‘I come with you,’ he said.
It seemed very odd to be walking along with a German close behind them. In Bristol, Mrs Tweed had claimed German soldiers killed babies; she said she’d read it in a newspaper. Mabel had heard other people claim they were savages and that they shot the men they took prisoner. It was so easy to just believe the things people said – after all, she knew nothing about Germany or its people. But now she knew Clara was happy to have a German working for her, and was going to the camp to teach them art, she thought perhaps people made things up – maybe in retaliation for the relatives they’d lost in the war.
‘You like to come here?’ Carsten asked as they went into the little cottage.
‘Yes, very much,’ she replied and smiled at him.
He had the kind of face that would make any woman smile; it was not just his blue eyes, but something in the way he looked at her, and at Clara too, as if he was curious about what made them tick. His mouth was lovely too, with plump lips and very white, even teeth.
‘So, Mabel, how do you like the cottage?’ Clara asked.
‘It’s really lovely,’ she replied.
The room they were in was a living room cum kitchen, all painted white; but like the main house there were bright splashes of colour everywhere. The sofa in front of the fireplace was draped with a scarlet rug. Four chairs round a small circular table were painted glossy green, and the cloth on the table had green-and-white checks. A curtain across the front of the sink was the same checked material too. There were colourful books on a shelf, and several of Clara’s vivid paintings. Even the oil lamps were pretty ones with coloured glass bases.
Carsten had the small range in the fireplace laid and lit within minutes. ‘I get more wood and coal from shed,’ he said.
As he went out, Clara said that she could boil a kettle on the range. That made Mabel smile, as she’d grown up cooking whole meals on one much older than this one.
‘But you can eat with me,’ Clara went on. ‘I’m afraid there is no bathroom here, the lavatory is just outside. But you can have a bath whenever you like, up at the house. Are you alright with that?’
‘It’s lovely,’ Mabel said and meant it.
In summer it would be a glorious place to live, looking out on to the garden with all its trees. The bedroom was pretty, with a big fluffy pink eiderdown on the double bed and a dressing table with a triple mirror, like one Mrs Gladsworthy had in her room. As time went by, she could add things to make it even more homely.
‘I’m looking forward to the day we can have electricity in the house,’ Clara said as Carsten came back in with a scuttle of coal and some more wood. ‘I can’t really draw after four in the winter because the oil lights are too dim to see properly. In fact, we’d better get back now, it’s beginning to get dark.’
After speaking to Carsten for a few minutes about banking up the stove for the night, coming back in the morning to see to it and bringing in more logs for the fires in the main house, they left.
‘Is the camp he lives in grim?’ Mabel asked as they walked back through the snow.
‘No, not really, especially after the terrible conditions they endured in the trenches. Wooden huts, as you’d expect, but they have a stove in each one. There are enough showers and lavatories for everyone, there is a hospital and a church too, and there are sports, art, a choir, drama clubs – and they have a band. Carsten says the men get enough to eat, and the English guards are decent to them.’
Mabel thought that all sounded surprisingly good.
‘There has always been the army here in Dorchester, it’s the home of the Dorset regiment, and the camp is almost an extension of the barracks, though it has grown and grown as more men arrive,’ Clara went on. ‘So it’s not like a real prison, though of course there is barbed wire all around, with floodlights and strict security. I just hope our men who’ve been taken prisoner in France are as well treated.’
‘Fancy them being let out to work,’ Mabel said. ‘Aren’t they afraid they’ll run away?’
‘Run where?’ Clara laughed. ‘This is an island, they can’t get off it. A few have tried, especially right back at the start of the war. I don’t think any of them got out of England. But I think they are very fussy about who they let out to work; except for men like Carsten, all the other men out at work are guarded. Last year, with all our men away in France, they had to let lots of prisoners help on the farms or there would’ve been no crops to harvest. It worked out well too. My friend Mary has a farm near here, and she was run ragged trying to milk the cows, plant and look after vegetables, get them to market, then caring for chickens, ducks and goats. Far too much for one woman to do alone. They sent her two men, and they’ve been marvellous; her yard used to be like a midden, but they wash it all down every morning after the cows go back in the fields. I couldn’t believe how orderly it all was when I went to visit her. She’s going to miss them when the war is over, they work much harder than her husband ever did.’
