Shelter Read online

  ‘Can she cook?’

  ‘Doubt it, but I’ll teach her a few bits. Least I can do.’

  ‘Aye, you do that. Want someone who can pull her weight a bit.’

  Amos tipped his head at the stairs, led the way up. His hand shook on the banister. Joyce was right; this was what Foresters did, gave each other a hand. But it felt all wrong. What if something dreadful happened to Billy out there in that war of Mr Churchill’s because Amos had moved life on without him? He wasn’t sure he’d be able to bear it.

  Amos pushed open the door to Billy’s room, nodded the women in, his head aching slightly. He couldn’t pretend Billy was coming back any time soon. And that didn’t sit right, didn’t sit right at all.

  Six

  WHOEVER HAD OWNED THESE boots before they were issued to Seppe had loved to play football. The leather was scuffed almost into oblivion at the right toe, the heel worn down where this mystery man had angled time and again for the ball. But they fitted Seppe as if they’d been waiting for him.

  He resisted the urge to scuff the other toe so that the shoes matched up, and continued his walk around the perimeter fence, urgency setting in now he’d nearly arrived at the right spot. The sheer height and length of the fence spoke of hordes of POWs yet to come. Italy’s wartime losses must be more severe even than they’d seen in the desert. More imprisoned Italian troops meant more Italian factions, more arguments about the dominance of the northern fasci over the soft, partisan south and whose fault it was that they were now incarcerated. Already the staunch fasci were making themselves known, even though they were in the minority here, forming a choir and lustily belting out the ‘Giovinezza’ as ‘resistance’. The guards took no action, even stopping sometimes to listen, feet tapping along. Seppe, for whom the song raised instant hackles of apprehension, couldn’t believe the guards let it continue, reasoned that it was because they had no idea of its potency as a fascist anthem.

  The night terrors had returned. He dreaded the days, the lies he had to tell to avoid being pulled in to the growing band of fascist troublemakers here. But the nights were worse. Violent colours clashed and screams rent the fabric of his soul so that he woke grasping for his knife, his garments soaked with sweat. He had been lucky, that’s what they’d told him, his capture relatively bloodless, the Allies ambushing them before first light and surrounding them so that the only recourse was surrender. But still the wounds and horror of battle played nightly, a prelude to the memories of Alessa, rendering sleep futile and every day jagged and uncertain.

  Seppe had managed to turn down an invitation – more of a command, really – to join the inmate choir by hinting that he’d smuggled a weapon into the camp and was thus doing his ‘resistance duty’. But it was a patch of a lie, destined to wilt away the moment his compatriots saw this ‘weapon’ in action.

  How he needed to find it now. The knife was the sole thing that could sustain him and he felt its absence in every muscle of his arms, in every vivid nightmare. Seppe glanced over his shoulder, apprehension never far away. Would the guards think he was trying to escape?

  But none of them were watching; they’d joined in the game of five-a-side starting up on the scuffed parade ground. Perhaps his boots had belonged to one of the sentries before they’d made their way to the uniform stores.

  He held his breath as he turned around, to stay less visible. What about the watchtowers? In the holding camp by the ferry, and before that, in that first camp in Egypt, the barrels of the rifles had poked out, a constant, oppressive reminder that they were captives and alive only at the mercy of their captors.

  But there were no watchtowers here. It had taken all of his first week for this to really sink in, so discomfited was he by the discrepancy. But he couldn’t wait any longer. He had to do it today. This had been the longest period he’d been without the knife; the desert had yielded long patches of waiting around for the foot soldiers such as himself and he’d managed to use it daily despite the salt gumming his fingers from the sweat and the heat, the anxiety coursing through his fingers out into the smooth handle.

  Only with the knife in his hands again would he gain some sense of self, some calm.

  Seppe lined himself up so that he was opposite the ablutions barracks and dropped to his knees. In the confusion of their arrival he’d buried it somewhere here, in one of these mounds of earth that looked like a misguided escape attempt. ‘Molehills,’ the guard had told him. ‘Can’t stop the blighters.’

