The Night Before Morning

by Alistair Moffat

  The tang of salt seaweed filled the night air as Eileen Grant quietly unloaded all that they had thrown into the back of the vehicle only two hours before. Having made his way carefully down the sea-steps to the soft sand in the little harbour, her husband began to untie the canvas cover that had kept the worst of the winter weather off the open deck and out of the cabin.

  By the time everything had been stowed and the Vauxhall parked out of the way up at the Creel Road, they sat down at last in the cabin, sliding the window shutters closed. With his hand torch, Alan rummaged under one of the berths for the primus stove. It was very cold indeed. Carefully pouring paraffin into the small reservoir and making sure the mantle was square and secure, he pushed the pump in and out a few times to create some air pressure. The stove lit with a flash and a puff of flame but soon Alan had adjusted it to a stable and warming glow.

  Sitting opposite each other on the berths, Eileen looked at Alan, her eyes filling with tears. ‘What is happening to our world? Madmen are everywhere. Terrible, terrible, cruel things are being done. Where can we run to? There’s nowhere.’

  Alan leaned over and took her hands in his. Small and delicate, her hair beginning to turn grey, Eileen seemed suddenly fearful and uncharacteristic tears brimmed. ‘Try not to worry, darling. David will do his best to look after Katie.’

  In no mood to heat any food, relieved to feel the edge come off the chill in the cabin, they ate some cheese and pieces of Eileen’s Christmas pudding, washed down with the remains of the brandy she had flamed it with. Consoled and sustained by such solid fare, the Grants climbed, exhausted, into their sleeping bags to wait for the morning tide to lift the boat, and perhaps lift their spirits.

  *

  Acrid smoke filled the room and Sergeant Bell staggered sideways, his face spattered with blood, the grey debris of Schneider’s brain and fragments of his teeth.

  Roused by the sudden thunder of the shotgun blast, two soldiers rushed in, looked in astonishment at the decapitated body of their commanding officer and then at my father, holding his shotgun in one hand by his side. They quickly disarmed him, handcuffed him and marched the old man to the cell downstairs. The same cell where Sandy Ormiston had been beaten to death.

  *

  Throwing all caution to the wind, I raced back from Abbey House to where Wilson and Campbell held our ponies. Riding hard for the footbridge that crossed the Tweed near the home farm, Katie chased and caught up with me.

  ‘David! David!’ she shouted, clattering across the bridge behind me. ‘Wait. Stop.’

  When we reached the far bank, only about a mile from St Boswells and my father, she grabbed my reins and pulled the pony’s head around. ‘You must think! If you ride through the village straight to the police station, you’ll be outnumbered and probably outgunned. Think! Think!’

  *

  ‘I am Oberführer Manfred von Klige from the Waffen SS detail at headquarters,’ I said in faultless German. ‘I am here to meet Kommandant Schneider and interrogate his prisoner.’

  What the Gestapo officer saw in front of him was a man in a long, heavy overcoat with a black trilby hat pulled down over his eyes, and he heard a perfect, faintly aristocratic German accent. What Sergeant Bell saw, however, was David Erskine standing in front of him. For an uncomfortably long moment we stared hard at each other.

  I barked at the Gestapo officer, ‘I served as a colonel with the SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and you will stand to attention when I address you, and you will not keep me waiting! What is your name and rank?’

  ‘Kurz. Lieutenant Reinhard Kurz.’

  We had left the ponies to graze on the golf course above the river while I pulled on Katie’s dad’s suit, overcoat and hat. After only a few minutes looking around the village, we found my father’s Bentley parked by the church hall and the keys were still in it. While Katie, Wilson and Campbell ran back to the golf course to saddle up the ponies and get ahead of us, I took the car keys and walked into the police station.

  ‘The prisoner will accompany me to Berwick immediately and one of you will come as an escort,’ I said, making a statement and not a request.

