Bombs on Aunt Dainty. Judith Kerr
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like a lawyer weighing up a tricky question in Court. Finally he said, “Well, I suppose it’s the right thing to do at the moment. But not for good. Not for you. Not in the long run.” Then a thought occurred to him. He leafed impatiently through one of his books, found what he wanted and started again to write.
Anna walked back to her digs, brushed her hair and changed into the only other dress she had. It was her old school dress made of grey corduroy and when she had worn it at Miss Metcalfe’s on Sundays she had thought it hideous. But Mama had found an old lace collar at the bottom of one of the trunks they had brought away from Berlin and with that, now that Anna had lost most of her puppy fat, it looked quite elegant. She returned to find Max putting away his papers and George surveying the high tea which the landlady had spread out in front of the fire. George’s bath had not been a success. Fearing that if he delayed too long he would not be able to have one at all, he had plunged in when the water was barely luke-warm and had sat in it, getting progressively colder, unable to face climbing out into the even colder air of the bathroom. However, at least it had now been dealt with and the problem of washing himself would not arise for another week, he told Anna with satisfaction. “Which prompts me to remark,” he added, “that you look remarkably clean and wholesome. Is that the latest fashion?”
She explained that it was what she had worn at school on Sundays.
“Really?” said George. “How extraordinary. My sister always wears a sort of a brown sack.”
From this they got to talking about George’s sister’s school where they had to curtsey to the headmistress every time they met her and which sounded not much better than Miss Metcalfe’s, and then about schools in general. Perhaps Max was right, thought Anna. Perhaps George was just as nervous of her as she was of him, and with this thought she began to relax a little. She was in the middle of telling him about a remarkable ceremony at Miss Metcalfe’s when a guinea-pig monitor had been stripped of her rank, when it was time to leave for the cinema.
They picked their way through the icy blackout to see a thriller in the company of Bill and a girl with frizzy hair whom Max, to Anna’s surprise, appeared to admire. Her name was Hope and she looked at least three years older than Max, but when he whispered, “Don’t you think she’s attractive?” Anna did not like to say “no”. The film was very bad and the audience, which consisted largely of undergraduates, took a noisy interest in it. There were boos for the villain and ironical cheers for the heroine who was trying to ward him off, and cries of “Come on Clarence!” whenever the lumbering hero appeared in pursuit. In the end the villain threatened to throw the heroine to a poorly looking crocodile which, the audience pointed out, was clearly in need of feeding, and when she was rescued in the nick of time the remaining dialogue was drowned in cries of “Shame!” and “RSPCA!” Anna thought it all wonderfully funny and glowed through the rest of the evening which they spent eating more doughnuts in a café. At last George and Max said goodnight to her at the door of her lodgings and she felt her way through the darkened house to her room and her freezing bed where she clutched her hot-water bottle, thought in wonder about this extraordinary world her brother was part of, and fell asleep. “Well, how do you like Cambridge?” asked Max the next afternoon. They were waiting for her train at the station and she did not in the least want to leave. They had spent part of the day punting on the river – the weather had been warmer – with Max and Hope arguing fitfully in a punt propelled by George, while Anna was in another with Bill. George and Bill had tried to ram each other and in the end Bill had fallen in and had invited them back to sherry in his rooms while he changed his clothes. He lived in a college three hundred years old, and under the mellowing influence of the sherry George and Bill had both urged her to come back to Cambridge soon.
She looked earnestly at Max on the darkening platform. “I think it’s marvellous,” she said. “Absolutely marvellous.”
Max nodded. “I’m glad you’ve seen it.” She could see the happiness in his face in spite of the darkness. Suddenly he grinned. “And there’s another thing,” he said. “Don’t tell Mama, but I think I’m going to get a First.”
Then the train roared in, astonishingly filled with soldiers and sailors. She had to squeeze past a pile of kitbags to get on, and by the time she had managed to pull the window down the train had started. She shouted, “Thank you, Max! Thanks for a marvellous weekend!” But there was a lot of noise and she was not sure whether he heard her. One of the sailors offered her part of his kit-bag and she sat on it all the way back to London. It was a long, weary journey – much slower than on the previous day. The light from the blue-painted bulb in the corridor was too dim to read by and every time the train stopped more soldiers got on, even though there hardly seemed room for them. Liverpool Street too was filled with troops and, as Anna picked her way among them in the patchy half-light of the station, she wondered where they could all be going. Then a newspaper poster caught her eye. It said “Hitler Invades Norway And Denmark!”
At first, when Anna had learned the news of Hitler’s attack on Scandinavia, she had been very frightened. In her mind she had heard again the voice of the woman at the Relief Organisation talking about the Nazis. “They said, ‘We’ll get you wherever you go because we’re going to conquer the world!’“ But then nothing had happened and life seemed to go on much as usual. Some troops were sent to Norway – the Danes had given in without a fight – and there had been a battle at sea, but it was hard to tell who was winning. And after all, Scandinavia was a long way off.
She started her secretarial course and Judy and Jinny came home for the holidays. Papa was asked by the Ministry of Information to compose the text of some leaflets to be dropped over Germany – the first work he had had for months – and Max and George went on a walking tour and sent her a postcard from a Youth Hostel.
Her one overwhelming desire now was to learn shorthand as quickly as possible, so as to get a job and earn some money. Each day she went to the secretarial school in Tottenham Court Road and practised taking down dictation on the little machine provided. It was quite fun. Instead of pressing down the keys singly as on a typewriter you pressed them down like chords on a piano, and each time the machine printed a syllable in ordinary letters on a paper tape. It reproduced the sound of the syllable rather than the spelling so that “general situation” for instance became “jen-ral sit-you-ai-shn”, but it was still quite easy to read, unlike the shorthand squiggles which had defeated her in the past.
Judy and Jinny were impressed with her new grown-up status, and she did not mind leaving them every morning to lounge about in the spring sunshine while she went off to practise her shorthand. There were one or two other refugees like herself at the school and the Belgian principal Madame Laroche said that with their knowledge of languages they were all bound to get good jobs. Anna, she said, was one of her best students, and she often sent for her to demonstrate the system to potential clients.
The week before Whitsun was warm and sunny, and by Friday Anna was looking forward to the long weekend as the secretarial school was closing at lunch time and Monday was a holiday as well. She was going to spend the afternoon with Mama and Papa, and Mama’s cousin Otto was coming to see them. For once she was bored with practising and she was glad when, half-way through the morning, Madame Laroche sent for her to demonstrate her shorthand to a middle-aged couple and their mousy daughter. They did not seem very promising customers, as the father kept saying how stupid it was to waste money on new-fangled methods and the daughter just looked frightened.
“Ah, and here is one of our students,” cried Madame Laroche as Anna came in – or at least that was what Anna thought she had probably said. Madame Laroche talked with an impenetrably thick Belgian accent and was very hard to understand. She motioned Anna to a chair and took a book from a shelf. Anna looked round for the English assistant who normally dictated to her, but there was no sign of her.
“I will dictate to you myself,” said Madame Laroche excitedly, or words to that effect. Clearly the father had stung her into determination to prove the excellence of her system at all costs.