Page 48 of Neighbors at War

‘And I really do appreciate it.’

When Pearl left, Helen decided she needed to keep busy and settled on rearranging her home slightly. She was unable to face packing away her aunt’s belongings. Instead, she tidied Sylvia’s bedroom and put everything neatly away in the wardrobe, hoping it would feel as if Sylvia had gone out for the day but would be returning soon. Helen knew they weren’t the sort of changes Pearl had meant, but it was all she could cope with.

After her initial sobbing, for the last week a strange numbness had come over her. Helen assumed she was in shock. She much preferred it to the agonising heartache she had been feeling. She hoped this phase of her grief would last.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

PEGGY

13 September 1942

‘You look serious,’ Tony said, making Peggy jump. She hadn’t heard him knock or enter her office and now he was standing on the other side of her desk smiling sympathetically at her.

She tapped her fountain pen against the edict on her desk that she had just translated and was now typing up.

‘What’s worrying you?’

She rubbed her tired eyes and groaned. ‘Apart from Helen, you mean?’

‘Have you seen much of her since her aunt passed away? How is she coping without her?’

Peggy shook her head sadly. ‘Not as much as I would have liked. I’ve usually left for work by the time she brings Bobby round for Mum to babysit. I do pop round most afternoons, but although she’s always polite, the spark has gone out of her. I can tell she’s still struggling to come to terms with her loss. It’s been months now, and I worry that she’s so withdrawn, but at least she’s back at work.’

Tony pushed his hands into his pockets and looked slightly awkward for a moment. ‘I hate to ask, but I don’t suppose she’s reported back about hearing any further information at work we might find useful?’

Peggy shook her head. ‘No, unfortunately not.’ A chilling thought occurred to her. ‘I hope she doesn’t get despondent about that and start taking unnecessary risks.’ She pictured Bobby and felt slightly reassured. ‘Hopefully, with Bobby to care for, she won’t be tempted to.’

‘I hope not. We must not do anything to draw attention to ourselves and neither should she.’

‘We definitely don’t want that happening,’ she said, terrified of being arrested by the German Secret Field Police.

‘If you’re worrying about the Geheime Feldpolizei,’ Tony asked, as if reading her thoughts, and giving them their German name, ‘Then don’t. The GFP have more than enough on their hands right now worrying about people helping escaped enforced workers. They won’t focus much on anything we’re doing.’

Peggy glanced at the closed office door, thinking about the many rumours she had heard about prisoners being taken to a house in Havre des Pas called Silvertide. She felt sick at the thought of being interrogated. ‘I hope not. I’m not sure how brave I’d be if I was arrested.’

He leant against her desk and gave her a reassuring smile. ‘You won’t be arrested if I have anything to do with it.’

‘You never did tell me why you ended up in prison,’ she said intrigued to know what he had done. ‘Or why you were released.’

He sighed. ‘I think it’s better you know as little as possible about what I was doing. As far as why they released me, all I was told is that there wasn’t enough evidence against me to prove my involvement.’

‘Thank heavens for that.’

He pointed to the papers on her desk. ‘I presume there’s more bad news in that document?’

She nodded. ‘It’s an order being announced in the Evening Post either tomorrow or the next day, this time about British subjects being deported to Germany.’ She didn’t think she had been this angry since her father died. ‘What’s worse is that the order has come straight from German headquarters. From Berlin, no less.

He groaned. ‘Probably from Hitler himself, then. That is bad news.’

‘It is.’ She thought back to the census that had been taken the previous year and how she had hoped it was just a tactic to frighten everyone when the deportations had been postponed. ‘It looks like this time there’ll be no delays. No one is going to ignore an order from him, unfortunately.’

Tony pulled out a chair and sat. ‘This sounds like he’s found out about the deportation order that wasn’t carried out last year.’

She closed her eyes in frustration. ‘It does. I can’t see these deportations not happening now. I suppose we should have known they couldn’t be put off for ever.’ She slid a piece of paper over to him to see for himself, then, remembering he couldn’t read German, translated it for him. ‘It says people have no choice. They must go. It doesn’t even take into account people’s age or their health.’

‘But why now? I don’t understand.’

She looked at his face, seeing her fury mirrored in his eyes. ‘Apparently, it’s because the British authorities have interned all the German people in Persia. Some of them have supposedly been caught spying.’ She realised she was crying and put her hand into her pocket looking for her handkerchief, but Tony gave her his. ‘Thank you.’