Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(60)

It had been my idea to do the Christmas bread, and Karolina who did the artwork – we were so excited about surprising the others. We cut our entire ration into squares an inch wide, like Fliss did back in Hamble, and we decorated them with stars, a scraping of margarine and a tiny star-shaped blob of red jam on each square.





Holiday Grace (for Lisette)


(by Rose Justice)

‘Now we’ll give thanks,’ you said, ‘and bless this food.’



Smiling, you passed around the Christmas feast –

a loaf sliced small in diamond panes and spread

with stars of glittering jam, bright tinsel treats

to put us in a festive mood.

We took the pretty stars and you, devout and pleased,

wished us ‘Joyeux Noel!’ and gratefully blessed the food.

Irony turned your frail adopted daughter



into a sneering brute.

‘Bless what ?’ she snarled, wild with angry laughter.

‘Why, are these holy wafers? Call this food ?

Tasteless stale bread, a smear of sour fruit!

Call it Christ’s body and his blood!

The Host can double as our Christmas treat –

now we can take communion as we eat!’

The tinsel turned to dust. All of us looked away



in shock and shame, stunned not so much

by her coarse, bitter blasphemy as that she’d say

something so cruel to you on Christmas Day –

you, who so love us all without condition.

You told her quietly,



‘Sit by yourself. Give thanks alone. We’ll wait

for you before we start.’ No indication

of how she’d speared your childless, pious heart.

We didn’t eat. She sulked for half an hour



on the dark boards alone. After another

of us began to cry she crept back to your side,

and you were full of love and joy, because you always are.

She whispered quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Mother.’

– Though you are not her mother, only she



who once, some time ago and in a different hell,

covered her tearful face and sang to her

while others dragged her mother’s body from your overcrowded cell

so that she would not see.





Sandwiched in between Ró?a and Irina that night I thought about Christmas in Pennsylvania. Not about past Christmases – I was thinking about this Christmas. I thought about my mother, and Daddy and Karl and Kurt and Mawmaw and Grampa, and how they’d be sitting round the table for Christmas dinner – maybe they were doing it now, this very moment – sitting at the cherry table with Mother’s Limoges china from out of the corner cupboard, and the poinsettia tablecloth and the brass and china candelabra with the tall red candles on it, and Daddy starting to carve the turkey. Mawmaw would be trying to say funny things to make the boys laugh and Grampa would be starting on his third bourbon. Suddenly Mother would leap up from the table and run into the dark living room, lit only by the low fire and the red and blue and green lights on the Christmas tree, and she’d curl on the sofa and sob.

She’d be doing it right now. I could see it so clearly, as though I were looking in the living-room window from the front porch.

She’d know I was missing – she’d have known that for months. And she hoped and hoped I was still alive, but she didn’t really believe it.

And the worst thing was that even though I was alive, I would never be able to tell her – and even if I could tell her, if I could have come through the feathers of frost on the windowpane and whispered in her ear, ‘Your Rosie is still alive,’ what hope could I have given her when I told her where I was? That I was starving and freezing and covered with lice and scabies and would probably be dead of typhoid or shot for stealing a turnip before the war ended?

Well, anyway, I started to cry again.

After a while Ró?a wiped my face with her sleeve.

‘You are thinking about Pennsylvania now, aren’t you?’

‘I am thinking about my mother.’

‘You idiot. I never think about my mother. I’d rather pinch the holes in my leg until they’re black and blue than think about my mother.’

I could understand that – it was probably less painful for her never to think about her mother. But it didn’t help me.

‘My mother will never know what happened to me,’ I said. ‘At least your name is out there on the BBC. Your legs are in those photographs. I’m just French Political Prisoner 51498. They don’t even have my nationality right. No one will ever know. And I bet they’ll incinerate all their precious prisoner records anyway, when the Allies come. They won’t want anyone to find out what’s going on here, just like they don’t want anyone to find out what happened at Auschwitz last summer.’

‘Don’t think about your mother. Think about the food she’s eating,’ Ró?a advised cheerfully. ‘You have a special meal on Christmas Day, like the Germans, right? What do you have for Christmas dinner in Pennsylvania?’

How she could be cheerful about food after what she did to Lisette I do not know. But we had the Christmas dinner discussion anyway. I won’t bother to write the rest of the conversation, because it was boring.