Bombs on Aunt Dainty. Judith Kerr

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       Chapter Six

      At the Hotel Continental, Anna was allotted a small room close to Mama’s and Papa’s on the top floor.

      When they had first come to England and still had some money they had lived lower down where the rooms were larger and more expensive, but Anna liked this better. From her window she could see right across the rooftops with only the sky above, or down into the scrappy yard, four storeys below, where cats fought among the dust and the weeds. A church clock nearby chimed out the quarters and sparrows hopped and fluttered on the sooty tiles. She was so busy settling into her new surroundings that she almost did not notice Dunkirk.

      In a way it was quite easy to miss, even if one read the papers, which Anna didn’t, because no one said much about it until it was over. Dunkirk was a place in France on the Normandy coast, and at the end of May the retreating British army was trapped there by the Germans. Only the papers, trying to keep everyone cheerful, never quite said so in so many words. However, by fighting off the Germans and with the help of the Navy and the Air Force, nearly all the soldiers managed to escape back to England, and by the beginning of June the papers suddenly came out in triumphant headlines. “Bloody Marvellous!” said one, surprising Anna into reading it. She discovered that, apart from the Navy, thousands of ordinary people had crossed the Channel in tiny boats, again and again, to help take the soldiers off the beaches in the midst of battle. It was disappointing that what had sounded like a great victory was only an ingenious escape from defeat. But weren’t the English amazing, she thought. She could not imagine the Germans doing a thing like that.

      The Hotel Continental had become very crowded. In addition to the German, Czech and Polish refugees, there were now Dutchmen, Belgians, Norwegians and French. You never knew what language you were going to hear in the narrow corridors and on the stairs. The Swiss waitress who had come to London to learn English complained constantly, and after supper the lounge was like the tower of Babel.

      The streets, too, were in turmoil. Every day there were long crocodiles of children with gas masks slung over their shoulders, each with a label attached somewhere to its person, trudging in the wake of grown-ups who were taking them to the railway stations, to be sent out of London, to the safety of the country.

      Everyone was talking about the invasion of England, for now that Hitler was only the other side of the Channel he would surely want to cross it. To confuse the Germans when they came, names were being removed from street corners and Underground stations, and even buses lost their destination plates, so that the only way to find out where they were going was to ask the conductor.

      One morning on her way to the secretarial school Anna discovered a rusty car with no wheels and two broken bedsteads dumped in the middle of the grass of Russell Square. First she thought it was some kind of joke, but then the porter at the Hotel Continental explained to her that it was to stop German parachutists from landing.

      “Could they really land in Russell Square? There doesn’t seem room,” said Anna, startled.

      “There’s no knowing what they can’t do,” said the porter.

      Parachutists were an inexhaustible source of speculation. There were endless stories of people who claimed actually to have seen some, disguised as British soldiers, as farm workers or most often as nuns, in which case, according to the stories, they always gave themselves away by their carelessness in wearing army boots under their habits.

      Anna tried, as always, not to think about them, but sometimes in bed at night her guard slipped and then she saw them dropping down silently among the trees of Russell Square. They were never in disguise but in full uniform covered with black leather and swastikas which were clearly visible even though it was dark. They called whispered commands to each other, and then they set off down Bedford Terrace towards the Hotel Continental to look for Jews …

      One morning after she had been kept awake a long time by her imaginings, she came down late to find a stranger sitting at the breakfast table with Mama and Papa. She looked more closely and discovered that it was George.

      Mama was in a state of confusion between happiness and distress, and as soon as she saw Anna she jumped from her chair.

      “Letters from Max!” she cried.

      George waved an envelope. “I got one this morning, so I brought it round,” he said. “But I see you’ve got your own. They must all have been posted at the same time.”

      “Max is all right,” said Papa.

      She began quickly to read.