I was surprised at how quickly my plan worked. Nancy Campbell, whoever she was, seemed ready to snap me up straightaway.
‘You must be tidy, and able to make travel arrangements by yourself,’ she told me. ‘I’ll send the rail fare if you’re willing.’
It seemed too good to be true.
‘But haven’t you other people applying as well?’ I asked.
‘I’ll accept the first suitable candidate who wants the position. I’ve lost count how many lasses have rung me, then changed their minds – oh, twenty, at least. No one wants to be seen with Aunt Jane, and that’s the truth.’
‘Is she West Indian?’ I blurted, before I could stop myself.
‘No,’ said the Scotswoman. ‘She’s German.’
German!
‘She’s suspected of being a risk to national security,’ the woman on the phone continued grimly. ‘She has to be collected from an alien detainment camp on the Isle of Man.’
A risk to national security in an alien detainment camp!
Worrying I’d hang up on her, Mrs Campbell rushed to give me more information. ‘My aunt’s what they call “category C”, a low-risk prisoner. She broke her hip last summer, hillwalking at eighty-two, silly woman! She needs help getting about. Not heavy lifting, just minding … and keeping her out of my way, to be honest. I have the pub to manage, and I can’t look after an invalid. Aunt Jane is far too old to be locked up like a criminal anyway, though that’s her own fault for lying about her age – she told the policemen who arrested her that she was sixty! And how she pulled off such a devilish falsehood, I can’t tell you. I’ve a mind she wanted to be arrested – attention-seeking Jezebel! But the government’s releasing quite a few folk they detained earlier this year. Most of them are Jewish and not Nazis at all, and people aren’t happy about imprisoning folk the way the Germans do.’
Mrs Campbell paused for breath.
‘Why did they arrest her?’ I asked cautiously. ‘Besides her being German?’
‘She was a telegraphist. She worked five years in a wireless exchange in Berlin when she was a girl, sending Morse code, before she became an opera singer.’ Mrs Campbell added hastily, ‘But that was more than sixty years ago, in the 1870s. Before the telephone – plenty of young ladies did the same! It’s not as if she was Mata Hari, taking messages and spying in the Great War!’
A telegraphist and an opera singer! Morse code! I thought the old woman might turn out to be quite interesting. And I wasn’t scared of an old woman, even if she was German. I liked old women. I liked our landladies, who were kind to me when Mummy and Daddy were killed. I liked Granny Adair.
Mrs Campbell elaborated, ‘Aunt Jane’s no blood relation, you understand. She’s my father’s brother’s wife. They lived a wicked bohemian life, Uncle John and Aunt Jane, in the last century – Berlin, Vienna, Paris. She was famous the world over, to hear her tell it. Her real name is Johanna von Arnim, though she’s Jane Warner now.’
‘How is she? Can she walk?’ I tried to think of any information I needed before the money for the phone call ran out. ‘Did she live alone before she broke her hip?’
‘Yes, she had a flat in London,’ said Mrs Campbell. ‘Uncle John had a long lease on it which expired ten years ago, and afterwards the landowner rented it to them year to year. But Uncle John’s dead now, and Aunt Jane’s let the flat go and has no place to live. At eighty-two! What am I to do with an eighty-two-year-old invalid who’s made her living in music halls – put her behind the bar? Oh – and you must be quiet about her being German. The pub is next to a Royal Air Force base, and the bomber lads often come here when they’re not in the air.’
‘Does your aunt speak English?’ I asked.
Nancy Campbell huffed at the other end of the telephone line. ‘Aye, did I not say? She married a Scotsman – they kept a London flat for fifty years! Of course she speaks English.’
I took the job over the telephone without the desperate Nancy Campbell seeing me. She was easily persuaded when I told her that Mummy had been a music teacher, and that I could play the flute and the piano. Mrs Campbell thought her operatic auntie would like to have a musical companion.
So I filled a pasteboard suitcase with books and sheet music, and a larger one with all the winter clothes I could cram into it. I said goodbye to the landladies at Number 88, Gibraltar Road, in Tooting. Then I started on my first journey all alone across the British Isles.
That journey passed in a swirl of November leaves and rain outside moving windows: train to Liverpool, overnight ferry to the Isle of Man, and another train to Rushen Camp, grey and wet, in a seaside town surrounded by barbed wire. I kept my nose in a book or pressed against the window the whole way, being polite to everyone, ignoring the stares, avoiding looking at anybody – just the way Mummy had always done when we went out together.
The prison guards were social workers, Society of Friends volunteers, they said. A young woman wearing a patched cardigan, with her hair tied back in a school ribbon, led me up the stairs in a Victorian guest house converted into barracks. ‘Are you from East Africa, perhaps? You do speak English very well. Was it difficult to pick up?’
She was as nice as possible, but annoyed me by asking the same old stupid questions, which I answered politely as usual.
‘I’m from Jamaica. My mother was English.’
‘Oh, Jamaica, even further! Don’t you mind the cold? Here we are.’
She didn’t give me a moment to answer about whether I minded the cold or not. She knocked and opened a door.
‘On you go.’ She waved me ahead of her.
I stepped into the room and came face to face with Johanna von Arnim.
The old woman sat swaddled in a mothy wool blanket. There were no curtains in her small room, which was filled entirely by the chair and bed and wardrobe. The window glass was slabbed with dark blue paint and tape because of the blackout, so that German bombers wouldn’t see a light on the ground at night. The window was open to let in daylight, and the air inside was as cold and damp as outside.
Johanna von Arnim stared at the Friends volunteer with cool, pale blue eyes. Then she turned those eyes on me, and they widened in surprise.
I held my breath, ridiculously expecting her to say something in German.
Instead, she sang an English singing game.
‘“Who shall we send to take her away?”’
Her voice was amazing. It was a rich, fruity mezzo-soprano, perhaps a little quavery with age, but not at all weak or thin. The song filled the room. When she stopped singing, the air seemed to hum with the memory of it.
I used to play ‘Nuts in May’ too, outside my primary school in Jamaica, holding hands with my friends in a circle beneath the Bombay mango tree. So I sang to her in reply.
‘“You’ll have Miss to take you away!”’
My own voice embarrassed me. It sounded like a tin whistle following a golden flute.
The old woman’s parchment skin crinkled around those pale blue eyes into a silent laugh.
‘Here I am,’ I said. I held out my hand for her to shake.
‘Which corner of the British Empire do you come from, my dusky maid?’ she asked, shaking hands politely.