Summerland Read online

  London is a place of magic and marvels, my mama once told me, all in whispers. Close your eyes, Liebling, and picture the city – a skyline of towers and spires. A river with ships that sail across every ocean on the planet, carrying sheep wool and spices, tree logs and diamonds … people and pineapples, cottons and queens. London is the heart of an empire. Unconquered. Defiant!

  Did I feel defiant? Definitely. Cold and overwhelmed too.

  I crossed the river. The Thames, they called it, pronounced tems. It was brown and clogged with boats. I wished I could stop and gaze out over the sliding, slapping water. You could watch boats for hours, I reckoned, and never get tired of wondering where they’d been and where they were going. Instead I had my own journey to make. To the one place on the planet where I might find what I was looking for.

  Which way was Summerland?

  Everything everywhere, all mine for the seeing, as long as I kept moving. Stone lions crowned with pigeons … a red bus splattered with an ad for toothpaste … men in turbans talking with such animation their beards bounced … a blind accordion player at the underground railway steps, my heart squeezing with every wheezy note she played.

  Mizzle turned to drizzle turned to rain. London people pulled down their hats and crouched under sudden umbrella sproutings. I thought they’d look happier that they’d won the war, not so pinched and tired. Didn’t they realise they had it better than Berlin? Yes, they’d been bombed, and there were rubble hills between the buildings, but no one was fighting to eat clumps of stringy nettles growing in the debris, or chasing rats along buckled train lines. I shivered at the memory.

  In Berlin it was women who cleared the bomb ruins at the end of the war, one brick at a time, one barrow after another. I’d done my fair share of chipping mortar from old bricks so they could be used again. Here in London, it was men with cranes who worked rebuilding. White, brown, black faces – the builders all wore wool caps but their hands were bare and their skin, whatever the colour, looked tough like gloves. Were they glad the bombs had fallen because now they had work and a pay packet every week?

  ‘We’ll bomb the Brits and all their filthy Jews into oblivion!’ Herr Trautwein used to boast when he came home from work. Herr Trout-face, with a shiny swastika on his lapel and a voice that carried through the apartment to where I was hiding. Herr Trout-face, manager in a factory near Berlin, building aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe so they could blow up the world. Frau Trout-face clucked and agreed with her husband, as all good Nazi wives should. My mama said nothing as she served them their dinner. The Trautweins didn’t know she was a Jew. Had no idea I was crouched in their spare-room wardrobe.

  Oh God – I couldn’t go back there. Not to that cramped darkness with Frau Trautwein’s fur coat tickling my nose and the fear that one sneeze would have me dragged into daylight to be shot.

  This world I now had to roam in, it was all suddenly too much. I ducked into a doorway and held my suitcase close. I clicked the clasps open and checked that my one grey glove was dry. Such a small thing, and so seemingly insignificant, yet that glove was the real reason I’d come to England: I had to find the other glove to make a matching pair.

  One by one the street lamps came on, making the rain shine silver. People poured out of the buildings, leaving the windows dark behind them. They all had somewhere to go. I did too, only the old fear gripped me: if I moved I’d be caught.

  Across the street a boy on a bike skidded to a stop outside a grand building of golden stone, with carved lions guarding the entrance. One window in this building was still bright. I saw the silhouette of a man standing there, looking out, as if searching for someone. I wondered if he’d find whoever he was looking for. If I would. Then the blind was drawn and the man moved away.

  The boy on the bike slapped a bundle of evening-edition papers on the pavement by a news kiosk. I thought of the reporters and photographers back at the station. It was the worst luck I’d been caught on camera. Someone might see me. Accuse me. Arrest me. Better to be invisible. So here I was. Unseen. Unknown. One small soul, lost among the ghosts.

  Hot Buttered Toast

  I’m not afraid of ghosts. Some people are, but I don’t know why. The dead don’t harm us – they leave that task to the living. I’d been seeing ghosts ever since I climbed out of the rubble after the bomb blast in Berlin, powdered with brick dust that stuck to the blood.

