Interpreters by Sue Eckstein

were clean and neat.’
     
    I was sitting in the garden learning that poem for an English exam the day war was declared. It’s quite funny, don’t you think?
    Funny?
    Don’t you know the poem?
    I’m afraid I don’t.
    So much for an expensive education.
    Indeed.
    Well it doesn’t end well for the oysters.
    ‘“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,
    “Is what we chiefly need:
    Pepper and vinegar besides
    Are very good indeed –”’
     
    Oh. I see.
    My father was furious when he heard the news. He rushed out of the summer house shouting, ‘I said he’s an idiot – your great friend the warmonger Adolf Hitler. What a fool! We’ll lose the war. You wait and see!’ It was as though it was all my fault – the war and the fact that he’d now have the terrific inconvenience of not being able to get to Italy to buy his handmade suits and shoes. My fault that the supply of imported Atco lawnmowers would be interrupted.
    And how did you feel? When war was declared?
    I can’t remember. It sounds stupid, but I really can’t remember.
    And England being the enemy?
    What about it?
    What did you feel about England being the enemy? When you’d been so keen to go there. To learn English .
    I didn’t think England was the enemy. I didn’t think like that at all. I don’t know what I thought. You want me to say something profound and meaningful about the war. About sides. There’s nothing like that to say. 

Chapter Six
    ‘CATHERINE’S BEDROOM – KEEP OUT!!’ it says on the door in blood-red ink on yellow paper. And underneath it in slightly smaller print, ‘I MEAN IT OR YOUR DEAD.’
    I open the door of my old bedroom very cautiously; nothing falls on my head. The plain white textured wallpaper has been replaced by repeating pink and white ballerinas gamely pirouetting between the posters of scowling marines in camouflage combat gear and helmets sprouting abundant autumn foliage. The pale oak bookshelves that my mother built for me are still there, now painted matt cherry-red. In place of my rows of alphabetised Puffin books and my china animals are a glossy brochure advertising careers in the army, a pile of magazines featuring pouting teenage girls in skimpy vests and too much make-up, a copy of David Copperfield that looks like a school set text, a small TV and a laptop computer. I somehow doubt that Catherine’s summer evenings are spent sitting on the windowsill reading until it is too dark to see the words on the page.
    I don’t remember ever being read to as a child. Reading was what I did to other people, whether they liked it or not. From the moment that Jennifer Black was undeservedly promoted to a higher level of Janet and John than me – something I felt was so monstrously unfair that I wept from the moment I got home until my mother went out and bought the book for me and then sat and listened to me reading it all the way through – I vowed to be the best reader in the school. Mymother would sit on my bedroom floor, leaning against the bed, her eyes shut, while I read her my favourite books over and over again. She seemed to enjoy the experience. The only book she eventually begged to be spared was Brer Rabbit . She claimed not to understand what it was all those Brer Foxes, Brer Bears and Brer everyone elses were talking about. Perhaps it was my Southern States accent that let me down. I don’t think that my favourite Noel Streatfeild books did much for her either, with their eccentric English guardians and shabby-genteel houses on the Cromwell Road inhabited by unfeasibly gifted dancers, skaters and violinists in sensible macs and sturdy shoes; but those she tolerated in silence.
    ‘You know, Mum, you never read,’ I once observed, my rendition of Great Expectations finished for the evening. I was leaning over the edge of my bed, brushing her hair and teasing it into ever more outlandish styles.
    ‘That’s because you like reading to me.’
    ‘No, I mean I’ve never seen you read a book,