The Children's War

by Monique Charlesworth

  In through the lights came a stream of boys and girls in perfect marching formation: first the thump-thump-thump, then outlines appearing though a haze of brilliance, up past the trembling leaves decorating the platform to become flesh and blood until the entire stage was packed. The leader raised his baton. Nicolai, already feeling slightly faint, rehearsed his line; upon the signal, their voices rose in unison:

  “Joyfully we enter through this door,

  With courage we face our fate

  For fate defeats the coward, but God will help the brave!”

  An SS officer stepped to the microphone.

  “Our Führer has said: ‘Let the young generation be hard and strong. We want our youth to be reliable, loyal, to obey orders and behave decently.’ ”

  The band started up. They sang “We carry in our beating hearts faith in Germany.” The SS man stepped forward again.

  “German youth! German parents! This ceremony marks the moment at which the young person between fourteen and fifteen enters a new stage of life. Before, your parents spoke for you; now you speak for yourselves. A nation fights for its future, so its youth must support the battle and fight with all its energy.”

  The words flowed. His arms hurt. His head buzzed. He wondered if he was going to keel over. To keep a fixed point, he stared at the dark scorch mark on the back of the shirt of the boy in front of him where an overeager mother had applied an unnecessary finishing touch. The triangular shape came and went until he felt dizzy. A girl opposite was blinking back tears; he too felt his throat constricting with emotion, he hardly knew what.

  “Let us together affirm the German oath.”

  They intoned: “We affirm that the German people has been created by the will of God. It is our wish to fight for this German Reich, for our home. We will never forget that we are German. This is our will.”

  But what if a person did not want to fight? He didn’t.

  The SS man shouted, “Let the flags fly!”

  With straining arms, Nicolai lifted his standard as high as it would go. Above his head the sea of red flags hung. The usual chords were struck; thousands of voices thunderously sang the “Horst Wessel Lied.” The roar invaded him. His arms ached; he mimed the song while uncontrollable shivers ran up and down his spine and a cold trickle of sweat started in the middle of his back and ran down.

  “Die Straße frei den braunen Bataillonen,

  Die Straße frei dem Sturmabteilungsmann!

  Es schau’n aufs Hakenkreuz voll Ho fnung schon Millionen

  Der Tag für Freiheit und für Brot bricht an.”28

  As the row in front turned to march out, and with relief he lowered his standard to rest it on the floor, he saw the officer was giving each one a book. Smooth-skinned and unsmiling, he offered it with his gloved hand, for a second his sharp eye rested on Nicolai. Then it was over. Outside, gulping in the fresh air, waiting for his mother and grandmother to find him in the milling, babbling throng, Nicolai steadied himself. The book was called Remember That You Are a German. A paper label was pasted inside with the insignia of the HJ in red, with a signature scrawled across it. It read: Presented on the day when you took on obligations for the life of your people. Nicolai snapped it shut. It was just words. He had not signed anything. They could not own him, body and soul, because of those words.

  The house was very still. Sabine slept upstairs. The sun slanted through the gaps in the ivy leaves and, reflected on their shiny surfaces, made shifting double patterns on the linoleum, on his bare outstretched legs. Sitting on the floor of Fräulein Lore’s room, for every other surface was covered with fabric, he played with her pin box, inserting half a dozen pins the tiniest bit into his fingertips, waving steel-tipped fingers.

  “Ouch,” she said.

  “It doesn’t hurt. Fräulein Lore, what does Ilse look like?”

  He was very curious about this child who was going to live in his house and be his friend. Putting down her sewing, she opened the drawer beside her bed and drew out a framed studio portrait of a sweet-faced child about eight years old, with hair in two thick plaits and big questioning eyes. The hair was hand-coloured a vivid auburn, eyes painted a startling unnatural turquoise.

  “And this is the passport photograph. She was twelve. She’ll have grown, of course, in a year. It’s over a year.”

