by Tanya Moir
The house is so quiet I can hear it creak.
It’s a perfect summer’s day, still and clear, the heat and dust washed out of the sky, and no other trace of yesterday’s squall. Across the water, there are sunbathers on the fake beach, a mid-tide nudging the scallop shell sand, lazy waves at just the right level. Above the old boathouse we pause for a moment, Ella and I, to watch the swimmers wade in, their arms held up above the water, the false shelf of sand still beneath their feet as the sea laps their stomachs and they plunge in, striking out over the reef, neither knowing nor caring what’s below them now, sharp rock and quicksand and broken glass, scuttling black crabs and slimed-up beer cans, the petrified bones of what was once a forest.
Ella and I walk on. It’s coming in, the tide. In another few hours there’ll be no beach left. At the end of the new jetty, I sit in the sun and swing my legs, stretch my toes down towards the water.
Will
ONE
I’m there at Maggie’s house on the day that Grandpa William dies. In fact, it’s me who answers the phone. The doctor on the other end is very nice, but I feel a sense of ambush. I’d only popped in for a coffee.
There are no tears. Of course not — this is Bradbury Street. Maggie turns a bit grey, and her face looks suddenly pinched and she’s already sitting down, but her hands look shaky. I ring directory, write down the numbers of funeral homes, arrange to have Grandpa collected. Somehow, I end up offering to drive her up to Nelson. Perhaps because I can’t think of anything else to say.
We sit on opposite sides of the lounge and watch the minutes lengthen. I’m conscious that I should, by now, be at 38 Rutledge Street, showing its three bedrooms and split-level lounge to a couple from Alexandra. I call the office, tell them I’ve been held up. My mother’s had some bad news.
‘Oh, you poor thing!’ says Noeline, and that’s when I realise that Grandpa William’s death is also happening to me.
I’m fairly certain I feel nothing. The world doesn’t seem to have changed. I haven’t seen Grandpa William for years — not, in fact, since he came to stay with us the Christmas after Nanny Biggs died. A long summer visit that made my mother’s nose bleed. After that, he said he didn’t feel strong enough to come down, and Maggie was too unwell to go up, so we all just stayed where we were and exchanged cards with sighs of relief, and were careful not to notice how much time was passing.
One can’t be shocked when someone dies at William’s age — not in my family, at least. I feel, of course, the sense of gravity that comes with the ending of a life — the enormity of a man not being, when three hours ago he was. But even this, if I’m honest, is tempered by the manner of his death. Because poor William Biggs, that least funny of men, has suffered a comic ending.
Spool back three hours, and we can join him walking out of Nelson Hospital into predictably brilliant sunshine.
On the plus side, he’s no longer worried about his chesty cough. But the news that he’s dying of T-cell prolymphocytic leukaemia has come as a bit of a shock. He’s seventy-seven years old, and prepared to be dying of something, but he’d like to be able to say it, at least. Not to mention having a bit more notice.
Because there are things he still wants to do. There must be, mustn’t there? There are things — he quickens his pace — he needs to tidy up at home. Ceiling cavities to clear. Things that need to be got rid of.
A wasting disease, leukaemia. A slide down to weakness, to bruised skin and bone. In T-PLL, a fast one. William has never thought much about his peripheral blood, but he’s not surprised to learn that it’s against him. The oncologist wants to admit him — tomorrow, if not today. His lymphocyte count might double in the night. Any day now, he might be too weak to move. Unable to raise himself up from under the candlewick. Unable to get to the bathroom. The picture the doctors paint is unnecessary. William Biggs already knows exactly what it looks like.
It’s no wonder that William is shaky. There’s a bit of a lump in his throat, and everything looks more than usually out of focus. All the colour has run out of the day, and his legs aren’t doing their job very well, and it’s not fair that they took his driver’s licence away last month, because today he has so very little time.
He hesitates on the kerb, too long, as a station-wagon crawls down Waimea Road. There’s a horrible buzzing in his head, and while he waits for the car to pass he takes out his hearing aids and drops them into his inside jacket pocket.
