Read Online Hannah & Emil by Belinda Castles - Free Book Online

right.’
    Faith, one of the stylish girls, groaned quietly somewhere behind me. I knew her groan of old.
    â€˜But I’m asking you, Hannah.’
    Just then the raid alarm sounded, starting quietly and quickly building to a deafening blare. We were not used to daytime raids. Miss Taylor blinked sternly and said, ‘Quick, children, under the desks, just as we’ve practised.’
    I felt the withdrawal of Miss Taylor’s attention like being cast into a cool shadow but I dutifully stood, picked up the Philip’s atlas I was sharing with Boris and pulled out my chair from under my desk. We dragged our desks together amid the screeching of the other children doing the same and crouched beneath our shelter, holding the atlas above our heads as though we were running home across Fitzroy Square in the rain with a newspaper for cover. Boris trembled. If our school had been hit, and they unearthed us later, they would have found us preserved in rubble, twenty ten-year-olds and one adult crouching, heads bent, as though what we did not see could not hurt us. Or perhaps they would decide that we were praying for mercy.
    The others whispered in their neighbour’s ear, hands cupped to their heads, made faces. When I saw that Miss Taylor was under her own desk, staring at the floor, whispering, I shuffled away from Boris, poked my head out from under the desk so that I could see through the window—but there was nothing there. I inched back to Boris, whose eyes were squeezed shut. I closed mine too for a moment and imagined I saw it: the long fountain-pen shape of the German zeppelin, its slow dark mass gliding out from the roofs. I didn’t know that they had decided to set the Gotha planes on us by then, that the mesmerising zeppelins were already fading into the past.
    I opened my eyes to peek at Miss Taylor. I do it now with air hostesses when there is turbulence: How bad is it? Should I be scared? It seemed I should. She was indeed praying, trying to pretend that she wasn’t. Her hands were clasped in her lap and her lips were moving. I hoped that if there were such a being as God, against the insistence of Father, he would be kind enough to listen to Miss Taylor. I felt confident that Miss Taylor would pray for us, or at least for me, and so I considered myself to be insured. I was my father’s girl enough to draw the line at praying for myself.

    When we arrived home from school the shop was empty. As we entered its cool shade and tobacco and cinnamon smell, the bell ringing behind us, there was a space behind the counter where we would usually expect to see Father smiling in his black waistcoat, consulting his chained gold watch and saying, ‘Ah, children, I believed the buka got you. Why so long to walk one hundred yards?’
    On the narrow stairs we heard Mother shouting in Yiddish in the apartment.
    â€˜What is she saying?’ Geoffrey whispered.
    â€˜That she cannot bear it a moment longer.’
    â€˜Bear what?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜Hysteria will solve nothing,’ Father was saying in English as we entered the flat. And then, ‘ Tishe, deti .’ Hush, the children.
    Throughout dinner Mother clenched a handkerchief and ate nothing. She looked pale and her hair had come loose from its bun. I saw suddenly that she was beautiful. I could not stop staring. Had her eyelashes always been so long, her skin so pale? She seemed to be from some other world, this woman I so often ignored as she moved about the kitchen and leaned over the tub in the yard. Now her white blouse, her long cheekbones, seemed touched by light. A ghost at our table while the rest were noisy, smelly, ruddy, alive. Father wrapped a dark square hand around hers and she pulled it away. The boys made big eyes at each other over their dishes and Benjamin could not help but giggle. I wished, not for the first time, that my two infantile brothers could be exchanged for an older one,