The Reunion

by Geoff Pridmore

  ‘We tie them up or put them in the cellar.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Karl, his panic beginning to dissipate. ‘Put them in the cellar. All farms have cellars.’

  Thomaz reached behind his shoulder and pulled his rifle onto the table. The farmer, having understood much of their conversation, raised the palms of his hands in surrender. ‘Merciful God, don’t shoot us!’

  Now, Hilda Rensburg, who so far had been stoic, who so bravely in the past had calmly dealt with the intrusions of soldiers, police and Gestapo, who had stood and watched her home being broken up in front of her, feared the worst. They were to be murdered in their own house and their remains left for the rats to devour. Poor Sonje! What would she find? What would they tell her?

  She began to cry, collapsing to her knees, shoulders heaving, tears spilling to the stone floor from a cloudburst of terror. Jan grabbed her awkwardly in a desperate attempt to hold her up while comforting her, but he couldn’t manage it. He too dropped to his knees in an effort to cradle and comfort his one and only love. Convulsing, she lifted her eyes to the bewildered trio now gathered around them, completely at their mercy.

  Thomaz lifted his rifle and pointed it at Hilda’s bowed, shaking head.

  ‘Where’s the cellar, farmer?’ he demanded. Ashen-faced, Jan could do no more than look up at the barrel now pointed at the bridge of his wife’s nose.

  ‘WHERE’S THE CELLAR?!’ screamed Thomaz.

  Karl reached for the rifle barrel, gently pulling it away from the woman’s face.

  ‘He doesn’t understand! Hugo?’

  ‘Yes, Karl?’

  ‘Look for a cellar.’

  He turned to engage Thomaz, looking him straight in the eye. ‘Don’t shoot them, Thomaz!’

  ‘I might do if the old lady doesn’t shut up!’

  Thomaz Binder was surprising everyone, including himself. He had never shouted at anyone in his nineteen years. No one who knew him would describe him as ever being a shouter or a bully and certainly not someone to lose control; a pragmatist – yes.

  ‘Certain things have to be done.’ That’s what he’d said to both Hugo and Karl during training when they were discussing a massacre that had occurred in rural France some years earlier. When asked why such things had to be done, he didn’t, or couldn’t, answer.

  They made sure that the door to the cellar was secure, but it was not locked in such a way as to be beyond the ability of the Rensburgs to break out, by which time their jailers would be long gone.

  The Allies couldn’t shoot them for imprisoning a farmer and his wife. No one was dead, no one would starve in the cellar as there was some food and wine and also some natural light. There was no alarm to be raised so there was nothing to fear, but, of the three, Hugo had been the most concerned for the plight of the Rensburgs.

  His widowed mother farmed and had done since he’d been small, since the father he could barely remember had died of smoke inhalation having fought a neighbour’s house fire; his chest already weak having suffered a gas attack in the Kaiser’s war.

  Hugo’s feelings toward the farmer’s wife were ambiguous at that moment in time. He didn’t want to hurt her, it was nothing personal, but there was a part of him that couldn’t empathise with her plight. He wanted to punish her because he was sure that she too lacked the emotion he had sought for so long from his own mother. He was sure that all farmers were like this; they all lacked the capacity to love truly because the land and property were the most important things to them. The land consumed all their natural and spiritual energies. The purpose of children was to continue the running of the farm and to care for their parents when they became infirm; it was clear and simple – a rule of life; of that, nineteen-year-old Hugo was convinced.

  He didn’t want the farmer and his wife to suffer, to starve or be short of food, and he made that plain to both Karl and Thomaz. He told them that he wouldn’t wish starvation on his worst enemy because he was always hungry and there was nothing worse in life than to be without food and water. As a Catholic boy he’d had to go hungry when he was made to fast for a day each week. He’d hated it! What good did fasting do anyone? The smokers were better off because they just didn’t seem to have an appetite at all, but not even a world war was about to start him smoking.

