The War that Saved My Life (16 page)

“His are so overgrown they’re hurting him,” Mr. Grimes continued, moving on to Butter’s other front foot. “Probably hurts him to walk at all, and he couldn’t really go faster, not without tripping himself. He’s showing sense. This ought to make a big difference.”

I felt stung. I’d been hurting him, and I didn’t know.

“Some people shouldn’t own ponies,” Mr. Grimes said, as though echoing my thoughts. Then he looked at me. “I don’t mean you,” he said. “Comin’ from London, and bein’ your age and all, how could you know? But that Miss Smith, she just threw the pony into the field once she’d sold Miss Becky’s hunters, and she’s never looked at him again as far as I can tell.”

“She told me ponies could do fine just eating grass.”

“Aye, that’s true, but it’s not the only thing they need. If someone gave you enough to eat, but didn’t keep you clean or healthy or ever show you any kind of love, how would you feel?”

I said, “I wouldn’t feel hungry.”

Mr. Grimes laughed. “Well, that’s so.” When he was finished he said, “You bring him back here in four weeks or so, so I can trim him again. Usually you’d say every six weeks, but we’ll have a bit of work to do before he’s back to normal. Ordinarily the village farrier’d do it, but he enlisted last week.”

I nodded. Searched my head for the right words to say. Found them. “Thank you very much, Mr. Grimes.”

His eyes crinkled, but he didn’t smile. He pulled off his hat, revealing a nearly bald head, and scratched himself behind one ear. “It’s just Grimes,” he said. “Mr. Grimes, that would be if I were a butler or something important, like. But if we’re going to be friends, you can call me Fred.”

“Fred.” I held out my hand, the way the colonel had. Fred shook it.

“And you’re?” he prompted.

“Ada,” I said. “Ada Smith, but just Ada to you.”

Fred took me all around the pony. He cut Butter’s long tangled mane (“normally we’d pull it, not cut it, but this mess is hopeless”) and showed me how to start untangling his tail. He taught me how to clean the saddle and bridle, and how to oil them, over and over with tiny dollops of oil on a rag. “You keep doing that,” he said. “And any other tack you see at Miss Smith’s, you oil that too. Leather dries out. It’ll be ruined if it goes neglected much longer.”

Then he told me he had to get on working. “Too much to do these days,” he said. “We’ve had to put the hunters back to grass. Too much for one man to keep ’em legged up and properly strapped and all, and anyways, there’s no hunting with the war on. But even still, it’s nearly all I can do, caring for thirteen horses.”

“I can help,” I said.

“Aye, I’d be grateful,” he said. We’d already put Butter into an empty stall while I worked on the tack. I helped grain, hay, and water the horses, bad foot and all, and he didn’t say a word about my limping or expect me not to be able to do things. When we were finished I saddled and bridled Butter. Fred gave me a leg into the saddle.

“Maggie said horses could have clubfoot,” I said. “She said you could fix it.” I tried not to feel hopeful.

“Aye,” he said. “In horses you fix it with special shoes. It’s not like clubfoot in people, though. I don’t think. That’s what you’ve got?”

I nodded. “Can’t help you,” he said. “But I’ll help you otherwise, whenever you like. You come back.”

I went down the drive. I turned left at the road, which I knew was correct, but after that I’m not sure what happened. It should have been easy to find Miss Smith’s house. Instead I got lost.

Seeing the ocean was like seeing grass for the first time.

I’d been lost for a while, wandering unfamiliar lanes. When I first realized I didn’t know where I was, I tried to retrace my steps back to Maggie’s, but I ended up somewhere else entirely. I tried letting Butter show me the way, but every time I gave him his head, he put it down and started to graze. He was no use. I kept moving, searching for something familiar. Finally I saw a long, tall hill and climbed it, thinking perhaps I could recognize Miss Smith’s house, or at least the village, from above.

Instead I saw, stretched out in the distance, an endless carpet of blue and gray. Clouds floated over it, and small white things seemed to flicker on the surface of it, but mostly it was like grass, flat and broad and unchanging, except that it went on forever, farther out than I could see. It made me feel lost and shivery, looking at it. I stared and stared. What could it be?

Eventually I pulled my gaze down from it, and there was the village—I recognized the church spire. So close to that gray-blue expanse. How had I not known? I made my way down the hill, scrabbling through rough tall grass, but keeping Butter’s head in the direction of the steeple. Then we found a road, and kept going. Pretty soon I was riding right along the middle of the main street. The village was quiet, the shops all shut up. The sky was getting dark, and of course not a light showed anywhere. Above me came the roar of an airplane.

