The War that Saved My Life (4 page)

I knew ponies from the lane but had only seen them pull carts. I hadn’t known you could ride them. I hadn’t known they could go so fast.

The girl leaned forward against the pony’s flying mane. Her lips moved as though she was shouting something. Her legs thumped the pony’s sides, and the pony surged forward, faster, brown legs flying, eyes bright. They ran alongside the train as it curved around their field.

I saw a stone wall ahead of them. I gasped. They were going to hit it. They were going to be hurt. Why didn’t she stop the pony?

They jumped it. They jumped the stone wall, and kept running, while the train tracks turned away from their field.

Suddenly I could feel it, the running, the jump. The smoothness, the flying—I recognized it with my whole body, as though it was something I’d done a hundred times before. Something I loved to do. I tapped the window. “I’m going to do that,” I said.

Jamie laughed.

“Why not?” I said to him.

“You walk pretty good,” he said.

I didn’t tell him that my foot hurt so bad I wasn’t sure I’d ever walk again. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

The day got worse. It was bound to. The train stopped and started and stopped again. Hot sun poured through the windows until the air seemed to curdle. Small children cried. Bigger ones fought.

Finally we stopped at a quay, but a bossy woman standing there wouldn’t let us out. She argued with the head teacher, and then with all the other teachers, and then even with the man running the train. The teachers said we had to be let out, for the love of mercy, but the woman, who had a face like iron and a uniform like a soldier’s, only with a skirt, thumped her clipboard and refused.

“I’m to expect seventy mothers with infant children,” she said. “Not two hundred schoolchildren. It says so, here.”

“I don’t care in the least what’s written on your paper,” the head teacher spat back.

The teacher supervising our car shook her head and opened the door. “Out, all of you,” she said to us. “Loos are in the station. We’ll find you something to drink and eat. Out you go.”

Out we went, in a thundering herd. The other teachers followed, opening the doors to their cars. The iron-faced woman scowled and barked orders everyone ignored.

It was more noise and rush than I’d ever seen. It was better than fireworks.

Jamie helped me off the train. I felt stiff all over, and I had to go something desperate. “Show me how to use the loo,” I told him. Sounds funny, but it was my first real loo. At home our flat shared the one down the hall, but I just used a bucket and Mam or Jamie emptied it.

“I think I gotta use the boys’ one,” Jamie said.

“What do you mean, the boys’ one?”

“See?” He pointed at two doors. Sure enough, all the boys were going through one door, the girls through another. Only now lines snaked out the doors.

“Tell me what to do, then.”

“You pee in it, and then you flush,” he said.

“What’s flush? How do I flush?”

“There’s a handle, like, and you push it down.”

I waited my turn and then I went in and figured it out, even the flushing. There were sinks, and I splashed water onto my hot face. A girl right in front of me—the shabbiest, nastiest-looking girl I’d ever seen—was using a sink in front of my sink, which seemed odd. I frowned at her, and she frowned back.

All of a sudden I realized I was looking in a mirror.

Mam had a mirror. It hung high on the wall and I never bothered with it. I stared into this one, appalled. I’d assumed I looked like all the other girls. But my hair was clumpy, not smooth. My skin was paler than theirs, milky-white, except it also looked rather gray, especially around my neck. The dirty calluses on my knees stood out beneath my faded skirt, which suddenly seemed grubby and too small.

What could I do? I took a deep breath and staggered out. Jamie was waiting. I looked him over with newly critical eyes. He was dirtier than the other boys too. His shirt had faded into an indeterminate color and his fingernails were rimmed in black.

“We should have had baths,” I said.

Jamie shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

But it did.

At home, when I looked out my window onto the lane, across the street, three buildings to the left, on the corner, I could see a fishmonger’s shop. They got fish delivered every morning, and laid it out for sale on a thick cool piece of stone. In the summer heat, fish could go off fast, so women knew to pick through the selection carefully and chose only the freshest and the best.

That’s what we children were: fish on a slab. The teachers herded us down the street into a big building and lined us up against one wall. Men and women from the village filed past, looking to see if we were sweet and pretty and wholesome enough to take home.

That they didn’t think many of us were good value was clear from the expressions on their faces and the things they said.

“Good Lord,” one woman said, reeling away from sniffing a little girl’s hair. “They’re filthy!”

“They’ll wash,” the iron-faced woman said. She directed operations from the center of the room, clipboard still in hand. “We need to be generous. We didn’t expect so many. We’ve got to do our bit.”

