by Lawton, John
Rod looked at him, angrily, Troy thought. They rarely understood one another.
‘But you do know, don’t you, Freddie. ’Cos you’re the one banging them up. So, brer, don’t take your guilt out on me, just tell me the truth. How many little Hitlers have you found in the last few weeks?’
Troy thought of Billy Jacks and smiled.
‘Well . . . mostly you’ll be sharing digs with Italian chefs and Jewish tailors. But take it from me . . . one or two of those really will be little Hitlers.’
As the train moved off, Rod yanked on the leather strap, sent the window clattering down, stuck his head out and yelled, ‘Tell Cid . . .’
But the train chose that moment to let rip with a head of steam, and whatever it was Troy had to tell Mrs Rodyon Troy was lost in the great black cavern of St Pancras’s engine shed. Over Rod’s shoulder Troy could almost swear he’d seen a pair of eyes glaring out at him from the darkness of the carriage.
The train chugged out of the engine shed. Troy watched until the lamp on the last carriage became a dot and disappeared. His brother had waved until the curve in the track leading to Kentish Town had obscured his view, and Troy had thought of a lifetime of arrivals and departures, of a common childhood spent at docks and railway stations and aerodromes, of a big brother with whom he was usually at loggerheads and often felt he hardly knew. It seemed possible now that he might never know him. It seemed odd in the extreme that Rod had waved like a schoolboy packed off for the new term.
Something small and warm appeared to be attached to him, and as the noise dipped he could hear a small, high voice saying, ‘Bye . . . Bye bye.’
The child was still waving at the back of the train.
Troy said, ‘Your mum promised to meet you, did she?’
‘Not ’zackly. I wrote and said she was to meet me please.’
Troy led her back down the platform, towards his car.
‘When did you post the letter?’
‘Las’ night just before I got on the train. There was a pillar box on the platform.’
‘Stepney, you said.’
‘S’right. I’m a Stepney Stunner, I am. Me mum says if we lived in Bow I’d be a Bow Belle, but we lives in Stepney so I’m a Stepney Stunner.’
The space around his car had cleared. Kids had been met and collected. Instead a group of soldiers in khaki were sat in front of his Bullnose Morris, perched on kitbags, smoking and dealing cards. He reversed neatly away from them, under the arch, spun the car around on the ramp and set off again in the direction of Stepney.
‘We goin’ ’ome now, are we?’
‘Yes. Just tell me where you live.’
The girl looked at the numbered tag on her tweed jacket as though needing to be reminded not of where she lived but of the official record of living somewhere.
‘Child number 1155, female, White Horse Lane, Stepney Green, London E1. Sept. 2nd 39. dob. 3.8.30.’
Troy dodged an errant cyclist as they crawled up the Pentonville Road, then said, ‘September 2nd? Is that how long you’ve been gone?’
‘Yeah. Ages. Wonder I don’t sound bloomin’ Welsh, init?’
She launched into what Troy took to be a mickey take of her recent foster mother.
‘Eat it up now, ’cos if you don’t there’s plenty of little gurrls’ll be glad of it. What do you mean “gristle”! ’Ow durr you call my best streaky bacon gristle!’
Pulling into White Horse Lane Troy asked what number, and when she said 11a stepped so hard on the brake they both shot forward.
‘What did you say your name was?’
‘Child 1155, but really I’m Sallie Jacks.’
Oh shit, thought Troy, oh shit, oh shit.
Judy Jacks yanked open the door, and before she could take in the whole scene had said, ‘Oh no, not you again.’
Then she had spotted her daughter, peeking coyly behind Troy’s back, snatched her from him, smothered her in kisses, and finally said, ‘Where did you find her?’
‘At St Pancras. She was wandering around looking for you.’
‘What, at the station just now?’
‘Half an hour ago,’ said Troy.
‘Then it’s a wonder she didn’t bump into her dad. Walter Stilton came round at breakfast, told him he was taking him an’ Joe this morning for a ten thirty train. Bangin’ ’em up in chokey they are. You know, Troy, you should be ashamed of yourself! You should be bloody well ashamed of yourself!’
