The only good news was that Great Britain had acquired a new monarch who was worthy of the throne, with a commonsensical Queen beside him who knew how to make their lives enjoyable.
Just before Daniel had left for Christmas, a Christian family in Silesia had been successfully prosecuted for refusing to bring up their children as Nazis, and it was this that had finally convinced Daniel that his remaining days in Germany were few.
He had been writing to various motoring, aviation and engineering companies, offering himself for employment, whilst also looking into the possibility of setting up a new company himself, which he envisaged as being somewhere equidistant between Eltham and Hexham. So far, he had received encouraging responses from de Havilland, Supermarine, Triumph and Bristol, and discouraging ones from Ariel, Matchless and Nuffield. Brough’s said they would have loved to have him back, but that their future was at present too uncertain to know what their staffing requirements were likely to be. They had already been approached by the government with a view to suspending the manufacture of motorcycles, and converting to war work. Now that the Royal Air Force was being rapidly doubled in size, Daniel had also written to the Ministry of War to find out if he could be of any service.
The one thing holding him back was the residual loyalty he owed to Willy and Fritzl, and to Oily Wragge, who wanted to remain in Dortmund because he was happily embedded with his landlady, and greatly enjoyed his work.
Daniel himself had grown tired of Nazi Germany. Its philosophical certainties deeply perplexed and annoyed him, and it was burdensome having to keep one’s mouth shut. The Germans were suffering from a kind of drunkenness that resembled the revelations of someone who has been perched on a bar stool for eight hours, sorted out the universe in its entirety, and finally reached the stage of righteous bellicosity.
In Germany he had found no lasting love, and everything that had been fun in the early years had become either stale or forbidden. Furthermore, he had not been making any more money than he could have done if he had stayed at home, and this fact alone made all his efforts over the past few years seem wasted. All he had done was make it difficult to be with the ones he loved. He told himself that never again would he allow his life to veer off course on account of a broken heart. From now on he was to be immune. He would love when he loved, and wave a resigned but cheerful farewell when it was over. When he thought of Mary FitzGerald these days, it was without rancour or regret.
He had begun to feel a deep ache of nostalgia for home, a longing to be closer to his children, and was deeply tired of the thousands of miles he had to drive every year, along the same old routes, just in order to keep the love alive.
On the estate in Hexham, Daniel walked through the woodland with Felix holding one hand, and Felicity holding the other. Felix was nine, and Felicity was seven. Behind them by fifty yards strolled Gaskell and Christabel, earnestly discussing a forthcoming exhibition in Dublin. They were both in a fever of excitement and anticipation because the photographs and portraits included many nudes in suggestive postures, and the thought of being arrested and deported by the Garda for obscenity was wildly entertaining. The exhibition was to be private, but there were certainly ways to get themselves into trouble all the same. Gaskell thought it might be a fine wheeze to write an anonymous letter of protest to Cardinal Joseph MacRory, just to get the ball rolling.
The children’s hands felt very small in Daniel’s, and their noses were red and dripping on account of the December weather. There was a sharp north-east wind, and a cold spit of rain.
‘Uncle Daniel,’ said Felix, ‘is it true there’s going to be a war?’
‘I think so. But if there is, I hope that it happens soon.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you two would be too young to fight in it. You’d be fairly safe up here, I would think.’
‘I like fighting,’ said Felicity. ‘At school I’m always in trouble for fighting. I hurt my thumb once when I bashed Rebecca Stephens for stamping on my teddy.’
‘You punched someone? Gracious me! What a girl! When you punch someone, you should always tuck your thumb away behind your knuckles. But you wouldn’t like the bullets and bombs kind of fighting,’ said Daniel. ‘That’s almost entirely about who’s lucky and who isn’t.’
‘Will you be fighting?’ asked Felicity.
‘I hope so. But they will certainly tell me I’m too old, and then I’ll have to make a big fuss.’
