‘I went to your funeral,’ I said to Johnston Melville. He was in a mess, but not the mess you would expect from a corpse. His thin red hair was plastered to his head with rainwater, and his German tunic with its sewn-in prisoner patches was mud-stained. He had lost a lot of weight, and his face was weathered a coarse carmine. Johnston stared at me wordless, as if staggered to hear about his own obsequies. Even in life, I thought, he hadn’t been quick-witted.
‘What’s going on? Why are you here?’
‘Please help me. I need to get away. Those Germans are going to kill me, Mike.’
‘Why don’t you just walk away? Or stay in this police station?’
Johnston suddenly began to shout. ‘You’re an idiot! You know fine I can’t go to the police. See the situation I’m in!’ We both glanced at the door, wondering who might have heard him.
‘What situation?’ Johnston said nothing. He pulled a lump of cotton waste from his pocket and wiped his nose with it. I saw he had a bad cold. I went outside and told the others to wait; one of the Germans had something important to tell me in private. The remaining prisoners had already been allowed to take shelter in their truck. I told the escort to get them back to their camp, as soon as the British had done with Wuttke’s interrogation. I would send the other man on when I had finished with him.
By now, I was making some connections. When Johnston was sitting in a vacant interview room with a mug of tea, I began: ‘You were on the Fronsac, when it blew up, yes? But you survived, and afterwards, you ran away. Why did you? What had you done?’
‘It wisnae me,’ he said like a child. His hands on the mug were shaking.
‘But you were the officer in charge.’
‘Right. I was in charge, so I was. It was my show. Me not knowing one end of a torpedo from the other. Well, we couldn’t open the cover on the firing interlock, to check it out. So I told this French leading seaman fellow to give it a single dunt with the hammer. But he went on and was hammering on the other locks too. I never told him to do that, never. And it went up – the launching charge. It should never have been in the breech, not in port. There was this flash and blast that blew me over the side, then the big bang. I don’t rightly mind what happened then, just being pulled out of the water.’
‘What happened to the French sailor?’
‘God knows. I think he bought it. He wisnae one of our lot, just some French matelot. Never saw him before or since. Never, believe me!’ He met my eyes and nodded hard. ‘When they put me ashore, I was lying on the quay with the burned sailors. I was seeing what was happening on the ship – smelling it and hearing it too. I thought: I did this. They’ll never believe it wisnae my fault. They’ll take my life away for this. So when they put me on a stretcher for the ambulance, I ran for it.’
‘But what about Helen and Jackie? Your mother? They think you’re dead.’
‘I got to a post launch; he took me across the water. I went into the hills. Found an empty cottage, up in the forestry.’
He watched me carefully. An idea came to me. ‘Mrs Melville knew where you were, didn’t she? You must have found a telephone. Your mother was bringing you food and stuff on her bicycle, across the ferry from Gourock. With Jackie. So did Jackie know too?’
No reply. ‘Why didn’t you tell Helen?’ I thought to myself; why didn’t Mrs M tell Helen either? Johnston looked sullen.
There was a long silence. One of the British officers opened the door, apologised, took a look at Johnston and went out again. I knew quite well what I should do. I was an Allied officer facing a British deserter who was wanted by the police and the naval authorities. I really had no alternatives.
‘Johnston, what the hell are you doing in German uniform?’
Quite unexpectedly, he laughed. ‘I got a lift with them.’ One morning, he had looked out of his cottage and seen the heads of a naval patrol bobbing above the bracken. (I thought at once of Eric, and his cosy interest in everything that Helen and Mrs M did and everywhere they went.) Johnston took off over the hill. A day later, hungry and midge-bitten, he had thumbed down an army lorry near Arrochar, and found himself in the back of a three-tonner with ten German prisoners of war, on their way to the east coast.