  Her lips curved into a faint smile when she looked at her daughter. The older girl in this tiny second picture stared at him directly with a serious look, her hair drawn tightly back. He was fascinated by this other secret life that had been hidden inside the woman he knew. She was like the Russian dolls Sabine was so fond of, with their round red cheeks and bright headscarves, their invisible join where a smaller, nearly identical person was hidden inside. The little doll Ilse was the image of her mother. A month younger than he was, Ilse would not be a silly flirt like some girls. She would be clever like her mother; they would ride on bicycles, go on picnics. They would walk and talk with Sabine between them, laughing as they swung the little one off her feet. She would speak French fluently, naturally, and perhaps she would teach him. Then they would share a secret language. Ilse’s life seemed very romantic; the great good fortune of being sent away to Paris to stay with her uncle and learn French balanced by the misfortune of being stranded there when war broke out, the further bad luck of having lost her papers. It had taken a long time and a fight with officialdom to obtain another set. (It had been expensive, too; he blushed at the memory of his theft, forgiven and forgotten, now that they were friends.) Who could have anticipated that the army would invade France as fast as it had, causing further confusion? All this time, Fräulein Lore had kept her secret well; she had not wanted to tell her employer about this loved, absent child until she knew that she would be coming home. She was a woman of mysteries and secrets. It would take time and all his patience, but he would unravel them all.

  The little green room was crammed with acquisitions for Ilse. First she had obtained the bedstead, which stood against the far wall. A pile of blankets and pillows sat on it. A new feather-and-down bed was rolled up, its cover white striped with a tiny pink and green sprig design, quite unlike anything else in the house. It was frivolous; he liked it. New celluloid hairbrushes were laid out in a row. She noticed him looking.

  “Such hair she has,” Fräulein Lore said, sighing and mock grumbling. “Such long curly hair, it needs a lot of brushing.” How proud she was of those curls. She picked up another two of the pieces of grey flannel fabric laid out in an elaborate jigsaw covering the bed, laid them together and tacked neatly along one side. It was a dress for her daughter.

  “How long now?”

  “Soon, any day.” Neatly, she snipped the thread with tiny scissors. He watched the little thimble flash as she sewed. She stitched all the time, never sat still.

  “You’re doing it again.”

  “Am I?”

  She smiled, pressed a hand to her forehead and rubbed it. When she frowned, she deepened the two little creases of perpetual worry in the middle of her forehead that never quite went away. He wanted to put his hands on her forehead and smooth them out; he imagined how soft the skin would be. He wanted to touch the delicate skin at her temples where the faint blue vein throbbed.

  Tight-lipped at the revelation that the nursemaid was a divorcée with a child of her own, his mother had said that there could be no question of taking in another mouth to feed. Magda could not be expected to work harder. When she understood that the alternative was losing the Fräulein to a more generous-minded household, she had relented.

  “You see, darling, it’s so hard to find good domestics these days,” she told Nicolai. “And we must think of the poor child.” As the idea grew in her mind, she became almost enthusiastic: the little girl would be a help-meet, a big sister to Sabine and a friend to him. Nicolai knew how essential Fräulein Lore was. Every day his mother was busy. She went lunching, dancing and dining with her friends in the Vier Jahreszeiten or the Hotel Atlantik. Ha
mburg was full of officers and there was a succession of tea dances and war drives; war, or the absence of their men, had released some frivolous part of them. Colonised by his mother’s friends, without his father to provide the balance with his good sense and reasonableness, the house had become enemy territory.

  Nicolai’s world shrank to his room and this one. He felt at peace here, knowing that Ilse had received her papers and was coming home to safety. Any day the call would come and she would be there, at the station.

  “I can’t wait to meet her.”

  “I can’t wait either. Toi, toi, toi,”29 she said, rapping the wooden mushroom. She tacked the seam, was threading the needle again, then reaching for pins. Leaning forward to pass the box, he took in the very faint vanilla smell of her skin.

  “Fräulein Lore! Please come upstairs!” Magda was calling down the stairs with a note of urgency. “Fräulein Lore, please! The Luftschutzverein30 are here.”

  She had given a painful start, then sunk back; he felt for her. How swiftly hope rose again, only to be suppressed.

  “I’ll go, you’re busy.” He ran up to the hall.

