We spent a few hours getting the Broughs shipshape, and then the Captain went home to the Wolffs.
It turned out that those same three Gestapo had turned up at the Wolffs’ and told them to get out of the house because they were enemies of the state, and the house was going to be sold at auction. And then the thin one got out forty marks, and he gave ten to each of them, and he said, ‘That’s for the house, because when you leave you’re only allowed ten marks each.’
So the Wolffs had a week to sell just about everything they had, and obviously they got bugger all because everyone knew they were desperate, and there was a glut on the market because of all the other Jews having to bugger off, and people wouldn’t give them anything anyway because their stuff was contaminated with Jewishness. Luckily that Herr Wolff wasn’t stupid, and he’d been taking money out of the bank for a year and hiding it away, and this is what we did: he could only take out ten marks, but me and the Captain could take out as much as we wanted, so when we were getting the Broughs ready we stashed all his lucre inside panels, and we folded it up and put it down inside the forks, and we even took the tyres off and put notes between the inner tubes and the outer, and we found plenty of scope on the sidecars. The Captain welded false floors into both of them. Those Broughs were mobile bank vaults by the time we finished.
Herr Wolff wanted to go to Palestine, but it cost something like a thousand quid that you had to hand over to the Brits, and everyone else was asking for visas and having waiting lists and demanding payments, and it was just impossible, so the Captain went to the British Consul, who was weighted down already with people wanting visas, with damn great queues going round the block, and half of them had musical instrument cases in their hands, but luckily that Consul knew about the Captain because he was famous for being an ace, and the Captain had what you might call the habit of command, and he harassed that Consul until he had visas for the Wolffs. He said he had a guaranteed offer of employment for Herr Wolff back in Blighty, because there was a terrible great shortage of logical positivists in the Midlands. Of course that Consul didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, and he got so fed up with the embuggerance he was getting from the Captain that he came up with visas in a couple of days.
There were four Wolffs and two of us, and that meant three on each Brough, with one on the pillion and another in the sidecar. We couldn’t take hardly any luggage, and we couldn’t take Baldhart even if we’d wanted to. We had to get those Jews out, that was the important thing. And Baldhart wouldn’t have come anyway. She didn’t have a passport, and she was still thinking everything would be all right, and she wasn’t very short of cash any more, and she didn’t speak a word of English, or even French, and by that time a lot of the shine had worn off, and we were just like any other couple, sort of just rubbing along.
Even so, we spent that last week in bed, because suddenly it all means more when one of you’s about to go, and on the last night she took that rubber off me and said, ‘Shall I wash it as usual, or shall I just throw it away?’ and I said, ‘Wash it, because I’m a coming back after the war,’ and she said, ‘What war?’ and I said, ‘Liebchen, you know there’s going to be a war,’ and she hung her head and started to cry.
* * *
—
Well, I can’t cope with a weeping woman, it makes me choke, and I started to feel sorry for her. I stroked her hair and I said, ‘Ich liebe dich,’ and you know what? It was actually the first time I ever said it, in any language, and she said, ‘Ich weiss es. Ich liebe dich auch.’
I said, ‘After the war I’ll come back and find you, and we’ll get married, because I can’t imagine being wed to anyone but you.’ And there were tears in my eyes.
‘It’s not too late to have children,’ she said, and she gave me a little smile. ‘I think I could have one.’
I nodded at that ugly old rubber that had done us some good service over the years, and said, ‘Might as well throw that away then.’
And there we were, pissed and in a state of nature, all clasped together tight, crying, and saying, ‘After the war, after the war, after the war’, and when I left at dawn she was still fast asleep, and I kissed her on the temple, and I had this ring I’d bought from Mrs Wolff to help her out when she had no money for food, and I left it there for Baldhart on her dressing table.
