The War that Saved My Life (29 page)

When the all-clear sounded two hours later, Susan and I were still wide-awake. Jamie had fallen asleep on Susan’s lap. She carried him back to the house. I walked beside her, trailing the blanket like a cape. We lay down in the living room, too worn out to climb the stairs.

Late the next morning, when we woke, Susan said, “Ada, there will be more bombs. We will have to go into the shelter. You’d better get used to it.”

I shuddered. I couldn’t imagine doing that again.

“What set you off?” Susan asked.

“Mam’s cabinet—the way it smells—” I made myself go somewhere else in my head, fast, before panic overwhelmed me. Butter. I imagined riding Butter.

Susan tapped my chin. “We can change the smell.”

She went to the market and bought aromatic herbs, rosemary, lavender, and sage. She hung them in the shelter, upside down from the edges of the benches, and their smell filled the little room even after they were crumbly and dry. I couldn’t smell the dampness anymore. It helped. I still panicked. Susan still always wrapped me in a blanket. But usually I could keep from screaming, and I didn’t actually see the cabinet in my head. It was still awful, but I didn’t frighten Jamie.

That was important, because we went into the shelter nearly every night from that first time. The Battle of Britain had begun.

Hitler had figured out he couldn’t land his invading army until he’d conquered the Royal Air Force. Otherwise, our planes would bomb his ships and troops while they were landing. Once he’d gotten rid of our planes, invading England would be easy. The Germans had a lot more airplanes and pilots than the British did. They had different kinds of planes, though, and their fighter planes had shorter ranges than ours. This meant that they could only reach the southeastern corner of England before they had to turn back for more fuel. They could only shoot our planes and bomb our airfields in Kent.

The airfields were their main targets. Every plane they destroyed, whether in the air or parked on the ground, brought them one step closer to invasion; every runway they destroyed gave our pilots one less place to safely land. Our airfield was hit that very first day; the bombs ripped through two storage sheds and left craters the size of small tanks in the grass runways. Fortunately all the air crews found shelter. Once the all-clear sounded, the crews worked through the night, shoveling debris into the blast holes. By morning planes could safely land again.

It was July, and the world was green and lovely. I rode Butter through fields of waving grass, up our hill to where I could see the blue sea glittering in the bright sunlight. Wild roses grew in the hedgerows, and the air felt heavy with their scent. The breeze blew and I could feel perfectly happy, except that now I always watched for planes as well as spies. They hadn’t come in daytime yet, but I knew they could.

Susan didn’t like me riding out, but she didn’t want to forbid it either. Our home was so close to the airfield, I figured I was safer farther away. When I said so, she looked grim. “I should send you away,” she said.

It was hard enough to cope with Susan. How would I ever cope without her?

What if we got sent back home?

I stared at the tips of my shoes. “I can’t leave Butter,” I said.

Susan sighed. “You survived without a pony in London.”

I lifted my gaze to look at her. I had survived. Maybe. Could I do it again? Back in that one room, I hadn’t known all I was missing.

“I know,” Susan said softly. “It’s why I’m keeping you here.”

“There’s things worse than bombs,” I said, remembering what I’d heard her say before.

“I think so,” Susan said. “And Kent’s a big place, they can’t bomb every inch of it.” But she looked out the window toward the airfield, and her eyes creased with worry.

Nights in the shelter, night after night. It was impossible to sleep through the explosions and the gunfire. Susan had a flashlight, but flashlights needed batteries, and batteries were hard to find. Instead she lit a candle inside a flowerpot, and by its dim light read to us.
Peter Pan. A Secret Garden. The Wind in the Willows.
Some were books she got from the library; others came from her own bookshelves. On his own, Jamie was reading
Swiss Family Robinson
over again. “We’re like them,” he said one night, as the candlelit flickered off the shelter’s tin walls. “We’re in our cave, safe and warm.”

I shuddered. I had wrapped myself in a sheet, because it was too hot for a blanket. I felt warm, but not safe. I never felt safe in the shelter. “You are, though,” Susan said. “You feel safer in your bedroom, but you’re actually much safer in the shelter.”

It didn’t matter how I felt. She made me go into the shelter every time the sirens wailed.

Men came and removed all the signposts from the roads around the village, so that when Hitler invaded he wouldn’t know where he was.

When he invaded, we were to bury our radio. Jamie had already dug a hole for it in the garden. When Hitler invaded we were to say nothing, do nothing to help the enemy.

If he invaded while I was out riding, I was to return home at once, as fast as possible by the shortest route. I’d know it was an invasion, not an air raid, because all the church bells would ring.

“What if the Germans take Butter?” I asked Susan.

“They won’t,” she said, but I was sure she was lying.

“Bloody huns,” Fred muttered, when I went to help with chores. “They come here, I’ll stab ’em with a pitchfork, I will.” Fred was not happy. The riding horses, the Thortons’ fine hunters, were all out to grass, and the grass was good, but the hayfields had been turned over to wheat and Fred didn’t know how he’d feed the horses through the winter. Plus the Land Girls staying in the loft annoyed him. “Work twelve hours a day, then go out dancing,” he said. “Bunch of lightfoots. In my day girls didn’t act like that.”

I thought the Land Girls seemed friendly, but I knew better than to say so to Fred.

You could get used to anything. After a few weeks, I didn’t panic when I went into the shelter. I quit worrying about the invasion. I put Jamie up behind me on Butter and we searched the fields for shrapnel or bullets or bombs. Once we came across an airplane shot down in a hops field. Soldiers had already surrounded it by the time we got there, and were keeping civilians away. “A Messerschmidt,” Jamie said, eyes gleaming. “Wonder where the pilot went.” The pilot had bailed out; the plane’s canopy was open.

“Caught him,” one of the soldiers said, overhearing. “Prisoner of war. No troubles.”

On a day in early August Susan went to a WVS meeting. Jamie was tending the garden—he loved it—and I took off on Butter for my daily ride.

I went to the top of the hill. I paused, the way I always did, to search the sea and sky. No airplanes. No big boats. But then I saw something in the distance, something small on the surface of the ocean. A tiny boat, a rowboat, pulling for shore. I watched it, wondering. It was headed not for the town harbor, but for one of the barbed-wire sections of the beach. Was the person lost? Surely he knew better than to land where there were could be mines. I kept watching, frowning. The man—it looked like a man, I thought—in the boat continued to row straight for shore. Surely he could see the village from the water. Surely he knew it would be safer there.

Unless, I thought, my blood running cold, he was a spy.

A spy! I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it. I always looked for spies from the hill. It was a habit. But that didn’t mean, despite the posters, despite the rumors, that I actually expected to ever see a spy. But yet—a single rowboat, so far out—where had he come from? Did he get dropped off by a submarine—a German submarine? If he wasn’t a spy, why was he headed toward the deserted beach?

I heard Susan’s voice in my head. “Improbable,” it said. That mean not likely.

Still, it was one of the rules: Report anything suspicious at once. I turned Butter down the face of the hill, weaving through brush and tall grass, trying to keep the little boat in sight. It disappeared from my view as I got lower, and I sped up, cantering along the road that led to the barricaded beach. I stopped Butter in a copse of trees just as the beach came into view.

It was low tide, and the sand stretched out wide and flat for a mile along the shoreline. Right in the center of the sand, the man stepped from his rowboat. He carried a suitcase and had a rucksack on his back. As I watched, he shoved the rowboat back into the water. The sea was quiet. The boat floated high above the gentle waves, and began to drift sideways, following the shore.