by Tim Binding
She watched as Ned climbed into the car, easing back onto the leather upholstery as if he was as familiar with its cushioned panels and pale armrests as he was with the pedalled chair sitting on its polished pedestal in the barber’s shop opposite Underwood’s. Then the Major stepped in, hiding her son from view. He put his hand inside his jacket and drew out a silver case. She saw her son’s hand floating over and, closing her eyes, shut the door fast, thankful that Dad had not been alive to witness such a close and crowning capitulation.
Ned could feel the acid rising in his stomach. He rubbed his chest, then despite the fact that it eased the pain, stopped. Lentsch was looking at him intently. Ned pulled his handkerchief up to his mouth and let the clear bile run.
“Stomach complaint?” Lentsch queried, bringing his voice under control.
Ned nodded.
Lentsch fumbled in his pocket.
“Chalk,” he said, holding out a silver case of small white tablets. “From home.” He patted his stomach. “I too have this malady.”
Ned chewed on the tablet.
“This is a bad business,” Lentsch said. “I have given strict instructions. There will be no reprisals. People must know we believe in the rule of law.”
The calm of Lentsch’s chili reassurance seemed to thaw a shard of frozen recklessness in Ned’s heart.
“Is that why you deported all the British-born last month?” he asked.
Lentsch looked to the floor.
“Has not England interned all Germans, taken them to some place of detention, where they can be watched, kept under guard?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course they have. It is only sense. Even if you believe that they will not plot against you, you must do this. For security. Do not worry about your English friends. They will be looked after.” He took out a chalk pill and popped it into his mouth. “Who knows? They may even get more to eat.”
Ned was annoyed. Even now the ever-present subject of food loomed large.
“But you promised us that no one would be deported. Except…”
He let the word die in the air between them. There had been only three of them, a nurse, a hospital cleaner and the woman who had taken a job on one of the big farms just a few months before the invasion. Ned had seen her once, herding cattle along the back lanes in the summer rain, slapping their backsides in affectionate exasperation, her determined face softened by an unhurried contentment. She’d been studying agriculture at a college in Reading and had come over as soon as she’d heard about the job. Even at the time people said she was being foolish, coming so close to the Continent, but she wouldn’t listen. To work outdoors, to work with animals, that was all she wanted, and Ned supposed that once here it hadn’t seemed possible that it would ever be taken from her, that she could be removed. And with her red hair and fair skin who was going to know? As long as she kept quiet and didn’t show herself, as long as she called the cows, cleaned their stalls, sang to them softly while wiping down their warm pink udders, surely she was safe? And so the days became weeks and the weeks months; the cows were led out in the morning and milked in the afternoon, and in the evening the meal she sat down to was a family affair. But early last year she had been informed upon—that was the whisper, though the unremarkable ratchet of official machinery was Ned’s more tutored guess. Whatever, she was gone by April, despite the farmer’s pleas. The family had held a farewell party for her the night before and still talked of her and her way with his cattle, wondering how she was faring, hoping, as they had all promised themselves that tearful evening, that one day she might return. The Major grunted.
“In war it is not always possible to keep one’s promises,” he admitted. “We expected the war to be short. Now it is long. The island’s significance, its specifications, have changed. To begin with it was to be an example of what the British could expect when we had won the war. This is what it will be like when you find us in the Cotswolds and Coventry and your town spa of Bath. This is what you will hear, this is what you will read, this is what you will see, marching down your streets. Though what is yours will be ours, we will respect it, strengthening all that is good, weeding out all that is corrupt. But now it has changed. The islands have become mixed up in the whole sorry plot. Now they are part of the military strategy.” He cleared his throat before changing the subject. “There is something else I must say before we arrive at her house. Though her death at the hands of an islander would be purely a civilian matter, there is the matter of her father. Working for the Organisation Todt he holds the honorary rank of major and comes under military jurisdiction.”
“Even though he’s English?”
