Joan was ten minutes late for school, but she managed to slip into her classroom just before the bell went for prayers. There was a new girl in the class, standing awkwardly beside Miss Sanderson’s desk. She was not a local girl. She was wearing the school uniform – a long-sleeved blouse with a school tie and a pleated navy serge tunic – but there was something weird about her. Her clothes looked too big and hung off her thin frame, and her hair was screwed up into braids and wound tightly around her head. She stood there with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes cast down, as though she was frightened to meet anyone’s gaze and was already expecting to be bullied.
Miss Sanderson tapped her desk with a ruler for silence.
“Girls, before we go into prayers, I want you to meet Ania. She is Polish, and she is joining our class. Her English is not too good yet – although I hear you’re working hard on it, aren’t you, Ania? – but I know you will all welcome her and help her settle down as soon as possible. Ania, would you like to take the desk here at the front, next to Angela Travis? She will help to explain any of our rules that you don’t understand. And, by the way, Ania won’t be joining us for prayers.”
Just then the bell rang, and most of the pupils stood up. School prayers were strictly for Church of England girls only. Catholic and Jewish girls remained behind in the classroom, taking the opportunity to gossip and catch up on unfinished homework. Ania stood still, looking at her feet. Heaven help her, thought Joan, if she’s got to sit in the desk next to Angela Travis.
Angela was a great favourite with the teaching staff, but among the girls she was known as the Himmler of the Lower Fifth, named after Hitler’s Gestapo chief, and for very good reason. She was an outwardly demure girl with neatly combed, slightly sandy-coloured hair, and her mother always managed to send her to school every day in a freshly ironed blouse. Angela had a way of lowering her eyes and whispering behind her hand about other people to her particular gang of friends, or rather, to those luckless girls who were too frightened not to be her friends in case they got whispered about too.
Angela and her gang usually waited until mid-morning break, when everyone was in the playground, before giving the signal to begin the daily victimization. This began with sniggering, meaningful looks and some very carefully judged and easily overheard personal insults. Then they closed in on their prey: pinching, hair-pulling and dragging her clothes awry. If they did not succeed in making a girl cry before the bell went for the end of break, they reckoned they had failed and would intensify their efforts during the next one.
Doreen, Joan’s best friend, was one of the few girls in the class who didn’t care a jot for Angela and her gang and treated them with offhand contempt.
That morning, when the bell went and they were all outside, Doreen strolled over to where Ania was standing on her own, marooned like a stag at bay, and tried to start some sort of conversation. She met with very little success. Ania’s eyes widened with fright and she could hardly manage more than a few replies in broken English in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. But Doreen’s support did the trick. Angela and company, who had been circling like vultures, could not summon the nerve to pounce with Doreen standing there and Joan hovering in the background. Ania was saved, for that day at least.
“You were great, sticking up for that new girl at break today,” Joan said later that afternoon as she and Doreen ambled homewards together. She was not proud of the fact that she hadn’t been able to do what Doreen had with such casual confidence. Deep down, Joan was a little afraid of Angela. She knew how capable she was of turning on anyone who protected an obvious loser.
“Oh, that Angela,” Doreen said carelessly. “Classic Nazi bullying tactics. Angela and her lot would have no trouble getting themselves promoted in the Hitler Youth. Actually, I was talking to someone earlier who seemed to know something about Ania. Came here with lots of other refugee kids – on a Kindertransport, I think – just before the war began. She’s been shunted around from one temporary place to another ever since so hasn’t managed to pick up much English. Both her parents are dead and they can’t trace any other family. Now she’s billeted with some old lady − I think her name is Miss Mellor – in Ashchurch Avenue.”
“Don’t envy her. It’s one of those roads near the promenade – so quiet that it’s a big event when a cat walks past. Nothing doing except a lot of curtain-twitching,” Joan said.
“Yeah. Ania muttered something about Miss Mellor being very fussy and ultra houseproud. She likes Ania to be out of the way as much as possible, so she has to walk about on her own after school until it gets dark and then she’s allowed to clock in for supper. After that, it’s sitting with Miss Mellor in the front room, listening to the nine o’clock news on the radio, then lights out and off to bed.”
“Poor her. Anyway, let’s hope Angela will stay away from her now or she might wish she was back where she came from!”