Helen smiled and kissed him. ‘There is no war yet, there might be no war. Look, the Russians still have signed no pact with anyone. Hitler needs that signature to neutralise Russia before he can bite into Poland. And in the street there has been no unkindness towards us, no anti-German feeling.’
‘Do they know we are German?’ Heine asked and Helen did not answer because she could only have said no.
In April conscription plans were endorsed after Britain and France pledged to defend Poland and that weekend Heine and Helen took Chris to the Avenue and dug her mother’s shelter. They bolted, doused, heaved, while Helen’s mother told her neighbour that Heine was too old to be called up and had an injured leg and later told Helen that perhaps they would think he was Dutch.
On Sunday evening before they returned to London, Heine and Helen took Chris to the stream and floated sticks, swearing that the winner was the one which Chris had thrown even though it was not. Helen watched as Heine lifted his son over the parapet, saw the strong hands, the fine blond hairs. Saw the green lichen which stained Chris’s coat. Saw her father, quite clearly now, his face, his shoulders, his hands, and remembered the horror of that war and its legacy for the women who waited and the men who never returned. She prayed that another war would not come.
May was hot and the British Government declared again that it would side with Poland in the event of a German attack to the East but negotiations were still being conducted between Russia and Britain with a view to a pact and so hopes for peace remained. Helen watered her rockery and sewed Chris’s initials on his shoe-bag and swung him in the park, talking to other mothers whose faces were strained as they listened to their children talk of the evacuation practice or the gas mask drill. She stood and watched as Chris played cowboys and Indians with the other boys, seeing him load his pistol with a roll of red caps, hearing the snap as he fought his battle, smelling the blackened roll when he gave it to her to carry home.
She was asked to photograph the trenches being dug in the parks, the builders reinforcing the basements, the brick surface shelters which were going up in many London streets. She did but she would not think of them afterwards.
In July a local boy won a big boxing match and Mr Simkins, their neighbour, drank until he passed out in the street. Heine carried him up to his flat above his tobacconist’s shop which also ran beneath theirs. It was then that Mrs Simkins asked if they would be evacuating Chris. She clicked her tongue and said that she supposed the Government was right to want to remove anyone who would get in the way but it seemed very hard and would the bombs really come? Heine said he did not know.
That night he and Helen talked as they did every night about Chris, their love for him, their need to keep him with them, but they spoke also of his right to safety, to a billet in the country. But then they thought of him with a stranger, of his face as he woke, soft and full, his arms which hugged them. They thought of his fear of the dark. Would foster-parents understand? They drank him in as he came home each day, listening to his voice, his ideas, hearing his laughter, watching him grow, holding him when he fell, kissing him when he was asleep, and knew they could not bear to be parted, not even for a week, let alone for the years of his childhood, for who knew how long a war would last?
And then in the darkness of night they talked again of the bombs that had fallen in Spain, of the buildings which had crumbled and killed, of the shrapnel which had sliced, the blast which had destroyed, and knew that they could not bear any of this to touch their son.
They talked then of them all moving to the country but Heine said, ‘How can we? We need to stay, to work for the nation as everyone else will do.’
‘But he is our child,’ she whispered, watching high clouds nudging in front of the moon.
‘How can we run away?’ he replied as he held her, his breath moving her hair. ‘I’ve done too much of that. And we must earn a living, darling. As photographers we need to live in London, we have our contacts now. I can work as an air raid warden, earn my place in your society.’
On and on they talked, night after night, but neither spoke of the question to which there was no answer. What would happen to a German in this country if war was declared?
After a hot dry summer the children of the neighbourhood were tanned and Helen’s arms were brown from weeding the rockery. In August negotiations between Russia and Britain collapsed and on 23 August, as Helen and Heine listened to the wireless on a hot still evening, it was announced that Germany and Russia had signed the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Helen cried while Heine held her but she did not feel safe, even with the feel of him so close because it meant war. She knew it meant war but what would that mean to them?
On 31 August Helen packed Chris’s bag. They had bought an enamel cup, a knife, fork and spoon and the list of allowable clothes had been ticked and folded into the case because Christoph’s school was to be evacuated tomorrow and Helen and Heine had decided that he must go. He must be safe, but they were numb with grief.
The next day they took him to school, walking past police cars which crawled the kerbs telling parents through tannoys to take their children to the schoolyard where they must assemble in front of their form teachers. Helen kissed her son at the gate, smoothing his hair with her hand, and somehow, she let him go. They joined the other parents outside the playground and watched through railings which held none of the summer heat. They saw the register being taken and the children being formed into columns two abreast. They saw him labelled by a teacher, saw him not look at them as they pressed with other parents against the school railings. Helen gripped the flaking metal, feeling the cold hardness, thinking of that, not of her heart which seemed to fill her chest and which was destroying her.
Helen did not hold Heine’s hand, could not move hers from the railings until they marched from the playground and then she thrust them into her pockets where they were bunched into fists, trying to keep the pain clasped inside them.
