Mum picked up the top letter and pocketed it. “Doesn’t matter if they do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that. It doesn’t matter if they do. They’re not going to. I want them to want to for a good long time. I want them towantto see Julia and not be able to. I want them to want it so much, it drives them near crazy.”
Emmy forked out a watery slice of meat and slapped it on top of one of the slices of bread. Juice spattered on the counter. “Brilliant idea, Mum. So very fair to Julia.”
Mum rose on unsteady feet and yanked on Emmy’s arm, forcing her to look at her. More meat juices erupted from the tin in Emmy’s hand and speckled the floor.
“That’s right. Itisa brilliant idea. It’s my brilliant idea. Julia deserves to have what is rightfully hers. Just like we all do. Just like you do, Emmeline.” Mum let go of her arm. “And I intend to see she gets it.”
Emmy watched as her mother kneeled down and used the handkerchief wet from tears and whiskey to mop the meat juice off the floor.
“They obviously know where you live, Mum. Do youreally think you will be able to keep these people from seeing Julia until you have what you want from them?”
Mum rose to her feet in one swift movement. “Is that what you think? That this is about what I want? When has anything ever been about whatIwant?”
Emmy turned back to the sandwiches. “That’s all it ever is,” she muttered.
Mum pulled at Emmy’s arm again, more gently this time. Her calm touch surprised Emmy.
“You’re wrong, Em.” Mum reached up to touch her daughter’s face and Emmy involuntarily flinched. Mum tenderly tucked a curling wisp of hair behind Emmy’s ear. “Someday I am going to prove it to you.”
For a moment, there was no age difference between the two of them, no crossed purposes, no opposing forces. They were just two women trying to chisel a happy life out of a giant hulk of rough-edged circumstances.
Then the moment passed. Mum pulled the letter from her pocket, held it over the rubbish bin, and saw that Emmy was watching her. She shoved it back inside the pocket and sat down again.
“There’s a designer who wants to teach me how to make patterns for my wedding dresses,” Emmy said a moment later. “He’s Mrs. Crofton’s cousin. He wants to see a couple of my sketches. He might mentor me in exchange for some hours working in his studio. He designs costumes for the West End, Mum.”
Mum furrowed her brow in consternation. Emmy could see that her mother was forming a response that Emmy would not want to hear.
“I’m nearly sixteen. Practically an adult,” Emmy said, already in defense mode.
“Nearly isn’t is, Em. You’re not an adult yet. Not in the eyes of the law.”
“But I know I can handle the extra work. Even when school starts in September. I can handle it. I’ve only a year left, anyway.” Emmy’s voice was rising in pitch and volume, and she tempered it to prove she was the rational adult she was claiming to be. “It’s not going to be a problem, Mum.”
“School isn’t starting in September.”
“What do you mean? Of course it is,” Emmy said.
Mum picked up the other envelope that had come in the day’s post and held it out.
Emmy wiped her hands on a dish towel and then took it.
The stationery was crisp and smelled of ink and importance. The return address was the school’s. Emmy sensed as soon as her fingers touched the paper that the letter would change everything that had happened that day. Her eyes caught the words “invasion” and “safety.”
“You and Julia are being evacuated to the countryside, Emmy,” Mum said. “They’re serious about it this time. You’re leaving London next week. All the children are.”
Seven
THEfirst time London’s children had been evacuated, nearly a year earlier, Mum had flat-out refused to send Emmy and Julia away. Her attitude then had been that there wasn’t a war, not on English soil, anyway, and she was not going to put her daughters on a train to God-knows-where. Emmy remembered her saying as much to their teachers at school, Thea next door, and anyone else who asked why Julia and Emmy were still in London. Emmy also remembered seeing something else in Mum’s eyes besides the defiance. Mum had felt it wasn’t in her best interest to send them off into the countryside, but for reasons Emmy was unsure of. There seemed to be more to Mum’s refusal than just outward unwillingness to be parted from her daughters.
There was no precedent for London being emptied of her children; no previous war had demanded it. Thelast time there had been an exodus for safer homes was during the plagues, and then it was only the rich who fled the cities. The adversary this go-around was not a disease but legions of army planes carrying bombs. It was an astounding concept that Germany could strike England by air and subdue her without even setting foot on her soil. But Mum had scoffed at the idea that the only way to ensure Emmy’s and Julia’s safety was to entrust them to strangers.
“You and Julia aren’t going anywhere,” she had said when the letter had arrived in August 1939, advising her to prepare her daughters for evacuation. When the other children in the neighborhood trudged to school carrying suitcases and gas masks, their weeping mothers trailing after them, Emmy and Julia had stayed home and played checkers. Some mothers, who had looked down their noses at Mum the day before, apparently hopped over the police cordon at the train station and snatched their children back before they boarded. Those who bravely waved good-bye got postcards from billeting officials a week later advising them of where and with whom their children were living. Emmy found out after many of her classmates started coming back to the city that foster parents arrived at designated churches and community centers in rural villages to look over the trainloads of London children and then they chose the ones they wanted like buyers at an auction. One of Julia’s six-year-old friends had been parted from her older brother because, so the story went, he could work a field and she could not. That little girl still had nightmares six months later. In the end, it had all been for nothing. The doomsayers who foretold that the Luftwaffe would flatten London had been wrong.
Emmy and Julia weren’t the only children whose parents could not or would not bow to the notion that evacuation was the only course of action that made any sense. There was a set of parents just down the street from the Downtrees who kept their children back, and on the next block over, a couple more. The sisters and these other children had gathered at the home of one of the houses for impromptu lessons since the schools closed after the children left the city. But within a month, the schools had all opened again because most of the children had been brought back home. At the time, everyone had concluded that Britain would win the war on the fields of France and in the air over the English Channel.