‘Why do you want to fight, Uncle Daniel? I thought you said it wasn’t nice with bullets and bombs.’
‘It’s the most important thing you can do, fighting for what you know is right. Or what you think is right. And anyway, I’m forty-five years old. I’ve had an interesting life, and it wouldn’t be too awful to leave a bit early. I don’t really matter any more.’
‘I don’t want you to fight,’ said Felicity.
‘If you do fight, will you keep me some bullet cases, Uncle Daniel?’
‘Of course I will.’
‘Uncle Daniel?’
‘Yes, my love?’
‘Why’ve we got you instead of a father? Where’s our father? Felix and me want to go and find him. When we’re grown up. And where’s our real mother?’
‘You should say “Felix and I” when Felix and you are the subject of the sentence,’ said Daniel. ‘And I have no idea who your real mother and father are. But Auntie Christabel might know. And she might know what happened to them.’
‘And we want to know,’ said Felix, ‘if we have the same father and mother. Because if we’re adopted, why do we look the same?’
‘And Auntie Gaskell is a funny kind of aunt,’ said Felicity, following her own train of thought.
‘What do you mean? She’s the best aunt possible.’
‘She’s more like a “he”, isn’t she?’ said Felix. ‘She smokes a pipe and goes out shooting, and she’s got a great big man’s car. And she plays cricket.’
‘She’s still a she, and we all love her, whatever she’s like or not like, don’t we?’
The children nodded, and Daniel said, ‘Ooh, look, there’s a pair of buzzards.’ He pointed out the two enormous speckled birds that were wheeling above, calling to each other. They reminded him of two RE8s on a reconnaissance.
Felicity said, ‘Aunt Christabel lets us call her Mummy.’
‘Or Mum,’ added Felix.
‘Does she?’
Felicity looked up and said ‘Yes, she does. Uncle Daniel?’
‘Yes, my love?’
‘Can we call you Daddy?’
Daniel stood stock-still, his heart racing in his chest. ‘Why don’t we ask Auntie Christabel and Auntie Gaskell if it’s all right with them? We wouldn’t want to upset them, would we? Perhaps you could call me Daddiel, or Dannydad, or something.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Felicity firmly. ‘Those aren’t words.’
Felix put his hands in his pockets and screwed up his face thoughtfully. ‘You’re the same as a daddy though, aren’t you? You give us florins and birthday and Christmas presents, and you’re here an awful lot, and you take us out and hold our hands and tell us to look right, look left, look right again. I can’t tell the difference. What’s the difference between you and a proper daddy?’
‘And,’ said Felicity, ‘Esther and Bertie look like you, and you’re their daddy. And you look like us. Who would know that you actually weren’t?’
39
Oily Wragge (2)
It was mad, and it all got madder. The Krauts even started to have a special day called ‘Eintopftag’ and on that day you only ate one meal, and it was stew, and you gave the money you saved to the SS who came out rattling their tins, and it was supposed to go to something called ‘Winterhelp’ but it went for Hitlerhelp, in my estimation. And the police had a day every year, and it turned into a week once. There they w
ere, smiling and shaking hands and collecting money, and all the time there were stories everyone knew about, which was the police overturning court decisions, and doing torture, and taking gyppos into the woods and making people disappear, and getting rid of degenerates and parasites and Poles and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and talking about riff-raff who were unfit for community life, and poofters ‘committing suicide’ in prison. Then they started castrating the poofters, and suddenly if you nicked something, or if you couldn’t be arsed with the Hitlergruss, it was high treason.
I don’t know why we didn’t leave sooner. Well, I do. In fact we started talking about leaving after National Boycott Day, when you were supposed to avoid any Jewish shops. Captain Pitt said it was all getting out of hand and going too far, and we should pack up and go. He said there was going to be another war, because no one was bothering to prevent rearmament. He started having big rows with Willy and Fritzl, and it got in the way of running the business. The Captain gave up all that wandering about in the countryside singing songs. Those two wanted to have another bash at War and Captain Pitt didn’t endear himself by telling them they were a pair of loonies. Those two turned into parrots, just repeating slogans.
