The Girl With No Name (6 page)

‘Where did you learn to fight like that?’ she asked. ‘All four of them, by yourself!’

Harry sniffed dismissively. ‘Them? They ain’t nothing.’ His expression hardened. ‘Nothing like the Hanau Hitler Youth. Had to handle yourself against that lot.’

‘Hanau?’ Lisa pounced on the name. ‘You come from Hanau? Really? So do I.’ Tears filled her eyes as she looked at Harry, Harry was a boy from another life, someone from home, who remembered ‘before’.

‘Hey,’ Harry said anxiously, ‘don’t start blubbing on me!’

‘I’m not,’ protested Lisa, blinking hard. ‘Just can’t believe you come from home.’

‘Not home any more,’ said Harry. ‘I ain’t never going back there.’

‘What about your... parents... family?’ Lisa asked hesitantly.

‘None left,’ replied Harry, and his tone made it clear there was no more to be said. Abruptly he changed the subject and asked, ‘Who’s that girl you go round with? With her all the time.’

‘That’s Hilda,’ Lisa said and explained how Hilda and her family had been helping her learn English.

‘She’s all right then, is she?’

‘Yeah, we’re good mates. I often go there after school.’

‘But not today. Which gave that scum their chance.’

‘Yeah, suppose so.’ Lisa looked round a little anxiously. ‘I better go, Aunt Naomi will be wondering where I am.’

‘I’ll walk with you,’ Harry said, ‘till I get to my bus stop.’

Together they set off down the street, watched from a distance by Roger. He knew better than to go near Lisa again. His mates were waiting in the next street and as he joined them he said dismissively, ‘Another Nazi Jew-boy.’

‘Not sure he can be both,’ said Albert, his second in command. ‘The Nazis is killing the Jews, ain’t they?’

Roger glowered at him. ‘Pity they didn’t get that one, then, before he came here to bother us!’

‘Yeah, you’re right there,’ grinned Albert, and Roger knew that despite his ignominious defeat at the hands of the new German boy, his authority over his own gang was still intact.

‘Come on,’ he said, setting off in the opposite direction, ‘we got better things to do than muck about with shit like them.’

Harry watched Lisa walk away as he waited for his bus. She’s a plucky little thing, he thought as she turned, once, to wave. Them buggers have been tormenting her for weeks and she’s put up with it. Threw a punch at one of them boys, showed some spunk, that did.

For the next week or so he kept an eye on her at school. Roger and his cronies ignored him entirely, ostentatiously turning their backs if he came anywhere near them, but he saw that they didn’t go near Lisa either.

Under Harry’s protection life at school became much easier for Lisa. No one molested her in the playground and she was gradually accepted by the other girls in her class, joining in their games. They teased her about her English, laughing when she got words wrong, but it was good-natured teasing and her English continued to improve. She still went home with Hilda sometimes after school and always felt comfortable in the Langs’ house. Esther was determined to include her in the family. She knew what it was like suddenly to be transplanted to a new country and, kind as she knew the Federmans were, they had no children. She wondered if they should suggest that Lisa come to live with them, but Max told her quite firmly that she shouldn’t interfere.

‘The child is settled with them now,’ he said. ‘Far better that she and Hilda stay friends at school and she visits.’ Esther wasn’t sure she agreed, but she bowed to her husband’s decision.

On occasion Hilda went home with Lisa. Naomi was keen to return the hospitality, but they were neither of them as comfortable together in the Federmans’ little house. Lisa felt that Hilda was judging them and she felt oddly protective of her foster parents. She had grown fond of them over the months, of Uncle Dan particularly, and she didn’t want Hilda to think they were beneath her.

On other days Harry would wait for her in the road beyond the gate and walk with her to the end of Kemble Street. At first Lisa thought it was because Roger and co might resume their bullying, but she soon realised that it was because Harry was lonely. He wanted the company of someone who had come from the nightmare that was Germany and understood the fear which had ruled their lives for so long. Sometimes they would wander into the park and sit chatting on a bench. If no one was near they spoke German; it was a relief to be able to express themselves freely without struggling for the words they needed, but they were careful to stick to English if they might be overheard. Roger and his mates weren’t the only ones; anti-German feeling was, understandably, strong.

