by Penny Thomas
As the weeks passed she grew thinner, gaunt and pale. Her eyes seemed to be too large for her face. The cold was biting and even the heavy uniform did not stop it seeping into my bones. I wondered how she survived. I was desperate to help her and in my desperation I became careless. I was caught about to pass bread through the wire to her. I knew I was in trouble when the commandant demanded to see me.
‘Guterman,’ the commandant almost whispered. He was at his most dangerous when he was controlled. I expected to be severely punished, beaten perhaps or even shot for fraternising with the enemy. I held my breath, wondering what was to follow.
‘It seems Guterman, that you want to be closer to the filthy Jews. Is that right?’ A spray of spit accompanied his question.
‘Nein, Herr Commandant. It was an error. It won’t happen again, sir.’ My heart was beating so loudly it was rivalling the clock on the wall.
He smiled, showing a gap where he had lost a front tooth. ‘I think Guterman, you need to see what happens to vermin. You are assigned to guard the chambers. You can take the little Jews to be gassed and see what happens to enemies of the Fatherland. Now, out, before I change my mind and have you thrown in there yourself.
‘Heil Hitler!’
‘Heil Hitler!’
I staggered out of the commandant’s office, my head reeling. Relief at not being executed was mingled with horror. Guard duty at the chambers was something discussed in quarters. Some of the guards spoke little about it but their faces betrayed the strain, while others boasted about how many ‘stinking Jews’ had been exterminated. It reminded me of my father talking about rat-catching on the farm and keeping the pests under control. There were rumours about what happened to the bodies, and the smells of human flesh as they were processed were stronger close to the chambers. The air was often pungent with the smoke from the incinerators. Those days at the gas chamber were the worst of my life. I prayed every night to be taken to the front line to die with honour. There was no honour in this herding of the old and ill, women and children into the death pits. I closed my eyes, ears and mind to these horrors and had to remind myself daily that it was all for the glory of the Fatherland. Screams filled my sleep and the smells seeped into my uniform, which made eating difficult. I longed to be back in my home and the arms of my mother. I wanted to be a child again, before the war, before hatred had filled our country and before my innocence had been lost.
The day Magda went into the chamber was my last. She gazed at me with understanding and nodded slightly, almost smiling as she went to her death as quietly as she had lived her short life. Her courage and acceptance of her fate made me shake uncontrollably. The other guards looked at me with pity.
I lay awake all night, haunted by the sight of her as she walked almost with pride, and without fear, to her death. I had a vision of my little sister entering the gas chamber and shuddered. Realisation hit me. There was no glory in this game of soldiers. I thought of the shame of my father and the pain of my mother but I knew what I had to do. There was no other way, no other solution for my pain.
In the morning, I washed and dressed as usual. I brushed my uniform and polished my boots until they shone. I was no longer the naïve young boy of sixteen with idealistic thoughts of war. Two years had passed and I was a man and ready to act like a man of honour. I couldn’t eat. The porridge felt like lumps of chalk in my mouth. I was sweating, despite the cold. Chin high, I marched to the central square, a soldier of the Reich. Trembling, I put my gun to my head.
I stand alone by the railway track, for all eternity.
The Pull of the North
Rona Laycock
Amelia hated the sound of the wind in the trees. The way it howled and buffeted its way through the copse at the back of their house. She would hear voices mingled with the clashing of branches; voices as old as the mountains that surrounded the town. At night in particular, she could make out the cries of ghosts and the deep rumbling bass notes of demons and she would shudder in her bed unable to sleep. No one else in the house was worried; Siôn would laugh at what he called her fantasy life and the twins just looked bewildered for a while if she mentioned it and then they would go back to their toys.
She loved the girls with every atom in her body but she couldn’t understand them. To look at them you would think the only DNA they had inherited was from her but in their heads they were Siôn’s. They only thought in concrete facts. Even from a young age they had had immense concentration when they played with building blocks and toy animals, but when she had tried to tell them tales from her homeland their attention would wander and she could see them staring longingly at their toys. Perhaps it was too much to ask; they couldn’t imagine the golden shine of gelid water at sunset; the vivid blues found in calving glaciers or the white mountains of ice that sailed past brightly coloured settlements. She would tell them the stories her mother and grandmother had told her, about the souls that lived in everything: rocks, animals and plants. About how the human soul could move from animal to animal. And she would explain the morals of stories that showed how people should live their lives. They never questioned her about these tales, never asked for them to be told, they were happy to go to bed tired out after running around outside and she realised she was reciting the stories because of the fear that if she didn’t keep telling them she would forget who she was.
When she had confided in Siôn’s mother about the way the twins seemed not to be interested in stories, she had laughed. ‘Just like Siôn,’ she said. ‘Never happier than when he could build up his bricks and knock them down or knock his brother’s toys over.’
