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Lorna opened her mouth to tell him that calculus could wait. She was almost eighteen, and when she left school in June, she’d be helping him to run the farm, so he ought to be telling her what this was all about. But before Lorna could say anything, a hugely muscled British soldier climbed down from the truck driver’s seat. He had three stripes across the straining arm of his uniform. A sergeant, she realized, just like her oldest brother, John Jo. For a moment, Lorna wondered where her elder brother was right then.
As her father walked toward the sergeant and the truck, a thickset man whose head was closely shaven but whose chin was not called out. He waved at Lorna and said something to her, his voice harsh and guttural. Even if she didn’t understand him, she recognized the language from the newsreels, and her heart leaped to her throat. He was speaking German.
He called again, and some of the others laughed. Suddenly Lorna felt exposed and awkward, and then the familiar burn of a blush began to creep up her neck.
The sergeant dropped the tailboard down with a clatter, startling the three cats sidling toward the milky cobbles.
“Army’s been puttin’ up proper fences over at Gosford for a week or so now,” he said, “gettin’ the camp secure for these blokes. I don’t know why, though. It’s not like they’ll be chained up or nothin’. Too busy workin’ for their keep, from what I hear.”
He beckoned someone forward with a stubby finger. “Vogel! Your turn, Sunshine, down you come!”
Lorna grabbed at her father’s sleeve while not taking her eyes from the men in the truck. Then her dad was growling in her ear. “Stop gawping, girl, and go!”
“But they’re Germans,” she said. “The enemy! You can’t be bringing enemy soldiers onto our farm, Dad. No!”
“They’re prisoners of war now, not soldiers. Sure, that Mr. Hitler is the devil in jackboots, but the war is over for these chaps. And since they’re fit and able young men, they can damn well do a man’s work around this farm—”
“But Dad!” Her annoyance now obscured her embarrassment. “We’re coping just fine—”
“—until your brothers come back.”
“If they ever come back.”
Even as she said it, Lorna knew she’d overstepped the mark, and she hoped her father hadn’t heard.
He had.
“Do not tell me how to run my farm!”
He pointed deliberately in the direction of the village and the school. As Lorna began to argue, a prisoner—had the sergeant called him “Vogel”?—jumped down from the truck, stumbling as he landed, his back to them. He quickly righted his balance. Tall and skinny, his dark gray uniform didn’t fit him. The pants were baggy and too short, and the jacket swamped his gaunt frame. He had the same haircut as the others, shaved close, and his neck was scrawny and pale. He was just a boy, and it looked as if a puff of wind would blow him away.
But then the boy turned toward them and Lorna could see a high cheekbone and strong jawline. All right, perhaps he was more a man, but still …
Then he faced them full-on, and Lorna’s irritation was instantly extinguished, her shock catching her throat.
Half the boy’s face was gone.
No, that wasn’t quite right. His face was there, but from his left temple to his chin, across his cheek and down the left side of his throat, the pale skin had been burned away, leaving raw red scarring, tight and shiny. The flesh was puckered into the knotted remnants of an earlobe, and his left eye was stretched out of shape, round elongating to oval.
Lorna was horrified. What had happened? What had done that to him? She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but not that. And then an awful thought struck her. Had this terrible damage been inflicted by a British soldier like John Jo? Lorna felt sick at the thought, but still she could not look away.
“Christ Almighty!” her father muttered.
Then the sergeant walked in front of her, and the spell was broken.
“Don’t look so scared, love, he won’t bite.” He seemed to find her discomfort amusing. “Well, not until he knows you better. Ain’t he a horrible sight?”
Lorna glanced again toward the prisoner. Had he heard that?
The sergeant chuckled.
“Don’t worry, love, he doesn’t speak a word of the King’s English. None of ’em do.” He gestured to the German. “Doo haff nine English, eh, Fritz?”
Was that even German?
The prisoner stood straight and still. His expression—or as much of it as she could interpret from the undamaged side of his face—was impassive. A mask. Perhaps the driver was right, and he hadn’t understood the insult.
As the sergeant gave them a mock salute and clambered back into the truck, Lorna struggled to remember what she had been saying before that awful scarred face had forced everything else from her mind.
As the army truck reversed across the farmyard, Lorna forced herself to look at the soldier again. He was glowering—maybe—the undamaged side of his forehead creased into a frown, but really, what expression could she ever hope to read there?
The rumble of the truck faded into the morning chill, and Lorna’s father rubbed his hand over his face. For all his gruffness and bad temper with Nellie, he suddenly looked very weary. Had he been as shocked as Lorna?
Her father walked to where the German waited. “I’m John Anderson and this is my farm,” he said, slower and louder than necessary. “I have two boys of my own away at the war, so you’ll work in their place.”
The prisoner appeared to be listening politely, even if he couldn’t understand the words. He did, however, give Lorna’s father a curt nod.
