The English Girl: A heartbreaking and beautiful World War 2 historical novel

by Sarah Mitchell

  The English Girl

  A heartbreaking and beautiful World War 2 historical novel

  Sarah Mitchell

  Books by Sarah Mitchell

  The English Girl

  The Couple

  The Lost Letters

  Available in audio

  The Couple (available in the UK and the US)

  The Lost Letters (available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  The Lost Letters

  Hear More from Sarah

  Books by Sarah Mitchell

  A Letter from Sarah

  The Couple

  Acknowledgements

  *

  This book is dedicated to Frankie, our golden retriever and family friend for fifteen and a half years. During the last months of her life she always positioned herself so closely behind my chair that it was difficult for me to move away from my desk – which is probably why I managed to finish the book on time.

  ‘In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.’

  Albert Camus

  * * *

  The winter of 1946/47 is the snowiest, and one of the coldest, on record in the UK.

  Chapter One

  9 November 1989

  West Berlin, West Germany

  Tiffany lowers her rucksack onto the packed pavement of Friedrich-Strasse and listens to the sound of singing. Lusty serenades float across the rooftops, while on the streets crowds of young and old are gathering, strangers calling out to one another and hugging with abandon. People swarm past her like a river, laughing, crying, waving their arms. It’s almost nine o’clock in the evening, and all around the night air thrums, jubilant and bright with shock.

  In London rumours had been building for weeks. Swirling with the autumn leaves as she jogged beside the steely Thames. Gathering momentum from the updates on her radio. Reports of resignations, of capitulations, of demonstrations in East Berlin. Tales of a people’s tide, about to turn a country on its head. And every hour made for fresh news. She listened while she ate breakfast on the counter that doubles as a table (trebles, occasionally, as a desk). Wondering, waiting, thinking of that address scribbled in her Filofax. And at long last, the dam burst. Today at the airport nobody bothered even to glance at her passport. Finally, Berlin has become the centre of the world. Today Berlin is focused only on itself.

  Two young men are hurrying past.

  Sofort! she hears.

  Freiheit!

  Delving into her coat, she pulls out an English-German dictionary. A soft-back book purchased late yesterday afternoon from a disgruntled shop assistant wanting to cash up his till. How can it have been just yesterday? The day before yesterday, she faced commuting in the London rain, persuading herself that selling artisan bakery products was the perfect job for a psychology graduate, and a steady and depressing stream of sympathy invitations supposed to lessen the pain of heartbreak.

  Yesterday, however, everything changed.

  Or rather, she changed everything.

  She dug out the address (from her Filofax), packed a bag (the trusty rucksack), bought a flight (an open return) and left a message on the answerphone at work. (And how will that turn out when she gets back to London?)

  Never mind.

  She is here now.

  Listening to history.

  And history seems to be shouting in her ear. A male voice says, ‘Freiheit, it means freedom. And sofort, that means immediately. Right this moment. Now!’ One of the young men has returned. He is smiling, beaming. His face is alight with happiness and crowned with soft brown curls that glow bronze in the streetlights.

  She gestures at the hordes. ‘Where are they going?’

  ‘Everyone is going to the Gate!’ His eyes are dancing. ‘Do you want to come? Do you want to see it too?’

  ‘The Gate?’ The question is superfluous. She is shoving the dictionary into her pocket, hoisting the rucksack onto her shoulder.

  ‘The Brandenburg Gate. The crossing to the East.’ Already the human river is sweeping him away. Stretching forwards, he grabs her arm. ‘Let’s go, sofort!’

  The roads are becoming busier by the minute. Everywhere people are chanting, singing, shouting. Cars are hooting, vehicles parked haphazardly, their drivers standing dazed and confused by half-open doors. Twice the young man turns to check she is following, pushing wire-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose and a hand, sometimes, through his hair.

  All at once there is a street sign.

  Invalidenstrasse.

  Then spotlights. Cold and white and too many to count.

  ‘The border!’ Her companion points towards a passageway, a high-sided concrete alley that is beginning to fill with clusters of people all drinking and cheering. He shakes his head as though he no longer trusts his eyes. ‘It was the border! Now we go where we want! East to West, West to East. Now there is one Berlin!’

  He pulls her closer to the crossing, to the checkpoint, where before there must have been barriers, policemen, border officials, and now a succession of small squat cars is crawling steadily into the West. Some of the occupants appear to be crying. Some are waving, Others, more composed, looking tired and pale behind their steering wheels, make Tiffany want to cry herself. Fists bang a welcome onto roofs. Champagne drenches bonnets in cascades of foam. ‘Die Mauer ist weg! Die Mauer ist weg!’ The wall is gone! The wall is gone! Although her new-found friend is translating again, this time she doesn’t need him to. The excitement is catching, like a fever. Now any fool can guess what the people are saying.