Deaf William Biggs steps out, into the road. He doesn’t see it coming.
But wait! I have a gift for him, at last, ungrateful grandchild that I was. One final frame, one glorious white moment. Because the ambulance is on its way. It might be forty-five years late, but it’s going to heal all his wounds.
Here is his last second. It’s clean. Without a thought.
Flashing lights. A red cross, why not? I’ll even give him Maura at the wheel.
Follow the tail of the film as it whirrs back, snippy-snap, all the way to the very first frame: here is Will Biggs, in Germany, on 17 April 1945. He’s driving through a forest. The sun is slanting through the birch trees, low, and it’s reminding him of Wimbledon Common, of rambles in the spring. He’d like to stop for a moment and shoot a few frames — red crosses in crisp stripes of light — but he knows better than to ask the driver to halt. The Godawful stink in the air is getting worse, and it’s making everyone nervous.
They’ve been warned, these men of the casualty clearing station, these veterans of Juno Beach, of the Reichswald and the Bulge. Last night, their white-faced CO put them on parade, and said that ahead in the trees, little more than a mile now, is a horror he could not order them to face, a horror beyond imagination.
Which is just the problem, of course. They can’t imagine it. How could they? William Biggs hasn’t taken his photographs. There aren’t any words, not yet. Concentration camp means nothing to them. Holocaust is an obscure thirteenth-century term for destruction by fire, and they’ve seen plenty of that, these men who have picked up pieces of the 11th Armoured Division all the way across northern Europe. They can’t imagine anything worse than the abattoir sands of a Normandy beach, than the mess you find inside a brewed-up Sherman tank. They all volunteer.
Except Will, of course, for whom the point is moot. He volunteered for it — all of it — when he joined the AFPU. Since they landed him at Juno ten months ago, he’s gone pretty much where he wants. The sergeants-cameramen of the Army Film and Photographic Unit don’t get a lot of orders.
(There’s a second lieutenant, fresh out of officer school, who thinks that he directs them — Will and Clive and the rest of the unit, sergeants and drivers, those of them still standing after D-Day. His name is John, but behind his back, they all call him Cecil. He’s twenty-one years old and talks like Monty, and Will hasn’t seen him since Brussels, where he was smoking a Meerschaum pipe, and kept wishing them ‘Good hunting!’)
In four days, Will himself will turn twenty-seven. Like Clive up ahead, like the ambulance men, he thinks he’s seen it all. He feels as tough as a camera case, and he’s taught himself to see war in two ways — 6 x 6 and 6 x 4. He’d tell you the world is black and grey. He’d tell you he’s a cynic.
But he’s not. Here in the birch wood, a mile from the gates of Belsen Camp, Will Biggs is innocent as a lamb. Let’s give him a moment there. Let’s give them all a moment, Will and the ambulance men, here where they still think they know some things, about mateship, and what a man can take, about bravery and dying. Because the sun is shining, and it’s spring. Ignore the smell, and the typhus signs, and the smoke away in the trees to the north where the British are burning out snipers. The forest is peaceful. Let’s make them look at the way the silver birch bark glows, and the starry flowers on the heath.
Hush now. Isn’t it lovely?
But they mustn’t stay long, because people are waiting — not for Will, of course, but for the ambulance men, for Jack, and Dave, and Terry. They’ve been waiting for days, they
’ve been waiting for years, and it’s all taking far too long.
So here comes William Biggs, with the cavalry, through the gates of Bergen-Belsen. You all know what he sees.
So.
Will Biggs drives in. He lifts his camera, which is to say, he opens his eyes. The stench, by now, is enough to make him retch, if he stops and thinks about it. So he looks around, fast, for a subject to shoot, and the first he finds is jolly enough — a couple of Tommy gunners, fags in their mouths and their sleeves rolled up, bringing in sacks of potatoes. They have the sort of tan you get from ten months of sleeping rough, in fox-holes and ditches and burnt-out chateaux from Cherbourg to the Rhine. You can see the muscles in their arms standing out and the sweat shining on their foreheads. They can’t be much over twenty, and they’re happy because nobody’s shooting at them today, and under their heavy sacks they can manage a smile for Will, albeit a wry one.