The door slammed in his face. He had always loved Judy’s eyes. And then he recalled with nagging clarity the two eyes that had bored into him from the darkness as Rod stood soft and sentimental in the carriage window.
§ 101
There is a short tunnel just north of St Pancras that plunges a train into momentary darkness and the smell of soot and steam. A sensation little different in the spring of 1940 from what it was in the spring of 1868 when the station opened. Only the novelty has worn off. Passengers, or, in this case, prisoners, still emerge from it blinking and slightly startled. The parting is over, the adventure has not yet begun – far too early to look at one another. One would not do that much before West Hampstead, and one would certainly be un-English to speak much before St Albans – and these men, foreigners all, are all keen to be English.
Packed in four-a-side, the outsiders watched London crawl from boroughs to suburbs to countryside. Kentish Town and Cricklewood, Mill Hill and Hendon, Elstree and Radlett. Insiders read posters advertising the attractions of Matlock Bath and Monsal Dale. Rod read that morning’s copy of the Post. He was the only one with the foresight to pack a newspaper, although the chap next to him had gone one better and brought a book – two books to be precise: J.B. Priestley’s The Good Companions and an English-German German-English dictionary. He bent to his book as soon as the light returned, and seemed to Rod to be curiously content, humming, as he was, softly to himself. Priestley had begun broadcasting to the nation only a week or so ago, on the Home Service after the nine o’clock news on a Sunday night. It seemed obvious, reasonable, that a foreigner seeking a handle on the English language might begin with the momentarily most famous novelist we had – although what he might make of life in Bruddersford was another matter.
Round about Market Harborough Rod was onto the letters page and became oddly conscious of being watched. Opposite him was a short, dark, angry – oh so angry – man glaring at him with big brown eyes. A homburg crammed onto his head, his belongings in a battered gladstone bag, clutched between his knees. The worst case of five o’clock shadow at eleven-thirty in the morning that Rod had ever seen. Only the suit gave him away. It was too good. Surely this man had to be one of the Jewish tailors that his brother had flung in his face at parting? And what was it he’d said about little Hitlers?
Pulling out of Loughborough, across the dull plain of the English midlands, at about ten past one, Rod had exhausted every inch of print in his paper and would have paid ten pounds for a copy of Reveille or the Beano. He folded the Post and offered it silently to the man opposite.
The man looked at the folded paper as though it were some kind of weapon, then he looked straight at Rod and said, ‘That copper.’
Rod realised he was expected to deduce something from this and said, ‘Yes?’
‘That copper what saw you off.’
‘Yeeess,’ Rod said slowly, wondering where this was leading.
‘Friend o’ yours?’
‘Well . . . no . . . actually he’s my brother.’
Now Rod was aware that they were both looking at him – the man opposite and the man next to him.
‘It was him nicked us. Him what banged up me an’ Hummer here. Ain’t that so Hummer?’
Hummer hummed and nodded.
Oh shit, thought Rod, oh shit, oh shit.
The little man leaned forward, one stubby finger stabbing at the space about halfway between them.
‘So, if you’re a copper’s brother, what the hell are you doin’ here? Spyin’ on us?’<
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Rod babbled something about being a prisoner just like them, but the humming man cut him short and said something in Yiddish, very quickly. So quickly that he had to repeat it when the angry man looked uncomprehending.
‘You’re kidding,’ he said in English. Then he turned to Rod and said, ‘Then we’d better introduce ourselves. Billy Jacks, tailor of Stepney Green.’
Rod had no idea what had defused the situation, and was simply grateful that something had. He stretched out his hand, ‘Rod Troy, journalist of Hampstead.’
Billy shook the hand and nodded his head in the direction of the man next to Rod.
‘And this is ’Ummer. Leastways I call him ’Ummer. Real name’s Hummel. He don’t say much but he hums a lot.’
Rod shook hands with Hummer, still wondering what the man had said, regretting that a sound knowledge of German still left him baffled by Yiddish idiom, never guessing that it had been, ‘Leave him alone, Billy. He’s one of the good guys. I knew him the moment he got on board. He’s the big Englishman who saved me from the SA on Kristallnacht.’