‘Why is Carsten an exception?’
‘He’s the equivalent to our rank of sergeant, for a start – there are very few NCOs at the camp. Because of his English he acts as an interpreter, and he is just very well thought of. Maybe at the start of the war, a brave, committed soldier like him would have tried to escape, to get back to Germany to fight. But now, when the war is nearing the end, I think he believes it is his duty to stay here and look after his men. He helps in the hospital too. Like I said, he is a good man.’
The snow lay thick on the garden for five days before the thaw came. As it slowly shrank back, revealing grass and soil, Mabel felt rather sad. It hadn’t felt like she was working at the house, more like she was on holiday, but now she’d have to move over to the cottage, and that would remind her soon enough that she was just a servant.
That afternoon, she took her belongings, plus a box of bed linen, towels, books and other items Clara thought would make her feel at home, down to the little cottage. To her surprise it felt warm and cosy. She hadn’t seen Carsten since the first time they’d met, but clearly he had been calling every day, because there was kindling, coal and logs too. She lit an oil lamp, and then noticed there was a can of oil to refill it in a cupboard, and a little carved wooden bear about three inches tall on the table, which hadn’t been there before.
She picked it up and smiled at it. She guessed it was a little present from Carsten.
She had put the kettle on to have a cup of tea and fill a hot-water bottle, to air the bed, and was just about to start making the bed up, when Carsten appeared at the window.
‘Hello,’ Mabel said as she opened the front door to speak to him. ‘Thank you for looking after the stove, it’s lovely and warm now.’
He looked cold; his broad shoulders were hunched, and his face was pinched and pale.
‘Would you like to come in and have a cup of tea?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got cake too.’
When he smiled, it was like the sun coming out. ‘You are kind, but it is not permitted for us to have food from you.’
Mabel had been brought up to treat people as you would like to be treated. It didn’t matter to her that he was a prisoner.
She shrugged. ‘Who is there to see?’ she said. ‘Maybe a fox or a badger, no one else.’
He laughed, a real guffaw, the kind of laugh that would make anyone want to join in.
‘So, it is tea then?’
He nodded and came in.
‘I didn’t see you coming here for the last few days,’ she said, urging him to take off his coat and sit down by the range.
‘I come along the riverbank and through the garden, not the front way.’
‘And the bear?’ she said picking it up. ‘Was this from you?’
‘Yah,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I carved it for you, I think you say a happy home present.’
‘I love him, thank you so much. I’ll call him Barney. He’ll always remind me of you.’
‘I hope good memories, not of the sadne
ss war brings.’
‘Only memories of kindness,’ she said. ‘You speak such good English. Where did you learn it?’
‘My mother had English friend, her name Doreen. She was a widow and so she taught English. She say to me once “to keep the wolf from the door”. I was only seven then and I worry about this wolf.’
Mabel giggled. ‘It’s a common English remark. You know the meaning now?’
‘Yes, and I am glad she taught me so well. My friends back at the camp who do not speak any English, they are not so lucky like me to come out.’
‘Do you get treated well at the camp?’
He shrugged. ‘Good enough. Our countries are at war, we did not expect much. But food is alright, I get told we are fed better than the poor people in Dorchester. The rationing, it keeps people hungry.’
The kettle was boiling. Mabel made a pot of tea and put it on the table along with cups and the half of the fruit cake Clara had said she must take. She had noticed Clara didn’t appear to have a problem with rationing. Yesterday a man had come to the door with a box of groceries, and Mabel suspected he wasn’t just a friendly neighbour helping Clara out, as she claimed, but was selling her black-market stuff.
