The Burning Summer Read online

  “Every night it’s the docks, only they don’t know like we do where the docks finish. Soon they think Aspen Street is the docks, and you stand out there on the step like a shlemiel so they make no mistake when they come and they get Alf Levine! So come on.”

  Still muttering, Mr Levine led the way down the passage, and Mrs Levine and Ruthie and her mother and Leon followed him. He picked up the big box of photographs, the silver candlesticks, and Mrs Levine’s best clothes, and Mr Levine’s best Homburg hat, and pushed the back door open, shepherding them out to the yard.

  Ruthie liked this door very much. It had a top half made of glass, and over the glass Mrs Levine had stuck waxed paper, all covered in brightly coloured triangles, and over this again had hung a net curtain that had patterns of butterflies in it, all made of strands of yellow cotton.

  It was still warm in the yard, the heat of the day lingering in the cracked concrete, round the three battered dustbins that had to be carried through the house passage to the front on the dustmen’s day, in the old tin bath that hung from one handle against the wall beside the outside lavatory.

  Right in the middle of what had once been the square of the yard, the hump that was the shelter raised itself in the blackness of the hot summer night, with a fringe of grass on the top silhouetted against the searchlights in the sky just as Mr Levine’s hair had been.

  Mr Levine went into the shelter first, scrabbling about in the dark for the oil lamp, scratching away with matches to light it, while the two women stood close behind him, edging forwards anxiously.

  Ruthie stayed on the top step of the three that led down to the shelter, looking up into the sky, her eyes still a little thick with sleep, feeling her cardigan scratching her back through her thin nightgown, curling her toes inside her sandals, enjoying the way the leather rubbed her skin, because she had no socks on.

  There were more searchlights than she could count tonight, she saw with admiration, all swooping about too fast to be counted. The thumping was getting louder, closer, with lovely crunchy noises coming right after each thump, sounding as though a huge stall full of giant potatoes were being scooped with an enormous brass scoop, so that the potatoes, bigger than the whole world, tumbled thud, thud, against each other. Ruthie bounced on her toes at the lovely noise. Then there was a big grumbling noise, a noise that Mr Levine had once told her came from the guns down by the docks, a noise like a lot of thunderstorms all at once, and at this Ruthie really jumped up and down, loving the roar and grumble, the way the air trembled and the ground tickled her feet with each long growling burst.

  “Ruthie! Come here at once. What’s the matter with you—have you gone to sleep?” Her mother was peering up the steps at her, so with a last regretful look up at the beautiful fingers of the searchlights, Ruthie slid down the steps into the shelter.

  Their shelter wasn’t as nice as some of the shelters in Aspen Street. The one next door was lovely, Ruthie thought. In Mrs Fleischer’s shelter, there was a little table and a bench to sit on, as well as two bunk beds like those in the Levines’ shelter, and the camp bed they kept pushed under the bunks. But Mrs Fleischer didn’t have a cupboard like the Levines’, a cupboard full of tins of biscuits and sugar and tea and cups and saucers. They kept all their things like that in a box under their table, with a big white tablecloth on the table to hide what was underneath. Mrs Fleischer had a piece of carpet on the floor of their shelter, but the Levines just had the old sacks Mr Levine had bought from the potato stall.

  “I should waste good money putting carpets on a shelter floor, yet?” he had shouted at Mrs Levine one night, when she had complained about the poorness of their shelter compared with others in the street. “So I’m a lunatic or something? Carpets I buy for houses, not for shelters.”

  There was a shelf up on one side of the shelter, fastened to the corrugated iron with big brackets, and on this the big old oil lamp stood burning brightly. Mr Levine was very proud of this lamp, and always reminded his wife, every time they used the shelter, that it had been because of what she was pleased to call his miserliness that they had such an excellent light in their shelter. The lamp, made of brass and with a high glass chimney and a round milky globe with flowers engraved on it, had belonged to his mother, and all through their married life, when Mrs Levine had tried to persuade him to throw it out together with the rest of the junk Mr Levine treasured so jealously, he had refused. Ruthie had heard him talk about his refusal so often that she felt sometimes as though she had been there all the time, whenever they had argued about the junk Mr Levine kept in their front room.