  Thomaz reassured him with a hand on his shoulder: ‘They won’t starve. There’s some food in there – some cheese. Dutch cheese. They even have a tap. Does that satisfy you?’

  Hugo nodded solemnly.

  Karl urged them on. ‘Let’s get this food back or all this foraging will have been in vain.’

  There was a handcart in the yard; they could use that.

  *

  A brief history of the Morris Minor:

  Designed by Alec Issigonis, over one million were manufactured between 1948 and 1972. Variants included saloons, convertibles, wood-framed estates, pick-ups, and panel vans like the one in this story. They were small but very gutsy.

  *

  In the van, Rene buttered the sandwiches, buttered the rolls and spread beef spread, passing the first to Hugo and then Hanne before preparing a special treat of banana for Marco.

  She might not have noticed had Hanne not prodded her on the arm, so preoccupied was she with feeding Marco, but Hanne had noticed. Dad was staring straight ahead at the farm as if suddenly he had become frozen and unable to speak or move. Strange.

  Like on the ferry, he was oddly inanimate, as if in another world.

  ‘Are you still hungry, Hugo? … Hugo?’

  ‘Yes, I’m hungry.’

  ‘Was it something they said to you at the farm?’ asked Rene, confused as to why her husband seemed so quiet and withdrawn.

  ‘No, she was a good lady – the daughter of the farmer, nah.’

  ‘Do they have cows? Proper farm animals like a proper farm that we can go and see?’ asked Hanne excitedly.

  ‘I do not think so,’ replied Hugo.

  ‘Do they grow flowers? Perhaps you could compare notes?’ asked Rene.

  ‘No, they do not have flowers. I think they are produce growers – vegetables – nah.’

  A fib, of course, rather similar to Rene’s fib about the letter to Oma that she didn’t post. There were a brace of Friesians grazing nearby and milked daily, hence the fresh milk.

  There was to be no explanation of the last twenty minutes; there was nothing to tell really. Hugo had not asked what kind of farm it was when a woman of similar age to him opened the door. He had begun by asking her whether she spoke English and she affirmed that she did, so he told her that he was English and that his family were English and that they were hoping they might be able to buy some milk. He didn’t recognise her and she didn’t recognise him, or at least she appeared not to.

  When she returned with the milk, he asked how much and put his hand into his deep trouser pocket, but she refused, telling him how good the English had been to them during the war. He asked whether she’d been farming there at that time but she replied, ‘No’; her parents had been farming whilst she had trained and worked briefly as a secretary in Nijmegen before returning to the farm after the war. ‘I hope your parents survived the war?’ he enquired.

  ‘They did,’ she replied. ‘Do you need anything else?’

  He thanked her and said it was ‘Just the milk’ they required. Of course, what he really needed to know was the fate of her parents. He wondered, as he walked back to the van, whether she’d realised who he might have been – one of those guilty young German soldiers who had robbed them of food and locked them away in their own cellar. She might not have been able to recognise him, but she would have been told the story many times. His German accent – heavy accent – would have been so easily picked up on by her. He didn’t even look English yet here he was claiming to be English, claiming to be passing by and in need of milk. Where would an Englishman be going in
this district in 1963? No real Englishman who had known the war would want to return for the sake of sightseeing! What would he be after seeing? The ruins? The graves? There was a generation of men who had no wish to return to the “bloody Continent”, least not in their lifetimes – a curious youngster maybe, but a thirty-eight-year-old?!

  Just as he had come under the scrutiny of the boys on his approach to the farm, now on his return he was watched by the woman’s father, who momentarily stopped his repair work on a wire fence, anxious for the uninvited stranger to leave.

  Jan Rensburg preferred his daughter to answer the door; he preferred to be somewhere else when people arrived unexpectedly. Still hard at work, with good eyes and a clear memory, there was, he feared, something horribly familiar about this visitor, so he gripped the hammer tightly and recited a silent prayer.

  So, that would have been the explanation, but why bother anybody with the details?

  Inside the van, Rene had boiled a kettle on the primus.‘Tea? Here!’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Can I have some tea? Can I see their cows?’ asked Hanne, not at all convinced that it was only an arable farm.

