Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(13)

I can’t believe I have only been in England for three months – it seems like forever. And yet the war hasn’t really touched me. I haven’t lost my fiancé or my best friend or my mother or my sister. I’m not in exile. I have a home to go back to, and people waiting for me. I have an aunt who is going to take me to lunch at the Ritz and an uncle who sends me fuses!

But I am very glad that Kurt and Karl are only ten years old, far too young to be drafted, and that they are safe at home in Pennsylvania.





August 25, 1944



Hamble



Felicyta and Maddie came over to play cards with me at the Hatches’ last night, and there was an air raid. The siren doesn’t scare me at all when it first goes off – it sounds exactly like the hooter at the Volunteer Fire Company in Conewago Grove. I always think, That’ll be a fire somewhere – I’m glad Daddy’s not on duty here. Mrs Hatch shooed us out through the vegetable garden to get to the shelter. The house is on a high slope and as we stumbled over the cabbages in the dark, we got a frightening glimpse of half a dozen flying bombs travelling across the sky. All you could see were the red exhaust flames of their engines – from far away it looked like a line of glowing balls of fire moving slowly along the horizon.

There is only room for one camp bed in the Hatches’ shelter, because they built it themselves and it is tiny. The camp bed is ridiculously covered with a candlewick bedspread to make it seem cosy, and we all squeezed together on it to stay out of the mud. Fliss said to me, ‘Singing will not scare the bombs away!’

I’d been humming nervously, without realising I was doing it. I laughed. ‘It’s a Girl Scout camp song.’

‘Rosie is always singing,’ Maddie pointed out. I could feel her trembling next to me, and remembered how much she hates the bombs.

‘Sing properly if you’re going to sing!’ commanded Mrs Hatch. ‘Then we can all join in.’

So we sat in the underground shelter and I taught them camp songs. I sang ‘Land of the Silver Birch’ and ‘My Paddle’s Keen and Bright’ (again) and then I got bold and sang my ‘Modern Warrior’ poem to the same tune, and they beat time by clapping. And then I taught them ‘Make New Friends’. It’s easy, and we sang it as a round, again and again –

‘Make new friends

But keep the old,

One is silver

And the other gold!’





Kind of corny, but it seemed so appropriate.

There we were in the mud, singing so loudly that we didn’t hear the all-clear siren when it went! And Mr Hatch came home and broke up the party, hustling us all inside and tut-tutting about his wife being so easily corrupted by modern youth.

‘You might have at least been singing hymns,’ he chided her.

It was the best air raid ever.

Back in bed I started thinking about how I like to be in a crowd – it’s not like being best friends, or even a threesome, where sometimes two of you pair up and leave the other out. There’s always someone on your side when you’re in a crowd.

Make new friends

But keep the old . . .





And then I started thinking about my combination birthday/Halloween party last year at our cottage in Conewago Grove, with Polly and Alice and Sandy and Fran – we all dressed up as the characters from The Wizard of Oz, with Polly as Toto, and told ghost stories on the sleeping porch by the light of jack-o’-lanterns. And now we have all graduated or gone to war (me) or married (Polly) or whatever, and we will never again be the team that won the Jericho County Girls’ Basketball Championship, or even play together probably.

It was the stupid candlewick bedspread’s fault! Mrs Hatch’s bedspreads feel the same as the ones Mother has out on the sleeping porch. Anyway, I had the candlewick on my bed pulled up to my chin last night and after I thought about the house party I started thinking about the sleeping porch – the thump and patter of squirrels running across the roof, the way the canvas awnings creak and flap, a trapped firefly blinking against the screen, the way the whole room shakes whenever anybody runs water in the bathroom on the other side of the wall –

I got so homesick I began to cry. I just couldn’t stop thinking about the sleeping porch!

It’s funny what sets you off. You miss people the most – really it is Polly and Alice and Sandy and Fran who I am lonely for – but it is the candlewick bedspread that makes me ache with longing to be home.





September 1, 1944



Hamble



Paris is free! It’s been a nerve-racking couple of weeks, watching the Allied forces inching along. We have a map we stick pins in to track the front lines. During the fighting in Paris there was no radio communication coming out of the city at ALL – nothing but rumours. The papers said the city was liberated and all the church bells in London were ringing to celebrate, and the next day the papers said, ‘Whoops, not yet!’ It wasn’t long before the real news came through, but it was like being on a roller-coaster waiting for it. Now the fighting is moving across the Seine and into Belgium.

The problem is that it’s getting harder and harder to get supplies to the front lines because the Germans are still hanging on to the ports at Calais, Le Havre, Boulogne, etc. They realise what a pain in the neck it is for the Allied forces to have to ferry fuel, food, spare parts, blood and bandages and everything else across to Normandy, and then truck it 200 miles north up this corridor between Germany and the French coast – especially with the train lines and bridges all blown up after the fighting (that is where Uncle Roger comes in, getting them to rig up temporary bridges in a hurry).