Across a War-Tossed Sea (2 page)

“Oh no you don't, mister!” Patsy grabbed Jamie before he could jump into the water. Bobby intercepted Johnny, who kicked and screeched in protest.

They watched the greenish-black snake slide in serpentines across the mirror-still water, leaving a trail of S-shaped ripples. At the far bank, it disappeared under a mess of wild roses overhanging the embankment. There was something odd-looking about the shape of the tangled underbrush.

“A TIRE!” they all shouted at the same time.

An old discarded tire had drifted down the creek, gotten caught in the brambles, and stopped, half submerged.

Ker-plunk!
Before Patsy could stop them, her brothers dove into the water like bullfrogs.
Kerplunk, kerplunk
. Yanking and shouting, they dragged the frayed tire out of the water.

“Boy oh boy, it's a beaut!” Bobby exclaimed. Since Pearl Harbor, he and Charles had become passionate salvage collectors for the war effort. Bobby pushed his coppery hair out of his eyes so he could look at the tire carefully. “Men,” he said. “Oh, and lady.” He bowed to his older sister. “This is a treasure trove! Y'all know why?”

“Why?” chirped the twins, clapping their hands.

“Well, I'll tell you. How many old razor blades does it take to make the tail of an air force bomb?”

“A whole twelve thousand,” the twins shouted together.

“Right! How many pairs of nylon stockings can make a parachute?”

“I know that one, Mr. General,” Patsy said, playing along. “Thirty-six pairs. We collected that many at Girl Scouts.”

Bobby nodded. “And it takes five thousand tin cans for a tank shell casing. That's a lot of soup and dog food! But this single, old, beat-up tire, all by its little lonesome, can be recycled into twelve—that's right, folks—twelve gas masks.”

“Twelve pilots,” breathed Patsy.

“Twelve of our mates back home,” Charles said to Wesley.

“Jeepers!” cried the twins.

“Hey! We'll be the first to bring in salvage this year!” crowed Ron. “We'll be heroes!”

Suddenly, school starting the next day was exciting rather than awful.

The Ratcliffs and Bishops trooped home, carrying the tire like a big-animal trophy from a safari hunt. Bobby and Charles led. As they emerged from the woods, they sang a song from a popular Donald Duck cartoon playing in the movie houses. It was full of red-white-and-blue sass and spite, making fun of German oompah-pah bands to ridicule those who'd blindly followed Hitler and his racist beliefs to become Nazis.

“Don't forget to add the raspberry after
Heil
!” called out Bobby.

The boys put their hands under their sweaty armpits and pumped their arms up and down in popping slaps, or stuck their tongues out and blew to make loud farting sounds to replace the Nazi
Seig Heil
salute.

“When der fuehrer says we is de master race

We heil
(BLAT)
, heil
(BLAT)
right in der fuehrer's face.”

They nearly split their sides with laughing after each fake fart—even Wesley.

“T
here!” Charles stuck a red thumbtack into Sicily. He took a step back from the world map he'd hung on their bedroom wall to admire his trail of pins. “Now we're talking.”

Wesley stopped fanning himself with a
Superman
comic book. The brothers shared an attic room under the gabled eaves of the Ratcliffs' green tin roof. Even though the white clapboard farmhouse was shaded by oak trees, they sweltered in warm months. That September afternoon the temperature had spiked back up to ninety, and their rotating circular fan only did so much good. But it was the only place for them in the three-bedroom house. The four American brothers were crammed together in one big bedroom on the second floor. Patsy, being the only girl, was given a small room to herself, and their parents occupied the last one.

Wesley tossed the comic book and stood to look at the map more closely. “We're doing better now, aren't we, Charles?”

“Quite!” Charles grinned at him. He pointed at the black-and-white photograph of Winston Churchill he'd pasted on the sloping ceiling. In it, Churchill made his famous V for Victory sign. “The Prime Minister showed us how to stand tall, all right. Remember what he said after Dunkirk, when France fell and we ended up facing Hitler all by ourselves?” Charles lowered his voice to a growl: “‘We shall not flag or fail.…'”

Wes joined him: “‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.…We shall never surrender!'”

