A Time of Birds

by Helen Moat

  3. Looking for Marcella

  We left Duisburg in watery sunshine. Whatever lay ahead today I knew that Marcella, who had once lodged with us for a few weeks in the Peak District, would be waiting for us at the end of it. It was our fifth day of cycling and the daily task of turning the wheels now felt comfortable and familiar, the saddle as easy as our living room sofa. Well, almost.

  My bike trip had become an unconscious journey in mindfulness. I was living in the moment, focused on the path in front of me, breathing in the cold and damp of earth and leaf. I was tuned into the lap of shore and the honk of geese feeding on Rhine-side meadows. The sky exploded with the increasing urgency of the birds’ mating songs, singing loudly, persistently and sweetly. For them, spring was here regardless of the weather.

  My father loved the month of May, roaming the fields in search of his beloved birds, hoping to log the first call of the cuckoo. He’d stop his grocery van at the end of his country run to catch a glimpse of the first summer migrants, or one of his favourite residents, and to listen to the first mating songs of the year. Saw yellowhammer and goldfinch today … Great bird activity in the country, a couple of May entries in his pocket diary exclaimed. And the next day: Saw a green linnet (presumedly a green finch). His entries were terse, simple observations rather than self-reflective, and surprisingly positive. They referenced work and worship, interspersed with birds, flowers and his garden. There were lists of places he frequented – Oxford Island, the River Lagan and coastal areas of County Antrim and Down – and his wildlife sightings. In between there were repeated phrases like meditative chants: Lovely day; Good week in shop, thank you Lord; Praise the Lord for his goodness; Lord, grant us all the will to follow thee and to love each other more until that day; Busy all day, praise the Lord; May we have sweet fellowship together. Sunday entries were often identical: At the remembrance of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

  Of any inner – or outer – conflict there was no sign.

  *

  It was still early in the day when we reached the medieval village of Kaiserswerth. It was already milling with tourists who’d come to look at the ruins of Emperor Barbarossa’s ninth-century castle, stroll through the cobbled streets of the old town and linger in terraced Biergärten overlooking the Rhine. We were tempted to join them but we had almost fifty miles to do – and Marcella would be waiting with her father to take us to the Eifel, a rural hinterland west of the river beyond Cologne and Bonn.

  Marcella had come to stay with us in England because of Andrea, whom I had met in the hostile environment of 1980s Derry in Northern Ireland. I was a student and Andrea a language assistant at an Omagh school. The German Stammtisch, or ‘gathering’, was an oasis in the troubled atmosphere of the city – away from the armed soldiers and police jeeps patrolling the near-empty streets; away from the threat of bombs, cross-fire and mob skirmishes. Later I stayed with Andrea’s parents when I went to Germany hoping to earn some money and improve my language skills. I’d planned to spend a few days with the older couple but ended up staying four months, finding a series of jobs in their village. After I returned home to the UK, Andrea and I dipped in and out of each other’s lives, losing contact for up to two years at a time then picking up effortlessly. Sometimes, she would contact me to ask if I would take in some unknown German. Marcella was one of them. She needed to spend some time in the UK as part of her education. We were able to offer six weeks. But it was a risk. What if she was difficult? What if she didn’t fit in with our household? We waited nervously at the airport for Marcella to arrive, but when she came through the barriers, a German Goldilocks with long blonde hair tied in plaits, her open face breaking into a wide smile, our fears evaporated. She worked hard but always had time to join me for coffee, chatting with ease. When she left us to return to Germany, we missed her presence in our home.

  Now, Jamie and I were edging in slow motion towards Marcella, and I felt joy at being on the road. Was this not freedom? Was it not life in its simplest form, uncomplicated and lovely? I felt I was beginning to out-cycle my depression. I realised that I needed to see my depression as something outside of me: it made it easier to objectivise any dark and destructive thoughts. Instead of allowing the black dog of depression to drag me along by its leash, I needed to call it to heel – to be in control.