  The Gestapo officer explained what had happened an hour before and I pretended to be outraged instead of absolutely astonished. Sergeant Bell said nothing, even when the German left the reception room to go down to the cells, and he busied himself with cleaning up the considerable mess on the counter and the wall behind it. Only when we heard footsteps approaching did Bell look up at me. ‘If I don’t do what they want, they’ll kill my wife.’

  My father had not been beaten but he did look stunned, almost catatonic, his gaze downcast. A stocky man in his prime, he had shrunk with age and grown round-shouldered. The loss of my mother had weighed heavy.

  Suddenly, Sergeant Bell came around the counter and, standing between my father and me, clearly realising that the old man might recognise his son, asked, ‘Will you give me the car keys, sir? I’ll see that the prisoner is in the back seat with Herr Kurz when you come out.’

  I waited for a few unnecessary moments, looking at the blood-stained wall behind the counter, trying to imagine how rage at the execution of Sandy and Agnes Ormiston had built volcanically in my father and erupted almost exactly where I stood.

  When I opened the driver door and slid onto the smooth leather of the seat, a memory of childhood flashed through my head. My father loved cars and his Bentley Vanden Plas was more than a joy, it was an engineering miracle – a British engineering miracle, made in Crewe.

  The rear-view mirror sat on a slim pedestal on top of the cherrywood dashboard and I had difficulty in adjusting it so that I could see both of my passengers. Kurz sat directly behind me and was clearly visible, but my father seemed to have slumped down. Perhaps he was unable to lever himself higher. I could not risk suspicion by asking the Gestapo officer to remove his handcuffs. I pulled the starter and pushed down on the throttle too firmly with my right foot, gunning the engine in neutral. Driving lessons around Abbey House were not a happy memory and for a mad moment, I waited for a comment from the back seat as I pushed the gear selector into drive and we glided off to find the coast road to Berwick.

  It was dark but clear, and a crescent moon was rising behind us. I had agreed with Katie and the others that I would follow the road to Kelso that took us past the track leading up to the tower where we had spent the night, just a handful of days ago. It seemed a long, long time since then. The Bentley’s huge, dish-like headlamps cast a wide, extended beam, bright enough for them to see us coming from a distance, flag down the car and stage an ‘ambush’, for the benefit of Kurz.

  Once out of St Boswells, we cruised along the night road at thirty miles an hour. ‘Perfectly adequate,’ my father would say, in different circumstances, ‘and with all of those damned potholes, slow enough to avoid them.’ It would take little more than an hour to reach Berwick Barracks, in theory. I glanced at Kurz sitting in the back seat, but with only the glow of the instruments on the dashboard, I could not make out his features or expression. My father seemed to be asleep or, at any rate, very quiet and motionless. If he was conscious, he must have been thinking that nothing good awaited him in Berwick.

  ‘Where did you serve with the Leibstandarte, sir?’

  It had not occurred to me that I would need some biography to back up my impersonation of von Klige, everything had happened so quickly. And so I opted for brevity. ‘I was taken prisoner at Caen in Normandy.’

  Kurz shifted a little on the leather seats. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘I too was captured in France. Where in Britain were you interned?’

  I could not hesitate, equivocate or shut down what was a perfectly natural exchange between a German soldier and a member of the Gestapo. ‘At what the British called the Black Camp, in the mountains.’ The only POW camp I had ever heard of was near Comrie in Perthshire, and it was so called because it held many Waffen SS men. Fanatics who refused to believe that the war was lost, they were ca
tegorised as dangerous and were therefore closely confined. Vindicated in their blind faith in Adolf Hitler, many of them now led units in what had become an army of occupation.

  Kurz grunted, made no reply. A moment later, I felt the press of cold metal on the back of my neck, the business end of the barrel of a pistol.

  *

  Even though the night sky was open and there was a sliver of a crescent moon, Katie found it difficult to make out more than dark shapes. There was no detail anywhere in the landscape and the only horizon she could be sure of was the watershed ridge of the Cheviots in the south.

  With Wilson and Campbell, she had found some cover at the end of a long straight on the St Boswells to Berwick road so that they could see the headlights of the Bentley soon enough to mount their ponies and drag an old field gate out of a ditch.

