NOT MUCH OF A GERMAN

Coming closer to my secret place, I slipped a hand into my satchel to take out the gun.

‘Oh, no.’ I stopped.

‘What’s wrong?’ Kim asked.

I held up the pistol for her to see. ‘It broke.’ There was slimy egg yolk all over the pistol, adding to the dirt that was stuck in the gaps in the metal.

‘You brought an egg?’

I nodded, feeling awful. I’d stolen food from Mam and now it was ruined. It was no use at all.

‘And you put it in your satchel with the gun? What did you expect?’

I shrugged and shook my head. All the effort I’d gone to this morning was wasted.

‘Well . . .’ She looked at me and stopped. She could see I was upset and annoyed with myself. ‘Oh, never mind. You got a blanket and that’s brilliant. Just wipe the gun on the grass over there.’

I went to the trunk of a hazel tree, where the grass grew in tufts as high as my wellies, and I squatted down to wipe the pistol clean. Kim crouched beside me.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Of course it matters,’ I said. ‘I took it from Mam. I thought it was all right because I was going to use it to help someone, but now I’ve broken it and . . .’ I sighed and picked up a twig to flick some dirt from a crevice on the gun. ‘We’ve got nowt to spare as it is.’

‘You think it’s bad here?’ Kim said. ‘It’s even harder in the city. There’s gardens here and loads of vegetables, but in Newcastle most of the gardens are blown up and—’

‘We’ve still got hardly anythin’ and we can’t afford to go breaking stuff, or giving it away. Maybe we shouldn’t be helping ’im.’

‘He’s our souvenir.’

‘Aye, but he’s not, though, is he? He’s a person and, well . . . maybe we should tell someone. Let someone else look after ’im.’

‘Look after him?’ she said. ‘They’d just shoot him. You said so yourself.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘Aye. I s’pose so.’ It all felt like such a mess.

‘Come on.’ She stood up and put out a hand to pull me up.

I reached out and took it. It was warm and soft. And when I was standing, she let me hold it for a moment longer before I let go and we continued on through the woods, going straight to my secret place; the place where we had hidden our souvenir.

*

At the end of the main street in the village, there was a noticeboard that used to show drab flyers about dances, or church services or about the village fair. Now, though, there were colourful posters telling people to ‘Dig for Victory’ or ‘Make Do and Mend’. There were even posters telling people not to talk about the war because German spies lurked round every corner and hid behind every bush.

When the posters first went up, there were too many people crowding round the noticeboard to see them, but then they were everywhere. They were in the village hall, in the grocer’s, and even on the wall inside the butcher’s instead of pictures of lamb chops and mince.

One of the posters was put up so we’d know how to spot the enemy if they invaded – as if we wouldn’t be able to tell by the fact they’d be shooting at us. There was a picture of a German sailor standing next to an airman wearing a blue-grey jacket with gold on the collar and matching trousers tucked into long black boots. He also had a hat with an eagle on it, pulled tight over his golden hair. I’d felt ashamed when I first saw the picture because I thought the uniform was really smart, and because my hair was a similar colour.

But the man we’d captured didn’t look anything at all like the drawing pinned up behind Mr Shaw’s counter. Our German was completely different.

It was dim inside the tangle of shrubs, but some light cut through the gaps, and it was clearer than it had been in the torchlight. I could see that he was sitting in the same position, with his back against the sycamore, his arms loose by his sides and his legs outstretched.

He was wearing an all-in-one suit, more like overalls, grey except for the torn left sleeve which had a good deal of dark-brown dried blood caked on it. There were pockets on his thighs and he wasn’t wearing a hat of any sort. I was also surprised to see he didn’t have golden hair. His hair wasn’t even as blond as mine; his was a sort of brown colour. What Mam would have called ‘mousey’. His skin was pale, but much of his face was dirty, and there were streaks of mud and scratches, too. One long cut ran from the top of his head, right along the side of his face, and curved around to his chin. It didn’t look deep but it had bled a lot. Both of his eyes were closed, and his chin was resting on his chest.

The other thing I noticed was the smell.

‘Stinks in here,’ I whispered, noticing a dark stain around the front of the airman’s overalls. When I realised what it was, I felt a great surge of embarrassment for him and glanced away. ‘You think he’s wet ’imself?’

‘Maybe. Probably. He’s been here all night.’

I’d never heard of a grown up doing that before and it made me feel even more sorry for him. I thought about how terrible Dad would feel if it had happened to him and, somehow, it seemed even worse than being shot down. ‘He must really be in a bad way.’

‘Looks like he hasn’t even moved.

’ ‘He looks dead,’ I said, putting the gun on the ground beside me. ‘D’you think—’

‘No, I can see him breathing.’

