Read Online Finding Sophie by Irene N.Watts - Free Book Online Page A

whistle. The train will leave without me!”
    “No. It won't. Come quickly.” Mama pushes me onto the platform. So many children waving. All going away like me. Mama pulls me along. I hold Käthe away from the soldiers and the fierce dogs.
    “Run, Zoffie. See, the door is still open. Good girl. Stay with the children.” She lifts me up into the compartment.
    “Mama?”
    Marianne says, “Your mother kissed your hand before she left and asked me to take care of you. You wore a blue dress.”
    “With white stripes. Mother sewed it for me.”
    “I thought so. You wore it over a little white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. By the time we got to England, it was gray. Do you remember how we all stood in a line on the platform at Liverpool Street Station? I was trying to scrub your face clean because photographers were taking pictures of us. We were that day's news: the first refugee children to arrive in England on a
Kindertransport
out of Nazi Germany. I wanted us to make a good impression,” Marianne says.
    “Later, when we were evacuated from Paddington Station, I was sure you'd be on the train, taking care of me like you didbefore,” I say. “For a long time, in the beginning, I waited for you to come and live with Aunt Em and me.”
    Marianne bites her thumbnail, then puts her hand back in her lap as if someone had slapped it down. “After you left, Sophie, I really missed you. I waited and waited for my name to be called. Finally, when I was the only girl left in the waiting room, Mrs. Abercrombie Jones agreed to take me.”
    “Was she kind to you, Marianne?”
    “I'll be charitable and say she did her best. Aunt Vera had hoped for an older girl, someone the same age you are now, Sophie, whom she could train as a maid. She hadn't the least idea of how homesick I was, or what we'd been through in Germany.
    “It wasn't all bad, of course. I wasn't hungry or beaten, and I made a wonderful friend. It was Bridget who got me through those first awful weeks. She helped me make up job applications to find employment for my parents. Imagine two eleven-year-olds going door-to-door with our little bits of paper, soliciting work.”
    “What happened?”
    “My mother did get a job offer. My father was trapped in Czechoslovakia when Hitler marched in, so there wasn't much hope of him getting out.
    “I waited for Mutti's letter, which never arrived, to say when she was coming. We missed each other by hours. She actually arrived in London the day after I was evacuated to Wales. The school was closed, Mrs. Abercrombie Jones had shut the house and moved away, so there was no forwarding address for me. I'd just been thrown out of my third billet when she found me, andby Christmas we were living together. That reminds me, Sophie – write down your address; I don't want to lose you again.”
    I scribble my address for her. Marianne gasps, “I can't believe it. When I lived with Mrs. Abercrombie Jones, I was less than half an hour's walk away from you. We lived in St. John's Wood, on Circus Road. Destiny meant us to meet again.”
    “Absolutely,” I say. “Tell me about Bridget – what happened to her?”
    “Bridget's parents sent her to Canada at the beginning of the war, to live with an uncle in Montreal. She's sailing home as soon as she can get a berth on a ship. She's done her probationary year of nursing in Canada. Her father, Dr. O'Malley, is pulling strings like mad so she gets accepted at the Middlesex. Bridget and I really want to finish our training together.”
    “Marianne, does Dr. O'Malley look anything like this?”
    I do a quick sketch on the back of the paper Marianne gives me, roughing in the doctor's shaggy eyebrows and the lines under his eyes.
    “Sophie, are you clairvoyant or something? That's him.”
    “Your Dr. O'Malley came to our house last week because our regular doctor is on holiday.”
    “It's amazing. Not just that you know him, but the way you draw.”
    I try to shrug modestly.