  Someone nudges her arm. A bottle is pushed into her palm. ‘Trink nach Berlin!’ Drink to Berlin! The glass is cold, the champagne colder and tastes likes almonds, cherries and buttered toast all at the same time. Tipping back her head, she swallows again, wipes her hand across her mouth and passes the bottle to her friend.

  ‘Trink nach Berlin!’ Her first words of German.

  He grins.

  They are of similar age, she sees. And behind the glasses, behind the delight, a hint of earnestness, of dependability.

  ‘Do you want to go into the East?’

  ‘To East Berlin?’

  He nods.

  Tiffany stares. This is why she is here, after all. To go to East Berlin. But she didn’t expect this. Not so soon. Can they really go now? Can they go sofort?

  The concrete passageway is overflowing with bodies. As they watch, a woman climbs onto the shoulders of another, scrambles up the wall on the far side and jumps from a bulwark and straight into the East, hair trailing behind her like a flag. A great
roar erupts. More bodies surge forwards. From nowhere four border guards appear. They glance at each other, as if for reassurance, before pushing the next in line back towards the western wall. In the glare of the lights the officials appear uncertain, almost scared.

  The crowd edges forwards again. ‘Lass uns rein!’ Let us in!

  The air seems to tremble.

  Tiffany finds she’s holding her breath.

  ‘We go a different way. In one moment.’ Her companion passes her the bottle of champagne, and as she drinks she feels the bubbles in her blood, the rush through her veins. He points towards the slow column of vehicles edging over the crossing, inching into freedom under the gaze of a full moon.

  And here comes the next, small and blue on thin fragile wheels.

  As the people part to let the car through he grabs her hand and together they race over the border ground towards the East. Her rucksack is bouncing on her back, the champagne is sloshing high against the glass. And in her chest her heart is thundering. She doesn’t dare look around, doesn’t dare look anywhere but at the outstretched arm of the brown-haired boy who is tugging her onwards and forwards until they have outrun the crowds and the furore and all there is about them is a dark and empty plaza.

  He slows to a halt.

  Both of them are breathing hard.

  Tiffany shakes her hair, long and blond, out of her eyes. ‘This is East Berlin?’ She can’t believe it.

  ‘Yes.’

  But nobody is here. Does anyone live in East Berlin? Do they know what’s happened?

  From deep inside her rucksack she seems to hear a rustling of paper.

  All at once her companion spins around. ‘Look! Over there!’

  Tiffany turns and steps back in amazement. To their left the Brandenburg Gate is soaring above them. Bathed in a deluge of light, the monument looms ghostly and majestic beneath a sphere that is as full and as round as the sun. For a while, they both stand motionless. Tiffany tries to imagine what it would be like, what it would have been like, to gaze at the titanic columns and galloping chariot from this spot before tonight. The Gate so close, yet so utterly out of reach. Dropping her rucksack onto the ground, she fishes out her camera. Although she knows the lens will never quite capture the authority of the moon hanging low like a polished coin, the uncanny quiet of the square, or the fact that less than a mile away a festival is exploding at the border.

  Nevertheless, a photograph is better than nothing.

  Afterwards, she sits down on the plaza. The ground has a deeply frozen quality that immediately seeps through the lining of her coat. Her German friend squats beside her. Neither of them seems able to drag their eyes away from the silver-drenched pillars. Silently she sips from the bottle. Her fingers are freezing, her grip on the glass is becoming clumsy. Yet a sensation of warmth is swelling inside her chest, either from the alcohol or simply the thrill of being where she is, being alive on 9 November 1989, when the world is changing in front of her eyes and she’s here in Berlin, witnessing the transformation for herself. She gives the champagne to her companion. For some extraordinary reason it doesn’t seem particularly ridiculous to consider leaning against him, a boy whose name she doesn’t know, or even to find his hand and slide her fingers into his. Maybe she is not quite as heartbroken, not quite as wretched, as she was three months ago. Perhaps, after all, she is moving on.

  As soon as he finishes drinking, however, her new friend rests the bottle on the ground. There’s a sense of finality to his action. ‘Shall we go back now?’

  ‘Go back?’ She blinks.

  ‘To the West.’

  He must go home, of course. Now he has crossed the border and experienced the fallen wall for himself he has no reason to be in the East. She, on the other hand, has no reason at all to return. And every reason to stay.

  She shakes her head and tries to hide her disappointment.

  It’s his turn to look astonished. ‘If you don’t come back, what will you do?’

  ‘I will find somewhere to sleep.’ She’s surprised to sound so confident. Already her stomach is tightening at the prospect of such alien surroundings. But surely East Berlin must have some kind of hotels or guesthouses? And since the border no longer exists, since nobody can send her away, why shouldn’t she stay in one? Before her courage has time to dip, she jumps to her feet, swings her hair into a ponytail and clips it high on her head with a band from her pocket. A sign she means business.

