The War that Saved My Life (25 page)

“Well, I have been reading up on the procedure,” Dr. Graham said. “It wouldn’t be me who would do the surgery, we’d have to send you to a specialist. I’ve written to one that I think would be best. He does say that you won’t ever have a normal foot. Please understand that. You could have if treatment had started early enough, but you can’t now. You won’t get a normally functioning ankle. But we could hope for a foot that looked normally positioned, that you could walk on with the plantar surface down.” He looked at me and added, “That means the bottom. What should be the bottom of your foot would be the part touching the ground.”

I thought about this. “Would it hurt?” I asked.

“You would be sleeping during the surgery,” he said. “We would give you special medicine to make you stay asleep, and you wouldn’t feel anything then. Afterward, yes, it would probably hurt. You’d need to stay in hospital for quite a long time too—probably several months. Your foot would be kept in plaster casts.”

“Would I be able to wear shoes?”

His eyes smiled, even though his mouth did not. “Yes,” he said. “When everything was healed, you would.”

I thought of something else. “Who pays for it?” I asked. It cost a pile of money to stay in hospital.

Susan and the doctor exchanged glances. “We’ll deal with that problem when we come to it,” Dr. Graham said. “I’m sure there are charities we could get involved.”

Susan and I walked home silently through the blustery freezing wind.

“What are you thinking?” she finally asked.

“He said if I’d started treatment early, I could have had a normal foot.”

“Yes,” Susan said. “Most babies born with clubfeet have them fixed right away.”

“All the way fixed?”

Susan put her hand on my shoulder. “Yes. All the way.”

I could have always lived outside the one room. I could have been like Jamie, running fast. I said, “I thought you kept writing to Mam because you wanted to get rid of us.”

Susan said, “No wonder you were angry.”

I felt fragile, not the way I had when I’d exploded on Christmas Eve, but the way I’d felt the next morning, when the only thing that kept me together was Jamie’s smile. Jamie’s and Susan’s smiles.

At home I sat at the table while Susan put the kettle on. “Do you want to go ride?” she asked. I shook my head. I drank the tea she put in front of me. I pulled my plait over my shoulder and studied the blue ribbon at the end of it. Then I pulled off the slipper shoe Susan had made, and pulled off my stocking, and looked at my foot. The awkward U-shaped ankle. The tiny toes that curled up, not down. The rough calluses where my skin had torn open and then healed, over and over again.

Susan said, “It’s not your fault.”

I said, “I always thought it was. I thought I’d done something wrong.”

“I know,” Susan said.

“It’s disgusting,” I said.

Susan said, “I never thought so.”

I searched her face to see if it was a lie. She looked at me steadily. She said, “If you feel very angry, go outside and throw something.”

I didn’t feel angry. I felt sad. So sad I could get lost in the sadness. But when I finished my tea, I got out paper and a pencil, and in my very best handwriting, wrote a letter.

Dear Mam,
it said,
please let them fix me.

I waited for a reply.

Twice a day the postman dropped letters through the slot on the front door. Twice a day I went to look. Susan said it would take at least two days for the letter to get to London, and two days for an answer to come back to us, but ten days passed and still there was nothing.

“I bet they aren’t delivering letters in London,” Jamie said. “Because of the war.” I could tell by the look on Susan’s face she didn’t think that was true.

On the twelfth day a letter I recognized fell at my feet. My own.
Return to sender
was scrawled across it.
No longer at this address.

“She’s moved,” Susan said, turning the unopened envelope over in her hands. “She lives somewhere else now.”

Susan said perhaps Mam had a new job and had moved to be closer to it. She said perhaps the government had requisitioned our flat. She said there were a number of reasons that Mam might have moved that didn’t mean she’d abandoned us, and she, Susan, would make inquiries through the WVS. Someone in London was bound to know where Mam had gone.

“What happens to us?” Jamie asked, wide-eyed.

“You stay with me,” Susan said, “just like you do now. Your mam knows where you are. She knows you’re safe.”

“What happens when the war’s over?”

Susan took a deep breath. “Your mam will come and get you.”

“What if she doesn’t?” Jamie insisted.

“Don’t worry,” Susan said. “I’ll make sure someone always takes care of you.”

“I’ll take care of him,” I said, suddenly furious. “I took care of him before, not Mam.” I hated—I hated—
oh
. Even in my head I still couldn’t say I hated Mam. Even now. If I could get my foot fixed, maybe she’d be different. Maybe she’d love me. Maybe she would.

“You did a good job taking care of Jamie,” Susan said. “But it was a big job, and you shouldn’t have had to do it. So now you can relax. I can take care of you. You don’t have to fight so hard.”