“You don’t need to bow to me, son, just do your work. Oh, and this is my daughter,” Lorna’s father said as he saw she was still standing behind him, “who should be in an exam room right now.”
But Lorna barely heard what he said. The German was looking at her, and Lorna shivered. His eyes were steel gray, glinting silver, hard and cold and angry.
Then his gaze fell to her school uniform and woolen stockings, her milk-and-muck-spattered shoes. The right, undamaged side of his face rose in a sneer.
Or was it a smile?
No, definitely a sneer.
He looked up again at Lorna and gave her one of those curt nods. Then, without another look in her direction, he followed her father, leaving Lorna alone in the yard.
The rooster crowed again, as if it were already time for—
School! The bloody exam! Lorna was late and Mrs. Murray would kill her. As she grabbed her coat and schoolbag from beside the gate, she scraped her knuckles on the wall and had to suck at the graze to stop it bleeding as she took off running toward the shortcut past the church. The path would be muddy, but her shoes couldn’t get much filthier than they were already.
As she ran, Lorna resolved to forget about the German for now, to forget that her dad had invited the enemy onto their farm, into their home. But still, there was the way the German had looked at the mess on her shoes, his burned face, his angry eyes, and his distorted smile—no, his sneer—and somehow that made her run all the faster.
Two (#u69f1a894-96a0-5325-941d-ea07400e07b2)
BIG NEWS! Need to talk later.
Lorna waited while the ink dried on the scrap torn from the back of her exercise book, then slid it across the desk and under the page her best friend, Iris Robertson, was doodling her latest dress design on. The calculus paper hadn’t been anywhere near as hard as Lorna had expected, and she and Iris had both finished it with plenty of time to spare. Now she was bored.
Iris glanced at the note and moved to slip it into her cardigan sleeve. Before it was hidden, however, long fingers reached out and took it from her hand, making Lorna and Iris both jump. Mrs. Murray stood over them, fanning herself with the note, then gave her head a quick shake of disapproval and returned to the front of the classroom.
Lorna had another twenty minutes of staring out at the heavy cloud that seemed to smother the high classroom windows before Mrs. Murray called an end to the examination. The teacher squeezed between the tightly packed desks to collect the exam papers into two piles—calculus from the older students like Lorna, and algebra from the younger ones. It had been close to chaos when the two classes had merged after Mrs. Duffy had run off to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force the year before, but Mrs. Murray’s rod of iron had soon brought an almost military discipline to the room.
As Mrs. Murray passed by Lorna’s desk, picking up the papers, she paused.
“Would you join me in the hallway please, Lorna?” she said. “I need a quiet word with you.”
Damn! It was only a note. It wasn’t like she’d been cheating.
Lorna exchanged glances with Iris before reluctantly pushing back her chair and walking slowly to the front of the classroom. Esther Bell snorted loudly as Lorna passed her, but Lorna paid no attention. Esther got told off more than Lorna ever did, anyway, and it was because of people like Esther that Lorna was counting down the days until she graduated from school. Only then would she be spared the trial of seeing Esther each day.
“Class! Get out your English notebooks and start on the assignment on the blackboard,” Mrs. Murray ordered as she opened her desk drawer and took out some papers. “We’ll break for lunch at noon, as usual. In the meantime, I do not, I repeat, do not want to hear one peep from in here.”
She walked into the hallway, holding the door open for Lorna to follow.
Lorna glanced back at Iris, but she was gazing at William Urquhart with that ridiculous look on her face.
Lorna pulled the door closed behind her and faced her teacher. “Look, Mrs. Murray, I’m sorry about the note, but it’s not like I was—”
“Oh, shush,” said Mrs. Murray, waving away Lorna’s defense with her hand. “This isn’t about the note, this is about you. Now, I’ve been thinking again about you applying to the university for next year.”
Lorna wanted to groan. It would have been better for Mrs. Murray to scold her for the note passing than this torture. “Mrs. Murray, you know that my father—”
“Yes, I know you’ve told me before that he’s not keen on you continuing your education after you get your school certificate in June, so perhaps I need to go and talk to him—”
“No! Really, you don’t have to do that.” Lorna tried to calm her voice. “He needs me at Craigielaw, that’s all.”
Mrs. Murray studied her for a moment.
“Well, I’m not so sure,” replied Mrs. Murray. “You have too bright a mind to rot on a farm your whole life, and I’m sure he knows that. Remind me of your birthday, dear. April, isn’t it? That’s when you’ll legally become an adult. So you’ll have to find a way to make him understand that you’ll be responsible for your own choices after that. And who knows, perhaps your dad might just surprise you.
“Now, as I’ve said before, I’d love to see you at the university, but if you won’t, I mean, if your father won’t agree to that, what about Mr. Dugdale’s Secretarial College?”
She held out the papers in her hand to Lorna.
“They offer all sorts of classes, like shorthand and typewriting, and I hear that Dugdale graduates are very highly regarded. You’d be able to go up to Edinburgh on the train each day, and the college is just a short walk from Waverley station.”
