Eliza Graham's Blog, page 2
May 8, 2014
Kindertransport Children
Benny, one of the two main protagonists in The One I Was, is a Kindertransport child: sent as one of a group of nearly 10,000 Jewish children allowed to come to Britain from Germany, Austria and Poland. There is a statue outside Liverpool Street Station which I think beautifully expresses what the children must have felt as they arrived in their new country: fear, trepidation, excitement, curiosity or homesickness. Or perhaps all of those emotion. Do have a look at the image. Not sure what I make of the fast food bag and cup at the bottom right of the image--but now doubt if the children had come to Liverpool Street Station now, they'd have probably been either already clasping fast food or eyeing the stalls in the concourse. I remember reading about a young girl who'd brought a delicious sausage with her from home, but it was confiscated because the Brits didn't really understand 'Continental' foodstuffs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindertr...
The books I found particularly helpful in researching The One I Was include:
We Came as Children, And the Policeman Smiled, The Ninth Of November
and Other People’s Houses by Lore Segal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindertr...
The books I found particularly helpful in researching The One I Was include:
We Came as Children, And the Policeman Smiled, The Ninth Of November
and Other People’s Houses by Lore Segal.
May 7, 2014
The Fourth Chapter of TOIW
4
As promised, the morning’s lessons continued in English. Benny felt the wires in his brain fizzing with new meanings. Maths involved problems using pounds, shillings and pence.
‘One shilling and sixpence,’ he said in halting English, responding to a question about the total paid for a basket of groceries.
‘One and six.’ Dr Dawes gave him an approving nod. Benjamin Goldman, known for being lightning quick at sums back home, was finding this all very hard but knew he had a position to maintain. He thought briefly of Rudi, how Rudi would day-dream during maths, only paying attention when the teacher stood, ruler in hand, over his desk.
The same shriek that had woken them sounded through the window. The boys looked at one another, unsettled. Dr Dawes smiled. ‘A peacock. Ein Pfau.’ He wrote peacock on the blackboard, with a little picture of a bird with feathers fanned out behind it.
At break Benny took his football outside to the large lawn on the south side of the house and kicked it around with the other boys. He managed a good goal, one that would have been hard for Rudi to have managed. It was fun playing here at Fairfleet with these boys. But there was still a numb ache under his ribs when he thought of how he’d played football with his friend back in Germany. The peacock stood on the terrace, observing them. At least it had stopped that frightful screaming. Its tail lacked the bright blue feathers of those he’d seen in pictures. Perhaps they moulted.
‘Let’s play again after lunch,’ David said.
‘Only if we speak in English,’ Benny answered.
‘Ha ha.’
‘Seriously.’ He picked up his ball. ‘You want to play with my football, we use English. Only English.’ He said the last two words in the language itself.
The others exchanged glances. ‘Aren’t you taking this a bit too seriously?’ Rainer asked. Benny felt a little prickle of unease. He’d be marked out now as a teacher’s pet. He didn’t care. Back home it had always mattered to him what other boys thought. Not now. Becoming English mattered most. If the others felt differently, well, that was their choice.
‘Do you think the lake’s frozen?’ Rainer broke the tension by pointing at the stretch of water. ‘We could go skating.’
*
Every other night they had baths. The first few times it was easy to make excuses and dawdle so he was last and the others had left the steamy bathroom. But one night Rainer forgot his pyjama jacket and barged in as Benny was drying himself on one of the fluffy new white towels they’d all been given.
Benny felt Rainer’s gaze.
‘You’re slow tonight,’ the other boy said, plucking his pyjama jacket from the tiled floor and walking out. Benny took in a deep breath and let it out very slowly, watching the air condense on the mirror above the sink and turn into little drops of water.
‘I am becoming an English boy,’ he told his misted-over reflection. The real Benjamin Goldman was already a vague approximation of his former self.
*
As days passed it was easier and easier to become English. Benny started to think like the new person he’d become: the refugee who was blood -keen to suck up the new language and way of doing things. If the English held their cutlery a certain way, well, Benny would watch carefully and hold his knife and fork their way. If they drank tea with their breakfast, so would he.
When he met Alice Smith on the staircase he’d nod at her, ignoring the watchful expression in her pale green eyes. How easy it was if you acted like this: shrugged off any disapproval. At first the other boys had muttered about Benny’s insistence on speaking English at all times, regarding him as a teacher’s pet, as he’d anticipated. He’d relaxed a little now, allowing himself to talk to his room-mates last thing at night in their old language for a few minutes.
Lord Dorner, whom they still hadn’t seen since arriving at Fairfleet two weeks earlier, had ordered crates of toys from Hamley’s, which was apparently a large toyshop in London. The boys pulled English board games out of a crate.
‘We had this at home,’ Rainer said, pointing at a box set of Monopoly. ‘But with Berlin streets.’ There were Ludo and Scrabble as well. The largest crate contained a table-tennis set and bats. And a train set. Miles of track, a dozen engines, sleek liveried carriages, station buildings, bridges, points. Looking at them made something churn in Benny’s stomach.
‘You can take all that down the basement,’ Alice told them. ‘I don’t want to be tripping over it when I’m vacuuming.’
The older boys muttered about kids’ things, but Rainer and David carried the boxes down to one of the disused basement rooms and spent days arranging the train set on a large sheet of plywood the gardener found for them.
Benny tried to ignore their enthusiasm for the engines and points. He could still close his eyes and see the set he’d owned himself in Germany, still hear his father’s voice.
‘You must take platform length into consideration when you’re allocating wagons. And don’t neglect the issue with the points. Or the signalling problem at that first junction.’
Leave me alone, he told the voice. You don’t belong at Fairfleet.
‘Come on Benny,’ Rainer urged. ‘Help us get this track sorted out.’
He mumbled an excuse and walked out of the room, carrying his football. On the left of the passage a bright rectangle of light had appeared. A side door to the garden. He hadn’t noticed it before. He slipped through. The door took him out beside the tennis court. Alice Smith was shaking out rugs with a maid.
She scowled at Benny. ‘That door’s not to be used.’
‘I am sorry,’ he said.
She gave the rug a particularly vicious shake. ‘I just open it once or twice a year to air the basement. You boys don’t half try it on.’
The peacock strode towards them. Benny heard the rug flicking, Alice shooing it away. It cried at the bad treatment and Benny drove his fingernails into his palms, thinking again of tormented children.
A large oak stood at the edge of the back lawn. Benny kicked the ball again and again against its rough bark. Every slap of the leather was a slap against his own memory. When he came inside again he felt better. As long as he didn’t have to play with the trains.
*
He could be this reborn Benny during the day. But sometimes at night he remembered that he didn’t deserve this fresh chance at Fairfleet, with its soft-carpeted rooms and well-stocked library, its lawns where football could be played. His mind flitted to his old home, its tiled kitchen with pots and pans hanging from a ceiling rack and the stove emitting its constant warmth. He thought of his father, as he had once been, years ago, tumbling him on to the ground and pretending to be a bear, chasing him round the garden. He thought of his mother as she’d been before she fell ill, reading him a story before he fell asleep, buying him a bunch of red balloons once when she’d seen him gazing at the man selling them at the park gates.
Somewhere in his home town, another boy would be lying in bed. Probably not a comfortable bed like this one. That boy would be reviewing the past day: stones whizzing through the air to strike his neck as he walked through the streets, youths in uniform jeering at him.
‘Es tut mir leid,’ he muttered in the language he’d forbidden himself to use. ‘I’m sorry.’
He buried his face in the soft, downy pillow and begged sleep to come.
As promised, the morning’s lessons continued in English. Benny felt the wires in his brain fizzing with new meanings. Maths involved problems using pounds, shillings and pence.
‘One shilling and sixpence,’ he said in halting English, responding to a question about the total paid for a basket of groceries.
