Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter One - Going …
Chapter Two - Only a Visitor
Chapter Three - A TOLD U UR BRILL
Chapter Four - Leavings
Chapter Five - Heidigran
Chapter Six - Dangerous Corner
Chapter Seven - Hello, Goodbye
Chapter Eight - Doppelgänger
Chapter Nine - Gone Away
Chapter Ten - Games
Chapter Eleven - Letters to Rachel
Chapter Twelve - Preludes
Chapter Thirteen - Encounters
Chapter Fourteen - Hands Together
Chapter Fifteen - Shopped
Chapter Sixteen - Snakes and Ladders
Chapter Seventeen - Window Dressing
Chapter Eighteen - The Night of a Thousand Bombers
Chapter Nineteen - Looking for Rachel
Chapter Twenty - Heidi Thornton
Chapter Twenty-one - Secrets
Chapter Twenty-two - Dumped
Chapter Twenty-three - Sarah Reubens
Chapter Twenty-four - Survivor
Chapter Twenty-five - Out of the Blue
Chapter Twenty-six - Long Shadows
Chapter Twenty-seven - Catch 22
Chapter Twenty-eight - Going …
Chapter Twenty-nine - Gone
Acknowledgements
Also by Linda Newbery:
Copyright Page
For David, Bella and Maggie, with love,
and thanks for letting me throw
another stone into the swamp
Copyright Acknowledgements
Lyric excerpt from ‘Sisters’ reprinted with kind permission. © Copyright 1953 by Irving Berlin. © Copyright renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.
Lyric excerpt from ‘Jealous Guy’ by John Lennon reprinted with kind permission. © Copyright Lenono Music 1971. Renewed 1999. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Extract from Dangerous Corner reprinted with kind permission. Reproduced from Dangerous Corner by J. B. Priestley (copyright © J. B. Priestley 1932) by permission of PFD on behalf of the Estate of J. B. Priestley.
Extract from The People’s War by Angus Calder published by Jonathan Cape. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Extract from the Chambers English Dictionary, 1999, © Chambers Harrap Publishers, reprinted by kind permission.
Extract from A Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English , editor Paul Beale, reprinted with kind permission by Routledge Publishers.
Extract from Alzheimer’s Disease by Robert T. Woods reprinted with kind permission of Souvenir Press.
Extract from The Holocaust reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, © Martin Gilbert 1987.
‘Dump’ and ‘Love’ from the Oxford English Dictionary, edited by John Simpson and Edward Weiner (second ed., 1989). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, but there may have been cases where we have been unable to trace a copyright holder. The publisher would be happy to correct any omissions in future printings.
Chapter One
Going …
Chapter Two
Only a Visitor
They came across Natzwiller-Struthof by chance. Not at all sure that she wanted to go in, Hilly knew she would, as the road had brought her to the gates. It wasn’t the sort of opportunity you could miss.
With their baguettes and Camembert and other picnic items stowed in the boot, they had been looking for a place to stop for lunch. It was another hot day, too relentlessly hot for walking round villages or for visiting Strasbourg. The forest offered coolness and shade, trickling streams and grassy clearings. Hilly, in the front passenger seat with the road atlas on her lap, had noticed the roadside signs with the three crosses indicating some sort of war memorial.
‘Natzwiller-Struthof?’ her father said, changing to a lower gear for a sharp uphill bend. ‘It’s a concentration camp. Was. Open to visitors now, I think.’
‘In France?’ said Zoë, in the back seat.
‘Zoë, this part of France was taken over by Germany at the start of the war.’ Her father glanced back. ‘You know, the Occupation of the Rhineland! We were talking about that yesterday, remember?’
Zoë lifted her chin and stared out of the side window, haughty and withdrawn.
Hilly said, ‘I know, though – it does feel a bit peculiar, doesn’t it? Here in the hills – the signs pointing up and up. It’s like we’re not in any particular country – as if the mountains are a sort of barricade between the Rhine and the rest of France.’