‘There was two German officers – aye, that Wuttke bastard was one. He knew me at once for a deserter. They’d hand me over to the escort if I didn’t do what he said. See, the other officer was planning to escape. They asked me where there was wee boats, so I had to say Hunters’ Quay, Rhu and so on – maybe he was going to make for the Irish Free State. They made me change clothes with this German and get his paybook and that. So the numbers would add up when they were counted the other end.’ Somewhere along the twisting Loch Lomond road, the escaper had slipped over the tailboard and rolled into the ditch.
‘So now you are a German? For how long?’
‘I saw you, Mike, that day the Polish general came to see us digging. But I didnae want you to see me. Now, it’s all changed. Wuttke’s bunch, first they reckoned I could be a kinna hostage, but now they’re no needing me any more. The word is they are going to a new camp, a real hard place that’s being put up at Abercultie for the SS prisoners. No chance I could pass for German there. See, I’m the only one who knows about the escape, so they’re wanting to kill me before they get to Abercultie. Help me out, Mike. We cared for you back in Union Street, Helen and I. Okay, maybe you never hit it off with me, but help me for Helen’s sake, Jackie’s sake!’
I went out, slamming the door and locking it. The British officer was still there, sitting on a bench in the police station lobby and studying a newspaper. He looked up at me. ‘Something special about that Jerry?’
It occurred to me that I had not checked the window in the interview room. Why not? I distinctly remembered wondering if it could be closed, as I turned the door key. But for some reason, I had not followed the thought. As soon as I unlocked the door again, I knew that the room would be empty.
The first thing I did in that room changed my life. I went to the open window and closed it. It was a sash window, and I remember noticing how heavy and stiff the lower pane was, clogged with grime and old paint. Tugging it down took a violent effort. Johnston must have struggled desperately to heave it up, and make a space wide enough for his thin, damp body to twist through. When the window was shut again, I turned the snib to secure it. Now I was a criminal, an accomplice.
What possessed me? I was concealing the escape of a prisoner – two prisoners, in fact, counting the German officer who had slipped off the lorry. Worse still, I was complicit in hiding a naval deserter wanted by both the British police and – whatever one called them – the security services. To that I could add my new guilty knowledge, near-certainty, that his mother had for months been helping that man to avoid arrest.
And all this for Johnston Melville? I did not even like him. Who could? All he seemed to have for a character was a caterpillar malignity; the power to poison anyone who bit him – perhaps anyone who tried to rescue him. And his appearance counted against him too. I still felt resentful, even cheated, that my first Scottish acquaintance had been this pallid mother’s boy. Book-reading in childhood had given me heroic expectations. But what had Johnston to do with the giants of Ossian or with Ketling, the merry little Scottish warrior in Sienkiewicz’s novels?
Every one of those alarms was ringing in my head. And yet I found myself leaving the room, locking it again and making my way to a back door. Our staff car was parked in the police-station yard round the corner; the British intelligence officer was no doubt still pretending to read a newspaper in the front lobby.
I looked down the street. The lorry with Wuttke and the other prisoners had gone. In the distance, I saw a figure dart from one close-mouth to another; even through the rain, his prisoner patches showed their colour. Going back into the police station, I found a black rubber gas cape hanging on a hook.
Stalking Johnston was easy. He gave only a grunt of terror when I grabbed his wrist. �
�Put this on. Here’s half-a-crown for the bus.’ I told him where to get off as the bus passed our camp. ‘There’s a Catholic chapel down the way on the left. Hide there till I come.’
Looking back on those moments, so many years later, I can’t reconstruct my recklessness. But I can recognise the drive which made me act as I did. Not out of pity for a fellow being. Not for Helen, wherever she might be. Not out of any inner bloody-mindedness towards authority, and certainly not through disloyalty to our cause. This war against the two ogre-powers who hated liberty even more than one another, and whose partnership to devour my country seemed so natural – that was still a war I wanted to fight.
None of those feelings moved me. It was the open window. A trapped creature had managed to free the steel hatch-cover jammed above his life, and – dressed as somebody else – to vanish into the future. In the blank rectangle of air between the sill and the sash, air carrying the scent of wet trees and distant frying, I had seen the outline of redemption, rebirth, the mouth of a secret passage open to every man and woman who is allowed to find it. No, I was not – am not – ‘religious’. But the open window was to me a sign which I knew that I could not deny.
