Once Was a Time Read online

  We dressed up in our princess costumes the evening we listened to their address on the wireless. We both wore paper crowns salvaged from last year’s Christmas crackers, and Kitty carried a scepter (a fire poker) while I wore a long robe (my mum’s).

  “Don’t the girls look so precious?” Mrs. McLaughlin asked her husband as she tuned in to the program for us.

  “Darling,” Kitty’s father agreed, puffing on his pipe.

  “Regal, Mum,” Kitty corrected her. “We look regal.”

  I sat up straighter on my footstool. Straighter and more regal.

  The princesses were speaking on Children’s Hour, which we listened to most every evening for the stories, but this night was special. Kitty squirmed with excitement until finally the announcer said, “Her Royal Highness, Princess Elizabeth.”

  Her voice came through as clear as a bell, as if she was right there in the McLaughlins’ front room with us. “In wishing you all ‘good evening,’ I feel that I am speaking to friends and companions who have shared with my sister and myself many a happy Children’s Hour.”

  Kitty and I both started squealing.

  “My word,” remarked Kitty’s mum, “if that isn’t the poshest voice I ever heard come out of a child’s mouth!”

  “Naturally,” Kitty said. “She’s going to be the queen, after all.” She adjusted her crown.

  “Hush,” I ordered them. “She’s still speaking!”

  “Thousands of you in this country have had to leave your home and be separated from your fathers and mothers,” the princess continued. “My sister, Margaret Rose, and I feel so much for you, as we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all.”

  I didn’t even need to look at Kitty before I felt her hand close around mine. She squeezed it, and I squeezed back. I hadn’t left my home, I hadn’t gone anywhere at all, but I knew far too well what it meant to be apart from my loved ones.

  “And when peace comes,” the princess concluded, “remember it will be for us, the children of today, to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place.”

  I wanted to do that, so badly: to make the world of tomorrow a better and happier place. And when I saw the determined look on Kitty’s face as she stared at the wireless, I knew that she was vowing to do the exact same.

  “Good night, children,” said Princess Margaret.

  “Good night, and good luck to you all,” said Princess Elizabeth.

  It was the best Children’s Hour ever.

  As soon as we turned off the radio, Kitty told me that we needed to come up with our plan to find each other if ever we were separated. It was as if hearing from the princesses had made her take this whole war business more seriously than ever she had done before. “We need to choose a meeting spot,” she declared, gesturing authoritatively with her fire poker—I mean, royal scepter.

  “You’re right,” I said. “What’s the spot, then?”

  “It ought to be somewhere we could find easily,” Kitty mused. “And somewhere we know we’d be able to get into. Not our houses, for example. What if they took over our houses when they sent us away to prison camp?”

  “Wills Tower,” I suggested. Wills Memorial Tower was the grandest building at the university where my dad worked. Probably the grandest building in all of southwest England. It was made to look as if it had been built in medieval times, all vaulted ceilings and turrets raised toward the heavens. It reminded me more of a cathedral than a university.

  Dad had taken me and Kitty to Wills Tower a number of times over the years. He had let us play hide-and-seek in the hallways and winding staircases while he sat in meetings. I knew we would be able to find it no matter what happened because it was right in the middle of Bristol, and it was one of the city’s tallest buildings. You could see that tower from almost anywhere.

  Kitty nodded her agreement, pleased. “Tell sir ‘Wow!’” she added.

  I blinked at her.

  “It’s an anagram of ‘Wills Tower,’” Kitty explained. And that decided it.

  That was how important it was, in Kitty’s family, to always keep track of everyone’s whereabouts.

  I couldn’t help but think how different my own family was. My dad often stayed at the labs so late into the night that we were asleep before he came home, and then went back there before we woke up the next morning. Some nights I don’t know whether he came home at all. When that happened, Justine was supposedly “in charge,” which meant that supper was cold fish and chips from the chip shop, and sometimes boys would come round to visit her. That’s just how things were in my family these days.

  So I wonder: Just how long did it take me to realize that Dad was missing?

  Chapter 3

  Perhaps I should have noticed my father’s absence days earlier than I did. But in my defense, school had gone from bad to worse, and there wasn’t room in my mind for anything else. What happened was this: Betsy, Margaret, and Jeanine had formed a club called the Film Stars, and they were inviting other girls in our form to join and they weren’t just walking up and saying, “Hey, do you fancy coming out to play with us at Margaret’s this weekend?” No, there were formal invitations in fine handwriting on lovely stationery. And then if you accepted the offer of membership (which everyone did, of course), you got a Film Stars badge and a Film Stars membership card, and I even heard there was a Film Stars initiation ceremony, only none of the girls was allowed to tell what happened there because it was secret.

  Let me be clear: The entire concept of the Film Stars was utterly soppy. All they did was go to the cinema together. That was it. And I could do that myself, without belonging to any sort of club. In fact I did do that myself. Often. With Kitty.

  So I wouldn’t have been upset not to find one of those formal invitations slipped into my desk, except that Betsy, Margaret, and Jeanine made it clear that they were never going to invite me.

