The Night Before Morning

by Alistair Moffat

  Around the room, I could detect one or two shudders. This sort of military directness naturally scared people, even academics who had been working on the most fearsome weapon ever seen.

  Jamie went on to say that, apart from himself, me, Katie, Alan Grant and Robert MacDonald, no one else had any experience with shotguns.

  ‘Hey. Over here.’ The wife of one of the American scientists raised her hand. ‘Hi, I’m Rita Curtis. I shot skeet when I was a kid. I was pretty good, better than my brothers.’

  Everyone laughed. Perhaps we could become a band of brothers and sisters.

  ‘From what you said,’ added Bradley Kaye, ‘you have a heck of a lot of cartridges, five hundred? We can make something out of them. I guess there’s some bleach and maybe paraffin round here?’

  Robert MacDonald nodded. ‘We have both. And I think there are other ways to discourage the Germans from getting close to the house that don’t involve weapons.’

  As gloaming fell, our discussions were slowly refined into practical plans that would begin to be put in train at first light in the morning. With no idea how much time we had, there had to be some urgency. We needed to get busy.

  5 January 1945

  ‘I think you understand what is required.’ A tall, straight-backed soldier, Oberführer Stengel towered over Colonel Kritzinger’s desk at College Gate in St Andrews.

  Along with a unit of sixty Waffen SS commandos, Stengel had driven up that morning from Army Command North at York. Without any warning, he had stormed into the building and made straight for the commandant’s office. After a thorough briefing, some of which he had the colonel repeat, Stengel was satisfied that he understood precisely what had happened. How it happened was another matter. Incompetence, criminal incompetence and an unwillingness to use harsh methods in pursuit of an outcome vital to the Reich – those were the reasons why this disaster had been allowed to happen.

  Stengel opened the holster of his Luger, inserted a single bullet in the chamber and laid it on Kritzinger’s desk. ‘I will leave you now.’

  While he waited in the outer office to hear the shot ring out, Stengel issued orders to the clerks. There was to be an immediate meeting of all the NCOs and junior officers in the garrison, and the senior officers from the Department of Public Safety would be required to attend. Immediately. And all of the files on the American scientists were to be reviewed. Did any of them have links, friendships in the local community? Someone must have seen something.

  After five minutes, Colonel Stengel had heard nothing from Kritzinger’s office. Having waited long enough for him to behave with honour, Stengel strode back into Kritzinger’s office to find him staring fixedly at the pistol on the desk.

  Without any hesitation, Stengel picked it up and shot Kritzinger in the head at point-blank range.

  *

  ‘Fertilizer!’ exclaimed Brad Kaye as he, Robert and I rummaged around the garden store behind the house, looking for spades, shovels, picks and barrows. ‘I can use that.’ He pointed to a stack of hessian bags. ‘The ammonium nitrate can be made into an explosive. And in the right casing, it can create shrapnel.’

  I smiled at Robert. We had an asset. Some of the scientists had been reticent, said little or nothing at the meeting, but Brad Kaye seemed in his element. And out in the paddock, there was another asset. Without wasting cartridges, Rita Curtis and Alan Grant were showing two of the Americans how a shotgun worked, how to shoot it and allow for the recoil so that it did not bruise their shoulders.

  At first light, Jamie Griffith-Smith, Robert and I had walked what we thought might make a defensive perimeter around Darroch House. Behind the wood at the back ran the drystane dyke with the ditch below it. If all of the winter’s detritus could be cleared out of it and it was deepened, it could become an effective barrier. Uphill, I had come across an ancient military deterrent that would make it formidable: blackthorn. It carried vicious spikes. Sometimes six inches long, they were needle-sharp and each twig and branch carried many thorns. I asked Katie to organise a party to cut it all and fill the ditches with it. Anyone who blundered into one would quickly come back out.

