by Ian Porter
They were part of a large crowd exiting down the steps between the cinema entrance and the street, giggling away to each other, blissfully oblivious of the war for a while, when they were brought back to reality with a bump. A thin, wizened man was shuffling along the pavement like a foot-wrapped geisha girl, head down, trying to negotiate his way through the throng. Neither the man, nor Nash, whose neck was turned looking down to his wife laughing, were looking where they were going. As Nash stepped off the final step onto the pavement the two men bumped into each other and, though the mildest of collisions, the man collapsed to the floor as if poleaxed.
“Steady on old feller,” said Nash good-naturedly as he bent to help up the man.
He reached down, expecting the fellow to grab his arm and pull himself up. But the man just lay there, hapless, like a new born baby. He stared back at Nash and tried to speak but nothing but a gurgle was emitted. Nash dropped down on to his haunches and realised the inaccuracy of his initial assumption that the man was old. It was difficult to tell his age. Perhaps younger than Ruby. Perhaps not. The cheap suit he was wearing was many sizes too big for him, suggesting rapid weight loss, and his sallow, wrinkled skin reminded Nash of the poor wretches on the ferry. A couple of days’ of unshaved greying chin whiskers completed the abject picture. His eyes then rolled up. He had passed out.
Nash felt his thin hand. Its skin had the feel of cold leather. Nash was wondering whether the flu could have done this to him, when Ruby took charge.
“Pick him up Nashey, we’ll take him round to Dr Alice. She told one of my nurses she was going to make time to pop round to the nursery just before it closed to see if any of the children were showing signs of the flu. If we hurry we should just catch her.”
Nash did as he was told, hoisting the man over his shoulder.
They were soon walking through the bomb ravaged entrance of the Mother’s Arms. One of the nurses had been locking up, talking to Dr Alice as she did so. A quarter of an hour and a doctor’s consultation later, the man was conscious and sitting, propped up against the bar of the ex-pub. The man couldn’t speak and was not the best educated but through his scribbling of simple notes, they had ascertained he had been home from the trenches for three months, having been shot through the lungs and lost his speech.
Nash had just arrived back from the Cost Price restaurant with some potato soup for the patient. Ruby noticed the flaking potato skin floating unappetisingly in the liquid. She tried to think of a suitable simile for a moment, but could not think of anything disparaging enough so returned to the matter at hand.
She continued with the slow process of a note writing conversation while Dr Alice administered soup to the man. It transpired that he had been refused a full pension so had to go to work in a factory to make ends meet. After two months doing this he had collapsed and become paralysed in his hitherto stronger right arm. The authorities then offered him a job as a bookkeeper, and to punish him when he refused, his pension was reduced further. He had gone to see Miss Pankhurst for help. Sylvia had written to the authorities and tried to get his pension raised to that of a married man but she was told that because he had married since his discharge, his wife could not be expected to be kept by the government.
Ruby made all the right supportive noises, telling the man not to worry and so on. But as she did so she could not help less charitable thoughts entering her head.
He had married since his return from the trenches. A woman had married this pathetic husk of a man. Her sweetheart. But she had fallen in love with a man who no longer existed. Do you still marry the man anyway? Out of pity as much as love? Out of loyalty, not just to him but king and country? After all, the press were appealing to women to marry war-broken men.
She considered her own sweetheart standing a few feet away. The man who had saved her on the Titanic; had come to her rescue again on many an occasion during the Suffragette years; who was always there to look after her when she overworked and suffered a resultant slump, as was so often the case in this war; the tough East Ender who knew no fear and would always protect her; the saucy devil with a wry smile never far away when she was around; the clever Dick who put her in her place when she needed to be; the sarky so-and-so who would engage her in sharp tongued banter; the joker with such a sense of humour; the incorrigible lovable rogue; and let’s face it, the good looking, huge hunk of a feller. If all these attributes were taken away by mustard gas or a German shell, and replaced by the man whose notes she was reading, could she stay with him?
She did not like herself sometimes.
A misty-eyed Ruby showed the notes of the conversation first to her husband, then the doctor. Nash flew into a rage. His wife had not seen him this angry since the first air raid of the war had brought Zeppelins to the East End. The deaths and injuries had been bad enough, but it was the sightseers who had arrived the next day on open-top buses to see the devastation that had sent Nash in to paroxysms. Many a sightseer had been on the end of Nash’s fists and boots that day. In contrast Dr Alice simply nodded matter-of-factly. Ruby was not sure which reaction was scariest. And then, after a moment, she knew.
There was nothing more the doctor could do for her patient, so she started to tidy things into her bag. She was about to leave, but she was not going to escape that easily.
“Thank you doctor. We’ll look after the poor little devil now,” said Ruby, before completely changing tack. “By the way, you never did come to see me about the flu. I was upstairs sorting out the repair of the roof when you next came to the nursery after I sent you my note. But when I came down you’d gone. And I somehow managed to miss you the next time you visited as well. Lucky you told one of my nurses you’d be round today and I’ve managed to catch you.”