“He is also Dutch, Inspector, and did much work, roads, bridges and so forth, before…” he gestured in front of him, “all this happened. His work here is of the utmost importance. He and Major Ernst.” He crossed the two long fingers of his right hand. “You know Major Ernst?”
“Only by sight. A stout gentleman.”
Lentsch grinned. “You are too polite. A little fat man, who I am told has to wear a corset under his uniform. If that is what you can call it.”
Ned sidestepped as best he could.
“I wouldn’t know about that. He likes to be on parade though, he and his men. Out in all weathers, gymnastic displays, marching up and down the Esplanade. They’re quite good once you’ve got over their spades.”
He drew a picture of an upended shovel on the condensation, then quickly rubbed it out. Lentsch sighed.
“He and van Dielen had been dining together last night, reviewing the fortification plans.”
Ned nodded, as if hearing this Information for the first time. “Are they not ended, then?” he asked.
Lentsch bridled sufficiently to let Ned know he had overstepped the mark.
“The Organisation Todt does not come under my jurisdiction. It answers only to the military.” Now it was his turn to draw upon the steamed up window, and from his reluctant fingers came the overelaborated letters Org. Todt, with the winged eagle perched in between, clutching its founder’s name in its talons. Lentsch circled it, then rubbed his picture out too, but in enmity rather than in haste. “It is a most powerfiil organization,” he warned, “and gaining strength at every turn. Major Ernst does not want you brought into this. He would like everything to be dealt with by the Geheimnis Polizei, to let the Captain go to work on whoever he sees fit.”
“And you do not?”
“The Captain is less mindful of the island’s sensibilities than I. He and his men would start jumping on suspects like a pack of dogs. The goodwill we have built up over the last three years would vanish in a matter of hours. We need the cooperation of the civilian population, Major Ernst more than anyone. He cannot rely on conscripted labour alone.” Lentsch faced Ned. “You are lucky you live here. Anywhere else in Europe and hostages would have been shot already. This is not the way for Guernsey. We must preserve what we have already achieved. Believe me, there are amongst us many who love your islands.”
Ned felt his anger rising again. “Including Alderney?” he said. If Guernsey and Jersey could be compared to prisons, Alderney had taken on the mantle of a condemned cell. In the winter Alderney was surrounded by a low and menacing mist, keeping sound and sight at bay, but on the long nights of summer, when they went to bed with Alderney’s still and distant image fading in the closing light, those living near the common claimed they could hear the faint chorus of Alderney’s suffering skimming over the water. Sometimes it was low in tone, like a solitary hymn sung in an empty church; at others it was as the thrashing of tethered beasts caught in a stable fire. Lentsch was unperturbed.
“Even Athens had such places,” he reasoned. “For every Parthenon there is a charnel house and someone to stoke the furnace; for every poet a slave, for every philosopher a captive whore.”
“Is that what your plans are?” Ned asked. “To turn us all into whores and slaves?”
“We are all whores and sl
aves here, singing for one supper or another, doing as others bid us for want of courage, in the name of greed or expediency. For myself, I do not wish to see Guernsey change at all, though there are others stationed here with different plans. Help me with this and they may not have their chance.”
As they drove past Saumarez Park they came up against a column of Todt workers on their way to work, about thirty of them, boys and old men mostly, shuffling along, feet bare or wrapped in torn rags, hunched against the morning cold, each one carrying a tin bowl in their shackled hands. A Todt official marched alongside them, exhorting them to sing and to piek their feet up.
The group split in two and shuffled past. As he looked out through the windscreen Ned caught sight of a young boy, dressed in a dusty jacket and a pair of red pantaloons. With his dark eyes and his lips blue with cold, he looked more like a lost clown than a conscripted labourer. Where on earth had he got that outfit from? he wondered. Suddenly the boy jumped up on to the bank scrabbling about in the grass. Two others followed. The Todt official, puiling at his belt, sprang forward and began to beat them apart with a home-made whip fashioned out of a stick and four strands of leather. As they clambered back down Ned could see the boy had the best part of a dead rabbit in his hand. He held it triumphantly in the air before sinking his teeth into it. Ned could feel his stomach turn. The boy raised his head and looked into his face. There was no expression. Ned looked to the floor. Lentsch stared straight ahead.
