The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel

by Neal Ascherson

  She rose and she dived. Once she went too deep, hunting across an underwater boulder gaudy with sponges and red starfish to see if lobsters were hiding under its overhang. It was darker and the surface was far above, as she suddenly knew she couldn’t hold her breath any longer and struggled upwards. In the air, she gasped and waited.

  ‘Jackie, come in now, that’s too much.’

  The vice of cold biting into her legs, which had relaxed, was gripping her again. But she shook the water out of her mask and dived for the last time, aiming back towards the sponge-littered boulder. There at last was a blue-black lobster, backing into the weeds of a wide crevice in the rock, and, on the sand at the foot of the crevice, a man’s empty boot. Waving her thin legs, Jackie went down closer: not much breath left. But where the lobster had gone, there was a cluster of crabs and starfish on top of something bulky and yellowish. Part of the something protruded like a stick, with one of its white twigs wedged through a gold ring.

  Jackie kicked away with all her strength. She thought she was going to die, because she only just reached the surface in time and because she knew what she had seen. She tried to scream but water poured into her mouth, and when she finally scrambled through to the shore she fell forward and couldn’t stand up. As she lay flat on the sand, coughing out sea and hearing her own sobbing, she saw the Fronsac and what was still inside the Fronsac and she felt her child-hand turning a key.

  She tried to raise herself on all fours and fell back again, as Helen ran to her. The sun had gone in. A chill north-west breeze was driving white flecks across the sea towards them.

  *

  In the weeks that followed, after the body had been worked out of the crevice and driven away by the funeral-parlour folk and the police, Helen and Jackie tried to find out who the man had been. Forget all about it, they were told, this is wartime and they had no need to know. Eventually, many months later, Mrs Melville asked an old friend on Argyllshire County Council to ask an old friend of his who was senior in the police at Campbeltown to find out. Yes, the remains had been identified almost at once: a young South African pilot officer who had gone missing after an accident on board an aircraft carrier. What accident? Never you mind.

  Jackie told her mother that she wanted to go on diving, in spite of what she had found. Helen said: ‘Are you morbid? You’ll get more bad dreams. Girl, it’s time you started thinking about a proper training. Look at yourself; you’re a big lassie now. I’m your mother, and I can see your lady equipment is being delivered up front – you with me? So we need to talk about a few things. Men, undies. Wait and I’ll take you up to Daly’s, Saturday in Glasgow, and we’ll get a proper bra and knickers.’

  ‘Mother, I’m after being a scientist. A marine biologist. Know what that is?’

  Helen studied her daughter. She nodded slowly. ‘That’ll be you getting paid money for diving under the sea? Well, great. If you go for what you want, I’m right pleased with it. You’re taking after me, you know that? So see and get good Highers in biology.’

  Jackie felt it was all flowing too easily. She said sharply: ‘How do you say it’s morbid? The sea’s full of dead things; if there werena any dead things, there’d no be any living ones either. It’s the law of nature. See now, the lifecycle of the hermit crab...’

  ‘Whiles you really vex me, Jackie. You think because I don’t have the blazer and tie education, I’m dead ignorant of science. Well, speaking as a ferry pilot, the Survival of the Fittest is me. And I do so know about the hermit crab. When it’s scunnered at how it lives, it flits to somebody else’s old shell. There’s a few wee crabs like that around this family, I’m telling ye!’

  So Jackie did science and biology, and when she was fifteen she went by herself down to Largs and across the ferry to Millport in Cumbrae and rang the bell on the Marine Biological Station. ‘My name is Jacqueline Melville, aged fifteen, I stay in Greenock but I’m at St Columba’s, Kilmacolm, I’m studying science for Highers and I want to be a marine biologist.’

  ‘Well, well, young lady.’

  ‘I have the certificates for swimming, diving and life-saving.’

  ‘Does your mammy and your daddy know you’re here?’

  ‘My mother does so know, and I think this is a fine place, a fine establishment, and I would like to come and work here.’