  Clicking on her torch for only a moment, Katie looked at her watch. The lights of the Bentley should have been visible by now. There was no traffic at all, nothing else moving in the darkness and no leaves on the roadside trees or hedges to obscure a car on the road.

  *

  ‘I myself was held prisoner at the Black Camp, at Comrie,’ said Kurz, ‘and I never saw you there. All of the Waffen SS were held in one compound, guarded by Polish soldiers who wanted to shoot them. But you were not there. Why are you lying? Who are you?’

  He pushed hard at my neck with the barrel of his gun. I reckoned we were two miles from the track that led to the tower, only five minutes. Soon Katie would see the lights. If I could stall, think of something, spin out what had become an interrogation, we might make it.

  ‘Slow the car down now!’ barked Kurz.

  With as much venom and authority as I could muster, I said, ‘You are interfering with business you know nothing about, and your behaviour will be severely punished. But if you put away your gun now, admit that your memory is faulty, then I may be lenient.’

  With the barrel of the pistol, Kurz hit me very sharply on the side of the head. And just at that moment an apparition suddenly loomed huge in the headlights. A white barn owl, its wing-spread more than three feet, flew directly towards the oncoming Bentley before lifting over it at the last moment. I swerved instantly. Kurz was thrown to one side and, looking for a second into the rear-view mirror, I saw my father grab for his gun. There were two shots. The big car fishtailed but I managed to keep it out of the roadside ditch and came to a halt.

  I turned to see Kurz’s blood-covered face rear up behind me like a hellish phantom, and he hit me again with his Luger before scrambling out of the car.

  I quickly looked at my father. The German had shot him in the head.

  Pointing his gun at me, Kurz opened the driver door. And when he tried to pull me out, I punched him and we rolled to the ground. Ablaze with rage, I fought like a demon. But Kurz managed to pull free, aimed low and shot me through the thigh.

  A few minutes later, I found myself slewing around in the back seat, handcuffed, with my father’s blood-soaked head leaning against one of the rear doors next to me. My thigh wound was bad, bleeding profusely, but I had no hands to exert any pressure on it. It forced Kurz to drive as fast as possible to Berwick to avoid arriving at headquarters with two corpses and no answers. Passing in and out of consciousness, I heard him on a walkie-talkie or a radio of some kind, telling his superiors that he had two prisoners and that he had seen riders on the road. He was sure there was some connection with Lord Erskine. I felt myself slipping away, not thinking rationally. Perhaps this would be how it would end, a rollercoaster journey into the bowels of hell.

  My father had tried to save me and I could not save him. I felt the fight ebbing out of me and closed my eyes.

  *

  Through the still night air, Katie, Wilson and Campbell had heard the gunshots. Abandoning any thought of ambush, they kicked on their ponies and made their way back along the road towards St Boswells as fast as they safely could.

  Swinging uphill and around a corner, Kurz was driving the Bentley at breakneck speed. Somehow, the three riders had managed to get out of the way of the wildly careering car, but Wilson’s pony reared and threw him.

  In the paddock at the foot of the tower we had slept in a few nights before, Katie and John Campbell caught up two of the ponies. Wilson had fallen hard, and Campbell and Katie suspected he had broken several ribs on his right side. ‘You’ll need to stay here,’ said Katie, giving him all of the food and water they had left. ‘I had a bad fall once and if you can bear it, try to continue breathing deeply. That will hurt, a lot, but it will get your ribs in alignment so that they begin to set properly. Wait a day before you try to move. We’ll come back for you.’

  A dense and welcome mist made the land seem ghostly, only the treetops showing above it in places, but it hid them from sight and discouraged other traffic. It meant that Katie and John Campbell could move quickly, perhaps reaching Berwick in three hours if the ponies were not too blown. And frankly, without Wilson to delay them, they would make much better time.

  *

  ‘More bloody Beethoven.’