The Scots sing in their kirk that ‘Ev’n as a bird out of the fowler’s snare / Escapes away, so is our soul set free’. I had heard those words, a psalm rough-hammered into rhyme, at a Church of Scotland service to which Polish soldiers were invited. It had been a bad idea. Their Catholic instincts were ruffled by the Kirk’s grim informality, and they chattered and laughed all through. Embarrassed, I bent over the words in the metrical psalter and saw that, after all, Scots and Poles had something in common:
When cruel men against us furiously
Rose up in wrath to make of us their prey;
Then certainly they had devour’d us all...
And as fierce floods before them all things drown,
So had they brought our soul to death quite down...
That was how things felt to us, as they had once felt to the children of Israel and then to the Scots facing Edward’s armies. The psalm went on to give God the praise for slashing a hole in the fowlers’ net; he would not give his people ‘for a living prey / Unto their teeth and bloody cruelty’. But he had given poor Poland for a living prey. The nets were all about us.
*
Like fixing Helen’s flit to Canada, translating Johnston into yet another existence turned out to be easier than I expected. Easier than it should have been. I gave him some of my own civilian clothes, and parked him in a brick air raid shelter behind the chapel. Then came some telephone calls and a visit to a closely guarded camp with tall radio masts, where we were starting to train what we called in Polish ‘silent-shadowy’ people – agents to be parachuted back into Poland.
As an intelligence officer, I was known there. Two bottles of Johnny Walker in a gas mask satchel clinked down on the desk of the captain whose shadowy boys produced forged Wehrmacht passbooks and movement permits. ‘A British identity card? A civilian one? Szczucki, don’t fuck this up, whatever it is, or I will get shot too. No, tell me after the war. What name?’
It took a week. Then Alexander Ketling, b. Paisley 1915, certified mentally subnormal and unfit for military service, went sulkily down the road when it was dark enough. I pushed three pound notes into his pocket. ‘Stay away from here. Find a job digging holes, caring for sheep, something. Keep out of the war. Keep away from me.’
The dangerous bit, I knew, would be covering his disappearance in Kirkcaldy, the escape of a prisoner of war in my charge. Next day, the British officers who had been in the police station arrived in my office and questioned me. My story was that, after listening to what he had to say, I had let him walk back towards the lorry where Wuttke and the other Germans were waiting.
No, I hadn’t waited to see him climb on board. What had he told me? Nothing interesting. He said he was from a part of Germany where there were many people of Polish extraction; his sister had married one of them who had gone back to Poland just before the outbreak of war to join the army. The prisoner wanted to know if his brother-in-law had reached our army in Scotland. I said I didn’t see why I should do him a favour. That was all.
The Brits watched me in their calm way. Presumably I had taken a note of his name and number? ‘He did tell me, but I don’t remember.’ Wasn’t that amazingly casual of me – an intelligence officer? One of the Brits began to write on a pad.
‘Maybe it will come back to me... it was... something like...’ A look of resigned disgust passed between the Brits. These Poles! The writing officer glanced up from his notes and said: ‘His name was Nuttgen, Hans, an infantry lieutenant. Did he say anything about going to look for this brother-in-law? No? Doesn’t come back to you either? Well, it seems that’s as far as we can take it today.’
I foresaw very bad trouble indeed. But days passed, and I heard nothing more. Then, a couple of weeks after I had sent Johnston off to become Alexander Ketling, there was a telephone call. ‘Major, er... Shoosky? I thought you’d like to know. We’ve caught him.’
‘You caught him?’ I looked round my familiar office, mentally saying goodbye. I had made myself comfortable here. Would they let me take a book with me? Were Scottish prisons heated in winter?
‘Absolutely! Should have told you before. Pretty enterprising chap – he seems to have walked across to the west coast, nicked a dinghy and rowed himself all the way to Ireland.’
‘Oh, you mean... Nuttgen did.’