‘You must miss your family,’ she said, cutting him a slice of cake and pushing it close to him. ‘Do you get letters okay?’
‘Not enough, very slow,’ he said. ‘In the camp, letters from home are everything. We read again and again. But you must miss your family too, Mabel. Where are they?’
‘I have no family now,’ she said and quickly told him the same story she told everyone else.
‘You will hate me because a German killed your husband?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Maybe he killed some of your men. Death in war is inevitable.’
‘What does inevitable mean?’
‘It is bound to happen.’
He nodded in understanding and took a bite of the cake. He rolled his eyes. ‘I hear Clara say one day the word “scrumptious”, another word I not know. But I think right for this cake. I could live on this. You make?’
‘Yes, I make, and scrumptious is a good word.’
They drank their tea in a companionable silence. Mabel had the feeling that sitting in a warm room with tea and cake was making him think of home. Just that morning, as she was trimming the wick on an oil lamp, she had a sudden, sharp memory of doing the same at the cottage in Hallsands. It was so vivid she could smell the sea, hear the fishermen down below on the beach shouting to each other as they hauled in their boats. And she saw Martin’s bright smile as he came in through the door. It made a lump come up in the back of her throat.
‘You should find a new husband,’ he said suddenly, breaking the silence. ‘You are too young and pretty to be alone.’
Those lovely blue eyes of his were fixed on her, full of compassion, and it made her feel a little trembly inside.
‘Another cup of tea and then I must make my bed and get back to Clara, to make the supper,’ she said, rather than address what he had just said. As she poured the second cups, her hands were shaking.
He drank his quickly and then got up. ‘Thank you, Mabel, for the tea and cake. I hope you will be happy here. I think your life not so happy in past.’
‘I think I will be happy here, and I’m so glad I met you.’
7
‘What a nice young man Carsten is,’ Clara said as she looked out of the French windows on to the garden, where he was doing some weeding.
Mabel was peeling potatoes for their lunch, and she got a faint sense that her mistress had made this remark, fishing to see if there was anything between her and Carsten.
It was the 1st of March and Mabel had been at Willow Cottage for six weeks. Every day, she found yet another reason to be glad she had come here. And now the garden was showing signs of burgeoning into life after the long winter, she felt even happier.
‘Yes, he is. So polite and correct,’ Mabel said.
‘That’s very Germanic,’ Clara said thoughtfully. ‘I went to Germany a few years ago; the men are all like that, a bit too stiff and chilly for my taste.’
Mabel didn’t find Carsten stiff or chilly, but she wasn’t going to say that.
‘What’s Germany like?’ she asked instead.
‘Very beautiful. Well, at least the parts I saw were – forests, lakes and charming villages.’
‘How come you never married?’ Mabel asked. She knew now that Clara was forty-five, but she seemed much younger, with her glossy hair, her trim figure and her joyous manner. ‘If that isn’t too personal?’
‘Not at all, my dear.’ Clara turned away from the window and leaned on the draining board. ‘I just never met anyone that I felt I could spend the rest of my life with. Lots of lovely chaps, parties, dances, kisses in the moonlight. But never that utter certainty that this was “the One”. Were you sure when you met your husband?’
‘Completely sure,’ Mabel said. ‘If the war hadn’t come along and taken him, I’m sure we would have remained as happy in old age as we were when we met.’
‘But he was your first and only sweetheart?’
‘Yes, I was just fourteen when we first met, and married at sixteen.’
‘I suspect that’s the secret,’ Clara said with a smile. ‘Too much choice is never a good thing.’
Mabel finished the potatoes and put them on the range to cook. Today they were having sausages and mash for lunch, with apple pie for dessert. Carsten had brought the apples out of the shed this morning; they had been stored there over the winter, but he’d noticed some of them were going mouldy and suggested they cooked the remainder that were still edible. As a result, Clara had asked him in to have lunch with them.
