by Derek Hansen
Heartbreak and elation are strange bedfellows but I hit the sack bursting with both of them and as confused as a puppy with two bowls to feed from. I was still too excited for sleep to come. Dad had let us stay up and have a hot cocoa and sandwiches while he bathed his battered hand and we filled Mum in on all the dramas. Mr and Mrs Rycroft took Clarry home for a hot bath while Gary and Christian Berger were taken to hospital in separate ambulances. Mr and Mrs Gillespie went with Gary, and his ambulance had been gone for at least five minutes before Christian Berger was carried out on a stretcher beneath a pile of blankets. Police, Water Board workers and Zambucks took turns carrying him. Sister Glorious sat in the back of the ambulance with Christian Berger. I learned a new word that night: hypothermia. Another great word. I reckon I’d been hypothermic at least a dozen times from staying too long in the water at Shelly Beach Baths but hadn’t had a name for it.
When I finally closed my eyes all I could see was Sister Glorious hugging Christian Berger, him in his sagging, soaking, white underpants with the window in the front. Nigel was still laughing about it. He reckoned Christian Berger’s willy had stuck its head out to sample the night air. I laughed with him but my laughter was kind of hollow. That, more than anything, seemed to underscore my loss and I felt let down by both Christian Berger and Sister Glorious. Christian Berger had stolen my girlfriend, not that he was probably even aware she was my girlfriend, and Sister Glorious had stolen Christian Berger. I thought Captain Biggs, Mack and I had ownership of the U-boat commander but all three of us had been well and truly trumped. Yet the fact that Christian Berger was there to be hugged by Sister Glorious was reason enough for elation and celebration. His story would continue. Our sessions would continue. I pictured Eric and me back in the Church Army lounge with Christian Berger telling us how his U-boat was sunk, and Mr Holterman telling us how he came to be shot down and lost his leg. I thought about the essays I’d write and the tone of voice I’d use, skimping on adjectives and letting the unfolding dramas speak for themselves. That was something Mr Ingleby was trying to teach us. His motto was ‘Actions speak louder than adjectives.’ I already had my introduction to Christian Berger’s story and I knew the ending. How it came about and how I’d add to it was what intrigued me. I wanted a short and pithy encapsulation. But as hard as I tried to lock in on my stories, my mind kept reverting to the image of Sister Glorious and Christian Berger. Sister Glorious may well have been the impossible dream but, in the febrile imagination of a twelve year old, sometimes it’s hard to know what’s possible and what isn’t.
In that magic moment between consciousness and sleep, I became Christian Berger in the drain, battling impossible odds and hypothermia to save my pals and gain the hand of Sister Glorious as my prize. For an instant the world became perfect.
Dad woke us what seemed like minutes later. The morning news on 1YA was all about the rescue and we stood around the radio feeling like heroes for having been part of it. But the real story was about Christian Berger. The news painted a picture of a brave man who was a hero to his own people and now to the whole of New Zealand. It described a man who was prepared to risk everything and give everything to help others. The newsreader quoted the New Zealand Herald as his source. The Herald? We were dumbstruck.
I wanted to race down the road and even use my own money to buy a copy of the Herald but Dad gave me the threepence even though we all knew he’d have copies to burn stacked up against the front door of his shop in New North Road. Alun Griffiths, the reporter who’d written the earlier story, had also written this one. It was hard to believe he was writing about the same person. The paper had a picture of Christian Berger being lifted from the drain by the police and Water Board men. The headline read ‘War Hero Risks Life to Save Boys’.
War hero?
