The Adoption (6 page)

I conjecture that there must be lots of wartime babies needing homes, an entire catalogue of them. Some, very probably, have been fathered by American soldiers. I grimace envisioning them armed with silk stockings, cigarettes, chocolates and their bold brash Yankee charm. Many gullible young women will have had their heads turned by easy promises and rare luxuries. Few possess my moral backbone. Ambrose’s Big Band is kicking off with ‘Memphis Blues’ as I return to my seat. Merfyn’s eagle eyes spy me interestedly through his large lenses. A measure of Yankee blood? After all, didn’t we sail over there on the
Mayflower
? Weren’t they English through and through when they set out?

‘I suppose we could give it a try,’ I agree slowly, taking up my knitting again. ‘Or at least make some preliminary inquiries without committing ourselves.’ Merfyn leans across to me and pats my leg approvingly through the wool of my skirt. ‘I’d have to see the baby first, of course, decide if I like the look of it.’

‘That goes without saying,’ Merfyn concurs. I hear the enamel of my husband’s teeth scrape on the stem of his pipe and he puffs contentedly for a few seconds. Then, ‘We’d do it all properly,’ he adds. ‘Officially.’ Hmm …
officially
– I like that. It has the ring of a money-back guarantee. My husband’s attention vacillates and he returns to his paper, flapping the pages with a rustle.

‘I think I’d like a girl,’ I say after a gap. I might try to get hold of some pink wool next.

Chapter 5

Bethan, 1947

THE NIGHT BEFORE
the Germans came I had a scary dream about them. I saw them far off at the other end of a newly ploughed field running towards me. They were both carrying guns and shouting. I wanted to escape so badly, but my feet were planted in the ground, really planted, as if there were roots coming out of my boots going deep down into the soil. It was a glorious day. Spring and the great greenness coming up. Birdsong, the distant treetops visible over swell of the ground, like sphagnum moss. I kept pulling and pulling, but I was stuck fast, and they were getting closer now. I crouched down and started frantically to undo my laces. And glancing up, I saw they had stopped as well, about twenty feet from me, that they had both raised their rifles and were taking aim. ‘Bethan,’ one of them called out in a German accent sighting me, ‘keep still. How can we kill you if you keep wriggling?’ Their voices were regimental barks, their hands were all covered in blood and their faces were scarred terrible. I woke with a fright when their guns went off. Listening to the hammering of my heart, I realised to my astonishment that I was still alive.

My heart was still hammering when they arrived for real, striding down the lane towards us. And my throat was so parched that I couldn’t swallow or speak or anything. I think Dad hadn’t slept very
well
either. The whites of his eyes were all bloodshot, and under them were purple pouches. He pulled his hat down and his expression soured. He told me I was to work on the vegetable patch and see to the pigs today, that I was to tell him immediately if I spotted them up to anything. He said that I was to be his spy. He had his hunting gun with him. And as they got closer, he hissed that he would shoot them both dead if they put a foot out of line. They wore dark clothes, jackets, caps, navy, brown, khaki. Blended in with the surroundings. They stopped about two yards away, took the caps off and spoke. I thought it’d be nonsense, the words all German and bitten up. But it was English I heard. A bit stilted, but English all the same. And their voices were soft as a breath of wind tickling the leaves in a tree. Very polite, apologetic almost.

‘Good morning. My name is Jonas Faust, and this is Thorston Engel.’ I’d dropped my gaze, both shy and scared. But I forced myself to look back up, to grit my teeth and face the enemy. Stunned, I saw the taller of the two reach inside his jacket. I was sure that he was going to pull a revolver out, but it was papers he held towards my dad. ‘We are from the POW camp at Llanmartin.’ He hesitated and cleared his throat. ‘I think you have been expecting us. Is it Mr Haverd?’

My dad grunted sullenly, snatched the papers and studied them for several minutes. I took the opportunity to hastily appraise the monsters who had come to labour on Bedwyr Farm, the monsters who might have thrown the grenade, pulled the trigger, or plunged the knife that ended our Brice’s life. The spokesman, Jonas, I estimated to be in his early thirties, broad across the chest but with a slim waist, his hair shaved close to his skull and fair. His eyes were greyish green but he kept them lowered, not once meeting mine. His friend was even leaner, and younger, his features gentler, kinder, his hair white blond with a touch of red in it. And his eyes … his eyes were blue, the blue of morning glory, and they
did
meet mine and held them for a long
moment
. Then Dad was shouting orders and the Germans were following him.