As Carsten had told her when they first met, feeding a prisoner was forbidden, but Clara was by nature rebellious towards authority, and as she said, ‘Why shouldn’t I give him a meal when I want to?’ Most days it was just a sandwich left on the garden table with a cup of tea, a slice of cake, a few biscuits, or a mug of soup. But Carsten really appreciated her offerings, as it was a long day between breakfast and his supper back at the camp.
He came and worked in the garden at least three times a week. Clara paid sixpence an hour for his services to the POW camp, but Carsten only received one penny an hour. Something that made Clara cross. It seemed unfair to Mabel too, because he worked so hard, and they were becoming good friends. She usually left the main house at two thirty and returned later, around six, to fix their supper. Carsten always left for the day at four thirty, and his route took him past her cottage. Most days he dropped in for a cup of tea before returning to the camp.
Mabel had learned he was the eldest of three boys, that his father was a keen hunter and his mother a model housewife and great cook. He often told Mabel stories about the mischief he and his brothers got into, and it was clear to her that he’d had a happy childhood and missed his family a great deal. He had been apprenticed as an engineer back in Germany but, at nineteen, as soon as war was declared, he enlisted in the army.
‘All my friends wanted to go. And we thought it was our duty too. I didn’t really want to – I didn’t think I would make a good soldier.’
‘But you are a Feldwebel ,’ she said. She’d thought that was a joke rank when he first said it, but Clara put her straight, explaining it was the military equivalent of an English sergeant. ‘You must have been a good soldier if you could lead your men.’
‘I didn’t manage to lead them away from becoming prisoners of war,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘I think I only got promoted because I spoke English. The officers thought that was useful.’
‘I’m sure it was more than that,’ she said.
He sighed. ‘War is a nasty, bloody, dirty business. The good men die, and the bad ones often survive, on both sides. I admit I was glad when I was taken prisoner. I’d had enough of the mud, the noise, lice, rats, rotten food and seeing my friends die in agony. There had been times when I almost ran away. That’s how g
ood a soldier I was!’
His honesty surprised her. Because he was German and, as such, expected to be on the winning side, she had imagined he would glorify war. But to admit the complete opposite was touching. ‘I think most soldiers must feel exactly like you, if they were truthful. From what I’ve read in the newspapers, the battlefields are a vision of hell.’
He looked thoughtful. ‘Yes, that is exactly how it is. Hölle . I’ve seen men crying, calling for their mothers, sick with fear. But such courage too, on both sides. Men who risked being shot by a sniper going back into no-man’s-land to rescue wounded comrades. But soldiers, yours and mine, admire that courage. Many times, the German and English snipers don’t shoot. It was because they felt the anguish of seeing a comrade injured and helpless.’
Mabel saw how his eyes filled with tears as he spoke, how he stumbled for the right words, his voice trembling, and that sensitivity moved her. In truth, each time she saw him, she knew she was growing fonder and fonder of him, waiting eagerly to see that wide smile, the brilliance of his blue eyes, and to hear his hearty guffaws.
He was strong, she’d watched him cutting up logs as easily as if he was slicing up tender meat. And when he took his coat off because he’d got too hot, she marvelled at his powerful shoulders and the muscles in his arms. Yet the gentle, sensitive side of him moved her more. She’d seen him tenderly brushing dead leaves and soil away from clumps of snowdrops, breaking the ice on the bird bath so the birds could drink. He’d cut her a little posy of daphne, a sweet-smelling blossom, too.
Mabel found herself daydreaming about kissing him; sometimes she could actually taste him, and shivers of delight ran down her spine. But she had to be so careful not to show her feelings. Clara would dismiss him, if she thought there was something between them. People around here might be tolerant enough to have prisoners working on their land. They might even grow to like the men who were sent to them. But there would be public condemnation of any English girl walking out with a German.
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