Hi, so here is another chapter. I hope you like this one as we make our way through the war years. The next chapter does have a bit more action in it as we head into 1941 and Australia come under constant threat by the Japanese.
Again some outdated language and some historical inaccuracies, please keep that in mind.
Please Read and Review.
And let me know what you think, I will try and update sooner rather than later.
A Sister's Love
Chapter 10-Help Wanted
As World War Two begins for most of the world, Jon is given an offer he is not sure that he could refuse, Liesl is caught between her feelings and Brigitta wants to plan out her life. Some time has passed between the last chapter and the next, aprox six months).
The war carried on as it must. There was in the first few months a terrible loss. The British were kicked out of France, half of Europe was falling under the Nazi flag and the chances of them finding their family was practically non-existent. Liesl had all but given up on that one message finding it's way to the Red Cross headquarters across the vast plains that had become the world at war.
Brigitta had never reproached her sister for this. And indeed as 1939 turned into 1940 and they steadily watched from the newsreels and the scraps of paper that they had gotten from the newspapers that she had poured over had told her that they had done the right thing. They had gotten out of Europe when there had been a chance and they had done so by the skin of their teeth.
It was something to accept.
The carried on as they always did. Australia did the same thing. They managed to put one foot in front of the other and they carried on as if nothing had happened since September 3rd 1939. Of course things did change. Soon enough uniforms were being worn by nearly every young man in the street. There was no question that they had entered the war though the constant debate was where they would fight. Europe was a battleground and then the British government spoke of North Africa and then with every other word there was talks about the Japanese who had taken not only huge chunks of China but also Singapore, Hong Kong and were getting increasingly close to Australia. Already many Australians were captured or killed by them and living in Australia Brigitta had to apply herself to the same research that she had done with the Nazis.
It was not a comforting task but she found that she enjoyed it. She loved books, she loved learning and she found she could not imagine a world where she couldn't do exactly that, a world where books were banned and a woman's place was in the home and any kind of thought over the dinner table had to be carefully controlled.
Edith did not hold to such theories either. She had a great belief in study and she certainly did not hold herself to the standard of what a woman should be as 1939 turned to 1940. Edith introduced her in those months to ideas that she had never considered before and she took her to meetings with her friends were everything was discussed from topics such as education as well as other topics such as abortion and contraception and weather or not those should be legalised—topics she had never understood before partly on an account of her age and party because her father would have been horrified. He had been quite traditional in his view of the world though he had certainly never held to the views of other men—all of his daughters had been just as well educated as his sons had been—though there had been topics that were strictly forbidden.
Thinking of what he would make of this made her hurt. They had still heard nothing from the Red Cross though Jon pointed out that they had enough to do. He had signed up for the Army but he had not heard back and he was getting restless. Considering he spoke many languages she would have thought that he was perfectly poised to help them but Jon shrugged and said that the wheels of military foresight moved slow.
She would miss him when he went she thought. And when their father came for them she would miss Australia. There was something about the country that made her feel safe. It had been a long time since something like that had happened. She had gone from being a child in the lap of luxury to a refugee, to an immigrant and now she was something else. It did not matter that she was eleven or that she was without any family but Liesl. For once Brigitta felt alive.
She held out hope though that one day her father would arrive. She trusted him which was odd really because she knew that he had not given her reason to apart from those last glorious weeks when he had become a different person. But she did trust him. Even when he had acted like he hated them simply for existing—for pulling him away from the glamourous life that came with the Baroness she thought that there was no way she could despise him. He had lost the woman that he loved and the mother of his seven children and though she had disliked the governesses and the uniforms she had mourned his absence in the way that Friedrich and Liesl and Louisa had done so.
She had never voiced this but she supposed that when Edith told her she was wilful and independent she thought that the woman might be right.
And then suddenly there was the reality that came with a war when the casualty lists started being published. Jon disappeared for hours on end when this happened and then finally one day he came back when the house was in subdued silence (the radio reporting the Netherlands had fallen to the Nazi's without so much as a shot being fired) to tell that he had gotten his papers and that he was enlisting.
One look at her sister's white face told Brigitta that despite it all she had not been prepared for this despite what she was seeing in the streets and reading about in newspapers. In fact the only person who looked even paler than she did was Edith. She too had obviously hoped that whatever it was that Jon was doing or whatever it was that had held up his paperwork had been keeping here indefinitely.
"Where will you go?" she asked as Liesl asked. "When will you go?"