‘One and six.’ Dr Dawes gave him an approving nod. Benjamin Goldman, known for being lightning quick at sums back home, was finding this all very hard but knew he had a position to maintain. He thought briefly of Rudi, how Rudi would day-dream during maths, only paying attention when the teacher stood, ruler in hand, over his desk.
The same shriek that had woken them sounded through the window. The boys looked at one another, unsettled. Dr Dawes smiled. ‘A peacock. Ein Pfau.’ He wrote peacock on the blackboard, with a little picture of a bird with feathers fanned out behind it.
At break Benny took his football outside to the large lawn on the south side of the house and kicked it around with the other boys. He managed a good goal, one that would have been hard for Rudi to have managed. It was fun playing here at Fairfleet with these boys. But there was still a numb ache under his ribs when he thought of how he’d played football with his friend back in Germany. The peacock stood on the terrace, observing them. At least it had stopped that frightful screaming. Its tail lacked the bright blue feathers of those he’d seen in pictures. Perhaps they moulted.
‘Let’s play again after lunch,’ David said.
‘Only if we speak in English,’ Benny answered.
‘Ha ha.’
‘Seriously.’ He picked up his ball. ‘You want to play with my football, we use English. Only English.’ He said the last two words in the language itself.
The others exchanged glances. ‘Aren’t you taking this a bit too seriously?’ Rainer asked. Benny felt a little prickle of unease. He’d be marked out now as a teacher’s pet. He didn’t care. Back home it had always mattered to him what other boys thought. Not now. Becoming English mattered most. If the others felt differently, well, that was their choice.
‘Do you think the lake’s frozen?’ Rainer broke the tension by pointing at the stretch of water. ‘We could go skating.’
*
Every other night they had baths. The first few times it was easy to make excuses and dawdle so he was last and the others had left the steamy bathroom. But one night Rainer forgot his pyjama jacket and barged in as Benny was drying himself on one of the fluffy new white towels they’d all been given.
Benny felt Rainer’s gaze.
‘You’re slow tonight,’ the other boy said, plucking his pyjama jacket from the tiled floor and walking out. Benny took in a deep breath and let it out very slowly, watching the air condense on the mirror above the sink and turn into little drops of water.
‘I am becoming an English boy,’ he told his misted-over reflection. The real Benjamin Goldman was already a vague approximation of his former self.
*
As days passed it was easier and easier to become English. Benny started to think like the new person he’d become: the refugee who was blood -keen to suck up the new language and way of doing things. If the English held their cutlery a certain way, well, Benny would watch carefully and hold his knife and fork their way. If they drank tea with their breakfast, so would he.
When he met Alice Smith on the staircase he’d nod at her, ignoring the watchful expression in her pale green eyes. How easy it was if you acted like this: shrugged off any disapproval. At first the other boys had muttered about Benny’s insistence on speaking English at all times, regarding him as a teacher’s pet, as he’d anticipated. He’d relaxed a little now, allowing himself to talk to his room-mates last thing at night in their old language for a few minutes.
Lord Dorner, whom they still hadn’t seen since arriving at Fairfleet two weeks earlier, had ordered crates of toys from Hamley’s, which was apparently a large toyshop in London. The boys pulled English board games out of a crate.
‘We had this at home,’ Rainer said, pointing at a box set of Monopoly. ‘But with Berlin streets.’ There were Ludo and Scrabble as well. The largest crate contained a table-tennis set and bats. And a train set. Miles of track, a dozen engines, sleek liveried carriages, station buildings, bridges, points. Looking at them made something churn in Benny’s stomach.
‘You can take all that down the basement,’ Alice told them. ‘I don’t want to be tripping over it when I’m vacuuming.’
The older boys muttered about kids’ things, but Rainer and David carried the boxes down to one of the disused basement rooms and spent days arranging the train set on a large sheet of plywood the gardener found for them.
Benny tried to ignore their enthusiasm for the engines and points. He could still close his eyes and see the set he’d owned himself in Germany, still hear his father’s voice.
‘You must take platform length into consideration when you’re allocating wagons. And don’t neglect the issue with the points. Or the signalling problem at that first junction.’
Leave me alone, he told the voice. You don’t belong at Fairfleet.
‘Come on Benny,’ Rainer urged. ‘Help us get this track sorted out.’
He mumbled an excuse and walked out of the room, carrying his football. On the left of the passage a bright rectangle of light had appeared. A side door to the garden. He hadn’t noticed it before. He slipped through. The door took him out beside the tennis court. Alice Smith was shaking out rugs with a maid.
She scowled at Benny. ‘That door’s not to be used.’
‘I am sorry,’ he said.
She gave the rug a particularly vicious shake. ‘I just open it once or twice a year to air the basement. You boys don’t half try it on.’
The peacock strode towards them. Benny heard the rug flicking, Alice shooing it away. It cried at the bad treatment and Benny drove his fingernails into his palms, thinking again of tormented children.
A large oak stood at the edge of the back lawn. Benny kicked the ball again and again against its rough bark. Every slap of the leather was a slap against his own memory. When he came inside again he felt better. As long as he didn’t have to play with the trains.
*
He could be this reborn Benny during the day. But sometimes at night he remembered that he didn’t deserve this fresh chance at Fairfleet, with its soft-carpeted rooms and well-stocked library, its lawns where football could be played. His mind flitted to his old home, its tiled kitchen with pots and pans hanging from a ceiling rack and the stove emitting its constant warmth. He thought of his father, as he had once been, years ago, tumbling him on to the ground and pretending to be a bear, chasing him round the garden. He thought of his mother as she’d been before she fell ill, reading him a story before he fell asleep, buying him a bunch of red balloons once when she’d seen him gazing at the man selling them at the park gates.
Somewhere in his home town, another boy would be lying in bed. Probably not a comfortable bed like this one. That boy would be reviewing the past day: stones whizzing through the air to strike his neck as he walked through the streets, youths in uniform jeering at him.
‘Es tut mir leid,’ he muttered in the language he’d forbidden himself to use. ‘I’m sorry.’
He buried his face in the soft, downy pillow and begged sleep to come.
May 6, 2014
The Third Chapter of TOIW
3
By the following morning Benny felt calmer. He strolled around the camp, watching some of the younger kids playing on swings and slides between the fir trees. Someone had told him about an indoor amusement area and he found it. Table tennis and a badminton net. He thought he might be tempted to play some kind of game but found himself feeling in continued need of solitude. He slipped into the communal dining room, uncertain whether he was supposed to be here outside meal times. Someone had left a pile of old English comics on a chair. Crackers, the title said. Benny settled himself on the ground in a quiet corner and flicked through them. He could follow the stories all right: parents on your back about untidy bedrooms, daft teachers, naughty dogs: some of the words were easy to decipher. But most of it was baffling.
A bell rang. Lessons. He stood up, uncertain where to go. But the doors opened and children streamed in, chatting. Nobody seemed to notice Benny. A blackboard was pulled out. A woman in a suit came in and pointed to the chairs.
He sat down with the others. Someone handed him an exercise book.
The teacher wrote the words on the blackboard, pronouncing them as she did. Benny copied them onto the sheet of paper he’d been given, lips silently pronouncing the sounds, trying to make the ‘th’ sound the way the English spoke it.
After lunch lessons became more relaxed. The same teacher took them on a walk through the slushy grass to the seafront, the wind fierce against their cheeks, the sea a leaden grey. Afterwards they returned to the amusement centre to learn the words of ‘Ten Green Bottles’. A young woman taught them how to do the Lambeth Walk. They danced again after supper in the dining hall. A group of girls and boys performed the dance called the Hora. Benny watched for a while and then joined in.
They had to have showers later that night. He grabbed his towel and dashed off to the cubicle, standing under the warm water before the rest of his room-mates had even removed their socks.
‘Someone’s keen to get clean,’ a youth worker commented as Benny wrapped his towel around him. ‘Good for you, young Goldman.’