“Well done!” Charles applauded Wesley's recitation. He turned back to Churchill's image. “Now that we Allies have taken Sicily and landed at Salerno, we've got Hitler's Italian pals out of the fight at least. Maybe within the year, we can move up the boot of Italy and push the Nazis back over the Alps!” Jokingly, Charles saluted Churchill's round, jowly face.

In their bedroom, Charles tended to drop the American persona he was trying so hard to perfect and be unabashedly British with Wesley. He'd hung up a Union Jack flag, models of RAF Spitfires, and photos of their parents, plus the king and prime minister. Over Charles's bed was a picture of his school cricket team. Their father, a geography teacher, coached it.

Instinctively imitating his father's teaching specialty, Charles had been tracking the progress of the Allied armies on his large map. He'd agonized over British defeats—retreats from Greece, Crete, and island after island in Southeast Asia. Finally, that spring, the tide had turned, starting in North Africa with the defeat of Rommel, Hitler's “Desert Fox” tank commander.

Charles continued, more to himself than to Wesley: “
If
the Russians can survive Hitler's siege of Leningrad, and
if
the Americans can finally invade France, and
if
the Allies can take all of Italy, we should be able to squeeze Nazi Germany from three sides.” He put his hands on his hips and cocked his head, looking at his maps like an army general planning a campaign. “The operating word here is
if
we can do all those things,” Charles muttered.

It wasn't looking so great in Russia, for instance. The Nazis had blockaded Leningrad for more than three years. And nobody knew when the Allies would attempt a land invasion of occupied France. American and British pilots were flying near-suicide missions over Europe to bomb Nazi ammunition factories to “loosen things up” before a beach landing of ground troops could be dared. The air forces were losing planes right and left. Patsy's sweetheart, Henry, had written that flyers averaged only fifteen missions before their planes were shot down.

It was beginning to feel like the war would go on forever, that evacuating “for the duration” meant he and Wesley might be permanently stranded in the States. He wasn't sure he could stand that. Even though he and Bobby were good mates and he was enjoying high school, Charles was antsy to return to England and do his part. Several of his old school chums had become nighttime air raid wardens. Charles feared some of them called him a coward for evacuating to the U.S.

He reached over to the dresser he shared with Wesley to pick up his souvenir lump of shrapnel. He tossed it back and forth between his hands like a ball as he mulled things over. Back home, after air raids, he and his mates had emerged from their backyard Anderson shelters and searched for smoldering bits of flak from London's antiaircraft cannon. Charles even had a shard of a Nazi warplane, a knife-sized piece of red metal—probably part of the Nazi Iron Cross painted on Luftwaffe planes. He'd found it down the street from his house after a horrible night of bombs and fires, a tiny remnant of one of the few Nazi raiders the London ack-ack antiaircraft guns had stopped.

For a moment his mind flew home, wondering what his street looked like now. He tried to walk it in his memory, replanting all the rosebushes that had been charred, rebricking the fences that had tumbled down, to make the lane peaceful again. Charles felt his throat tighten and shook his head to rid himself of the image of destruction.

“Yes, a big
if
,” he repeated, going back to his analysis of Allied strategy of trying to surround Hitler's strongholds. “Unlike the Yanks, we know firsthand how big a fight the Nazis will put up, don't we, Wes,” he murmured.

“What did you say, Charles?”

Charles turned away from the map to look at his brother, about to repeat his worries loudly enough for Wesley to hear. But he stopped himself. Wesley's mop of blond curls and peaches-and-cream complexion gave him a typical British appearance but also emphasized how young he was, reminding Charles that as much as he needed to talk out his concerns, his younger brother wasn't emotionally ready to hear Charles's worries that the Allies might fail.

“Oh, nothing.” Charles put the blackened lump down. “Say, don't you have lessons to learn?”

Wesley sighed. “Yes. I have to memorize the forty-eight states and their capitals, although it won't be much use when I get home. I worry about not knowing my British geography.”

“I know,” said Charles. “I should have finished translating Virgil by now, and this high school doesn't even offer Latin. Their one teacher of it is off with the navy. How the deuce does Dad expect me to win entrance to Cambridge?”

He gestured for Wesley's homework. “Here, want me to test you?”

“Really? You don't mind?”

“Not at all. The only reading I have is for English Literature and I've already studied all the books on the syllabus.”

“Smashing!” Wesley handed Charles a list he'd written out for homework. “See how far I can recite. I need to spell them correctly, too.”

