by Gee, Maurice
Willi came back, too noisily, and told us the dinghy was in its usual place, tied to a ring by the boatshed. It was only on stormy nights that the caretaker locked it inside. ‘We could break the lock and get some proper oars,’ Willi said, but Steinitz insisted that his would do the job. And they did, perfectly, with no noise but a muted rumbling that could have been taken for water sucking round the jetty piles.
Steinitz rowed, strong and careful. It was a big dinghy and could have taken eight or nine escapers. I knelt in the bow, keeping watch ahead. We meant to get Leper Island between us and Somes to dampen our noise and allow Steinitz to row freely. But already we were elated. The roll call must have passed without alarm. No lights showed on the island except for a crooked line in a badly drawn blackout curtain in the caretaker’s house. Once, looking back, I saw a red pinprick in the dark by the cemetery and guessed it was a guard having a smoke. Then we were round the northern tip of Leper Island and Steinitz leaned into his rowing. The crossing would take an hour and a half. By midnight we would be on Petone beach.
Then Willi confessed his fear of bottomless water and Steinitz and I laughed, which made him angry. He splashed us with handfuls of brine. They could flood this harbour with searchlights, he said, and we would be sitting there like a cockroach on a tin tray. So we carried on in silence to Petone beach. Steinitz rowed nonstop. I told him he should be in the Olympic Games.
We came ashore fifty yards from Petone wharf; which was dangerous, Steinitz thought, but Willi insisted. We pushed the dinghy out to make it float away.
‘Wait here,’ Willi said, and was gone, and Steinitz and I crouched on the beach, hidden from the road by a ridge of sand. The wharf glimmered faintly against the eastern hills.
‘We’re too close. Someone could be out there,’ I said. ‘It is the place to take a girl,’ Steinitz said sadly.
We heard a car start and drive away. Willi came back, wearing a pack and carrying a fat canvas roll on his shoulder. ‘A tent,’ he said. ‘And we have blankets and more food. We will not have to go into shops.’
‘Who was it, Willi?’
‘A friend.’ He never said more than that, but it must have been Joan – there was no one else. Willi could have gone with her and got well away.
He gave Steinitz the tent to carry. We walked along the beach towards the western hills, and cut across the road and the railway line and went up a dirt road into scrub and bush, which leaned towards us, making fists and heads. We climbed a farm gate, which creaked so loudly it seemed the sound would carry to Somes Island. Petone was hidden, Wellington was hidden, and soon our piece of harbour withdrew behind a hill.
‘There will be a moon in half an hour,’ Willi said.
We had agreed that we would travel by night and hide by day, but had not known that the country above the Hutt Valley was as gully-hatched and scrub-covered as this. The paddock we had climbed into ended in a wall of tea-tree, with water running in it, deep in a cleft. So we followed the fence line north, with sheep galloping out of our way. Soon we found another fence cutting steeply down towards the east, and knew we would end among houses on the valley floor if we went that way.
‘It is supposed to be a farm,’ Willi complained.
‘But the farmer is away fighting Hitler,’ I said.
‘They should have used us out here cutting down trees instead of locking us up on an island,’ Steinitz said.
We sat down for a while and worked out what to do. It was plain we could not cover the fifteen miles a night we had planned. I did not mind. I knew we weren’t going anywhere; we were out for a trip in the country, a holiday. My hope was to stay free for a respectable time. But I kept that to myself. Willi meant to last until the war was over, while Steinitz hoped to escape from New Zealand. His plan was to steal a yacht and sail north into the Pacific and find an island and stay hidden until it was safe to come out. He dreamed of turtle steaks and coconuts and dusky maidens.
We climbed the fence and broke through tea-tree scrub. A half moon came up but was of little help, apart from giving us our compass points. North was the way we meant to travel, between the Hutt Valley and the coast. Willi wanted to go inland after a day or two and cross the mountains into the Wairarapa, and Steinitz wanted to stay close to the sea, where we might find a yacht moored. I voted with Willi. Sailing blind into the Pacific was crazy, I thought. None of us knew any navigation. I wanted to find open bush and catch eels in a stream and sleep on a hillside in the sun. I wanted the scrub to turn into the Vienna Woods; but instead it smothered us and drove us left and right, with Steinitz cursing the heavy tent on his shoulder. Before long the tea-tree gave way to gorse. There was no way through so we angled to the east, back towards the Hutt Valley, and found more gorse that way, old man gorse. I left the others resting and crawled on needles through the scurfy trunks; I wriggled on my belly a quarter mile towards a growing lightness, and tangled at last in barbed-wire fencing off a paddock. Sheep went skittering away. The moon gleamed on water in the bottom of a valley and lit tree faces on the far side. There was my bush, there was my stream. I felt myself grinning.