Another middle-aged man came for them on the Thursday. Not as smartly dressed as the bowler-hat man. He wore round spectacles and a tweed jacket. Dr Dawes, his name was. A university man from the town of Oxford, which wasn’t that far away from Fairfleet. He told them he was going to be their tutor at Fairfleet.‘Go and fetch your luggage, boys.’
Of course the refugee Benjamin Goldman had nothing except a football and a satchel containing a single withered apple, two German exercise books with his name on them and a pencil box.
‘I need the lavatory,’ he called, running back into the chalet. He stuffed the exercise books under the mattress of his bed.
‘No suitcase, Benjamin?’ Dr Dawes was ticking names off a list in front of a shiny green charabanc. He lifted his head, showing mild irritation behind the glasses. ‘You’re supposed to have a change of clothes and underwear.’
‘There wasn’t time.’ He blushed. Some of the kids here had even brought toys with them. Benny tried hard not to think of the boxes of building blocks and construction kits he’d left behind. And his train set.
Dr Dawes pushed his spectacles back up his nose. ‘I remember your circumstances now. Forgive me.’ He leant towards Benny so that the others couldn’t hear. ‘Lord Dorner is well-off and will ensure you have everything you need. He’s sponsoring twenty Jewish boys and girls, but you six are the only ones he’s taking into his own home.’
‘Why us?’ Benny wasn’t used to asking adults questions. At home it was generally safer to let them do any questioning. Safer still not to get yourself into situations where questions were demanded. But Dr Dawes didn’t seem to mind.
‘He asked for bright boys.’ The tutor gestured that Benny should climb into the charabanc. ‘Lord Dorner wants to educate you privately so that you can do well over here, perhaps even go to university. We had reports on you from the Jewish refugee council in your town.’
Benjamin Goldman had certainly been regarded as bright, working out the answers to sums before others had even copied down the questions from the blackboard. Sometimes other children had resented this. They’d muttered about sharp Yids. Like most of the Jewish kids Benjamin had left that school and taken lessons in a Jewish school set up in someone’s basement.
The charabanc journey to Fairfleet lasted most of the day because of the snow. Dr Dawes said this was because the roads weren’t good in winter, not like the new autobahns in Germany, he added. At least this time nobody threw up.
In the afternoon the charabanc pulled off a small country lane into a driveway. FAIRFLEET, the sign said. The house itself was a white rectangular structure, one side of which was bathed in the last of the pink winter sunset.
‘Eighteenth century,’ Dr Dawes said proudly, as though it were his own home.
‘In the Palladian style. Small for its type,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘The owner captured a French ship in one of many wars against France. He won prize money for depriving the enemy of an important vessel. Hence the name Fairfleet, the English word “fleet” meaning a group of ships.’
Hitler himself would like the sound of plunder like this from defeated enemies, Benny reflected.
The charabanc drove round to the back of the house.
‘Servants’ entrance,’ muttered David, the boy sitting next to him. A thin-faced, aproned girl of about eighteen stood at the door, arms crossed, frowning.
‘Thrilled to see us, isn’t she?’ David whispered.
Dr Dawes got out first and said something to her. The English he spoke sounded flowing yet precise and rhythmic. She answered in a sharp-pitched, jerky voice. Funny how the same language could sound so different.
They walked inside to a parquet-floored hall and up two flights of stairs.
‘Put your bags down here for now and wash
yourselves in the bathroom on the right,’ Dr Dawes told them. ‘Supper in ten minutes. The kitchen’s in the basement, three floors down.’
The girl said something else, sounding like a crow.
‘Wash your hands properly before you come down,’ Dr Dawes translated. ‘Including your fingernails.’
As she went downstairs the tutor coughed and rubbed his nose. ‘Alice has worked hard to prepare for your arrival. She’s very efficient.’
‘Efficient is good,’ David said.
Dr Dawes gave a little smile.
The food at Fairfleet was more like what they were used to at home – better, actually, because there was plenty of beef in the stew. A cheerful woman in her forties served them, chatting kindly in the language they couldn’t understand.
‘You won’t be eating in the kitchen all the time,’ Dr Dawes translated. ‘Lord and Lady Dorner are away at present. And it’s warmer in here.’ Benny wasn’t sorry to be down in the kitchen. The saucepans hanging from the ceiling rack and the dresser with its crockery reminded him of home. Something hit him below the ribs, a pang so strong it felt like a physical blow. He concentrated on his stew.
Later he lay in the bedroom he shared with David and Rainer. Proper beds, not bunks. They looked new. Moss-soft rugs on the floor. Heating that seemed to permeate the parts of his body that had been frozen since the boat had docked at Harwich.
Sniff, sniff. David might be weeping under his blankets, Benny couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he just had a stuffy nose.
Benny himself could weep too, but wasn’t going to. Not yet.
*
A scream filled Benny’s dreams. Someone was punishing a child and it was crying out. He sat up. Next to him David was also awake, rubbing his eyes. The two boys glanced at one another and tried to look as though the dreadful sound wasn’t freezing their blood.
‘It’s a bird,’ David said at last. ‘Not a human.’ As though to confirm what he had said, the bird screamed again. David smiled. ‘Reminds me of the noises you hear in a zoo.’
Someone pounded on the door and called out.
‘Time to get up,’ David said. ‘Come on, Rainer, lazybones.’
As he came downstairs, Benny noticed the view from the window. To one side swept a line of hills like the white back of a sleeping beast. A window on the opposite side of the first floor showed him the gardens.
‘They planned the house so there was always something to look at. You’ll have to look at the animal hedges later on.’
He stared at the tutor, who gave him his gentle smile.
‘Box trees clipped into the shape of a pig, fox, elephant and chicken. They call it topiary in English.’
After a breakfast of toast and boiled eggs, which everyone agreed was a great improvement on the porridge they’d suffered before, they went up to the specially furnished classroom on the ground floor. Six new wooden desks in two rows of three faced a blackboard. No photograph of Hitler on the wall, just a map of the world and a family tree of all the kings and queens of England.
‘That’s right, Benny.’ Dr Dawes nodded approvingly. ‘Familiarize yourself with all the history.’
The room smelled of new paper and fresh wood and overlooked the snowy lawn, which stretched out towards a small lake. Benny looked for the animal-shaped trees but couldn’t see them from this side of the house.
Dr Dawes coughed to get their attention.
‘This is all new and strange for you, boys,’ he said. ‘Let me explain what’s in store for you. Britain expects that you refugees – aliens, you’re unfortunately known as – will go into low-skilled work when you grow up.’
Benny had an image of himself ploughing fields or working down a mine.
‘But that’s not what Lord Dorner intends for you. He wants you to have the finest education the country can give you, if you’re up to it. You’ll have to work hard and make very good progress in English.’
The classroom door swung open. The girl Alice came in with a bucket of coke.
‘Soon you will be not only aliens but enemy aliens,’ Dr Dawes went on.
Alice looked at them through her sandy eyelashes, clearly regarding them as exactly this. Dr Dawes said something to her in English. She went to the stove, its door squeaking as she opened it. The acrid smell of the coke as she shovelled it in caught the back of Benny’s nose. For a second he was in the kitchen at home. He jabbed the sharpened point of his pencil against his palm until pain drove out the memory.
‘It will be difficult,’ Dr Dawes continued, looking from face to face, ‘unless you adapt. These are some of the last German words you will hear in this classroom. All our lessons will be conducted in English.’
The boys sat up in shock, glancing at one another.
‘You need to think in English, speak in English, sound English. Then you’ll be accepted.’
Alice slammed the stove door as though in contradiction of the last claim. Dr Dawes didn’t seem to notice. ‘Eventually some of you may be called to fight Nazism as soldiers.’ He switched to English. ‘But for all of you, the fight starts now. In this classroom.’