  Herr Trautwein once bragged, ‘The RAF will never drop a single bomb on German soil!’ That was shortly after Mama got the job as their housekeeper – on false papers of course. She’d long since destroyed her proper passport, stamped with a J for Jude – Jew. She used the last of our precious money to pay for a false identity. I had to memorise her fake name. I was used to that – forgetting who we really were, to remember who we had to be.

  This was after the other hiding places had failed, maybe two or three years into the war. I forget dates as well as places. I carry tunes in my head instead. Mama smuggled me into the apartment while both Trauts were out. Frau Trautwein went to the Nazi Women’s League meetings, where they boasted about their offspring and knitted children’s clothes for charity. The Trauts had specified no dependents on the job description, but Mama was desperate for work, and the job came with food and shelter. It was cold living rough. We hadn’t eaten much for days, just raw potatoes we dug straight from the ground in someone’s allotment.

  How ironic, that after everywhere in Europe we’d searched for safety, we ended up in Berlin, the heart of the regime working to stamp Jews out. The only thing more outrageous would be turning up at Hitler’s bunker looking for a bed and a bite to eat.

  ‘They won’t expect us here,’ Mutti explained. ‘They think Berlin is Jew-free.’

  They were wrong. We saw others like us, scuttling about after curfew, or curled up in the sewers. Jews in hiding were called submarines, because they were under the surface. Jews not hiding were called dead.

  So Herr Trautwein helped build aeroplanes to bomb Britain, and Britain retaliated with bombs on Germany. By the time all the bombs had fallen it was hard to tell ghosts from flesh-and-blood people, we were all so faint and grey.

  Here in London ghosts were everywhere, dressed in all kinds of clothes – uniforms, evening gowns, shawls, short skirts, whatever they’d been wearing when they died. Some of them noticed me as I pushed between warm living bodies in an underground station to find a map of the rail network. Mostly the dead minded their own business, travelling in the groove of their last living moment.

  Long ago one magic summer Mama had travelled across London by car. A Silver Ghost, she’d called it. ‘But you’ll need to get the train,’ she told me. ‘Look for King’s Cross station.’

  From the name I expected a king and a cross, or at least a crown. Instead I found arched girders thick with pigeon droppings.

  ‘All fares!’

  The ticket inspector was moving along the train carriage. I knew this game. I’d played it before, in Berlin, keeping ahead of the uniform then jumping out at a station, sprinting along the platform and dodging into one of the compartments that had already been checked, just as the train moved off again. It was a trick I’d learned from other feral children after the war was over. We were like packs of rats, scavenging all over the skeleton of the city. If I hadn’t heard that the Red Cross were helping Jewish refugees get to England, I might have been stuck there still.

  I squished into a compartment and sat down, suitcase tucked between my legs. Other passengers wrinkled their noses. Was it me that smelled bad or my sandwich? Hard to tell. Ignoring the disapproval, I fed the fish paste to the wolf in my stomach.

  A young soldier opposite was reading the evening newspaper. My heart jolted at the headline.

  NEW HOMES IN ENGLAND FOR NAZI VICTIMS

  There was a photograph of a flash-bright face and a check coat. A picture of me, being ambushed by those idiot reporters. This was a disaster! What if I was recognised and caught before I got to Summerland? The sol
dier caught me staring. He folded the newspaper – thank God – and leaned forward with a stained-tooth smile.

  ‘Going far, darlin’?’

  I pretended not to hear.

  A hefty woman next to him nodded at the newspaper headline. ‘Look at this: more foreigners flooding the country, coming here to sponge off us hardworking English. A disgrace, I call it.’

  Please don’t look at the picture.

  The soldier ignored her and spoke to me. ‘Come on, darlin’, smile – it might never happen.’

  ‘Aw, leave her alone,’ said his mate, a sailor.

  The soldier casually put his hand on my knee. ‘Just being friendly, aren’t I? A pretty girl out on her own likes a bit of company.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think that if it was your sister,’ said the sailor.

  The soldier pulled his hand back quickly, saving me from having to break his wrist or stab him through the palm with my knife.

