Last Telegram (18 page)

“What's in it?”

“My photographs and some other precious things my mother gave me. They will be safer with you.”

“I'll guard them with my life,” I said, trying to stop my voice wobbling, to be strong for him. “Now I know you'll have to come back for them.”

As we kissed, the policeman shouted again. “Come on, lads. Two minutes, or I'll have to come and get you.”

I clutched at him, willing time to stop, trying to capture the feel of his lips, the warmth of his body, the touch of his fingers, the sweet smell of his hair.

“Write to me soon,” I whispered.

“Every day,” he promised.

And then we were downstairs and all of us embracing, and the boys were ushered through the front door by the policeman, each carrying the small suitcases they had arrived with all those months ago. Weasel-face shepherded them toward the van. There was the sound of doors opening, slamming shut. Kurt waving, tears streaking Walter's cheeks, and Stefan's pale face at the window, his eyes soft and sad.

The policeman got into the driver's seat, and as Weasel-face got in beside him, I started toward the front of the van as if by some desperate force of strength I could stop it driving off. Father shouted, “No, Lily,” grabbing my arm and pulling me back. He held me, both arms around me, and we watched in silence as the van accelerated away and disappeared as it turned the corner at the end of the road.

I gripped his hand and leaned on him to prevent myself falling, as if the world had just stopped and I was still turning.

• • •

It was nearly Christmas by the time we heard any more. Six long months during which, alone in my room each night, I tried to relive every moment, every sensation and gesture, every word of our precious last evening together. Six months of wondering where Stefan was and what he was doing, of looking up at the stars and moon, hoping he too could see them and was thinking of me. Six months of half-lived days, tearful nights, and dreary, painful emptiness, like losing a limb. I avoided going past the cottage. We'd given up the tenancy and its empty windows looked like blank eyes, keeping their sad secrets. I hid Stefan's writing case safely at the back of the drawer in my bedside table.

Father and I tried to find out where they had been sent, but each time we met with a wall of official secrecy. In my worst moments, I wondered whether Robbie had told the authorities about the boys, and contemplated the idea of challenging him. But each time, I flunked it. He would deny any involvement, of course, and the last thing I wanted was to give him any cause to feel vindicated or triumphant, or any reason to visit me again. And of course, our contract with Camerons was due for renewal any time now.

But as the months went by, my conspiracy theories seemed increasingly unlikely. The weary truth was, of course, that like all the Kindertransport children, the boys' names and those of their sponsors were already on some government paperwork somewhere. It was inevitable they would be traced, and it was far too late to change anything now.

Small planes fought in the summer skies, there were desperate battles and devastating air raids, but I felt oddly detached from it all. Churchill tried valiantly to raise our spirits with his speeches. But nothing raised mine, until I received that first small blue aerogramme tightly packed with Stefan's neat, curlicued handwriting.

7th October 1940

Hay Camp, Australia

My Dearest Lilymaus,

I hope you are well and this letter reaches you safely. You may be surprised to hear that I am in Australia. How we got here is too long to write. Many trains and buses, then on a dreadful overcrowded ship called
Dunera
for two months. It was very hard, but we survived and landed here three weeks ago.

We are in a camp locked up like criminals—kosher butchers, Italian waiters, Austrian accordion players, and boys like us! But we have enough to eat and are treated well. After the journey, Australia is like heaven.

Have you ever been in a desert? It is hot and the sand blows into everything, but I did not expect it to be beautiful. Every morning, flocks of green parrots fly over our camp, and the sunsets are like the colors of silk—gold, red, purple, and blue. Last night, the sky shimmered like shot silk. When the stars come out, they are upside down!

The worst thing is being so far away from you, my lovely Lily. I think of us on our island together, watching the sky. Or in “our” tennis hut! It is hard to bear, especially at night. I pray you are safe and well. Please write if you can.

