The War that Saved My Life (2 page)

If I could walk, maybe Mam wouldn’t be so ashamed of me. Maybe we could disguise my crippled foot. Maybe I could leave the room, and stay with Jamie, or at least go to him if he needed me.

That’s what happened, though not the way I thought it would. In the end it was the combination of the two, the end of my little war against Jamie, and the start of the big war, Hitler’s war, that set me free.

I began that very day. I pulled myself up to the seat of my chair, and I put both feet onto the floor. My good left foot. My bad right one. I straightened my knees, and, grasping the back of the chair, I stood.

I want you to understand what the problem was. I could stand, of course. I could hop, one-footed, if I wished to. But I was far faster on my hands and knees, and our flat was so small that I didn’t bother to stand straight very often. My leg muscles, particularly in my right leg, weren’t used to it. My back felt weak. But all that was secondary. If the only thing I’d had to do was stand upright, I would have been fine.

To walk I had to put my bad foot to the ground. I had to put all my weight on it, and pick my other foot off the ground, and not fall down from my lack of balance or from the searing pain.

I stood by the chair that first day, wobbling. I slowly shifted some of my weight from my left foot to my right. I gasped.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been walking all along. Maybe the little curled-up bones in my ankle would have been used to it. Maybe the thin skin covering them would have been tougher.

Maybe. But I’d never know, and none of this standing business was getting me any closer to Jamie. I let go of the chair. I swung my bad foot out. I pushed my body forward. Pain stabbed my ankle like a knife. I fell down.

Up. Grab the chair. Steady myself. Step forward. Fall down. Up. Try again. Good foot forward first this time. A quick gasp, a swinging of the bad foot, and then—crash.

The skin on the bottom of my bad foot ripped. Blood smeared across the floor. After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore. I dropped to my knees, shaking, and I got a rag and wiped up the mess.

That was the first day. The second day was worse. The second day my good foot and leg hurt too. It was hard to straighten my legs. I had bruises on my knees from falling, and the sores on my bad foot hadn’t healed. The second day all I did was stand, holding the chair. I stood while I looked out my window. I practiced moving my weight from one foot to the other. Then I lay down on the bed and sobbed from the hurt and from exhaustion.

I kept it secret, of course. I didn’t want Mam to know until I was good at walking, and I didn’t trust Jamie not to tell her. I suppose I could have shouted the news down to the street, but what good would that have done? I watched people out my window every day, and sometimes I did speak to them, but while they often waved, and even said, “Hello, Ada!” they almost never really tried to speak to me.

Maybe Mam would smile at me. Maybe she’d say, “Aren’t you clever, then?”

In my mind I went further. After a hard day, when I was holding my leg on the bed and shaking from the effort of not crying more, I thought of Mam taking my hand to help me walk down the stairs. I thought of her leading me out on the street, saying to everyone, “This is Ada. This is my daughter. See, she’s not so hopeless as we thought.”

She was my mother, after all.

I imagined helping with the shopping. I imagined going to school.

“Tell me everything,” I said to Jamie, late at night. I held him on my lap near the open window. “What did you see today? What did you learn?”

“I went into a shop like you asked me,” Jamie said. “Fruit shop. Fruit everywhere. Piled up on tables, like.”

“What kind of fruit?”

“Oh—apples. And some like apples, but not quite. And round things that were orange and shiny, and some that were green—”

“You’ve got to learn the names of them,” I told him.

“Can’t,” Jamie said. “When the shop man saw me he chased me out. Said he didn’t need dirty beggars stealin’ his fruit, and he ran me off with a broom.”

“Oh, Jamie. You’re not a dirty beggar.” We had baths sometimes, when Mam got to disliking the way we smelled. “And you wouldn’t steal.”

“’Course I would,” Jamie said. He put his hand inside his shirt and pulled out one of the not-quite-apples, lumpy and yellow and soft. It was a pear, though we didn’t know it then. When we bit into it, juice ran down our chins.

I’d never tasted anything so good.

Jamie swiped a tomato the next day, but the day after that he got caught trying to take a chop from a butcher’s shop. The butcher walloped him, right on the street, and then marched him home to Mam and told her off. Mam snatched Jamie by the neck and walloped him herself. “You idiot! Stealin’ sweets is one thing! What were you wanting with a chop?”