  As soon as Ruthie was inside the shelter, Mr Levine pulled the big door closed, shutting out the searchlights and the lovely noise. Mrs Levine was already on the bottom bunk, her legs stuck awkwardly in front of her, her plaited bag on her lap.

  “So are you going to be all night getting ready?”

  The familiar pattern of nights in the shelter began, with Mr and Mrs Levine bickering, sometimes loudly, sometimes in furious half-whispers, while Ruthie’s mother, her face closed and grim, lay in silence, reading a magazine or a book she had borrowed from the library.

  Mr Levine with exasperating slowness pulled the camp bed out from under the bottom bunk, and Ruthie’s mother jerked her head at Ruthie, who came obediently to climb under the scratchy blankets on it. As she settled herself, her mother climbed onto the other end, pushing Ruthie to one side with her feet, arranging the sleeping Leon in the crook of her arm, while Mr Levine, with much grunting, climbed up to the top bunk, to lie on his back, his nose nearly touching the corrugations of the roof.

  Mrs Levine, twisting and turning on her bunk like an angry cat, keeping her hat on even while she was lying down, arranged her plaited straw bag carefully at her side, and settled down to talk the raid away. Ruthie’s mother arranged a book, holding it uncomfortably in the hand of the arm that was round Leon, propping her head up on the one thin striped pillow on the camp bed squirting at the print in the soft yellow glow of the lamplight.

  Ruthie lay and stared up at the curved roof above her, careful not to fidget, because that always made her mother angry, and tried not to listen to Mrs Levine’s monotonous voice, trying to hear the thumps and roars from outside.

  It was easy to hear them tonight, because they sounded very close, and once a very loud crump made the lamp on the shelf sway, so that they all looked at it, keeping very still, frightened to move in case their movement should send it crashing down. But it straightened itself, only a blur of lampblack on the chimney left to show what had happened.

  Ruthie fell asleep quite abruptly, in the middle of a very long roar from the guns, the light inside her eyes from the lamp suddenly fading away to blackness.

  When she woke, the lamp was out, and she could hear Mr Levine breathing thickly from somewhere above her in the darkness, and Leon whimpering a little, wriggling somewhere near her feet.

  Then she heard it again, the high wail of the all-clear that had woken her, and she moved slightly, whispering “Mummy?” carefully wriggling her feet away from her mother’s side. She was wet again, of course, but in the shelter, somehow that didn’t seem to matter so much. As long as the wetness didn’t reach her mother, Ruthie knew she was safe.

  Above her, Mr Levine stirred, muttered, and then Mrs Levine woke, calling petulantly, “So open up, Alf! Are you deaf? The all-clear—open up.”

  They came blinking out into the early morning sunlight, and Ruthie took a deep breath as she came to the top step, surprised as always to find how different it smelled outside, how thick the smell in the shelter had been. But this morning the smell was quite different, not thin and clean like usually, but heavy with smoke. Her mother came up the steps to come to where Ruthie was standing beside Mr Levine. He was standing quite still, making no attempt to go to the house and open the back door as he usually did, his head up as he sniffed.

  “What’s happened?” Mrs Levine came panting up the steps, her flowered hat twisted on he
r grey hair. “What is it—the house?”

  It all looked the same everywhere, their house, the houses each side of them, the yard with its dustbins and cracked concrete.

  “Nah.” Mr Levine was quiet. “All right this side—but it smells bad—I’ll go see.”

  They followed him into the house, Leon whimpering, Ruthie painfully aware of the wetness of her nightdress under her cardigan. The house looked the same, until they went through the curtain in the passage, and Mr Levine opened the door of the front room.

  He stood there, both hands holding his cheeks, staring round at the piled furniture, the heaps of old clothes he kept in one corner, the boxes of old newspapers and magazines. Ruthie came and looked under his arm, and stared too.

  The window was gone, the glass lying in shattered sparkling heaps under the sill, everything covered in whitish powder, and above, a big piece of the ceiling was gone, only a patch of bare wooden joists showing through the hole.

