the shadows at the back of the shop, tins in her hands, apron around her slender waist. It had to be the kid Rainer’d mentioned. Not a stunner, no.

‘Hello.’ She was about his age. Was she going to order him out of the shop on the grounds of possible infection?

‘I’m his niece,’ she said, nodding towards the man behind the counter. ‘Come to stay.’

‘Bombed out?’

‘No. My mum’s got a job in a factory and they think I need looking after.’ She rolled her eyes. She didn’t look like someone who needed looking after. Perhaps that was what her mother had been worried about. The newspapers talked about young people behaving wildly in bombed-out London houses. Certainly sounded livelier than it was down here. The girl spoke with a slight accent, he noticed.

‘Quiet here, isn’t it?’ She looked out towards the lane. When Benny’d first arrived at Fairfleet he’d missed the noises of a town, too: the clanking of trams, engines backfiring, marching troops. Sometimes you heard the squeak and grind of a rusty bike chain here as someone cycled past, or the shouts of the kids in the village school when they had their morning break in the playground. Occasionally a farm horse clopped by. That was it, really.

‘Different from the town,’ he agreed.

‘What’s that accent of yours, then?’

He flushed. Just occasionally he forgot and rolled an ‘r’ in an un-English way.

‘Local,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ll catch it too.’

‘Bloody hope not.’ But she grinned. Then her eyes became more watchful. She glanced at the man behind the counter. ‘Want to go for a walk?’

Benny shrugged, feeling wary. But intrigued, too, if he was honest. And it would be something to tell Rainer.

‘We’re going to feed the chickens,’ she called to the man, taking off her apron and throwing it onto a pile of potatoes.

‘We’re not really,’ she confided as Benny closed the shop door. ‘I thought we’d go into the woods.’

The dark, secluded strip of trees leading down to the brook, which Benny had rarely ventured into.

‘You don’t look like a Kraut,’ she said as they strolled down the lane. Her arm swung close to his. Once or twice the little hairs on her arm touched his skin and he felt it like an electric shock.

‘Is that a compliment?’ he asked.

She tossed her head so that the auburn hair bounced around her shoulders. ‘If I hadn’t known you were one of those Fairfleet boys, I’d never have guessed you were German.’