  But I also began to acknowledge I had a pain so securely locked away that I no longer felt I could lift the lid on it – a pain that was making me ill. I saw history repeating itself. The experience of the war years was my father’s secret, but I too had a secret I was hiding from my siblings and parents that forced me to live a lie. And there was my fragile relationship with my father, borne of another secret from a single night long ago that no one spoke about in my family. I had convinced myself and my therapists that my illness had been the result of my job, not my childhood – refusing to dig deeper.

  *

  My joy at being on the road soon turned sour. I’d been warned that the headwinds on the Rhine were a force to be reckoned with. Until now, however, we’d only experienced short, violent gusts that died away in a whimper as quickly as they arrived. This time the wind persisted, pushing against our bodies and bikes. Against speeds of 30mph, it felt as if I was cycling through a wind tunnel. I pressed down hard on the pedals, but my bike barely seemed to move. The spokes sung a mournful tune from the crosswinds as I inched forward.

  ‘Mum, you need to cycle faster. We’re never going to reach Düsseldorf today at this rate, never mind Cologne!’

  The ever-tolerant Jamie was finally losing patience with me. As we passed by Stockum, the wind gathered force until it felt as if I was at a standstill. It was almost midmorning when we reached the outskirts of Düsseldorf at Golzheim. I sat down on a bench exhausted and reached for our sandwiches. We’d cycled a paltry twenty miles. If I didn’t quicken my pace, we’d have to cancel our meet-up with Marcella and find somewhere to spend the night between Düsseldorf and Cologne. If I didn’t quicken my pace, we’d be lucky to reach Basel after three months, never mind Istanbul!

  Düsseldorf wasn’t the ugly industrial city I’d imagined. Sleek skyscrapers of glass reflected the Rhine; buildings twisted and curved like folded origami paper. Steps led up from the riverbank to a large plaza edged with cafés and museums, offices and shops. I wanted to stop but we had to press on. The path climbed up and over a bridge onto a long finger of land. We passed marinas, little cube houses and allotments of vegetables and flowers, then squeezed through housing estates until we were spat out of the city’s heart. It had taken us an hour and Cologne still felt a long way off.

  At Volmerswerth, still in the outer reaches of Düsseldorf, I messaged Marcella, saying I didn’t think we could make it that day. The wind died away at Leverkusen, only a dozen or so miles from our meeting point with Marcella, but instead, hailstones the size of marbles fell and pummelled us. For the first time, I wanted to be back home in the warmth of my own house. I pulled my mobile out to phone Marcella, my fingers so cold I could hardly hit the number on the screen. ‘We’re going to try and make it,’ I said through chattering teeth.

  ‘Good. Head past the city until you hit the fifth bridge at Rodenkirchen. We’ll be waiting for you at the car park.’

  We counted the bridges down through Cologne. Across the Rhine, we could see the soaring twin spires of the cathedral but there was no time to linger. We pushed on, and the sun was now dropping in the sky – the track alongside the railway line seemed interminable. Finally, we came to the car park by the bridge. There was no sign of Marcella and her father. Were we at the right bridge even? I rang again.

  ‘You’re on the other side of the bridge from us,’ Marcella finally worked out.

  Crossing the bridge, we found Marcella, grinning. While her father loaded the bikes onto the trailer, we climbed into the back of the car and settled with relief into the wide, leather seats with back supports.

  4. Monika and the Chilean Seaman

  Memories of the wind an
d hailstones of the Rhine corridor quickly receded in the suburban house below the woods. Monika, Marcella’s mother, embraced us in a big German hug. She was tall with a strong bone structure, yellow hair and eyes that sparkled glacier-blue behind her frameless glasses. Enrique, her Chilean husband, was small and stocky with a thatch of black hair that swept down to bracken eyes. His peppered beard and moustache revealed a perpetual smile suggesting joie de vivre – or alegŕia de libro.

  No sooner had we arrived than a large plate of food was placed in front of us. It was a big, noisy table with dishes clattering and laughter threading a jumble of words in German and English. We felt at home straight away with Monika, Henri (as his German friends called him) and Marcella’s sister.