  “They were at the Reemtsma house last week,” hissed Magda. “Poking around. Inspecting everyone’s air-raid defences, noses in every cupboard. Their maid told me.”

  He peeped out of the window. A dozen fierce-looking ladies with steel helmets and grey mackintoshes over their arms stood at the front door.

  “We can’t let these busybodies in the cellar to see our supplies. Frau Bucherer is lunching at the Vier Jahreszeiten. What do I do?”

  “Fräulein Lore will know,” he said.

  She came up to the front door and let them in. The ladies crowded into the hallway, saying things all at once. There was a new decree. All cellars had to be reinforced, new emergency exits provided. Everything had to be inspected. They were looking around at the paintings and furniture and flowers.

  “I’m so sorry,” Fräulein Lore said. “The cellars are locked.”

  “Where is the key?”

  There was a pause. Nicolai hung over the banisters and watched her face.

  “It is in the offices of Colonel Oster.”

  “Colonel Oster?”

  “Of the SS. Currently based in Lübeck. A family friend who has been helping Frau Bucherer with the necessary building works. Of course, with young children in the house, one doesn’t want to risk any accidents. The Colonel is very precise about these matters.”

  The ladies whispered together for a moment.

  “The Colonel is a busy man. But if you insist, I will inform him.”

  Suddenly, all smiles, they withdrew. Nicolai admired her quick thinking. He knew perfectly well where his mother kept the cellar key; they all did, for air raids. The RAF had bombed Hamburg, and though they had rushed to shelter in their deeper cellar, there had been no need. The British hadn’t hit a single target, had killed women and children. “Germany will exact a terrible revenge for these crimes,” his father’s newspaper said. He had formed the habit of reading it in his father’s study. Nobody else went there and the room still smelt faintly of him. Unlike Magda, who listened avidly to every radio announcement, Fräulein Lore hated war news. She was like his father, wanting peace, praying for it to be over soon.

  She stitched pleats together, folding and measuring the fabric so they were all the same width. Nicolai dreamt on, lost somewhere in the folds. He could not imagine why Colonel Oster should be invoked. Wolfgang’s godfather and guardian was so awe-inspiring that Nicolai had never dared address him. Nicolai’s own godfather was a wishywashy second cousin who lived in Elmsbüttel but only turned up once a year, if that. Before Wolfgang turned twelve and went away to live with him and be trained up for the military academy, the Colonel had visited regularly, bringing wonderful presents: binoculars, quarter-size model engines that really worked, even a rifle with real bullets. He had taught Wolfgang to shoot, he treated him like his own son. Their mother’s first husband had been the Colonel’s dearest friend in the army. Nicolai still remembered Wolfgang bragging about the car and how he had been driven away to his new life, puffed up with pride because the chauffeur had saluted him.

  “Does Colonel Oster really have a key?”

  She shrugged, nodded.

  “I suppose the Colonel’s only supervising the cellar work because Father’s so far away.”

  “I suppose,” she said.

  Nicolai could not utter the word “father” without a twinge of sorrow and, alongside that, a sharper pang that his mother did not seem to miss him as he did, as she should have. Pushing the thought away, he studied the way Fräulein Lore’s lashes swept up and then down. She scrutinised her work. He had managed to take one good picture of her, in profile, minimising that little frown of hers, which even now remained.

  “We don’t need officers here. I can look after my womenfolk,” he said. The glance she sent him was very sweet. It was a little victory, to make her smile.

  Uniformed boys flocked around the station buffet; the train seethed brown. The annual summer camp took not just his whole school year, but fourteen-year-olds from two other schools. They blurred together, the shorts above bony knees the same, even the backs of their necks and haircuts seemingly identical, so that he no longer knew which his troop was or barely who he himself might be. In younger, sadder years, camp week had passed in terror at this uniformity. He had been on constant alert, fearful that if he once ducked into the wrong tent, he might find himself forever trapped in somebody else’s life.

