The Other Child (11 page)

For the first time in the conversation Fiona had smiled, not happily so much as wryly.

‘Then you judge her wrongly, I'd say. You are second to no one in her eyes. But you never did have much of a feeling for the subtleties of human interaction. Still,' she was serious again, ‘I'd appreciate it if you would delete the emails. I'd feel safer.'

The computer was ready now and Chad opened his mailbox. Fiona had sent him five emails over the course of the last half year – five, that is, with an attachment. Between each of them there had come a flurry of her usual messages.

She would write something to pep him up when the weather was bad and she feared that he was in pain; something sharper when she was annoyed that he had not been in touch for a while; something ironic when she had once again met someone they both knew and she could be nasty about the acquaintance. Sometimes she wrote about a film she had seen. Sometimes she complained about growing old. But she never mentioned old times, the past which they shared.

Until March of this year. Then the first file arrived, along with her instructions on how to open it.

‘Why?' he had asked in his reply – nothing else, just
Why
, in bold italics, followed by at least ten question marks.

Her answer had been: ‘Because I have to straighten things out for myself. I have to tell someone. And as no one else can know about it, it can only be you.'

His reply: ‘I know it all anyway.'

And she in turn: ‘That's why you're no danger.'

Then he thought: She can't handle it.

He remembered asking her the previous evening what had triggered her writing it all down, all the things that no one was supposed to know, only him. Though he knew it anyway, he was not keen to be reminded of it.

She had considered his question as she smoked, then said, ‘Maybe what triggered it was realising that my life won't last much longer.'

‘Are you ill?'

‘No. But old. It can't be too long now. No need to pretend.'

He had read some of what she had written, but not all of it. Often he had felt it was asking too much of him. He would get angry at her for bringing it all up again, for picking at the scab. She was unearthing something dead and buried.

He clicked on the first email. It was dated 28th March. It was in Fiona's typical style.

‘Chad, hi, how are you? It's dry and warm today so
you must be doing well
! I've written something that you should read. It's just for you. You know the story, but maybe not every detail. You're the only one I trust. Fiona.

PS: Double-click on the file. Then just click on
Open
!'

He opened the file.

The Other Child.doc

1

At least we did not have to look after a relative back then, at the end of the summer of 1940, when all our lives changed. Many of my girlfriends' fathers were at the front and their families were trembling at the thought of receiving bad news. My father, on the other hand, had already died before the war, in the spring of 1939. He got into a fight with another drunk on one of his infamous pub crawls, in which he would drink away the little money he earned as a street cleaner. It was impossible to tell afterwards who had started the fight and what it had actually been about. Probably nothing in particular. In any case, my father was badly injured and had to go into hospital, where he contracted tetanus – a disease that people were not really able to deal with in those days. He died very soon after. Mum and I were left on our own and had to get by with the widow's pension from the state. Actually we were better off financially than before, because no one took all the money down the pub. And Mum found two jobs as a cleaning lady, so increasing our income. We managed as best we could.

In the summer of 1940 I turned eleven. We lived in London's East End, in a little flat up under the roof. I remember how stiflingly hot that summer was. Our flat was like an oven. Germany was getting the world involved in the war. France had been occupied, and the Nazis had pocketed our Channel Islands while they were at it. People here were getting nervous, even if the government was exhorting us to remain firm, appealing to people's fighting spirit and talking of an imminent victory over Nazi Germany.

‘What will we do if they come here?' I asked Mum.

She shook her head. They won't come, Fiona. You can't take an island as easily as that.'

‘But they occupied the Channel Islands!'

‘They were small, and undefended, and they're right off the coast of France. Don't worry, darling.'

The Germans themselves did not come, but from September they sent their bombers. The Blitz began. Night after night London was attacked. Night after night the sirens wailed, people gathered in air-raid shelters, houses collapsed and whole streets disappeared under ash and rubble. The next morning a previously familiar area could look completely different, because a house had been flattened, a pile of bricks, smoking away. On the way to school I would see people searching in the ruins for belongings that might have survived the inferno. One time I saw a dirty, thin young woman who was burrowing around like a madwoman among the stones of a collapsed house. Blood ran down her hands and arms. Tears streamed down her face and left bright, shiny tracks in the layer of dust.