The first time Siôn hit her she wondered if she had imagined it. The blow was so sudden, so unexpected and his face so impassive as he lashed out. The twins had cried and rushed to her side and later she understood that that was why he had not hit her a second time that day. He lost his job at the boatyard because of a fight. She heard so many different stories; Siôn had started it, someone else had hit Siôn first, it had been a free for all, with fists and feet flying and Siôn just hit the wrong person – the foreman. Whatever the cause, Siôn had been fired on the spot and instead of coming home straightaway he had been in the Skull and Crossbones until the barman threw him out.
She was no stranger to alcohol, it was the scourge of her community back home; since the coming of the Danes and industry, many young Inuit men no longer learned the ways of their elders and they felt they had no role to play. They existed on handouts and occasional jobs in the tanneries and fish packing factories. Drink had become a solace and a curse; she had lost her youngest brother to alcohol. She remembered the night he didn’t come home and the days spent searching for him, praying he would be found crashed out at a friend’s place or in a boat. A week later he had been found, washed up amongst the debris on the fishing island. His body was tangled up in nylon netting and the verdict had been that he had stumbled into the harbour while he was drunk. It was not an uncommon story.
Siôn drank more and in his befuddled stupor he would blame her for being a millstone round his neck; there was nothing she could do as night after night he would sit in front of the television drinking whatever he could get his hands on. The twins were spared most of it as she made sure they were in bed long before he became abusive, although she knew he would never hurt them; even at his most drunken she could see he loved them and would be tender towards them. She just didn’t want them to see what he did to her.
One night she had a dream that was so vivid it spilled over into her waking life. She was in the small church where they had got married. A tiny corrugated iron building that was dull green on the outside, but on the inside was painted a pure, beautiful white. Colour came from the abundance of wild flowers covering the altar, a gold cross that gleamed in the weak sunlight and the model ship that hung above the aisle. She was dressed in beaded skins, the traditional costume she had worn for the wedding and she could hear her mother singing – not hymns but an Inuit song of cele
bration. She opened her eyes but could still hear the music; as she prepared breakfast for the girls her head filled with visions and sounds from her village to the south of Qaqortoq. There was a letter from home on the doormat, she tucked it unopened into her pocket; she needed somewhere quiet to read it.
After walking the girls to school, she went to the tiny church of St Philip that was perched halfway up the mountain. Unlike the big parish church in town, this church was intimate in scale and she felt safe within its granite walls.
Winter was coming, she could feel it in the whispers borne on the north wind; soon it would snow and the mountains would sparkle in bright cold sunlight and she would feel the tug of home. It happened every year.
She pulled the letter out of her coat pocket and looked at the writing on the envelope. Not her mother’s; she ripped it open and saw that it was from her uncle. Everything she had dreaded was in the letter; her mother had died. Suddenly and without warning. She tried to make sense of the words – aneurysm, very fast, didn’t suffer. What did any of that matter?
She walked back to her house in despair. The day passed and the children came home; she made their tea and helped them with their homework. Their voices were strange, the language was wrong, their laughter was wrong; she watched them as they built bridges and houses with brightly coloured bricks. Left to their own devices they would build for hours. They built towns and cities that were completely alien to her. Siôn came in in high spirits; he had found a job on the ferries – good pay. He threw himself down beside the girls and they built and built; the living room filled with a miniature city of hard edged shopping centres, office blocks and flats. Here and there the girls placed plastic trees but nothing interrupted the regimented streets and blocks. There was nothing organic in their project, nothing Amelia could identify with.
The girls went happily to bed; no time for stories, they were too tired. Amelia kept her hand on the letter as she listened to Siôn talk about the good times that were coming. They went to bed and for the first time in ages they made love.
At midnight Amelia felt her mother call; she got up and went to the window. The sky was clear and the stars shone with a brittle light. She went into the girls’ room, bent over them and whispered their Inuit names in their ears so that they would never forget who they were, then she pulled sealskin mukluks on over thick socks and dressed in her fur anorak. She had not worn it since arriving in Wales. She listened; all was silent in the house as she let herself out of the front door.
In darkness she walked to the path that led to the little church on the mountain and climbed up the steep incline. It was silent and very cold; her breath came in sobs as she passed the church and pushed on up the mountainside. Clouds were gathering above her and the stars were fading and being covered. When she reached the summit she stopped and looked down over the town; streetlights shone yellow and she could just make out some of the houses, but not her own. She climbed over the summit and found a small cwm in the lee of some rocks where she sat down. She watched the last of the stars being smothered by the clouds and then snowflakes started to fall. She took off her anorak, folded it and placed it under her head as she lay down. The cold was welcome and the snow did its best to envelop her as she fell asleep to the sounds of her mother singing.
Seashells
Gillian Drake
Lowri eased the car along the Pembrokeshire lane. The sky was leaden, overcast and misty, and the grey line of the sea was barely visible on the horizon. A tangle of wild flowers fringed the road – pretty on a sunny day, she thought, but today the daisies were tightly closed and the wild roses hung their heads, heavy with rain.
She glanced at the estate agent’s details on the seat beside her. Shell Cottage. She would surely be there soon. It was a pity Sam had been unable to take time off work so that they could view the house together. But, ‘A house like that won’t be on the market long,’ he had said. ‘It’ll be another fortnight before I’ve finished this account and it could be gone by then. You go; you can let me know what you think.’