“Animals,” they heard Wedel mutter. The column moved on, out of sight.
Five
You could barely see it from the surface, though there were plenty of clues to tell you that there were more than moles working away under the soil: the endless supply of trucks moving along the connecting roads, the brute mouths waiting in the woods to swallow you up, the bare-bricked ventilating shafts set in the middle of vacant fields. If you put your head down one of those dark, plummeting holes you could hear the sound of hard-pressed men shouting and grunting behind the grind and clank of wheels, sniff the dank smell of oil and earth and, yes, the wet slippery scent of fear rising out. Then you would might know that beneath the buttercups and tufts of couch grass lay the largest and most complex structure existing in the whole of the Channel Islands. Ah, the solid rock of Guernsey.
He found that by lying on his back and pressing his feet against the roof of the tunnel he could push the cart along the rails like the old man had suggested. The old man had lived on the canals, and in the early days, when they’d had the will to talk, he had told him of his years working on the coal barges, crisscrossing Europe and the long low tunnels that ran through his working life.
“Me and the wife would lie on the barge roof and walk ‘em through,” the bargee had recalled. “No matter what the weight. Longer than the night itself some of them tunnels. We’d take a rest halfway and lie there in the pitch dark, not a sound around us, except the water dripping and the craft nudging one another. Maybe the splash of a rat somewhere.” He’d poked him in the ribs. “It’s where all our sprats got started. Didn’t matter how dark it was. We knew what we was looking for.”
Walking the wagons was tough on his legs, but it saved his arms for the shovel work at the end. Cement and brick going in, granite going out. Of the two operations, pushing the wagons out was the more dangerous, for the track sloped down towards the entrance and unless checked the wagons could piek up a dangerous momen-tum of their own. Crushed legs, crushed hands, broken ribs, a punctured gut—the wagons had taken their toll. A hospital, that’s what they were building, a hospital with kitchens and laundries and everything, even a cinema, though at the moment it was just rock and soil and the reverberation of a hundred hammers. Two long corridors they had hacked away, and in between, connecting them, a series of long domed rooms looking more like catacombs in a cathedral, where stone plinths covering the crumbling bones of ancient saints should reside, than dormitories built to raise the wounded from their beds. Not that he would ever lie on one of them. There was only one sickbed waiting for him. Collapsed from exhaustion? Sling him in the back of the truck. Back broken by a fallen roof? Sling him in the back of the truck. Blinded by blast fragments, coughing up too much blood, arm wrenched out of its socket? Sling him in the truck. And if he survived the day? Put him on the boat to that other island from where no one returned. They would die here, he knew it, wither and die and be chucked away, tipped out over the cliffs like so much rubble.
He had been working the tunnels for three months now in numbing twelve-hour shifts, twelve hours on, twelve hours off. Up at first light, a hard tear of bread, a bowl of cloudy water speckled with torn cabbage leaves and unwashed potato peelings, perhaps a strip of dog in the bottom, and then out in the half dark, with the overseer alongside them, whipping the air with his little tin pipe, deformed merriment playing down the narrow streets, their uniform a mixed bag of rags, here a long nightshirt hanging down over a municipal trousers, there a string vest behind a railwayman’s jacket, baggy linen trousers and calico shirts and flat caps atop every one, appropriated headgear of the defunct Czech army.