The inmates appear in the very next frame. Skeletons, in striped pyjamas. Bones to which the dirty skin still clings. There’s no telling where they’ve come from — out of the ground, maybe, out of the mounds of unburied dead that Will has not yet seen. Jerkily, frame by frame, they’re lurching towards the soldiers, animated by God knows what, because there’s nothing left on those bones that could move them, Christ, and he’s fumbling with shutter-speed and aperture because they’re picking up the pace. In the final frame the Tommies blur as they drop their sacks and run.
Eleven exposures. Will’s first roll is done. Next, he gets to the corpses.
His is not the only camera here — other AFPU crews are already at work. But there are plenty of bodies to go around — ten thousand, maybe, the army don’t know for sure. Who has time, or stomach, to count them?
Across the compound, in a grove of birches where the dead lie thick, Will can see Clive changing the reel of his ciné camera. He finishes his own second roll on a pile of dead women behind a cookhouse, and picks up his Contax for the close-ups. He frames a good one of a child’s soft hand amid the jutting bones. At the base of the pile, the bodies are older, and the shutter comes down between him and them, three times, and he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing, which is why it has to be done just right, because today he is God’s witness.
He takes a tight shot of a young girl’s face. She’s still fresh, and quite a find, because before she was dead she might have been pretty.
In the next frame, she’s sitting up, wrapped in his jacket, and looking into his lens. He feeds her what he has in his bag, Spam and crackers, a chocolate bar, one of Nanny Biggs’ rock cakes. She doesn’t seem to hear him when he speaks, makes no reply when, in English and German and French, he asks her name. On the dope sheet, he can identify her only as ‘Survivor’.
He shoots off another two rolls across the road in the men’s camp. His last frame is of an old man in tears, clinging to Clive’s hand. It’s only midday, but Will’s had enough. He lights all three of them a cigarette, and the old man raises his chin and relinquishes Clive’s hand. He nods to them with some dignity, and returns to his own thoughts.
‘Jesus,’ says Clive. ‘This is big.’
Will nods. They look around, exhale, take another drag.
‘You see anyone else here?’
‘Just the unit. The correspondents can’t have heard yet.’
They look at each other, and Will feels a sudden charge in the air, a neck-hair-raising crackle.
‘I know the picture editor at Today,’ says Clive. ‘I’ve got her number.’
They find Bob and the jeep and drive out, fast, into clean air and the spring. In the streets of Bergen town, they find what they need — a wedding photographer’s studio. The upstairs curtains are drawn, and the door is locked, but no one objects when they kick it down.
In the darkroom out the back, they print up Will’s films. They’ve got one ear out for company — Germans, or worse, MPs. Bob guards the door, his service revolver in one hand and a Wehrmacht Luger in the other, and once they think they hear something upstairs, but then it all goes quiet. In the red light, test-prints of plump German brides beam down from the walls, and it’s all a bit of a dream, and they’re marking up shots, but they don’t really have time to look at the images swimming up on the wedding photographer’s paper. On the way out, Will requisitions all the 35mm film he can find, plus a Rolleiflex, an 180mm/f2.8 lens, and a light meter still in its box.
Bob drives through the night, through swift and snipery darkness, and they reach the press office in Celle just in time to put the censor off his breakfast. He pushes away his toast, takes a snifter of Scotch, and clears Will’s chosen shots. By eight o’clock the radio’s done its work, and the pictures will be on the editor’s desk at Today well before the morning deadline.
They celebrate with fried eggs and tea in the sergeants’ mess, and then champagne in a dingy bar across from the press office. A couple of hungover-looking correspondents wander in, big names telling bigger stories, and Will and Clive smile quietly and order themselves another bottle.