  The molehills had multiplied in the few days since he’d used one as a hiding place. Seppe scrabbled at the first heap of earth he came to. It was damp and surprisingly silky, but yielded nothing.

  Nothing in the second one, either. In the third, his increasingly desperate fingers met something hard and he pulled it out in relief, but it was a piece of stone, worn smooth from years of mud.

  Seppe’s pulse met his fingertips and his breath quickened. It must be here. Nobody else had noticed him bury it, he was sure of that. He straightened and looked again at the camp. No guards were in sight. He bent to his task again. Off beyond the fence a hawk called, the eerie bleat of a lost child.

  His nails found it first, clinking against the blade. His fingers curled around the handle and relief surged through him. Ecco. Even covered in a pile of dirt, he knew this was it. Seppe lifted his hands and pulled out the knife. Perhaps these disturbingly relaxed guards wouldn’t have confiscated it; maybe he hadn’t needed to bury it after all. But he couldn’t have taken that risk, his English not good enough to explain how he needed this knife, what the weight of it in his hand did to his soul. Seppe’s breath eased as he shook the clinging remains of the dirt from the blade and slipped it into his pocket.

  Now, if he could only find a piece of wood he could make a start. Anything would do. He paced the perimeter, his breath coming fast now, eyes sweeping like the searchlights. But the weather had been calm and still since they had arrived at the camp a few days ago, and the imposing ranks of trees beyond the perimeter fence hadn’t given anything up.

  He found what he was looking for at the furthest end of the camp, away from the locked gates and the parade ground, beside the ungainly structure of brick and concrete that was apparently on its way to becoming yet another sign of Italian dominance. An elbow of wood unable to support its spring foliage. Perfetto.

  Seppe bumped down the knots in the wire until he was sitting on the ground. He turned the wood over in his hands. It was scaly against his palm, the lichen betraying its age. What did it smell of? Of the earth, of damp, and of something else that must be the scent particular to this timber. He studied the cluster of leaves, sticking out of the far end of the wood like a bunch of flowers at Holy Communion. Tiny hands, reaching out to greet him. This was oak.

  Allora, finalmente. He fished the knife back out of his pocket and tested it against his finger, then against the wood. Renzo’s voice echoed in his ears, still clear and calm after a decade. ‘Not quite sharp enough, not yet. Never start with a blunt blade.’ With a rush he was in Livorno again, outside the stables at the port with the men rushing trolleys to the ships, the shriek of the seagulls and the brine of the sea against blue skies, his hands clamped around the blade’s handle, the only place they didn’t tremble.

  The knife was his guardian, the bright thread that showed him how to be himself. Caught between these English guards and his volcanic, trapped fellow-prisoners, it was more vital to survival than ever.

  Seppe ran the knife against the wire, wincing at the screech of metal against metal. He glanced around again: surely this would bring the guards running? He needed to be careful until he knew he could explain properly about the knife in English. But the football match was still in full flow, any noise he made drowned out by the shouts of outrage and success.

  This time when he greeted wood with metal, the knife pulled through cleanly, despite its time in the soil. Seppe rotated the wood, sizing it up, slicing through soft layers of moss and bark, finding the rhyt
hm of the grain, his breath slowing, his hands steadying, his mind calming.

  The wood was softer here than he was used to. L’acqua satura il legno. He heard Renzo’s voice again: there’s water in the wood. But despite the unfamiliar quality of this English oak, the knife grounded him, carried in it all the memories of the happy times with Renzo, their backs warming against the sun on the stable door, knees up, forearms resting as they sat side by side with their knives and their carvings, taking a break before getting back to the ‘proper’ carpentry Renzo was paid for by the Livorno port authority.

  Seppe’s heartbeat settled. Gently, gently he carved, twisting and turning the wood, humming, content, his fingers, thumbs and palm forming his own personal lathe. A soft gust of wind blew up over the hill and a timpani of fallen twigs rattled against the wire. He smiled to feel the reassuring ache in his fingers as they found the grooves of the knife, the grooves of the grain, and his breathing slowed, a tune came slowly to his lips.