And neither Hummer nor Billy translated for him.
§ 102
At Derby they were allowed to stretch their legs. Soldiers lined the platform – locals, civilian and free, peeked through to look at the motley threat, this fearsome horde of pastry chefs and tailors, the detritus swept in from Europe. The prisoners strolled around under the dirty, blacked-out glass canopy, high equinoctial sunlight slanting in through the gaps where the paint had peeled. A summer’s afternoon in the railway heart of England, huge whooshes of steam from all directions, the earth-shaking rattle of steel on steel, the roar of heat and smoke. The thunder of manufacture beating ploughshares into railway engines. Derby. A place Rod had never bothered to imagine, a place he felt sure many of his fellow passengers had never even heard of.
They had begun to know one another. Mr Jacks the tailor, once released from his animosity, had been most forthcoming – he had told Rod about the unfortunate accident of his birth, how unfortunate to find that he was German (Rod had been able to tell him all about the history of Danzig that had made his birth so unfortunate) and mercifully he had asked Rod no more questions about his brother – he surely would later, but for now it was a small mercy gratefully received. The man he called Hummer had retreated back into his novel and his dictionary – ‘Din’t speak a word when he got here,’ Billy Jacks had told him. ‘Now he soaks it up like hot jelly poured on sponge cake. Says bugger all for days, then he comes out with a string of long words the half of which he can’t pronounce proper, on account he’s only ever seen ’em written down, the other half of which I don’t understand in the first place.’ Rod had learnt that Hummer was a refugee from Vienna. He’d like to talk to him about Vienna if he ever surfaced from Bruddersford. Perhaps they knew the same parts? Perhaps they’d been there at the same time? The chap in the far corner, diagonally opposite Rod, had introduced himself. A Berlin Jew named Rosen who’d had the foresight to get out in 1933. The two blokes next to Hummer spoke no English, did not respond to Jacks’ cockney Yiddish, and spoke in polysyllabics that Rod could not place anywhere on the map of Europe. If he’d been sitting next to them Rod thought he might run the gamut of his European tongues and have a go at them in his decent French and his far from decent Polish. As a last resort he might even talk to them in his native Russian. Next to Jacks was an Italian chef from Soho, a Mr Spinetti, who baked pastries at Quaglino’s (Rod had eaten plenty of them in his time), who spoke English as well as Rod or Billy Jacks. Next to him, between him and Rosen, was a man in his sixties who looked at them all, responded with his eyes, blinking blue behind gold-rimmed spectacles, and the occasional nod, but would not or could not speak despite the obvious understanding he had of what they were saying.
Misunderstanding the nature of the occasion, the nature of his charges, a uniformed sergeant had yelled out, ‘You may smoke!’ Most of them were anyway, lighting up one cigarette from another and flicking the butts onto the track. The silent man was at the platform’s edge, staring down at the tracks. The rails began to rattle and hum with the approach of an express. He turned and looked at Rod as though he had somehow felt Rod’s eyes upon him. Then he straightened up, tugged his jacket neatly and strode over, hand outstretched.
‘Hugo Klemper. How pleasant to know you.’
Rod took the hand, wondered at the inflection of what the man had said. It sounded like parrot-work poorly learnt, too much emphasis on the first syllable, rising too high at the end of the sentence, as though the ‘how’ were the question it wasn’t.
‘Professor of Electrical Engineering, Dresden.’
‘Rod Troy, I’m a journalist,’ Rod began, but before he could reciprocate full chapter and verse, Herr Klemper had moved on to shake hands with Jacks.
‘Hugo Klemper. How pleasant to know you.’
It was breath for breath the same sentence. As though they had dialled up the speaking clock and got that infuriatingly precise woman with her infuriatingly unvarying vowels.
‘Professor of Electrical Engineering, Dresden.’
Again, as soon as Jacks could rattle off the potted version of life as a single occupation, Klemper had moved on, to waste his words on the men who spoke no known language, and, seeking out everyone he shared the compartment with, Herr Rosen and Hummer, both of whom he addressed in English despite the common bond of German.