“Oh, of course I must apologise Ruby,” said Alice. “I have been such a busy bee of late your note completely slipped my mind and I forgot all about seeing you. I have to dash in and dash out of the nursery these days I’m afraid. Needs must and all that. I would have caught up with you sooner or later no doubt.”
Alice was one of the two most intelligent women Ruby knew. She was perhaps not as intellectually clever as Sylvia; few were. But she had one of those minds that never missed a thing. And she certainly never forgot to answer questions that were asked of her, especially on medical matters. Ruby knew full well that the good doctor had been avoiding her lately because she clearly did not want to answer questions about the flu. But Ruby played along. Both women could be equally good actresses.
“Oh, I know Alice. These days you don’t know whether you’re coming or going I’ll wager. Still, lucky we’ve bumped into each other now. Gives us a chance to talk about the flu.”
Alice knew she had been backed into a corner. And Nashey was looking on, which didn’t help. They were lovely people but she felt rather intimidated by Ruby and her husband. And she knew that if she refused to answer, Sylvia Pankhurst would be banging at her door within the hour. That would be even worse. So, having gained assurances from both Ruby and Nashey that whatever she told them was for their and Sylvia’s ears only, she told them a little, though not all of what she had been told about the flu. She also told them her own thoughts as a doctor on the matter.
Chapter 10
“Soon the women who stood in the pallid queues before shops spoke more about their children’s hunger than about the death of their husband.”
German woman 1918
Before the war Fritz Patemann had been an entrepreneur. Though not a very good one. When he had left school with no qualifications or professional interests, he had drifted into the first job that had landed in his lap. He had become a bank clerk. And had hated it. He had quite liked the actual work, adding figures together and making them balance, but had despaired of the politics, back-biting, stuffiness and snobbery of it all. And he had despised the other young men in the bank. Many of them liked to play the working class hero, throwing their
weight about. Fritz remembered them with contempt. They were bank clerks from a middle class area of Berlin. Not chain-makers from the toughest city slum in the Ruhr. They needed to come to terms with it!
He had stuck it out for almost four years, at the end of which he knew what he wanted to do. Become an entrepreneur. The only problem was that he lacked that essential quality that successful entrepreneurs tend to have. An understanding of what people want and, perhaps more importantly, before they know it themselves. Thus various business ventures failed.
When the war began he did the obvious thing for an entrepreneur with no real ability. He became a black marketeer. Nothing was available. People wanted everything. You couldn’t go wrong. But it was too easy. And Fritz believed himself to be fundamentally an honest man. He needed to do something honest that showed entrepreneurial flair and ability.
And then a headline in a newspaper changed his life.
******
Fritz had begun by telling his farmer contact Klaus that he was arranging for five thousand eggs to be sent by train to Munich next month. And Klaus could supply as many of them as he wished. The deal was set up; payment and transportation logistics arranged.
The farmer was appreciative and advised his young business associate that he had heard on the grapevine that much of the potato harvest had been ruined by blight. As a result he was stockpiling turnips, confident that their price would rise. He thought this information might be useful to a young man with an eye for the main chance. Anything that went well with turnips, such as bones for a soup or anything that made a turnip marmalade, might be worth getting his hands on.
Fritz thanked him for the information but he made it clear that he was not overly interested. He had another iron in the fire. And perhaps a friendly farmer could help him with this.
Moments later Klaus was having the best laugh he’d had all war. Fritz had just told him that an elephant had died in Dresden Zoo and that he had just bought the carcass. Cue Klaus’ outburst of merriment. Once the laughter started to subside, Fritz informed him that he intended to butcher the elephant and sell the meat off to restaurants. More laughter. But only for a moment until the farmer realised this idea had legs. Big fat ones, plus a trunk and various other fine cuts.
Now he had a captive audience, Fritz went on to explain that he needed someone he trusted with some level of butchery experience. He needed someone who knew what they were talking about to liaise with a Dresden slaughterhouse to set up a deal, no questions asked, at a good rate. Someone like a farmer who dealt in the black market. Meanwhile he himself would hawk the idea of elephant steaks around the best restaurants in Dresden.
Chapter 11
“England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere…The civilians talked a different language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.”
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
The fight for the vote for women had lost impetus in Germany during the war, but when eight and a half million British women had been added to their country’s electoral register in February, the ears of German women had pricked up. And with the success of the Spring Offensive apparently about to bring the war to an end in Germany’s favour, its women had been quick to mobilise. They could surely gain the vote during the Fatherland’s warm glow of victory.
And though belief that the war was about to end had receded, optimism that women would gain the vote remained. Dorothea was starting work for the German Association for Women’s Suffrage. She had shown her face at their headquarters to be introduced to a few people but soon enough was getting cracking down at the Borse marketplace. She was going to run a market stall, with the profits going directly into the coffers of her suffrage organisation.
Her fellow suffrage members had not exactly been lining up for the job. On busy days, it brought one into close contact with far too many people. The previous incumbent had unsurprisingly succumbed to the flu, which was laying low large numbers of people. And it was ‘potato day’ today, provided by the city authorities on a first-come-first-served basis. There was sure to be a rush.
