‘She’ll be fine,’ Dan had said. It was an optimistic remark, but neither he nor Naomi knew just how optimistic. It was far more difficult being a foster parent than Naomi had expected; being responsible for a child who wasn’t yours, needing to keep her safe so that, one day perhaps, she could be reunited with her parents. When she and Daniel had offered themselves she hadn’t realised how heavy the responsibility would feel.
The early weeks had not been easy on either side. Lisa was desperately homesick and unable to explain her fears and her emotions to her new parents. She spoke only a few words of English and the Federmans spoke absolutely no German. Everything was strange to Lisa, and with no children of their own, Naomi and Dan were at a loss as to how they might deal with a thirteen-year-old girl, who looked at the world through wide, frightened eyes and often cried herself to sleep.
‘I’m beginning to wonder what we’ve taken on,’ Naomi sighed to Dan one evening when Lisa had been with them for a week. ‘The poor kid is so homesick and I can’t communicate with her except by signs and the odd word or two. I tried to give her a hug today when she was looking very down, but she pulled away and ran out of the room. I don’t know what to do, I feel so helpless.’
Dan pulled her into his arms and held her close. ‘You’re doing the best you can, love. You can’t do more. We just have to take each day as it comes and when her English improves we’ll be able to talk to her properly. Till then, well, we have to be patient and try and understand how she must be feeling, dumped on us, complete strangers, and away from everyone and everything she knows and loves.’
Naomi returned his hug. ‘You’re a wise man, Daniel Federman,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t deserve you, but I’m glad you’re mine.’
It did indeed take patience and goodwill on both sides, but with a great deal of sign language they managed to communicate enough to get by.
Soon after Lisa had arrived, Mary James, Naomi’s oldest friend, looked in for a cup of tea one afternoon. She and her husband Tom kept the Duke of Wellington pub on the corner. It was Dan’s local and the four of them had been friends since their school days, growing up in the area, building their lives in the familiarity of their London streets. When Naomi and Dan had decided to offer themselves as foster parents to a refugee child, Mary had, Naomi knew, suggested to Tom that they should do the same, but Tom had refused. He’d been in the last war, he said, and he’d seen enough bloody Germans to last him a lifetime and he wasn’t bloody going to have one in his house.
Mary had said no more about it, but when Lisa arrived in Kemble Street, she had taken pains to get to know her. On her first visit, she’d brought an English–German dictionary with her. ‘Found this on a stall down the market,’ she told Naomi. ‘Thought it might be useful!’
Naomi gave her a hug. ‘You’re a saviour! Look, Lisa!’ She held out the dictionary. When Lisa saw what it was she gave Mary a huge beam and said carefully, ‘Thank you, madam.’
Mary smiled back at her and said, ‘I hope it helps you.’
It certainly did. The dictionary was well-used. Left on the mantelshelf in the kitchen, it was there to hand when anyone was at a loss for a word in either language.
After that, Aunt Mary, as Lisa was instructed to call her, often dropped in to see how the girl was getting on and Lisa found herself looking forward to her visits. Mary seemed to understand how lost and lonely she must feel, a child in a foreign country, living with strangers and with war fever building around her.
It was indeed a time of national tension. War was coming, everyone knew that now, it was only a matter of when. The country had been preparing for months and Lisa was soon involved in some of the preparations. Naomi took her to the local distribution centre to have a gas mask fitted. People were queuing up to get their masks which were laid out on tables ready for trial. Harassed-looking volunteers dealt with each person in turn, finding the right mask and explaining how it should be put on. Lisa watched, wide-eyed, as Naomi was fitted with hers, not at all liking what she saw. Then it was her turn. The woman picked up a mask and, pressing it firmly against Lisa’s face, told her to push her chin forward into it and then adjusted the straps, so that it fitted snugly round her head. Lisa hated it. She hated the smell of the rubber, the touch of it on her skin, but more she hated having her face enclosed, feeling that she couldn’t breathe.
‘Just breathe normally,’ the woman said. But Lisa couldn’t, she fought for breath as a bubble of panic rose in her chest, threatening to suffocate her, and she ripped the mask from her face, gasping for air.
Naomi tried to encourage her to put it back on again, but she refused. She couldn’t explain her panic, all she could say was, ‘No! No! No!’
‘She’s a refugee,’ Naomi explained. ‘She doesn’t speak English.’
‘Well,’ snapped the weary volunteer, ‘that won’t stop her getting gassed, now will it? Never mind,’ she glanced back at the queue of people waiting, ‘it was a good enough fit. Just take it home with you and get her to practise wearing it, so she gets used to it. Instructions are in the lid.’ She handed them the two gas masks in their cardboard cases and turned to the next in the queue.