  Realising that the perimeter was much too long to defend with only eight weapons and six people who knew how to use them, Jamie and I became convinced that we had to force whoever came after us to attack where we wanted them to, funnel them into a narrow approach. If Brad Kaye was right, the Germans would not risk bombarding the house – a dead scientist was a disaster. If we made most of the perimeter behind and at the sides of the house as secure as possible, then the only direction they could come at us was at the front, up the paddock from the loch. The effective range of a shotgun, choked down to concentrate the shot as much as possible, was about fifty yards. And so that was where we began to dig a ditch.

  Rafael and Jane Levinson watched from the windows as we cut the turf and carefully laid it to one side. ‘Perhaps this ditch will keep us alive,’ Jane said.

  *

  ‘So,’ shouted Stengel, standing in the office of the Department of Public Safety, ‘you have not seen your commanding officer for two days? Where does he live?’

  With four of his Waffen SS commandos, the colonel was led the short distance to the Griffith-Smiths’ house in South Street. When Stengel saw a group of framed photographs on the mantelpiece, he turned to the officer who had brought them. ‘Is this him?’ When he took the photograph out of its frame, he read the names on the back. ‘Miriam? This is his wife? That is a Jew name.’

  More searching, spilling the contents of drawers on the floor, revealed the Griffith-Smiths’ marriage certificate. ‘Levinson. That too is a Jew name. From Glasgow, I see.’

  Stengel shouted to one of the soldiers to find the nearest office of the Department of Internal Affairs. ‘They have begun the resettlement programme, no?’

  *

  ‘That’s a lovely one, my dear, big and purple. I think it fell from a chestnut tree.’

  Dr Levinson carried a large sack in the woods behind Darroch House. With their mothers, the four children had been assigned to the vital task of collecting as many sacks of last summer’s leaves as possible. This was their third, and Rafael Levinson had decided that an educational dimension might keep them at it before boredom set in.

  ‘What is this one?’ He held up a windblown branch of brittle copper beech. ‘And these are oak leaves. Look what a beautiful shape they are.’

  By lunchtime, when the famished children ran into the kitchen, the Levinsons and their little workers had picked up half a dozen sacks of fallen leaves. After he had set them in the garden store, the doctor thanked me for a delightful task and asked what the leaves were for.

  ‘Disguise, Rafael, disguise.’

  *

  In the years immediately before the war, when Jenny and he had spent more time at Darroch House and regularly met guests off the Arisaig train, Robert had a games room built next to the garden store. There were, after all, plenty of days when the rain sheeted off the Atlantic. He had installed a table-tennis table and a full-size snooker table.

  The great attraction of the latter for Bradley Kaye was the long, bright rectangular light above it. Having covered the green baize surface with a protective cloth and laid wooden boards on top, he began to set up his bomb factory. On the door of the games room, he hung a sign with a drawing of a skull and crossbones at the top, and underneath: Danger. Keep Out. All manner of unlikely items joined the bags of fertilizer, the cartridges, bleach and paraffin.

  ‘Why do you need tennis balls?’ asked Robert MacDonald as he handed over a net bag full of old, bald ones. ‘And a pressure cooker?’

  The American smiled, winked, clicked his tongue twice and shut the door. And then opened it again. ‘Demonstrations later. Not close to the house. Or people.’

  Meanwhile, I found a cupboard full of fishing gear and, with Katie’s help, spooled out a reel of line. Having cut a six-foot length, I found it impossible to break. ‘I saw some fence posts stacked
at the edge of the wood. Do you think you could find a couple of kindling axes?’

  The ditch across the paddock was almost deep enough and I asked two of the Americans working in it to come with me. By the wood store there was a chopping block and, with an axe, I showed them how to get a very sharp point on the end of a post.

  ‘When you finish these, look around in the woods for any straight-ish fallen branches – not too brittle, and about as thick as your forearm. We need as many of these sharp stakes as you can make.’

  *

  When Jenny parked the Humber at the quayside in Arisaig and she and Eileen walked over to MacCaig’s shop, they paused to turn and look over Loch nan Ceall to the white façade of Darroch House. A low winter sun was throwing shadows, but in the clear air it seemed that every detail of the landscape was graphic, in sharp focus.