  “We don’t want to hurt your feelings,” Betsy said to me in the schoolyard one Friday morning in late October, “but we don’t really think you would fit in. D’you know what I mean?”

  “Sort of,” I answered, clutching A Little Princess tighter against my chest.

  “It’s just that you read,” Margaret added. “A lot. And that’s not really what the Film Stars is about.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s about films. I like films, too.”

  “Have you seen The Wizard of Oz?” Jeanine asked.

  “No,” I said. “But I’ve read the book.”

  They all nodded grimly, as if to say, Exactly.

  “You know we’re going to secondary school next year,” Betsy explained. “So it’s time we start acting a little more grown up.”

  I hadn’t known that reading books was babyish.

  “I can act more adult,” I offered.

  “It wouldn’t really help, you know,” Jeanine said in a fake-sweet voice. “The Film Stars just aren’t looking for that whole ‘girls with glasses’ thing.”

  As if it was my fault that I needed glasses.

  But still, it would have been all right, I could have dealt with it. Except that then they invited Kitty to be a Film Star.

  Kitty and I sat down at our desks next to each other, and I saw her pull out the envelope, beautiful in lace and ribbons. She stuck it back in her desk really fast, as if she didn’t want me to notice. But it was too late.

  She didn’t mention her Film Stars invitation to me the whole rest of the day, so I didn’t bring it up either. She just acted like her normal Kitty self: splitting her lunch with me, distracting Miss Dickens just as she was about to shout at me (again) for reading during class, playing make-believe witches with me in the schoolyard. She behaved normally, but as soon as she got that invitation, nothing felt normal at all.

  I slipped out of school as soon as the day ended, and I went home alon
e. From school to my house was a twenty-minute walk across the Downs, which is a vast, flat expanse of grass and basically nothing else for as far as the eye can see, except for a few barrage balloons, like Martian spacecraft suspended high up in midair, which the Royal Air Force had installed when the war started. Sometimes we would come out here to fly kites, because there were no trees or buildings to block the wind.

  This day was gray and blustery and rainy, like almost every day in Bristol. I didn’t mind rain as a rule, but it was so much worse when it came whipping across the Downs at an almost horizontal angle, and the wind, finding no kites to support, dedicated itself to trying to knock me over. I had an umbrella, of course, but it wouldn’t stand a chance against this wind, so I stuck it in my schoolbag and just let myself get soaked through. The cardboard box holding my gas mask banged painfully against my knees as I hurried forward. If Daddy was home, he would have a fire going and maybe a cup of Ovaltine and I would dry right up. If Daddy wasn’t there, well, I could always use a towel.

  “Hullo!” I shouted when I walked in the front door.

  “What?” Justine shouted back from upstairs. Otherwise, no response. The downstairs was dark, and there was nothing in the fireplace but cinders.

  Fine. I would make myself a cup of Ovaltine. Betsy said it was time to start acting more grown up. But what did she know about it? Being adult had nothing to do with watching more movies. Making your own Ovaltine when you were soaking wet and friendless because there was no one there to take care of you—that was grown up.

  I went into the larder. No milk.

  I started to cry then, so I suppose Betsy was right, and I really am a baby. Crying over spilt milk. Or no milk, really.

  I huddled down on the kitchen’s filthy tile floor, which hadn’t been cleaned in weeks, maybe months, maybe even not since Mum left. I pressed my forehead against my sopping wet knees and wept. I was so noisy about it that I almost didn’t hear the knocking on the front door.

  Slow. Slow. Fast-fast-fast-fast-fast.

  That was the pattern everyone in my family used to knock on doors: when Mum wanted to come in and tidy my bedroom, or when I wanted to bother Dad in his library. Kitty had adopted it, too, although her parents had no interest in secret knocking codes.

  I stood up, wiped the back of my wrist across my eyes, and went to open the door. There I found Kitty, looking like a drowned cat. She had her book bag but no gas mask, a forgetful habit for which Miss Dickens frequently reprimanded her. “Thanks a lot for waiting for me,” Kitty said.

  I was so surprised to see her that I just stood there.

  “Can I come in?” she asked. “I’m still getting rained on, you know.”

  I let her inside and went upstairs to get towels for both of us. We sat on the living room floor together, dampening the rug. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “It’s Friday,” was her explanation. “Why wouldn’t I be here?”

  “What about the Film Stars?”

  Kitty looked puzzled. “What about them?”

  “They invited you,” I said. “I saw their letter.”

  “Oh, right.” Kitty shrugged, her towel bobbing up and down on her shoulders. “I said no thanks.”

  “Why?” I gasped. No one ever said “no thanks” to Margaret, Betsy, and Jeanine.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Because I don’t want to be a Film Star. Those girls are mean. And boring. And they didn’t invite you. So it sounded like a stupid club.”

  I didn’t say anything because the love that I felt for Kitty, which was always part of me, like background music to my life, suddenly crescendoed into a symphony so loud and powerful that I would not have been able to speak over it had I tried.

  “Did you honestly think I was going to join a club without you?” Kitty asked, her eyes wide.

