Bombs on Aunt Dainty. Judith Kerr

I want to know,” cried the old lady, poking Cousin Otto in the chest with a bony finger, “is, who is minding the shop?”

      “Perhaps we should go upstairs,” said Mama.

      The Hotel Continental did not provide lunch on weekdays and they usually filled in the gap between breakfast and dinner with a snack in Papa’s room.

      Cousin Otto accepted gratefully. “I’m dying for a cup of tea,” he confessed as Mama went scurrying in and out with the kettle, cups and some buns she had stored in her room next door. He sat on Papa’s bed, drinking tea with milk like the English, and asked Anna if she had any messages for her brother, as he was leaving for Cambridge himself that afternoon in the hope of getting a job.

      “What sort of a job?” Mama wanted to know.

      Cousin Otto began to touch every bit of wood within reach. “Touch wood!” he cried. “In my own line. There is a professor of physics there – I was a student of his in Berlin – and he has asked me to come and see him.”

      “Oh, Otto, it would be wonderful,” said Mama.

      “Touch wood! Touch wood!” said Cousin Otto and touched the bits of wood all over again. It was difficult to remember, with his old-maidish ways, that he was barely thirty.

      “Well, just give Max lots of love and ask him to write,” said Mama.

      “And wish him luck for his exams,” said Anna.

      “Oh, I forgot,” cried Mama. “The exams must be quite soon. Tell him not to write – he’ll be too busy.”

      Papa said, “Would you give Max a message from me?”

      “Certainly,” said Cousin Otto.

      “Would you tell him –” Papa hesitated. Then he said, “I think that now the Germans have attacked, Max may want to volunteer for one of the fighting forces. And of course he must do whatever he thinks right. But would you ask him, please, to discuss it with the University authorities first, before he makes up his mind?”

      “But he’s only eighteen!” cried Mama.

      “It’s not too young,” said Cousin Otto. He nodded at Papa. “I promise I’ll tell him. And when I get back to London I’ll ring you up and tell you how he is.”

      “That would be most kind,” said Papa.

      Cousin Otto stayed a little longer, chatting and drinking tea, and then it was time for him to catch his train. Soon afterwards Anna went back to the Bartholomew’s. She had arranged to spend Saturday with Judy and Jinny. She had hardly seen them since their return from school and they had such a good time playing tennis and sunning themselves in the garden that they decided to spend Sunday the same way.

      Most of the Sunday papers carried pictures of Winston Churchill, who had become Prime Minister instead of Chamberlain, and there were several eye-witness accounts of the German invasion of Holland. Huge numbers of Nazi parachutists had been dropped from aeroplanes, disguised as Dutch and British soldiers. To add to the confusion, Germans who had been living in Holland for years and whom no one suspected of being Nazis, had immediately rushed to their aid. The Dutch were fighting back and the French and the British were on their way to help them, but clearly the Germans had a strong foothold. There was a map of Holland with thick arrows breaking into it from Germany and an article headed “If Germany Captures Dutch And Belgian Coasts”, but, said Jinny, the Sunday papers always exaggerated and it was no use minding them.

      Monday was hotter and sunnier than ever and when Anna arrived at the Hotel Continental to spend the day with Mama and Papa it seemed a pity to waste such lovely weather indoors.

      “Couldn’t we go to the Zoo?” she asked on a sudden inspiration.

      “Why not?” said Papa. He was feeling cheerful because Winston Churchill had been made Prime Minister – the only man who understood the situation, he said.

      Mama was worried about how much it would cost, but then she too found the sunshine irresistible and they decided to be extravagant and go.

      It was an extraordinary day. Anna had not been to the Zoo for years and she walked round in a daze, looking. The sand-coloured and orange tigers with their black stripes which seemed to have been poured over them, peacocks with unbelievable embroidered tails, monkeys with elegant beige fur and tragic eyes – it was as though she had never seen any of them before. And giraffes! she thought. How could anyone have invented giraffes!

      She looked and looked, and all the time some other part of her mind was being careful not to think of the map on the Sunday papers and of the Nazi horror seeping out of Germany into other parts of Europe which had, until now, been safe.

      They stayed until late afternoon and, by then, Anna’s mind was so full of all she had seen that it no longer needed any effort to forget about the war. It was as though those long hours in the sun had changed something, as though everything were suddenly more hopeful. Mama and Papa, too, were more light-hearted. Papa had discovered a creature in the Small Cat House which looked, he said, exactly like Goebbels, and all the way home in the bus he imagined it making speeches in German to the other small cats and inspecting them for signs of Jewishess. He kept Mama and Anna laughing and they arrived back at the Hotel Continental tired and relaxed, as though they had been away on a holiday.

      The lounge was dark after the sunlit street and it took Anna a moment to focus on the porter who looked up from his desk as they came in.

      “Someone rang you from Cambridge,” he said, and she wondered why Max should telephone rather than write.

      Papa lingered for a moment, glancing at a newspaper that someone had left lying on a table, and the porter observed him. “Nothing in there,” he said. “But it’s bad – I’ve heard the radio.”

      “What’s happened?” said Papa.

      The porter shrugged. He was a little discouraged man with a few hairs carefully arranged in stripes across his bald head. “The usual,” he said. “It’s all up in Holland. The Nazis are everywhere and the Dutch royal family have escaped to England.”

      “So quickly!” said Papa, and the feeling of having been away on holiday slipped away as though it had never been.

      Just then the telephone rang. The porter answered it and said to Anna, “For you – from Cambridge.”

      She rushed to the telephone cabin and picked up the receiver.

      “Max?” she said – but it was not Max, it was George.

      “Look, something awkward has happened,” he said. “I don’t quite know how to put it, but Max – he’s been arrested.”

      “Arrested?” What had he done? Anna thought of undergraduate pranks, getting drunk, knocking off policemen’s helmets, but surely Max would never…Stupidly, she asked, “You mean by the police?”

      “Yes,” said George and added, “as an enemy alien.”

      “But they don’t arrest people for being enemy aliens!” cried Anna. “And anyway he isn’t one. We lost our German nationality years ago. He’s just waiting to become naturalised British.”

      “I know, I know,” said George. “We told them all that, but it made no difference. They said they were interning all male enemy aliens in Cambridge and his name was on the list.”

      “Interning?”

      “Yes,” said George. “In some kind of camp.”

      Anna suddenly felt quite empty, as though it were pointless even to go on talking.

      “Are you still there?” said George anxiously and continued, “Listen, everyone here has made an awful fuss. Me, his tutor, the College – everyone. Bill got so wild at the police station that they threw him out. But we can’t move them. It’s a Government order. Bit of a panic, if you ask me, after what’s been happening in Holland.”

      “Yes,”