The top sheet, with a fancy crest, was a letter thanking Mrs. Murray for her recent inquiry, and a printed brochure lay underneath.
“It’s amazing what girls these days can do with good secretarial skills,” Mrs. Murray continued. “And secretaries have all sorts of travel opportunities, you know. Glasgow, Aberdeen, or even Birmingham.”
Lorna tried not to sigh. Mrs. Murray made it sound like Birmingham was the most exotic place on earth, but Lorna knew it wasn’t even as far away as London, where Sandy, her other brother, worked in the War Office. And it certainly wasn’t anything like Paris or New York, or Cairo or Bombay, or any of the other places Lorna and Sandy had talked about traveling to. But right now, Lorna couldn’t think of going anywhere.
She knew she was virtually an adult now, and she would have to make some decisions soon about what to do with her life, but she couldn’t even think about leaving her father alone at Craigielaw, at least not until the war was over and the boys came back. Then she might think about secretarial college. Maybe. But who could guess when the end might come? When the war was declared in September 1939, everyone had said it would all be over by Christmas. It was now 1945; six Christmases had come and gone since then. How many more …?
And was secretarial college enough for Lorna? What about her dreams to travel?
“Lorna?”
Lorna realized that Mrs. Murray was still waiting for an answer.
“Lorna, have you got something on your mind this morning?” Mrs. Murray suddenly appeared concerned. “Is everything all right at home, dear? Are your brothers …?”
Mrs. Murray’s lashes were glistening wet.
“I mean,” the teacher tried again, “have you perhaps had some news from the regiment?”
Then Lorna understood what she was really asking. Mrs. Murray’s only son, Gregor, was one of John Jo’s best friends—and Lorna’s favorite by far—and was serving with him in the same regiment of the Royal Scots. Her husband had died when Gregor was quite young, so once Gregor joined up, she’d been left on her own.
“Oh no, Mrs. Murray, nothing like that. We had a letter from John just yesterday, and he’s doing fine. He moaned about the cold and the food and all the usual stuff but seemed to be fine otherwise. I’m afraid he didn’t mention Gregor in his letter, though.”
Mrs. Murray’s anxious expression shifted to relief, then to disappointment.
“But I’m sure Gregor will get in touch soon. I’ll write back to John Jo this evening and I’ll have him tell Gregor you were asking after him, if you like.”
Mrs. Murray’s mouth smiled, though her eyes did not.
“That would be kind, dear, thank you. Gregor never was one for writing, was he?”
Mrs. Murray gave a not very convincing laugh and dabbed at her cheeks with a white lace hankie she had drawn out of her skirt pocket.
“Come on then, Lorna, back to work, and please think about what I’ve said.”
Lorna tried to hand back the college papers, but Mrs. Murray didn’t take them.
“Keep them, dear.” Mrs. Murray patted Lorna’s hand. “You never know what might be around the corner. And if you would be kind enough to pass that message on to your brother, I’d be very grateful.”
Mrs. Murray pulled open the door of the classroom and, squaring her shoulders, walked inside.
“George Brown! Sit down! Can I not leave this classroom for one minute?”
As Lorna returned to her desk, Iris tore her eyes away from William Urquhart to look at Lorna questioningly, but Lorna just shrugged back. The secretarial college papers crinkled inside her cardigan as she sat down. Her secret for now.
As Mrs. Murray wrote again on the blackboard, Iris nudged Lorna’s elbow.
“What news?” she whispered.
Lorna shook her head and mouthed, “Later.” As soon as they were alone after school, she would tell Iris all the details of that morning. After all, Lorna and Iris had shared everything since they were tiny.
It was strange, though; as the day wore on, Lorna became aware of an unfathomable desire to keep the arrival of that awful damaged stranger to herself.
Three o’clock finally came. William Urquhart stood up from his desk with an officious clatter. William was the son of the parish minister and was also Aberlady School’s head boy. As such, he was responsible for ringing the big handbell by the front door to signal the beginning and the end of the school day.
As he passed by, William winked at Iris.
Iris giggled and blushed.
Lorna groaned.
What was Iris thinking? Of all the boys she could set her sights on, why did it have to be pompous William Urquhart?
As the first heavy peal of the handbell sounded from the front door, Lorna was on her feet, signaling to Iris to be quick. Iris clearly had other ideas. As everyone else surged from the room, she very carefully flipped down the lid of the inkwell set into her desk, wiped her pen nib on a cloth rag, and placed her workbook into her desk, lining it up carefully on top of the pile already inside. Then she took a hairbrush from her schoolbag and began tugging at the knots in her messy brown curls, pulling the hair straight down her shoulder with the brush, only to have them bounce back up again, looking no tidier than when she started.
“Come on, Iris, hurry!” urged Lorna.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” said Iris, stuffing the brush back into her bag. Suddenly, her eyes lit up as she looked behind Lorna.