  ‘Less of that hanky-panky if you please,’ huffed the hefty woman. ‘Honestly, girls today don’t know how to behave! I blame the war – giving young people too much freedom. Girls going away from home and wearing trousers and who knows what. No wonder the world’s in such a mess.’

  ‘Mind your own business!’ scowled the soldier. ‘And the world’d be even more of a mess if we hadn’t gone over there to sort old Hitler out. Why shouldn’t we have a bit of fun, now we’re back?’ He eyed me in a way that made me wish I had the protection of trousers, not a flimsy skirt over bare legs. At least he’d forgotten about the newspaper.

  He went to light a cigarette in the train corridor. The sailor got up to follow him.

  ‘Look after yourself,’ he mumbled as he brushed past.

  I watched them slouch and smoke and joke, feeling jealous. It was easy for men to do things. Girls were always getting warned about what might be done to them. Mama said it was safer to be a girl in wartime. In the early months they’d only been rounding up men and boys. Arresting anyone who might be a threat. There’d been three of us back then – me, Mama and Papa. We were waiting to hear from England, about a safe place to live. Then all the Jewish men in town got taken. ‘I’ll find you!’ Papa said, as they dragged him along the street, away from me and Mama.

  He never did.

  It was so long ago I couldn’t remember his face or his voice. I stared into the glass of the train window, thinking how things could have been different.

  The hefty woman who didn’t like foreigners fell asleep. She snored. When the train reached the station she was supposed to get off at, I didn’t bother to shake her awake. My own eyes were so heavy. but I had to keep alert to check every single station name. It was only safe to sleep when you were properly hidden, or if Mama was on guard. Not safe now. Definitely mustn’t, wouldn’t …

  ‘All fares!’

  I must’ve nodded off, propped up against the window. We came to a halt. The carriage was empty. Just me and … the ticket inspector!

  Instinct kicked in: hide or get away. Nowhere to hide. I fumbled for the door handle and tumbled out onto the platform with my case. A whistle blew. Doors slammed shut. The train pulled off and I was alone in a circle of lamplight, rain spattering down.

  The station name sign was underneath a basket of drowned flowers: East Summer. Mama must have been watching out for me, because it was the very place on the planet I needed to be.

  Beyond the lamps of the station all was dark. Wet hedges edged a lane, making a black border to wide miles of windswept unknown. I felt a sense of emptiness – a space left behind in time.

  Head down I trudged along the lane … and walked straight into a policeman. Without hesitation, I turned and ran – straight into the hedge. A beast loomed up, all white eyes and steaming breath. It bellowed. I yelped and fell. The policeman hoisted me to my feet.

  ‘All right, all right, it’s only one of Old Rory’s cows having a moo at you.’

  A cow? Of course it was a cow. How stupid to panic. I had to think clearly. Behave normally. Mama had taught me how to produce real-seeming tears if necessary. She said to use this technique only as a last resort, because sometimes looking weak was the last thing you wanted.

  The policeman planted his feet wide.

  ‘To be fair, it’s more likely to be a bull – not nearly so stroppy as the cows. Old Rory’s got them to pasture on the old East Summer airfield now it’s closed. New here, aren’t you? A bit lost and wet by the look of it. Hang on, let me get me bike light and we’ll see what’s what.’

  I knew all about policemen. They sometimes started with a pretence of friendliness. Next thing you knew, there’d be a concrete prison cell, questions, beatings … unbearable things. Once in Berlin my mother had been missing for three days. They’d picked her off the street and interrogated her – What’s your name? Where do you live? Are you hiding something? By the time she came back, Frau Trautwein was furious. Without her trusty housekeeper she’d had to do her own cooking and cleaning and shopping. Mama apologised and said it had all been a misunderstanding, she’d get right back to work as soon as she’d changed out of her bloodied clothes.

  It had been one of the worst times of my life, those three days of not knowing. Of not daring to leave my hiding place to go look for her. Of being twisted with hunger because the potato peelings Mama had left me were soon gone. Of being parched with thirst because I couldn’t turn on the taps without the Trauts hearing, yet sick from the stench of the jar I had to pee in.