She couldn’t take care of me. She talked about fixing my foot, but she couldn’t do it, not really. It was all just lies. And I wanted my foot fixed so badly. I was tired of it hurting. I wanted to be like a normal person. I wanted to walk without crutches, and I wanted to go to school, and I wanted to wear shoes on both feet. I never wanted to be locked up again.

I hated crying, but I couldn’t help it. I sat on the sofa and sobbed. Susan held me to her. “I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I know.” She stroked my hair. “If it was emergency surgery,” she said, “if you broke your leg or if your life was in danger, I could give permission for that. But this is a big operation, and it is elective, you can survive without it. I can’t give permission. I’ve asked the WVS and I’ve consulted a lawyer, and without your mam’s permission we can’t have it done. I’m so sorry. We’ll keep looking for her. We’ll find her.”

“I don’t want to just
survive,
” I said.

“I know,” Susan said. “So you’ll have to figure out how to make that happen, without fixing your foot.

“It’s hard,” she said, “but that’s the truth.”

The winter turned fierce. Snow drifted over the fields and made it impossible for Butter to climb our hill. Even the ride to Fred’s was so wretchedly cold I dreaded it. I went every day now, for afternoon feed, because the winter work was too much for Fred. He didn’t watch me ride. It was far too cold for that. I put Butter in a stall and did chores with Fred as fast as possible, and then rode home. Water froze in the troughs. The horses ate mountains of hay.

“It’s getting to be too much for you,” Susan said, when I came home with my toes and fingers numb, shivering so hard I couldn’t stop. “If Fred can’t manage, Lady Thorton will have to hire someone to help him, war or no war.”

“It’s not too much for me,” I said. “I promise.”

Susan insisted I would attend the village school next year. She borrowed all sorts of books from the town library and made me read them. If I couldn’t read a word, I was supposed to ask her what it meant. The more I read, the less I had to ask. She started me on math and history too.

Our days went like this. Susan woke us in the dark and cold. We washed up and dressed as quickly as we could. Downstairs, Jamie tended the fire in the living room while Susan worked the range. I went out to give Butter hay. After breakfast Jamie washed the dishes by himself while Susan and I took the blackouts down. Then we had housework, reading, and sewing. Jamie played with Bovril on the rug. Lunch, school for Jamie, shopping for Susan, me helping Fred. More chores, then dinner. Susan would read out loud while she massaged my bad foot, and then we went to sleep under the mountain of blankets Susan had piled on our bed.

Susan looked horrified when the first chilblains appeared on my bad foot. I shrugged. “I always get them,” I said. She shook her head at me and consulted Fred. He found a piece of stout leather meant for tack repair, and together he and Susan designed a sort of boot. I stepped my bad foot into it and buttoned it up the side. It was loose, so I could wear extra stockings, and Fred oiled it until it stayed dry even in wet mushy snow. That kept the chilblains from getting worse. They didn’t heal, however, which distressed Susan.

“I don’t know why,” I said. “They’re not bad.”

“They must hurt,” she said. I shrugged. They did, and the itching sometimes kept me awake nights, but I couldn’t do anything about it.

“My foot always hurts,” I said. “I always get chilblains in winter.” Usually I got them on my hands as well.

“Next winter,” Susan said, “we’ll stop them before they get started. There must be some way.”

I looked at her. “Will I be here next winter?”

She said, “It’s starting to look that way. The war’s not going anywhere.” She bought goose grease in the village and rubbed it on my sores.

Stephen’s colonel invited me for tea again and this time I went. The winter was so bleak I was glad to have something different to do, and, anyway, I wasn’t as afraid of things as I had been.

The colonel wore several cardigans layered over his waistcoat, even though his parlor was warm. He presided very grandly over a tea table set with scones and small ham sandwiches. “My dear,” he said happily, “we’ve saved up our butter ration for you.”

They had. They had a whole little dish of butter along with jam for the scones. “Thank you,” I said.

“Take plenty,” he urged.

I took a tiny sliver.

“More than that,” he ordered, as though he could see me.

I laughed. Stephen said, “She’s got loads, don’t worry,” and after that it was easy to relax and eat.

Stephen said there was a new poster up by the train station. It showed Hitler listening to some British people’s conversation. “‘Careless talk costs lives,’” Stephen quoted. “That’s what it says on the newsreels.”

Susan had taken us to see the film
The Wizard of Oz,
but she’d let me stay in the lobby during the newsreel. I said, “Jamie worries about spies, but I don’t know if they’re really real. The government’s so full of talk. How many spies do you think there are?”