‘My child is down there!' she screamed. ‘My child is down there!'

No one seemed to be concerned. That shocked me deeply. When I told Mum about it that evening, the colour drained from her face and she took me in her arms. ‘I'd go crazy if anything happened to you,' she said. I think that was the day the idea started to grow in her that I should leave London.

Evacuations had started before then. On 1st September 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland and two days before England declared war on Germany, evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people from the large cities had begun. There was already a fear of attacks from the air, especially the fear that the Germans might launch poison gas attacks. Every citizen had to carry a gas mask at all times, and everywhere in the city there were warnings reminding us of how real the danger was.
Hitler will send no warning
, they said in giant black letters on a bright yellow background. In other words, we could be the victims of his cunning at any time.

Most evacuees were children, but pregnant women, the blind and people with other disabilities were also evacuated. Mum had asked me in passing if I wanted to leave, but I had objected violently and so she had dropped the idea. I was extremely relieved, because the whole thing flooded me with fear, almost horror. For some odd reason the first evacuation had been named
Operation Pied Piper
, and like most children I knew the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the rat-catcher who led a long train of children into a mountain, never to be seen again. That was not exactly reassuring. Somehow I had the idea that we were all to be taken away, never to return.

In addition, from what we heard it was pretty chaotic. England had been divided into three zones: evacuation zones, neutral zones and zones where the evacuees were to be received. There were reports of chronically overcrowded trains, of traumatised young children who could not cope with being separated from their parents, and of a lack of organisation when it came to receiving the evacuees in other towns and other families. East Anglia reported it was full to bursting, while in other areas hundreds of families who had offered to take someone were left waiting. People cursed the government for not having allocated enough money for the whole operation. And then the bombs did not fall as expected. At the end of the year most of the evacuees returned to their families and their hometowns.

‘You see how good it is I didn't go,' I had said to Mum.

But then came the summer of 1940, and now everyone realised that the war was going to last longer than they had hoped and that the Nazis had moved dangerously close. From June large-scale evacuations took place once more. Parents, particularly those who lived in London, were asked again and again by the government to send their children away.

Once more posters covered the centre of London. This time they carried a picture of children and in large letters the words:
Mothers! Send them out of London!

However, no one was forced to do it. Parents could decide for themselves what they wanted to do. So for a while I managed to talk Mum out of her notions of getting me somewhere safe.

Now in the autumn my position started to weaken, which made me uneasy.

At the start of October our house had taken a direct hit. We were sitting in the air-raid shelter with other people from our house when there was a deafening boom above us. We thought our eardrums would burst. At the same time the ground trembled and quaked, and dust and plaster fell from the ceiling.

‘Out!' screamed a man. ‘Everyone out at once!'

Some people swarmed to the door in panic. Others called out for calm. ‘It's hell out there! Stay here. The roof will hold!'

Mum was for staying. There were so many bombs landing in quick succession nearby that, she thought, we would be more likely to die on the street than to be buried here in the cellar. I would have preferred to go outside. The fear of suffocating down here was making it difficult for me to breathe. Not that I was going to do anything that Mum had not given me the OK for. So I stuck it out, shivering and trembling, with my head in my hands.

In the early hours of morning the ‘all clear' sounded and we crept out, fearful of what we would find up above. Our house was a pile of rubble. The one next to it too. And the one next to that one. In fact, apart from a few houses, the whole street was. We rubbed our eyes and stared incredulously at the sight of the devastation.

‘Now it's happened,' Mum said in the end. Like all of us, she had swallowed a lot of dust. Her voice sounded as if she had a cold. ‘Now we don't have a home any more.'

We poked around in the ruins for a while, but did not find anything that was still in a usable state. I found a bit of cloth which had been part of my favourite dress, on whose red linen yellow flowers were printed. I took the scrap. The rest of the dress was not to be seen.