I looked closely, watching his chest, and saw that Kim was right.

She knelt facing the airman and opened her satchel, removing a paper napkin which she laid out. Onto it she placed a handful of broken biscuits and a raw carrot. She also took out a cloth, a clean rag and a bottle of Dettol antiseptic.

‘It’s all I could get,’ she said.

I opened my satchel and looked inside. The egg had soaked into the leather and begun to stiffen. I’d have to wash it later, otherwise it would start to smell. I took out the small package of paper and unwrapped it to show my piece of tripe. ‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Apart from the egg.’

‘Tripe? Can you eat it raw?’

I stared at the pitiful thing and shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’

‘Can’t risk having a fire to cook it.’

I crumpled it back into the paper and sighed. ‘It’s no good then, is it? Wasted.’ A stab of guilt poked at my insides. Wasting food was the worst crime.

‘No, it’s good,’ Kim said. ‘He’ll just have to eat it raw.’

‘You reckon?’ I wondered if she was just trying to make me feel better.

‘Of course. Put it with the rest.’

So I put it beside her offerings and we stared at the bits and pieces. It didn’t look like much.

‘We’ll have to get more than this,’ Kim said with a sigh. ‘It’s not enough.’

‘How?’

She thought for a moment. ‘I might be able to get a few more things. A slice of bread, a small piece of meat. I’ll try to get something that’s cooked. Maybe sneak out a bit of my lunch or tea.’

‘I can try that.’

‘You ever get the rations from the shops?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Well, next time see if you can keep a bit; bring it here.’

I nodded, feeling a tinge of shame that I was sitting here, in front of a German airman, discussing how I was going to steal food to feed him. But underneath it all, I felt as if I was saving his life.

‘And we’ll need something for him to wee in,’ Kim said.

‘What?’

‘Well, you’re right about it stinking in here, and what if he needs to go for a you-know-what? He needs a chamber pot.’

‘A gazunder? Can he not just go outside, like?’

‘Not sure he’s in any state to. He can hardly walk. Haven’t you got a spare one?’

I shook my head. ‘Just the one under me bed.’

I tried to think what we could bring for him. If I ever needed a pee when I was in the woods, I just found a good tree. Anything more serious and I ran home to the netty at the bottom of the garden – a small wooden outhouse that was painted a faded and cracked green. There was a gap under the door that the winter wind blew right through and I sometimes begged to use the commode in Mam’s bedroom if I needed a sit down, but she always said no. That was only for use at night.

‘We used to have an old coal scuttle,’ I said, ‘but that went to the scrap collection. Don’t think we’ve got anything else. Nothing Mam wouldn’t miss, anyways.’

‘Well, see if there’s anything you can find. I’ll have a look too.’

We waited a while longer, saying nothing, but still he didn’t wake up, so Kim edged forward and put her hand out. She touched his shoulder, a quick poke, and drew her hand away.

Still he didn’t move.

This time she put her hand on his shoulder and shook him, making his whole body wobble. For a moment, I thought he was going to slide sideways and fall over but, instead, he moaned, and opened his eyes. Just a crack.

Kim jumped back to sit next to me and I put my hand down to touch the pistol.

The German looked at us as if he was trying to remember where he was. He blinked hard and shook his head, a tiny movement as he looked about. And then he remembered.

He opened his eyes wide, panicking as he tried to push himself up. Immediately he gasped in pain, lifting his right hand to his left arm, putting his legs up to shuffle away from us. He turned his head from side to side like a cornered animal searching for an escape route, but there was nowhere for him to go, so he just cowered there. The sound of his heavy breathing filled the cocoon of foliage.

‘Don’t think we’re going to be a pushover,’ Kim said to him. ‘We might be children, but we’re English and we’re tough.’ She knelt up very straight and puffed out her chest. ‘Show him the gun, Peter.’

‘Hm?’

‘Show him the gun.’

‘Oh. Aye,’ I said, gripping the pistol and holding it up. The German cringed and put up his good hand, holding it out in front of his face. He said something in German, but all I heard was a lot of sounds, and the only one I could pick out was the one he had said last night. ‘Bitte.’

‘Don’t point it at him,’ Kim told me.

‘But you said to—’

‘I said show it to him, not point it at him.’

‘All right.’ I lowered it and put it down.

‘Are you thirsty?’ Kim asked him. She picked up the bottle she’d left last night and shook it. ‘There’s not much in it.’

‘We can always get more,’ I told her. ‘From the burn.’

‘Thirsty?’ she asked him again, shaking the bottle. ‘You want a drink?’

‘Wasser,’ he answered. ‘Wa-ter.’