“My bit don’t extend to a pack of dirty street rats,” an old man retorted. “This lot looks like they’ll murder us in our beds.”

“They’re
children,
” the iron-faced woman replied. “It’s not their fault what they look like.”

I looked around. The village girls handing round cups of tea were sort of shiny bright, with ribbons in their hair. They looked like they would smell nice.

“Maybe not,” another woman said. “But they’re not much like our children, are they?”

The iron-faced woman opened her mouth to argue, then shut it without saying a word. Whatever we were, we weren’t like their children, that much was clear.

“Ada,” Jamie whispered, “nobody wants you and me.”

It was true. The crowd was thinning out. Fewer and fewer children remained. The teachers pushed us together and said nice things about us. The iron-faced woman cajoled the remaining villagers.

A blue-haired old woman put her hand on Jamie’s arm. “I won’t take the girl,” she said, “but I suppose I could manage the little boy.”

“You don’t want him,” I said. “He steals. And bites. And without me to manage him he might go back to having fits.”

The woman’s mouth dropped into a soundless O. She scuttled away, and went off with somebody else’s brother.

And then the hall was empty, save the teachers, the iron woman, Jamie, and me. Mam had been right. No one would have us. We were the only ones not chosen.

“You’re not to worry,” the iron-faced woman said, which was perhaps the most ridiculous lie I’d ever heard. She thumped her clipboard. “I’ve got the perfect place for you.”

“Are they nice?” Jamie asked.

“It’s a single lady,” the woman replied. “She’s very nice.”

Jamie shook his head. “Mam says nice people won’t have us.”

The corner of the iron-faced woman’s mouth twitched. “She isn’t
that
nice,” she said. “Plus, I’m the billeting officer. It’s not for her to decide.”

That meant the lady could be forced to take us. Good. I shifted my weight off my bad foot and gasped. I could get used to the pain while I was standing still, but moving made everything so much worse.

“Can you walk?” the iron-faced woman asked. “What did you do to your foot?”

“A brewer’s cart ran over it,” I said, “but it’s fine.”

“Why don’t you have crutches?” she asked.

Since I didn’t know what crutches were, I could only shrug. I started to walk across the room, but to my horror my foot gave way. I fell onto the wooden floor. I bit my lip to keep from screaming.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” the iron-faced woman said. She knelt down. I expected her to yell, or haul me to my feet, but instead—this was even worse than falling in the first place—she put her arms around me and lifted me off the floor.
Carried
me. “Hurry up,” she said to Jamie.

Outside, she deposited me into the backseat of an automobile. An actual automobile. Jamie climbed in beside me, wide-eyed. The woman slammed the passenger door, and then she got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “It’ll only be a minute,” she said, looking back at us. “It really isn’t far.”

Jamie touched the shiny wood beneath the window beside him. “’S okay,” he said, grinning. “Take your time. We don’t mind.”

The house looked asleep.

It sat at the very end of a quiet dirt lane. Trees grew along both sides of the lane, and their tops met over it so that the lane was shadowed in green. The house sat pushed back from the trees, in a small pool of sunlight, but vines snaked up the red brick chimney and bushes ran rampant around the windows. A small roof sheltered a door painted red, like the chimney, but the house itself was a flat gray, dull behind the bushes. Curtains were drawn over the windows and the door was shut tight.

The iron-faced woman made a clicking sound as though annoyed. She pulled the car to a stop and cut the engine. “Wait here,” she commanded. She pounded a fist against the red door. When nothing happened, she barked, “Miss Smith!” and after a few more moments of nothing, she turned the knob and stepped inside.

I nudged Jamie. “Go listen.”

He stood by the open door for a few minutes, then came back. “They’re fighting,” he said. “The lady doesn’t want us. She says she didn’t know the war was on.”

I was not surprised that Miss Smith didn’t want us, but I had a hard time believing anyone didn’t know about the war. Miss Smith was either lying, or dumb as a brick.

I shrugged. “We can go somewhere else.”

The instant I said that, everything changed. To the right side of the sleeping house a bright yellow pony put its head through the bushes and stared at me.

I could see that it was standing behind a low stone wall. It had a white stripe down its nose and dark brown eyes. It pricked its ears forward and made a low whickery sound.

I poked Jamie, and pointed. It was like something I’d imagined come true. I felt again in my gut the feeling I’d had on the train when I’d seen the galloping pony and the girl.