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CHAPTER FIVE: EIGHT
The summer went by very quickly, and it seemed I had just started to really enjoy myself when it was time to go back to school.
This year I was not a newcomer, and it felt good to know all the children in the class rather than being a stranger. Some of them looked a bit taller than I remembered; they must have grown during the holidays. I sat down at a desk with my friend Pierre, just like last year. His hair had grown back, but there were now a good number of children with shaven heads. When a new "baldhead" made his appearance in the class, we all would tease him about his naked top. It was not as funny though when my own head, and Jacques' as well, had to be shaved. Godmother had discovered that we had nits, and the only way to prevent the lice from spreading was to have a close-cropped skull.
Our new teacher was tall. He had a crew-cut and he did not smoke as much as Monsieur Cheval. I did not get his name because he mumbled a lot, but everyone called him M'sieur. He started the class by having us copy the homework assignments from the blackboard. And there was lots of it! A few of the children started to complain but he said that the work he was giving us was for the week, and that we'd better be sure to write everything down because if it was not handed back next time he saw us, we were on our way to failing the year which had barely started. No one dared to ask him what he meant exactly, but we found out at the end of the morning, when the director appeared at the door. Everyone became very quiet and stood up when he entered the classroom, as we had been taught to do. He told us to sit down and to listen carefully.
"Until further notice," he started, "there will be regular classes only once a week. Because of the bombing, it is not safe to have so many people under one roof...."
We all looked at each other in disbelief at this unexpected bit of news and there were a few excited whispers here and there.
"Quiet!" screamed the teacher. "Monsieur le directeur is not finished yet!"
There was immediate silence at his outburst, and the director continued to speak.
"I would like to make it clear that we are not speaking of a holiday; far from it! You will receive work to be done at home and to be handed in when you return. It will be carefully looked over and corrected by your teacher. Anyone failing to attain the required mark will automatically fail the year. Some of you may find it harder to maintain the discipline required to work on your own, but you are going to have to get used to it. I will personally keep an eye on the results of your homework, and anyone who thinks he has a license to wallow in faineancy is going to have to deal with me. Is that clear?"
There was a deadly silence in the room as he looked sternly at all the faces staring at him in awe. After a minute, he nodded at the teacher and made his way to the door. Everyone stood up once more until the door closed, and then the room erupted in an excited chatter, even though the teacher threatened to make us stay after school to write hundreds of lines. Eventually calm was restored and we spent the rest of the time copying down our assignments.
In spite of what the director had said, it felt very much like a holiday when we walked home with the knowledge that we were off school until the following week.
It took me about a day to finish all the homework. After that it was just like the summer vacation. When Jacques was finished with his work, we went out to play near the slag heap where we were sure to meet some of the other children. We had our own gang, and sometimes we fought with another gang, throwing stones at each other until someone was hit and started to cry. Then the fight was stopped, and everyone felt a bit sheepish.
The slag heap was a great place to explore. There was of course the fact that you could climb all the way up and feel that you were on top of the world. Then we discovered that there were some old tunnels running through it. These could be dangerous at times, as rocks would fall from overhead, or holes would suddenly appear under your feet. But we could dream up all sorts of adventures and expect some dragon to appear at any time.
We were not allowed to play with fire, but there was always somebody who managed to get some matches. We would light a fire in some isolated area and watch it burn while making up some weird stories.
One of the children was allowed to smoke by his parents. We looked at him partly envious -- we would have liked to try it out for ourselves -- and partly scared. He was the shortest one in the class and he was living proof that, as we had been warned, smoking would stunt your growth. I had tried once to make a cigarette with dried tree leaves in an old piece of newspaper. It looked very much like one of Monsieur Cheval's cigarettes, but when I tried to smoke it, I ended up choking and coughing so much that I threw it away and never tried it again.
When we came home after having made a fire, Godmother would be very angry with us. I did not understand how she could possibly know about it, unless God had told her, but she claimed that she could smell it all over us.
There had been a lot of air-raids during the summer, but nothing serious had happened until we started to get bombed. We did not understand why the Allies were attacking us, since we were their friends. They must have made a mistake, we thought. Someone mentioned that they were probably trying to shut down the coal mine, since much of the coal was being shipped to Germany.