  During the interminable, confusing months in the camp in Egypt, he had carved by the light of the same unforgiving moon that had led to their capture, not daring to show the knife in daylight for fear of dying by it. The guards there had been brutal, unprepared, didn’t take kindly to the hundreds of Italians thrust upon them, the near-constant escape attempts. Certo they would not have played football with the inmates. This English camp was an inexplicable place. There was talk here of some prisoners being sent out into the forest on work duties.

  He peered at the dark outline of the trees just beyond the camp. To work outside, to carry the illusion that you were a free man, to be soothed by nature during the course of a prison day … To return each evening to this camp, which, despite the poisonous choirs and aggression that bubbled below the surface, threatening any moment to erupt, was proving to be a place of uneasy but nonetheless reassuring containment. Seppe shivered at the thought of it, dared to dream.

  ‘Where did you get that knife?’ A shadow fell over him. Now the trouble would come.

  A guard, panting slightly, whether from the football or with self-importance was hard to assess yet.

  ‘Thought I saw a funny glint and then we realised we had one missing from the roll call. Come on, Sonny Jim.’

  Seppe put his hand over the blade the way Renzo had a decade earlier, but he didn’t offer it up.

  ‘No, no!’ He gritted his teeth. The knife must stay with him. The guard would never understand. Even in Italian he couldn’t have expressed this.

  ‘What do you mean, no? Up here with a knife and half a blessed tree, by the looks of it? You want to tell me what you’re up to?’

  Seppe couldn’t follow all the words but he had been an expert gauge of his father’s tone since before he could read, and this man wasn’t angry. He sounded curious. Seppe forced his shoulders back, met the guard’s eyes.

  ‘Is from friend, the knife. For make this.’ He opened his palm. There in the centre like a communion wafer, was a thumb-sized acorn. It wasn’t anywhere near finished yet. The bowl needed nicking with the inverse edge to dapple it, and the nut itself was too symmetrical. But it was a start.

  ‘Crikey Moses, lad, you made that in the time it took the rest of us to have a bit of a kick about? Well, I’ll be blowed.’ Seppe’s shoulders sagged.

  ‘You’d better come with me. Hundreds more like you arriving these next few weeks and we haven’t got anything like the furniture we need. The boss is in two minds if we’re going to need to segregate you all, too. From the sounds of things it’ll be them from the north of your country coming next, and from what we’ve heard on the wireless here, them’s the ones that love that Mussolini. Reckon they’ll be a whole other kettle of fish from these soft southerners we’ve had in, we do.’

  The guard beamed.

  ‘Anyway, reckon you could build a table or two?’

  Seppe had built his first table, with only minor interventions from Renzo, when he was fourteen.

  ‘Certo.’

  The guard smiled again. ‘Reckon you’ve got yourself a job then, boy. And if you prove to be half decent, not one of them troublemakers, I’ll see my way to getting your knife back to you.’

  He had no choice. Working in the woods was only a dream, not something for someone like him. ‘I start now.’

  Seven

  May

  SHE WASN’T IN COVENTRY any more. Amos’s house was her home for now, if you wanted to look at it that way. Perhaps it would feel more like home once she’d been to this dance tonight, started living a bit more like she used to. Not that living totally like she used to was an option any more. Connie smoothed down her yellow dress and shook her head to stop the bad memories landing. She pushed open the door into the little back room and concentrated on the biggest difference between here and home: the wiry black-and-white dog splayed out in front of the fire. Connie had never lived with an animal before and was surprised every day by that jolt of happiness when Bess nudged her rough nose under Connie’s hand. She found herself wanting to say things to the dog that she couldn’t say aloud to anyone in case she crumpled, and it made her pleased and terrified all at once.

  Amos was shrunken into that wingback chair of his, head cocked to one side to catch the wireless despite it being up so loud that Frank and Joyce must be able to hear it from their side of the wall too. Connie sighed, sympathy for Amos inflating her. He might not say much, but he didn’t miss a bulletin. He spent a lot of time poring over a very crumpled envelope, apparently always in his pocket.

