Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

Travelling back to London, Ellen thought of Sophie, needing somewhere quiet to study for her University Entrance, and Ursula, whose appalling grandparents tried to keep her captive in their hospitalised house among spittoons and bedpans. Margaret Sinclair was working in the dungeons of the Ministry of Information and seldom saw the daylight; she would benefit from weekends in the country. Bennet was incommunicado doing something unbelievably secret in Bletchley Park, but her mother was working far too hard in her hospital. And if the bombing started, as everyone thought it must do any day, there could be no safer place in England than Kendrick’s home.

Even so Ellen held off until the day she met two men in uniform wearing the badge of the Czechoslovak Air Force-and realised that her heart had not leapt into her mouth. That she no longer expected Marek to appear, or claim her. That dead or alive she knew him to be lost for ever.

Kendrick would not have dared to propose to her again. No one proposed to Ellen in those years since Marek vanished. Isaac was sheltering in Gowan Terrace, waiting for his visa to the States, when Ellen came back from Hallendorf. He had seen in an instant that his case was lost, and shown his quality by leaving her alone. And the procession of young men who came to the house after he left for America, though they fell in love as they had always done (she was perhaps more beautiful than ever) knew better than to declare themselves. Perfectly friendly as Ellen was, there was something in her manner that put that out of court.

It was Ellen who informed Kendrick that if he was willing to consider a marriage of the old-fashioned kind, for the management of land and the care of children, she was prepared to become his wife.

Sophie and Leon met during their lunch break in Hyde Park to discuss the news of the engagement. Sophie’s father, complete with experimental rats and Czernowitz, was now installed in a big house in Surrey and her mother was in Scotland, so she spent the week boarding in Gowan Terrace.

The bedding plants had been removed and the ground divided into allotments so that Londoners could dig for victory; the gas masks abandoned during the phony war now hung again from people’s shoulders-but Sophie, who had been so terrified of rejection and abandonment, found herself less frightened than she had expected at the prospect of invasion and total war.

“Why is she doing this?”’ Leon asked. He was working as tea boy in a film studio, but still enjoyed the comforts of his parents’ mansion near Marble Arch.

“She’s sorry for Kendrick and the evacuees, and Aunt Annie has to have a gall bladder operation, and she wants us all to go there when the bombing starts-or even if it doesn’t.”

They were both silent, remembering Ellen driving off with Marek; the joy on her face-the absolute happiness that transformed everything about her-and her return after the fire.

“Do you think he’s dead?”’

Sophie shrugged. “I almost wish he was; she wouldn’t be so hurt that way. Anyway, whether he’s dead or not doesn’t make any difference.”

“No.”

Ellen had explained to them carefully what had happened at Pettelsdorf and why she would not be seeing Marek again. She had stayed on for the autumn term, the last term at Hallendorf, and packed up the children’s trunks and helped to clear the building. She had taken the tortoise to Lieselotte’s house and then everyone left. Two months later, Hitler had marched into Vienna and been greeted by jubilant and cheering crowds. Finis Austria…

“No storks have come yet,” Liseselotte had written that spring and the following spring-and then she became “the enemy” and could write no more.

“I suppose I’d better go and congratulate her,” said Leon now. “I’ll come round on Sunday.”

But on Sunday the inhabitants of Gowan Terrace, having baked an egg-free cake in his honour, waited in vain, and when they phoned him, the telephone rang in an empty house.

The wedding was planned for December, but long before then the poor British, waiting for invasion, standing alone against Hitler, succumbed not to panic, for that was not in their nature, but to paranoia. Nazis disguised as parachuting nuns were reported daily; old ladies with a chink in their blackout curtains were taken away for questioning-and now, in an act of madness, they began to round up and imprison just those “enemy aliens” who had the most to fear from Hitler and Mussolini, and who had been engaged in the fight against Fascism while high-ranking British diplomats were still taking tea with the Führer and admiring the fact that the trains ran on time.

Austrian and German professors were hauled out of lecture rooms, doctors out of hospitals, students out of libraries, told they could pack one suitcase and taken away by the police. Italian shopkeepers, German bakers who had spent years in Britain, disappeared within an hour, weeping and bewildered. Spy mania was everywhere; even one traitor among the thousands of innocent refugees could not be tolerated. The camps they were taken to were not in fact concentration camps, the tommies who guarded them were no Storm Troopers, but the bewilderment and anguish, particularly among older refugees, was appalling.

Leon happened to be at home when two policemen came for his father. He lied about his age, packed his current film scenario-and was taken to an internment camp consisting of a large number of seaside boarding houses on the Isle of Man.

The views of the landladies evicted from their villas-from Bay View and Sunnydene and Resthaven-are not recorded. Forced to leave behind their garden gnomes, their monkey puzzles and brass plates offering Bed and Breakfast, they were replaced by rolls of barbed wire, observation towers and iron gates. Facing the sea but unable to reach it, cut off from all news of the outside world, the inmates wandered about, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, trying to understand the nightmare that had enveloped them. Housed in villas stripped of everything except camp beds and a few cooking utensils, the men assembled each morning for roll call and the rations which they had no idea how to cook. And each day more confused “enemy aliens” arrived-Nobel Laureates, old men with diabetes, social democrats who had been tortured in the prisons of the Reich and had come to Britain as to Mecca or Shangri La.

Although it was obvious to even the thickest British tommy that Hitler, if he had been relying on these men for spies, would have little hope of winning the war, the net which produced such a strange catch did just occasionally dredge up a genuine Nazi. When this happened, the results were unfortunate. Immolated in boarding houses with at least a dozen Jews whose suffering at the hands of the Nazis had been unspeakable, a man polishing his boots and saying that Hitler would soon overrun Britain did not have a happy life. He was refused his rations, ostracised, the blankets stolen from his bed. Most of them capitulated and learnt to hold their tongues, but one of them, a handsome blond young man called Erich Unterhausen, continued each morning to polish his boots, give the Nazi salute and say “Heil Hitler!”

At least he did until a rainy morning in late July when he flew suddenly out of the first-floor window of Mon Repos, bounced off a privet bush, and landed on a flower bed planted with crimson salvias and purple aubretia.

He was not hurt, only bruised, which was a pity, but the news, spreading quickly through the camp, was regarded by the inmates as the first glimmer of light since the Fall of France.

Needless to say, the perpetrator of this brutality was immediately marched off to the camp commandant in his office, where he admitted his guilt and was entirely unrepentant.

“If you don’t get rid of people like Unterhausen you’ll have a murder on your hands,” he said, confusing the commandant with his flawless English. “Rounding up accredited Nazis with these people is madness. You know perfectly well who the real Nazis are in this camp-I’ve only been here a day but I can tell you: Schweger in Sunnydene, Pischinger in that place with the blue pottery cat-and the chap I threw out of the window. He’s the only one who could possibly be a spy, and the sooner he’s in a proper prison the better-anyone worth their salt could signal from here. As for Schweger, he’s in with some hotheads from the Jewish Freedom Movement and they’re starving him to death.”