Berlin Blind

by Alan Scholefield

  There were other calls on his attention. One day, about six weeks after his arrival, appell was held an hour earlier in the afternoon. This was unusual and the men went to their positions speculating on the reason: some said the war was over, some that they were being moved to another camp, others that there was going to be an exchange of prisoners and that they were going back to Britain. But when they reached the recreation area they found that a small platform had been set up and a microphone had been connected to the loud-speaker system. Appell was taken, and then the Kommandant arrived, followed by another figure: short, square, and dressed in an old, trench-coat style macintosh. In his right hand he carried a walking stick. There was something familiar about him, then Spencer realized he was looking at William Joyce, whom he had last seen in his father’s house in Bromley.

  ‘We have here today an important British person,’ the Kommandant began by way of introduction. ‘Herr Joyce, who works in Berlin at the Rundfunk and broadcasts all over the world in the cause of the Fatherland and of peace. Herr Joyce wishes to say something to you today.’

  He gave a stiff bow in Joyce’s direction and moved away from the microphone. It had been the briefest possible introduction and the Kommandant had looked uneasy. When the name Joyce was mentioned there had been a stir along the lines of men, many of whom, like Spencer, had heard his broadcasts in Britain. Now, as he stepped to the microphone there were several shouts of ‘Traitor! Traitor!’ and an undercurrent of booing. Joyce stood behind the microphone, staring down at the prisoners, the scar at the right side of his mouth giving an arrogant cast to his face. He waited for the jeering and booing to die down, then he said, ‘Men, we are fighting with the best of Europe’s youth to preserve our European civilization and our common cultural heritage from the menace of Jewish Communism. Make no mistake about it: Europe includes England.

  ‘Should Soviet Russia ever overcome Germany and the other European countries fighting with her, nothing on this earth would save the Continent from Communism and our own country would inevitably sooner or later succumb. We are British. We love England and all it stands for. Many of us have lost comrades, sacrificed in this war of Jewish revenge.

  ‘We have always felt we were being lied to and betrayed. Now we know it for certain. This conflict between England and Germany is racial suicide. We must unite and take up arms against the common enemy!

  ‘I ask you to come into our ranks and fight shoulder to shoulder with us for Europe and for England.

  ‘Many of the other countries of Europe: Norway, Holland, Sweden, even Spain have sent their sons to fight with us. Now we are asking you to join such a force, but made up of Britons. It is called the British Free Corps, and is being formed in Berlin.

  ‘Anyone who wishes to join will be taken from this camp to special training facilities in Berlin where there is good food, good wine and not so good women.’

  There was an ironic cheer at this. Spencer had noticed that at first the magnetism of his personality and his voice had grabbed the unwilling attention of the audience, but this ironic cheer broke the spell. Men began to talk to each other and shuffle their feet. Joyce went on at some length about this new fighting unit. He described how hundreds had joined from other prisoner-of-war camps. He spoke of the dedication needed, of the pay, and how they would be making themselves useful instead of decaying behind barbed wire. But, above all, he repeated the need for a united stand to conquer Jewish Communism.

  At the end of the speech the men were dismissed and Spencer walked back, feeling uneasy and ashamed that he knew Joyce. As they went back to their huts each mail was given a pamphlet about the British Free Corps. Some dropped them in the dirt, others stuffed them in their pockets to be used as lavatory paper.

  The weeks went by. Summer gave way to autumn. Allied troops were fighting on the Continent of Europe and it was said that the war was going to end any day. It did not. It lingered on. But everyone, including the German guards and administrative staff, now knew that it was only a matter of time before Germany was overrun. Discipline became lax, punishments less severe; no one wished to be remembered as being a tyrant once the war was over. It was in this atmosphere that Spencer’s relationship with Campbell reached crisis point.

  The big stoker had been forcing his company more and more on Spencer, so that he had taken to playing cricket and football to get away from him. Then, one day in October, the Scots crew got hold of liquor.