She unscrewed the cap and gave it to him. He put it to his lips and I watched to see if he did anything strange, but I couldn’t see anything that made him different. On some of the posters, the Germans looked like they had no faces, just half-closed eyes looking at us from the shadow beneath their helmets. Or they were dark monsters, sighting along the barrels of their rifles. On one of them, the enemy was a moustached cross between Hitler and the devil – his red face topped with horns that stuck out from his side-parted black hair. But as I watched him drink, I realised the man we’d brought into my secret place wouldn’t have stood out if he’d been waiting in the queue at the grocer’s. A change of clothes and he would have looked just like everyone else. He wasn’t very frightening at all.

When he’d drained the water bottle, I took it back and replaced the cap. Kim handed him the broken biscuits and the carrot, putting the paper napkin on his lap.

The German eyed them with suspicion.

‘We’ll get some more water,’ Kim said, holding up the bottle and nudging me. ‘Come on.’

We left him to his food and crawled out.

When we were at the burn, Kim squatted beside the clear water and submerged the bottle. I jumped up onto the tyre swing that hung by a thick rope from the bough of an old tree, and watched the bubbles rising in the burn.

‘I like your swing,’ Kim said.

‘Me da’ put it up for us,’ I said, swaying gently, legs dangling, the tyre twisting slowly so that one moment I was looking at Kim and the next I wasn’t.

‘That should do it,’ she said, taking the bottle from the water and screwing the top back on.

‘He’s not much of a German, is he?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve seen the posters. They always look different. Like they’re monsters or somethin’.’

Kim looked confused at first, then she smiled and laughed through her nose. ‘You don’t really think they all look like devils, do you?’ She came over and put a hand on the tyre to stop it from revolving.

‘Well, no, but . . . I dunno . . . That’s what they’re like on posters. Or they’re blond or they’re angry or . . . something. But he’s not scary at all. He’s sort of . . . well, sort of sad, and you can’t help feelin’ sorry for him.’

Kim tightened her mouth and nodded.

‘He just looks like us,’ I said.

‘You’re right,’ she agreed. ‘No different at all.’

For a little while we stayed like that, not saying anything. Me sitting in the tyre and Kim standing beside me, holding it still.

‘Every time I look at him, it makes me think of Josh,’ she said eventually.

‘Me too. About me da’, I mean.’

‘Have you heard anything?’ she asked. ‘Any letters?’

I shook my head. ‘You?’

‘Not for ages,’ she said. ‘I hope he’s all right.’

‘Me too.’

‘And I can’t stop thinking about how I wish someone would look after him if anything like this happened to him and . . . well . . .’ She shrugged.

‘He looks really scared, doesn’t he?’ I remembered how I’d pointed the gun at him, and that’s when I realised I’d made a terrible mistake. All the time I’d been thinking about how sorry I felt for the German, I had forgotten about something important.

‘Oh no,’ I said, slipping out from the tyre. ‘I left it inside. The gun. I left it in there with ’im.’

‘What?’ She stared at me. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘I forgot about it.’

Kim took a deep breath and let it out in a big rush. ‘Well, there’s not much we can do about it now.’

‘Are we going back?’

‘Do you want to?’ she asked.

I looked at the tangle of sticks and leaves that hid the German from view. ‘What if he shoots us?’

‘Do you think he will?’

I imagined the airman inside, pointing the gun, ready to kill us. A moment ago I’d been feeling sorry for him, but now . . . ‘No.’ I shook the thought away. ‘Of course he won’t. It probably doesn’t even work anyway; it’s so full of muck.’

‘So do you want to go back?’

I swallowed hard, thinking for a moment before I nodded. ‘Aye.’

‘You sure?’

‘Not really.’

I went first; it was only fair that way, because it was me who had forgotten to bring the gun with us. I held my breath and crawled in, cringing, waiting for whatever it would feel like to be shot and killed, but the German was still sitting against the tree trunk eating his carrot. The pistol was exactly where I had left it, as if he hadn’t bothered with it at all. He was sitting forward now, though, as if he’d noticed his wet patch and was trying to hide it from us.

I let out my breath and shuffled further in to sit with my legs crossed, so the pistol was just on one side and Kim was on the other.

The German looked up at me and took another bite of carrot. The vegetable snapped off in his front teeth and we could hear him crunching it. Kim and I sat as far away as possible from him, staring almost as we might stare at a curiosity at a travelling fair – or an animal in a zoo.

The German continued to chew.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

He stopped chewing.

‘Peter,’ I said touching my finger to my chest. ‘Peter.’ Then I pointed at Kim and said, ‘Kim.’