  Henri, I discovered quickly, sang in a local Latino band. The music was wild and pulsing, sensual and loud. He showed us videos of the band and took Jamie down to the basement to show him his guitars and play for him. Henri’s zest for life was endearing, and his openness and enthusiasm was infectious.

  We were spending a few days here and I enjoyed the stillness of the house after the perpetual motion of bike and the battering of weather. One day, we drove out into the Eifel, an area familiar to me from that summer I’d spent in the home of Andrea’s parents – a soft landscape of hills and valleys thick with deciduous and conifer woodland, broken only by occasional meadow. It was odd to revisit Bad Münstereifel with Jamie. The last time I’d walked the cobbled streets by the canal among the Fachwerkhäuser, the overhanging timber-framed buildings, Jamie was a toddler just above my knees. I’d held tight onto his tiny hand to stop him stumbling on the uneven streets. And here he was now towering above me, guiding us on our ride and making sure we didn’t get lost in the remote Rhine villages when the trail led us away from the riverbank.

  On the Friday night, Monika invited Andrea over. It was Feierabend. There is no equivalent in English. The word does what the German language does so well: describes in one neat compound adjectival noun what requires a whole sentence in English. Celebration evening – work’s done; I’m letting my hair down. Monika’s coffee table was crammed with sparkling water, German beers and wines with olives, pretzels and other nibbles. It brought back memories of long evenings with Andrea in Blankenheim that summer long ago: out on the balcony; in the mock-Austrian kitchen parlour of one of Andrea’s friends; and in living rooms across the village and beyond, when we had laughed and chatted late into the evening by candlelight.

  Back then, my summer interlude in the Eifel was far removed from my life in Northern Ireland, distilled to church and countryside. Candles were thought to be papish in the Puritan austerity of my home, wine and beer the drinks of the devil. In this part of Catholic Germany, there was a different culture, a different tongue, a different past and another way of seeing the world. In the Northern Irish Brethren upbringing of my childhood, there was only one possible world view: the indisputable Word of God. There was no sense of irony when the Brothers argued over its interpretation in their weekly Bible studies. As far as they were concerned, Andrea’s family and friends were going to hell because of their secular-Catholic West German view of the world. They were not born again.

  ‘I don’t hate Catholics,’ my father said. ‘Just their religion.’ But the bitterness that crept into his voice suggested something different.

  ‘They should bring back the B-specials.’ The B-specials were a police force entirely made up of Protestant Unionists and were known for revenge killings and reprisals against Catholics. ‘They should bring back hangings,’ he said when another IRA killing hit the news.

  I had begun to see that my father was a strange mix of independent thinker and conditioned Unionist, and I no longer felt I was walking in step with him.

  5. Ghosts from the Past

  On the morning after the Feierabend gathering we called in on Andrea, who still lived in the house where I had spent that summer. Her parents, Lisbeth and Bernie, had found me work, not only in a Gasthaus and adjoining restaurant in the heart of the village, but also in the youth hostel up on the Finkenberg and at the Altersheim, the old people’s home above the main shopping street. I was a source of much local information and they would enjoy gossiping over coffee and cake.

  Inevitably, things had changed at the house. Gone was the kitchen garden with its rows of old-fashioned dahlias and lupins, the Canterbury bells and delphiniums, the vegetables and fruit from Bernie and Lisbeth’s day. In their place was a long stretch of narrowing lawn, pointing an arrow to the village centre. The garden was strewn with hammocks and chairs and an assortment of natural objects from Andrea’s beachcombing trips to the Netherlands, England and Ireland – mainly shells and driftwood.

  Behind the hedge, the open-air swimming pool, once ringing with splashes and laughter, was now closed and silent and spreading weeds. It was here that Andrea’s niece and nephew had dared me on to ever-higher diving boards to jump and dive. Above the house, the road climbs up to the Finkenberg, a hillside of pines where most of Andrea’s friends lived and I’d cleaned the private hostel. To the left of the garden, Blankenheim’s castle teeters on the hillside, poking out of ash and oak.