  ‘Ciamar a tha sibh?’

  Both women jumped. Neither had heard Donald MacCaig steal up behind them to ask how they were. But Eileen amazed him by replying, ‘Tha gu math, tapadh leibh.’ She and Katie had begun to learn Gaelic at evening classes before the war and enough of it had stuck for her to say that she and Jenny were well, thank you.

  MacCaig looked discomfited, as though he had just had his pocket picked. Pointedly, he replied in English.

  Having navigated his considerable girth behind the counter of his shop, with its jangling till, weighing scales and their stack of black weights and a wide chopping board, MacCaig put on his white grocer’s apron, ready to do business. Yes, Mrs MacCaig had indeed been baking. If Mrs MacDonald could say how long they were all staying, perhaps a daily order of bannocks and scones and any other items could be delivered? And how many were they catering for?

  Jenny MacDonald politely ignored this inquisition and the two women set down their wicker shopping baskets on the counter and began working through their list.

  From the back shop, the beaming, rotund Mrs MacCaig appeared, an excellent advertisement for her talents. She carried a wooden baker’s tray piled with good things, some of them still warm from the oven. ‘MacCaig has a flitch of bacon and some salmon he has cured.’ Referring to her husband in the traditional, formal style, she also shot him a withering look. ‘And I’m sure you will not be needing any help to slice them.’

  On the short journey back to Darroch House around the head of Loch nan Ceall, Katie and Jenny passed under the ancient shadows of the oak woodland of the Strath of Arisaig.

  ‘He’s such a busybody, that man,’ said Jenny. ‘I never feel comfortable in his company and I dislike the way he looks you up and down. I feel I’m being sized up, not a thought I enjoy. How Mrs MacCaig has put up with him all these years, I can’t imagine.’

  He did keep decent whisky, though, and they had managed to prise two bottles of Islay malt out of him.

  *

  ‘Hut 21 is empty.’ The camp commandant at Comrie had leapt to his feet when Colonel Stengel barged into his office. ‘We liquidated all the old Jews this morning.’

  A wasted journey, thought Stengel. But then something occurred to him. ‘All of them? You shot all the old Jews?’

  For a second or two, the commandant weighed his options. ‘Ah, no, not all of them,’ he finally replied.

  ‘Now, let me guess,’ said the colonel. ‘What happened to Dr and Mrs Levinson? Are they still here?’

  As the pit of his stomach churned, the commandant could see that nothing good would come of this and so he related the events of January 3rd.

  ‘What do you mean, you do not know where the train went? Did you not ask? Did you not go with them to the station? So far as I understand it, there are only two possible directions, east or west. And you do not know which!’ Stengel opened the door of the office and shouted to the staff sergeant, ‘Bring me a map. Now!’

  *

  ‘The atom bomb was devastating in another sense,’ I said, as we sat down in front of Jenny’s blazing log fire in the sitting room at Darroch House. ‘It not only destroyed London and devastated the south-east, it also left us leaderless. The death of the king and the royal family, the prime minister and the government has hollowed us out. There’s no one in Britain we can turn to.’

  Alan Grant was pouring glasses of Bruichladdich and insisting that the Americans added a little water. ‘And that means the US government holds the key to all of this,’ he said.

  Robert MacDonald picked up the thread of our thinking. ‘If we can convince them that the Germans have no more bombs, then everything changes. And then add to that the possibility that Professor Feldman and his team can supply them the data that will allow a prototype bomb to be produced quickly . . .’

  He was interrupted by a fit of coughing. ‘Wow!’ said Rita Curtis. ‘This stuff is firewater!’ And then she took another sip of the peaty Islay malt. ‘I’d say it’s a hell of a bluff to call,’ she went on, ‘and before we left, or were kidnapped, I heard that President Roosevelt was sick, real sick. He has to use a wheelchair.’

  From a long discussion of options, it became clear that we would need solid documentary evidence, as we could not prove, beyond doubt, that there were no more bombs.