  For some weeks they had been talking about ways and means, and then there was a surge of Red Cross parcels and they pooled their chocolate and bribed one of the guards. Spencer was not sure what the drink was because it came in unlabelled bottles. It had a pungent smell which reminded him of kerosene, but the men didn’t seem to mind. They drank it in enamel mugs, coughing each time they took a mouthful.

  ‘Ma Gawd,’ one of them said, ‘this’ll put something in yer trews.’

  They drank and talked and played cards and Spencer lay on his bunk trying to read. After a while one of them said, ‘Gie us a tune, Archie’.

  ‘Aye, come on then.’

  Archie took out a concertina and began to play, ‘I Belong to Glasgow’, and they sang that, and ‘Loch Lomond’, and ‘Cock o’ the North’, and then Campbell got to his feet and said, ‘Come on, lads, an eightsome. Gie us a reel, Archie.’

  The music grew louder and the men began to dance a mixture of an eightsome reel and the ‘Dashing White Sergeant’. A chair was knocked over and broken and two of them crashed into a tier of bunks.

  ‘Steady, lads, or we’ll be in trouble,’ Archie said. He began to play a waltz. Several of the men began to dance, some taking the women’s parts.

  ‘How about a turn, ma wee lassie.’ Spencer looked up startled.

  Campbell was standing by the bunk. His big face was red and sweaty. Spencer noticed his hands again, huge and square: coal dust was ingrained at the sides of his nose.

  ‘I don’t feel like it,’ he said.

  ‘I’m no askin’, laddie, I’m tellin’.’

  He pulled Spencer out of the bunk and they began to dance. At first it was not more than drunken fun. They danced waltzes and foxtrots, and other seamen cut in from time to time. Then one or two of them staggered off to their bunks and Archie was sick over his concertina, the lights flickered once, then went off, and Spencer was left with Campbell. Suddenly everything changed. They were in a corner of the hut that could not be seen from the sleeping area when he felt Campbell’s hands on his trousers trying to unbutton his flies.

  ‘Take your hands off me!’ he said.

  ‘Och, we’re only having a bit o’ fun.’

  He tried to pull away but the stoker’s arms were like iron. He put his face next to Spencer’s and he smelled the reek of liquor. ‘You’re a pretty wee thing,’ Campbell said.

  ‘Let me go!’

  ‘I’ve nae had a woman for a year.’

  Spencer fought silently and ineffectively. He could feel his trousers being pulled down. ‘Wha’s a bit o’ fun?’ Campbell said. We’re aw entitled to a wee bit o’ fun.’

  The stoker’s hands were between his legs and he shouted at the top of his lungs, but no one in the hut stirred. He felt the power of the big man and knew that in a moment he must fall. Campbell was so drunk he could barely keep his balance and it was this that helped Spencer. He had been pushing Campbell and the big man seemed to lose his balance and his shoulder went through one of the hut windows. There was a splintering of glass followed almost immediately by shouts and lights and the hut was swarming with guards. Campbell and Spencer were grabbed. Campbell fought and was finally silenced with a rifle butt. Then they were dragged to the cooler and placed in adjoining cells.

  Campbell was awake the following morning when the Kommandant sent for Spencer. He was standing at the door of his cell gripping the bars with his huge hands. There was an expression of anger on his dark face. ‘You listen tae me, lad: one word — one bloody word — and I’ll finish you.’

&nbs
p; The camp Kommandant was a pragmatist. The last thing he wanted at this stage of the war was trouble.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for something like this,’ he said, looking first at Spencer and then at his file. He stood up, a loose-jointed man with a high-domed bald head, and walked to the window which looked out onto a bleak prospect of barbed wire and sentry boxes. ‘Sixteen years old! I told them at the beginning what would happen. They said there was nowhere else to send you. You should be at home with your father and mother, Spencer, not here giving me trouble.’ He came back, slumped in his chair. ‘What to do with you, that is the question, eh? You are a problem to me. Wherever I put you the same thing is going to happen. Oh, don’t bother to lie to me, I can guess what happened. A man of thirty and nearly one hundred kilos fighting with sixteen years. Don’t you think I know? You cannot have a command like mine and live like a saint. There are no saints here, Spencer, that is why I worry about you. Did he threaten you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘If you spoke about it?’ He moved back to the desk.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘He will try again one day and if you don’t give him what he wants he will hurt you badly; maybe even kill you. It is not nice to think about.’