It was cold and weary, marching along with the wind from the coast adding a final chili to their bones. He’d never seen the sea before he’d been sent here. Two years and he still hated the sight of it. Last summer one afternoon they’d been let loose on one of the long beaches past the harbour, but though the rest had run down to the water’s edge, jumping and splashing and pushing each other as if they were on holiday, he had stood on the shore, unable and unwilling to move. It scared him, the sea, so huge and cold and without remorse. Not like the river by his village, and the towpath where he’d gone fishing with his dad, the cows mooching up and down in the meadow behind them. They’d shot them all that second afternoon when the other soldiers came, the dogs, the pigs, the cows, shot the lot of them, casual and laughing, as if they were out for day’s fun at a distant country fair.
So here he marched, with the weight of the sweeping sky calling to a stilled life beyond, no not marched, but shufïled in a frozen shivering sleep, ragged arm to ragged shoulder, ragged shoulder to ragged arm, feet black and raw and wrapped in blood-hardened rags, with the road bright and shiny from the night and the distant sound of the great green water sucking at the island’s heart: up the hill, past houses and cottages and hidden lives which he could guess at all too well. Were these the whitewashed walls behind which he had once lived, this cracked smudged pane of glass the window looking into his own forgotten life? Was this the meadow, this the pond, this the deserted apple grove where once his family’s pigs broke ground? Was that creaking iron pump, so sturdy in its stone casement, the pump under which he pushed his dirty traant face, that the handle, that the gush of water washing away, what, his mother’s ire, his sister’s gibes, his father’s loud lament? As they reached the lip of the hill, and starled down into that deep valley, half running, half stumbling, clanking like a medieval siege machine with the tin cups and billycans hanging from their sides, it seemed to him that the closer they came to the great dark hole the lusher the valley grew, as if God Himself was taunting them, showing them all the green wonder of the world before bidding them to depart. Thick ferns rose up out of the wayside grass, buds of he knew not what had pushed their way through the dark soil, the lattice of bare branches now replaced by a canopy the colour of succulent evergreen. And then, as it appeared that the road was leading them ever deeper into this impenetrable fertility, came the clearing, a bare slice of burnt and flattened ground, announced by black-lettered noticeboards peppered with exclamation marks and protected by wire fencing twelve foot high. Waiting behind the opened double gates, in two long rows, stood the guards, bristling in their brushed uniforms, barking at them as they trotted past, towards the iron grille and the grinding lorries and the great maw of a mouth beyond, ready to swallow and chew and spit them out, digested.
They went in slowly, some directed to the wagons, some to the lines of pickaxes and shovels leaning up against th
e wall, their handles still greasy from the night shift. The air was chili and damp, and his clothes stuck to his skin almost immediately. Water dripped from the roof, mud slid under his feet. Though electric lights were slung along the walls it took time to appreciate the length and breadth of the gallery and the dark brilliance of the imagination that had created it. Moving along that first long corridor, hewn of granite, the traces of past pickaxe blows pressed like fossils into its slick black walls, the tunnel stretched beyond the limit of light and dark into a stone labyrinth of implacable strength. There was no beginning to be found here, no end, such was its depth and its vast disdain for life. Though he knew that he had been banished to fashion a terrain upon which his life might come to a flickering halt, he felt that unwittingly he had uncovered a land of dim eternity. This was not simply a man-made device. This was a vision of a world to come, beyond man’s calling, God’s gift to a cursed world, a place of unspeakable holiness. He had been driven into this darkness, to fight amongst his brethren, to jostle and squeal like another lost rat, gnawing at the earth’s heart, and here, he had concluded, was where he belonged. Up top he was nothing, a number to call, a mouth to feed, a back to beat. Up top there was air and sun and the sight of the world. It was too bright, there was too much colour, too much light. The day hurt him, hurt him for what he had lost, though he saw only the dawn grey and the blood dusk of it now, and he was glad of that. Down here, with nothing but echoes of his fading memories to remind him of his fairy-tale past, it was easier to dwell. Down here doom and hope mingled like blood and sand, with sudden milky mists rising from the floor to hide him from their most searching gaze. This was of its own. Here he would make his mark, searching for the mystery of it all, and they knew it not.