Alice At The Home Front Read online

  “Pretty nifty, pretty nifty there, ol’ boy,” said Bill.

  “Ooooh! It’s nice!” gushed curlicue’s friend.

  Alice thought, Ugh. It was time to go.

  After everyone had examined the insignia, Mrs. Brownell began collecting the dishes, and the others were helping her, while Jimmy stood at the door saying good-bye.

  “Yup, I’ll be into the real rescue business next week. As a CAP sub chaser and search-and-rescue pilot. That’s when the fun begins.”

  Moses was mumbling, “At eight bucks a day, you’re going to risk your life?”

  “Aw, it isn’t like I was overseas, ye know.”

  Jimmy turned toward Alice. “Bye, Alice. Go catch some of those Jerries before I do, ya hear?”

  “You bet!” said Alice with a grin. With that, she hopped down all the steps.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lens Grinding

  One night Mother and Gramp were discussing the letter they had received requesting volunteers and whether they should leave Alice alone at home for the evening while they went to grind lenses at the observatory.

  “She could always phone Mrs. Wilcox next door if something went wrong,” said Mother.

  “I sure don’t mind being left alone—on one condition,” said Alice, “that you tell me what grinding lenses is all about. I don’t remember anybody in this family ever grinding anything, except maybe their teeth when they’re mad.”

  “Well, Alice, it’s something we can both do for the war effort—your grandfather and I—that won’t be too troublesome,” said Mother.

  Alice guessed the job was mainly for Gramp. “You mean you can still do it if you’re old and have a trick knee?”

  “If you must put it that way. Try to be a little more considerate, Alice, when you’re speaking of someone,” Mother reminded her.

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” said Alice, and she meant it. Sometimes things like that just popped out. “So what are you grinding?”

  “We’re grinding the lenses that go in telescopes, field glasses, binoculars, and things of that kind. It’s a job that has to be done by hand, very, very carefully.”

  Alice twisted a bit of hair and frowned. “What happens if you get a spy in there, and he or she grinds everything on an angle so that what you see through is all crooked, and hundreds of field glasses go out to the front like that, all misshapen, and the enemy wins battle after battle all because of a spy who was working with you, sitting right next to you, and you didn’t even know it—don’t say that can’t happen! Who’s going to catch that spy before they do it, huh, Gramp? Ever think of that?”

  “Uh, actually I hadn’t,” he admitted.

  Alice spat out a strand of hair and placed her hands on her hips to show she meant business. “Well, promise me you’ll get the guards over there to check every single person who comes in. They do have soldiers or guards, don’t they? Or I’ll be responsible because I agreed to stay at home alone while you let some spy work along with you.”

  “That’s a very good idea, Alice. We’ll see about it,” said Gramp. “You won’t be responsible; I promise. And you promise not to open the door to anyone and to keep it latched. And to call Mrs. Wilcox if anything goes wrong. Agreed?”

  “All right.” Alice grinned. “Anyway, if somebody tried to break in, Bagheera would leap up and scratch his eyes out.” Bagheera meowed and looked up, hearing his name.

  “Do not open the door, Alice,” Mother said with finality.

  When they came back later in the evening, Alice admitted she had fallen asleep over her Chinese writing and had let the inked brush fall on the floor and spatter the carpet. “Try to be careful in the future,” Mother remarked.

  * * *

  The next day, Alice went to make fudge with Elsie again after stopping at the Red Cross to make bandages. She’d folded more than ever before, and Mother was pleased.

  On the way, she thought of Jimmy. What if he’d seen a U-boat, and then they had spotted him and had reported it back to the enemy ship, and … “Oh, Jimmy,” she said out loud, “You’re wearing out my brain.”

  “If you’ve come to make fudge with me, you shouldn’t have bothered,” said Elsie, opening the door a crack. “There’s no more sugar. Mother went to get some in the kitchen for tea, and she was pretty mad when she saw the tin was empty. So she said no more sugar for fudge. Then she saw that half the butter was gone, and she said no more butter for fudge. So I guess that means no more fudge. This month, anyway. Why don’t you bring your own sugar and butter. Can’t you spare any?”