  Her companion gets up more slowly. He slaps the dirt off the seat of his jeans and takes a moment adjusting his spectacles, even though they don’t appear to have moved since he last corrected them. ‘So, I will leave you now.’ The sentence is poised between a statement and an enquiry.

  Before she can react, voices interrupt them, shouting from the eastern end of the plaza. Two young women are hastening across the square, hurling questions towards them through the dark. Die Mauer ist weg. Die Mauer ist weg? The wall is gone?

  Tiffany’s companion calls back, ‘Ja! Ja! Wir sind aus West Berlin!’ We are from West Berlin!

  There are squeals and screams. The women consult each other briefly before running in the direction of the border. The second they disappear, more people arrive. Die Mauer ist weg. They too sound incredulous. Soon the trickle expands in number and swells in volume until the hush of the previous minutes is evaporating amongst an assembly of stunned faces and rapid, eager German. Some of the crowd start to rush across the plaza. Others hang back as though the news must be a trap. Or a joke. As if their hopes have been dashed too many times in the past to dare to trust them again now.

  ‘I must go.’ Her German friend sounds worried. Tiffany can’t tell if he’s concerned about her safety or anxious his journey back won’t be as straightforward as their one here. She’s still wondering about that, about the thoughtful crinkle to his brow, as he thrusts out his hand. She hesitates. The handshake has a strange solemnity. She feels the fleeting grip of his fingers, a sensation of heat and the brief charge of interlocking eyes before he swings around.

  ‘Hey?’ She catches his sleeve. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ralp. My name is Ralp.’

  ‘And mine is Tiffany.’

  ‘Goodbye, Tiffany. Viel glück!’ He leans forwards. ‘It means good luck!’

  She starts to walk, heading away from the border, against the steady current of people now negotiating the square, and only allows herself to stop and turn around when she reaches a road. Although her German friend is nowhere to be seen, she can still glimpse the green glass of the empty champagne bottle through a sea of legs.

  She feels suddenly alone.

  Alone and slightly afraid.

  Ahead the Unter den Linden stretches long and dark with only the occasional yellow arc light to dilute the gritty gloom. Tightening the strap of her rucksack, she tells herself to get a grip. This is nothing, she reflects, compared to what my grandmother did when she was my age. But remembering her grandmother is less of a comfort than she might have hoped. Her grandmother would certainly not approve of Tiffany’s current whereabouts. And if she knew what Tiffany intended to do next, she would probably be utterly horrified. She would never even have mentioned the existence of such a heartbreaking letter. Let alone shared the anguish of the writer with her impulsive granddaughter.

  As she walks away from the plaza, the pavements get busier. People trickle from buildings and alleyways. All of them wear the same stunned expression of disbelief and the same style of dreary, functional clothes. There’s a smell in the air too. An oily, fume-laden stench, and every so often her boot turns on a broken paving slab and slips into a puddle.

  She almost walks straight past the Hotel Metropole. Most of the illuminated signage over the entrance isn’t working; only the letters tel and Met stutter a lukewarm glow that makes little impression on the darkness. Tiffany hesitates. The concrete edifice is sooty and decayed and the windows are too grubby to see through properly. She’s still dithering as someone nearly knoc
ks into her. The woman running past is in hair-curlers and appears to have thrown on her coat over a baby-blue bathrobe. Tiffany watches her hurry into the gloom and only once the woman has disappeared does she take a breath and push open the door.

  Inside the dirty, marbled lobby, two men dressed in jeans and leather jackets are slumped on a sofa. Both are smoking cigarettes while beside them an ashtray on a metal stand overflows with stubs. The receptionist is talking on a telephone, whispering into the receiver. As soon as she sees Tiffany, she stops and covers the mouthpiece with one hand. Although of similar age she’s dressed in the type of shapeless skirt and jumper that Tiffany associates with her parents’ generation, and her expression is one of naked astonishment.

  ‘I was wondering,’ Tiffany says quickly, ‘if you have a room that I can stay in.’

  The young woman looks at her wordlessly.

  ‘A room…’ She scrabbles in her pocket for the dictionary and thumbs through the pages. ‘Ein Zimmer.’

  ‘Ein Zimmer?’

  ‘Yes.’ She nods to reinforce the point.

  The receptionist’s gaze sweeps from Tiffany’s kitten-heeled boots to her red-and-blue checked coat. ‘Bist du aus West Berlin?’ The emphasis on the last word is almost reverential, making the question obvious.

  ‘I’m from London,’ Tiffany says, and then reconsiders. ‘Today I came from West Berlin.’