Whistling in the Dark (2 page)

All this had been before the war against Hitler had started. Now quite a few local families and girls Joan knew at school had lost a father or brother, killed in action. There was a bond between people who had also suffered that first sickening moment of opening the telegram and the long drawn-out misery that followed as the reality of their loss began to sink in.

The war news since the German occupation of France and the evacuation of the British forces at Dunkirk had been very bad. And then the bombing had begun in earnest. Almost every night when it got dark, the air-raid siren began its warning wail, telling everyone to take cover.

Mum said that if Britain was ever occupied by the Nazis, they would have to leave their home and everything in it, and try to get to Ireland. In the meantime, they would just have to get on with it, as everybody these days was being urged to do. “Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us victory!” as the slogan on the poster said, although this was easier said than done.

Joan stared hard at her grammar book, stretching her eyes wide in a futile attempt to force herself to concentrate. The light was getting too bad now to see properly. She was just wondering when Mum and Judy would come home so they could have tea when she heard a gentle sound coming from outside, quite close to the window. A faint, low whistle.

Joan sat very still, listening. The hairs on the back of her neck began to prickle. She had that feeling you get when you know someone is watching you. Slowly, Joan turned her head. Over her shoulder, very near to the glass, she saw the dark shape of a man looking in at her.

CHAPTER 2

B
rian sped down the final homeward stretch, freewheeling, and then expertly swerved his bicycle through the front gate. He was easing his heavy satchel from his back when he saw a shaft of light coming from the front door and Joan standing there, on the top step.

“Shut the door, quick!” he called. “The air-raid warden’ll get us fined if he sees us showing that light!”

Joan didn’t answer. Brian went in, slammed the door behind them both and then slung his satchel on the floor. “I’m
so
hungry! Is Mum in?” Still no answer from Joan. Then he saw her white face. “What’s up?”

Joan replied in a whisper. “It’s a man. I saw a man, staring in at me through the sitting-room window. Just now. He was right there in the garden.”

“What? What man?”

“I don’t know. He was just sort of peering in. So I pulled the curtains and put on the lights.”

Brian slowly loosened his school tie. “Do you think he’s still here, then?”

“I don’t know. I’m glad you’re back. Ought we to go and look?”

“Not me. Not likely! Have you locked the back door?”

“No! Oh, I didn’t think of that!”

Together they scooted through the kitchen, past the place where Mum kept her cleaning things and did the washing, and down to the end of the passage. Brian turned the key in the back door and bolted it. Then he peeped out of the little larder window. It wasn’t quite dark yet. A watery sun was just disappearing into a low belt of purple cloud.

“I can’t see anyone,” he said.

“He was there. He had a cap on.”

“An army cap?”

“No, I don’t think so. I couldn’t see very well. Only his eyes, sort of staring.”

“Are you sure you’re not making this up?”

Joan flung herself away from him, near to tears. “Of course I’m not. I
told
you. I was doing my homework and I looked round and
there
he was.”

“Well, he’s not there now. At least, I don’t think so.”

But even Brian was relieved when they heard Mum’s key in the lock.

Her reaction was briskly practical, as it always was when there was any kind of family crisis, but they noticed that her voice was a bit shaky. “The sitting-room window, was it? Well, he can’t have been a paperboy or he would have rung the doorbell. You two stay here with Judy. I’ll just go and have a look around.”

“I’ll come with you,” Brian offered bravely.

Judy, left alone with Joan, set up a wail. “I want my
tea
! When are we having tea? We didn’t get anything to eat at the jumble sale. What’s Mum doing in the garden? It’s nearly dark! Is there a horrid man out there?”

Joan was in no mood to comfort her. Together they watched from the window as Brian and Mum searched the garden in the dying light, looking behind bushes and all around the rustic arbour where a neglected garden seat swung and creaked in the wind. It wasn’t a very big garden, so it didn’t take them long. At the far end, beyond the rubbish heap, there was a fence with a gate that led directly onto the golf course.

“If there was someone nosing around, he probably went out that way,” Mum said when she and Brian came back indoors. “Anyway, he’s gone now. Let’s light the fire and have a cup of tea.”

Judy was already asleep, and Joan was brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed in the room they shared. She kept peering out of the window, worried that the man was still lurking around. By the next morning, when it was beginning to get light, Joan was feeling braver. As Mum cooked breakfast before school, she opened the back door and stepped outside. The fear of the previous night’s events was now eclipsed by her anxiety about not having done her French homework.

Joan wandered out a little way into the garden, scuffing her feet on the wet grass. The old seat hung there, dripping with rainwater and swaying gently. She went up to it and absently gave it a push. As it creaked to and fro, she noticed some muddy footprints underneath, quite fresh in the dewy grass. It looked as though somebody had been there, maybe slept there, quite recently. Last night, perhaps? She shivered and hurried back inside to get ready for school.