‘You can always use it as a hanky,' Mum said.

Then we set out to find new accommodation. My father's sister and her family, our only relatives, lived a few streets further on. Mum was sure they would take us in for a while. Auntie Edith's house was indeed still standing, but they were not at all pleased to see us. The family of six was squeezed into a two bedroom flat on the ground floor and had already taken in a friend who had also become homeless.

In addition, Edith's husband had just been sent back from the field hospital and was not – as Edith confided in a whisper – quite right in the head at the moment. He would sit and stare out of the window all day, now and then starting to cry for no reason. It was clear that Mum and I were all that was needed right then.

And now Mum spoke again about us separating, and she sounded serious. I heard her talk to Edith about it.

‘I'm thinking of sending Fiona to the country. They're taking more and more children away. She's not safe in London.'

‘Good idea,' said Edith relieved. It meant one less person in the overcrowded house. Not that she wanted to send her own children away just yet. She claimed she would not be able to bear their leaving.

Unfortunately my mother was less sentimental. Although I cried and screamed and showed my complete despair, she did not back down. She arranged everything so that it could go ahead.

Soon I was on the list to go to Yorkshire with a group of children at the start of November.

2

The train was to leave Paddington Station at nine in the morning. The morning of 4th November was foggy, although we could see that the sun was trying to penetrate the grey.

‘You'll see. Today will be a glorious autumn day,' Mum said to cheer me up.

My mood could not have been blacker. I did not care whether the sun shone or not. I trotted along beside my mother with the obligatory gas mask over my shoulder and a little cardboard suitcase in my hand, which Edith had lent me. The government had put together lists of what the children should take with them, down to the number of handkerchiefs considered necessary. As we had been bombed and had little money, Mum had not nearly managed to meet all of these requirements. Auntie Edith had plundered her children's old clothes for a dress that was too short for me, a sweater whose sleeves did not nearly reach to my wrists, and a pair of boots that were actually made for a boy. Mum had sewn a nightie for me and knitted two pairs of socks. I was wearing the checked dress that I had been wearing on the night of the bombing, as well as my old cardigan and my red sandals – they were the only belongings of mine that I still had. It was really too cold for those clothes and Mum warned me that I was bound to catch a cold. I insisted stubbornly. I had lost everything I possessed, my own mother was sending me away – I needed at least
my
dress and
my
shoes to have something familiar to hold on to. So let me catch a cold. Maybe I'd catch pneumonia and die. It would serve Mum right if no one from her family was left alive.

We had to walk down the street we had lived in until that October night. It was the most ruined street in London, it seemed to me. Right at the end a single house had been standing since the raid, but already from a distance we could see that it too had fallen victim to the air attacks.

‘I think they don't want to leave a single stone standing in London,' Mum said in disbelief, and with
they
she meant the Germans.

As we approached, we noticed the intense smell of burning that hung over this last bastion in our street – now finally vanquished. We saw that smoke was rising from the rubble. The house must have lost the battle with the bombers in one of the past few nights. We had known the families who had lived there a little, as you know each other when you live not many yards from each other in the same street. We knew who was who, exchanged pleasantries, knew a little about everyone's lives but not in detail. The Somerville family had lived on the first floor. Father, mother and six children. I had played with their second oldest daughter sometimes, but only when I was bored and could not find anyone else to play with. The Somervilles were considered anti-social. Although no one spoke about this in front of a child, I had an inkling of this. Mr Somerville drank, and much more than my daddy. He drank from morning to night. You could never catch him sober. He was abusive to his wife, which had led to Mrs Somerville, who apparently also drank more than was good for her, walking around with a grotesquely crooked nose. It had been broken in a fight with her husband and mended wrongly. He was also abusive to his children. People said that some of them were a little soft in the head because of how often he had hit them, and that their mother's excessive consumption of alcohol during her pregnancies had caused them damage. Whatever the truth of the matter, there was always the fear of appearing rather suspect yourself if you were too close to the Somervilles, and so for that reason too I had kept contact with the children to a minimum.