The Reunion

by Geoff Pridmore

  ‘When you leave here tomorrow morning and you go out into the wider Germany, speak to those who, like me, know the truth of it. Speak to those who are homeless, without work, without income. Speak to the priests – they know. Some have spoken out; I’ve heard that myself many times. Some Amis speak out too, but they are silenced – told to shut up by their superiors. Other Amis say, “Who cares about you Krauts! You did this to others, now it’s your turn!” They’re right, I understand their anger, but the last thing Europe needs is more Nazis only this time dressed in American uniforms.

  ‘The war may have finished for you in England, in America and Canada, but here it continues. The shelling and shooting may have stopped, but the bloodletting goes on and on without end. You may be free, my friends, and I may be free, but our comrades are to this day locked up behind the wire and dying still.’

  Having slept in his clothes fully prepared for a quick getaway should the café be raided, Hugo wiped the condensation from the upper storey window with his sleeve and stared out at the ruined remains of what had been a vibrant, living city.

  There was no sunrise. Grey merely replaced the blackness that had replaced the previous day’s grey. Overnight, Berger Strasse had been littered with a light covering of wet snow that by morning was already melting into blocked gutters and broken downpipes. Directly below, a scruffy child of indeterminate gender held out a saucepan to catch the flow of dripping water.

  Hugo’s nightmare, which was still vivid at that moment, was becoming ever more frequent. In it, he is haunted by the deranged woman in the burning village singing her mournful song, only last night she was joined by the spectre at the station – the two having become one. In the nightmare, she spies him lying in the dirt. He crouches deeper and deeper into the grass, but she comes closer until she is standing over him. In her skeletal hands is a shovel; grinning, she proceeds to heap soil on him, burying him alive. Paralysed, he can do nothing; he chokes and, in an effort to wake, calls out for Karl as the soil impedes his windpipe, but Karl can’t hear him.

  Eager now to get the remainder of their journey underway, he looks back at Karl sleeping soundly – snoring like he always did. It’s a true comfort to see him.

  Outside, he is mightily relieved to see that there are no Jeeps waiting to take him away. The café is not surrounded by MPs ready to break the door in, no shouts fill the air, just a steady rumble of assorted traffic on cobbled streets; and it just may be that they can depart quietly and without fuss into a city that at least appears to have some normality as the inhabitants begin the business of another day.

  Of all the people who have died and continue to die, why should he blame himself for a murder he didn’t commit? It probably wasn’t even murder; just one more slow death like another leaf fallen from a dying tree. Maybe someone else killed her in those minutes when they left the station. Maybe she just died of starvation, heartbreak, or even the effects of that final rejection, and there was nothing anyone could have done. She was a casualty whose passing no one would record, for no one cared, and in that respect there was just one more thing for him to do. He would leave flowers as a tribute – that’s if he could find some.

  *

  Freitag 28th Juni 1963, 3.03 pm

  Oberwinkel

  Stealing glances at Hanne. He wanted to be proud, he wanted to open up to her, but the barrier was still in place – the barrier he’d been building, the barrier with deep foundations. Nothing on earth could shift it. There wasn’t a bulldozer or any sort of tracked vehicle big enough to break it down.

  Tears welled for a moment. He looked away, certain that Hanne hadn’t noticed anything. The idea that one day in the far distant future this child might die on the streets of wanton neglect horrified him. Surely hell was safely under lock and key. There was a certainty that he preferred to consider: that one day, way, way into the future, he would tell Hanne about his “wanted man” status, and that somewhere in a Frankfurt police archive was his description in a folder; but that could wait. A family reunion would be a happier occasion without a ten-year-old girl from Cornwall telling everyone in confidence, and in English, how her father was really a fugitive from both American and German authorities – wanted for questioning in respect of an unexplained death.

  It also occurred to Hugo that without chess Hanne might never have been born.

  *

  Saturday 15th July 1950, 1.51 pm

  Cornwall

  Wally’s invitation to play chess in the village hall had introduced Hugo to Rene.

  ‘You are, what we would call in this country, a natural chess player,’ remarked Wally of his good friend’s ability. Despite the compliment Hugo barely glanced up, although this was probably more to do with his lack of understanding the language than any determination to concentrate on the game in hand.

  An inter-village match had brought a group of supporters and other interested parties together in the great hall of Aubyn House for want of something better to do that afternoon. Among them a couple of former Land Army girls now in service at the big house insolently leaning against a wall, inadvertently leaving grubby palm prints on 200-year-old plaster as they propped themselves up while telling jokes and other whispered tittle-tattle.

  The older, rounder, stout village women, there to support their menfolk whilst making tea, whispered their own suspicions that these “girls” were simply in attendance for a bit of a laugh and to ogle the tall, handsome former POW who was proving to be a wizard at chess.

  They were not entirely wrong in their suppositions.

  London-born Rene ­– herself so noticeable by her amazing height of 6 feet tall and not an inch less – would make an ideal friend for Hugo, thought Wally.