  ‘Young lady, you know this is not really the sort of work for girls. It’s cold and wet, and there’s a lot of complex analysis with chemicals and maths.’

  ‘Girls make tanks. Girls make rockets and my mother flies bombers. Look, mister, just give me that piece of paper over there.’

  ‘My goodness, you’re awful forward. I think you should be getting home for your tea.’

  ‘Mister, just kindly see us that sheet of paper. Right, thanks. Now this is going to be a diagram of how the intertidal zone ecology in the Firth of Clyde varies with seasonal temperatures. Okay? Just stay where you are. Oh, I’ll be needing a red pencil, too. And d’ye keep graph paper?’

  The assistant director went home to his wife in Millport that evening. He said: ‘Elspeth, I just met a phenomenon. She’s fifteen years old and she’s just dead brilliant. A real grasp of what we do. And she’s wanting a job.’

  ‘Well, so give her a job.’

  ‘Ach, I don’t know. I more or less did. I told her: come back before you go to university, and if you’re still keen, we’ll maybe see about it. But a young woman on the research staff? We’ve girls sterilising glass in the lab and that, but the offshore fieldwork, the recovery diving out at sea and at depth – is it really for females? She’s quite attractive too, unfortunately. You know, she said her mother flew bombers: what am I supposed to make of that?’

  ‘Andrew, will you get off your big fat bahookie and move with the times?’

  So Jackie went back to Millport when she left school, and again when she had done the science honours degree at Glasgow, first class, and was taken on as a junior.

  Lab work, then shallow-sea fieldwork and diving. The big lads on the boats were surly at first, not sharing the rum they added to their navy ‘kye’ cocoa or, when she needed the toilet, telling her the heads below was out of order when it wasn’t. But Jackie barely noticed.

  ‘Cauld as yesterday’s fish supper, that high-heid lassie.’ But even when she was back ashore, her hair drying as she wrote up reports soon noted for their neatness and exactness, her soul was underwater with the living organisms and the dead.

  23

  The war; I don’t want to talk about it. Many of us say that, but only some of us mean it. I don’t quite mean it.

  But for a good many of my friends, silence has been a positive decision. I’m thinking of those who were in Siberia or in our country during the German occupation, and especially those ‘of Jewish origin’. Their children complain: why won’t they tell us? Surely it’s healthier to tell, to pour it all out and ‘come to terms with it’, to reach ‘closure’? They say: Surely we have a right to know?

  And yet I have come to understand that decision for silence. Admittedly, I don’t quite understand why it’s usually men, rather than women, who take it. Women are better at keeping secrets than men, and yet Wisia wanted me to know what had happened to her and to her family. Maybe men feel they have the patriarchal right to edit and redact the narrative of history before it is passed down the generations. More likely, men are simply more pessimistic, less resilient, less able to see beyond their own disabling experience than women.

  Such men say to themselves: I have seen things done by human beings which no human being should see, or even know about, or imagine to be possible. To know what I know has damaged me, taken something from me that can’t be put back. I can never be quite like other people.

  And yet there remains a sort of remedy. I can make sure that this bad seed, this virus of terrible knowledge, does not reach my children and the generation of their friends. I can make sure that it stops right here with me, and dies with me. I will be silent.

&n
bsp; Why am I explaining all this? My own case is nothing like so bad. I am not going to write much about this part of my war, not because it shouldn’t be remembered but because it would not mean a lot to readers. I saw foul and terrifying things, but when I occasionally meet old comrades who were in the Division, we talk about the in-jokes: the grotesque orders from on high, the obsessions of adjutants, the folly of allies. We talk about what happened to a Him and sometimes to a Her (women began to enter our lives again as we liberated Belgian and Dutch cities). We have no need to remind ourselves of horror.

  And speaking of suppression, I came to appreciate the English art of understatement at bad moments – and I mean English, not Scottish. Infuriating at the time, treasured for style later. Take this scene in a command post near our forward positions in Normandy, after the Royal Air Force had bombed our tanks for the second day running. A Polish colonel who had made a furious protest the first time had just stamped out after an even longer and louder outburst. When he had gone, I heard one of the young RAF liaison officers on the phone to his headquarters: ‘Yes, well, I’m afraid they do go on about it rather.’