  Mrs Levine started to cry as soon as she saw the mess, rocking her body backwards and forwards, making ineffectual dabs at the powdery mess on the lino with one foot, until Mr Levine turned and said viciously, “So shut up! So there’s a mess! It’ll kill you to clean it up, will it? So get a broom!”

  As soon as she saw the mess in the Levine’s front room, Ruthie’s mother turned and hurried up the stairs, to see what had happened there, and Ruthie ran after her.

  The place above the Levine’s front room was the hallway outside Ruthie’s mother’s kitchen. Ruthie looked from behind her mother when they got to the top of the stairs, full of hope.

  There was glass all over the floor, but no powdery whiteness—the ceiling here was just as usual. Ruthie moved forwards to pick up some of the long pieces of glass that shone so beautifully in the sunlight, but her mother pulled her back with a painful twist of her arm.

  “Keep back—the floor might go. I’ll clear it myself.”

  So Ruthie went into the kitchen, but to her intense disappointment everything here was all right. No broken glass, no powder on the furniture, everything as usual. Her eyes filled with tears as she looked. She so much wanted a piece of the sparkling broken glass, but how could she get it? If her mother wouldn’t let her go into the hallway to get a piece because of the floor, and Mrs Levine was crying so embarrassingly downstairs what could she do?

  Her mother looked at her sharply, and then said with the warm voice that Ruthie liked to hear, “Never mind, lovey—it’s all right, you see? Nothing broken here. We’re lucky, aren’t we?” and though Ruthie didn’t think so at all, she nodded, swallowing her tears, and smiling at her mother as best she could.

  Talking all the time, her mother bustled about, dressing her and Leon, washing her face at the sink in the corner, making breakfast of bread and cream cheese and tea, feeding Leon’s wide mouth full of bread and milk, while Ruthie sat silent at the table thinking about the way the glass downstairs and in the hallway had sparkled, and how much she would have liked a piece to keep for herself.

  She was nearly finished with her breakfast before she noticed the way her mother was trying to keep between her and the window. Something she doesn’t want me to see, thought Ruthie, and with a sharp glance at her mother, decided that her mood was the sort that would mean she could go and look and not be smacked for it. So she slipped from her seat quickly while her mother was bending over Leon, giving him a drink of milk from a cup, and ran to the window.

  It was funny. Across the street, there was a gap, just like the gap in her mother’s teeth. There had always been a row of houses all joined together, only now Mrs Levy’s house, and the ones on each side, were gone, just gone. There was a big pile of bricks and grey stones, with people in tin hats walking around on it, but no houses.

  Ruthie stared, excited, forgetting her sadness about the glass she couldn’t have. The pile of bricks and stones on the other side was much more promising, and as soon as she could, she thought, she would go and see what she could get from the pile for herself.

  Her mother came and stood beside her, and said gently, “It was a bomb, Ruthie. It—it broke Mrs Levy’s house.”

  Ruthie nodded, enthralled.

  “Look—there’s a bed on that pile of stones—see? With all those bricks over it—and all the blankets are on it, can you see, Mummy? Can you see all the blankets on it?” The bed looked very funny, Ruthie thought it was funny, too. But her mother’s face was very straight, so Ruthie didn’t laugh.

  “Don’t watch, Ruthie. Come away from the window—don’t look. They’ll clear it up soon—don’t watch.”

  “But I want to.”

  “No!” her mother said violently. “Do you hear me? I said no! When they’ve cleared up everything, then you can go out—but God help you if you move out of this room till I say you can, do you hear?”

  So for the rest of the day, Ruthie stayed in the kitchen, while the sun got hotter and hotter, aching to go out but not daring to. Her mother went in and out of the kitchen, busily clearing the mess in the hallway, fixing pieces of wood across the floor over the place where the ceiling downstairs had a hole in it, but even when she was out of the room, Ruthie knew better than to dare to look out of the window. She had a feeling her mother would know if she did, and that would mean a row.

  Late in the afternoon, while Ruthie was drawing in her red book again, making pictures of aeroplanes with big bombs in them, she heard voices below the window, one of them her mother’s.

  It wouldn’t do to look out of the window, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t listen to what was going on, so she carefully slid across the room to sit on the floor under it, and listened.