40
Oily Wragge (3)
I had Herr Wolff and one daughter on my Brough, and the Captain had the other daughter and Frau Wolff, and we rode across the Rhineland. That countryside was just about as beautiful as I have ever seen in my life, what with castles up on hills, and old towns sitting like ducks on the edges of rivers, and all those vineyards, but it was seething with soldiers and military trucks, and that’s when I fully realised, with absolutely certainty, that it was war again. It was proof enough.
It pelted with rain a lot of the time, and when it got too bad, we just stopped, because you can’t keep going with rain running down your goggles, and the Captain and I were used to all that kind of thing, but the Wolffs just got too miserable. The girls quite liked all the riding, but the older Wolffs hated it. They’d been used to a nice big limousine, hadn’t they? The girls went pillion, and the Wolffs went in the sidecars, and what little luggage there was was strapped to the racks on the back end of the sidecars, and we had throw-overs between the seats on the Broughs. We did everything in hops, quite a long way each time, but not too far. Luckily there were lots of barns, and some of the farmers were friendly, at least ’til they realised the Wolffs were Jews. I’d say they’d caught the sickness in the countryside even worse than they had in towns. Some of the villages had signs up that said ‘Jews Unwelcome’.
The Captain said it was nice having a lovely young girl up behind him for hundreds of miles, with her arms around his waist. I got the second-best girl as my pillion, surprise surprise, but still, I was happy enough.
We went through Essen and Duisburg, not too far really, and then when we got to the Kraut side of Venlo, the Captain said we were going south and over a smaller border post. He said the little ones out in the sticks were much easier to get through. By the time we’d got close to Venlo the roads were full of poor exhausted stragglers with their cardboard cases and bicycles and even wheelbarrows, and they were all headed for the border like us. I was right sorry I couldn’t give anyone a lift, they were that pathetic.
The Captain took us a few miles south and then down a road called the Rabenstrasse, and there wasn’t much going on at that border post. There was a guard reading the Völkischer Beobachter and another one eating a sandwich, and one on the barrier, and he hadn’t even shaved properly, the lazy bastard. He wasn’t soldierlike.
Well, they looked at the passports, and the Captain even had two, because he was half French, and they looked at the visas the Wolffs had, and then they didn’t bother me and the Captain because at that time Adolf was still thinking we were going to be on his side. Exactly the same mistake as the Kaiser. They tipped everything out of the luggage bags and the Wolffs’ pockets, and they searched inside their clothes, but all they found was ten marks each. And then the half-shaved one said, ‘I’m sorry, Herr Kapitän, you and your friend are all right, but these Untermenschen don’t have the proper exit papers.’
‘What exit papers?’ asks the Captain. ‘I thought you wanted the Jews to leave,’ and the guard says, ‘They still need proper exit papers’, and it goes on like this until the Captain suddenly twigs, and he takes a wad of marks out of his wallet and he divides it into three, and that does the trick. The bags get repacked, and up goes the barrier.
We get about five miles into Holland, and then Herr Wolff indicates that he wants to stop, and he gets out and he kneels down and kisses the earth, and then he gets up and shakes my hand, and shakes the Captain’s hand, and then the girls and their mother want to shake our hands, but the Captain takes their hands when they hold them out, and he bows do
wn and kisses them. Sometimes he had so much charm it was actually annoying. Then the Wolffs go into a sort of huddle in a circle, and a strange noise comes out, and I realise they’re all crying and wailing.
It was freedom, and safety, and relief, I suppose, and losing their homeland and everything they ever had. I felt like that when the Light Horse turned up and I got released from that labour camp on the railway in Turkey, except I still had a homeland to go to.
In Eindhoven the Captain sent a telegram to the Fairheads: BRINGING FOUR REFUGEES STOP TEMPORARY STOP GOOD PEOPLE STOP DANIEL, and then it was off to Antwerp and Bruges. The Captain wanted to go and see all the places in Flanders he’d been in the Royal Flying Corps, and visit the grave of his friend Ash, but I said, ‘Give over, sir, we’ve got to get these characters to Blighty. We’ve got no time for flippin’ tourism.’ I think he knew it was a pretty daft idea because he gave in straight away.