  ‘Billy. His only son,’ Joyce had said one Saturday afternoon when she’d come over to show Connie how to pluck a chicken (Joyce had killed it herself! She’d shot right up in Connie’s estimation for such daredevilry).

  In a flash Connie had got why Amos wasn’t one for gabbing on. Even after all these years of war, it only hit hard when it came for your family.

  It wasn’t cold out, but Connie pulled her cardigan closer over her dress as she skirted the shadow-filled garden to get to the road down to Parkend and Hetty. It went on for miles, that garden; you’d fit another row of houses at least into that garden if this were Coventry. At the end, where there should be brick walls backing on to terraces behind, fuzzy green stone walls were locked in ownership battles with trees. All these trees! And Frank was worrying about getting down enough to fill some daft Ministry of Supply numbers. Frank felt about these trees the way Amos felt about his son; he was sending them off to a war when all he wanted to do was keep them safe.

  There was the path. Wouldn’t be long now. A gin and the music would perk her up.

  This dance might yet be worth the trouble of sprucing herself up. The Yank looked a bit surprised at being asked to dance, but he recovered quickly enough. He was a pretty slick mover, too. Connie wanted to put her head back and howl at the sheer joyous rightness of it, but he’d probably do a runner. She ducked and twisted, smiling, staying at arm’s length, the tiredness shucking off with every swoop, every twirl.

  A slow number came on – who knew you could play slowly on seven accordions? – and the Yankee moved in closer, pulling her towards him.

  No.

  The panic of the bombs was upon Connie again without warning, sending sparks into her speech.

  She pushed away and the GI took a step back, hands outstretched. ‘Hey, no offence meant.’

  She smelled a trace of his Lucky Strikes and swallowed, her mouth slick and watery.

  She needed to get out.

  ‘Sorry … sorry …’ She hustled her way to the door.

  ‘Watch it, you!’ Connie didn’t stop to see who was yelling like that, or why.

  That tree with the big splayed leaves, opposite the hall, would have to do. Connie braced herself against its trunk and heaved up all the jolted memories along with her dinner. Nobody was queuing outside now, thank heavens, and even George Thomas’s accordions were muted from this distance. She stood gingerly upright and leaned against the tree, backhanding away tears.

  She’d bee
n so excited about coming to the dance that she hadn’t bargained for the way the music would slice right through the shell she’d been forming. Connie leaned over the branch and retched again, speckling the shadowy grey-green of the lichen with vomit. And the Yank’s accent, as he had got up close, it had been too much. The tears were back, streaming this time. Nothing to do but to let them out.

  If only she could go back and change it all, she’d be dead – and that’d be easier than this. Easier than toughing it out and carrying on alone. If she could only will the bombers back. Connie looked up into the sky, but all she saw were the tops of the tree laced with soundless stars.

  There hadn’t been any cloud cover that night either.

  January, 1944

  The Coventry doormen are old hands at ramming them all through at double speed before their light and laughter betrays them. There’s barely room to hop on the dance floor. It’s heaving, joyous. Connie, spruced up in the bright yellow dress and on her second glass of gin and water, has already lost the girls from the factory in the crush of it all. What does it matter, though? The band, some local outfit with bad teeth and good tunes, is playing the ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ with as much spirit as Captain Glenn Miller himself, and all around couples are whooping and swooping. The music ripples through Connie and she laughs. Mam was expecting her home by teatime. She’s supposed to be minding the littluns whilst Mam goes to the bingo to win the family fortune and Dad slopes off to the workingmen’s club to drink it. But then Cass, working beside her on the munitions belt, started on about the dance.

  ‘It’s your Friday night too, you know; and God knows we’ve worked for it this week. I feel like we must have built twenty new tanks between us.’ Cass has a point; they’ve worked like the devil was at their backs this week. To stay on top of their production targets the munitions factory has had them doing overtime whether they want it or not, the whole line of them.