Marc combed his fingertips through the mass of sweaty hairs. Sometimes you had to hunt the louse making you itch, but today a whole family had hatched in one go. He squinted as he picked half-a-dozen sesame-seed-sized body lice out of his armpit, squishing each one against the wall for a satisfying crunchy sound.
The next phase of battle was a hunt for nits – trying to pick out sticky eggs before they hatched. With so many bodies packed on the boat, with most prisoners only having one set of clothes and no proper washing facilities, body lice, fleas and bed bugs were inescapable.
Picking out bugs always depressed Marc. It was hard being far from everyone he knew, being hungry and being forced to work, but the bugs and filth were worst because they meant he didn’t even control the most intimate parts of his own body.
When Marc had done his best with the lice, he turned on to his back and stared at the mildewing wooden slats of the top bunk, less than an elbow’s length from the tip of his nose. He was fiercely hungry and his mind drifted, but his hand slipped under his straw mattress and he smiled warily as he felt a piece of green card in his grubby hand.
Just touching it scared him. He’d been trying to escape since arriving in Frankfurt ten months earlier, and removing it from the administration office was a risk. If everything worked out, a card like this would be his ticket out of Germany. But if he got caught, it could just as easily become his death warrant.
*
Marc was no ordinary prisoner. Reich Labour Administration records said he was Marc Hortefeux, a fifteen-year-old French citizen from Lorient, sentenced for smuggling black-market food, who’d volunteered for agricultural labour in Germany.
In reality he was Marc Kilgour, a fourteen-year-old from Beauvais near Paris. Orphaned shortly after birth, Marc had escaped to Britain after the German invasion of France two years earlier. He’d then been among the first batch of young agents trained to work undercover for an espionage group known as CHERUB.
Imprisoned by the Gestapo during a sabotage mission, Marc had been forced to kill a fellow inmate who’d bullied him. He’d faced a death sentence for murder, but a French prison commandant took pity and agreed to commute Marc’s sentence, provided he volunteered for five years’ labour service in Germany.
To qualify for this programme Marc needed to be fifteen years old. The commandant ensured that Marc’s prison records were lost, and a replacement set drawn up with a false age and giving him a longer sentence. The next afternoon Marc had boarded a train to Frankfurt and he’d been here ever since.
*
‘Sleep, eh?’ sixteen-year-old Laurent shouted, as he slapped Marc gently across the chest. ‘Lazy bastard.’
Marc’s eyes opened as he shot up, almost thumping his head on the bunk above. More than two hundred inmates had finished a shift, and as well as the sound and smell of his roommates, the Oper’s cabins and passageways had come alive with shouts and clomping boots.
‘Just resting my eyes,’ Marc said, as his mouth stretched into a yawn. ‘Reading documents is a strain.’
Laurent shook his head wryly as he unbuttoned a shirt coated in grey dust. ‘Poor little eyeballs,’ he laughed. ‘All we had to do today was haul bags of cement.’
Laurent had been on German rations long enough to get skinny, but he still had the solid jaw and vast fists of someone you wouldn’t pick a fight with.
‘Pen-pusher,’ Marcel added, as he squatted on to the bunk below Marc’s, peeling back his shirt to inspect skin scoured by the heavy sacks.
Marcel’s words were harsh, but the tone was warm. Marc’s cabin mates were envious that his ability to speak German had earned him an admin job, but none of them seemed to resent his good fortune.
Marc rolled on to his side, trying not to inhale a grey haze as four sweating lads stripped off clothes thick with cement dust.
‘There’s a couple of apples on the table,’ Marc said.
‘We’ll get fat on them tiny buggers,’ Marcel replied.
Marcel was a joker. Only fourteen, his crime was to lead cheers in a Rouen cinema when a newsreel showed the aftermath of a British air-raid in Cologne. The Gestapo officer two rows back didn’t see the funny side and Marcel found himself riding to Frankfurt, minus two front teeth.
‘Grub’s up,’ Richard – the last of Marc’s cabin mates to arrive – shouted, as he stepped in holding a battered roasting tin. It held two loaves of black bread1 and a tall metal jug, with steam rising off a thin, orangish soup.
Richard was a Belgian, fifteen but with tiny, sad eyes and a genteel shuffle that made him seem old. As he placed the roasting tin on the table, his roommates dived under their mattresses to grab spoons and mess tins.
‘If I divide this, you’d better not moan,’ Richard said.
‘I’ll divide if you don’t want to,’ Marcel said eagerly, lunging towards the loaves.
The food on the tray was dinner and breakfast for six hungry teenagers, and the lads would fight over every crumb. Marc was lucky to have roommates who’d played fair, even during the harshest winter rationing. There were plenty of other cabins where bullies ripped off weaker inmates’ food.
‘Marcel, you mess around with that bread and I’ll slam your head in the porthole,’ Laurent said, firmly. ‘Richard’s always fair, leave it to him.’
‘Yeah, Marcel,’ a lad called Vincent added. ‘Especially seeing as you’ve spent half the day picking bugs out of your crotch.’
There was some laughter, but it was also an uncomfortable reminder of the squalor they all lived in.