  Spencer agreed. During the night in the cooler when he had been unable to sleep he had felt sick with apprehension at the thought of the future. He knew that Campbell would have another go at him and he knew that Campbell’s mates would do nothing to stop him.

  ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t you transfer me to another camp?’

  ‘At this time in the war it is not possible. There are no arrangements left for such things.’

  ‘To another hut, sir.’

  ‘Don’t you understand that what happened to you with Campbell can happen in any hut! You are a problem, Spencer. You are too good-looking. Has such a thing never happened before?’

  He remembered the soldiers and sailors in the streets of South-East London. But theirs had been friendly advances compared to Campbell’s.

  ‘I cannot leave you with Campbell, that is certain,’ the Kommandant said. He began moving papers about on his desk, putting one on top of the other, shuffling them, rearranging them. At last he pulled one up and studied it. He looked thoughtfully at Spencer for a moment, then said, ‘Perhaps you will have more chance against the Russians than against Campbell. Have you read this?’ It was the pamphlet that had been distributed to the men after William Joyce’s speech.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go into the office next door and read it. Think very carefully. Take your time. Understand it. Understand what you are doing and how it will affect you when the war is over. Then come and tell me your decision.’

  He went into an empty room next to the Kommandant’s office and looked at the piece of paper. It was headed ‘British Free Corps’. He began to read:

  As a result of repeated applications from British subjects from all over the world wishing to take part in the common European struggle against Bolshevism, authorization has recently been given for the creation of a British Volunteer unit. The British Free Corps publishes herewith the following short statement of the aims and principles of the unit:

  1. The British Free Corps is a thoroughly British volunteer unit conceived and created by British subjects from all parts of the Empire who have taken up arms and pledged their lives in the common European struggle against Soviet Russia.

  2. The British Free Corps condemns the war with Germany and the sacrifice of British blood in the interests of Jewry and International Finance, and regards this conflict as a fundamental betrayal of the British people and British Imperial interests.

  3. The British Free Corps desires the establishment of peace in Europe, the development of close friendly relations between England and Germany, and the encouragement of mutual understanding and collaboration between the two great Germanic peoples.

  4. The British Free Corps will neither make war against Britain or the British Crown, nor support any action or policy detrimental to the interests of the British.

  Published by the British Free Corps.

  He read the leaflet three times. He had always despised the fascists as symbolized by his father, but he saw no conflict now in accepting the way out that the Kommandant was offering. His experience of those who were fighting fascism had been little better. He went back to the Kommandant.

  ‘Do you understand it? Will you go?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘All right.’ He paused for a moment and then looked up. ‘I will put on your papers that you were sent to Berlin because you were too young for the camp. It might help after the war when you are interrogated. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  *

  Spencer stood at the window of his study in the house in Hampstead and stared down on the lights of London. It was a cold and frosty night and they were particularly brilliant. It was six weeks since the terrorists had been in the house, since Sue, Tellier and Werner Riemeck had been killed, and still the investigation seemed to have got nowhere, except that the police now knew that the Volkswagen had been stolen from a parking lot in Stuttgart; it had been owned by an American couple on a touring holiday. Apart from that, there was nothing, or at least nothing that the police were confiding to Spencer.