I crawled back and found the others by calling out – more noise than we had wanted to make – and we battled with our gear to the fence and went down to the stream, which was narrow and still and possibly dirty. We drank and filled the empty beer bottles we had brought and corked them tight. Then we zigzagged up the other side of the valley. We had taken four hours from Petone beach. The sky was lightening. It was time to find our cover for the day.
We climbed the fence at the top of the hill and went into the bush. Soon the understorey opened out and we walked more easily, keeping the open valley on our right. We were going north again and we kept on until the sun was up. Then we went deeper into the trees and found a hollow with trunks closing it off and foliage hiding us from the air. We did not put our tent up, there was no need. We made a little fire of twigs – a fire with no smoke, I promised Willi – and opened cans of beans and corned beef, and boiled water in a pannikin. We ate slabs of bread cut from a loaf; and Willi looked at his watch (an illegal watch) and said, ‘Now they find out we are gone.’
The earth was damp in the hollow so we opened the tent for a groundsheet and wrapped ourselves in blankets and settled down to sleep out the day. But midday was the best we could manage. We were too keyed up. I scouted round. The bush seemed to go on north and south. I did not try west, wanting to keep away from the coast and Steinitz’s yachts. Sheep grazed in a bare valley, which turned out of sight, running north. There were no houses, no roads, no farm tracks. I thought we might as well stay where we were for several days and let the search go by us, and went back to put that to the others. They were quarrelling. Steinitz was determined to head for the coast. I took the pin I kept in the point of my shirt collar and started digging gorse prickles out of my palms. Willi would do better by himself, I thought. Steinitz too. But I did not want to be alone.
‘What we should do,’ I said, ‘is find the railway line and follow it over the mountains. Then we can work our way north. There are farms all the way up there, as far as Napier. We can do that all summer, live in the bush and kill sheep on the farms. And then in Napier,’ I said to Steinitz, ‘you can steal a yacht. That way you can sail straight out into the Pacific, you don’t have to go into the Tasman Sea.’
It was a good plan for keeping us together. Steinitz would fall for being an outlaw and stealing into farms at night to kill a sheep. As for Willi – I told him the hunt would die down and he could work his way north from Napier and hide in Auckland with one of his communist friends. The police would not think of looking there.
A plane flew over, banking and circling, but our tree cover was thick. We heard no other sound except the calling of birds and, far off, the bleating of sheep.
‘I will kill one tonight,’ Steinitz said. ‘We can have fresh meat.’
Willi winked at me. He recognised how I had captured Steinitz; but did not see that I had caught
him too. He was a city man, a Berliner. He needed streets and buildings and a room to sit in while he worked out plots. His eyes had made a flash when I said Auckland.
We travelled north for another night. Steinitz chased several sheep but all he came back with was a handful of wool. At dawn we crawled into a patch of scrub high on a hill and ate our food cold and drank cold water. Again we could sleep only half the day. The plane flew over, and once we heard men shouting back and forth on another hill. Willi was worried that they would use dogs to hunt for us. He had armed himself with a tea-tree club. Any dog that comes at me, I will knock his brains out,’ he said.
‘We will eat dog liver,’ Steinitz said.
I was startled by them. They were turning savage. Yet half an hour later Willi was calculating and afraid, for we went scouting through the scrub, trying for a view of the land we would traverse on our third night. The harbour opened up and there was Somes Island, bright in the sun, and only a dozen miles away, which deflated us; and then we found a new valley with a marshy stream in the bottom and, hunkered down on clay plateaux beside a gravel road, four squat buildings with grey asbestos walls and frowning roofs. A soldier, pacing back and forth, guarded each one, while men unloaded boxes from army trucks and set them on their shoulders and carried them inside.