“Ada’s hungry,” Jamie sobbed.

I
was
hungry. Walking was so much work, I was always hungry now. But it was the wrong thing to say, and Jamie knew it. I saw his eyes widen, afraid.

“Ada! I should have known!” Mam wheeled toward me. “Teaching your brother to steal for you? Worthless runt!” She backhanded me. I had been sitting on my chair. Without thinking, I jumped up to dodge the blow.

I was caught. I couldn’t take a step, not without giving away my secret. But Mam stared at me with a glittering eye. “Getting too big for your britches, ain’t you?” she said. “Get down on your knees and get into that cabinet.”

“No, Mam,” I said, sinking to the floor. “No. Please.”

The cabinet was a cubby under the sink. The pipe dripped sometimes, so the cabinet was always damp and smelly. Worse, roaches lived there. I didn’t mind roaches out in the open so much. I could smash them with a piece of paper and throw their bodies out the window. In the cabinet, in the dark, I couldn’t smash them. They swarmed all over me. Once one crawled into my ear.

“In you go,” Mam said, smiling.

“I’ll go,” Jamie said. “I nicked the chop.”

“Ada goes,” Mam said. She turned her slow smile toward Jamie. “Ada spends the night in the cabinet, any time I catch you stealin’ again.”

“Not the whole night,” I whispered, but of course it was.

When things got really bad I could go away inside my head. I’d always known how to do it. I could be anywhere, on my chair or in the cabinet, and I wouldn’t be able to see anything or hear anything or even feel anything. I would just be gone.

It was a good thing, but it didn’t happen fast enough. The first few minutes in the cabinet were the worst. And then, later on, my body started hurting from being so cramped. I was bigger than I used to be.

In the morning, when Mam let me out, I felt dazed and sick. When I straightened, pain shot through me, cramping pains and pins and needles down my legs and arms. I lay on the floor. Mam looked down at me. “Let that be a lesson to you,” she said. “Don’t be getting above yourself, my girl.”

I knew Mam had guessed at least part of my secret. I was getting stronger. She didn’t like it. As soon as she went out I got to my feet, and I made myself walk all the way across the room.

It was late August already. I knew it wouldn’t be long before Jamie started school. I wasn’t as afraid of Jamie leaving as I had been, but I was dreading being alone so much with Mam. But that day Jamie came home early, looking upset. “Billy White says all the kids is leaving,” he said.

Billy White was Stephen White’s little brother, and Jamie’s best friend.

Mam was getting ready for work. She leaned over to tie her shoes, grunting as she sat back up. “So they say.”

“What do you mean, leaving?” I asked.

“Leaving London,” Mam said, “on account of Hitler, and his bombs.” She looked up, at Jamie, not me. “What they say is that the city’s going to be bombed, so all the kids ought to be sent to the country, out of harm’s way. I hadn’t decided whether to send you. Suppose I might. Cheaper, one less mouth to feed.”

“What bombs?” I asked. “What country?”

Mam ignored me.

Jamie slid onto a chair and swung his feet against the rungs. He looked very small. “Billy says they’re leaving on Friday.” That was two days from now. “His mam’s buying him all new clothes.”

Mam said, “I ain’t got money for new clothes.”

“What about me?” My voice came out smaller than I liked. “Am I going? What about me?”

Mam still didn’t look at me. “’Course not. They’re sending kids to live with nice people. Who’d want you? Nobody, that’s who. Nice people don’t want to look at that foot.”

“I could stay with nasty people,” I said. “Wouldn’t be any different than living here.”

I saw the slap coming, but didn’t duck fast enough. “None of your sass,” she said. Her mouth twisted into the smile that made my insides clench. “You can’t leave. You never will. You’re stuck here, right here in this room, bombs or no.”

Jamie’s face went pale. He opened his mouth to say something, but I shook my head at him, hard, and he closed it again. When Mam left he launched himself into my arms. “Don’t worry,” I said, rocking him. I didn’t feel frightened. I felt grateful, that I’d spent my summer the way I had. “You find out where we have to go and what time we have to be there,” I said. “We’re leaving together, we are.”