While the lead story talked about Christian Berger’s heroics in the drain and the courage he showed in going back to help Gary, Alun Griffiths had also written a profile. He wrote about an entirely different Christian Berger to the ruthless U-boat captain intent on torpedoing our boys. The story talked about his work with the Centre for U-Boat Personnel in Hamburg and the hardships he’d endured as the war ended. You have to give Alun Griffiths credit. He could fit his story to any occasion. The profile introduced people to the ‘other side’ of Christian Berger and gave them good reason to regard him in a more favourable light. While I admired the reporter’s dexterity and welcomed the article, I couldn’t help feeling Alun Griffiths was just jumping on a bandwagon. Christian Berger had already given people good reason to revise their thinking about him. He’d already demonstrated the kind of man he really was—brave, compassionate and self-sacrificing. He didn’t need Alun Griffiths’s help. He’d redeemed himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Walter Harmann was among the crewmen who hauled them aboard the inflatable life raft. Walter had also survived along with Gustav Richter and seven others. Just ten blessed survivors from a crew of forty-eight.
Christian shook from cold and shock as he watched the U-boat’s bows rise from the water in final salute before sliding beneath the waves, taking the Chief and other entombed crewmen with it. Alongside him a soft voice, barely audible above the sounds of wind and sea, whispered the Lord’s Prayer. Someone—probably Walter—sobbed uncontrollably. An eruption of bubbles, the last gasp from the stricken U-boat, provided a brief foam marker to the dead. Darkness settled over them like a shroud upon a coffin.
A Royal Navy destroyer rescued the ten survivors the following morning. The destroyer had been sent to finish off or capture the submarine on the assumption that it was still afloat. Christian Berger experienced the overwhelming hollowness of defeat that would soon engulf the rest of his countrymen, the sense of not only having lost but of having lost everything.
It was an end entirely without glory.
AN EXTRACT FROM ‘DEATH OF A U-BOAT’
Mr Ingleby remains the best teacher I ever had. He always insisted we should map out our essays before we began them, and gave us a diagrammatic structure that showed us how. He said it was important to know our final destination so we could steer a true course towards it. He claimed Shakespeare had a piece of advice for all aspiring writers. It was ‘All’s well that ends well.’
Unfortunately not all stories are able to end well and those that flirt closest to the truth are often less able than others. I said at the beginning that there were several ways in which I could end this story and I’d already decided. I think it will become fairly obvious which option I chose.
Prejudices and attitudes build up at their leisure over long periods of time and become entrenched. It takes more than one event to reverse them. Mr Gillespie and Mr Rycroft did the honourable thing, which took its own kind of courage. By arrangement with Captain Biggs, they stood up in chapel and publicly thanked Christian Berger for his bravery in saving the lives of Gary and Clarry, and apologised for their earlier behaviour. Their wives hugged and thanked him when the service was over. These actions contributed more than any newspaper article towards his belated acceptance. But for many, acceptance was not wholeheartedly given. Old wounds take long to heal and Christian Berger didn’t help his cause by waltzing off with Sister Gloria. People were outraged although they tried not to show it. I wasn’t the only one with a soft spot for her. I think everybody loved her in his or her own way. She represented everything that was good and pure, embodied everything aspirational about Christianity and the teachings of the Church Army and, I suppose, she also showed us the fundamental goodness that was within all of us. I don’t think there was a father in the parish who wouldn’t have put on his uniform once more and taken up arms to protect her. And the German had stolen her, stolen her from under their noses when, by all rights, if she was going to marry any man, he should at least have been an All Black. The German had no right to do that.
We also benefited from the revised attitudes towards Christian Berger. Customers who’d left us came back to the shop, some a bit sh
eepish but others seemed to think Mum should be grateful to receive their forgiveness. Fat chance. How Mum kept her composure I’ll never know.
Christian Berger stuck to his promise to Eric and me although he skipped a lot of detail from the middle of the war and went straight to the sinking of his U-boat. Time had become an issue and he was well aware of what we most wanted to hear. He told us how he’d been swept helplessly through the companionways of his sinking U-boat, how Gustav Richter had miraculously saved him from certain death, and how he’d had a fear of drowning ever since. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Tears streamed down Sister Gloria’s face and also Sister Kathleen’s. Sister Kathleen never cried, not even in movies. If Sister Gloria was the purity of Christianity, Sister Kathleen was its strength. But suddenly the courage Christian Berger had shown in the drain took on a whole new dimension. How brave was he? Seriously, how brave do you have to be to do what he did? His admission swept around the neighbourhood. Nigel reckoned he must have balls as big as watermelons.