CHAPTER 3

J
oan was ten minutes late for school, but she managed to slip into her classroom just before the bell went for prayers. There was a new girl in the class, standing awkwardly beside Miss Sanderson’s desk. She was not a local girl. She was wearing the school uniform – a long-sleeved blouse with a school tie and a pleated navy serge tunic – but there was something weird about her. Her clothes looked too big and hung off her thin frame, and her hair was screwed up into braids and wound tightly around her head. She stood there with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes cast down, as though she was frightened to meet anyone’s gaze and was already expecting to be bullied.

Miss Sanderson tapped her desk with a ruler for silence.

“Girls, before we go into prayers, I want you to meet Ania. She is Polish, and she is joining our class. Her English is not too good yet – although I hear you’re working hard on it, aren’t you, Ania? – but I know you will all welcome her and help her settle down as soon as possible. Ania, would you like to take the desk here at the front, next to Angela Travis? She will help to explain any of our rules that you don’t understand. And, by the way, Ania won’t be joining us for prayers.”

Just then the bell rang, and most of the pupils stood up. School prayers were strictly for Church of England girls only. Catholic and Jewish girls remained behind in the classroom, taking the opportunity to gossip and catch up on unfinished homework. Ania stood still, looking at her feet.
Heaven help her,
thought Joan,
if she’s got to sit in the desk next to Angela Travis.

Angela was a great favourite with the teaching staff, but among the girls she was known as the Himmler of the Lower Fifth, named after Hitler’s Gestapo chief, and for very good reason. She was an outwardly demure girl with neatly combed, slightly sandy-coloured hair, and her mother always managed to send her to school every day in a freshly ironed blouse. Angela had a way of lowering her eyes and whispering behind her hand about other people to her particular gang of friends, or rather, to those luckless girls who were too frightened not to be her friends in case they got whispered about too.

Angela and her gang usually waited until mid-morning break, when everyone was in the playground, before giving the signal to begin the daily victimization. This began with sniggering, meaningful looks and some very carefully judged and easily overheard personal insults. Then they closed in on their prey: pinching, hair-pulling and dragging her clothes awry. If they did not succeed in making a girl cry before the bell went for the end of break, they reckoned they had failed and would intensify their efforts during the next one.

Doreen, Joan’s best friend, was one of the few girls in the class who didn’t care a jot for Angela and her gang and treated them with offhand contempt.

That morning, when the bell went and they were all outside, Doreen strolled over to where Ania was standing on her own, marooned like a stag at bay, and tried to start some sort of conversation. She met with very little success. Ania’s eyes widened with fright and she could hardly manage more than a few replies in broken English in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. But Doreen’s support did the trick. Angela and company, who had been circling like vultures, could not summon the nerve to pounce with Doreen standing there and Joan hovering in the background. Ania was saved, for that day at least.

“You were great, sticking up for that new girl at break today,” Joan said later that afternoon as she and Doreen ambled homewards together. She was not proud of the fact that she hadn’t been able to do what Doreen had with such casual confidence. Deep down, Joan was a little afraid of Angela. She knew how capable she was of turning on anyone who protected an obvious loser.

“Oh,
that Angela
,” Doreen said carelessly. “Classic Nazi bullying tactics. Angela and her lot would have no trouble getting themselves promoted in the Hitler Youth. Actually, I was talking to someone earlier who seemed to know something about Ania. Came here with lots of other refugee kids – on a Kindertransport, I think – just before the war began. She’s been shunted around from one temporary place to another ever since so hasn’t managed to pick up much English. Both her parents are dead and they can’t trace any other family. Now she’s billeted with some old lady − I think her name is Miss Mellor – in Ashchurch Avenue.”

“Don’t envy her. It’s one of those roads near the promenade – so quiet that it’s a big event when a cat walks past. Nothing doing except a lot of curtain-twitching,” Joan said.

“Yeah. Ania muttered something about Miss Mellor being very fussy and ultra houseproud. She likes Ania to be out of the way as much as possible, so she has to walk about on her own after school until it gets dark and then she’s allowed to clock in for supper. After that, it’s sitting with Miss Mellor in the front room, listening to the nine o’clock news on the radio, then lights out and off to bed.”

“Poor her. Anyway, let’s hope Angela will stay away from her now or she might wish she was back where she came from!”

CHAPTER 4

I
t was Saturday morning, and Joan was helping Audrey to paint her legs with gravy browning. This was a tricky, exacting business, demanding time and concentration. But as nylons and proper leg make-up were now almost unobtainable, gravy browning was the only solution. The problem with it was that it tended to run and turn streaky in wet weather. It had to be applied very evenly. Then, to achieve a perfect effect, a line was drawn at the back of each leg with an eyebrow pencil to imitate a stocking seam. This was Joan’s job, although she wasn’t very good at it. It was part of the elaborate preparation that Audrey was making for meeting Dai Davies that evening.