  Normandy wasn’t like what I remembered of the September campaign in Poland. For one thing, I was five years older. For another, we had far better weapons and armour, though never near German quality. In Normandy I was part of a highly organised headquarters as an intelligence officer; in 1939 I had soon been reduced to a straggler with the survivors of my battery.

  And this time it wasn’t a simple war to defend our country. Was our advance supposed to take us all the way to Warsaw, to liberate Poland before the Soviets got there? Would there be a Poland left to liberate? Or were we killing Germans in France just to take our minds off these questions?

  General Maczek’s First Armoured Division crossed the Channel well after the first wave of landings, and was at once embroiled in the horrible fighting before Caen. As I have said, we were repeatedly bombed by our own side. This fate earned les Polonais the warm sympathy of French civilians, generally cool towards the other ‘liberators’ who had left their villages in rubble.

  About a month after we had landed I was driving a jeep along a long, straight Norman road, well behind our forward positions, when an American fighter-bomber skimmed low overhead. It was heading for the German lines. But when I saw it bank, roll and start back towards us, I slammed on the brakes, yelled for the radio operator to take cover and bolted for the ditch.

  The cannon shells bounced the jeep across the road in an eruption of smoke and dust. I tripped and fell as my leg jerked, and realised that I had been hit. For some reason, as I lay there, I felt for Wisia’s earring in my tunic pocket. Still there.

  The plane had vanished. In the silence, the jeep suddenly gushed flames. I limped over the road, but the young radio operator was very dead in the other ditch. A quiet boy from Lithuania, whose parents wanted him to train for the priesthood.

  I had the sense to pull two jerrycans of petrol off the back of the jeep before the fire reached them, and then lay down on the grass verge. I saw blood on my boot and felt a throbbing, but it seemed a good time to have a sleep.

  Such was my ignominious war wound: ‘friendly fire’. But it was truly friendly in one sense, because while bits of metal were being tweezered out of my leg in a field hospital, I missed Falaise.

  This was the Division’s worst or, if you like, finest battle. General Maczek was sent to close the ‘Falaise Gap’ against the escaping German army, and the full strength of many desperate panzer divisions was hurled against the Poles. My replacement as an intelligence officer was killed trying to fight off tanks with a rifle, the day after he reached the Division. I lost good friends there.

  Some of the prisoners who put their hands up at Falaise were shouting in Polish: men from western Poland who had been forcibly drafted into the Wehrmacht. I acquired a new wireless operator, a fat, merry fellow from near Danzig who had German university degrees in radio technology. He was a Kaszub, from the small Slavic people who over centuries have learned to adapt towards whichever masterful nation happens to be hoisting its flag over their landscape. He told me: ‘Home is Mum, the farm, a good funeral wake with the neighbours. Oh, and a deep cellar to hide our women until the next army has passed.’

  In Belgium and then the Netherlands, we became heroes. Old cities fell to us. Crowds cheered and threw flowers, girls clambered on to our Sherman tanks with bottles of wine and kissed us. Streets were renamed after General Maczek and city fathers wiped away tears as they made speeches of welcome. Several officers were standing with me on the roadside in Breda, watching this carnival as the Division came through the town, when a passing tankman shouted down to us: ‘This is how it’ll be in Poznan´, in Warsaw – only better!’ On the pavement, we looked warily at each other. There was nothing anyone wanted to say.

  The Warsaw Rising had begun that August. Our Parachute Brigade, formed for the purpose, was ready to jump into the outskirts. But the British forbade it because they wanted the Brigade for their own purposes. When Warsaw finally surrendered to the Germans, nearly a quarter of a million people were dead.

  It was winter as we approached the borders of the Reich. By now, Liberation euphoria was only a memory. The bad news and worse guesses about Poland’s future were on everyone’s mind and in every conversation. Would the Allies keep faith with their promises to Poland? Meanwhile, the Division halted on the Dutch side of the Rhine, and for many snowy weeks waited for orders to advance again.