For the first few months, Dad didn’t like me ever to be alone with Faust and Engel. He refused to call them by their first names. And when I asked him how I should address them, he said that I shouldn’t as I’d have no cause to talk with them. His suspicious eyes tracked their every move, waiting for them to flatten us with the tractor, or jump us from behind and string us up with rope from the barn rafters, or smash our brains out with a shovel. He mumbled we should keep alert in case they tried to rob us, as if we had anything worth stealing. It was as though they were invisible to Mam though. She didn’t use any name for them, first or second. She sent me out with a bit of bread and cheese or bacon rinds for them at lunch, and a mug of tea. But that was it. When she gave me the food she just jerked her chin in the direction of the fields. If it was raining they ate in the shelter of the barn. I knew she couldn’t bring herself to wash up their plates or their mugs, so I did it. They left them at the back door and I rinsed them, dried them and put them away.

And nothing did happen. They didn’t try to murder us. They arrived on time every day, kept their heads down, spoke only to each other in German in subdued voices, or in English to answer a question, or query a direction. They were always well mannered and deferential, worked very hard and never complained. They didn’t make any attempt to break down the wall between us. It was there and that was it. But we all felt the benefits of them coming. They undertook the heaviest tasks automatically, digging, lifting, loading and unloading. Three times Jonas mended the tractor when it broke down. He said he knew about engines and if Sir, that was what they called Dad, would permit him to, he thought he could fix it. At first Dad was scathing. But when the only alternative was putting Jessy our horse to the plough, he relented and let him have a go. When he did it and the
engine
began to purr and chug again, I think secretly Dad was impressed, though he didn’t say so, or thank Jonas either.

We’d taken in an evacuee in the autumn of 1944, Tilley Draper, from Bethnal Green in London. She was twelve years old, with a fluffy head of peanut-gold hair, slightly cross-eyed, her irises a vivid green. And she had a snub nose and the cheeriest smile I think I’d ever seen, apart from Mam’s – and I didn’t see that any more. She slept in Brice’s room, and helped in the kitchen mostly and around the house. She proved a tonic for Mam, and company for me, a little sister, kind of. During the days she couldn’t be serious for more than five minutes, which was terrific. She worried about her mam in London, and her dad who was a sailor in the navy. Sometimes she woke in the nights and came to me, and we had a bit of a cry together. But in the morning it was as if it hadn’t been. She dried her tears, put on her valiant smile and came to breakfast humming, an example to us all.

It was the day one of the cows got stuck in the mud that something altered. We’d had a dreadful spate of wet weather. Torrential rain for weeks. I made a joke at breakfast about us having to build an ark. But only Tilley laughed. One of our fields slopes down very steeply in the corner furthest from the farm. And there’s a bit of a ditch and beyond that a stream. Well, it gets awful muddy there, like sinking sand Dad says. He fences it off when cattle are grazing that land. Only this March day one of the cows had broken through and got stuck in the boggy ground. We tried everything to get her out, but she just kept on sinking further down. The rain was sheeting horizontal and the poor beast was lowing and lowing, neck all stretched and roped with straining muscles, her eyes wild and rolling with panic. Piteous it was.

By noon, Dad declared there was nothing for it but to shoot the creature and butcher her where she lay. He was setting off to fetch his gun when Thorston said he had an idea, and would Dad let him have
a
last go before he shot her. Dad shrugged as if he didn’t care one way or another. Thorston and Jonas put their heads together, and the next thing they’d brought the tractor over and ropes from the barn. Thorston stripped off his jacket and his shirt, then jumped down into the mud with the struggling cow. It was dangerous because one of her back legs was still free and kicking about, and it was fearful slippery. Jonas threw two lengths of rope down to him. Dad stood looking on, frowning, shaking his head and driving back the other cows who’d come to investigate what was going on. Curious creatures cows are. We were all drenched and trembling with the cold. But even with the noise of the rain, which mercifully was easing off now, I could hear Thorston talking to the heifer in German, gentling her and stroking her back. Somehow he managed to get the ropes under her, to either side of her belly. Then he tossed the ends up to Jonas, who tied them to the tractor’s towing hook. Our eyes met just before he clambered up the bank. He was as brown as a Negro, head to foot plastered in mud, and those melting blue eyes peered up at me. I wanted to laugh. But not a mocking laugh, look you, just because it was funny. Though I wanted to cry a bit too. I was so frightened he’d fail, and that Dad would fetch his gun and the cow would be dead.