  “That’s a good idea, Elsie. I’ll try to find something to put the butter in. Maybe mother’s shopping bag.”

  The next day at school she saw Gladys, who said, “Guess what, Alice. The teacher read your scarab story to my geography class today. Those old guys sure did a lot of weird and interesting things. Why don’t we try something like that—build a pyramid or make a tomb?

  “Maybe we can turn the sunroom into a tomb,” said Alice. “I think my Uncle David’s bringing me home a mummy—a real one.”

  Meanwhile, the week went by and the next one, but Alice didn’t hear anything from Jimmy all that time.

  * * *

  Mother sent Alice to do some shopping at Sherwood’s Store that Thursday afternoon, when the sky clouded over into a deep purple, and she got caught in the heaviest downpour ever. She quickly stepped under the shelter of a doorway. She was just in time, because a deafening clap of thunder startled her and illuminated the sky with a bolt of lightning, blinding Alice. Alice thought it must be from Zeus himself throwing the bolts right at her from up in the clouds.

  She was standing there, hair and jacket dripping, when she saw a single person trudging up the hill in the rain. At first she thought it had to be a man. Looking closer, she saw it wasn’t, and darned if she wasn’t wearing a black raincoat. The spy in the black raincoat herself! Well, this time Alice was going to find out what she was up to, so as the woman turned down an alley, Alice followed behind her in the rain—not too close, like they say in the mystery books, but just close enough. She saw the woman ducking into what looked like an abandoned storefront. It was completely dark inside, and Alice couldn’t see in, but she approached close enough to hear voices.

  A man’s voice was yelling at the spy, “I already told you. The ships are supposed to be sailing on the twenty-fourth. Why don’t you pay attention? You can go get the name and the details yourself.” A clap of thunder covered the spy’s answer, but Alice knew it was about sinking the ships.

  Hmmmpf, thought Alice, not if I can help it. That was enough to convince Alice to call the cops as soon as she got home and tell them what a good job she had done, finding the spy and discovering her mission. In the meantime, she’d better skedaddle over to Sherman’s and do the errands.

  Alice’s list was wet by this time, and crumpled, but she managed to find the oatmeal and the canned fruit in the back of the store and plunk it all in a basket. She was just going up to the cash register when she saw the woman in the black raincoat coming up the aisle. Her heart jumped. How did she get in here? The spy’s glasses were so thick you couldn’t see her eyes. Alice shivered. She didn’t want to see them.

  Quickly, Alice slid behind the sundries counter, but to her surprise, the woman turned and headed straight for her. Alice couldn’t back off because she was cornered some distance away from the counter. An umbrella with a sharp point hung dripping from the woman’s arm. There was no one else in the store. The woman was approaching faster now, bumping cans along the way. Suddenly, she grabbed Alice by the wrist with a gnarled hand. Alice shrank away from her, but the woman held her tight. In her other hand, she unfolded a page of newspaper for Alice to see.

  “Little girl, read diss for me, please. I have der veak eyes,” she said in a low, accented voice. “Ze first two lines
only.”

  Alice caught her breath when she saw what was printed: “Ship departures from New Haven, Connecticut, week of February 23.” What should she do? Change the names? She didn’t dare. Instead, Alice obeyed quickly. Her voice came out cracked because she was so anxious to get away from the woman’s firm grip and rancid breath.

  “The, ahem, The Moses Brown, February 24. The Henry Cabot Lodge, February 25.” She still had time to warn the police, she reasoned.

  “Ya, dass enough!” the woman exclaimed, grabbing the paper. And before Alice could recover, the woman had paid for something and left the store, the black raincoat bulging out in the wind behind her.

  “Excuse me,” Alice came up to the cashier. “Do you know who that lady is who asked me to read for her? In the black raincoat?”

