4

As promised, the morning’s lessons continued in English. Benny felt the wires in his brain fizzing with new meanings. Maths involved problems using pounds, shillings and pence.

‘One shilling and sixpence,’ he said in halting English, responding to a question about the total paid for a basket of groceries.

‘One and six.’ Dr Dawes gave him an approving nod. Benjamin Goldman, known for being lightning quick at sums back home, was finding this all very hard but knew he had a position to maintain. He thought briefly of Rudi, how Rudi would day-dream during maths, only paying attention when the teacher stood, ruler in hand, over his desk.

The same shriek that had woken them sounded through the window. The boys looked at one another, unsettled. Dr Dawes smiled. ‘A peacock. Ein Pfau.’ He wrote peacock on the blackboard, with a little picture of a bird with feathers fanned out behind it.

At break Benny took his football outside to the large lawn on the south side of the house and kicked it around with the other boys. He managed a good goal, one that would have been hard for Rudi to have managed. It was fun playing here at Fairfleet with these boys. But there was still a numb ache under his ribs when he thought of how he’d played football with his friend back in Germany. The peacock stood on the terrace, observing them. At least it had stopped that frightful screaming. Its tail lacked the bright blue feathers of those he’d seen in pictures. Perhaps they moulted.

‘Let’s play again after lunch,’ David said.

‘Only if we speak in English,’ Benny answered.

‘Ha ha.’

‘Seriously.’ He picked up his ball. ‘You want to play with my football, we use English. Only English.’ He said the last two words in the language itself.

The others exchanged glances. ‘Aren’t you taking this a bit too seriously?’ Rainer asked. Benny felt a little prickle of unease. He’d be marked out now as a teacher’s pet. He didn’t care. Back home it had always mattered to him what other boys thought. Not now. Becoming English mattered most. If the others felt differently, well, that was their choice.

‘Do you think the lake’s frozen?’ Rainer broke the tension by pointing at the stretch of water. ‘We could go skating.’

*
Every other night they had baths. The first few times it was easy to make excuses and dawdle so he was last and the others had left the steamy bathroom. But one night Rainer forgot his pyjama jacket and barged in as Benny was drying himself on one of the fluffy new white towels they’d all been given.

Benny felt Rainer’s gaze.

‘You’re slow tonight,’ the other boy said, plucking his pyjama jacket from the tiled floor and walking out. Benny took in a deep breath and let it out very slowly, watching the air condense on the mirror above the sink and turn into little drops of water.

‘I am becoming an English boy,’ he told his misted-over reflection. The real Benjamin Goldman was already a vague approximation of his former self.

*

As days passed it was easier and easier to become English. Benny started to think like the new person he’d become: the refugee who was blood -keen to suck up the new language and way of doing things. If the English held their cutlery a certain way, well, Benny would watch carefully and hold his knife and fork their way. If they drank tea with their breakfast, so would he.

When he met Alice Smith on the staircase he’d nod at her, ignoring the watchful expression in her pale green eyes. How easy it was if you acted like this: shrugged off any disapproval. At first the other boys had muttered about Benny’s insistence on speaking English at all times, regarding him as a teacher’s pet, as he’d anticipated. He’d relaxed a little now, allowing himself to talk to his room-mates last thing at night in their old language for a few minutes.

Lord Dorner, whom they still hadn’t seen since arriving at Fairfleet two weeks earlier, had ordered crates of toys from Hamley’s, which was apparently a large toyshop in London. The boys pulled English board games out of a crate.

‘We had this at home,’ Rainer said, pointing at a box set of Monopoly. ‘But with Berlin streets.’ There were Ludo and Scrabble as well. The largest crate contained a table-tennis set and bats. And a train set. Miles of track, a dozen engines, sleek liveried carriages, station buildings, bridges, points. Looking at them made something churn in Benny’s stomach.

‘You can take all that down the basement,’ Alice told them. ‘I don’t want to be tripping over it when I’m vacuuming.’

The older boys muttered about kids’ things, but Rainer and David carried the boxes down to one of the disused basement rooms and spent days arranging the train set on a large sheet of plywood the gardener found for them.

Benny tried to ignore their enthusiasm for the engines and points. He could still close his eyes and see the set he’d owned himself in Germany, still hear his father’s voice.

‘You must take platform length into consideration when you’re allocating wagons. And don’t neglect the issue with the points. Or the signalling problem at that first junction.’

Leave me alone, he told the voice. You don’t belong at Fairfleet.

‘Come on Benny,’ Rainer urged. ‘Help us get this track sorted out.’

He mumbled an excuse and walked out of the room, carrying his football. On the left of the passage a bright rectangle of light had appeared. A side door to the garden. He hadn’t noticed it before. He slipped through. The door took him out beside the tennis court. Alice Smith was shaking out rugs with a maid.

She scowled at Benny. ‘That door’s not to be used.’

‘I am sorry,’ he said.

She gave the rug a particularly vicious shake. ‘I just open it once or twice a year to air the basement. You boys don’t half try it on.’

The peacock strode towards them. Benny heard the rug flicking, Alice shooing it away. It cried at the bad treatment and Benny drove his fingernails into his palms, thinking again of tormented children.

A large oak stood at the edge of the back lawn. Benny kicked the ball again and again against its rough bark. Every slap of the leather was a slap against his own memory. When he came inside again he felt better. As long as he didn’t have to play with the trains.

*
He could be this reborn Benny during the day. But sometimes at night he remembered that he didn’t deserve this fresh chance at Fairfleet, with its soft-carpeted rooms and well-stocked library, its lawns where football could be played. His mind flitted to his old home, its tiled kitchen with pots and pans hanging from a ceiling rack and the stove emitting its constant warmth. He thought of his father, as he had once been, years ago, tumbling him on to the ground and pretending to be a bear, chasing him round the garden. He thought of his mother as she’d been before she fell ill, reading him a story before he fell asleep, buying him a bunch of red balloons once when she’d seen him gazing at the man selling them at the park gates.

Somewhere in his home town, another boy would be lying in bed. Probably not a comfortable bed like this one. That boy would be reviewing the past day: stones whizzing through the air to strike his neck as he walked through the streets, youths in uniform jeering at him.

‘Es tut mir leid,’ he muttered in the language he’d forbidden himself to use. ‘I’m sorry.’

He buried his face in the soft, downy pillow and begged sleep to come.