Once, they almost got us. The air-raid siren had sounded in the middle of the night. We crowded down with our next door neighbours in the shelter, anticipating another false alert, or a bombardment in the distance, but this time the planes seemed to be flying just over our heads. I heard the deep droning of thousands of engines way up in the sky, and then the unmistakable sound, remembered from long ago, of bombs falling towards us. It started as a drawn out whistling scream which changed quickly to a lower pitch, and then it became more insistent as it drew inexorably closer, and closer, second after second, after second....I held my breath waiting for the inevitable explosion that would rattle furniture, shatter windows, and leave the houses trembling to their foundations.
"Pray!" I was ordered by a shaking Godmother.
"Please, Lord," I prayed silently, terrified like everyone, "let it fall next door, not here, not this time. Please!"
The prayer must have worked because we were not hit, although the ground shook under our feet, and we were engulfed in thunderous detonations that drowned out the screams of all the panic-stricken people in the shelter. Next morning we learned that, very close to us, a whole street had been turned into rubble, and many people had been killed.
As soon as we were allowed out of the house, we made a bee-line to see the destruction. It was fascinating to look at row after row of jagged walls, with here and there, clinging on as if by magic, bits and pieces of floor, or a few stairs leading to nowhere, or a bed hanging in mid-air, ready to fly down at any moment. Where the floors had entirely collapsed, you could see the outlines of the rooms. It was as if someone had taken a saw and roughly split the house open from top to bottom, so that everything that was inside it was exposed to public view, from the most private areas -- like the toilets or the closets -- to the flower-speckled wallpapers, the family photographs, the twisted or broken water pipes.
A thick dust was hovering over the mounds of broken debris, and a few dazed people were picking through the devastation to see what they could salvage. I heard some of them cursing the war, but no one blamed the Allies.
The mine itself had not been hit. Work continued as usual, and since I did not have to go to school, I had a chance to observe every morning the night shift going home to wash and to sleep, before going back down the pit in the evening. I watched with great admiration these helmeted men walking by, swinging their lanterns, the sweat glistening on the shiny muscles of their soot-covered arms, their faces also black except for the white circles around their eyes. No doubt they were tired, but they looked proud and powerful, like real men, and I too wanted to be one of them. "When I grow up," I thought, "I will also go down in the mine; unless I become a fighter pilot with the Allies."
With lots of time on our hands, we invented some new games. One of them was played only when we were at the slag heap, where no adults could see us. We'd pick up old bottles at the dump and fill them with bits and pieces of some chemical that had been lying around. Then we added water from a nearby ditch, and after stuffing the bottle with some sort of cork, we would shake it and quickly throw it away before it exploded in our hands, like a grenade, sending fragments of glass in every direction.
On one of the days we went to school, Pierre gave me a glimpse of a matchbox that he had brought with him. At recess he showed me, to my revulsion and delight, what was inside. It was a finger that he had found, he said, near one of the bombed houses. I believed him at first, until it started to move: it was his own thumb that he had stuck through the bottom of the matchbox. To make it more real, he had dabbed some iodine near the knuckle to make it look like blood. After we had witnessed the horror in the faces of anyone who saw this special finger, we vied with each other to make up the most gruesome tales or to show the most horrid objects that we could possibly think of.
There were other games as well. The neighbours had joined us one day in our back yard shelter during an air raid. Once the all-clear signal had been given, they went back home but their daughter Christiane, a girl of my age, stayed behind to play. I did not know any girls and rarely saw any, except at Sunday school. Since it was dark in the shelter and we were alone, we decided, with a lot of giggling, to find out the difference between girls and boys. It was fun but we had to interrupt our exploration when I was called in to eat.
I would have preferred to stay down in the shelter and to play with Christiane but we had to go and eat as soon as we were called, otherwise we might have to skip a meal. I regretted not doing that, since the food was not very appetizing. It was getting boring, with mostly potatoes and soup. Sometimes on Sundays there would be a little piece of meat added, or the day after shopping with the ration cards there would be an omelette that was made with the only egg we were allowed for the family. Godmother would extend it with some milk so that we all had a small piece.
The bread was not very good either. There were rumours that chestnuts and some other unknown ingredients were added to the flour, which would explain why it was so heavy and sticky. I did not like eating it, but since nothing could be thrown away, I ended up taking my slice of bread "to eat it later". Instead of eating it, I used it to make small animals that I kept in the bedroom in an old shoe box. It was perfect for modelling, just like plasticine; and it became very hard when it dried.