  “Sure do, Alice. Ol’ Mrs. Schnitzer. She’s German but harmless. And lonely. Her only nephew’s going overseas pretty soon—fighting on our side, of course. He’s American. She probably forgot the name of the ship and the departure date.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Icy Waters

  Alice tried not to think about Jimmy, but at night before going to sleep, she could see herself in the cockpit with him. She’d yell, “Enemy plane at four o’clock,” and he’d report it, ditch into the clouds, and head for the base. On the next trip out, they’d discover two wrecks and a sub and report them when they got back to the base, and they would both be given certificates of excellent conduct, although it occurred to her as she fell asleep that she wasn’t sure such a thing existed.

  Alice started to write to Uncle David more often, reminding him to bring back the mummy. But most of the time she spent spotting at the windows and noting the planes in her book. One afternoon, she went down to Mr. Parker’s house and showed him all she’d done, all her entries in her book, and he said, “Yup, yup. Mighty good job, Alice. Keep it up.”

  She didn’t know for sure he’d meant it, because she still had not spotted a Messerschmitt, but then, she hadn’t seen one.

  About a week after her visit to Mr. Parker, Alice noticed a change in the house. An eerily sad feeling, as if Bagheera had run away, only he hadn’t. He was right there on the dining room table with his paw on the butter. She chased him off.

  Mother seemed more serious, and her mouth was clamped down, which wasn’t a good sign. Gramp wasn’t humming like he usually did when he was tinkering with the clocks. The first thing she thought was that she might have done or said something really wrong and they were not telling her about it because they were so upset with her. But she couldn’t think of anything she’d done that was any worse than usual. Then she thought maybe Mother had lost a relative in the war in Europe and was really sad and didn’t want to talk about it.

  Or maybe some spy had sneaked into Gramp’s factory and stolen the silk for the parachute cords. She didn’t dare ask him if that was it. If it was her fault, then there’d be a lot of shouting from Mother and frowning from Gramp, so she thought she’d let sleeping dogs lie.

  But then came a phone call, and Alice could hear Mother talking in a low voice and saying grown up things like, “It’ll be all right, Clare, you’ll see.” She knew then for sure somebody was sick or in trouble, but she didn’t dare ask who. Sometimes Alice could be brazen, like Mother said, but sometimes she’d feel shy.

  There had been two air-raid warnings since the first one and another that night. By then they had it all down pat, as if they were putting on a Christmas play. Alice was the one to check the drapes and turn off the lights. Her mother would stay close to Gramp, who was holding the flashlight, and they’d go down to the basement with Alice following and take their places under the table. Alice would check the food for the tenth time, and Gramp would see that the sandbags on the bulkheads were secure.

  After the all clear, they would go up to the kitchen to have a cup of Postum and cookies, sort of a reward for their good deeds. But that night there was an unexpected rapping at the door, and Gramp let in Mr. Hopkins, who had just finished making the rounds to check that everybody’s lights were off, or at least not showing.

  He shook off the light snow that had started to fall on him and stamped his boots before he came in. Mother offered him some cocoa, but he refused. Alice poured herself a cup from the jug.

  “No thank’ee. Better get back home soon. Mrs. Hopkins”—Alice noticed, like the old folks, he always called his wife “Mrs.”—“has spent all day with Clare Brownell, keepin’ her company, keepin’ her spirits up, and given’ her hope, so to speak.”

  “Why?” interrupted Alice. “Why giving her hope?” Hope was when things were bad, and that’s all there was left.

  Mr. Hopkins looked over at Mother, who shrugged her shoulders and looked aside. “She’ll hear about it sooner or later,” she replied.

  “Alice, dear,” she turned to Alice, took the cup away, and placed her hand on hers. “There has been a storm. Jimmy’s missing. They can’t find his plane.”

  “What do you mean missing?” Alice almost shouted. “He can’t be missing. That’s what the CAP’s for. That’s their job—to see that everybody gets back!” Alice suddenly felt fury, like boiling milk rising up in her chest.

  “It’s winter, young lady,” explained Mr. Hopkins. “He must have gone as far as a hundred miles out to sea, and with that flimsy plane in this weather … but they’ll be searching for him when the weather clears, ye know. They’ll find him, I’m sure.”