Ich liebe Dich,

DeinStefan x x x x

The medieval age of chivalry was an age of silk. Epic poems of gallantry and heroic deeds were circulated by wandering troubadours, tournaments were bedecked with silk-hung tents and banners, and rich silks caparisoned the horses. Knights received a silken sleeve or veil as a “gage,” a token of honor from the lady symbolically defended in the joust.

—
The
History
of
Silk
by Harold Verner

Christmas 1940 was only enlivened by the arrival of John, who had been given a few days leave, and Vera, who caught the last train out of London on Christmas Eve and had to stand all the way. They were both exhausted, and when we asked John about the bombing raids, he clammed up. When Vera wasn't with us at The Chestnuts, he spent most of the time sleeping.

I spent much of the time in bed too, wrapped up against the cold, reading and rereading the three precious aerogrammes that had arrived from Stefan, my few tenuous links with the boy who consumed my thoughts. At least he was safe, tucked away in the Australian desert and well away from war, I reasoned, even though his absence made an aching gap in my life. We were all glad when Christmas was over so that we could stop pretending that we were enjoying ourselves and get back to work. But we should have treasured every moment.

It was just a few days later and early morning when the measured rings sounded insistently through our sleepy house. I met Father on the landing, still in his pajamas. “Go back to bed, I'll get it,” I said, heading downstairs, wrapping my dressing gown tight against the winter chill.

The woman at the other end of the phone was flustered. “Is that Grace?”

“No, it's Lily. Who's this?”

“Beryl. From the London office.”

“Beryl. Of course. Good morning,” I said, taken aback. She usually sounded so calm and efficient.

“Have you been listening to the news?”

“No, not yet.” I glanced at the grandfather clock. It was ten past seven.

“Is Harold awake? I need to speak to him. There's been a hell of a raid. They say Cheapside's been hit.” I sat down heavily on the hall chair to catch my breath. This could be a disaster. The London office housed not only hundreds of precious customer files and accounts ledgers, but also the Verners archive of silk samples, dating back two hundred years.

Father was coming downstairs in his red paisley dressing gown. “Who is it?”

“Beryl. She says the office might have been bombed.”

He took the receiver and spoke calmly into it. “Beryl, good morning. Harold here.” As he listened, his face, already shadowed with morning stubble, turned grayer still.

“Have you rung anyone else? The police?” I couldn't hear her reply.

“There's nothing else for it, then. I'm on my way.” Then, more firmly. “No, Beryl, you are absolutely not to go. I can handle it. Stay at home and I'll telephone you as soon as I know anything further.”

He put the receiver carefully into its cradle and turned to Mother and me, steadying himself with a hand on the telephone table. “It doesn't look good,” he said. “All Beryl knows is the radio report of a huge raid—the biggest yet, they're saying—and direct hits on the city. They mentioned Cheapside and a dozen other streets. She's tried the police but no one's answering.” He glanced at the clock. “If I hurry, I can catch the eight thirty.”

“You must have a cooked breakfast before you go, my darling.”

“Don't fuss, Grace. Tea and toast will do.” As he turned to climb the stairs, his shoulders sagged and his usually firm step seemed tentative and weary. Something inside me clicked.

“I'm coming with you,” I said.

“I'm not sure, Lily, it could be unpleasant.”

“You'll need me even more if that's the case.”

He paused, then nodded his assent. “Wrap up warm then, my darling.”

At breakfast we listened to Alvar Liddell's portentous news:

More than thirty German aircraft were destroyed
in last night's raids over London. The raids lasted several hours and incendiary bombs caused over a thousand fires. Many are still burning despite the valiant efforts of our fire services, whose work has been hampered by broken water mains and an unusually low tide in the River Thames.

• • •

The railway carriage was packed with businesspeople and servicemen returning to their units after the Christmas break. There was an air of almost ghoulish excitement as they exchanged stories.

“Literally hundreds of the buggers this time, they said.”