At first they said little of their lives ‘before’, but gradually they began to speak of those they had left behind. Lisa told Harry about her parents and Martin, able at last to tell of what had happened to them to someone who understood. Harry found himself opening up to Lisa as he had to no one else; because she had lived through it all too, she understood, and a special bond was forged between them.

Like Lisa’s, Harry’s father had been arrested on Kristallnacht, leaving the young Heinrich to try and look after his invalid mother. They had no money and no way of making any. Harry had taken to the streets, earning a few pfennigs wherever he could, doing the dirty jobs that were the province of Jews: cleaning the gutters, scrubbing the daubed graffiti,
Juden Raus
, from walls and windows so that the new German owners would no longer be reminded that Jews had once inhabited their homes. Other times he stole from market stalls, occasionally from the offertory box in the local church, but always on the lookout for the Hitler Youth who delighted in tormenting any hapless Jew happening to cross their paths. He had become a tough street kid, a feral animal, fighting hard and dirty to defend himself against those marauding gangs. Then one day his mother received a postcard telling her that her husband, Ezra Schwarz, had died of a fever in prison. No further explanation was given. Harry was filled with fury, angry at everyone and everything; his mother seemed to give up and simply faded away. Within a month she, too, was dead, and Harry was left an orphan.

‘So what did you do then?’ asked Lisa.

‘Hanau was too hot for Jews by then, so I got myself to Frankfurt. There was still a Jewish community there. They put me in an orphanage and then on the train, so here I am and here I’ll stay.’

Like Lisa, he hadn’t been evacuated when war with Germany had once again burst upon England; that day, they were both too newly arrived, already refugees with nowhere further to run.

Lisa didn’t take Harry home to meet Aunt Naomi and Uncle Dan. She knew, instinctively, that Aunt Naomi in particular wouldn’t approve of him. Though they, too, lived in a tough area, Aunt Naomi had very high standards. Her house, though small, was spotless, her doorstep scrubbed, her windows bright. Lisa was never allowed to go to school in anything but clean and pressed clothes and the food on the table, though plain, was always well-cooked. Even on their small income, Aunt Naomi managed to keep her little family well fed. She definitely wouldn’t approve of a street urchin like Harry in his scruffy clothes and workman’s boots. Secretly, Lisa knew that her own mother wouldn’t approve of him either. Back in Hanau their paths would never have crossed; their families came from entirely different social strata, but here Harry was special, Lisa’s private link with home, and so she didn’t even mention him in Kemble Street.

Hilda knew about him of course, she’d heard how Harry had come to Lisa’s rescue, but she didn’t like him. She felt he wasn’t the sort of person someone like her should know and was surprised when Lisa continued to be friends with him. Part of it was jealousy; Lisa was
her
friend, it was
she
who had helped Lisa to learn English, it was
her
mother who had invited Lisa to come home with her at any time and Hilda resented Harry’s intrusion. For his part, Harry considered Hilda a snobby little madam. She lived in a posh house and he knew she looked down her nose at him. Well, let her. He didn’t care.

Their mutual antipathy kept them apart, but Lisa drew strength from each of them.

The expected air raids had not happened. There was one a few days after the declaration of war. The siren wailed its warning into the early-morning sky and the Federmans insisted that Lisa should take shelter with them in the cellar. As before, she had frozen in the doorway, looking down into the underground room, and Dan almost had to drag her down the steps.

‘Come on, Lisa, me duck,’ he said encouragingly. ‘We have to go down. It won’t be for long.’

Naomi, coming in behind them, had pulled the door closed and the draught from the closure had snuffed the candle, engulfing them for a moment in total darkness. Lisa began to scream in terror. Remembering her earlier fear, Dan held her close, his arms wrapped round her, his voice soothing, ‘It’s all right, me duck, you’re all right,’ but she had remained rigid against him, her breath coming in ragged bursts, until Naomi had struck a match and lit the candles stuck in their beer bottles, the only light they had. The raid lasted two hours and Lisa sat stiff with fear throughout. In the flickering candlelight the stone walls seemed to move, closing in round her, the ceiling pressing down.

I’m buried alive, she thought wretchedly as the minutes dragged by. I’d rather be upstairs in the house and take my chance with the bombs. She gripped her hands together so hard that her fingernails dug into her palms.

Watching her, Dan and Naomi spoke softly to each other.

‘D’you think she’s going to be like this every time there’s a raid?’ Naomi wondered.

‘Let’s hope not,’ said Dan. ‘P’raps she’ll get used to it. She’s terrified, poor kid.’