  ‘Not just now,’ Hugo replied as he stared out of the windscreen at the events of 1944.

  The last thing the picnickers were expecting happened suddenly with no warning whatsoever: Hugo turned the ignition on and pulled the starter. He hadn’t finished his rolls or tea, nor had Rene or Hanne, who complained: ‘I haven’t had my tea!’

  ‘Oh, we’ll stop again soon. Oma will be waiting.’

  ‘Are we nearly there?’ Hanne asked excitedly, quickly forgetting her tea.

  ‘We’ve a long way to go. There’s a border to cross.’

  ‘Is the border a river?’

  But Hugo wasn’t talking to his daughter; he was talking to Karl and Thomaz.

  *

  Thursday (Donderdag) 14th September 1944, Holland.

  Where the Allies had not been able to penetrate in the north, a national railway strike was called by the Dutch government in exile and a German embargo on all food transports to Western Holland. The “Honger Winter” (Hunger Winter) was just around the corner.

  *

  They departed the farm along the very same lane that he, Karl and Thomaz had pushed the loaded cart away in search of their platoon. In 1944, they didn’t want the main road for fear of running into an American or British patrol, so they pushed further into the Dutch countryside certain that they could use their only compass and map to work their way around to the last known position of the platoon.

  They also didn’t want to run into a Waffen-SS patrol for fear that they might be seconded into its ranks and forced to murder, rape and pillage as part of an initiation ritual. Thomaz and Karl had both heard various rumours that it had happened recently to a band of hapless infantrymen who lacked a senior officer and the courage to defend themselves. They were, apparently, a band of admin clerks in search of food and a unit. Such were the rumours.

  ‘Stop taking food off the cart! Think of your comrades!’ Karl snapped at Hugo. ‘Didn’t you eat enough at the farm?’

  ‘My meal was interrupted by our good friend Thomaz wanting to kill the farmer and his wife.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t kill anyone,’ replied Thomaz, now feeling quite ashamed, ‘but I can tell you now, comrades, my boots are surely killing me with every step.’

  Karl and Hugo empathised with their friend. An army marches on its feet primarily and, although they were a little more comfortable than they had been, the constant walking was causing foot problems. Socks, if an individual was lucky enough to have them, were wearing thin, causing the skin of the heel to chafe against the inner lining of the boot, so all three limped to some degree. Athlete’s foot plagued each and every one in the platoon.

  ‘The Americans have better boots than we do. Even the British have better boots because they lace up. My feet sweat so.’

  ‘Thomaz? When the war is over I will buy some Italian boots. I will buy my entire family Italian boots.’

  ‘Your entire family, Hugo?’

  ‘Yes, my mother, my brother and my two sisters.’

  ‘Dreamer! Where will you get the money? Eh?’

  Yes, Hugo the dreamer. He dreamt of making money once the war was done. He could clearly see what was to come; no fortune teller required. In his mind it was already written as a promissory note to self: Hugo the businessman driving a big car, living in a big house, taking advantage of all those post-war opportunities for ambitious young men like him.

  Dreams kept him going that day, helping with every laboured step.

  Property development was his plan. The bombing and shelling would mean rebuilding on a vast scale. It would require hard work and commitment, but should the Good Lord see fit to spare him there would be plenty of scope for an entrepreneur of his ambition. And he wouldn’t squander his money on booze, tobacco and women. He’d be a wise investor in foreign markets. Not so wise perhaps to mention it now while pushing a cart over uneven ground.

  Pragmatist Thomaz was scathing. ‘The Americans will take all our money, and if they don’t the British will. They still have all their Jews in place.’

  Karl the historian wasn’t quite so sure. ‘There are no Jews in England.’ Of that he was certain: ‘One of their kings killed them all in the Middle Ages. I read it – King Henry or King Edward, someone like that. He put them all in a tower and set it alight. But first he made them sew yellow felt badges onto their clothes. Where do you think Himmler got the idea from?’