But Dorothea had volunteered for the job. Although very intelligent, she actually preferred duties that did not involve much in the way of responsibility. When working as a nurse, she had always turned down opportunities to gain promotion. She always had plenty to say about women’s rights, the war and all the subjects of the day, and was considered something of a sage with friends and suffrage colleagues alike, but the reality was that she preferred theory over practice. Where work was concerned, she liked an intellectually easy life. Rather than becoming a politician on women’s rights, merely working on a market stall for the movement, was just fine with her.
And she hoped that her years in nursing, during which time she had caught the flu particularly badly on one occasion, may have left her with a certain level of immunity to the virus. That said, she was not taking any chances. As she got near the market, she donned a face mask before making her way through the busy narrow cobbled streets surrounding the large town square marketplace, past lines of empty hooks outside butchers’ shops. Butchers stood forlorn in their doorways, their only stock on sale being ‘ersatz’ sausages.
Ersatz, meaning substitute, had a new pejorative meaning. There were eleven thousand ersatz food and drink products available throughout the country. Coffee made from tree bark was particularly despised as dishwater, though the empty butchers’ shops were testament to the popularity or otherwise of meatless ersatz sausages, the ingredients of which few were brave enough to even hazard a guess at. But tomorrow was horse-meat day, when these same shops would be full of queues and dark red carcasses.
The potatoes had just been delivered, and another member was already busy awkwardly woman-handling the huge heavily laden hessian sacks, so they could be reached by the stall workers in an ergonomically efficient manner. Another colleague was standing in front of the produce, walking up and down pretending to busy herself getting the ration card punches ready, which took all of a few seconds, when in reality she was simply standing on guard to protect the stock from pilferage.
Potato stalls were scattered across the full width of the top of the square, and although still early, there were long queues for all of them stretching down the length of the marketplace like the tendrils of a giant jellyfish.
The women and children at the front of the lines stood on one foot, then another. They swayed and muttered.
Dorothea looked around the square. There must have been two thousand people in the marketplace. She whispered to her colleague.
“How long do you think the people in the front have been here?”
The woman nodded in the direction of the teenager at the front of their queue.
“I overheard that girl tell someone she got here at seven o’clock last night. But those at the back have slept in their beds and it will only take us and the other stalls three hours to reach them.” She paused for effect before adding a wry aside. “If we don’t all run out of stock by then of course.”
******
During the success of the Spring Offensive, German soldiers had raided Allied supply depots and hearing of the shortages at home, had reversed the usual system of care-packages being sent by the Home Front to those in the trenches. Peter Fueschel, a veteran of the war, had received a Jammerbrief; a letter from his family complaining about their lot, so he had been only too happy to send such a package of tinned food, clothing and tobacco back home.
After each year in the trenches, German soldiers usually received two weeks home leave. But such was the decimation of the army by the flu that Peter’s able-bodied presence had been required at the Front and his latest leave deferred. But now, with the Spring Offensive over, he had finally arrived home in Berlin on his fortnight’s leave. He understood from the many Jammerbriefs he had received that morale on t
he Home Front was at its lowest ebb due to the shortages and flu. Nevertheless he was still expecting a little of the ‘all hail the conquering hero’ treatment. But he had barely taken off his boots and braces and taken the first swig of his father’s weak beer, before he was being assailed by moaning. His father was quick to tell him that the beer was ‘strechen’.
If ersatz had become the second most hated word in the German language, after ‘Englisch’, strechen, meaning stretched, had become a close third. Beer, as well as milk, was watered down. Bread was stretched with potato flour. And if one was really desperate almost any foodstuff could be stretched with turnip.
Peter had to listen to a long litany of gripes and ingratitude which showed little comprehension of his life at the Front. So despite feeling exhausted, it was with some relief that he was sent off to line up at the market for some potatoes. Being in uniform he could go straight to the head of the queue and he would be served immediately.
He duly arrived at a potato stall and looked at the queue. The people in it were eerily silent. The hungry stood four abreast and shuffled forward when they could with the orderliness of soldiers. It all added to the general air of depression in the square. He stood close to the head of the queue but hesitated about going right to the front. He looked down the line of people’s anaemic faces, anxious and drawn, with puckered brows, lustreless eyes and dry cracked skins. Below some of them was the irony of swollen, bloated stomachs protruding from baggy trousers or skirts. One boy had bandy legs. Peter wondered if that at been caused by ‘the English disease’, rickets. How ironic.
It did not seem right to jump the queue. While contemplating whether to or not, he looked at the woman in charge of the stall. It was one of those moments when the person under scrutiny appears to have a sixth sense they are being watched and looks up and straight back at their voyeur. Their eyes met, but rather than the usual embarrassed look away, both parties held each other’s gaze. From what he could see of her face above the face mask, Peter thought her a good looking woman, but that would have been all the more reason to quickly avert his stare. There was something in the woman’s eyes that held him. She was lost. That was it. She was lost too.