  From the base of the hill, Andrea’s father, Bernie, had secretly spied on Lisbeth with his friends as she’d exercised in the castle courtyard above him. Lisbeth was a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädchen, or the League of German Girls – the girls’ wing of the Hitler Youth movement. Bernie was in the boys’ wing.

  Bernie, like my father, was conditioned by the culture and politics of his youth and adulthood. Unionism and National Socialism had one thing in common: they were driven by a fierce patriotism stirred up by self-interested politicians, and the perceived threat of a minority group. In my father’s case, Catholics; in Bernie’s, the Jews. Bernie looked back to this time with nostalgia: the fireside songs; the marches through woodland; the whittling of sticks and food cooked in billy cans over the campfire; the banter and camaraderie. How much of Hitler’s insidious xenophobia entered his consciousness back then wasn’t clear. Was there a filter?

  Later, the British took aim at Bernie’s house, Bernie and Lisbeth told me, missing its target and landing on the sewage tank in the yard instead, damaging the goat stall in the basement of the house. The excrement landed on the hall ceiling, and the gables of the house were left at a peculiar angle. Some of the soldiers quartered in the house were injured and had to be taken to the military hospital in nearby Ripsdorf. Fortunately, Bernie’s parents were unharmed.

  As war ravaged Europe, Bernie joined the Marine, the navy. While my father mopped up blood from the victims of German raids in Belfast, Bernie was quietly sailing up and down the Baltic Sea, side-stepping any action.

  I have a photo of Bernie at sea, dressed in crisp white flairs and a singlet. He’s standing on the steps of his ship, looking dapper, leaning casually on a stairway railing between decks. He looks like a young Elvis Presley with his strong handsome face, muscled arms and floppy hair swept back from his brow. It’s only when you look closer at the photograph that you spot the Nazi insignia on his singlet: the spread-winged eagle and the swastika below it.

  If Bernie was nostalgic about his time in the Hitler Youth, he was even more enthusiastic about those wartime years in the navy.

  ‘Komm, Helen,’ he beckoned to me that eighties’ summer. ‘I want to show you something.’

  He led me into his study, a shrine to his time in the Kriegsmarine. On the wall, there was a framed knot board, a great macramé anchor and a photograph of Admiral Dönitz, who’d risen to the position of navel Commander-in-Chief in the war. There were also pictures of Bernie’s ships: the Bismarck and the Köln. Luck was on Bernie’s side, for he had swapped ships to the Köln just before the Bismarck was sunk by the British. Below the picture, there was a cabinet containing a model of the Bismarck and other paraphernalia. There were also flags: the Marinebund flag and the Reichskrieg flag.

  Later, when I recalled Bernie’s memorabilia, Andrea had squirmed: �
��Oh dear, I’m afraid it makes my dad look like a real Nazi – which he probably was! He kept telling us that he had the time of his life. Anyway, the Marine gave him the chance to leave Blankenheim and see the world.’

  In truth, Bernie had mixed feelings about the war years. He’d seen the economic depression before Hitler came to power, and he’d witnessed how Hitler had pulled the country together, regulating trains and rolling out motorways. Hitler had made things work and lifted Germany out of an economic mire. He’d given German citizens a sense of pride and a sense of worth in a time of desperation, and above all a feeling of unity. It was a potent mix. When Bernie harked back to the good old times, referring to Hitler as ‘der Adolf’, Andrea was livid. ‘You’d think Hitler was your brother, the way you talk about him!’ She belonged to a generation who felt ill at ease with their history and their parents’ links to the past.

  For Bernie it was more complicated. Retrospect is a wonderful thing. He acknowledged Hitler was an evil man, and he claimed he knew nothing of the concentration camps when I asked him. His mind was muddled, for he had to unlearn his earlier conviction that all was great and good under the National Socialists. And there were those warm memories still coursing through his blood. It wasn’t easy.