It was my fault that we didn’t leave sooner. I didn’t want to leave Baldhart behind, and the Captain said, ‘Well, Mr Wragge, why don’t you just marry her? Then we can take her with us.’
I said, ‘Sir, you know I’m married already, and I never got round to divorcing the cow,’ and he says, ‘Yes, but we can probably get it all sorted out at the Consulate,’ but I never did a thing because to tell the truth I’m not the marrying kind. Always got one eye open for what might be better, just coming along round the corner. We could have had a Kraut wedding and no one would’ve known about the last one, would they? And she would have got a visa. But I didn’t do it. And anyway, she wasn’t ready to give everything up and sell her precious house and go to Blighty. She didn’t speak English, and she was doing all right, and she had her friends right there, in the house with her.
The other thing is, we were earning good money, and that’s a bit hard to give up. Adolf got a grip, and fixed all the wages and prices, and put half the blokes in the army, and suddenly everybody had a job and a little bit of cash.
And another thing, Captain Pitt was exceedingly fond of that Jewish family he was staying with, and he was worried about them all the time. I know they loved him back, and those two girls used to look at him like he was John Gilbert or something. I don’t know if he ever had his way with them. He was somewhat lethal with women, but they were a bit young, and he wasn’t much of a chancer.
Everything got turned around in about 1935. There was a law all about the protection of German Blood and Honour. Herr Wolff got sacked from his job, and his mates who sacked him told him confidentially that he could continue to teach his Jewish students at his own house as long as they didn’t know about it, and so that’s what he did. It was proper lucky that his books had all been translated, because that way he got money from America. He gave me a couple of books, because he wanted to show his gratitude, and in the end books were all he had left. Look. This one’s called The Analysis of Atomic Propositions, and this one’s The Nature of Scientific Progress, and this one here is called Rudolf Carnap and the Epistemological Paradox of Logical Positivism. I mean, look at the first sentence. I don’t even know what a proposition is if it isn’t making a suggestive suggestion. I can’t make head nor tail of it. I can hardly read anyway. But that professor was a nice old codger and he wrote me a dedication in each one, and that’s the only bit of those books I ever get round to reading. Captain Pitt had actually met someone that the professor used to write to, on a train to Cambridge. Small world.
It was at that time that Captain Pitt started telling the Prof that he had to leave, but the Prof said that Adolf was too nasty and too mad to last for very long. The Captain said, ‘You’re wrong there.’
But the Prof was like Baldhart. He had a nice house he’d lived in for years, and he didn’t want to go when he had nothing to go to. He said, ‘But this is my homeland; I’m a Jewish German, not a German Jew,’ and when he said that, he had tears in his eyes, and he had the Iron Cross to prove it, always pinned to his chest to give the bastards who abused him something to think about. He just stayed there and twiddled his thumbs whilst all his mates, like that Einstein with the mad hair, got up and left. The Captain said he should apply for a job at a proper posh university, like Princeton or Cambridge.
Well, it just got worse. The Prof got so poor that he had to sell his car. What happened was that Jews suddenly had to have a special number plate, so that when you drove around people could spit at you and throw stones, so what Captain Pitt did was that he bought that car off Herr Wolff, and then lent it back to him. The Prof had to go and register his wealth, and it was obvious they were going to take it off him one of these days.
They had a damned great bonfire of paintings in the square in Dortmund. Jewish and Degenerate Art, it supposedly was. And then they burned a load of books, and the Prof said they even burned his, and he said actually there was no point in burning books, because you’d never get every copy, would you? And you’d never get every Jew, would you?