  “You don’t believe that!” Alice snapped back. “Who’s searching anyway? How can they search if they can’t see?”

  “Well, there you have the problem,” answered Mr. Hopkins.

  “The water’s freezing out there. If he ditches, he won’t live through it! He’ll just freeze to death!”

  “They’ll find ’im, though. Bound to’s my guess. Soon as it lets up.”

  “Alice,” intervened Mother, “it’s not Mr. Hopkins’s fault. You shouldn’t yell at him.”

  “I’ll yell at who I want!” screamed Alice. She felt like she’d never been so angry in her life. “Go find him then. What’re you waiting for? Get the CAP to send a search party right now! Not when it’s too late!” As she yelled, she realized she was asking the impossible.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Hopkins. Alice doesn’t mean it. She’s upset,” Mother was saying.

  He nodded. “I’d best be goin’.”

  “Wait! How long’s he been missing, anyway?” Alice remembered the sad feeling in the house. “It’s been three days, hasn’t it, Mr. Hopkins? Three whole stupid days, and everybody’s just sitting around on their behinds.”

  Then, suddenly, it was like a dam had burst. She sobbed and choked on her own tears and tore at the fringe on the chair with her fingers and plunged her head in the velvet pillow, but still the sobs wouldn’t stop. She saw nothing but black in front of her eyes, like she’d never seen before—a suffocating blanket of anger and pain all mixed into a black cloud.

  “Alice!” she heard Mother call. “Alice!”

  She felt a firm grip on her shoulder.

  “Alice, sit up right now and drink this water.” Mother’s voice, so stern. “Drink it all down, every drop.”

  She sat up slowly and tried to take the glass from Mother’s hand, but Mother held it for her. She drank between sobs, knowing Mother was right to make her drink because now she was beginning to calm down, and the anger, a nasty sharp-toothed animal, began to back down, leaving her feeling empty, like a rag doll with no stuffing.

  When she woke up the next morning, she knew something was terribly wrong with her. Her chest hurt so bad, she could only take short, shallow breaths. She felt like she soon wouldn’t be able to breathe at all. Her whole body pulsed with pain, but worst of all was the heat. She felt her face. It was burning and covered with sweat. She lay there, exhausted. She couldn’t even call out for help.
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br />   When Alice didn’t go down to breakfast, Mother came up to see what was wrong.

  To Mother, it was immediately clear. “That’s what comes of leaning out of the window for hours on end in mid winter.”

  But to Alice, the words meant nothing.

  The doctor arrived and examined her—her throat, her chest, her temperature, and her pulse—Alice pushed away his hands. Everything was so hot, and she felt so horrible.

  She heard him say in a low voice, “It’s a case of pneumonia, I’m afraid. We’ll have to act quickly to bring the fever down.”

  Alice didn’t hear anything else after that because her ears kept buzzing, and all she wanted to do was go to sleep. Twice she woke up in the middle of the night, cold and shivering, and grabbed at all the clothes she could reach, including her bedside rug, pulling it over herself.

  A few days passed, and the medicine brought her fever down a little, but she was still not able to get out of bed without Gramp or Mother holding her up. Coming back from the bathroom, she would slump on the bed, exhausted, and drift off into a dreamy state with voices calling and strange scenes flickering in and out of her head—some of them of Jimmy off in the distance. She was barely conscious of what was going on around her. Next followed a series of days when she was hungry but couldn’t eat. Bagheera, curled up at the foot of her bed, never left her side. There were nights when pictures of the dark ocean water rose and fell in her mind’s eye—Jimmy’s exhausted body floating, bobbing up and down, the tide slowly dragging him below the surface, and his plane somewhere in the distance, sinking beneath the waves.

  She tried to imagine a rescue party that she would lead. She would be the first to fly overhead and spot him. She would save his life; everyone would be happy and proud for her, but she knew it would be a lie. She would never head a search party. There was nothing she could do to help, because she couldn’t even get out of bed.