At home Miss Smith and Jamie rushed out the door when they saw Butter and me walking up the lane.

“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I got lost.”

Miss Smith said, “I thought you’d fallen off that pony and were lying dead in a ditch somewhere.”

Jamie’s face went white.

“I wouldn’t have died,” I said. I went around to the back to take care of Butter. Jamie helped me.

“How was school?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Teacher let you use your left hand?”

“Only because Susan made her. She still thinks I’ve got the mark of the devil.” He held my hand as we walked back to the house. “When you weren’t here Susan didn’t say you were dead in a ditch. She said you were probably having a nice time and I shouldn’t worry.” He paused. “She was worried, though. I could tell.”

I snorted. “She doesn’t need to worry. Nor you.”

Dinner was waiting. I fell to eating, so hungry that for a few minutes I didn’t think of anything else. Then I said, “I saw something strange from the top of the hill. Far away. Like grass, stretched out a long way, and flat, but different—blue and gray. When the sun hit it, it looked shiny.”

“That’s the ocean,” Miss Smith said. “The English Channel. I told you before we weren’t far from it.”

I stared at her. I wanted to say she hadn’t told me anything. I wanted to say she’d crippled my pony, ignoring him. I wanted to say she should have showed us the ocean, she should have taken us there.

I wanted to say she never needed to worry about either of us. She didn’t need to bother. I could take care of Jamie, and I could take care of myself. I always had.

I wanted to say a lot of things, but, as usual, I didn’t have the words for the thoughts inside my head. I dropped my head and went back to eating.

“Did Grimes help you?” Miss Smith asked.

“Yes,” I said, rudely, through a mouthful of food.

“Why wouldn’t Butter trot?”

I swallowed. I took a deep breath. I said, “Because you crippled him.”

Miss Smith looked up, sharp. “Explain.”

I didn’t want to talk, but eventually she got the whole story out of me. She sighed. “Well, I am sorry. It was ignorance, not deliberate abuse—but that’s never an excuse, is it?” She reached out to pat my arm, but I jerked away. “I understand why you’re angry with me,” she said. “I’d be angry too.”

After dinner she marched me out to the pasture. She made me show her what Butter’s feet looked like now, and tell her how they had been. She made me tell her what else Grimes had taught me, and then she went into the storage room and looked at all the tack. “It’s awful having to face your own shortcomings,” she said. “Did Butter feel better after he had his feet fixed?”

“They’re not fixed,” I said. “They won’t be fixed for weeks and weeks. And I don’t know how he felt. I got
lost
.”

She nodded. “You must have been scared. Scared and angry.”

“Of course not,” I said, though I had been, at least until I’d seen the sea. “Of course I wasn’t scared.”

“Angry,” Susan said, putting her arm around me.

“No,” I said through clenched teeth. But I was. Oh, I was.

The
Royal Oak
sank.

She was a Royal Navy battleship. She was torpedoed by a German submarine while anchored off the coast of Scotland, and 833 of the over twelve hundred men on her died. We heard about it on the radio, which we listened to most nights.

The next Saturday Susan decided to take us to the movies. It was the first time Jamie and I had ever been. We sat down on the plush seats, like our purple chairs at home, and before we knew it the whole wall in front of us had become a giant moving picture. Music played, and a man’s voice started to talk about the war.

I’d thought we were going to watch a story, not stuff about the war. Other than the silly posters and the sandbags that lay piled near some of the road intersections, you’d hardly know there was a war. Hadn’t been any bombs. But now here was a picture of an enormous ship, rolling onto its side while black smoke poured out of holes in its hull. The picture was so big and so horrible, and it got worse when the solemn voice talking about the
Royal Oak
said that over a hundred of the dead were young boys. I looked at Jamie sitting on Susan’s other side. “I want to go home,” I whispered.

“Shh,” Susan said. “The newsreel will be over in a minute. Then they’ll show the story.”

“I want to go home,” I said, more loudly.

“Don’t start,” Susan said.

“Don’t start,” Jamie echoed.

I didn’t. But I plugged my ears and I shut my eyes, and I stayed that way until Susan nudged me to let me know the story picture was starting. Even then I couldn’t quit thinking about the burning ship and the boys that died.

I had nightmares from the pictures. Jamie wet the bed, but he always did, every night still. I had dreams of fire and smoke and being tied to my chair, my little chair in our flat at home. I couldn’t walk and I couldn’t move, and I screamed. Jamie woke and cried and Susan came at a run.

“So, that was a little too overwhelming?” Susan said the next morning. She looked tired and cross, but she usually looked cross in the mornings.

I avoided her gaze. I didn’t know what she meant by
overwhelming
.