And all the time the people got madder and madder, doing physical jerks in public and putting up statues of blokes with huge muscles and tiny dicks, and marching around to brass bands and singing songs, and they took a lump out of Czechoslovakia, and the SS wiped out the SA, just massacred all the leaders. One day I suddenly noticed that all the little carts that sold books in the streets had gone, and you could only buy one newspaper when there used to be hundreds. I liked those little carts. I liked looking at that Gothic script I couldn’t make head nor tail of.
A lot of Jews became U-boats. That’s what they called them. They just slipped out of sight under the surface. But you couldn’t do that if you had a wife and two daughters.
What did it in the end was Reichskristallnacht. I heard it all going on, and Baldhart and I stayed in because we didn’t like what we were seeing from the windows. There were trucks of Nazis going round smashing all the shops and windows on Jewish premises, and then getting back on the trucks and going off to smash up somewhere else. There was shouting and jeering and wailing and crashing and banging, and smoke drifting through the streets, and the police did absolutely nothing. Just folded their arms and stood and watched. A lot of Jews got beaten up, including the Prof, and Captain Pitt got whacked on the head with a cosh when he tried to intervene. He’s still got the scar on his forehead where he fell down and got cut. Then they gave him a kicking, and then they took the car. They didn’t smash it up or anything, they just stole it. It was a Hansa-Lloyd, really beautiful it was, and it was Herr Wolff’s pride and joy. Everything in that big beautiful house did get smashed, though, and luckily the girls and the mother were up in the attic behind the chimney stack under a heap of old carpets, because God knows what might have been done to them otherwise.
It was the worst thing I can remember that didn’t actually happen in a war. And you know what? Hitler said he was going to fine the Jews a billion marks to pay for all the repairs. Well, I suppose he had a sense of humour.
It was after that that the Gestapo turned up at the workshop and demanded to see Captain Pitt. They didn’t kick the door down for once because we had big double doors and they were open. We had about ten men working for us by then, and they all just stopped work and looked up with their spanners in their hands.
There were three Gestapo, and one was tall and thin and one was a bit short and fat, and the other had glassy eyes, like he was on something, and they walked straight up to Captain Pitt and gave him the Hitlergruss, and he just held out his hand for them to shake, and that got them confused, but it softened them up, and they shook it anyway, and they said, ‘Herr Kapitän, we have a proposition. Either you help us with the Luftwaffe, or we lock you up, or you get on your motorcyc
le and go home,’ and Captain Pitt said, ‘Where’s your warrant?’ and the thin man reached inside his coat and brought out a pistol. He waved it in the air and smiled, and said, ‘We are the Gestapo. Here is my warrant, Herr Kapitän.’ Then he pointed it at the Captain’s face, smiled again, and said, ‘My friends here also have a warrant’, and he turned to them and said, ‘Nicht wahr?’ and they smiled and took out their pistols.
‘You’ve come too late,’ said the Captain.
‘Too late?’ said the thin man.
‘Yes,’ said the Captain, ‘I’d already decided to leave.’
‘Das ist aber schade,’ said the thin man. ‘You would have had a good welcome in the Luftwaffe,’ and he put his gun back in his pocket.
‘I’ll be gone in a week,’ said the Captain.
‘And are you taking this man with you,’ he said, nodding his chin at me, and I said, ‘Of course I’m going. If he goes, I go.’ My Kraut was pretty good by then, so I said it in Kraut, you understand.
After that it was a mad rush. We didn’t get on with Willy and Fritzl any more, because you couldn’t talk things over with them. They just shouted and strutted about and talked a load of balls because they’d got that Hitler up their backsides like they’d sat on hedgehogs, and they went on and on at Captain Pitt about how he shouldn’t be lodging with Jews. There was no more getting pissed together and it wasn’t fun any more. It was just business. At least they were decent enough to go to the bank and they got enough cash to buy the Captain out of the business, and they handed it over with a little bow and without a word, and that was the end of nigh on twenty years’ friendship.
So Much Life Left Over Page 23