  Mrs Fleischer and Mrs Coram were talking to her mother, and Ruthie could almost see the look of smugness on Mrs Fleischer’s face as she said, “My Lenny—all night he was working—only a student he is, but last night he work like a real doctor already. I put him to bed a half an hour ago—I tell you, that boy is exhausted, worn out he is. A day and a night he works with no sleep, nebbish.”

  “Have they got her out yet?” That was her mother.

  “Sure—dinner time they got her out. Terrible it was—the A.R.P. man told me, nothing of her left, he said.”

  “God rest her soul,” Mrs Coram said. “God rest her soul. I told her, times and times I told her, the shelter is there, you should use it, but Mrs Levy—you know Mrs Levy, rest her soul. Always under the stairs she sits. She don’t go to no shelter, she says, they’re dirty places. Under my own clean stairs, there I’m all right, she says. A terrible thing.”

  “Thank God no one else …” Ruthie’s mother said. “Where are they—the others? The Karminskys, the Steins?”

  “The centre—the Commercial Road centre. Where they go after that I don’t know. Maybe they go away to the country now—who knows?”

  “You should take your Ruthie and Leon and go to the country, Mrs Lee.” This was Mrs Fleischer. “Me, I stay here for my Lenny. He got to work at the hospital, so I got to stay look after him. Always he says, Momma, go to the country, but me, I tell him. You work at the hospital, Lenny, so I stay, I look after you. Can I leave a boy alone here? But you, Mrs Lee—you should go. For the children.”

  “And what about Benny?’ Her mother’s voice sounded very hard to Ruthie, sitting under the window listening. “How do I go and Benny won’t know where we are? When he comes back, then maybe …”

  “So listen, Mrs Lee. You think he’ll come back here? Don’t he know the army are looking for him? Always they send men to ask you, is Benny here? You think he don’t know this? Sure he knows. He won’t come back here—maybe he’ll write you a letter, but he don’t come back. So you go to the country, you tell the postman where you goin’ and he sends Benny’s letter to you when he writes …”

  “I stay here,” Ruthie’s mother said flatly. “I’ve got to talk to him before the army gets him back—my God, have I got to talk to him….”

  Ruthie slid away from the window. When they started to talk a
bout her father like this, it was time to stop listening. So when her mother came upstairs again to give her her supper and put her to bed, she was sitting at the table, drawing pictures of soldiers with white hats on, and big boots.

  CHAPTER SIX

  EVERYTHING seemed to get a lot nicer after Mrs Levy was killed in the raid. No one else in the street had been killed before, and Ruthie was very proud of this. She told Mrs Ward about it when she went to school in the morning, very excitedly, and Mrs Ward had shivered and closed her eyes for a moment before talking to Ruthie about something else, and Ruthie felt very pleased about this. It wasn’t everyone who knew someone who had been killed like she had known Mrs Levy, and Mrs Ward was obviously impressed. If she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have tried to pretend she hadn’t heard properly.

  Everyone in Aspen Street got a lot friendlier, too, even her mother. Now when Mrs Cohen gave her biscuits or Black Sophie called her over—“You want a sweetie, dolly? So come to Sophie—I got sweeties for you. Come and get, dolly”—her mother made no attempt to stop her from taking the things. Ruthie ate a lot of sweets and biscuits.

  There were big raids nearly every night, now, and most afternoons as well, though the afternoon ones weren’t very big ones—sometimes they weren’t in the shelter more than a half hour or so.

  School was very nice too. She went most mornings, even after big raids, because her mother said it would take her mind off things, though Ruthie wasn’t quite sure what she meant when she said that. At school, they played a lot, and sang a lot, and did P.T. a lot, and Mrs Ward gave the children sweets as well. Some days, what with the sweets from Mrs Ward and the biscuits and sweets from Mrs Cohen and Black Sophie, Ruthie had enough sweets to swop as well as to eat. She got ten coloured pencils from one girl at school, and three books, big annuals, from a big boy, and a lovely bird with real feathers on it that you wound up with a key, and then it walked about and made cheeping noises. She lost the key to that, after a few days, so she swopped it for a big drawing-book with thick pages in it. Ruthie was very happy about this.