“The ack-acks didn't stand a chance.”

“Don't seem to be able to stop them, do we?”

“Did you hear about the food storage warehouses that were hit the other night?” one said.

“Apparently all the little urchins were out collecting peanuts that had been roasted in the fire,” the other replied, and they both laughed mirthlessly.

“And what about all those butter rations that got melted? There were rivers of the stuff, they said. The housewives were out scraping it off the roads.”

“Don't blame them, must be grim.”

“There's not enough rescue workers. People are dying under the rubble.”

“Any news on casualties?”

As their conversation ebbed and flowed, I watched the morning mist slowly lifting over small villages, farms, fields, and woodland, all so calm and apparently unaffected by war, and wondered gloomily how long we could hold out. Would the landscape look different under German control? Would they straighten out the roads and hedges, make everything symmetrical for greater efficiency? I missed Stefan, but for the moment I was glad that he and the other boys were safely interned, away from the threat.

Father looked up from his newspaper. “I should have moved them out of London sooner,” he said quietly.

“You mustn't blame yourself,” I whispered back. “No one's been hurt, as far as we know.”

The head office of Verner and Sons, Silk Merchants, had operated in London since 1740: first in Spitalfields and for the past fifty years in the City, dealing with customers at home and overseas, buying and selling raw and woven silk, and managing the financial controls and audit. To the London staff, Westbury was merely the manufacturing end of the business. When the bombing started, Father had suggested they leave London, but they had been reluctant to move out to “the sticks.” As the air raids became more devastating, he had insisted. Just before Christmas, they had packed up the office, ready to move in January, just a few days' time. And now this.

The sun started to break through, but toward London the sky became dulled with a yellowish haze of smoke. The train edged into Liverpool Street Station even more tentatively than usual, and as we arrived, we could see why. The station was in complete confusion. The platforms were so jammed with people trying to get on trains leaving London that it was almost impossible to get off the train. We pressed on through the crowds toward the tube station, but when we got there we could see at the entrance a hastily handwritten sign: “
Closed
due
to
bombing
.” At the bus depot, a dozen red double-deckers were parked, going nowhere. The taxi rank was empty.

“Looks like we're on Shanks's pony,” Father said. “Are you up for it?”

I nodded. I'd walked the route to Cheapside with him just a couple of months ago; it was just a few streets away. “Only takes ten minutes, doesn't it?”

But as we came out of the station, we stopped in our tracks. The streets were unrecognizable, transformed into piles of rubble, punctured by craters and broken buildings. Our eyes searched for familiar landmarks, but there were none. It looked like a foreign place. The city had been remodelled. It was chaotic, reminding me of the terrifying Old Testament depictions of hell in the color plates of our ancient family Bible.

Father took my hand and squeezed it. I squeezed his back, too stunned for words.

My thoughts could barely keep up with the horrors my eyes were witnessing. In some places, the interiors of what had once been offices were exposed where external walls had been ripped away, some of them strangely untouched with desks and cabinets, curtains and carpets still in place.

On the top floor of a building to our left, there was a kitchen, complete with cooker and fridge, chairs set in their places around the table still laid with blue-and-white-striped plates and a matching fruit bowl, as though its occupants had just left the room. Next door was a bathroom with the mirror hanging above the basin, towels on their rails, bizarrely undisturbed.

On the other side of the road, a bus had been thrown, like a toy discarded by a careless giant, coming to rest on its side against a wall. Through its crazed, charred windows, we could see the rows of seats still in place. I prayed no one had been on board.

After several moments, Father cleared his throat.

“Ruddy hell,” he said. “Do you think we can find our way through this mess?”

I wanted to run away, to pretend we had never witnessed these terrifying scenes, but heard myself saying, “We've got to get to Cheapside somehow.”