‘Barricade against British tourists, as well,’ her father said. ‘Anyone noticed how few Brit number plates there are? Dutch, German, but very few GBs – I’ve only seen one or two since we got here. Looks like Alsace is a well-kept secret.’
‘No beaches, that’s why,’ said Rose, the girls’ mother. ‘Lots of people want beaches.’
‘So why do we have to be different?’ Zoë said, still huffy. She hadn’t wanted to come on this holiday, and was making sure everyone knew. She complained about the room she was sharing with Hilly; she complained that self-catering meant they were forever shopping for food; she complained that it was too hot.
‘I wish you’d stayed at home, too!’ Hilly had told her earlier, in a fierce, muttered conversation in their bedroom, before their parents were awake. ‘It’s Dad’s birthday today, so you might make a slight effort.’
How many more times would they go on holiday like this, all four of them? Hilly wondered. This was possibly the last time. For their parents, this Alsace trip was revisiting the past; they’d come here nineteen years ago, the summer they got married. Although she had seen photographs, Hilly was surprised by the wooded slopes of the Vosges mountains, the deep valleys, the almost ridiculously picturesque villages along the wine-growing route. It was as she imagined the Swiss Alps: high meadows rich in wild flowers, remote farmsteads with logs stacked under the house eaves.
As they followed the memorial signs the road narrowed between stands of spruce, the young trees clustering so thickly that the farther slopes looked furred in green. Through the open window Hilly smelled warm grass and the resinous tang of pine; she saw verges bright with the purply mauves of wild thyme and harebells. It seemed an unlikely journey to a concentration camp, she thought, remembering documentaries she’d seen at school: bleak industrial areas, windswept flatlands, and those terrible railway tracks that led one way.
A sign to the left took them to a levelled parking area. The Craigs’ car nosed into line next to a Peugeot with a French number plate, facing trees and a grassy slope. The large car park was two-thirds full; there was a blockish building that looked like toilets, and a sign asking visitors not to picnic or play ball games. Looking towards the entrance, Hilly saw iron gates, a high wire fence.
‘You must be joking,’ said Zoë from the back seat. ‘You’re not seriously expecting us to go in?’
‘You can wait here if you like,’ their father told her. ‘I’d like to see inside. Anyone coming?’
‘Me,’ said Hilly.
‘You would.’ Zoë was sliding out of the car, trailing the lead of her Walkman. ‘Just up your street, isn’t it? – holiday combined with doom and gloom. Why be happy when you can be miserable?’
‘You’d know all about that!’ Hilly stood up, stretching. ‘Coming, Mum?’
Rose glanced towards the gates. ‘You go with Dad. Don’t think I will. I’ll wait with Zoë.’
Zoë reached for her magazine, slammed the car door and
moved into the shade of a silver birch, settling herself on the grass. ‘I hope you’re not going to take ages – I’m starving! Can’t we start on the lunch, Rose?’
Zoë had recently taken to calling her mother by her first name; although Rose didn’t mind, Hilly couldn’t do it without feeling selfconscious. She noticed, too, that Zoë always called their father Dad, even Daddy: never Gavin.
‘We can’t picnic here.’ Rose nodded in the direction of the sign that urged Silence and Respect.
‘No one’s going to tell us off, are they?’
‘We’ll wait for Dad and Hilly,’ Rose said firmly. Zoë sighed, rolled over onto her front and flicked open her magazine with the martyred air she was so practised at conveying; Hilly gave her a disparaging glance, which went unnoticed.
‘Get a shift on, then, if you’re going,’ Zoë said, while Hilly hesitated about whether or not to take her camera. ‘Great choice for your birthday outing, Dad.’
‘Take as long as you like.’ Their mother was delving in the glove compartment for her paperback. ‘There’s no rush. We’ll be fine here, reading in the shade.’
Walking towards the ticket office, Hilly had the sense of stepping out of the sunshine and into cold shadow. Her father nudged her and nodded towards a sign in French: Entry free to children under sixteen. ‘That’d put Zoë in an even worse mood,’ he remarked, sorting Euros, ‘being classed as a child. Deux adultes, s’il vous plaît.’ The woman in the booth glanced behind him to see where the other adult was, before realizing he meant Hilly; quickly she covered up her mistake. ‘Voilà.’ She handed them their tickets. ‘Bonne journée.’