By the following morning Benny felt calmer. He strolled around the camp, watching some of the younger kids playing on swings and slides between the fir trees. Someone had told him about an indoor amusement area and he found it. Table tennis and a badminton net. He thought he might be tempted to play some kind of game but found himself feeling in continued need of solitude. He slipped into the communal dining room, uncertain whether he was supposed to be here outside meal times. Someone had left a pile of old English comics on a chair. Crackers, the title said. Benny settled himself on the ground in a quiet corner and flicked through them. He could follow the stories all right: parents on your back about untidy bedrooms, daft teachers, naughty dogs: some of the words were easy to decipher. But most of it was baffling.
A bell rang. Lessons. He stood up, uncertain where to go. But the doors opened and children streamed in, chatting. Nobody seemed to notice Benny. A blackboard was pulled out. A woman in a suit came in and pointed to the chairs.
He sat down with the others. Someone handed him an exercise book.
The teacher wrote the words on the blackboard, pronouncing them as she did. Benny copied them onto the sheet of paper he’d been given, lips silently pronouncing the sounds, trying to make the ‘th’ sound the way the English spoke it.
After lunch lessons became more relaxed. The same teacher took them on a walk through the slushy grass to the seafront, the wind fierce against their cheeks, the sea a leaden grey. Afterwards they returned to the amusement centre to learn the words of ‘Ten Green Bottles’. A young woman taught them how to do the Lambeth Walk. They danced again after supper in the dining hall. A group of girls and boys performed the dance called the Hora. Benny watched for a while and then joined in.
They had to have showers later that night. He grabbed his towel and dashed off to the cubicle, standing under the warm water before the rest of his room-mates had even removed their socks.
‘Someone’s keen to get clean,’ a youth worker commented as Benny wrapped his towel around him. ‘Good for you, young Goldman.’
Another middle-aged man came for them on the Thursday. Not as smartly dressed as the bowler-hat man. He wore round spectacles and a tweed jacket. Dr Dawes, his name was. A university man from the town of Oxford, which wasn’t that far away from Fairfleet. He told them he was going to be their tutor at Fairfleet.‘Go and fetch your luggage, boys.’
Of course the refugee Benjamin Goldman had nothing except a football and a satchel containing a single withered apple, two German exercise books with his name on them and a pencil box.
‘I need the lavatory,’ he called, running back into the chalet. He stuffed the exercise books under the mattress of his bed.
‘No suitcase, Benjamin?’ Dr Dawes was ticking names off a list in front of a shiny green charabanc. He lifted his head, showing mild irritation behind the glasses. ‘You’re supposed to have a change of clothes and underwear.’
‘There wasn’t time.’ He blushed. Some of the kids here had even brought toys with them. Benny tried hard not to think of the boxes of building blocks and construction kits he’d left behind. And his train set.
Dr Dawes pushed his spectacles back up his nose. ‘I remember your circumstances now. Forgive me.’ He leant towards Benny so that the others couldn’t hear. ‘Lord Dorner is well-off and will ensure you have everything you need. He’s sponsoring twenty Jewish boys and girls, but you six are the only ones he’s taking into his own home.’
‘Why us?’ Benny wasn’t used to asking adults questions. At home it was generally safer to let them do any questioning. Safer still not to get yourself into situations where questions were demanded. But Dr Dawes didn’t seem to mind.
‘He asked for bright boys.’ The tutor gestured that Benny should climb into the charabanc. ‘Lord Dorner wants to educate you privately so that you can do well over here, perhaps even go to university. We had reports on you from the Jewish refugee council in your town.’
Benjamin Goldman had certainly been regarded as bright, working out the answers to sums before others had even copied down the questions from the blackboard. Sometimes other children had resented this. They’d muttered about sharp Yids. Like most of the Jewish kids Benjamin had left that school and taken lessons in a Jewish school set up in someone’s basement.
The charabanc journey to Fairfleet lasted most of the day because of the snow. Dr Dawes said this was because the roads weren’t good in winter, not like the new autobahns in Germany, he added. At least this time nobody threw up.
In the afternoon the charabanc pulled off a small country lane into a driveway. FAIRFLEET, the sign said. The house itself was a white rectangular structure, one side of which was bathed in the last of the pink winter sunset.
‘Eighteenth century,’ Dr Dawes said proudly, as though it were his own home.
‘In the Palladian style. Small for its type,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘The owner captured a French ship in one of many wars against France. He won prize money for depriving the enemy of an important vessel. Hence the name Fairfleet, the English word “fleet” meaning a group of ships.’
Hitler himself would like the sound of plunder like this from defeated enemies, Benny reflected.
The charabanc drove round to the back of the house.
‘Servants’ entrance,’ muttered David, the boy sitting next to him. A thin-faced, aproned girl of about eighteen stood at the door, arms crossed, frowning.
‘Thrilled to see us, isn’t she?’ David whispered.
Dr Dawes got out first and said something to her. The English he spoke sounded flowing yet precise and rhythmic. She answered in a sharp-pitched, jerky voice. Funny how the same language could sound so different.
They walked inside to a parquet-floored hall and up two flights of stairs.
‘Put your bags down here for now and wash
yourselves in the bathroom on the right,’ Dr Dawes told them. ‘Supper in ten minutes. The kitchen’s in the basement, three floors down.’
The girl said something else, sounding like a crow.
‘Wash your hands properly before you come down,’ Dr Dawes translated. ‘Including your fingernails.’
As she went downstairs the tutor coughed and rubbed his nose. ‘Alice has worked hard to prepare for your arrival. She’s very efficient.’
‘Efficient is good,’ David said.
Dr Dawes gave a little smile.
The food at Fairfleet was more like what they were used to at home – better, actually, because there was plenty of beef in the stew. A cheerful woman in her forties served them, chatting kindly in the language they couldn’t understand.
‘You won’t be eating in the kitchen all the time,’ Dr Dawes translated. ‘Lord and Lady Dorner are away at present. And it’s warmer in here.’ Benny wasn’t sorry to be down in the kitchen. The saucepans hanging from the ceiling rack and the dresser with its crockery reminded him of home. Something hit him below the ribs, a pang so strong it felt like a physical blow. He concentrated on his stew.
Later he lay in the bedroom he shared with David and Rainer. Proper beds, not bunks. They looked new. Moss-soft rugs on the floor. Heating that seemed to permeate the parts of his body that had been frozen since the boat had docked at Harwich.
Sniff, sniff. David might be weeping under his blankets, Benny couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he just had a stuffy nose.
Benny himself could weep too, but wasn’t going to. Not yet.
*
A scream filled Benny’s dreams. Someone was punishing a child and it was crying out. He sat up. Next to him David was also awake, rubbing his eyes. The two boys glanced at one another and tried to look as though the dreadful sound wasn’t freezing their blood.
‘It’s a bird,’ David said at last. ‘Not a human.’ As though to confirm what he had said, the bird screamed again. David smiled. ‘Reminds me of the noises you hear in a zoo.’
Someone pounded on the door and called out.
‘Time to get up,’ David said. ‘Come on, Rainer, lazybones.’
As he came downstairs, Benny noticed the view from the window. To one side swept a line of hills like the white back of a sleeping beast. A window on the opposite side of the first floor showed him the gardens.
‘They planned the house so there was always something to look at. You’ll have to look at the animal hedges later on.’
He stared at the tutor, who gave him his gentle smile.
‘Box trees clipped into the shape of a pig, fox, elephant and chicken. They call it topiary in English.’
After a breakfast of toast and boiled eggs, which everyone agreed was a great improvement on the porridge they’d suffered before, they went up to the specially furnished classroom on the ground floor. Six new wooden desks in two rows of three faced a blackboard. No photograph of Hitler on the wall, just a map of the world and a family tree of all the kings and queens of England.
‘That’s right, Benny.’ Dr Dawes nodded approvingly. ‘Familiarize yourself with all the history.’
The room smelled of new paper and fresh wood and overlooked the snowy lawn, which stretched out towards a small lake. Benny looked for the animal-shaped trees but couldn’t see them from this side of the house.