We started to walk again, and the sheer effort of concentration needed to pick our way among the debris helped push the fear to the back of my mind. The air was filled with cloying, suffocating mortar dust and the acrid, choking smoke of fires still burning among the rubble, like some kind of infernal underworld. In places, I had to hold my coat sleeve to my nose because of the sickening stench of raw sewage from broken drains. We became covered, like everything and everyone else, in black smuts and gray dust.

At almost every corner were roadblocks. When Father approached a policeman to ask which route we should take, he answered with weary resignation.

“Your guess is as good as mine, sir. It's a bugger's muddle just about everywhere.” He regarded us with sad eyes. “I wouldn't bother, if I were you, with the young lady and all.”

Father turned to me. “Do you want to turn back?”

I shook my head. “Not now we've come this far. What about you?”

“I'd never have brought you if I'd known. I can't believe the office can have escaped damage in this lot,” he said.

“We're here to find out, aren't we?” I said, trying to keep my spirits up. “It can't be far now. Let's carry on.”

In one place—it must have been Threadneedle Street—dozens of people, children and adults, swarmed over the ruins of a destroyed building, apparently unafraid of collapses and unexploded bombs. The police and air raid wardens were trying to keep order, but it was an impossible task. As they shooed one group away, others clambered onto the wreckage behind them.

“What are they looking for?” I asked a warden.

“Money,” he said, with a resigned sigh. “Happens every time a bank gets hit. We can't control them. But the vaults are safe under the rubble; there's not usually much to be had.”

A small boy ran past triumphantly waving a bent coin, heading toward a caravan with a blackboard advertising, “
Tea
½d, toast with butter 1d.”

“Let's have a cuppa,” Father said. “I'll get them.”

I sat on a broken wall, and as I waited, my eye was caught by a rescue worker who crouched down to pick up something that looked like part of a shop dummy. With rising revulsion I realized that it was a human hand, a very pale, slender hand with rings on the fingers, stopping abruptly at the wrist, cleanly, with no blood. I wanted to turn away, but my gaze seemed unwillingly fixed. The man appeared almost unmoved. Still crouching, he gently eased the rings from the fingers, put them into a brown envelope, wrote something on it with a stub of pencil, and put it into his pocket. He wrapped the hand in a strip of white sheeting and carefully placed it into his shoulder bag before standing up to continue his search.

All this he executed in the most matter-of-fact way. No one else seemed to have noticed, and I could barely believe what I'd seen. This was the hand of a real woman, whose body was probably buried in the rubble, I thought, with a shiver. Till last night she had been going about her daily life, working, eating, sleeping, trying to have a bit of fun in spite of the war. Now, in an instant, all that was wiped out. Her family had lost a sister, wife, or mother. They would learn this from the rings, I supposed, but what was left of her body might never be identified. How many other dead or dying people lay concealed under these anonymous piles of bricks and mortar? I found myself scanning the wreckage, gruesomely fascinated, afraid to see other body parts.

Father returned with two steaming mugs. “Are you all right, my dear?” he asked anxiously. “You look as though you've seen a ghost.”

“I think I have,” I said, standing to take the cup from him. The hot sweet tea burning my throat was a welcome reminder that I was still alive, still capable of feeling. Father pressed me to tell him what was wrong, and as I described what I'd seen, my legs started to tremble uncontrollably. He sat me down again, gave me his handkerchief, and held me against his solid, reassuring bulk until the sobs stopped.

“I wish I could protect you from this, my darling.” With my head against his chest, his voice was a deep, comforting rumble. “But it won't last forever, and we'll see it through together, you and me.”

“I love you, Father,” I said, raising my head to kiss his cheek and realizing that it was the first time, as an adult, that I'd told him.

He squeezed me tighter. “My precious girl. I love you too. It means so much, having you working with me. Couldn't do it without you. It's the only good thing about this bloody war.”

“I wish it was over,” I said, feeling tearful again.

“We'll get through it together, my darling,” he said. “John will come home safely and we'll all get back to normal. You'll see.”