  ‘I see you have an admirer,’ he remarked, spotting the appreciative glances of the taller of the two girls, her attention clearly focussed on Hugo. She wasn’t a stranger to Wally as he had been the first person she’d met on arrival in Cornwall in the summer of 1942.

  She was billeted – as she had been since 1942 – in the converted stables of Aubyn House. Her employers – the Valdean family – re-employed her, after the Women’s Land Army was disbanded, to be a nanny to the family’s three small children; a post that brought some perks as the East End of London, like Frankfurt, was in a mess, so there was no going home.

  Hugo raised his eyes from the board to see Wally gaze across the room at the two girls and acknowledge them with a smile, a discreet wave, whilst silently mouthing, ‘How are you? Long time no see.’

  Fearing it might be some sort of ruse in order to distract him for an illegal move on the board, Hugo was mightily suspicious, but then another glance. It was true: Rene caught his attention, smiling right into his eyes as if admiring his every move. Shyly, all too briefly, he reciprocated – a rare smile for the former POW.

  Quickly resuming his attention on the game in hand, he could now spot the move that would put Wally in check and soon thereafter into checkmate.

  ‘I’ll have to watch you,’ warned Wally. ‘Soon you’ll be playing at county level.’

  It was also Wally’s idea that Hugo settle into British life by participating in a good British pastime, such as playing the football pools. Hitler and his “disreputable staff”, as Wally called them, would never have thought to institute such a wonderful socialist opportunity as Britain’s own football pools, and this surely was their overall downfall, in his opinion.

  Playing the pools was, according to Wally, a great opportunity for a working man of meagre means to better himself without having to rob a bank and all the consequences that that might entail. And Hugo, being a keen football fan, was only too keen to better himself with what appeared to be a sure-fire gamble. It was also a good way to learn English, and Wally was his primary English teacher in return for learning some basic German. That was the trade-off because Wally had an ambition to visit Berlin one day to see for himself just what had h
appened.

  Hugo’s lack of progress in learning English was probably down to the fact that he now shared a farm cottage with old friends Karl and Thomaz, and together after work the talk was German. The few words of English he’d started to learn were now rarely uttered, but even in his native tongue there weren’t enough words in the national vocabulary to express his delight on opening a very official looking brown envelope addressed to him alone and marked “Strictly Private” and “If undelivered Return to Sender”.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ he exclaimed on tearing open the envelope and taking out a cheque made out in his name.

  ‘What is it, Hugo?’ asked Karl.

  ‘I’ve won seven shillings and six pence on the football pools!’

  ‘You bugger! I didn’t win anything,’ cursed Thomaz who, along with Karl, had also entered into the draw.

  ‘Luck is for the brave!’ Holding the prize-winning slip above his head like a cup-winning football player, Hugo was triumphant. Not only was he winning chess matches, but now he was winning cash prizes, too.

  ‘I put down my four home wins as Wally suggested – my favourite four. All four teams won their matches. This is a postal order from Littlewoods.’

  ‘That’s more than enough to buy Karl and me a good meal and a lot of drink,’ said Thomaz. ‘Don’t forget your friends, Hugo. We wouldn’t have forgotten you had the fortunes been in our favour.’

  It was the word “friends” that sparked an idea in Hugo’s head, especially as he now had some money to play with.

  ‘I have another idea! I am going to take Rene to the pictures.’

  ‘The tall girl who works at the big house? They say she has poor eyesight!’ joked Karl.

  ‘Laugh all you like, but this is my opportunity.’

  ‘It just might be if you could speak the language,’ Thomaz reminded him.

  ‘She’ll understand when she sees the colour of my money!’

  But Karl was not convinced that Hugo would be ready to walk out with an English girl. ‘Better still we teach you some basics. You’re going to ask her to come with you to the cinema – yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In Penzance?’

  ‘In Penzance,’ Hugo confirmed.

  ‘So, say it in English – say it to me. I’ll be Rene.’

  Hugo concentrated, trying to recall and then arrange in their English grammatical order the words he needed. He began: ‘Would… like…’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Karl, encouraging every faltering step.

  ‘Would… like… you come to…’

  ‘No, Hugo. The grammar in English is very different. You should say: “Would you like to go to the fucking cinema?”’

  ‘Okay,’ said Hugo; ‘Would you…’

  ‘like…’ prompted Karl.

  ‘like…’ repeated Hugo.

  ‘to go…’

  ‘to go…’

  ‘to the…’

  ‘to the…’

  ‘fucking cinema.’

  ‘fucking cinema.’

  *

  For Rene, the invitation to the cinema gave her an opportunity to get to know this equally tall, shy young man who had intrigued her for months. The first time she ever saw Hugo he was waiting for a bus in the Market Square to take him to Penzance. Despite being dressed in civilian clothes, he was clearly not local, nor was he – she thought – particularly German.

  He was very dark in hair colour and skin tone, and she assumed he must surely be a Pole or Czech. Germans were very blond and blue-eyed, weren’t they? And, if he was German, why was he still here after the war?

