I thought I would choke to death with wanting to fight back, to join in, to make a difference, to do something.
Johanna von Arnim slept peacefully, snoring gently.
Well, she was my responsibility. Looking after her was my wartime job right now, and it was too bad if it wasn’t very exciting or even very patriotic. I sat down beside her again and sighed. It wouldn’t matter anyway if our ship sank on the way to Liverpool.
But mercifully it didn’t, and by the time we docked the raid was over. I hauled the cases and gramophone on to land as the all-clear sirens hooted. My wartime job was going to keep me fit, whatever else happened.
We spent hours in the city police station getting her registered, and then in the railway station at Liverpool Lime Street queuing to buy our tickets.
‘Identity documents, miss?’ the ticket seller asked, eyeing me suspiciously, when I finally got to the front of the line. I felt conspicuous in the fur coat.
Be polite, Lula, warned Mummy’s calm, comforting voice in my head.
I gave a false, bright smile. ‘Oh – yes, sorry! I haven’t had to show ID to buy a rail ticket before.’ Of course I hadn’t. No one has to. But I dug in my school satchel for my National Registration card anyway.
‘Please step aside so you don’t hold up the queue,’ said the ticket seller coolly.
My heart plummeted as I bit back rising anger. It is hard to stand your ground and politely break rules at the same time. Why hadn’t I parked Frau von Arnim with the luggage instead of shuffling everything along in the queue with us? If we lost our place I’d have to shift it all again—
The old woman reached over me with an official-looking booklet open to a smiling photograph of her own face. The ticket seller nodded and pushed the passport back.
‘Apologies, madam, I didn’t realise you were together.’ He smiled at her over my shoulder.
‘Well, we are,’ said Frau von Arnim. ‘Two singles for Stonehaven.’ She added in a friendly way, ‘We are visiting my niece in Scotland.’
My face burned as the horrid man thumped our tickets with the date stamp. I paid without saying anything.
‘Thank you,’ said the old woman as we turned away. But she might have been talking to me.
Afterwards we sat in the ladies’ waiting room, surrounded by our piles of luggage, until it was time for our train.
‘What did you show that man?’ I asked. I was supposed to help her with her papers, and here was something she’d kept to herself.
The old woman gave a slow, shy smile, as if she were the one who was a bit embarrassed this time. She handed over the booklet and let me look at it.
It was an ordinary British passport, more ordinary than mine, even, because mine says JAMAICA across the front below BRITISH PASSPORT. The smiling photograph pasted inside was definitely a recent picture of the person sitting next to me – at least, it wasn’t taken so long ago you couldn’t tell who it was. But the name read clearly, Jane Warner, British subject by birth.
It also said she was a musician. And it said she was born in Aberdeen, in Scotland, in 1868, ten years later than the date on Johanna von Arnim’s alien registration card.
‘You can call me Jane,’ said the old woman. ‘It’s what I call myself.’
I stared at the lying document, then looked up at the person who called herself Jane. The shy smile was gone. She watched me seriously, trusting me with a secret.
‘How did you get this?’ I demanded. It came out sounding very stern, and her thin shoulders cringed a little. Perhaps she was expecting me to take it away from her. That’s what they’d have done at Rushen Camp if they’d known about it.
‘It was my husband’s,’ she said defiantly. ‘I kept it when he died. It wasn’t until I was already locked up in that miserable place that I started fiddling with it. Of course they knew who I was, but I’ve called myself Jane Warner since the early thirties … And who doesn’t look forward to a better life ahead? I thought I should be ready if the chance arose. It was simple to fix – a razor and ink is all it took. Rubbing the raised stamp on to the photograph was the difficult bit.’
She was more of a rule-breaker than I’d realised.
‘You really ought not to use it,’ I scolded. ‘You could get into terrible trouble.’
She laughed. ‘What do you think they would do? Put me in prison? At my age? Imagine!’
‘It would be worse than the camp,’ I argued.
‘I was in prison for three weeks before I went to the camp, so I know what it would be like,’ she told me.
I gazed at the glamorous smiling face of the elderly, but younger, woman in the fake passport.
‘You don’t need to show identification papers to buy a rail ticket,’ said Jane Warner. ‘That man was a bully. He was bullying you.’
‘I know he was bullying me,’ I said. ‘People often do.’
I’d been saved by an old German woman! Suddenly I laughed too. ‘Stupid bossy official! Aren’t there enough rules already? I wish we could report him for making up extra ones.’
‘Never mind,’ said Jane. ‘There’s no danger to national security, and we have our rail tickets. If he goes on making up extra rules, the stupid bossy official may get himself in trouble without our assistance.’
I gave her back her husband’s doctored passport.
‘This is going to expire next year,’ I pointed out.
‘I’ll worry about that next year,’ said Jane.
I rang Mrs Campbell from the red telephone kiosk by the bus shelter on the Aberdeen road. That was as far as we could get to the village of Windyedge without having to walk, and Mrs Campbell said she’d arranged for someone to come in a car to collect us.
It felt like the end of the earth. I remembered, in a flash, a time when I’d been very small, following a path in the bush behind Granny Adair’s tiny ramshackle house, and suddenly everything seemed strange. I was alone among the giant ferns and banana trees and huge Anansi spiderwebs, and I panicked. I wasn’t lost – I shouldn’t have been afraid. But I was terrified. I turned around and ran screeching back down the path to Granny Adair’s familiar shack and henhouses.
I felt a bit like that now. Only the bus shelter, the telephone kiosk, and a small postbox sunk in a stone wall showed it was the twentieth century. All around were brown winter fields dotted with sheep, a brown hillside wreathed in low clouds, and unhappy blackthorns stooped by sea wind. There weren’t even any signposts. They’d all been taken down to confuse the Germans if they invaded. Smoke rose from the invisible village down the lane, almost a smell of tobacco, because they were burning peat, not coal – just as they’d done for thousands of years. Beyond the smoke stretched the sea, the cold North Sea.
But Mrs Campbell had said there was an aerodrome nearby, for a Royal Air Force bomber squadron. The airmen came to her pub. Perhaps I’d see some of them there, young British men returning from combat over the North Sea.
The longing I felt when I watched an air battle swelled up in my throat again until it was drowning me. What in the world was I going to do here, or learn to do here, to help win the war? Looking after Jane Warner would keep me from starving, but it wasn’t going to lead to anything else, was it?