They passed through gates into a large wire enclosure, surrounded by a high double fence with watchtowers at intervals on the perimeter. It was incongruous, high on the hillside: rather like coming across a floodlit football pitch in the middle of a forest. The area inside, on a downhill slope, was terraced steeply; there was one barrack-style building at the top, with a sign saying MUSÉE, and two others at the lower end. Hilly felt a constriction of fear at her throat, and her heart beating. But I can walk out again, she thought, whenever I want to. She felt all wrong, dressed for the heat in cut-off jeans, a purple T-shirt and wide-brimmed hat; but everyone else was similarly clad. She saw crop-tops, painted toenails, sun-dresses; men in shorts, with hairy legs. We might be on a beach, she thought, or visiting a theme park. But this was real. And in spite of their holiday clothes, people were subdued, speaking to each other only in whispers. Seeing a woman in front remove her straw hat as she entered the museum, Hilly did the same.
TU N’ES QUE VISITEUR DU PALAIS DE LA MORT, she read on a framed card inside: YOU ARE ONLY A VISITOR IN THE PALACE OF DEATH.
Several hours later, in the main street of Orschwiller, Hilly felt strangely dislocated – plucked out of Natzwiller and transplanted to this busy village, festive in the early evening. Tonight being her father’s birthday, they were eating out; he wanted to find a restaurant he and Rose had visited on their honeymoon. They wandered along the narrow streets, past intriguing alleyways, wine cellars, and windowboxes of pink or scarlet geraniums. The street names, Hilly noticed, showed the region’s confused past: most had both a French and a German name, on separate plaques. ALTE WEG. RUE DES MARTYRS. Orschwiller itself sounded more German than French.
‘Perhaps it wasn’t here at all, Rose,’ her father was saying, standing in the middle of the road till Zoë yanked him out of the way of an approaching four-by-four. ‘I don’t recognize it, do you? These villages are all so alike.’
Eventually they settled for a small courtyard place with tables set under a canopy of vines. A waiter greeted them: ‘Guten Abend!’ He showed them to a corner table and handed out menus. With an air of reproach, Dad ordered drinks in the very correct French he’d been practising with study tapes for the last month.
‘Do we look German?’ Hilly asked, after the waiter had returned with mineral water, Coke, two Pernods and a basket of bread; this wasn’t the first time it had happened.
‘He could tell.’ Zoë looked up from a grudging scrutiny of the menu. ‘One look at Mum, that’s all he needed.’
‘No,’ her father said. ‘Nine out of every ten tourists here are German, that’s why.’
‘It’s her Aryan look that does it,’ Zoë insisted. ‘Blonde hair, blue eyes – you could be a perfect Rhine maiden, Mum.’
Her mother was looking at the wine list. ‘I get my colouring from your grandad, not from Heidigran. As you well know.’
‘Would Heidigran like it here?’ Hilly wondered. ‘She might feel at home. She could order for us all in German.’
‘I think she’s all but forgotten,’ said her mother. ‘She can’t have spoken German for years and years.’
‘But can you ever forget your first language?’ Hilly persisted. ‘Your mother tongue? Even if you don’t use it, does your tongue remember?’
‘Good job she wasn’t with us at that place today.’ Zoë was gazing round the courtyard with bored interest. ‘Heidigran’s a Nazi.’
‘Zoë! ’
‘Zoë, that’s a ridiculous thing to say,’ said their mother. ‘As well as offensive. You know perfectly well it’s not true.’
Unabashed, Zoë tore at a piece of bread. ‘And you know it is true. She’s racist. Isn’t she, Hill? The sort of things she comes out with!’
‘I—’
‘I think we’ll change the subject, shall we?’ said their mother, turning back to the menu. ‘Has everyone decided what to have?’