  When he looked back over the six weeks, the hours and days seemed to blur. There had been so many questions and so many policemen asking them that he could no longer differentiate one question from another, one policeman from the next. The daylight hours, which he spent at his office, could also not be differentiated. He was picked up by his driver in the Mercedes at eight and returned at seven, day in, day out, including Saturdays. There had been an attempt on the part of one or two senior executives in the company to take the work load off his shoulders, and a suggestion that he go away for a month or two and forget, but he had retreated into the cliche that it was better to have something to do, something to occupy his mind.

  But he could not stay at work on Sundays nor through the long hours of the night. At first he had gone for aimless drives, sometimes stopping at a pub, talking to people, listening, sometimes getting drunk, until one night he found himself in the American bar of a hotel in Surrey with no idea of how he got there. He had taken a room and slept it off and returned home the following morning.

  He was haunted by many things, but the most immediate and the worst was the knowledge that he had to sort out Sue’s belongings and give them to a charity. He began one Sunday morning with the sun streaming into the house. It was like self-mutilation. There were dresses he knew well from times she had worn them on holiday in Corfu or the Algarve; there were shoes, there were handbags and stoles, furs — the rooms were filled with memories. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to think of each garment, each accessory, as so much cotton, silk or leather, without her personality, without her aura.

  He emptied everything on to the floor of her sitting-room and soon the pile grew high. At first he had looked at each piece of clothing, felt in each pocket, but later he began to work more quickly, grabbing armfuls of underwear or dresses, scooping up shoes, throwing them on the growing pile. He had no idea she’d had so much. Drawers, dressing-tables, walk-in cupboards, wardrobes — all were full.

  And then, going through the drying cupboard, where some of her underwear was still hanging, he saw at the back a small attache case. He pulled it out and looked at it frowning. It had belonged to his first wife, Margaret. He took it in to the bedroom and opened it and immediately wished he hadn’t. It held two photograph albums and a book of cuttings. He knew what they contained and decided not to look at them. But almost of their own volition his hands raised the cover of the first album.

  It was worse than he had imagined it would be. It contained the pictures of his son Dick as a child, blurred photographs taken on the box Kodak. He knew them all so well because he had looked at them many times. But he saw things in them he had not seen before, lit
tle quirks of expression on the boy’s face. And something else; in almost every photograph of Dick, Margaret made an appearance, holding him as a child, being with him as a boy. The second album was Dick grown up; Dick married to Lucy; Stephen born; Dick in uniform; Dick out of uniform; holidays in Wales and Scotland. Halfway through the album he knew he was never going to finish the set of books without a drink. He went down to the drawing-room but he had run out. In the kitchen he found the liquor which Sue had used for cooking. There was a bottle of Bual Madeira, one of Cyprus sherry and half a bottle of rum. He took the Madeira upstairs and began to go through the cuttings album.

  They started with Dick at school winning the mile; Dick scoring fifty at cricket; Dick’s poem in the school magazine; then a gap and a cutting of a news picture of Dick getting his wings at the passing-out parade; Dick’s marriage — and then, suddenly, the stories of the accident. CHILD CAUSES ACCIDENT TO FAMILY was the Telegraph’s heading. FAMILY WIPED OUT IN M-WAY SMASH said the Mirror.

  He read the Telegraph story: ‘A stone thought to have been thrown by a child from one of the bridges over the M1 caused the deaths of three members of a family near Stevenage yesterday.

  ‘Squadron-Leader Richard Spencer, 28, his wife, Lucy, and their son Stephen, 4, were travelling south towards London at about 5 p.m. yesterday when the car suddenly swerved on to the north-bound carriage-way and crashed into an oncoming container lorry.

  ‘All three members of the family appear to have died instantly.

  ‘Mr Albert Gittings, 43, of Edgbaston, the driver of the lorry, was unhurt, but was taken to hospital and treated for shock. He was later released.

  ‘Today Mr Gittings described what happened: “The traffic was light as I was coming towards the bridge. I saw two or three kids run off to the left. One stopped and threw something. Then this car came over from the south-bound carriageway.

  “‘I remember thinking, my God, he can’t see, the windscreen’s shattered.

  ‘“There was no way I could avoid him.”