  Both of them unable to sleep, Alan Grant had reconnected the battery to the yacht’s radio and was fiddling with the dial, looking for something they could listen to. The Scottish Home Service and the Light Programme were unrelievedly dull, with only approved music playing, most of it classical and German, certainly nothing from the American and British big bands and singers so popular during the war. And then with another flick of the dial, a familiar and now sickening phrase filled the little cabin. ‘German calling. Germany calling. Germany calling.’

  Popularly, infamously, known as Lord Haw Haw, a former British fascist, William Joyce, had made weekly broadcasts on Radio Luxembourg for most of the war. It was not against the law to listen and millions in Britain did, not because they agreed with what he said but rather to discover something of how the Nazis saw the world.

  In his thin, nasal whine, Joyce was crowing about how Jewish-dominated capitalism in Britain would change, how Germany would reorder the world with its Italian and Japanese allies and how the Axis powers had cowed the USA and the Soviet Union into defeat. Without explicitly mentioning the atom bomb that had destroyed London, Joyce reminded listeners about Germany’s total military dominance: ‘Be in no doubt, the Führer will not hesitate to act if irreconcilable elements threaten our undertakings with our new friends and allies in Britain.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ muttered Alan, and he poured two generous tots of brandy. ‘Let’s see if we can find something worth listening to.’

  With the volume turned low, he tried to find new frequencies. Through several bands of static and gurgling noises that sounded as though they came up from a deep well and not down from the airwaves, he began to pick up a strong signal. But it was not from a radio station. It sounded more like a conversation. Two men were speaking quickly in German, but he could make out some words, including several mentions of the name of Berwick. Was this a military frequency?

  Then he heard one of the voices mention St Boswells, and after that – he was absolutely certain about this – the other said ‘Lord Erskine’.

  Alan Grant turned to his wife. ‘I’m sure I heard someone say “Lord Erskine”. Absolutely sure.’

  They felt the hull of the yacht shift as the incoming tide began to fill the inner harbour.

  Alan and Eileen Grant looked at each other and she said, ‘We can’t move until first light, can we? How far south is Berwick? About six or seven miles?’

  Alan Grant smiled. ‘About that. But we can’t just blithely drop anchor in the harbour, in full view of the walls and the garrison.’

  He unfolded a chart of the coastal waters. His yacht had a minimum draught of about four feet and could sail further inshore than most without running aground. ‘I’ve never dropped anchor there, but Fisherman’s Haven must have got its name because you can.’ He pointed to a small, sheltered bay that lay no more than three hundred yards from the Elizabethan walls
and the barracks. ‘As soon as there’s enough light in the east, we’ll make our way south,’ he said. ‘But let’s get some sleep first.’

  27 December 1944

  They must have assumed that I did not understand English.

  A local doctor and nurse were replacing the dressing on the wound in my thigh. ‘He’s been lucky that the bullet passed straight through, missed his femur and a major artery, but he has lost a lot of blood,’ the doctor said.

  Instinctively maintaining my fictional identity, I kept muttering, ‘Danke, danke schön’. Woozy with what I imagined was morphine, I asked, ‘Wo ist die alte Mann? Where is the old man?’

  They shook their heads. ‘Soldiers come soon,’ said the doctor and, with practised hands, they rolled me off the examination couch onto a stretcher on a trolley.

  When I turned my head, I could see through a window that a misty day was dawning. Perhaps a haar was floating in off the North Sea, I thought, as I closed my eyes.

  *

  ‘Attention!’ Every soldier in the courtroom of Berwick’s grand Guild Hall stood up immediately, except for Oberführer von Klige. ‘Heil Hitler!,’ barked the sergeant by the double doors. With Katie’s father’s overcoat around my shoulders and my heavily bandaged leg extended, I had been permitted to sit.

  When Kurz came for me earlier, I had made a tremendous fuss. Having had time to think and work out a strategy, I insisted that if he had suspicions, then they ought to be tested in a courtroom and not by some Gestapo torturer. ‘I am your superior officer!’ I shouted. ‘I served in the SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. Some of my comrades were once the Führer’s personal bodyguards. And you will respect my rank!’