In the Fall, we went gathering hazelnuts. Godfather took a suitcase from the attic, and Jacques and I accompanied him on this outing. We had to take a streetcar to the end of the line, and then we walked until we reached a forest. It was a sunny day and the leaves were just beginning to change colours. We were shown how to recognize the right trees and then we started picking up the nuts. In no time at all, the suitcase began to fill up and we looked forward to go home and start cracking open these free gifts that came from heaven, like the manna in the desert. We sat down for a rest, listening to the birds chattering away, when suddenly gunshots broke the peaceful atmosphere. They were very close. Godfather grabbed the suitcase and jumped up. "Let's get out of here fast," he said in a low voice. We heard dogs barking and more gunshots as we took off in the opposite direction from where they came.
When we got out of the forest, I asked him who had been shooting.
"It's better not to ask too many questions," he said. "These woods are full of caves and it is said that the Resistance is active in the area. We do not want to be caught between them and a German patrol. We could be shot by either side."
He did not elaborate, but I found it exciting as well as frightening to have been so close to the action. Maybe when I grew up I would also join the Resistance.
The days started to get cooler. Normally the heating would have been put on in the house, but it was difficult to get coal. When there was any, it was very expensive and it was used only for the kitchen stove. I remembered that last year a big pile of coal had been delivered to the house, and dumped through a chute in the basement. But this year it could only be bought in small bags every week. Jacques and I, like many other children as well as some women, started to spend hours every day at the slag heap scrounging for pieces of coal. We each had a bucket or a bag, and when it was full we went home. As the days went by and more and more people did the same, it became harder to find anything burnable to bring home.
One evening, Godfather went out with an empty potato sack. Next morning the sack was lying near the stove, full of coal. I asked him where it came from, and he answered that he found it on the railway tracks.
"How come that there is coal on the tracks? I have never noticed any there before," I said.
"Well, it seems that a wagon full of coal on its way to Germany was somehow opened," he answered with a twinkle in his eye. "All the coal fell out on the tracks and I just happened to be there with an empty sack...."
There were more wagons full of coal that "accidentally" dumped their loads as they went by, in spite of the armed German guards who accompanied the trains, and there were always people ready to scoop it up as soon as it happened, which was usually at night.
Christmas came around once more, and once again I was involved in the pageant at the Temple. The adults put on a show of their own and we all attended the presentation. It was a play about everything being black. When one of the actors said: "We even have the black market", everyone burst out laughing, although I was not sure what it meant. Godfather rode his bicycle one day to the country and came back with some butter and eggs, as well as a ham which we had for Christmas dinner. From what was said around me, I guessed that he had bought these things at a black market.
Gifts this year were made at home. I received a wooden locomotive that Godfather had put together on his work bench in the basement. I liked to watch him work. It was like being down in a magician's den, surrounded by strange and wonderful tools. There were saws, drills, hammers and odd-shaped pieces of wood and metal that he would transform into completely new and unexpected objects. He made a gift for Pastor Barbeza out of an old piece of brass. He first cut it up with a metal saw into many parts. Then he lit a torch that hissed and sputtered and directed the flame to a soldering iron. While it was heating up, he assembled the cut-out shapes and carefully rubbed some cream, which he called a flux, along the edges. When the iron was hot enough, he applied it to the brass pieces, together with some soldering wire. Wherever he had rubbed on some flux, the heat melted the solder which flowed into it, and when he removed the soldering iron, it cooled off and became hard.
What a surprise it was when the work was all finished: he had created a lighter that looked like a book. On the front of the book, he had engraved the word "Bible" with a burin. There was a wick in a piece of pipe that was inserted in the back of the "Bible". The latter was filled with lighter fluid. All you had to do was to take out the pipe, rub the wick sharply against a stone that was glued on the side, and it would light up, looking very much like a little torch. The light of the Bible!
Nothing much changed when we returned to school after Christmas, except that now we only had to go in every two weeks. We also had to be warmly dressed on those days, because there wasn't any coal for the stove in the classroom.
There were more and more air raid alerts, and less and less food to eat or coal to burn. We started picking up anything we found that would burn in the stove, and we even got into trouble for bringing home an old wooden fence that we thought did not belong to anybody. Apparently we were wrong. Someone who had seen us take it complained and the police came to the house to recover it. We were warned not to do this again, but we were not scolded too seriously.