  She didn’t see him again for some months, although his image remained clear in her thoughts. He intrigued her; she’d never seen anyone quite like him and that was unusual considering that as a city girl she was used to seeing hundreds and thousands of people and never gave one of them a second look – until now.

  Perhaps it was because there were so few people in this far southwestern corner of the world. Unlike the East End, there weren’t crowds of people to pass on a daily basis, just five or ten at most, and these were the people she lived with and worked alongside.

  If she ventured into a town like Penzance or Helston there were people, but it was all so much more intimate. Everybody seemed to know everybody else. In the big house there were just the staff and the family going about their business, so everything seemed magnified somehow. Strangers seemed to have a very different sort of presence, she thought. Would she have looked twice if the tall foreigner had been waiting for a bus in Charing Cross? Of course not! London in wartime was full of foreigners.

  The very idea of working in the countryside, too, had been so alien to her; a strange but wonderful place that she had only ever seen represented in books and paintings. Cornwall had been completely off the map in her imagination and she’d had no idea where it was or how to get there. She knew of a distant aunt in Dorset, but that county, too, was far off and unreachable for a naïve, inexperienced East End girl.

  She might never have ventured far beyond the East End had it not been for the direct hit on the engineering factory where she worked.

  *

  Just one more (important) little aside…

  Rene’s story:

  Wednesday April 8th 1942

  Walthamstow

  Aged nineteen, Rene had narrowly escaped death when a 500 lb bomb crashed through the skylight of the factory she was working in, blasting machinery and an entire shift of operatives into the four block walls and bringing down the ceiling to bury any survivors from the initial blast.

  Rene, by sheer good fortune, had taken two minutes out of her shift to visit the toilets situated in an annexe adjacent to the main shop floor. The blast burst her eardrums and in a cold panic she called out, unable to hear her own voice, until such time as she realised she was alone.

  Pushing her way through tangled metal and climbing over rubble, smoke and dust filled the air while a broken electric cable sparked and spat at her like a venomous snake.

  Suddenly, she felt someone grab her shoulder from behind, forcibly pulling her back onto her heels and away from the carnage; it was the gateman, Reg Ormear, his black uniform now grey with dust, his anguished face barking some unfathomable order in an effort to make her understand.

  Safely placed on the grass she tried to focus as Reg bravely returned to what was left of the building. As her unsteady vision cleared moment by moment, she could vaguely make out a man’s head facing her, his eyes staring fixedly at her, appealing for assistance.

  She tried to stand, but her lanky legs would have none of it; so she crawled to reach him; tugged at an iron bar that seemed to be trapping him. It came free easily as if she’d found an inner strength she never realised she possessed. Pushing her fingers deep into the rubble, chucking brick after brick over her shoulder, she dug for all she was worth.

  Suddenly, loose masonry cascaded, tipping her backwards. She screamed for fear of being buried alive. Mercifully, the avalanche stopped as quickly as it had begun. Momentarily pinned down, not daring to look then slowly opening her eyes, there in her lap was the man’s severed head.

  Doctor Mervyn Pritchard was a pipe-smoking, war-weary Welsh Presbyterian in late middle age, who frequently coughed and openly criticised the Catholic Church in the presence of all his patients; and those who were not easily offended paid no heed as he had a good reputation and otherwise excellent bedside manner.

  The Whiteshaws were not Catholic and so took no notice of his customary enquiry whenever the front door was opened to him: ‘You’re not Catholic, are you?’ No, came the reply. ‘Good! Then show me the patient if you’d be so kind.’

  As the days had passed since the bombing, though safe at home in the suburbs, Rene’s shaking body had refused to settle. ‘She can’t stop shaking, doctor!’ Agnes Whiteshaw
was beside herself. ‘She’s been shaking all week long. What are we to do?’

  Taking Rene’s hand, Pritchard held it gently for some moments, examining each eye in turn. She returned his kindly glance and tried to smile but her trembling lips couldn’t maintain the expression, so she looked away at the bay window, sunshine beaming in through dirty cross-taped panes that caused a lattice shadow effect on the bedroom wall. It wasn’t just her hands that were shaking it was her whole body from head to foot, and consequently the metal-frame bed on which she lay shook too; so much in fact, that it would travel across the floor. It was the first thing Pritchard heard upon entering the house, thinking that it sounded like some frenetic passion in full flow upstairs.

  ‘You worked in the polymers factory, didn’t you, Rene?’ She turned to acknowledge his question but couldn’t answer him.

  ‘She was a lucky girl, doctor. All her shift killed – everyone on that floor – every single one. She were in the toilet and that’s what saved her. It were a direct hit. A young girl of Rene’s age shouldn’t be seeing things like that, now should she?!’

  ‘They produced engine mountings and bushes, I seem to remember? Definitely a target for Herr Goering and his mad Austrian puppetmaster. Catholics, you see. Can’t trust the buggers. How old are you, Rene?’

  ‘She’s nineteen, doctor – just turned nineteen – haven’t you, luv?’