Dr Dawes coughed to get their attention.
‘This is all new and strange for you, boys,’ he said. ‘Let me explain what’s in store for you. Britain expects that you refugees – aliens, you’re unfortunately known as – will go into low-skilled work when you grow up.’
Benny had an image of himself ploughing fields or working down a mine.
‘But that’s not what Lord Dorner intends for you. He wants you to have the finest education the country can give you, if you’re up to it. You’ll have to work hard and make very good progress in English.’
The classroom door swung open. The girl Alice came in with a bucket of coke.
‘Soon you will be not only aliens but enemy aliens,’ Dr Dawes went on.
Alice looked at them through her sandy eyelashes, clearly regarding them as exactly this. Dr Dawes said something to her in English. She went to the stove, its door squeaking as she opened it. The acrid smell of the coke as she shovelled it in caught the back of Benny’s nose. For a second he was in the kitchen at home. He jabbed the sharpened point of his pencil against his palm until pain drove out the memory.
‘It will be difficult,’ Dr Dawes continued, looking from face to face, ‘unless you adapt. These are some of the last German words you will hear in this classroom. All our lessons will be conducted in English.’
The boys sat up in shock, glancing at one another.
‘You need to think in English, speak in English, sound English. Then you’ll be accepted.’
Alice slammed the stove door as though in contradiction of the last claim. Dr Dawes didn’t seem to notice. ‘Eventually some of you may be called to fight Nazism as soldiers.’ He switched to English. ‘But for all of you, the fight starts now. In this classroom.’
May 5, 2014
What am I working on?
The talented Deborah Swift, author of last year's A Divided Inheritance, the third of her novels to date, has kindly invited me to join a blog hop on the writing process. You can find Deborah's musings on this subject on her blog.
There are only four questions, which makes it all seem very simple, but as with all apparently simple exercises, this is deceptive, as some of my answers will show.
What am I working on?
The second of my Blitz Kid novels, about a teenage girl living through World War II, and also another adult novel I wrote last summer and am revising.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I suppose we all like to feel that we're different! I come across other dual-thread novels, going from contemporary to historical, so there's nothing new in what I do. I do have a fascination with the way in which World War II changed whole generations of families: not just the lives of those living through those times. Sad, dangerous or possibly exciting things that happened during such a time of struggle can well affect those living decades later, and that's what interests me. In my new book, The One I Was, a secret that a Kindertransport child carries with him to England in 1939 ripples on down through the years so that it becomes part of the story of a contemporary English nurse who's not related to him.
Why do I write what I do?
I suppose it's that fascination with how things are connected, about hard it is to untangle ourselves from the past and from our histories.
How does your writing process work?
I have a rough outline of what I'm going to do before I start--often in the form of a short synopsis or something more 'query'-like: a quick summary of what the book will actually be about, rather than what happens in it. I like to know where the conflict points will be before I start. I now use Scrivener, so that I can separate each chapter and play with their order in the novel. If I'm writing a novel with two threads, it's important to reveal information at the right time, so being able to shift scenes around easily is very useful. Once I have a draft I'm reasonably happy with, I'll ask a first reader to have a look. Then redraft based on their comments, and then perhaps ask someone else. Ideally then I'd lock the ms. up for a year and come back to it with a fresh eye, as distance allows you some objectivity.
I have daily set word targets, though if I'm in full writing mode I imagine I probably write at least a thousand words a day. I'm a great believer in not just putting down words for words' sake. It's better to try and work that out first and not force it. I often have breakthroughs when I'm driving or walking. A lot of the 'writing' happens in my head.
Next week, it is the turn of the critically acclaimed Nicole Hayes to tell us about her writing process. Nicole is a freelance writer, editor and teacher based in Melbourne. She has an MA in Creative Writing, which she teaches at the University of Melbourne and Phoenix Park Neighbourhood House. Her first novel, The Whole of My World, was published last year to critical acclaim, and is a dark young adult story of a girl's attempt to escape her grieving father and her own terrible secret by the medium of Aussie Rules Football.
There are only four questions, which makes it all seem very simple, but as with all apparently simple exercises, this is deceptive, as some of my answers will show.
What am I working on?
The second of my Blitz Kid novels, about a teenage girl living through World War II, and also another adult novel I wrote last summer and am revising.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
I suppose we all like to feel that we're different! I come across other dual-thread novels, going from contemporary to historical, so there's nothing new in what I do. I do have a fascination with the way in which World War II changed whole generations of families: not just the lives of those living through those times. Sad, dangerous or possibly exciting things that happened during such a time of struggle can well affect those living decades later, and that's what interests me. In my new book, The One I Was, a secret that a Kindertransport child carries with him to England in 1939 ripples on down through the years so that it becomes part of the story of a contemporary English nurse who's not related to him.
Why do I write what I do?
I suppose it's that fascination with how things are connected, about hard it is to untangle ourselves from the past and from our histories.
How does your writing process work?
I have a rough outline of what I'm going to do before I start--often in the form of a short synopsis or something more 'query'-like: a quick summary of what the book will actually be about, rather than what happens in it. I like to know where the conflict points will be before I start. I now use Scrivener, so that I can separate each chapter and play with their order in the novel. If I'm writing a novel with two threads, it's important to reveal information at the right time, so being able to shift scenes around easily is very useful. Once I have a draft I'm reasonably happy with, I'll ask a first reader to have a look. Then redraft based on their comments, and then perhaps ask someone else. Ideally then I'd lock the ms. up for a year and come back to it with a fresh eye, as distance allows you some objectivity.
I have daily set word targets, though if I'm in full writing mode I imagine I probably write at least a thousand words a day. I'm a great believer in not just putting down words for words' sake. It's better to try and work that out first and not force it. I often have breakthroughs when I'm driving or walking. A lot of the 'writing' happens in my head.
Next week, it is the turn of the critically acclaimed Nicole Hayes to tell us about her writing process. Nicole is a freelance writer, editor and teacher based in Melbourne. She has an MA in Creative Writing, which she teaches at the University of Melbourne and Phoenix Park Neighbourhood House. Her first novel, The Whole of My World, was published last year to critical acclaim, and is a dark young adult story of a girl's attempt to escape her grieving father and her own terrible secret by the medium of Aussie Rules Football.
May 2, 2014
The second chapter of TOIW
2
Benjamin, 1939
The boy clutched his football. The label round his neck flapped in the breeze, cutting into his skin. Now they’d docked at Harwich, his stomach had stopped heaving. He stood at the top of the gangplank, took in deep breaths of the salt-and-oil air that rasped his throat. Where were the little kids he’d looked after on the voyage? A woman in nurse’s uniform was already steering them away. Someone pushed him gently down the gangplank.
It looked different, England: the cars, dockers, buildings. People were smiling at them, even the policemen in their tall helmets and capes. One of them was holding a small girl’s hand, picking up her suitcase, snow falling on them.
All very foreign. All very safe. He had to get the hell out.
He turned around. He’d hide on the boat. But there was no fighting the tide of children streaming down the gangplank. Boys cursed him and girls tutted as he shoved into them. He gave up and let them push him down to dry land. Not that it was very dry. It had obviously rained here. And now it was snowing, white flakes dissolving into the black ground. Everything swayed as Benny walked along the quay. Perhaps it took a while to get used to being on land again. The English dockers were shouting in that up-and-down, up-and-down language he couldn’t understand. HARWICH, he read on a sign.
Then they were on a bus, the air thick with the reek of long journeys and farewells and not being sure where the toilets were and hoping the big boys wouldn’t give you trouble. Act your age, he told himself. You’re eleven, not six. A plump woman in a hat that looked like a squashed cake wiped noses and handed round wrapped sweets. Someone was sick, very quietly, into a paper bag. A child of about four wept, face buried in his lap, tears running down his knees. The seven-year-old girl twins stared at their hands, their golden curls now less smoothly brushed, stains on the fronts of their coats.