Mr Holterman sat in with us and finally told the story of how he’d been shot down and lost his leg. I don’t have a copy of the essay I wrote about it. The day I finished it I dashed down the road to show it to him. I was really proud of it. Mr Holterman had a different way of telling his story. He overlaid it with ironic, often self-deprecating humour and I thought I’d captured the essence of it in my essay. Mr Holterman read it sitting in his big, overstuffed armchair in his gloomy lounge, with the pictures of him and his crew posed in front of his Lancaster resting on top of the dining table. He made me raise the blinds a bit so he could read it.
‘It’s good,’ he said.‘Very good and accurate, too. Might be the best you’ve written.’
I glowed, but not for long. Mr Holterman did exactly what Mack had done months earlier. He folded my essay in four and put it in his top pocket. When he saw the stunned, horrified look on my face he laughed.
‘It’s my story,’ he said. ‘You know the rules.’
There’s a lot I don’t remember about his tale and if I try to tell it I’ll probably confuse it with others I’d read. But there was one episode I’ll never forget. I was aware that Mr Holterman had a passion for coffee. I’d seen him making coffee in a percolator when I was playing at Bobby’s. The first time I had to ask what a percolator was because I’d never seen one before. Mr Holterman had let us watch the water bubble up the stem into the glass lid and gradually turn dark brown. He drank it black without sugar. He took his coffee into the living room where he could enjoy it in peace and let Bobby and me sample the few drops remaining in the pot. It tasted worse than medicine.
Before the dramas in the drain, Mr Holterman had taken to brewing a pot of coffee during the storytelling sessions, which he shared with Christian Berger who, of course, also shared his passion. It was a rare act of generosity because real coffee was extraordinarily expensive and hard to come by, but it was also a piece of theatre I’d never expected of him. I think he was actually paving the way for the climax of his story, for the day he told us how he’d been shot down and how he’d managed to survive the aftermath. He laughed about it. We all did. Christian Berger may have rescued Gary and Clarry from the drain but in hindsight there’s no doubt in my mind that he also rescued Mr Holterman. He pulled him out of his disappointment and gave him back his life.
Mr Holterman had acquired his love of coffee by mixing with American airmen stationed near his airbase. The Americans didn’t find it easy to socialise with British airmen, who resented their charm, good looks, smart uniforms and, of course, their pay. The Yanks had money, a seemingly endless supply of cigarettes, hard liquor and treats for the ladies. No wonder the Pommies resented them. Mr Holterman liked the Americans and enjoyed talking to them. They introduced him to coffee and from that point on he was addicted. He had nothing to give the Americans in exchange for coffee beans except his friendship. Ultimately that proved enough. They liked this convert to their national beverage to the point where one night they presented him with his own manual coffee grinder.
Mr Holterman shattered a few myths inspired by heroic British war movies when he told us how scared all bomber crewmen were of being shot down. They did their best not to think about getting killed but the prospect was inescapable when night after night friends and acquaintances failed to return. A lot of crewmen ended up in German prisoner-of-war camps and this fact inspired Mr Holterman to stuff a sealed bag of coffee beans inside his flight jacket before every mission, just in case. It became a standing joke and then a superstition, a talisman his crew wouldn’t let him take off without.
His Lancaster was shot down by a night-fighter en route to Berlin. He lost an engine, ailerons and a large section of his tailplane. Mr Holterman fought to hold the heavily laden plane steady as it dipped into a terminal dive, fought the controls to give his surviving crew a chance to jump out. When it began to corkscrew into a spin he abandoned ship and threw himself out into the night. He spoke of the calm he felt in the quiet and apparent stillness beneath his canopy as he watched his stricken bomber—at least the flames from it—as it spiralled into the ground and exploded. The calm ended abruptly when his parachute struck a tree and collapsed. A yard or so further on and he would’ve landed safely in a ploughed field. Instead he was flipped back up into the air as the silk caught on a branch and then dropped like a stone when it tore apart. He joked that the ground broke his fall. What really happened was that the ground broke his leg in four places.
