The War that Saved My Life (19 page)

Susan tricked me into writing.

Jamie was practicing his letters at the table in the evening after the dishes were washed. I sat down at my place and watched him. “Show Ada why you’re left-handed,” Susan suggested.

Jamie grinned. He moved his pencil from his left hand to his right. Immediately the pencil started to skitter across the page. His letters went from small and neat to large and shaky.

“You’re fooling,” I said, laughing at his grin.

“I’m not,” he said. “I can’t do it in this hand.”

“You try,” Susan suggested. “Try your left hand first.” She took a fresh piece of paper and wrote a few letters on it. “Copy that.”

I tried, but it
was
impossible. Even when I used my right hand to hold the page steady, my left hand couldn’t control the pencil at all.

“You’re definitely right-handed,” Susan said. “Move the pencil over, and you’ll see.”

With my right hand, it was easy. I copied Susan’s letters and they looked almost as good as her own.

“Well done,” Susan said. “You’ve just written your name.”

“That’s my name?”

Jamie looked over my shoulder. “Ada,” he said, nodding.

Susan took the pencil back. “And this is
Jamie
,” she said. “And here’s
Susan
.” Then she gave Jamie the pencil. “Keep on with your work,” she said. “Ada, would you put on some more coal?”

I put the coal on, but first, when Susan wasn’t looking, I slid the paper into my pocket. I’d borrow a pencil the next time she was out. I’d try it again.

One afternoon near the end of November when I rode over to help Fred, he met me in the yard with a wide grin. “Come look what I’ve found,” he said. I dismounted, tied Butter’s head, unslung my crutches, and followed him to the door of the tack room. He showed me a strange-looking saddle on a stand. It had a normal seat, and one normal stirrup, but it also had two odd crooked knobs sticking up from the pommel. “It’s a side-saddle,” Fred said. “Must be twenty, thirty years old. Maybe more.”

“So?”

“Here, I’ll show you.” Fred scooped the saddle up. He exchanged it for Butter’s, then tossed me into it. My left leg went into the stirrup, snug beneath one of the crooks. My right leg hung down on the stirrup-less side. “Now you swing your right leg over, right here,” he said. He showed me how to tuck my right thigh around the other crook, so that my right leg actually draped over the pony’s left shoulder. “That’s it,” Fred said. “Now shove your right hip back, and get square in the saddle.”

It felt very odd, but also snug and secure. As Butter had become more forward, my bad foot had become more of a problem. That I couldn’t use the right stirrup was no issue, except that it tended to make me lean. But I couldn’t use my right foot properly—I could thump him with it, but I couldn’t keep any sort of proper contact with his side. My ankle, such as it was, didn’t move that way.

“Now,” Fred said, handing me a heavy leather – wrapped stick, “here’s your right leg.”

“My
leg
?”

“Absolutely. You haven’t got one of your own legs on the right side, see? So you hold one end of that stick and keep the other end on the pony. You’ll signal him with it, just like you would with a regular leg.”

Fred led us out to the field where I usually rode. “Take a bit of time to get used to it, both for him and for you.” He was still grinning ear to ear. “’Ow’s it feel so far?”

“Pretty good,” I said. My seat could still move with Butter’s walk, but my legs felt firm. “I didn’t know they made saddles for cripples.” I wondered where Fred had found it, whose saddle it had been.

“Nah, not for cripples,” Fred said. “This is how all proper ladies used to ride. Back when, straddling a horse wasn’t thought to be ladylike. But after the war, things changed—the gentry women started riding astride, and after that pretty much so did everyone.”

“Which war?” Because the one we were in wasn’t over.

“Last one. Twenty years back.” Fred’s face clouded. “England lost three million men.”

“So they had lots of extra women,” I said. “And lots of men’s saddles for them to use.”

“Suppose so.” He made me go around the field, first at the walk, then at the trot. Trotting was gobs easier in the sidesaddle—I still bounced, but I couldn’t really get shaken loose.