When the all-clear finally sounded Lisa leaped from the chair and ran up the stairs, bursting the door open, and was out into the fresh morning air before Dan or Naomi had even got to their feet.

‘I don’t know what to do with her,’ Naomi confided to Mary later in the day. ‘She’s really afraid of being shut in. We could all go to the public shelter in Hope Street, but Dan thinks that would be worse.’

‘Difficult for you,’ Mary mused. ‘Don’t know what to suggest. Do you have to shut the door? Silly question, of course you do.’

‘Not sure it would help anyway,’ said Naomi. ‘If only we could discuss it with her properly, perhaps find out what’s behind it.’

They all waited in fear for the next warning, but it didn’t come. The days turned into weeks and there was no sign of the Luftwaffe. Everyone began to relax a little, except perhaps the air raid wardens. The blackout was severely enforced and the wardens patrolled the streets as soon as darkness fell, banging on any door where a dangerous shaft of light leaked past badly fitting curtains or blinds. Everyone still carried a gas mask in its box slung over the shoulder and at school there were regular gas mask drills. Lisa still hated hers, but she’d learned how to put it on correctly and by taking steady, deep breaths managed to breathe through the filter without panicking.

‘I hate these things,’ she said to Harry on the way home one day.

‘Better’an being gassed,’ Harry said, who had no problem wearing his.

‘I know, but I can’t breathe and it makes me panicky.’

Harry, seeing the fear in her eyes at the thought of the mask, changed the subject and said, ‘Not coming back to school after Christmas. Got a job.’

‘What job?’

‘Errand boy.’

‘Errand boy?’

‘Don’t say it like that. It’s a job, OK? I get paid for it. Working for a bloke what runs a market stall, delivering stuff.’

‘What sort of stuff?’ asked Lisa, intrigued.

Harry just tapped the side of his nose and grinned. ‘Just stuff,’ he said. ‘He gets it for people, stuff they want.’

‘Black market?’ cried Lisa.

‘Ssh!’ Harry hissed, looking round anxiously. ‘Course not. It’s all legit.’

But he knew it wasn’t. The previous Saturday, he’d been caught nicking a packet of Woodbines from one of the stalls in Petticoat Lane. He’d been grabbed by the ear by a big bloke with ginger hair, who held him in a painfully tight grip and dragged him over to the Black Bull, the pub his boss, Mikey Sharp, used as his headquarters.

‘Caught this blighter pinchin’ from your barrow,’ he said, giving Harry such a shove that he fell on to the floor at Mikey’s feet.

‘Did you now?’ Mikey looked down at Harry with interest. ‘You been stealin’ from me, sunshine?’

‘Only Woodbines,’ quavered Harry. ‘Only ten.’

‘Only Woodbines,’ repeated Mikey as if considering the offence. ‘Only ten? What’d happen if everyone thought they could half-inch fags off my barrow? Where would I be then, eh?’

‘Dunno, sir,’ Harry said miserably.

‘No, nor do I,’ Mikey said. ‘Reckon you’ll have to pay for them somehow. Got any money, have you?’

Thankful that he’d left the few coins he did have back at the hostel, Harry said, ‘No, sir.’ It might mean he was in for a beating, but he was used to those; far better than having what little cash he had, taken from him.

‘So how you gonna pay me, then?’

‘Could work for you,’ suggested Harry, feeling suddenly brave. ‘Do jobs for you an’ that.’

Mikey had looked at him speculatively for a moment. ‘You’re not English, are you?’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Harry Black an’ I am English, now.’

‘Now?’ Mikey raised an eyebrow. ‘What was you before?’

‘A refugee.’

‘From?’

Harry thought fast. Don’t say Germany, he thought, this bloke might kill you for that. ‘From Hitler,’ he said.

‘I suppose that means we’re on the same side,’ Mikey said with a laugh. The man who’d caught Harry laughed, too. Harry didn’t. He didn’t know if he was supposed to. He just stayed where he was, sitting on the floor, and waited.

‘I reckon you’re German,’ Mikey said and waited for Harry’s nod before saying, ‘but not a bleedin’ Nazi.’

Harry shook his head vigorously. ‘No! Not Nazi!’

‘Good,’ Mikey said. ‘Well, sunshine, that’s all right, as long as you behave. I could make use of a lad like you. Speak German, do you?’