Another day they went to the street market and Naomi managed to buy the end of a roll of black material so they could make blackout curtains. Together they sat in the front room and covered the wooden frames Uncle Dan had made to fit each window.
‘Good thing our windows ain’t big,’ Naomi remarked as they stretched the scant fabric across the frames and stitched it into place. ‘We was lucky to get this much.’ Black material was in great demand and she knew she had been extremely lucky to find any at all. Lisa liked to sew and helping Naomi with the blackout brought her a little closer to her foster mother. Naomi could see that Lisa had been well taught. Her stitches were neat and even and she worked quickly.
‘Good, Lisa,’ she said. ‘That’s very good. You sew beautifully.’ She was rewarded with a shy smile and Lisa’s first unprompted words. ‘My mother do me this.’
Building on this effort, Naomi said, ‘Your mother taught you. That’s good, Lisa, very good!’ They exchanged smiles and another link was forged between them. The next evening, when Naomi was listening to the wireless and darning one of Dan’s socks, Lisa leaned across and took another from the mending basket, neatly darning the hole which had appeared in the heel.
Number sixty-five Kemble Street had no garden, nowhere to put one of the Anderson shelters that the government were providing, and though there was a public air raid shelter at the far end of Hope Street, the thought of running there through a raid in the dark of night and being crushed in among so many was frightening, so Dan decided to fix up the old vegetable cellar as a shelter.
‘Is it deep enough?’ Naomi asked anxiously.
‘Should be,’ Dan reassured her, ‘unless we get a direct hit.’
‘So, shouldn’t we go to the Hope Street shelter?’ persisted Naomi.
‘That wouldn’t survive a direct hit either,’ he told her. ‘We’re just as well here.’ He brought down a couple of sagging armchairs and an old mattress with blankets and pillows, so they could sleep if the raid was a long one, keeping them there all night. There was a rickety table and on a shelf along one wall were some candles, stuck into the tops of beer bottles, matches, some bottles of water and biscuits in a tin.
When Lisa saw the cellar shelter she was terrified. She hated small spaces and being shut in. She had never liked closed doors, always leaving her bedroom door open, and the idea of being underground, actually under the house, filled her with horror. The cellar was a dark, cramped space, with no window and no electric light. The low ceiling and the grey stone walls pressed in on her, the dank musty air smothering her so that she could hardly breathe. She froze at the top of the steps and only allowed herself to be taken down, holding firmly to Dan’s hand. He had lighted some of the candles and the light flickered in the draught from the door.
‘Not shut door,’ she had begged. ‘Not shut door.’
‘No.’ He spoke reassuringly, knowing that she understood few of his words and hoping his tone would calm her. ‘Not today anyway. Only if there’s a raid.’ He recognised her panic and said soothingly, ‘We won’t be down here much, me duck, only if there’s an air raid,’ and with that he led her back upstairs to the kitchen.
‘She’s claustrophobic,’ he told Naomi later. ‘We’re going to have trouble getting her down into that cellar when the siren goes.’
Always pragmatic, Naomi said, ‘We’ll face that when the time comes. We ain’t at war yet, thank God.’
War fever was in the air though and it was only three weeks later that, listening to the wireless, they heard the grim news that Hitler had invaded Poland. Naomi and Lisa had come home from the market weighed down with groceries: tins of meat and vegetables, soup and sardines, iron rations to be squirrelled away for future use. Everyone was stocking up against the expected scarcities. Londoners knew they would be Hitler’s prime target and they were preparing themselves.
‘I saw some kiddies being taken to the railway station today,’ Naomi told Dan. ‘Dreadful it was. They was all lined up with labels on their coats, being taken away from home to goodness knows where.’ She looked across at him and added softly, ‘Just like poor Lisa.’
‘Better than staying here in London and being bombed to death,’ Dan said.
‘S’pose so,’ Naomi reluctantly agreed, ‘but heart-breaking for their mums.’ Secretly, she’d often wondered how Lisa’s mother could bear to send her daughter so far away, all alone; it wasn’t natural, she’d thought. But now, she realised, London mothers were doing exactly the same thing. Sending their children off into the unknown, with no idea of where they’d gone or who would be looking after them. It took brave women with deep love for their children to do that. And for the first time she was glad that she had no children to send. Then she thought of Lisa.
‘D’you think we ought to be sending Lisa away to the country, too?’ she asked Dan.
He shook his head. ‘Don’t know. Be a bit much for her, wouldn’t it? She’s only just got here, poor kid.’
‘Perhaps I ought to go and ask that Mrs Carter, at Bloomsbury House. What d’you think?’