“That’s enough for now,” Fred said. “You can practice runnin’ on your own. No jumping yet.”

Never any jumping yet.

When I’d finished my work I went home by way of the tall hill above the village. Susan had drawn it on my map for me. At the top of the hill I stopped, and watched the ocean for a long time. Some days I saw ships, far off in the distance, and once or twice a fishing boat closer in. Today there was nothing but glimmering sunlight, birds circling, tiny white waves crashing against the shore. Susan said there was sand at the water’s edge, and when there wasn’t a war it was a lovely place to walk and look at the ocean. Just now the beach was fenced with barbed wire, and planted with mines, which were bombs in the ground, in case of invasion. We’d walk on the beach when the war was over, Susan said.

Susan didn’t think I should accept the sidesaddle. She thought it was too valuable of a gift. She marched it and me over to Lady Thorton in the WVS office. “That old thing?” Lady Thorton said. “It must have been my aunt’s. Mother never rode. Of course Ada may have it, or Grimes wouldn’t have given it to her. Margaret doesn’t want it, and neither do I.”

Maggie sent me a letter from her school. Susan laid the envelope on the table one afternoon, and I traced the word I recognized on the front with my finger: Ada. I still had the paper where Susan had written my name, and I’d copied it over and over.

“Shall I read it to you?” Susan asked.

“No,” I said. I opened the letter and stared at the marks on the paper inside. No matter how hard I stared, they didn’t make sense. That night I tried to get Jamie to read it. “Her handwriting’s all curly,” he said. “I can’t read that.”

Still, I didn’t want Susan to help me. In the end I brought it to Fred. He chewed his pipe and said Maggie wanted us to ride together when she came home for Christmas holidays.

“I won’t be here for Christmas,” I said. “The war will be over by then.”

Fred shook his head. “I wouldn’t think so,” he said. “That’s barely a month away. Doesn’t seem to me that the war’s properly started yet.”

“Mam’ll send for us,” I said. “All the other evacuees are leaving.”

Fred scratched behind his ear. “Well, we’ll hope not, won’t we? Don’t know what I’d do without you, I don’t.” He grinned at me, and to my surprise I grinned in return.

I knew I couldn’t really stay. The good things here—not being shut up in the one room, for starters, and then Butter, and my crutches, and being warm even when it was cold outside. Clean clothes. Nightly baths. Three meals a day. That cup of Bovril before bedtime. The ocean seen from the top of the hill—all of these things, they were just temporary. Just until Mam came for us. I didn’t dare get too used to them.

I tried to think of good things about home. I remembered Mam bringing home fish-’n’-chips on Friday nights, crisp and hot and wrapped in newspaper. I remembered that sometimes Mam sang, and laughed, and once even danced Jamie around the table. I remembered how when Jamie was little he spent his days inside with me. I remembered the crack on the ceiling that looked like a man in a pointed hat.

And even if it felt like Mam hated me, she had to love me, didn’t she? She had to love me, because she was my mam, and Susan was just somebody who got stuck taking care of Jamie and me because of the war. She still said so sometimes. “I didn’t ask for evacuees,” she said, when Bovril puked mouse guts on the living room rug. “I don’t need this,” she said, shaking her head, when Jamie came home with his sweater ripped, smeared in dirt from head to toe. “I never wanted children,” she said, when Butter shied at a pheasant and dumped me in the road, and ran home with my crutches tied to the saddle. Susan came out to find me, muttering, crutches in hand, and when she saw me she scowled and said it was a mercy I wasn’t killed. “I never wanted children.”

“I never wanted you,” I said.

“I can’t imagine why not,” she said, snorting. “I’m so loving and kind.” The wind had come up sharp and it was nearly full dark. I was shivering. When we got home Susan draped a blanket around my shoulders. “Make us some tea,” she said. “I’ll put up the wretched pony.” She squared her shoulders and stalked into the night, and I watched her go, and wanted Mam.