‘Hugo Klemper. How pleasant to know you.’
The tracks hummed louder.
‘Professor of Electrical Engineering, Dresden.’
The tannoy crackled to life and a woman’s voice told passengers on Platform 1 to stand well back as the 2.25 to Sheffield passed.
Then Rod knew. This had not been a formal introduction, it had been a summary farewell. He lunged for Klemper, only to find Jacks and Hummer had him by his jacket. He watched, submerged in the rush and roar, silent inside the bubble of noise, as Klemper stepped off the platform and vanished under the train.
§ 103
It was, Rod thought, a form of madness. Each side going mad in its own way. The panic among the prisoners more than matched by the reaction of the troops, advancing on the helpless, hysterical captives as though they had themselves been attacked, rifles at waist height, barrels aiming into the crowd, boots banging down, sergeant and corporal barking orders. They herded them back across the platform to their own train, shoving them back inside and slamming the doors.
Somehow they flowed around Rod. At six feet two it seemed odd they should miss him, and suddenly he found himself behind enemy lines, looking down the track for a sign of Klemper. Twenty yards down the platform, Spinetti emerged from the gents, ‘’Ere, what’s all the commotion?’ and ‘Bloody Hell’ as he caught sight of the remains of Klemper. He leaned into the wall of the gents to throw up. Rod ran towards him, but by now the soldiers had spotted him, and two of them stepped in front of him and slapped their rifle barrels across his chest.
‘Let me through,’ Rod said softly.
‘Back on the train, mate, back on the train.’
Rod pointed down the track to Klemper’s mangled corpse.
‘Good God, man, do you have no decency?’
The received pronunciation, the clipped speech of the officer class seemed to hit an automatic deference in them. They followed him down the platform. Spinetti was pale and groping around desperately in his pockets for a cigarette. Klemper was in three pieces, one arm, his head and then the rest.
‘See,’ said one of the Tommies. ‘Ain’t nuffink you could do.’
‘Then perhaps it should be one of you. Get down onto the track, find his papers and see that someone informs his family.’
They were staring at the blood – a crimson slick a yard across, seeping into the limestone chips between the sleepers. Rod jumped down, put a hand inside Klemper’s jacket and pulled out his wallet. Willing hands helped him back to the platform, but none would take the blood-stained wallet from him. Rod opened
it, two ten-shilling notes, a letter from the Ministry classifying him as a Category C Alien, a blue-grey National Identity Card bearing an address in Willesden, a buff-yellow ration book . . . and nothing else. Not a single personal item.
‘What was you expecting?’ said a Tommy.
‘I don’t know,’ said Rod. ‘Letters, a photograph, some memento of a wife or child. Some sense of family.’
‘Maybe he got no family?’
Then Rod realised. They had been his family. Seven total strangers on a train. Seven men whose names and jobs he had to know before he died or die alone. Rod let himself be shepherded back and, with Spinetti all but thrown in behind him, the train started up once more, northward. Out of Derby, criss-crossing the Derwent every few miles, bridges and tunnels all but beyond number, for Manchester and points north.
§ 104
’Why?’ said Billy, for the umpteenth time. ‘Why would he just . . . bleedin’jump?’
For the umpteenth time Rod declined to answer. It seemed hubristic in the presence of so many refugees for this debate to be taking place between the compartment’s resident Englishmen. But Rosen, after twenty minutes or more, had recovered his composure and seemed combative enough to want to answer.
‘Mr Jacks, I heard you say you have lived your whole life here. Am I right?’
‘Yeah. My old man brought me over when I was a nipper. Before I’d even learnt to speak. He was a Pole. I thought I was a Pole, when I didn’t think I was English that is. Suddenly . . . I’m German . . .’
‘Ja, ja. It is so. But you have never been back to Germany?’
‘Course not.’
‘Then you cannot possibly know. I was a prisoner of the Nazis for only a few weeks in 1933. The Oranienburg camp near Berlin. It is closed now, but worse have arisen in its place. The experience was enough to make me leave for good. I was lucky that I could leave. Many who go into the camps are never seen again.’