Prisoners weren’t allowed knives, so Richard broke the bread into six fairly even clumps with his filthy hands, then began ladling the soup into six differently shaped mess tins. Hungry eyes tracked every move of the ladle.
‘Give me more!’ Vincent said. ‘Marc’s is way deeper.’
‘His tin’s round, yours is square,’ Richard said. ‘You both got four spoonfuls.’
Vincent folded his arms and pouted. ‘I always get screwed.’
Laurent took a mildly intimidating step towards Vincent. ‘He’s spooning it all out the same.’
Out of his cabin mates, Vincent was the only one Marc didn’t care for. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he was always having digs about stuff, and that grinds you down when there’s six of you living on top of each other.
‘Have my tin if you think there’s more,’ Marc said irritably.
Before Vincent could answer, the tension was broken by a body thumping down hard on the main deck above their heads.
‘Fight,’ Marcel said, staring up at the ceiling as cheers and shouts echoed down from the cramped main deck.
As the ruckus continued, the six lads grabbed their mess tins, and settled on the wooden crates, or propped awkwardly on the edge of the lowest bunks. Marc eyed his soup and poked his spoon in, spotting a few identifiable chunks of vegetable and strings of horse meat, amidst thin gruel made from swede and potato.
The hungry boys dispensed with their soup in under a minute, then licked out the tins. Their black bread was days old and made slower eating. Marc stuffed a crusty end into his cheek and began softening it with his back teeth as he lay on his bunk.
‘I’ll cut each apple into six pieces,’ Richard said, as he pulled his identity disc over his head.
The metal ovals were stamped with each prisoner’s number and worn around the neck. Rubbing your disc against stone gave a sharp edge, which was no substitute for a proper knife but better than nothing at all.
‘Five pieces,’ Marc said. ‘I had mine earlier.’
‘And the rest,’ Vincent sneered. ‘I bet you scoff all kinds of shit over in that office.’
‘It’s easier cutting something into six,’ Richard complained.
‘Next time I’ll eat it myself and save the moaning,’ Marc said, as Richard cut into the first apple.
The apples were bitter and the lads screwed up their faces, but nobody complained because they appreciated the risk Marc had taken, smuggling food out
of the administration office when he could have scoffed the lot.
As the six boys settled on their bunks, mouths stuffed with bread, a shout came down the passageway from the top of the stairs.
‘Raus!’
It was the first word of German every prisoner learned. It meant out, but the guards used it as a kind of rebuke: get out of bed, move out, get ready. If the guards were in a mood and you stood close enough, raus would be accompanied by a flying boot or ball of spit.
The six lads in Marc’s cabin all launched curses as a pair of German guards clomped down the stairs. Prisoners got called off the boat for all kinds of reasons: roll calls, searches for contraband, delousing.
‘Boots on,’ a guard shouted in bad French as he leaned through the doorway. It was Sivertsen, a squat, fair-haired Dane, who’d volunteered for the German army. The Russian shrapnel lodged in Sivertsen’s back left him with a severe tremor in his arm. The inmates regarded him as a bit of a joke.
‘What’s going on?’ Laurent asked, as he swung his legs out over the edge of the top bunk.
‘Obey,’ Sivertsen shouted. ‘No questions.’
Laurent got his answer from another guard, who spoke better French and was explaining to the lads in the next cabin that a train had derailed and needed to be unloaded before it could be safely lifted back on the tracks.
As Sivertsen turned to leave, he noticed that Marc hadn’t shifted from his bunk.
‘Did you not hear?’ Sivertsen roared, as he shoved past Richard and closed on Marc’s bunk.
Marc spoke in German. ‘I work for the administration office, not in the goods yard.’
Prisoners pulled all kinds of tricks to get out of work. Sivertsen didn’t believe Marc and placed a hand on the baton hanging from his belt. ‘This is an emergency. If I tell you to get up and work, you get up and work.’
‘You need to speak to Commandant Vogel if you want to use me,’ Marc said, then with a cheeky smile: ‘But he’ll have gone home for the day.’
At the same moment, Marcel crept up behind Sivertsen and made a loud quacking sound in his ear.
The Dane pirouetted with his stick. The blow glanced off Marcel’s elbow as he dived on to his bunk and pulled up his mattress as a shield. Marc and the other lads started laughing.
‘What’s this?’ a senior guard named Fischer roared through the doorway. ‘Why is this taking so long?’
Sivertsen was a joke, but Fischer scared everyone. He was a Great War veteran on the wrong side of sixty, but a lifetime hauling cargo in the docks had kept him tough and he had a reputation for stomping inmates who talked back.
‘We’re all getting ready, sir,’ Laurent said.
Fischer gave fellow guard Sivertsen a contemptuous look. ‘Are you in control here, officer?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Sivertsen said, anxious not to look weak in front of his boss. ‘Lad here says he works for the commandant.’
Marc was about to explain, but Fischer yanked him towards the edge of his bunk and clamped a hand around his throat.
‘If your feet aren’t in your boots in three seconds, I’ll have you shitting blood for a month. All clear, inmate?’
‘Yes, boss,’ Marc croaked.
Note
1 Black bread – a coarse, near-black loaf, traditionally eaten by European peasants who couldn’t afford refined white flour.
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Henderson’s Boys 4: Grey Wolves Page 29