  Thomaz guffawed. ‘Are you saying Himmler isn’t an original thinker?’

  ‘I’m just saying there isn’t a new idea under the sun.’

  Hugo reminded him that he wouldn’t dare say that if Himmler were actually stood in front of him, to which Karl begrudgingly agreed. ‘True, but I would ask him to take his turn in pushing the cart!’

  *

  Hanne had read somewhere that the Dutch didn’t use umbrellas in the rain, so she made another mental note to spot an umbrella user in a downpour. Infuriatingly for her, it didn’t rain during her brief time in the country, so this was never put to the test.

  *

  It seemed no time at all since leaving the farm that the border post hove into view – in fact, it was an hour’s drive at a steady 45 mph. Hugo prompted Rene to find the passports schnell as this was the German border and the guards would not be amused if they were kept waiting.

  He had no experience of German borders in 1963, so this was his assumption based on experience from the immediate post-war period and American border guards. (There were no borders when Holland, Belgium and France were occupied, so what did he know.)

  ‘Passports!’ was the one-word request from the guard, who seemed anxious to be relieved of his tedious duty. His job: to stop and check any vehicle with a foreign registration. He was not at all impressed by the blue/grey farmer’s van that had so valiantly got the Mauer family to the border from West Cornwall without mechanical incident.

  Rene had expected a more British reaction from the guard. ‘My! You’ve done well! Come all the way from Cornwall have we in this little Morris? I remember seeing the boffins from Oxfordshire test this particular type of car some years ago. A number of them came right through this very checkpoint. Would it be possible to see your passports, please?’

  A little more like the AA officer on the ferry.

  But in the here and now she thought that he looked very much like a guard of World War 2, with his black, calf-length boots, peaked hat and tunic with its piping and those baggy trousers. He looked smart but depressingly grey in a severe sort of non-democratic way, as if all the Nazis were still in place and no one was prepared to soften their image.

  ‘He could look like a guard without all that!’ she remarked. ‘And a beret would help, with a white shirt and blue tie and a
nice pair of creased flannel trousers with tan shoes. The French looked very smart and very handsome, and so unthreatening. Not so here – shame.’

  She was confident in the belief that he did not speak English.

  ‘Rene? You have the passports?’ Hugo urged her to search her handbag without delay. He was only the driver; Rene was the holder of the keys to the kingdom.

  She reassured him that she would find them in just a moment, but both husband and guard were intimidating her by the very nature of the whole ridiculous exchange.

  As she fumbled, seconds turned to minutes. She began to exhale knowing that all eyes were upon her – Hugo, the guard and, from behind, Hanne and Marco. Where was Oma’s house from here? Where’s the plate of bratwurst and sauerkraut and would it be cold? Would this silly man stop them in their tracks?

  She felt as if she wanted to make it quite clear that she was in fact a British citizen. She had a God-given right therefore not to be impeded from entering a country that was correctly hers through victory. Montgomery had not been forced to wait at the border or had his passport scrutinised by some self-important, heel-clicking jobsworth.

  It was not the time for remembering the debacle that had been Arnhem.

  A queue was forming behind, and the guard was determined to clear it by ordering Hugo to park in the adjacent layby in order to allow a much more important German-registered Mercedes Benz to come through without further hindrance. How embarrassing! What sort of return to the Fatherland was this? A German gives orders and he does as he is told.

  Switching off, Hugo decided it would be prudent to talk German with the guard now towering over the roof of the van.

  ‘This is the first time I have crossed the border in… many years. I was captured on this border and I’ve wanted to see it again. So, I’m doing it now with my family.’

  Even with Hugo speaking in German, the guard seemed unwilling to partake in any small talk, but Hugo persisted, feeling it was better and more honest to be friendly rather than demonstrate a possible guilt or animosity through silence. During the war, he’d seen people shot at roadsides for not explaining who they were and what they were doing, for not having the right papers, and he found it difficult now to convince himself that the war was in fact over and that this wouldn’t happen.