She sighed as yet another bend in the road appeared before her. This place was so remote…she feared that she already knew what she thought of it. True, the cottage looked delightful in the property details, but then it was the estate agent’s job to make sure that it did. Moving to Pembrokeshire for Sam’s job transfer sounded fine in theory, but what would it be like to live in an old, probably damp, cottage after their comfortable flat in Cardiff Bay? In the two years since they married she had settled happily there, enjoying being able to walk through town to her job in the small mail-order business that had now folded, leaving her redundant. How would she adjust to life in the country – especially in weather like this? Perhaps they would be better off looking for something in the town of Haverfordwest after all.
Her phone rang. There was no other traffic in the lane and Lowri stopped the car in a lay-by.
‘Are you there yet?’ Sam’s cheerful voice was so welcome.
‘Couple of miles to go,’ said Lowri.
‘How’s it looking? Promising?’
‘Can’t really tell…’ She peered into the drizzle. Fields, a wood in the distance, the rooftops of what must be the village, huddled below a church tower. ‘Be better when the mist clears.’ She hoped with all her heart that it really would.
‘I’ll ring you in about an hour, then.’ She heard the sound of a phone in the background, busy voices. ‘I’ll have to go,’ he added. ‘Sorry!’
Lowri drove the last mile or two, arriving at Shell Cottage as arranged at three o’clock. As the sound of the engine died down into the silence, she formed her first impression of the place. ‘Tucked into a fold of the hillside, on the edge of the village on the road to the sea…’ well, the estate agent had been right about the location. She got out of the car and swung open the wooden gate with its peeling blue paint. The path to the front door was of shingle: stones and small pebbles, mixed with masses of tiny shells. Along its length was a border of larger shells – cockles, scallops, even the occasional big nautilus, interspersed with smaller whelks, limpets, cowries and mussels. It wasn’t difficult to see how the cottage had got its name. Somebody must have collected these for years, adding them to the border and also to the tops of the low walls which surrounded the house.
Lowri approached the front door. In the flowerbeds, Canterbury bells, lavender, foxgloves, stocks, crowded together in front of a wild rose hedge, mixed with bindweed and, she noticed, plenty of dandelions. An elderly lady had lived all her life in the house, the estate agent had told her on the phone; she had passed away peacefully in the local hospital. Now, there was only a nephew in Australia who could not come back to take possession of it. The place looked a bit neglected, but then it had been empty for some time.
As arranged, the key was in the lock. That would never happen in Cardiff – or almost anywhere else, for that matter.
Lowri pushed the door, surprised to find that it opened easily. The house had charm, certainly, she thought, looking at the windows set deeply into the thick walls, the upstairs dormers protruding like raised eyebrows over the roof edge. But it would need a lot of work. Nothing had been changed here for years, by the look of it. She felt rather daunted at the prospect. DIY was hardly Sam’s speciality, but he would cheerfully set to and get started, she knew; and besides, he had wanted to get away from what he called the ‘Rat Race’ for some time now.
The door led to a narrow passageway with old terracotta floor tiles underfoot. There were two rooms, one on either side of the passageway, and at the end, an antiquated kitchen with a stone butler’s sink and some huge wooden cupboards, which must have been there since the house was built. No other furniture remained anywhere in the house; nothing to indicate the tastes of the woman who had lived there for so many years. Lowri turned back and set off upstairs to the bedrooms. No central heating either, she noted drily, folding her arms and wishing she had brought her jacket in with her.
What should
she tell Sam? There was work to be done, certainly, but more importantly, would they be happy here? Uncertainty overwhelmed her as she plodded up the stairs, her footsteps echoing on the wooden treads.
At the top of the stairs there was a bathroom with a claw-footed bath, and then, across the landing, three bedrooms with deep set windows at knee level and uneven floors. As she entered the smallest of these, she stopped suddenly. This room, like all the others, was empty but on one wall was a picture: painting, print, photograph…? It was difficult to tell. Whoever had cleared the house had obviously overlooked it. Lowri crossed the creaking floorboards for a closer look. The picture showed a young girl aged about eight standing on the sea shore. She wore a faded floral dress and a battered straw hat, and was absorbed in gazing into a rock pool. Her long hair fell over her face and she held up the hem of her dress delicately in both hands, to make a sort of hammock for the seashells she was collecting.
Lowri was captivated. She glanced around the neat room at the wallpaper patterned with seaside flowers and shells. A small wardrobe and low-level chest of drawers had been built in on either of the cast-iron fireplace: the room must have belonged to a child. Perhaps it had been the bedroom of the owner of the house, when she was young. And maybe this was her on the wall. Lowri looked more closely at the picture, noticing that it was perfectly placed to catch the light from the single window: a window, she noticed, which framed a square of sky now surprisingly, gratifyingly, beginning to lighten from dull, heavy pewter to soft, pale grey.