Then the camp: a huge, metal-clad structure. Not like the camps he’d heard about at home. The woman in the squashed-cake hat ushered them inside to trestle tables, where they were served a hot stew he was too tired to identify.
Young men and women led them to little houses like miniature Alpine chalets, where they were to sleep, even though it wasn’t yet night. Groups of three or four. The other boys in his hut complete strangers. Good. He laid his football at the end of the bunk. Certain he wouldn’t sleep. Closed his eyes to block out everything. Thought of his bedroom back at home. Quiet. Shuttered. Football posters on the wall. Boxes of construction kits. A bookcase of books. Emil and the Detectives was his favourite, be good to have it here now and flick through its pages. A dull ache of homesickness inside him now. Try to ignore it, feel the safe roundness of the football at your feet and . . .
When he woke it was morning. He was still wearing his outer clothes. If he’d been at home there’d have been trouble.
They spoke German here – he heard them calling out as they walked along outside the chalets, knocking on doors, encouraging kids to wash before breakfast was served.
He’d tell them he’d changed his mind and wanted to go home. But he’d seen them on the boat, hushing kids who cried for lost homes and families. Telling them how fortunate they were, how their families and friends were so relieved they were safe and would be sad if the children returned to the danger.
Well he was no little kid. He wasn’t going to blub. He’d force down the memories of the people at home so they wouldn’t trouble him any more.
Perhaps he’d only be in England for a few months anyway, if the war didn’t happen. They might be pleased to see him back in Germany after an absence.
*
A couple of days passed. They were kind enough here. He was even growing used to English cooking: strong-smelling kippers for breakfast with a thick oat soup called porridge, which coated your insides like a warm glue.
At home breakfast meant warm bread rolls from the baker’s. Eggs boiled so that their yellows were still soft. Slices of nutty cheese.
Thinking about these past meals sharpened the persistent ache inside him into a more painful stab of homesickness. He looked around for distraction. The children were wearing coats and scarves to breakfast in this huge glass-and-iron edifice where once, they’d been told, holidaymakers had enjoyed cabarets, and fish and fried potatoes the British called chips. Were all English homes cold like this? A vase of chrysanthemums sat on the table. At home these were flowers you took to the cemetery for your mother’s grave. The floor was wet from snowy footsteps.
Today was Sunday: market day for English families seeking foreign children. He’d already heard rumours that nobody really wanted kids like him: male, over eight.
‘Try smiling,’ he overheard a youth worker telling a boy of about his age. ‘It helps.’
Benny practised smiling. His facial muscles ached. He’d laughed since he’d been here at Dovercourt: at a clown performing in one of the evening shows. But you could laugh and not really be happy.
‘Why don’t you join in prayers?’ one of his room-mates in the wooden chalet had asked him this morning, frowning.
Benny tried to make a relaxed but dismissive gesture with his hand.
‘Weren’t you observant at home?’ The boy folded a towel into neat squares, while he addressed Benny, eyes narrowed.
Silence seemed the safest response.
‘Perhaps …’ the boy’s nose wrinkled,
‘you’re a secular Jew?’
Benny threw his football at the boy, hitting him in the midriff and preventing further questions.
Now the would-be buyers shuffled into the hall to examine the wares. The blond Berlin twins drew a flock of clucking matrons. Those girls would be sitting in front of the fire with doting foster-parents before supper time.
Benny arranged his face into what he hoped was a nonchalant confidence. Nobody came near him. He fiddled with the petals on the chrysanthemums.
A middle-aged man wearing a smart black coat and clasping a bowler hat walked over to the table and stared at him.
‘Good afternoon.’ Benny stood up and spoke in his best English, deciding against a heel click.
‘Benjamin Goldman, sir,’ said a nearby youth worker in German. ‘Eleven, as you may know, from a small town near Berlin. Excellent school reports. His father was a successful businessman until, well, things took a turn.’
The middle-aged man observed him kindly for a moment, slipped a bar of chocolate across the table, murmured a farewell and walked away. Probably not impressed with Benny. None of the other English visitors came near him. He wasn’t sent to collect his possessions from the chalet so that he could go home with an English family. He ate his chocolate.
This indifference was a sign. He’d talk to one of the friendly volunteers, beg to be sent back to Germany. Plenty at home who’d jump at the opportunity to replace him.
The visitors left and supper was laid. While they were eating, someone read out a list of kids’ names over the megaphone. He paid little attention, knowing he had failed to impress this afternoon.
‘… and Benjamin Goldman,’ the man read out. ‘Please come to the table at the side of the hall.’
It took a second to realize that meant him. He forced himself to amble over to the table as though he wasn’t surprised or excited. Five other boys waited there. A youth worker sat behind the table with a clipboard.
‘Ah, Benjamin. Good news. They’re ready for you now at Fairfleet.’
Fairfleet? He tried not to let his confusion show. Don’t draw attention to yourself.
‘The snow blocked the road and the bus couldn’t get through.’
The youth worker was speaking in German, but it might as well have been English for all his words meant.
‘You must be impatient to start your new life.’ The young man grinned.‘Fairfleet will certainly be more luxurious than here.’
‘Don’t know much about it,’ he mumbled.
‘Your parents –’ the youth worker flushed, ‘the orphanage, were sent a letter with all the information. Perhaps it went astray?’
Best just to nod.
‘Fairfleet’s a large house in the countryside near Oxford. Lord and Lady Dorner are taking you in.’
Benny blinked.
‘There’ll be lots of fresh air and exercise.’
Hopefully not like a Hitler Youth camp back in Germany. Plenty of fresh air and exercise there. And songs. And kicks and blows behind the shower blocks if you weren’t enthusiastic enough.
‘Cheer up.’ The youth worker made a final tick on his sheet and stood up. ‘We’re running English lessons from tomorrow. You’ve got two days to learn a bit of the language.’
Two days. He took himself back to the chalet, lay on his bunk, thinking. Whatever Fairfleet was, it had to be better than here. But if he went along with events, he’d be even more caught up in the mess he’d made for himself. What was the alternative?
He needed to forget about all of it. Forget Rudi and what Rudi had done and the last time they’d been together.
Rudi and Benny: two friends who’d tried to sort things out, tried to beat the system, even though they were only eleven and most grown-ups were too scared to try.
They’d done their best, but it hadn’t worked.
Benjamin, 1939
The boy clutched his football. The label round his neck flapped in the breeze, cutting into his skin. Now they’d docked at Harwich, his stomach had stopped heaving. He stood at the top of the gangplank, took in deep breaths of the salt-and-oil air that rasped his throat. Where were the little kids he’d looked after on the voyage? A woman in nurse’s uniform was already steering them away. Someone pushed him gently down the gangplank.
It looked different, England: the cars, dockers, buildings. People were smiling at them, even the policemen in their tall helmets and capes. One of them was holding a small girl’s hand, picking up her suitcase, snow falling on them.
All very foreign. All very safe. He had to get the hell out.
He turned around. He’d hide on the boat. But there was no fighting the tide of children streaming down the gangplank. Boys cursed him and girls tutted as he shoved into them. He gave up and let them push him down to dry land. Not that it was very dry. It had obviously rained here. And now it was snowing, white flakes dissolving into the black ground. Everything swayed as Benny walked along the quay. Perhaps it took a while to get used to being on land again. The English dockers were shouting in that up-and-down, up-and-down language he couldn’t understand. HARWICH, he read on a sign.
Then they were on a bus, the air thick with the reek of long journeys and farewells and not being sure where the toilets were and hoping the big boys wouldn’t give you trouble. Act your age, he told himself. You’re eleven, not six. A plump woman in a hat that looked like a squashed cake wiped noses and handed round wrapped sweets. Someone was sick, very quietly, into a paper bag. A child of about four wept, face buried in his lap, tears running down his knees. The seven-year-old girl twins stared at their hands, their golden curls now less smoothly brushed, stains on the fronts of their coats.