"They don't want me on the front line" he said firmly. "I think they want me in Intelligence though this doesn't leave this room. Whatever that entails I don't know"
Brigitta opened her mouth but out of nowhere Liesl's foot came out and kicked her. She turned to tell her sister to fuck off (one of the things that came with living with Edith for a prolonged amount of time was the fact that she swore like a sailor just on shore leave and you tended to pick up on it in your thoughts even if you maintained a civilised tongue in public).
"So when do you leave?"
"Friday. Have to go to basic and then see whatever the army want to do with me."
She was not sure what that meant but she was additionally sure that Liesl did not know either.
He was outside smoking when she came out. She had told Edith that she would see to it that the laundry that was hanging outside was brought in. They helped out around the house for free bed and board and chores were the least that they could do.
She was folding up the laundry and Liesl was hyper aware that he was watching her.
"Are you alright?" she asked turning. He shook his head lighting another smoke.
"I think somewhere down the line this shit just became real?"
"What the war?"
"All of it. It's been on for six months, were scattered all over the world and half of it's been taken over by a madman and only today when they told me I could help with Intelligence did it hit me. And If truth be told I always thought that I would be the man in the trench with a gun when this kicked off, not the one behind the desk trying to pry and spy"
"You could have refused and gone into the Army like a regular man" she said folding the last sheet and then coming and sitting next to him on the small bench in the back garden.
Jon gave a laugh and it was tinged with the same bitterness that had dominated it in Switzerland and on the ship as they came to Australia. She had heard that laugh then and she had thought that she hated it then. Now she loathed it.
"What turn down Special Branch? Ah Liesl you are funny. No I don't get a choice. Besides you can see their reasonings, I speak, read and write fluent German and French, I've been in the house of a man who I am sure is soon to be in one of the inner circles of the Nazi Regime. I was in the country, I got in and I got out and besides if I refused they'd look for a way to make me and that way would be you"
"Me?"
"You. Jesus Liesl you're a seventeen year old with a marriage that is not a marriage, with no family bar an underage sister and a residency permit pending, I imagine fucking up your life would be easy for these people. Besides…" he threw the cigarette down on the floor and then stomped on it. "I suppose it is not too bad. It's something anyway. Something good, something practical. Something decent. If I get a bit of information that stops something terrible from happening I imagine to those men who might be living it, it would be worth it."
Liesl supposed that it was.
"I will miss you" she said spurned into honestly. In the last few months they had not even been alone together but he had been there, a constant steadying presence that made her breath a sigh of relief. Perhaps it was the fact that he had taken her out of hell and given her a new life. Perhaps it was just him. Rolfe had never had that he'd never be anything but steady, he would have hated the idea of being steady and supportive. He was all for glamour and glory and though it seemed so long ago, a year and a half ago she had wanted the same thing.
Now she was seventeen and she wanted to be as young as Brigitta.
Not that that would mean anything because she suspected Brigitta knew more than most of the Allied High Command (or whatever it was that they were calling each other on the radio nowadays) put together. Brigitta who was loving it here. Who was to go to school in September when a place became available. Brigitta who had never had to sit up at night and worry about why it was taking so long for their mother and father too…
But she cut herself off. Thinking those thoughts did nothing but cause hurt and panic and confusion for everyone involved. She would tackle what she was feeling towards her family right now, later, when the world did not seem like it was falling apart.
"You are angry"
"Not with you"
How was it that he could read her so well? How was it that he could read her to the point where he saw her and understood her before she saw or understood herself.
She said nothing.
"I will try, if I can get the access, to find out what happened to them"
"Thank you" she said simply. "It would mean a lot for Brigitta"
"But not for you?"
She did not reply. It was hard to tell this straightforwardly honest man the complicated relationship that existed between her and her father that had developed and soured and been breaking for years now. It was hard to tell the man whose father had tried to kill him what she was feeling to her own when even at his worst he had never tried to do that.
Her feelings for her family, for Rolfe, for her country were still locked away in that box.
"My advice" Jon said standing up. "Let it all out. World is gonna be going to hell in a hand basket sooner rather than later. You don't want to be another grenade with the pin stuck in it. Trust me I know"
She stood up with him but her foot caught on a stone and he steadied her his warm hands coming to her waist. Without warning she was filled with some kind of unnamed emotion she had never felt before as she stared at him.
For another long second (though for all she knew it could have been longer) those eyes stared back at her and then with that genuine quizzical, lovely smile her husband who was not her husband was gone and she was left alone wondering just what on earth had come over her and (not for the first time) just what was going to happen next.
As 1941 begins the war news becomes increasingly grim. Jon gets a shock when he comes across one of the men on Special Branch's wanted lists and Liesl gets a letter from the Red Cross which tells her exactly what she expected to hear.
Enjoy.