Earlier, in the museum, Hilly had been struck by the associations of the word ‘camp’. It brought to mind guide and scout camps, or fields of mud at the Glastonbury Festival; it suggested a willing denial of comfort, a wacky makeshift arrangement enjoyed by people who would go back to duvets and central heating after a few days. It was a kind of pretending. But Natzwiller-Struthof was not pretending.
The German word was Lager. She had seen it at the entrance: KONZENTRATIONSLAGER. I wonder if Germans have lagering holidays, she found herself thinking, ridiculously; or signs in lay-bys saying NO LAGERING …
The museum was a long, single-storey building; inside the entrance you could turn left or right. Her father had gone on while she stopped to read the ‘Only a Visitor’ poem; she followed him into the lefthand end and found herself confronted by rows of wooden bunk beds. This wasn’t a purpose-built museum, she realized, but a – she wasn’t sure what the word was. Dormitory sounded far too cosy, like something from an old-fashioned boarding-school story, with midnight feasts and prefects. Accommodation block, then. People had lived in here, imprisoned. There were photographs: skinny men, not very old by the look of them, with big eyes, huddled together, several to a bunk.
She looked away, out of the window. If you ignored the foreground – the hangman’s gibbet positioned there starkly, the wire fences and the watchtowers – the view was glorious. The sky was hazy blue, above the undulating outline of hills opposite, thickly clad in trees; a bird of prey soared high.
Did that make it better or worse, she wondered – if you were shut in like a battery hen, no hope of escaping – to know that, beyond the fence, streams trickled over rocks, the earth smelled of pine needles, and buzzards roamed the sky?
But the stream would trickle and swell and join bigger streams flowing down to the Rhine, the broad slow river that had proved inadequate as a border. In the dusty, respectful hush, the marching boots of documentaries sounded loud in Hilly’s ears.
‘Choucroute garnie?’ The waiter held a loaded oval plate at eye level; Hilly goggled at it.
‘Pour moi, s’il vous plaît,’ said her father. When everyone was served – a cheesy potato gratin for Hilly, sausage platters for Zoë and their mother, leafy green salad for all – Hilly stared across at the mound of sauerkraut, potatoes and various kinds of meat her father was regarding with some awe.
‘Dad! How many people’s that for?’
‘He had that last time, didn’t you, Gavin?�
� Mum poured Riesling from a slim green bottle. ‘I remember then it looked like something a farmer might tuck into, after a hard day digging turnips.’
‘Gross,’ Zoë remarked, ‘all that cabbage stuff.’
‘I like to try the local delicacies,’ her father said, attempting dignity.
‘Delicacies! How many kinds of dead animal can you get on one plate?’ Hilly said.
‘It’s his birthday – he can have what he likes,’ said Rose. ‘Even if it’s not exactly healthy eating. Are you going to try the wine, Hilly?’
‘Thanks.’ Hilly pushed her glass across.
‘Me, too.’ Zoë clinked hers against it. ‘How come you’re encouraging under-age drinking?’
‘We’re in France,’ their mother said, watching the cool trickle. ‘French children learn to drink wine with meals from an early age. It’s civilized, not like the British teenage idea – drinking isn’t drinking unless you end up vomiting in a gutter.’
‘Charming, Mum! Just what we want to talk about with our meal. Anyway, happy birthday, Dad.’ Hilly raised her glass.
‘Happy birthday, love.’ Mum leaned sideways to kiss him on the lips. He raised a hand to her shoulder, prolonging the moment; an older couple at the next table looked at them and smiled.
Zoë made a retching sound, rolling her eyes at Hilly. ‘Do you have to do that in public? Honestly, adults! Don’t they show you up? Anyway, Dad – if you’ve finished slobbering over each other – what’s it feel like, being forty-eight? Nearly fifty. I hope I’m never forty-eight.’
Hilly took a cautious sip of wine. Interesting, the way it flowed into her mouth, cool, flowery and even bland at first, then the flavours developed and changed on her tongue and in her throat into something muskier and longer-lasting. She saw Zoë’s wincing expression as she gulped hers; it was typical of Zoë to insist on having wine, even though she didn’t like it.
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