They winched the Broughs aboard at Calais, and by the end of the following day we were in Blackheath, and it was all avenues lined with conker trees, and mothers out with prams, and there was Miss Sophie and Fairhead, looking the same but older, with cakes all ready in the living room and the kettle full and waiting to boil, and beds made up upstairs, and a game of cricket going on just over the road. No damned great posters about Blood and Fatherland. It was so peaceful and nice, it hardly seemed real.
I asked the Captain why he’d brought them to Fairhead and Miss Sophie, and not to Miss Rosie, and he said, ‘Because Fairhead and Sophie are proper Christians.’
‘What’s a proper one, then?’ I asked, and he said, ‘They do the deeds.’
Well, it turned out that the Fairheads and the Wolffs got on really well, and it was because Herr Wolff didn’t believe a damn thing out of the Bible, and Fairhead was a chaplain with doubts. They set to and argued about it for months until Herr Wolff got too good at English and Fairhead couldn’t keep up with all the philosophical jargon. Mrs Wolff couldn’t stop cleaning the house, she was such a tittlemouse, so Miss Sophie put her feet up and read magazines. The two girls liked it in Blackheath because everybody felt sorry for them and treated them nicely, and the prettier one was more than a bit happy because the Captain kept turning up to see how everybody was getting on, and they developed this tendency to take the dog and go out together and walk on the heath. That dog was called Crusty, on account of having been very scabby in his youth. He was lucky, the Captain, he looked a lot younger than he was. Always did. I always looked older than I was, until I got to the age that I looked like.
Miss Sophie and Fairhead were sorry when the bombing started, because it was decided that the Wolffs would go up and stay in Hexham with Miss Gaskell and Miss Christabel. They had a huge great house with no one in it, apart from all the refugee tiddlers, and no one was going to bomb a country house outside Hexham, were they? Not on purpose, anyway. And then Miss Sophie went up there as well, to set up her little dame school in that house, and Fairhead came up when he could for a while, until he shut up that house in Blackheath, just for the duration, and went and got the chaplaincy in a hospital nearby.
And then Herr Wolff had a bright idea and he went to Oxford and he called in on all the logical positivists that were nineteen to the dozen there in those days, and before you could say knife they were all on a ship to America, and he ended up in some posh university getting paid handsomely for talking complicated folderol for the rest of his days. I think it was the one where that Einstein went. The Captain had a thing about Einstein. He kept trying to explain relativity to me, because I’m not stupid, but I never did understand it, and now I wonder if the Captain did either.
As for the Captain, when Hitler marched into Poland he went straight to the War Office and demanded to go back into the RAF. He was like me. Not being at war never felt quite right. It made us proper uneasy. It was like being in one of those gigantic department stores, with stuff everywhere, and no money to buy it with and no reason to choose one thing rather than another. War makes everything simple. There’s a tunnel in front of you and you put your head down, and you struggle forward for the light at the end of it, one bloody impossible step at a time, and that frees you up somehow.
What I did was I went to Liverpool Street Station and I got on a train to Norwich, and I walked a good mile or two to Britannia Barracks, up on the side of the hill, and it hadn’t changed a bit. I said to the guard on the gate, ‘Sergeant Wragge reporting for duty,’ and he said, ‘Bless my soul, another one,’ and he pointed me towards the sergeants’ mess even though I knew where it damn well was.
Well, the Sergeant Major says, ‘You’re too old,’ and I roll up my sleeve and I show him my tattoo of Britannia with ‘2nd Norfolks’ under it, and my right tit with ‘HOLY’ written round it, and my left tit with ‘BOYS’ written round that, and I say, ‘Listen, bor, I was a Barnardo boy, and I was at Shaiba and Basra and Kut. I got through Kut, and I got through a blinkin’ death march for two thousand miles, and I got through a Turkish slave camp where they worked us to death, and I have been shot in the arse by a mad old woman who thought I was a pigeon, and I even drove a Brough Superior, which is the biggest and heaviest bike in the world, with two up and one in the sidecar from Krautland to flippin’ Blackheath, and that was only last year,’ and he blows his lips and says, ‘Tough old bugger then,’ and I says, ‘Yes, I am a tough old bugger and I am a Holy Boy of the 9th Foot, and the Norfolks is my regiment, and the 2nd is my battalion, and there has never been a better man with a bayonet, and I am not bloody leaving ’til I’m back in.’