One of the children in our gang had no shoes to wear. He was always barefoot and whenever he stubbed his toe, we all knew about it. He would start to scream and to cry loudly for a minute, and then he would stop just as abruptly as he had started. He was also hungrier than we were. One day as we roamed the neighbourhood, we found a fresh apple core that someone had thrown away. Nobody in our gang was hungry enough to consider eating it, but he grabbed it and ate it ravenously.
We were lucky, we had at least the potatoes which we had planted. After they were picked, we piled them up in a dark corner of the basement, and they became our main food for the winter. We also had a few carrots and occasionally beets. Sometimes there was a lump of sugar for desert, and we all looked forward for the fruit season when the pears from our tree in the garden would be ready to eat. They were hard pears and I had not liked them when I had first bitten into one of them, but now I fervently wished for the summer so that I could have one again. Another child in our gang was really lucky: there were cherry trees in his garden, and when they were in season, he had so many of them that he would sometimes bring us a few, when he was allowed to come and play with us. He was rich -- he had real shoes instead of wooden ones -- and his parents did not want him, he said, to mess them up on the slag heap.
There were a few very cold days when you had to really keep moving. It was difficult to run with wooden shoes and when they were filled with straw, it did not make matters any easier, but we always tried to do our best. There was a deep hollow in the craggy ground around the slag heap which would fill up with water after it rained. We called it a pond, even though no one ever caught any fish there. Just an occasional frog in the summer, but that was all. At times it became deep enough for swimming, but I was afraid of the water - someone had tried teaching me to swim by throwing me in the deep part, and I had almost drowned -- so I never went in very far.
One morning we discovered that the pond was frozen. Adults said that it was not safe to walk on, because the ice could break and we would drown for sure if we fell into that filthy icy water. But as soon as there was no adult around, we quickly discovered the joys of walking and even sliding on solid water, in spite of the wooden shoes. We enjoyed ourselves for a few days, until the ice started to melt and one of the more daring boys went right through it. Fortunately it was not very deep where he was, and he only lost one of his shoes. He got quite a beating when he got home, shoeless and shivering. After that we were quite careful to stick very close to the edge, until eventually everything thawed.
At last, buds began to appear on the trees, and the weather became more pleasant. It was the only good change that one could look forward to: the food was not getting any better, and I became sick and tired of eating mostly potatoes.
Once we had rabbit for dinner. It was a special treat but I almost did not eat it, because I remembered the rabbit that had been butchered by the father of one of our gang. He had invited us to watch, and I was horrified when I saw the live rabbit hanging by its legs from a tree branch. My friend's father picked up an iron bar and hit the rabbit time and again, to tenderize it, he said.
I was in shock but I could not avert my eyes from the scene. When the rabbit was obviously dead, he took a sharp knife and skinned it, peeling off the fur as if it was the animal's clothes. I was shaking and felt like throwing up, and I told myself that I would never eat such a thing.
But on the day that Godmother cooked the rabbit, it smelled so good in the house that my mouth started to water. When I saw the delicious-looking meat on my plate, I could not resist it and I enjoyed it to the last morsel.
Later that day, Jacques showed me something that, he said, he had found in the garbage. I became nauseous when I realized it was the tail of a cat, but I preferred not to ask anyone what exactly we had eaten.
We could see the school year drawing to an end, but we did not have the same anticipation for the summer holidays as on the previous years. It would just be more of the same, except that we would be spared the one-day a week meeting with the teacher to receive the homework assignments.
And then, at the beginning of June, there were some big news: the Allies had landed in France in a place called Normandy. After a few days, in spite of our fears, it seemed that this time they had not been beaten back. Could they really chase the Germans away? We barely dared to imagine what this could mean, and we only spoke about the landing in hushed tones. It was dangerous to let anyone know that you knew, for it meant that you were listening to the BBC which was an offence for which you could be shot. Since we had no radio, I looked forward to speak with Pierre at our daily playtime meetings at the slag heap, because it was his uncle that listened to the forbidden broadcast.
At home, when the landing was mentioned, we were told to put our trust in the Lord, not in armies, and all would be for the best. With school almost at an end, Godfather informed us that Jacques and I had been lucky to be chosen, with a few other children from our Sunday School, to attend Bible Camp in the North of France. He would accompany us, not as a student but as a helper, and we would leave as soon as classes officially ended.