As he lay winded he could see figures running towards him, backlit by the flames from his bomber and the incendiaries it had carried. Some of the figures carried torches. His first thought was that help was on its way, and God knows he needed it, when he realised the figures coming towards him were farmers and it wasn’t only torches they carried but pitchforks and axes. They seemed intent on finishing off what the night-fighter had begun. Mr Holterman had one of those ideas which seems ridiculous now but which was inspired back then. As the farmers reached him, cursing and abusing him in German, he reached into his flight jacket. They probably thought he had a pistol, and hesitated.
‘Coffee?’ said Mr Holterman.
The comment was so incongruous the Germans were stumped for a response. Mr Holterman produced his little package of coffee beans and offered it up to one of his would-be assailants.
‘Kaffe?’ The farmer took the package and sniffed it suspiciously. ‘Ja!’ he cried, amazed. ‘Kaffe!’ He handed the package around for others to sniff. ‘Kaffe!’ they all agreed. The farmers’ anger and desire for retribution were replaced by delight and astonishment. It was clear they’d gone a long time without. One farmer noticed Mr Holterman’s broken leg and made sympathetic comments. Any residual tension evaporated. They picked him up and gently carried him to a farmhouse where he was looked after while someone went to fetch the authorities.
As Mr Holterman dryly commented to us, ‘They wanted to kill me but it’s pretty hard to stick a pitchfork into someone who’s just offered you a coffee.’
Eric, of course, was mesmerised by Mr Holterman’s story. We immediately elevated coffee to our favourite drink, although the closest approximation we could get was Bushell’s Coffee & Chicory Essence, mixed with hot milk and a heap of sugar.
Three weeks after his heroics, Christian Berger left his digs at the Church Army and moved to Campbell’s Bay on the other side of Auckland Harbour, a ferry and long bus ride away. He joined Jitchak Kovacs, the Jew who’d been his cabinmate on the Rangitiki, and his brother and together set up an import and export agency. While the brother put up the capital, Christian Berger’s association with Gustav Richter was the ingredient that made their venture at first viable and then a success. I don’t know why Christian Berger chose to move across the harbour. Perhaps it was to put enough distance between himself and Richmond Road to make another fresh start possible, or maybe it was all he could afford. Effectively, he moved out of our lives.
In an ironic twist, Mr Holterman took the job th
at had originally been offered to Christian Berger and then withdrawn. I suspect Captain Biggs had a hand in the appointment. The storytelling sessions up at the Church Army had changed Mr Holterman. The grim, bitter, private man who never laughed had opened up to Christian Berger in ways previously unimaginable. He laughed a lot and told his story with humour. He revelled in the camaraderie. Christian Berger brought him back into the world to the point where the idea of going to work every day appealed. Maybe it was only as a clerk rather than as a pilot but it was a whole lot better than sitting alone and brooding in his gloomy living room.
Sister Gloria left the Church Army to no one’s great surprise. The photograph of her hugging the trouserless former U-boat captain on page three of the Herald made it impossible for her to remain. She returned home to live with her parents while arrangements were made for her wedding. Captain Biggs married them in the chapel one Saturday at the start of the cricket season. Eric and I had to skip a match to attend. Mack was best man and so proud of the fact his smile stayed glued to his face for days. The Herald sent a reporter and a photographer.
The following year, my parents converted their hardearned savings into two around-the-world airline tickets and went ‘home’ to visit their brothers and sisters. They were away for seven months while a much-loved, favourite aunt and her daughter (my first real girlfriend if you don’t count Judith) moved in to look after my brothers and me. When they returned from their trip, my parents had only one agenda—to leave Richmond Road. The storm may have blown itself out but I don’t think they ever got over the way people they’d regarded as friends and acquaintances had turned against them. Maybe some people who’d walked on past as I’d lain bloody and broken in the gutter hadn’t realised how seriously hurt I was, but others certainly had. They’d made a choice and for that Mum, especially, could not forgive.