‘What are they?’
‘Magazines. Ammunition storage,’ Willi said.
‘We can blow them up,’ Steinitz said. His life had become us and them and he had forgotten that the Nazis were the ones he should fight.
Willi had gone pale. ‘We should not have seen this.’
The buildings made me frightened too. Those soldiers will shoot us,’ I said.
‘We will go to our camp. Be very quiet. And then we will go the other way,’ Willi said.
We crawled and slunk, watching out for twigs that might snap. Those grey squat buildings seemed to press on our backs, forcing us closer to the ground. It took an hour to work our way through the gullies to our camp. Then Steinitz wriggled off to scout at the edge of the scrub. In a moment he was back. ‘Come. Look.’ We crouched at the edge of a paddock. ‘Soldiers. Over there.’ They were spread out in a line, several hilltops to the south. ‘They are hunting for us. We must go a different way. We must steal a yacht.’
Then we heard voices, so close I thought they were at my shoulder. Two soldiers walked towards us along the line of the fence.
‘This is a waste of bloody time,’ one of them said. He was panting and unhealthy, perhaps a reservist, perhaps Home Guard.
The younger one, a boy, knelt and sighted his rifle across the valley. ‘Pow! Fair up Jerry’s jacksie,’ he said.
‘Cut that out,’ the older man said. ‘You’re on charge if they see.’
‘All I want is a shot at them,’ the young one said.
They walked by, ten feet from us, and we squatted like barn owls on a rafter, watching them go.
‘There are soldiers everywhere. They’re in the trees,’ Steinitz said.
‘They’ll find our camp.’
‘They’ll shoot us if they see us. These are the ones who can’t go to the war. We are their only chance to kill a German,’ Willi said.
‘What shall we do?’
‘Hide,’ Steinitz said.
‘They’ve got us cut off.’
‘We have come too close to their magazines. They will think we want to blow them up,’ Willi said. ‘So we must go into the open and sit down. We must play dumb Fritzies.’
‘Not me,’ Steinitz said.
‘You go that way, then. Head for the coast and get yourself shot. Josef and I will go out here. Josef, take some dry branches. And some green leaves too.’
I gathered them quickly. The soldiers had gone round the hill and the ones further off had dropped out of sight, but soon they would come up on the skyline in a row.
We slid under the fence. We ran down the paddock into a hollow. Steinitz came too, frowning and sullen. I made a pile of tea-tree branches, dry at the bottom, green on top, and Willi lit it with his matches. He tipped the whole box on, and white smoke went up in a plume.
‘Now we sit like Dummkopfs,’ Willi said. ‘We warm our hands.’ We sat cross-legged round the fire. In a moment the line of soldiers came over the hill. I saw the man in charge raise his hand and they fell still. Half a dozen knelt and aimed at us. The rest came stepping quietly down.
‘What are they doing?’ Willi said. ‘Will they shoot?’
‘They are keeping us covered. They’re coming down.’
‘Pretend you see them now. You tell us and we put up our hands.’
We raised our arms over our heads.
‘Sit still. Do not move,’ Willi said.
The soldiers walked down the hill. Their rifles were ready. They gathered round us in a ring.
‘Dumb buggers,’ one of them said.
‘We are the winners here,’ Willi said.
Soon an officer arrived with two policemen, who handcuffed us. Willi said in German, ‘Say nothing about the tent.’
‘Don’t talk that fucking lingo,’ the officer shouted.
They marched us round a hillside, heading further away from the magazines, and put us in the back of an army truck with a guard of six men, and drove us into Wellington, which I was pleased to see – streets and buildings, women, children, a tram like a Viennese tram. They questioned us in a blind cell for an hour, and that was the end of our escape. Theft of a dinghy was all they could charge us with; and no place to put us but back on Somes Island.
By roll call we were in our huts. Moser gave a sour grin to see me. But I had been two days in the bush, walking free. I was pleased with that, I was refreshed. I was grateful to Willi for managing it, and for thinking clearly at the end. It still seems to me that he saved our lives.