  Pushing his kitbag onto the train, Nicolai felt deep relief that he was not going to be with this gang the whole time. His family would be at the other end. Though for many months she had been busy with other things, his mother had really bucked up at the reminder of his obligatory week of camp, had insisted, wonderfully, that this must be a family affair. She and Sabine and Fräulein Lore had already driven up to Timmendorfer Strand; even Wolfgang would be coming. All this was for his benefit. The only ones left out were his father, of course, and his grandmother. Though she usually came away with them, she had decided this time to stay in Hamburg. All the way in the noisy compartment with boys flicking things and squabbling, boys eating salami and Leberwurst sandwiches out of greasy paper and belching, like idiots, straight in one another’s faces, he felt grateful to his mother for such generosity of spirit. In a week, all these boys would go home and a new set would arrive. But he would stay on and spend an additional week at the hotel. That would be a real holiday.

  Rows of tents stretched across the sand dunes. They were put to work, sweeping them out and gathering driftwood for the fires, then assembling in long rows.

  “We owe to our leader, Adolf Hitler, the fact that we can open our camp today,” said the camp leader, Herr Francke, then they all sang “Onward, Onward.” “Tonight, boys, community hour is omitted as the group is still very tired.”

  Nicolai would not have to sleep in a tent on the hard ground, nor drink his breakfast milk from a tin mug. He stood to one side longing to go, not quite daring to leave.

  “Where’s our official photographer? Ah, Bucherer. There you are. Good. I must come over to the hotel with you and greet your delightful mother.”

  They walked in a group; Herr Francke and two other boys, who soon peeled off. They too had obtained permission to stay with their families in hotels, though none was as grand as the Strandhotel, which gave right onto the beach, the crisp white building now visible, its blue shutters flung open in welcome.

  Clicking his heels, Herr Francke kissed his mother’s hand. Dressed in silk, she had makeup on and her shining blond hair was swept up in a different style. She looked very pretty. Lugging over his kitbag, Nicolai felt a wave of pride.

  “Frau Bucherer, what a pleasure. I am honoured to meet the famous daughter of the equally famous shipbuilding firm.”

  “Goodness, I don’t have anything to do with the business,” she said. “We have managers for that. One day this young man will take
it over, I hope,” and she leant over and ruffled his hair. Nicolai squirmed between pleasure and embarrassment. She usually said that about Wolfgang, not him. Everybody knew who her favourites were. “Herr Francke—my husband is away in the army of course—an intelligence officer. We miss him so. Now, it will be lovely to have some clever conversation for a change. I am hoping you are going to tell me about the war and what’s happening.”

  “At your command.” Overcome, the camp leader clicked once more.

  Dimpling, his mother beckoned a waiter, who came over with a bottle of Sekt and glasses on a tray. She looked at him. “Your kit, darling— run along and find Fräulein Lore and put it in your room.”

  From his high attic room he watched the attendant down on the beach in front of the hotel rolling up the bright striped awnings of the little beach baskets and closing up their doors for the night. In the adjoining room Fräulein Lore slept peacefully; Sabine lay, arms flung wide, in her cot. Herr Francke and his mother were on the terrace with other people she knew, having drinks and laughing. He had had crayfish for dinner and potato salad, then cake and cream. Over at the camp, they had had to cook pea soup, which always formed a disgusting frothy scum. In pyjamas, he stood at the high window and sniffed the salt wind coming from the grey sea beyond.

  Fräulein Lore had brought his camera and equipment safely; he needed to prepare some film. He got out the lightproof cassette, took his scissors and neatly slit open a fresh packet. Sitting on his bed, holding the loading cassette under the blanket, he carefully placed the film inside and snapped the lid to in the dark. By moonlight, he dropped the bobbin into the narrow end, attached the end of the film, closed the lid and turned the handle to wind it on, not needing the counter to tell him when he had reached thirty-six. His hands knew. Reaching under the blanket, he slotted the two halves of the cassette together. In the morning he would trim the tongue of film so it was ready for loading. He was going to take dozens of excellent photographs and make his father proud. When three films had been prepared, he tiptoed over the scrubbed pine floorboards to the partly opened door, crept over to the bed. Just for an instant he lowered his head beside hers, intoxicated by the clean, lovely smell of her skin and her warm breath on his cheek.