and coming fast.
‘Perhaps we should get out and lie on the ground, just in case they see the car,’ said Fraulein Gelber nervously.
‘Too late,’ said the driver. ‘They’d see us move.’
Heidi craned to get a better look out the window.
Would they hear the sound of a bomb falling before it hit their car and killed them, Heidi thought in sudden terror?
Fraulein Gelber pulled her back, as though just seeing the plane might make her more vulnerable, but Heidi caught a glimpse of it anyway, too high up to make much out, and then there was its black shadow flying across the grass beyond the trees.
How could death come so quickly over the trees? wondered Heidi. She watched the shadow till it was out of sight, and the engine noise had faded to humming again.
Fraulein Gelber took her hand. Fraulein Gelber’s hand was damp and clammy, and shaking, too. The driver started the car, and they drove off again.
More trees and fields, and once, a village, with a church at one end of the square and a cafe at the other, with no bomb damage at all that Heidi could see, except for one house on the outskirts, half ruined, and the windows filled up with cardboard instead of glass.
‘Stray bomb, probably,’ said the driver, nodding at it. ‘Sometimes they have a few spare that they haven’t dropped on targets and they drop them anywhere, so that they don’t use up so much fuel carrying them back home.’
Home was England. England was the enemy. Sometimes Heidi wondered what it must be like to be English. Were they evil people or just stupid? How could they possibly win against all of Germany, against Duffi. It was such a little island on the map.
The road twisted out of the village, past a farm, and then another, with pigs rolling in the fresh black mud, and then down another road, past two ancient oak trees like giant dark umbrellas across the road, and they were there.
The new house was small, or at least it seemed so to Heidi after the big house where she’d lived before. It crouched under the trees like it, too, was hiding from the bombs.
But it had three bedrooms upstairs (narrow twisting wooden stairs): one bedroom was for Heidi and one was for Fraulein Gelber. The third was to be their schoolroom, where all their books would go. It had a big kitchen with a cold, paved floor and an even bigger cellar that you got to by going out the kitchen door and down some steps.
Fraulein Gelber inspected the cellar thoroughly. She didn’t say why, but Heidi knew that the cellar was where they would go if enemy planes flew overhead. Bombs might crush the house, but the cellar would be safe.
The cellar smelled sweet and musty. It had bins of apples stored in old dried leaves, and shelves with jars of jam and sauerkraut and honey, and cabbages all in a pile and two sacks of potatoes with just a few taken out of one, and a sack of golden onions, their skins floating off like yellow autumn leaves.
‘Where are the people who lived here before?’ asked Heidi, but Fraulein Gelber couldn’t say.
‘That’s none of our business,’ she said, though Heidi thought it was. It seemed odd to be wandering through rooms that other people had lived in not long ago eating their onions and plum jam, and then not even to know what they’d been like or where they were now.
Only Heidi and Fraulein Gelber were to live in the house. Sergeant Amchell lived in the barn.
He was old, with a long salt and pepper moustache that looked like it would fall out if he blew his nose too hard. He had been wounded in the leg in the last war, so he limped just like Heidi.
She hoped he’d notice that she limped, too, and maybe joke about it—the two of them with only two good legs between them—or something friendly like that, but he kept to himself and tended the giant cabbages in the garden instead of standing to attention at the door like the other guards she’d known. Mostly he pretended he didn’t see her when she smiled at him, or hear her when she said ‘
He was the only guard they had now.
The first night in the new house Fraulein Gelber lit the candles and sat her on one of the hard dark chairs in the sitting room.
‘A woman will be coming tomorrow to cook the food, and to look after the house,’ said Fraulein Gelber. ‘Her name is Frau Leib. She is just a farm woman, but I want you to be polite to her, even so.’
‘Of course,’ said Heidi.
Fraulein Gelber hesitated. ‘Frau Leib has been told you are my niece, the child of my sister who was killed in the air raids.’
Heidi looked up. ‘Was your sister killed in the air raids?’ she asked in alarm.
Fraulein Gelber’s sister was married and lived three streets away from her mother. She had sent Fraulein Gelber a scarf last Christmas. Heidi had secretly hoped that one day someone from Fraulein Gelber’s family might send her a present too, but they never did. Perhaps Fraulein Gelber had never mentioned Heidi in her letters. Or maybe they thought she had everything she needed and didn’t need presents.
‘No, of course not,’ said Fraulein Gelber. ‘My sister is quite well, apart from a slight case of grippe last month. But it’s best if that’s what Frau Leib continues to believe.’
Fraulein Gelber hesitated again. ‘I don’t want you speaking too much to her, you understand?’
‘I understand,’ said Heidi.
chapter seven
Frau Leib
The rain pounded on the roof of the bus shelter like it couldn’t wait to get down from the sky. One of the cows moaned softly, a sad, wet complaint about life in general.
‘Go on,’ urged Mark.
‘The bus,’ said Anna.
Mark looked at his watch.
‘We’ve got another five minutes at least,’ he said. ‘Go on!’
Anna took another breath, and began the story again.
Frau Leib had grey hair, not speckled grey like Fraulein Gelber’s—whose hair looked a bit like a hen’s feathers, Heidi thought sometimes—but grey all over like a saucepan, and tight curls that looked like they were made of metal too, they were so firm about her head.
Frau Leib’s hands were large, with red knuckles. Her skirt was much longer and wider than Fraulein Gelber’s, the sort of skirt you could use for carrying apples or cabbages from the cellar, and an apron from her neck to her knee, a ‘kittel’, that seemed welded to her waist no matter what else she wore.
Heidi never saw Frau Leib without her apron; whether she was coming or going, she still had it on. It looked bigger than she was, all bunched up at her sides, as though at one time Frau Leib had been even larger than she was now.
Frau Leib lived on the farm just down the road, the one with the pigs in the black mud. Her husband worked the fields with their young grandsons and two of their daughters-in-law. Their sons were away fighting, except for one who was in a prisoner-of-war camp in America (America was the enemy now, too).
Herr Leib was in the Nazi Party—one of the first members in the whole district—so his wife was supposed to be trustworthy.
She also liked to talk.
Frau Leib talked in a dialect so thick it was sometimes hard to understand, but that didn’t matter, because she said so much that you could leave half of it out and still have enough for conversation.
‘I talk as the pig’s snout grows,’ said Frau Leib with a grin that showed the dark gaps in her back teeth, meaning that she talked as thoughts flew into her head, and there were a lot of thoughts under Frau Leib’s grey