EIGHT
When the winter storms came I thought our huts would blow off the island. Southerlies, carrying chips of ice, came through the harbour mouth, over the black reefs, and struck us blows that seemed personal. The hump of the island gave no shelter. The wind came down with a greater weight. We hid inside by the stoves and felt the huts shudder and groan. Rain and hail on the roofs made a roaring like huge waterfalls.
Moser and I and our fellow Jews did not get a place by the stoves. When I wrote ‘we’ a moment ago I was thinking of everyone, all forty men, Italians and Jews. Now I separate us, as they separated us and kept us out. The old Italians were harder, more violent than the young; and harder physically too, although several had to be invalided off the island when the cold weather came. I do not know if they survived somewhere else or died. We shivered in our beds and slept curled in a ball even though we had two extra blankets for the winter. Working, we ran from job to job, close to the ground, and did not dare shelter in the groaning trunks of trees. I watched the tiny city. It had turned grey and silver and looked like a broken shelf of stones at the edge of the sea. It did not seem possible that people lived there, only creatures that had learned to lie flat with the wind and rain. I asked Willi if he had seen it properly, but like me he had come to the island straight from the train and only glimpsed it from the truck after our arrest. Moser had lived on a central city street called The Terrace and told me there was no building over five storeys tall. He had walked about one day counting them. The houses in the suburbs were made of tin and wood. I could not understand why their roofs did not fly off, and I looked with respect at those Italians who had worked as fishermen on the south coast, at Island Bay. How could they sail their boats in a place like this? The ships that came in between Somes Island and Point Halswell seemed too small to survive out past the reefs. Only the battleships, lead-coloured and spiky with guns, seemed to belong. They came from the war, which was fought in countries I no longer recognised. The place I could know was Vienna, and Vienna was gone. Somes Island and the storms were mine.
One thing was normal. One thing went ahead as though a world might exist. That was the life of the caretaker’s family. How avidly I watc
hed his wife pegging out clothes to dry. (And once, in summer, in a northerly, a blouse tore from the line and floated like a gull to me over the wire. I plucked it from the air and was overcome. I buried my face in the cloth until Pengelly ran up and snatched the blouse away. He hauled me in front of Dowden who prodded my trousers with his little stick and told me to keep what I had in there for Jewish girls.)
The children sometimes walked with their father down to the shore. A boy, two girls, aged about fourteen, twelve and ten. The girls grew friendly with some of the Italians but I kept away. I was frightened I would touch them; feel a cheek like Susi’s, feel an arm. I watched from a distance. The boy made his sisters lob a tennis ball at him and struck it with a bat in a game I had never seen. (Cricket it was.) The wife dug a flower bed, then worked the earth with a trowel. She knelt and planted seedlings and stood and pressed the soil firm with her toe. I waited through the weeks to see them flower, and when they came they were white and yellow. One of the daughters picked a bunch and carried it gravely inside. I came to need rather than to love them, and when they chugged away on the launch for a holiday, leaving a temporary man in charge, I felt the island darken and something die, even though the sun burned down that day.
Battles, atrocities, things I do not think of even now, were happening, but my world was 120 acres in size and two miles around. My feelings went lancing out from it, then sheeted in the sky and flickered away, like the aurora australis we saw one night. There was nothing out in the world for them to fasten on. All the same, I kept petitioning to go out there and said each time that I wished to go away and fight. The answer came back no, and in the end I wrote only to practise my English. I had no one else to write to in that language. I requested permission to buy a grammar book and a dictionary, and Dowden said yes – my only yes. The volumes that came were tattered but complete and I set myself to learn them from cover to cover. There was also a library that sent books to the prisoners on request, charging a fee. I asked for novels by P. G. Wodehouse but none came. Dickens came, just one book, Nicholas Nickleby, which I struggled with but increasingly enjoyed. It seemed to me that he wrote about a fantasyland and I was willing to go there. The Society of Friends also sent books – no charge. Willi asked for Soviet Communism by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, which Dowden, though he searched the pages muttering, allowed. Willi muttered too as he read it. He was a pure Marxist, and Russia sullied his ideal. I had to help him out with words and meanings now and then, and I read the book as an exercise when he was finished. Communism was done with for me; it was out there in a world I could not make exist; it was a book of words, no longer an action and a history – but I was after words so I got through to the end, and even read a bit of it to Steinitz, translating into German as I went.