‘You could, I suppose. See what she thinks is best.’
Naomi nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think I will. Don’t want Lisa to escape from the Nazis only to be bombed by them here.’
She went to Bloomsbury House the next day and had less than two minutes of a very harassed Mrs Carter’s time.
‘I can’t do anything for her at present,’ she said. ‘The best thing is to keep her with you for the moment and get her into a school as soon as possible. If the school is then evacuated, well, she can go with them.’
So Lisa stayed on with the Federmans in their little house in Kemble Street, never realising how close she’d come to being put on yet another train, with a label on her coat.
On 3 September, that fateful Sunday morning, she and her foster parents listened in silence to Mr Chamberlain’s broadcast.
‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.’ The prime minister’s speech was slow and sombre and the sound of it filled Lisa with fear. ‘I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’
Lisa had only understood very few words in the whole broadcast, but ‘war’ and ‘Germany’ were among them and she could see the horrified look on Aunt Naomi’s face and the weary resignation on Uncle Dan’s.
‘Here we go again,’ he said, ‘so much for “peace in our time”!’
At war with Germany, the words echoed in Lisa’s head. Mutti, Papa and Martin are still trapped there, she thought, as she fought to keep the tears of desolation and despair from flooding down her cheeks. I’ll never see them again.
Lisa had written home to tell her mother that she had arrived safely in London and to give her the Federmans’ address. She had received one letter back.
Aunt Naomi handed her the envelope one morning, saying, ‘This is for you, Lisa. Looks like a letter from home.’
Lisa had almost snatched it from her, and muttering, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ had retired to her bedroom to open it. Tearing the envelope open she found the letter written on a sheet of paper torn from an exercise book. There, suddenly dear to her, was her mother’s familiar handwriting.
My darling,
I was so pleased to hear that you have arrived safely and are now living with such kind people. Please thank Mr and Mrs Federman for me and remember to be a good girl. They are so generous to take you into their home and look after you, you must be sure to show how grateful you are and behave like the loving and thoughtful girl I know you are. We are well here. You’ll be glad to hear Papa is home again now and though he hasn’t been very well, he is getting better.
We all miss you very much, but are so relieved to know that you’re safe. Remember you can write to Cousin Nikolaus, he would love to hear from you.
Write again soon, darling, as we are longing to hear about your new life in London, about your school and the friends you have made, indeed everything that’s happened to you since you got on the train.
We all send our love and Martin says to tell you that he’s looking after us very well.
All our love,
Mutti
Tears filled Lisa’s eyes as she read and reread the letter, savouring the news it brought. Couched in such general terms that nothing in it might be construed as seditious or dangerous should it be intercepted and read, it still told Lisa much of what she wanted to know. Papa was home again. The Gestapo, or whoever had been holding him – her mother had been careful not to say – had finally let him go. Perhaps now that he was home, they’d be able to leave Germany, perhaps go to Cousin Nikolaus in Switzerland. Surely now he was with them they could try. Surely it wasn’t too late.
Though the letter made Lisa ache with homesickness, at least she had news of them all. She kept it under her pillow, often reading it again before she went to sleep, kissing the paper her mother had touched. That and the photograph, which she carried everywhere, were her last precious links with home.
As they sat in the kitchen that Sunday morning and Uncle Dan and Aunt Naomi pondered Mr Chamberlain’s words, Lisa fingered the picture in her pocket of her family, now trapped by the declaration of war.
‘Thank God you’re too old to go this time,’ Naomi was saying.
Daniel, ten years older than she, had, as a seventeen-year-old lad, spent several months in the Flanders trenches. He had not been wounded but his health had been broken and ever since then he’d had a weak chest, on occasion wheezing and fighting for breath. Privately, Naomi thought his general weakness could be the reason that there had been no babies, but she would never have said so. She loved him dearly and if no babies was the price she must pay for marrying her Dan, then so be it. At least he didn’t have to go to war again.
‘They said it was the war to end all wars,’ murmured Naomi, ‘and that was only twenty years ago!’
‘Reckon it’ll be a different sort of war this time,’ Dan said, ‘air raids and the like.’
‘Like in Spain, you mean?’ Naomi asked fearfully. She, like everyone else, had been horrified to see the newsreel films of the bombing in the Spanish civil war which had been shown at the cinema.
‘That,’ said Dan dismissively, ‘that was just ’itler practising. You’ll see.’
At that moment an air raid siren began to wail. Lisa started to her feet with a cry of alarm. It was only a test, but the sound of its swooping howl made all three of them realise that it wouldn’t be long before they heard it again and next time it would truly be warning of an attack.