The children marched with their gas masks banging against their sides, their cases in their hands, following the Headmaster who held a banner with the letter ‘S’ and the number ‘60’ inked on. Along the streets they marched, with Heine and Helen and the other weeping or silent parents.
They crossed the road in waves as they had learned to do in the summer practices, the parents waiting as their children queued up along the pavement in lines two hundred yards long before turning to face the road and crossing quickly at a teacher’s command. The traffic was held up by police for three seconds only.
So efficient, Helen thought. They are taking my child from me so efficiently. Old men and women stood outside their doorways watching the children followed by their despairing parents, and their eyes were full of the knowledge of what war really meant.
At the station the children marched past the barriers to the waiting area, where there were other schools milling or sitting on cases talking. The Stepney children stopped close to the entrance and Helen watched as Chris stood quite still, looking across at the group beneath the clock. His face had been still and quiet all morning and now she saw it close, saw his shoulders drop, his head turn but not before she heard, ‘It’s that bloody German.’ It was a high voice and she turned and looked and there were the Alton Mews children from Highlands School, standing behind their banner, carrying the same gas masks as Chris, the same cases. But they were not the same; they were English and at the flash of fear on her son’s face, she moved.
She felt Heine hold her arm but she heard the call being taken up as it had been in 1938 when faces grew ugly and words even uglier.
‘It’s that bloody Hun.’
‘What you doing ’ere, boy? You should be over with that Hitler.’
The other children were turning now, staring first at the boys from Highlands, then over to Chris.
Around them women were looking, talking, pointing.
Helen moved again, pushing forward and this time Heine was with her. She passed the woman she had talked to in
the park.
‘Please let us through,’ she said and the woman looked at her and then at Heine. Her own face was blotched with tears.
‘Please let us through. I have to reach my son,’ Helen said, clutching her arm.
The woman wrenched away. ‘I didn’t know you were one of them,’ she said, her mouth twisted in her face. ‘If it wasn’t for you, our kids wouldn’t have to go.’
Her words were taken up then and Helen was pushed and so was Heine but they got through, somehow they got through into the station, and saw Chris yards and yards away, standing with space between him and his friends who were no longer his friends. A teacher was there, his face cold, his hand on Chris’s shoulder. A train was pulling in now and there was hissing steam and shrieking brakes and the harsh engine smell all around them.
A guard came towards them, his hat large, shouting at them to go back.
‘You’ve made your decision. Stick by it.’ His teeth were rotten and his breath smelt. Heine put his arm out and pushed on by. Chris was crying now, watching them but moving, always moving towards the train, the children still shouting, the teacher herding his column onwards.
A WVS woman in a hat intercepted them. ‘Go back, please, behind the barrier. If we let you through they’ll all come.’ Her voice was loud but the shrieking brakes were louder and Helen pulled free of the hands which held her, dodging past the children as they turned to look for their parents one last time, and now there were tears from many children and they were on her face too.
Still she could hear the calls of ‘German’ ‘Hun’ ‘Murderers’, and she wanted to scream at them and at Heine because it was all his fault.
A boy with red hair shouted at her, ‘Bloody Hun.’
‘Stinking German.’
Christoph’s column was moving now. His face was white and pinched but the tears were still there and they were too far away. He was getting on the train and suddenly she saw that he must not because now she knew what it was going to be like being German when England was at war.
A teacher was taking Chris’s shoulder, pointing to the door, and she wasn’t going to reach him, there were too many children, too many teachers, too many hands pulling at her but then she was through and Heine was with her. She reached Chris and he felt her hands on his arm, her voice.
‘Chris, come home.’
He turned and pressed his face to hers. The boys were shouting at him because he wasn’t Dutch as he had said, he was German. The teacher told her that there were many who would be kind, it was only a few and she knew that he was right but a few was too many and so the three of them went home to a city almost without children.
That night she whispered to Heine, ‘I’m sorry, my darling, because she couldn’t forget that she had blamed him and part of her still did.
At eleven-fifteen a.m. on Sunday 3 September, Chamberlain announced over the wireless that Britain was at war with Germany, and fifteen minutes later Helen heard the air raid siren and stopped with a duster in her hand, fear making her mouth drop open, making her scream come as though she were a child in pain. Heine picked up the gas masks and turned her, pushing her towards the stairs, calling Chris, shouting at her to hold her son’s hand, get him to the shelter, get him to safety, and then she moved, pulling her son, her head down, waiting for the whine of bombs, the crash and splinter of glass.
She ran down the garden, hearing nothing but the siren, hearing their neighbours rushing down their path, hearing Heine running behind. Her mouth was open and saliva ran down her chin. She felt a fear deeper than anything she had ever known. She looked up but could see no planes, no black crosses, no falling bombs, but they would come. She thrust aside the curtain and went down into the dark, the bloody dark which she could not bear, which her son could not bear. She took the masks from Heine, watching as Chris put his on, his chin in first and then the mask over his face, the straps wrenched over his head, and still the siren filled the air.