  Mama came to me as soon as it was safe. My darling, I’m sorry, so sorry, you poor dear … That night, when the Trauts had scuttled down to the bomb shelter and searchlights criss-crossed the sky, Mama walked me around the apartment until my legs worked again. Usually we’d play silent piano duets when we were alone together. After her time with the police Mama couldn’t play anything until her broken fingers had mended.

  Never trust a policeman, she said.

  This English policeman was wide and tall, made taller by a strange helmet with a silver badge. He had gingery whiskers on his chin, and hairs coming out of his nose too.

  He seemed surprised when I handed him my papers. He took them anyway and read them through.

  ‘Brigitta … Iggle? Eegoyle? Austrian, are you? Hitler’s homeland, eh? He should’ve stayed there, painting houses or whatever he did before trying to rule the world. Hmm, you don’t look much like a Nazi to me. Says here you’re with the Red Cross – a refugee.’

  I nodded.

  ‘From … how d’you say this …? Auswitsh? Blimey – heard about that on the wireless. Bloody awful it sounds, killing babies and everything. Like that Belsen place. Mr Oakley in the village, he can tell you about Belsen, except he won’t, it was so nasty. Don’t worry, you won’t find folks so badly behaved here in England, at least not in the village. Out towards town there’s the glove factory, Gant’s, and they do employ a lot of foreigners. No offence.’

  And then, instead of locking me up, or kicking me into the gutter, or shooting me on the spot, the policeman gave me back my papers and he smiled.

  He smiled.

  ‘I’m Constable Ribble. Where d’you need to get to, petal? I’ll give you a croggie on me bike.’

  In my suitcase I had a dictionary. It was a tiny thing, with pages too small to be any use as toilet paper, which is probably why it hadn’t been ripped up like other books. It was one of the few things I’d salvaged from the wreckage of the Trautwein building after the bombs. Midget Dictionary German–English English–German it said on the cover. I desperately wanted to check it now to see what on earth croggie meant, and why this Ribble had called me a petal. Wasn’t that something to do with a flower? Did I look floral? The constable’s dialect was nothing like the elegant English my mother had forced me to learn. I was in a place called Yorkshire now.

  You must speak like a local to avoid suspicion, Mama said, when we were looking for safe places to stay. If in doubt, say nothing.

  Constable Ribble pointed to the seat of his bi
cycle and mimed him pedalling with me balancing.

  ‘A CROG-GIE!’ he repeated, loudly and slowly. ‘No? Suit yourself. I’ll walk you back to the village anyhoo. I usually come to the station to pick up the evening papers that folk leave on the train – something to read while I’m dunking me biscuits on the evening shift. Nice time of evening this, ’cept for the rain. Most folk are snug and dry indoors, minding their own business, just a few rascals creeping round where they oughtn’t to be. Don’t suppose that’s you, is it? Up to no good?’

  Although he acted bluff, his eyes were sharp.

  I produced a smile.

  The lane led downhill until the hedges gave way to houses with warm chinks of light showing at curtained windows. Soon we were on a street with pavements, a pub – open, a shop – shut, and one solitary lamp post shining by a telephone box. A wide stream ran through the village and there was a pond.

  Ribble stopped by a small stone building with a blue lamp that said POLICE.

  ‘Why don’t you and I get out of this rain for a bit …? I’ll fix us a brew and rustle up biccies. No?’

  Very no. Brew and biccies could mean any kind of torture device.

  ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you’d better tell me where you’re heading. Can’t have you wandering around the village, scaring the cows and whatnot.’

  After so many months and so many miles it was time to commit. I lifted my chin and took a deep breath. I said it out loud.

  ‘Summerland.’

  ‘Summerland? You mean the big ’ouse? That’s easy. Cross that there bridge, follow the avenue and you can’t miss it. Say ’ow-do to the missus for me. You sure you’re all right? Fair enough. Goodnight for now then, Miss Eegoil …’

  I went over the arch of a bridge, with invisible water rushing beneath, and came to the start of a long avenue. Ranks of tall tree sentinels marched along either side. Beyond the trees were shadowed lawns, lumped with grey-grassy humps like the burial mounds of giant ancestors.