  I shrugged.

  “Lottie, are you daft?”

  I nodded, and we both giggled.

  “Come on,” I said, standing up and heading to the mantel. “It’s freezing in here.”

  So Kitty and I built a fire, together.

  Chapter 4

  Much, much later that night, Kitty and I were back in the living room. We’d spent hours designing a massive treasure hunt that went through every room in the house, and then forced Thomas to solve it. He got in a sulk when he reached the end and realized that there was no actual treasure to be found, so that was the end of that.

  Then it was time for bed, but Justine kicked me and Kitty out of the bedroom for whispering and giggling too loudly, so now we were whispering and giggling too loudly downstairs, where my sister couldn’t hear us. We were drinking Ovaltine that tasted more like sludge—a little bit of hot water with an awful lot of powder—and practicing our psychic connection.

  My dad had told us about things called Zener cards that were used to test for extrasensory perception. A deck consisted of twenty-five cards: five showing a circle, five showing a plus sign, five showing three wavy lines, five showing a box, and five showing a star. If you were just guessing what the next card to come up would be, the odds were that you’d get about five of them correct. So if you got a lot more than that correct, then you weren’t just guessing: You were exhibiting genuine psychic abilities.

  Dad didn’t think there was any scientific proof behind any of it, but Kitty and I really wanted to have a telepathic connection, so we made our own deck of Zener cards out of paper and practiced mentally beaming the pictures at each other. One time when Kitty looked at the cards and thought really, really hard about the image on each of them, I got nine correct. Justine told us it was just luck, but I could swear I’d seen the symbol appear in my mind’s eye as if Kitty was broadcasting it directly to me.

  Tonight we’d run through the deck a few times, but we hadn’t done any better than eight out of twenty-five. Which was certainly better than average, but still not our personal best.

  We were halfway through the deck, this time with me looking at the cards and trying to send the images to Kitty, when we heard a knocking sound.

  “Daddy?” I called.

  No reply.

  It must have been the dying embers of our fire. I glanced at the windows to make sure the blackout curtains were drawn, so nobody outside would be able to see any light left from our hearth or the one lit lamp. That was a rule that Mum had been very strict about: If the Luftwaffe could see light, they would know where the cities were, and then they would know where to bomb. She’d put Thomas in charge of drawing the curtains half an hour after sunset every evening, and he took this wartime responsibility very seriously. If the air raid wardens could see light coming through the windows at night, they would yell and even fine you.

  Of course the curtains were drawn tightly, like every night. Kitty and I went back to our cards.

  “Squiggles,” Kitty said.

  It was a square.

  “Square,” Kitty said.

  It was a circle.

  “Star,” Kitty said.

  This one was a star. I smiled to myself and marked her answer on my score sheet.

  Then the knocking sound came again, louder.

  “I think there’s someone at the door,” Kitty said.

  “Who would be knocking on the door this late at night?” But I was already on my feet and walking into the front hallway, Kitty right behind me.

  I have a quick imagination. That’s what my schoolteacher last year had told my parents, like she wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing: Charlotte has a quick imagination. That meant that, in the few steps between the living room and the front door, I had already come up with a dozen possible explanations for the knocking—the odd knocking, which was not slow. Slow. Fast-fast-fast-fast-fast.

  Maybe our neighbors had locked themselves out of their house again and needed to come in from the rain.

  Maybe Jus
tine had arranged a late-night rendezvous with one of her beaux.

  Maybe Mum had realized her mistake in leaving us and had journeyed all through the day and into the night so she could come home. And had been gone so long that she’d forgotten the right way to knock.

  But when I opened the door, the person standing there was not a neighbor, or a teenage boy, or my mum. It was a tall, slender stranger in a dark gray raincoat with a smart hat angled over her face. She looked like a film star. Not a Film Star, a real one.

  “Hello, girls,” she said, her voice calm but serious. “Which one of you is Charlotte?”

  “I am.” I raised my hand.

  “Ah, so this must be your sister,” the lady said, her eyes flickering over Kitty.

  “Oh, yes,” I said innocently. “That’s why our eyes are the same color, you see?” We widened our matching hazel eyes up at her.

  She gave a tense smile. “I do see. I’m afraid I need to discuss something serious with you, however. I have some news to share with you about your father.”

  “My father?” I repeated, and that was the moment when it occurred to me to wonder how long it had been since I’d last seen him. Today was Friday. I was certain I’d seen him on Tuesday. Hadn’t I? Or had it been Monday?

  “Yes,” the film star woman said. “It’s quite important. Would you come out to the car with me?”

  Kitty and I peered past her, but in the rain and the dark, it was impossible to make out a car on the street. I ate a lot of carrots these days, even though I thought they tasted like medicine and dirt, because Mum said they would help us see better in the nighttime, but they didn’t do anything for my vision right now. Every house on my street had its blackout curtains drawn, of course no streetlamps were lit, and any cars that might have been on the road were required to cover their headlights and taillights. Driving on a night like this seemed to be madness—how would you avoid running straight into a tree? Whatever had brought this woman to my house must have really been urgent.