Free Pennies For Hitler by Jackie French

battleship, the Bismarck . Germany has been preparing for this war for ten years; and England has done nothing in that time.’

    ‘Nothing?’
    She shrugged. ‘Not enough then. England hoped to negotiate a way to avoid a war. I hoped too. But lately, well, war is coming for us whether we want it or not. If we don’t fight we will be ruled by Hitler and his Brown Shirts.’
    People who hate Jews, thought Georg, but he didn’t say it.
    ‘But England will win? The empire will fight too?’
    ‘The empire will fight.’ She shook her head. ‘However, the empire isn’t like it looks on the map, George. India has millions of people but very few soldiers, even though they’re good ones. Australia looks big but it’s mostly desert and there aren’t a lot of people. Canada too has more forests and lakes than people. Africa — well, Germany has colonies there as well.’
    ‘So Germany might win a war,’ said Georg slowly.
    Aunt Miriam shut her eyes. Her face was hollowed with weariness. ‘I studied history at Oxford. Your father studied his poets. He studied dreams and words. I studied what people did and tried to understand why. Countries that begin wars rarely win them, George. Maybe because greed stops them seeing situations clearly. And maybe because only a certain sort of madman leads his country to invade another.’
    ‘But Hitler has already won in Czechoslovakia, in Austria …’ Though the Austrians didn’t fight back, he thought.
    Aunt Miriam opened her eyes. ‘I didn’t say victory would be quick. Or easy. Ten years, a hundred … but we’ll win, George. We won last time, despite the odds. We’ll win again.’ Her smile looked almost sad. ‘Or perhaps I am like your father too. Perhaps I only see the patterns in history that tell me what I want to see: that our tiny island has a chance of winning, of defeating a country determined to persecute and kill many of its own people as well as outsiders.’

    Ten years of war. A hundred. He glanced out the window and down to the street. A horse was dragging a cart piled high with rubbish. A man in filthy grey clothes called out, ‘Rag and bones! Bring out your rag and bones.’ The cart came in the evenings after people had eaten their dinner. Aunt Miriam had let him take down the chop and roast lamb bones last week, but there were none today. The man and the cart looked so normal. So safe. It wasn’t fair that the world could look safe while darkness hid around the corner.
    It wasn’t fair at all.
     
    He read the newspaper every morning after that; it was usually slightly crumpled after Aunt Miriam had read it over breakfast. Ten thousand Jewish women marched through the streets of a place called Palestine to ask the English rulers to let more Jews come from Germany to Palestine. But it seemed the Führer wouldn’t let them out, nor the English rulers let them in.
    He wondered if they would let Mutti in to England if Papa wasn’t with her. Aunt Miriam would help if she could, but he didn’t ask Aunt Miriam what she thought. If he didn’t know for sure then he could still hope that one day — someday — there’d be a knock, a phone call, a flowered silk dress down in the foyer.
    In August Hitler and Stalin of Russia promised not to fight each other. At least that was better than Russia promising to fight England too. The newspaper that day had an article about a new type of plane too: it had been invented in Germany and was called a ‘jet’. It went very fast by pushing out jets of hot gas.
    For a moment Georg was proud of his country and then remembered it wasn’t his country any more.

    Sometimes now Aunt Miriam’s women friends came round to supper. They all worked like Aunt Miriam, which disappointed him, as he hoped some might have children. The women wore skirts and jackets like Aunt Miriam did, and shoes with stumpy heels. They were women who knew things, like Aunt Miriam; and they talked about them too.
    He listened when Aunt Miriam and