41
Where They All Were
On the morning of Sunday, 3 September 1939, the Reverend Fairhead came home from conducting a service at the hospital, to find Sophie waiting for him in the hall, seated on the cupboard bench inside of which they stored their useful rubbish, such as wrapping paper and Christmas decorations. When he came in he said, ‘Hello, darling, what are you doing sitting there?’
Sophie stood up, put her arms around his neck and began to sob.
In Brighton, Archie Pitt poured himself a stiff glass of gin, even though it was only time for elevenses, and pulled the plug for his single-bar heater from the one electrical socket in the wall. He plugged in the radio, and caught the Prime Minister’s broadcast just in time. It was like the sound of a bugle to an old cavalry horse. He stood up slowly, poured the gin back into its bottle, and went to look at himself in the mirror. Shaven, tatty, pathetically thin, but upright and respectable. He took his black air-raid precautions helmet from its hook on the back of the door, brushed a speck of dust from it with his fingers, and went out to report for duty, no longer a humble roadsweeper.
At the home of their decadent friends in Lewes, Christabel and Gaskell were draped over the sofas, nursing their hangovers. Felix and Felicity had got themselves up and given themselves breakfast and were wrenching quinces from the tree, to throw at each other. Their sibling screams of ‘I hate you, I hate you’ were ringing out over the river valley, from which an early-autumn mist had begun to evaporate. After they had listened to the broadcast, Gaskell said, ‘What are we going to do? Paint pictures and take photographs?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Christabel.
Gaskell thumbnailed her cigarette out of its holder into an ashtray, undraped herself, and went to the French window. She watched the children for a while, and said, ‘We’re going to go home to Hexham and open the house up for refugees. They’ll be evacuating all the children from London now.’
Christabel came and stood beside her, taking her arm. ‘It’ll be the best thing we’ve ever done,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and pack.’
Daniel’s mother, Mme Pitt, wearing galoshes over her slippers, was in the garden in Partridge Green, deadheading the roses, when her neighbour popped her head over the garden wall. ‘I thought you’d like to know,’ she said. ‘On account of Poland. We’re at war. I just heard the Prime Minister. And
France is in with us again.’
Mme Pitt took off her gloves and wiped her brow with the back of her hand ‘Oh, mon pauvre pays,’ she sighed. Then she looked up at her neighbour and said, ‘I am selfish to think like this, I know, but at least my boys are too old to fight this time.’
‘No one’s too old,’ said her neighbour. ‘Well, begging your pardon, but you might be, I suppose.’
Mme Pitt gestured towards her flower bed. ‘Je peux faire pousser les légumes between the roses,’ she said. ‘I’ll grow vegetables.’
Mrs McCosh was with Cookie in the kitchen at The Grampians. Cookie was the last servant left, and the two women had been together for more than several decades. There was very little left of the relationship between mistress and servant apart from the formality of Cookie addressing Mrs McCosh as ‘madam’. Cookie was completely reconciled to her employer’s fits of extreme eccentricity, unembarrassed because they had become so completely commonplace.
‘We’ll get bombed again, won’t we, madam?’ said Cookie.
‘I’m not leaving the house. I shall be buried in its rubble, if need be.’
‘They’ll fly straight over us to get to London, won’t they, madam?’
‘Last time,’ said Mrs McCosh, ‘the Kaiser declared war on his own family. The least you can say for Herr Hitler is that he doesn’t have any relatives here.’
‘I think we should bomb them first,’ said Cookie, ‘before they get a head start.’
So Much Life Left Over Page 24