The German swallowed. He ran his tongue around his mouth and said ‘Peter.’ He pointed at me with the half-eaten carrot, then swung it to my right and pointed it at Kim. ‘Kim.’

We nodded and he nodded.

He looked at us, his eyes sliding from me to Kim and back again. Then he sniffed hard and touched his own chest with the bitten end of the carrot. ‘Erik.’

‘Erik.’ I glanced at Kim. ‘Doesn’t sound foreign at all.’

‘Erik,’ he said again, forcing a smile to his lips, but I could see he was in pain, even if he wasn’t as afraid of us any more.

When he’d finished eating, he folded up the paper napkin and handed it back. Kim replaced it in her satchel and offered him the cigarette the soldier at the wreck had given her. Erik took it, putting it into his mouth. He looked very grateful to have it, and waggled his hand in front of it until we realised we had no way to light it.

‘Sorry,’ Kim said, holding out her hands and shrugging.

The German patted the pocket on his left knee, and unzipped it, putting his hand in and taking out a silver gas lighter that he used to light the cigarette. He took a deep suck on it and tipped back his head before letting the smoke drift out. Immediately, the small space was filled with the smell of tobacco, making us both cough.

As the German smoked, Kim unscrewed the cap of the water bottle once more and wet the cloth she’d brought. She edged closer to the German and held it towards his face.

‘I should clean your cut,’ she said.

At first he flinched away, but then he nodded and allowed Kim to gently wash the dry blood from around the long gash on his face. It was crusted thick in places and when she rubbed a little too hard, Erik winced and his gaze met mine before he looked down at the bare, compacted soil, almost as if he were ashamed.

Kim wafted the smoke away as she cleaned the dirt and blood from his face, and when she sat back, we could see what Erik really looked like. Kim had been right when she said he was only a young man, perhaps even still a teenager.

She dabbed some of the Dettol onto the scratch using the cloth, then she put her fingers to the place where his sleeve was ripped and parted the material to look inside. She wrinkled her upturned nose and took a deep breath. ‘That’s quite a scratch.’

‘Maybe he did it on a tree when he was comin’ down.’

‘Maybe. Give me your knife,’ she said.

‘Why? What you gonna do?’

‘I need to cut the rest of his sleeve.’

‘What?’

‘His arm needs to be cleaned,’ she said. ‘It looks really bad.’

‘Shouldn’t we get a doctor or somethin’?’

Erik was watching us closely now, trying to follow our conversation, and he stiffened at the word ‘doctor’.

‘It’s all right,’ Kim said. ‘I’ve seen people clean wounds before. Bigger wounds than this.’

Erik was looking from me to Kim and then back again, desperation coming to his eyes as he started to shake his head.

‘Where?’ I put my hand in my pocket and started to take out my knife, but hesitated.

‘Where d’you think? Dad’s a doctor and Mum’s a nurse,’ she said. ‘I’ve been to the hospital loads of times. I did tell you.’

‘Did you?’

‘I think so.’

‘Nein,’ Erik finally said, taking us both by surprise. ‘No. No doc-tor. No.’

‘It’s all right.’ Kim sat back and held her hands out to him. ‘No doctor.’ She looked at me. ‘We don’t need a doctor. I can do this. I promise.’

‘But—’

‘We can’t tell anyone, Peter. You know what they’ll do to him. We have to look after him ourselves. Just give me your knife; it’ll be fine.’

I sighed and took out my penknife, opening the blade and passing it to her.

Erik pulled back when Kim put the steel close to his arm, but she smiled at him. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s fine.’

It was strange watching Kim cut away the sleeve and clean Erik’s wounded arm. For that short time, she didn’t look like a child. She looked more like a little adult because she seemed to know exactly what she was doing. She didn’t hesitate or panic or worry about anything she was doing. And when she had cleaned the wound, I watched as she disinfected it with the Dettol and cut the rag she had brought, making it into a good, tight bandage.

‘That’s amazin’,’ I said when she was finished. And I thought how proud her mam would have been to have seen her bandage him like that. ‘Really brilliant. You’ll be a brilliant nurse, like.’ I even imagined, just for a moment, that one day I might be wounded, and Kim could be my nurse.

Erik put his right hand to the dressing on his left arm and nodded. ‘Danke,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome.’ Then she looked at me. ‘It’ll do for now, but it’ll need to be changed. We’ll have to get proper bandages from somewhere. It could get infected otherwise.’

‘Doctor Jacobs has some,’ I said, remembering how he’d taken care of me just after the plane crash. ‘I saw them in his medical bag.’ And I knew, as soon as I’d said it, what was coming next. I could already see Kim’s mind at work.

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll have to find a way to get hold of that bag.’