Thorston didn’t ride on the tractor with Jonas. He was too filthy. Jonas put it into gear and started to drive away very slowly. The rope whipped taut and mud splattered on my cheeks. You could see the wheels grinding in the sodden earth, and smell the burning petrol. The cow started up her lowing again, louder now, more panicky, and then all of a sudden more and more of her appeared. The tractor moved, slow and steady, and the cow was pulled from the mud like a stopper from a bottle. As soon as the animal could, she got a foothold and began scrambling up the bank. She was filthy too, though the rain was already washing them both off. Thorston undid the ropes. She heaved herself up the last few steps, then ambled off to join the herd none the
worse
for her encounter. All my dad did was nod curtly at Thorston, and tell him to go and clean up.

That night I lay in bed thinking about it, about the way he had talked to the panicking beast, his determination to save her, the sound of his voice like balm on a sting. Afterwards, I began taking notice of the way he looked up at the sky as if it was speaking to him, the way the wind flattened his hair, the way on the hottest day when we were wracking hay he stripped to the waist and the sunbeams slid over his torso. And I felt his blue eyes on me, fastening on me, looking at me in the way he did the shifting skies. I imagined touching his skin, tasting him, what his lips would feel like pushing against mine, what it would be to have him pull me out of the numbing, back-breaking quagmire of this war. I imagined him jostling my five slumbering senses, making them stand to attention tingling with life, making my blood burn.

I waited for Brice’s ghost to come wailing at me through the nights, telling me what a wicked sister I was, how I was betraying him with my lustful longings. But he didn’t. He was dead, see. I’d thought I was dead, too. But I wasn’t. I was alive, starved for the sensual, beset with cravings I didn’t know I had. I very nearly told Tilley one night when she came to me, but then I changed my mind. I s’ppose I knew deep down what a taboo it was to hunger after a German, a soldier who’d probably killed one or more of our boys.

When the war was over and Tilley went home, I missed her dreadful. I really did. I thought we’d revert back to how it was, that the shops would fill up, that rationing would cease, that I might even get to go back to school, pick up where I left off. But things seemed just as hard, only there wasn’t Tilley’s giggling to make it bearable. By then we’d got so accustomed to having Jonas and Thorston about the farm that Dad had stopped watching them so much. You could say he’d got so as he trusted them. He still didn’t call them by their first names though.

Jonas went back to Germany, back to his family. But Thorston stayed on. He said he didn’t have anyone waiting for him, that he was an only child and that his mother had died when he was twelve years old. His father was also dead; gassed in the First World War his health had never recovered. Thorston had no memory of him. He had been a baby when a respiratory infection had claimed his father’s life. His mother had remarried but he did not have a good relationship with his stepfather. He also told me that he came from East Germany, from Saxony, an area now under Soviet control, and that he was not sure what the future held for him there. He volunteered all this information piecemeal and without elaboration. He said he was content working the land, and that this was reason enough for him to want to stay, that he was even considering trying to immigrate, to make Wales his permanent home. I did wonder though if there was something more, something he was holding back, something which might explain his reluctance to leave Bedwyr Farm. He didn’t have to report to the camp any more though. The prisoner-of-war camps were gradually closing down, the functions of the buildings being reinvented. He was effectively a free man and, while he made his contribution to British agriculture, providing unpaid labour, his presence was tolerated by my dad. We cleaned up one of the outbuildings and he moved in there for a bit. It was much more convenient really, him being on the spot, for all of us. No travelling, see. And he was able to put in longer hours, which with Jonas gone was a bit of a blessing.