Then the camp: a huge, metal-clad structure. Not like the camps he’d heard about at home. The woman in the squashed-cake hat ushered them inside to trestle tables, where they were served a hot stew he was too tired to identify.
Young men and women led them to little houses like miniature Alpine chalets, where they were to sleep, even though it wasn’t yet night. Groups of three or four. The other boys in his hut complete strangers. Good. He laid his football at the end of the bunk. Certain he wouldn’t sleep. Closed his eyes to block out everything. Thought of his bedroom back at home. Quiet. Shuttered. Football posters on the wall. Boxes of construction kits. A bookcase of books. Emil and the Detectives was his favourite, be good to have it here now and flick through its pages. A dull ache of homesickness inside him now. Try to ignore it, feel the safe roundness of the football at your feet and . . .
When he woke it was morning. He was still wearing his outer clothes. If he’d been at home there’d have been trouble.
They spoke German here – he heard them calling out as they walked along outside the chalets, knocking on doors, encouraging kids to wash before breakfast was served.
He’d tell them he’d changed his mind and wanted to go home. But he’d seen them on the boat, hushing kids who cried for lost homes and families. Telling them how fortunate they were, how their families and friends were so relieved they were safe and would be sad if the children returned to the danger.
Well he was no little kid. He wasn’t going to blub. He’d force down the memories of the people at home so they wouldn’t trouble him any more.
Perhaps he’d only be in England for a few months anyway, if the war didn’t happen. They might be pleased to see him back in Germany after an absence.
*
A couple of days passed. They were kind enough here. He was even growing used to English cooking: strong-smelling kippers for breakfast with a thick oat soup called porridge, which coated your insides like a warm glue.
At home breakfast meant warm bread rolls from the baker’s. Eggs boiled so that their yellows were still soft. Slices of nutty cheese.
Thinking about these past meals sharpened the persistent ache inside him into a more painful stab of homesickness. He looked around for distraction. The children were wearing coats and scarves to breakfast in this huge glass-and-iron edifice where once, they’d been told, holidaymakers had enjoyed cabarets, and fish and fried potatoes the British called chips. Were all English homes cold like this? A vase of chrysanthemums sat on the table. At home these were flowers you took to the cemetery for your mother’s grave. The floor was wet from snowy footsteps.
Today was Sunday: market day for English families seeking foreign children. He’d already heard rumours that nobody really wanted kids like him: male, over eight.
‘Try smiling,’ he overheard a youth worker telling a boy of about his age. ‘It helps.’
Benny practised smiling. His facial muscles ached. He’d laughed since he’d been here at Dovercourt: at a clown performing in one of the evening shows. But you could laugh and not really be happy.
‘Why don’t you join in prayers?’ one of his room-mates in the wooden chalet had asked him this morning, frowning.
Benny tried to make a relaxed but dismissive gesture with his hand.
‘Weren’t you observant at home?’ The boy folded a towel into neat squares, while he addressed Benny, eyes narrowed.
Silence seemed the safest response.
‘Perhaps …’ the boy’s nose wrinkled,
‘you’re a secular Jew?’
Benny threw his football at the boy, hitting him in the midriff and preventing further questions.
Now the would-be buyers shuffled into the hall to examine the wares. The blond Berlin twins drew a flock of clucking matrons. Those girls would be sitting in front of the fire with doting foster-parents before supper time.
Benny arranged his face into what he hoped was a nonchalant confidence. Nobody came near him. He fiddled with the petals on the chrysanthemums.
A middle-aged man wearing a smart black coat and clasping a bowler hat walked over to the table and stared at him.
‘Good afternoon.’ Benny stood up and spoke in his best English, deciding against a heel click.
‘Benjamin Goldman, sir,’ said a nearby youth worker in German. ‘Eleven, as you may know, from a small town near Berlin. Excellent school reports. His father was a successful businessman until, well, things took a turn.’
The middle-aged man observed him kindly for a moment, slipped a bar of chocolate across the table, murmured a farewell and walked away. Probably not impressed with Benny. None of the other English visitors came near him. He wasn’t sent to collect his possessions from the chalet so that he could go home with an English family. He ate his chocolate.
This indifference was a sign. He’d talk to one of the friendly volunteers, beg to be sent back to Germany. Plenty at home who’d jump at the opportunity to replace him.
The visitors left and supper was laid. While they were eating, someone read out a list of kids’ names over the megaphone. He paid little attention, knowing he had failed to impress this afternoon.
‘… and Benjamin Goldman,’ the man read out. ‘Please come to the table at the side of the hall.’
It took a second to realize that meant him. He forced himself to amble over to the table as though he wasn’t surprised or excited. Five other boys waited there. A youth worker sat behind the table with a clipboard.
‘Ah, Benjamin. Good news. They’re ready for you now at Fairfleet.’
Fairfleet? He tried not to let his confusion show. Don’t draw attention to yourself.
‘The snow blocked the road and the bus couldn’t get through.’
The youth worker was speaking in German, but it might as well have been English for all his words meant.
‘You must be impatient to start your new life.’ The young man grinned.‘Fairfleet will certainly be more luxurious than here.’
‘Don’t know much about it,’ he mumbled.
‘Your parents –’ the youth worker flushed, ‘the orphanage, were sent a letter with all the information. Perhaps it went astray?’
Best just to nod.
‘Fairfleet’s a large house in the countryside near Oxford. Lord and Lady Dorner are taking you in.’
Benny blinked.
‘There’ll be lots of fresh air and exercise.’
Hopefully not like a Hitler Youth camp back in Germany. Plenty of fresh air and exercise there. And songs. And kicks and blows behind the shower blocks if you weren’t enthusiastic enough.
‘Cheer up.’ The youth worker made a final tick on his sheet and stood up. ‘We’re running English lessons from tomorrow. You’ve got two days to learn a bit of the language.’
Two days. He took himself back to the chalet, lay on his bunk, thinking. Whatever Fairfleet was, it had to be better than here. But if he went along with events, he’d be even more caught up in the mess he’d made for himself. What was the alternative?
He needed to forget about all of it. Forget Rudi and what Rudi had done and the last time they’d been together.
Rudi and Benny: two friends who’d tried to sort things out, tried to beat the system, even though they were only eleven and most grown-ups were too scared to try.
They’d done their best, but it hadn’t worked.
The first chapter of TOIW
1
Rosamond
Every atom of my body screamed at me to run away from the elegant and classical white house at whose door I stood.
I was a forty-something woman, a professional, a nurse, but I felt like a twelve-year-old again. I forced myself to push the doorbell. Sarah, the housekeeper, opened the front door and let me in. I heard myself exchanging pleasantries with her while my heart beat out a tattoo. I took stock of my surroundings. Duck-egg walls. A chandelier of twisted metal and crystal, hanging from the ceiling like an icicle.
I looked up the staircase, trying to accustom myself to being back at Fairfleet again. My fingers clenched the handles of my suitcase as I drew in a long breath. The house smelled of new paint and the large white lilies on the console table. An older, deeper smell undercut the scent: polished wood and old stone, but it should have been bitter like burning almonds, to remind me of my guilt.
The telephone rang. Sarah frowned.
‘That’ll be the district nurse. Excuse me one moment, Rosamond.’
Some of the balustrading on the staircase had been replaced, but the work had been done with sensitivity; only someone who knew where to look would have spotted the new spindles. The flagstones replacing the old parquet floor might have been there for centuries. What had I expected: that the house would somehow remember what had happened on a clear, frosty morning just like this, thirty years ago?
I tried to clear my mind, to remember why I was here. I thought about my patient, Benny Gault, and his arrival at this house. Just before the war Fairfleet had taken in a group of Jewish refugee boys from Germany, made them a home while they grew up, and sent them back out into the world to make good lives for themselves. And then the adult Benny Gault had returned years later to buy Fairfleet and make it his own. Now he lay dying upstairs.