  Our General alone seemed unmoved by rumours. He was imperturbable, often sharp with officers betraying signs of depression, never uncertain about what was next to be done. We loved him. And yet he had his own reasons to be sardonic about our allies. When Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery met him for the first time, Monty said: ‘Now then, Maczek, you can answer something I’ve always wondered about. You Poles – which language do you speak when you are in Poland? Is it German or Russian?’

  I like to think our General counted up to twenty before he allowed himself to reply. Another time, near the end of the war and following the news from Yalta that Churchill and Roosevelt had abandoned Poland to the fate of a Soviet protectorate, Monty heard that there was unrest in the Division. He sent for our General. ‘I don’t see why you are upset about all this. Buck up, Maczek! After all, here you are only a General. When you get home, they’ll make you a Marshal in the Red Army!’

  The truth about Yalta broke around the time that the Division was moving forward again, in February 1945. They say that some of the armoured units halted and that men climbed out of their tanks and began to debate. They asked why they should go on fighting one enemy, when their allies had sold their country to the other one. General Maczek – so the legend continues – immediately came to these soldiers and spoke to them ‘like a father’. I find it hard to imagine what he can have said. But after a while, the ground shook again as the Shermans’ engines let out their bison-bellow of ignition, expelled a thundercloud of blue smoke and lurched back on the road to Germany.

  I can’t be sure what happened, because I wasn’t there. The shrapnel remaining in my leg – the same leg ravaged by dancing with Tibbie – made me hobble and swear. So just before Christmas I found myself on a fortnight’s leave, an outpatient in a London hospital.

  I had hardly seen the city before, and knew nobody. It was black, ominously quiet, gap-toothed by bombs. The gutters of what had once been fashionable streets brimmed and sparkled with broken glass.

  How she found me, in a small Pimlico hotel requisitioned by Polish armed forces, I don’t know. It was afternoon, but I was in bed fully clothed except for my boots, trying to keep warm and reading a Graham Greene thriller, when there was a loud triple rapping. Margaret burst into the room without waiting for me to open the door.

  She was wearing a British army overcoat which came down to her ankles, over a smart black suit and that familiar string of pearls. ‘Mike, darling! God, it’s freezing in here. No, get back in bed;
I’ll perch on the edge.’

  Margaret was ‘stationed in London now’, working for a government department. When I asked her which department, she was evasive.

  ‘My Polish comes in useful, smattery as it is.’ We talked about Normandy and my leg, and then she gave me a little packet done up with a red-white ribbon. It held something purely extraordinary.

  ‘But these are Polish! I mean, these are pre-war Wedel chocolates, from Warsaw. Where on earth did you find them?’

  ‘Oh, one of our chaps brought them back for me. I shouldn’t have said that, should I?’

  ‘No. No, you shouldn’t. Let’s agree you didn’t.’

  She rubbed her cold hands together. ‘Heard anything about my poor Tadek?’

  ‘Well, I have been in the wrong place to get that sort of news. I have a feeling I should be asking you.’

  ‘They nabbed him – you must know that. Dropped in a place already swarming with Russian soldiers: the Home Army guys he was supposed to meet had been mostly rounded up. Wandered about for a few days, trying to contact. Then they got him. Maybe somebody gave him away, maybe they just tracked down his radio.’

  I remembered Tadek’s wireless aerial at Polmont, too green to look like grass. ‘Anything more?’

  ‘Well, actually... there is a notion about where he’s being held. Of course they could ship him off at any moment, to Moscow if he’s lucky and Siberia if he’s not.’

  ‘I think I would put it the other way round.’

  ‘Yes, well, those interrogations in the Lubianka. I can’t let myself think about all that, not about Tadek. But there’s apparently some outfit – not ours, if you get what I mean, let’s say locals – who want to try and get him out. They say they need an airdrop with lots of money – only gold will do, needless to say – and masses of plastic explosive.’