“Right-o.” Charles stretched out on his bed in the stream of the fan.

“Alabama, Montgomery. A-l-a-b-a-m-a, M-o-n-t-g-o-m-e-r-y.”

Charles nodded, thinking back on the capitals he'd had to memorize at Wesley's age—Bombay, Nairobi, Johannesburg—places that were part of the British Empire.

“Kentucky, Frankfort,” Wesley was continuing. “F-r-a-n-k-f-o-r-t.”

“F-
u
-r-t,” Charles interrupted.

“No, Charles, it's not like the German city. It's
o
-r-t.”

“Rubbish.”

“No, truly.”

“He's right, Chuck,” Bobby had climbed the stairs without Charles hearing him over the rattle and whirl of the fan and was leaning against the doorway. He grinned at Wesley. “I didn't realize you were so good at spelling, Wes. You know what? You should enter the county spelling bee. Bet dollars to doughnuts you'd win. Patsy won it when she was your age. I tried to keep up the tradition, but failed miserably!” He laughed. “And we can't count on Ron to keep up the family tradition either. He's my brother and I'd clobber anyone else who said this, but sometimes I think Ron was standing behind the barn door when they handed out brains—for schoolwork anyway. So, you need to enter it for us. We'd be mighty proud if you brought that trophy home again.”

“Gee, thanks, Bobby.”

Wesley beamed.

Charles had watched Bobby have that effect on countless boys, especially on the football team. Bobby had a confident friendliness and an ease with giving out compliments that, generally speaking, Brits didn't. Charles had come to really appreciate that about some Americans. He'd also marveled at the fact Bobby didn't seem to mind that he and Wesley occupied the attic room which Bobby could have claimed for himself as the eldest Ratcliff brother. Charles would try to replicate that kind of instinctive generosity when he got home to England.

“Came to tell you the bathroom's yours now, Chuck,” said Bobby. “Then I need your help candling today's eggs to check for bloodspots before crating them, okay? We've got a passel to deal with. The hens are in fine form.”

“Shore 'nough,” Charles answered in an exaggerated Virginia drawl as he grabbed his towel.

Laughing, Bobby and Charles bounded down the stairs together.

12 September 1943


Dearest Mummy,


How is Hamlet? Are you able to spare him a soup bone these days? I wish I could send some of our food. Nothing posh, but quite tasty. Pancakes with maple syrup are smashing!


The new school term has started. It is perfectly AWFUL. I have been skipped ahead to seventh grade because of being ‘so advanced.' Everyone is almost two years older and so much BIGGER. The worst is Ron is in my class because he had to repeat the grade! Our teacher, Miss Darling, thinks because he brought in an old tire for salvage that Ron is some natural-born leader. She put him in charge of our class's war efforts. It has quite gone to his head. He bullied one poor chap into stealing his mother's girdle to bring in for our rubber collection!


Even worse is studying the American Revolution. Was King George III really such a tyrant? It is quite hard being British when the teacher goes on about the Boston ‘massacre' and ‘lobsterbacks' gunning down a crowd of ‘innocents.' Now Ron has got everyone calling me ‘the Tory.'


I wish Charles were around at recess. But he has entered high school and larks about with older boys and tries to sound American. He even calls himself “Chuck.”


The heat is BEASTLY. It is hard to breathe until nighttime during American summers. But then fireflies light up in the grass. Have I told you about fireflies? They twinkle! They drift through the air to the trees and light them up in flashes through the night. We catch them and they crawl about, blinking on our fingertips. Sometimes I pretend I have caught little shooting stars.


But there are also terrifying things here too, Mummy. The other day an ENORMOUS snake fell out of a tree right on me. It tried to wrap itself around my throat, just like Kaa in
The Jungle Book
. If Charles had not pulled it off, I might be D-E-A-D now.


I miss you ever so much, and things like the sound of London's church bells. Does Big Ben still chime the hour despite being scorched by the Luftwaffe? Have you got our roof built back where it shattered from old Adolf's bombs dropping on the street?


I try not to worry, but I haven't heard from you for FIVE WHOLE WEEKS. Your last patch of letters must have been sunk by the Jerries. Do let me know you are all right.


Your loving son,


Wesley Bishop