‘Yes, of course. Is this a bad line? He got to Ireland – but the wrong one! The Royal Ulster Constabulary picked him off the shore in County Antrim. Good try, one has to say.’
‘Did he tell you anything more? Who helped?’
‘Well, some things still don’t add up. How he got civvy clothes. How he got from Kirkcaldy across to Argyllshire. That SS sod Wuttke probably knows more than he’s saying. We’ve got him in a punishment cell. By the way, Nuttgen keeps saying he never talked to any Polish officer, and doesn’t have a brother-in-law anywhere. Bizarre!’
When he hung up, I sat for a long moment in silence. Then I went to the office safe, and brought out a bottle of whisky. Beside it in the safe was a small brown envelope. I took that out too, and as I drank to my own escape I spread out the German Wehrpass in the name of Nuttgen, Hans, which Johnston had been given with the escaper’s tunic. Not something I wanted to be found with. Next day, I gave it to the ‘silent-shadowy’ people up the road. They and their parachutists would find a use for it.
9
The war came closer. Although London and the English cities were being blitzed, I had assumed that Scotland was more or less beyond the Luftwaffe’s reach. Then, on two nights in the middle of March 1941, the German bomber fleets came for Clydebank. One of our destroyers, Piorun, was in John Brown’s yard for repairs at the time. She cheered the town’s survivors with the banging of her guns, but hit nothing.
Greenock was only a few miles away downriver. I thought uneasily about Union Street and Mrs Melville and Jackie. Mrs M was on my conscience. She knew nothing about Johnston’s second escape, but I was certain that persistent Eric knew what she had been doing in the Argyll hills. Sooner or later, he would be ready to pounce. It seemed to me that there was little I could do to stop him. To visit Union Street would only set Eric wondering whether I too had something to hide. Anyway, the less Mrs M knew about Johnston, the better.
I sat quietly at my typewriter, drinking tea and editing little bulletins. Polish troops had been in action far away in Syria, and perhaps would soon be fighting in Greece or North Africa. Speeches by Churchill, speeches by our Supreme Commander. Weeks passed. Then, at breakfast in the mess one day, somebody said: ‘They hit Greenock last night. Isn’t that where you were, Szczucki?’
Back in my office, the external telephone rang. I knew who it would be. ‘Mr Ketling? Yes, I heard. No, don’t talk now. At St Monans, at six, outside the harbour gate? Fine, Mr Ketling.’
I hardly recognised
this figure in fisherman’s yellow oilskins, over a dirty white jersey. It wasn’t just that Johnston had put on weight. There was something newly self-assured about him, even insolent. I had to ask him twice what he was doing until, reluctantly, he explained that he had got a job with an East Neuk drifter going after haddock. ‘The other lads? They’re no bothering me. They just ignore me now, when we’re ashore. Coarse types, you know; off the boats there’s only beer for them and getting the wee bit with the women. They get their pay and it’s away in an evening.’ Johnston was healthier, but no more likeable than before.
‘There’s no way I can go through there myself. But you could go. See if the house is standing yet. See if my mother’s fine, and Jackie. And Helen.’
‘I never told you. Helen’s gone away, last year after you – after the funeral. She’s in Canada.’
‘Canada? What for Canada? She never telt me she was going.’
‘How could she? You were dead.’
‘Aye, right.’ He stared me down. ‘If you’re through to Union Street, there’s things I need. My father’s watch, it’s gold. And my passbook from the Union Bank. I’m putting my money away here, a fair sum now, and I’m wanting it safe in the bank.’
‘Johnston, are you mad? If you use that passbook, they’ll catch you.’
‘Aye, right,’ he said again. He thought for a moment. ‘Just the watch, then. And my suit – the good suit, that’s in the press in my mother’s room. That’ll be enough for now.’
‘Will I tell your mother where you are?’
‘Ach, just tell her I’m fine. That and no more. That’ll be plenty for her.’ He turned to go.
I called after him: ‘Don’t telephone me again!’ But he took no notice, and marched on down the steep harbour street. Gulls with yellow bills snarled at him as they hopped out of his way.
The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Page 8