‘No, Dad, I’m serious. If you did things like Hitler did—really bad things—what do you think I should do?’
Dad looked at him more sharply. ‘You mean, should you go along with me because I’m your father, no matter what?’
‘Yeah, that’s about it,’ said Mark.
‘I don’t know,’ said Dad slowly. He put his paper down, as though for once he was seriously trying to answer Mark’s question. ‘I suppose I’d want you to do what you thought was right.
‘But…’ Dad hesitated, then went on. ‘If we do ever disagree about things, I hope we’ll still be able to talk about it. Still meet and be a family, no matter how much we argue.’
‘Okay,’ said Mark.
‘Does that answer your question?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mark truthfully. ‘Hey, what would you do if I was a mass murderer? You know, chopped them up with a chainsaw or something.’
‘Stop your pocket money,’ said Dad, grinning. ‘And I’ll tell you straight, kid—you murder one more person and there’ll be no television for a fortnight. And if you try burying the bodies under your mum’s roses I’ll send you to your room. And you’d better clean the blood off my good chainsaw too.’
‘No—really.’
‘Dunno,’ said Dad, serious again. ‘Try to work out why you did it. Be sad for you. Be sad for your victims. Try to get help for you. Wonder how your mother and I failed you.’
‘Would you turn me into the police?’
‘Yes,’ said Dad slowly. ‘I suppose I’d have to. That’s a hell of a question, Mark.’
‘Would you still love me? No matter what I did? Even if I killed hundreds and hundreds of people?’
‘Yes, of course we would, you dingbat. Or maybe we’d love you in a different way. What’s brought all this on anyway?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Mark.
chapter six
Anna Continues
The rain chattered onto the ground, and dribbled along the wet barbed wire round Harrison’s paddock till it trickled down in short ploppy streams. It seemed even louder in the bus shelter.
The cows chomped sadly at the wet grass. Today the air was still, so the rain fell straight and clear.
‘It’s never going to stop,’ said Mark. ‘It’s going to go on and on and we’ll have to get a boat to school and all the cars will float away…’
‘Really?’ asked Little Tracey, wide-eyed.
‘No, of course not really,’ said Mark. ‘Hey Anna I was wondering. Have you told anyone else this story? The Hitler one?’
‘No,’ said Anna shortly. ‘It’s just between us.’
‘Oh,’ said Mark, vaguely pleased.
‘Are you going to tell us more?’ Little Tracey bounced up and down.
‘If you like,’ said Anna.
It was soon after Heidi had asked Fraulein Gelber about the Jews that they had to move house.
‘Why do we have to go?’ asked Heidi, half scared and half excited.
Fraulein Gelber waved a letter, typewritten, with a sprawling signature at the bottom, but too quickly for Heidi to read what it said.
‘From Duffi?’ asked Heidi.
Fraulein Gelber shrugged, as though to say that all orders came eventually from Duffi, but this letter was from someone else.
‘Where will we go?’ asked Heidi.
Fraulein Gelber told her. The name meant nothing to Heidi.
‘We will look it up on the map this afternoon,’ said Fraulein Gelber. ‘It will be a nice place. You will like it.’
‘But WHY do we have to go?’
‘It will be safer there,’ said Fraulein Gelber, but she didn’t say for whom. She smiled. ‘It is much nearer my family,’ she added. ‘Only two, three hours away by bicycle.’
‘Will they visit us?’ asked Heidi eagerly.
Sometimes Fraulein Gelber had let Heidi read her mother’s letters or her sister’s, or even her brother’s, as a treat. Her father had died, many years before, and that was why Fraulein Gelber had to work. He had been a friend of Duffi’s.
But Fraulein Gelber had told her often that it was an honour to work in the Fuhrer’s household. ‘I could have married,’ she had explained to Heidi. ‘I have had…oh, several offers. Several men have pleaded with me to marry them.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ asked Heidi, hoping that Fraulein Gelber would say, ‘I didn’t want to leave you.’
But instead she said, ‘To give up my work, after all the Fuhrer has done for us? That I couldn’t do.’
‘I don’t think they will visit,’ said Fraulein Gelber now, in a voice that told Heidi not to ask why.
Suddenly a thought occurred to her. ‘Will Duffi be at the new house?’
Perhaps that was why they were going, so they could be with Duffi. Maybe Duffi missed her. Maybe he had said…
‘No, of course not,’ said Fraulein Gelber. ‘He is in Berlin.’
‘But will he visit?’
‘
Other people packed for them. Heidi only had to pack her dolls and her special books.
Half of her wanted to leave the dolls behind—the pretty, perfect dolls—but Duffi had given them to her and, besides, she’d have had to explain to Fraulein Gelber.
They travelled to the new house by car the next day. Their move must have been arranged even before Fraulein Gelber had been told.
Three soldiers came to help them.
One of the soldiers drove their car, another rode behind on a motorbike, and the other drove the car with their luggage.
Fraulein Gelber didn’t know how to drive—most women didn’t know how to drive back then, and anyway, the guards were to look after them and make sure nothing happened to them on the way.
It was only an hour’s journey, but it was the first time Heidi had ever been in a car. (No, there had been one time before, when Duffi had taken her for a drive. He had pointed out a lake and geese and made her laugh by making the goose noise, but that was so very long ago it was hard to remember.)
She had never been so far before. There was so much that was new to see: the fields that were much like the fields she knew, but yet different, and pale brown cows, and once, a pair of goats in an orchard. The goats had climbed up onto a table and were stretching up to eat the trees, and Heidi laughed and pointed them out to Fraulein Gelber.
She would have liked to ask the soldier to stop the car so she could watch the goats, but she had been told already that she was not to talk to him.
No one said why she had to be silent, but she guessed. The driver was not to know who she was.
Suddenly there was a humming, far up in the sky, like bees in the plum blossom, but too sharp to be bees. The humming deepened, closer and closer, and then engines could be heard.
The driver glanced at Fraulein Gelber, then pulled the car in under a tree, so they couldn’t be seen from the air. The car behind pulled in close to the hedge, and so did the motorbike driver.
‘Bomber,’ said the driver briefly.
The enemy plane seemed to come slowly, slowly, slowly; then suddenly the plane was almost above them,