On the drive back, between swigs of champagne, Will looks over his contact sheets. It’s the first time he’s seen his own pictures since he left Pinewood, and he’s relieved to see that they’re sharp and well exposed. Capa would have done better, no doubt. But the child’s hand and the survivor girl are just as good as he thought, and he’s really quite pleased with his compositions. Clive toasts the cover of Today, again, and Will can see it, can see his name there, his very first byline, beneath Survivor Girl wrapped up safe in a British Army coat against a wall of murdered bodies.
They pass the bottle up front to Bob, who raises it to the German countryside and shouts, ‘Bugger Capa!’, and they laugh until the stench outside Bergen hits them again, and then they don’t say anything at all. Will holds the empty bottle between his knees, and no longer feels larger than life, but small and tired and sick, and he wants very much to turn around and go home. Bob speeds up, and Clive looks out, away, at the forest.
The next day, among the tens of thousands of faces in Camp One, Will sees one he knows. He photographs Survivor Girl again, a full-length shot with the Ikonta’s 80mm lens. This time, she doesn’t get up.
She hasn’t gone very far. The mound of bodies he found her in can still be seen in the background, slightly out of focus. Today, SS men are working to clear it, surrounded by hard-faced Tommies with bayonets fixed, chain-smoking to combat the smell. Will has a word with the corporal, and two of the SS are brought over to pick up Survivor Girl’s body from its puddle of vomit and diarrhoea. Will watches the SS men try not to gag as they sling Survivor Girl onto the back of a truck and she rejoins the rest of her heap on their way to a grave.
When the truck is full, Will follows it to the hole the bulldozers have dug. More SS men unload it. He takes a shot of two of them, struggling towards the edge of the pit, carrying the body of a man between them. The body is naked, and looks to be several weeks old. The men hold it away from themselves as much as they can, their bare hands circling rotten ankles and wrists, fearful of squeezing too tight. They’re not allowed to wear gloves. They’re made to feel, as well as to see and to smell and to taste, in the backs of their throats, what they have done. Our boys want to see it get under their fingernails, and mess up the fronts of their smart black coats.
As the two SS men pass, a Tommy guard hits one between the shoulder blades. A clever blow with the butt of his rifle, nothing too vicious, just enough to make him lose his feet. The SS man falls forward on top of the corpse. For a second they lie tangled together on the ground, close as lovers.
Will’s shutter clicks.
The SS man rolls away quickly and gets to his feet. He’s shaking. The Tommies shout at him to get on with it, and Will hears a wry voice with soft Cheshire vowels say, ‘What? Not so keen on your death’s head now, then?’
The SS man stares, for a moment, into Will’s lens, as if it might offer mercy. Will takes the shot.
There are tears starting down t
he man’s cheeks, and Will thinks it isn’t enough. He thinks these men, all of them, and the women guards too, should be thrown into the pit themselves, and the splitting corpses bulldozed down upon them. He thinks he would like to see them drown in the stinking sea of putrefaction they have made. He wants, with a shuddering, visceral need, to put his boot to their necks, and force their faces under.
At the end of the day, Will hitches a ride out with the Tommies taking the SS back to their barracks. He shows the guards his photographer’s pass, and they’re only too happy to let him inside. He’s prepared for resistance here, on the Germans’ home ground, but most of the prisoners don’t even react when he takes their picture.
It’s dark now, and he works the angles of the shadows. He wants to show these men as monsters. But he sees they’re something more frightening than that. They’re ordinary. Even their commandant looks like nothing worse than a stolid farmer.
In a clean and comfortable room, Will takes his time with one officer’s portrait. The man has taken off his stinking jacket and shirt, and apart from his SS tattoo, he’s just an exhausted clerk in singlet and braces. In fact, he looks a bit like Will’s Great-uncle Mike. His hands are shaky, his English good.
‘I have nothing against the Jews,’ he says, while Will angles the head of a desk-lamp. ‘Would you choose to die for strangers?’
Will is silent. But the man keeps looking at him, and he seems to want an answer, so Will holds his new light meter up in front of the officer’s face and says, ‘Yes,’ because he knows it’s cruel, and because, on day two in Belsen Camp, he still believes it.
The SS man rubs his hands over his face and says, ‘Then there is no one you really love.’