Sarah came back in. ‘Sorry about that: come through to the kitchen, Rosamond.’
I moved onwards into the house. I felt more relaxed now I wasn’t dwelling on myself and my past. I was thinking about how Benny must have felt when he’d first arrived in England. Homesick? Relieved? Excited? Possibly all of these.
Rosamond
Every atom of my body screamed at me to run away from the elegant and classical white house at whose door I stood.
I was a forty-something woman, a professional, a nurse, but I felt like a twelve-year-old again. I forced myself to push the doorbell. Sarah, the housekeeper, opened the front door and let me in. I heard myself exchanging pleasantries with her while my heart beat out a tattoo. I took stock of my surroundings. Duck-egg walls. A chandelier of twisted metal and crystal, hanging from the ceiling like an icicle.
I looked up the staircase, trying to accustom myself to being back at Fairfleet again. My fingers clenched the handles of my suitcase as I drew in a long breath. The house smelled of new paint and the large white lilies on the console table. An older, deeper smell undercut the scent: polished wood and old stone, but it should have been bitter like burning almonds, to remind me of my guilt.
The telephone rang. Sarah frowned.
‘That’ll be the district nurse. Excuse me one moment, Rosamond.’
Some of the balustrading on the staircase had been replaced, but the work had been done with sensitivity; only someone who knew where to look would have spotted the new spindles. The flagstones replacing the old parquet floor might have been there for centuries. What had I expected: that the house would somehow remember what had happened on a clear, frosty morning just like this, thirty years ago?
I tried to clear my mind, to remember why I was here. I thought about my patient, Benny Gault, and his arrival at this house. Just before the war Fairfleet had taken in a group of Jewish refugee boys from Germany, made them a home while they grew up, and sent them back out into the world to make good lives for themselves. And then the adult Benny Gault had returned years later to buy Fairfleet and make it his own. Now he lay dying upstairs.
Sarah came back in. ‘Sorry about that: come through to the kitchen, Rosamond.’
I moved onwards into the house. I felt more relaxed now I wasn’t dwelling on myself and my past. I was thinking about how Benny must have felt when he’d first arrived in England. Homesick? Relieved? Excited? Possibly all of these.
May 1, 2014
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April 29, 2014
More on The One I Was
The One I Was was titled 'Fairfleet' for the period of two years in which I wrote it, because the house itself seemed to be such a part of the narrative, almost a character in its own right. Eventually I changed the name, because a friend, rightfully, pointed out that it gave the book a nautical, if not naval, air! It is set in inland England, near the historic cities of Oxford and Abingdon, so I was worried that this would be misleading.
The One I Was as a title popped into my head at a random moment and it seemed completely the right title for the book. Benny comes to England as a refugee from Nazi Germany and immediately realizes that to flourish in a new country he needs to reinvent himself into someone irreproachably English. But are we still the same people we were when we were children? And if you try and change yourself into someone else can you always succeed?
There are lots of other things in the The One I Was that fascinate me: topiary animals and peacocks. Appropriately, only last night, a few weeks after the book was published, a friend and I nearly jumped out of our skins when a peacock shrieked at us in the dark. A Spitfire plane also features in the novel as an emblem of freedom and danger, completely irresistible for Harriet Dorner, female pilot.
The One I Was as a title popped into my head at a random moment and it seemed completely the right title for the book. Benny comes to England as a refugee from Nazi Germany and immediately realizes that to flourish in a new country he needs to reinvent himself into someone irreproachably English. But are we still the same people we were when we were children? And if you try and change yourself into someone else can you always succeed?
There are lots of other things in the The One I Was that fascinate me: topiary animals and peacocks. Appropriately, only last night, a few weeks after the book was published, a friend and I nearly jumped out of our skins when a peacock shrieked at us in the dark. A Spitfire plane also features in the novel as an emblem of freedom and danger, completely irresistible for Harriet Dorner, female pilot.
April 27, 2014
The One I Was
Two epub or MOBI versions of The One I Was available for reviewers to the first Goodreaders who message me.
April 24, 2014
The One I Was--first chapter
1
Rosamond
Every atom of my body screamed at me to run away from the elegant and classical white house at whose door I stood.
I was a forty-something woman, a professional, a nurse, but I felt like a twelve-year-old again. I forced myself to push the doorbell. Sarah, the housekeeper, opened the front door and let me in. I heard myself exchanging pleasantries with her while my heart beat out a tattoo. I took stock of my surroundings. Duck-egg walls. A chandelier of twisted metal and crystal, hanging from the ceiling like an icicle.
I looked up the staircase, trying to accustom myself to being back at Fairfleet again. My fingers clenched the handles of my suitcase as I drew in a long breath. The house smelled of new paint and the large white lilies on the console table. An older, deeper smell undercut the scent: polished wood and old stone, but it should have been bitter like burning almonds, to remind me of my guilt.
The telephone rang. Sarah frowned. ‘That’ll be the district nurse. Excuse me one moment, Rosamond.’
Some of the balustrading on the staircase had been replaced, but the
work had been done with sensitivity; only someone who knew where to look would have spotted the new spindles. The flagstones replacing the old parquet floor might have been there for centuries. What had I expected: that the house would somehow remember what had happened on a clear, frosty morning just like this, thirty years ago?
I tried to clear my mind, to remember why I was here. I thought about my patient, Benny Gault, and his arrival at this house. Just before the war Fairfleet had taken in a group of Jewish refugee boys from Germany, made them a home while they grew up, and sent them back out into the world to make good lives for themselves. And then the adult Benny Gault had returned years later to buy Fairfleet and make it his own. Now he lay dying upstairs.
Sarah came back in. ‘Sorry about that: come through to the kitchen, Rosamond.’
I moved onwards into the house. I felt more relaxed now I wasn’t dwelling on myself and my past. I was thinking about how Benny must have felt when he’d first arrived in England. Homesick? Relieved? Excited? Possibly all of these.
Rosamond
Every atom of my body screamed at me to run away from the elegant and classical white house at whose door I stood.
I was a forty-something woman, a professional, a nurse, but I felt like a twelve-year-old again. I forced myself to push the doorbell. Sarah, the housekeeper, opened the front door and let me in. I heard myself exchanging pleasantries with her while my heart beat out a tattoo. I took stock of my surroundings. Duck-egg walls. A chandelier of twisted metal and crystal, hanging from the ceiling like an icicle.
I looked up the staircase, trying to accustom myself to being back at Fairfleet again. My fingers clenched the handles of my suitcase as I drew in a long breath. The house smelled of new paint and the large white lilies on the console table. An older, deeper smell undercut the scent: polished wood and old stone, but it should have been bitter like burning almonds, to remind me of my guilt.
The telephone rang. Sarah frowned. ‘That’ll be the district nurse. Excuse me one moment, Rosamond.’
Some of the balustrading on the staircase had been replaced, but the
work had been done with sensitivity; only someone who knew where to look would have spotted the new spindles. The flagstones replacing the old parquet floor might have been there for centuries. What had I expected: that the house would somehow remember what had happened on a clear, frosty morning just like this, thirty years ago?
I tried to clear my mind, to remember why I was here. I thought about my patient, Benny Gault, and his arrival at this house. Just before the war Fairfleet had taken in a group of Jewish refugee boys from Germany, made them a home while they grew up, and sent them back out into the world to make good lives for themselves. And then the adult Benny Gault had returned years later to buy Fairfleet and make it his own. Now he lay dying upstairs.
Sarah came back in. ‘Sorry about that: come through to the kitchen, Rosamond.’
I moved onwards into the house. I felt more relaxed now I wasn’t dwelling on myself and my past. I was thinking about how Benny must have felt when he’d first arrived in England. Homesick? Relieved? Excited? Possibly all of these.