She pulled hers on; it was hot and smelly and pulled at her hair. She felt that she could not breathe, that she would die here and now in the noise and the fear. She held Chris to her, watching Heine who sat with them but then the mask clouded up with her breath and she could not see his face. They waited but no bombers came that day though the liner Athenia was sunk on the third and then the letters from German-haters began to drop through the letterbox, harsh, cruel and accusing.
Internment also began. Men were taken from their homes, locked away where they could do no harm to Britain. Their friends went, those who had come to escape the Nazis and who loved Britain. They went in police cars, handcuffed, interned without trial but no one came for Heine and they dared not think of it or even talk.
There was no school now because there were so few children, but Helen asked Dr Schultz who ran a small private school a quarter of a mile away if he would have room, and because he knew of Heine’s work and was Austrian he took Chris. He would only charge half the fees because Heine had been visited by the police and told he could no longer use a camera because he was an alien and they soon found that he could find no other work for the same reason. Dr Schultz offered to approach a bank manager he knew who might find essential work for him so that they could live once their savings had gone. They felt exposed, impotent and afraid.
Each morning Helen walked Chris to school past alley-ways where children who had not been evacuated and who did not now go to school waited. They never hurt them, just shouted and Helen told Chris to ignore their talk because they knew no better, but they made her tremble and see only greyness around her. Even the rockery had bloomed then faded.
In the afternoon Heine collected him and walked back to the swings but Chris did not want to stop where people could see him with his father because his father, Herr Weber, was German, wasn’t he, and the British were fighting the Germans, weren’t they? So Grandfather and Grandmother were their enemies and planes would come and blow them to bits and those planes were flown by Germans, by people like his father. So one day he went screaming from the park and when Heine ran after him he shouted, ‘Leave me alone. Why can’t you be English? I hate you. I hate you, you’re a Hun.’
In November they heard that Heine had to appear before a tribunal which would decide whether he was to be imprisoned.
That night they did not sleep but then neither of them slept any more. Helen listened to their son crying and she could not do anything to help because nothing could be altered. Heine had cried too because he was the cause of all their tension and she had held him and said, ‘Sshh, it doesn’t matter. It will be all right. Everything will be all right.’
But she wondered how it could be because already he was not allowed to travel more than five miles from the house. Already they had swept up shattered glass from the stones hurled through their window. Already their son was weeping because he did not want his father to bring him home from school but neither did he want him to be kept from them in a prison camp.
In the morning there was a letter from the bank manager that Dr Schultz had spoken too. He offered Helen a job, not Heine. It would be deemed war work and keep her in London with her family. Heine had kissed her as she left for school with Chris holding her tight, looking at her face, the lines, the eyes, and loved her more than life itself and tried not to feel humiliated, just as she was trying too.
His son would not kiss him but pulled away and went from the house but then ran back and hugged him.
That night Heine was home again. He was not considered a danger to the country, he told Helen over a glass of wine, sitting Chris on his knee, explaining to him about Category A and Category B but how much could a child who was not yet seven understand? He looked back to Helen.
‘I’m Category B, my love. I’m not dangerous enough to be interned immediately but unfortunately I didn’t merit refugee status, Category C. I was not deprived of my occupation by my government or deprived of their protection. I merely ran away from them.’ His laugh had no humour in it.
&nb
sp; Helen gripped his hand. ‘But they must know how hard you’ve worked to save people. They must know you won’t do anything to hurt this country.’
Heine hugged Chris to him but the child pulled free and went across to Helen.
‘I want to go to bed, Mummy. Will the German bombers come tonight?’ He did not look at his father and Helen could not either because of the hurt she would see there.
Heine was not allowed to register at the Labour Exchange and so Helen earned for them while he washed their clothes, swept the flat and made sure their supplies were ready to take into the shelter if there was a raid. But there was no raid. There was no real war. Just hostility, just fear and pain. He was refused as a warden. He could only walk his son home and try not to feel that his life had no worth any more.
In the evenings the lights were dim, the voltage reduced as a wartime measure. The blackout was in force. Helen asked her mother to come and stay because she felt she should but Mrs Carstairs refused because Heine was at home all day and he was a German, wasn’t he? She told Helen that she did not want to be whispered about, did not want a brick to be thrown at her.
Helen met Marian one day and smiled but she walked straight past, the collar of her coat drawn up, her gloved hand holding it together at her throat. Her brown shoes scuffed the leaves which lay on the path outside the park. Emily was with her because Marian had not been able to face the thought of evacuation either.
‘Hello,’ Chris said.
There was no answer because Marian dragged the child along too quickly. Helen didn’t watch her go, but took her son into the park and watched him on the swing. It was so quiet with no children.
At the end of November her mother came to stay and Helen was surprised.
‘It’s Chris’s birthday and he must have a party,’ her mother said. ‘For the children at that nice little school.’ Helen looked at Heine and smiled and was touched at her mother’s efforts.
Her work at the bank was not interesting but it kept her from the war factories outside London and earned them just enough for party food but not enough for a present for Chris. So each night she sewed in the dim light of the sitting-room lamp as her mother drew up plans for games and made hats out of cardboard with Heine, sticking the seams while he held them together.
Somewhere Over England Page 9