  ‘But the story is compelling,’ said Katie, looking at me. ‘You’ve kept notes in your precious journal that you think I don’t know about. If you could flesh those out, it might be even more compelling, more convincing.’

  Professor Feldman interjected. ‘Yes, forgive me, but I think you need more than that. I propose that I draft a scientific analysis, detailing all that we’ve done since we came to Scotland and giving a detailed estimate of how long it will take to make a viable bomb, with others using the work we have done. I can add to that an account of my continued but fruitless requests to be put in contact with the German scientists who built the first bomb. And there’s also the question of the high volume of heavy water shipments we’ve received from Norway. Before the war, I had some understanding of their output and I think we were receiving all of it. Such a document, signed by all of us, combined with Mr Erskine’s journal would, I think, be persuasive. It might prompt investigation, at least.’

  The western sky sparkled with stars, Sirius shining brightest and the upended Plough climbed above the Morar mountains. Tired of talking, tired of planning, Katie and I went out into the paddock after supper in search of stillness. The tide was high, the waves shushing, lapping on the white sand as we walked slowly along its wrack-strewn fringes. Swaddled in scarves and heavy overcoats, we said nothing to each other, enjoying the silence. But on that starlit night, I felt we had never been closer. Hidden until then by the headland at Morroch, the kindly lights of Arisaig reflected on the water and the beach began to run into rock pools and a scatter of ragged boulders. We stopped, ready to turn back to the house.

  I took off my glove and, gently touching Katie’s cheek, I said, ‘I have never loved you more than I do now.’

  *

  Stengel’s instincts told him they had gone west. Even though the idiot commandant, who would soon be cleaning the Jews’ latrines, could tell him very little, it was clear that Griffith-Smith had somehow extracted his parents-in-law from the camp. But he had a train, and you don’t need a train for three people. There must, thought the colonel, be a link with the disappearance of the scientists. Leaving his men in their vehicles, he walked into the little railway station. The track led east or west. Why would they go back the way they had come? It was much more likely they had gone into the mountains.

  Looking closely at the map spread on the commandant’s desk, Stengel had found himself daunted. It was a vast area of glens, sea lochs, islands, moorland and mountains. They could be anywhere. Or, anywhere that a railway train would take them. Tracing it with his finger, he followed the black line out of Comrie on the map. From the junction at Crianlarich, it led south towards Glasgow and since that was where the Levinsons had come from, he rejected that option. His convoy of three trucks, an armoured car and his staff car would turn north and head for Fort William. It seemed like a hu
b for the West Highlands. He could not follow the railway line across Rannoch Moor or up over the foothills of the Nevis ranges; there was no road, but the map suggested that was desolate country, in any case. Griffith-Smith had his family and twenty Americans to hide, feed and look after. He would need to be near a village or a town.

  6 January 1945

  My concentration was broken by a very faint knocking at the door. I had found some space and peace to fill out the notes in my journal in an upstairs sitting room at Darroch House. Over the last day or so, I had been told a great deal of what had happened elsewhere and to others, things I had not seen for myself, and I wanted to record it all.

  ‘Come in, please come in.’

  A small, mouse-like face appeared round the side of the door. ‘Hi. I’m real sorry to disturb you. My name’s Millie Harbison and I don’t want to speak out of turn.’

  Her words were tumbling out in what was clearly a rehearsed speech. ‘When I listened to all the talk about the US government, I had an idea. It might not work, and I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but my brother, Averill Thomson, is a diplomat who’s currently posted to the US consulate in Edinburgh. At least, I think he is. He was the last time I spoke to him, when we were still in the US. Since we got to St Andrews, we haven’t been allowed to use the phone. So he might have been posted someplace else. I just don’t know. But I still have his private number. But he did say that his calls were listened to. I don’t know. Anyway. There it is. Sorry to disturb you.’

  ‘Please, sit down, Millie – may I call you Millie?’

  *

  ‘Hello. Yes, hello. Is that the Department of Public Safety? Yes. Good. It is Donald MacCaig who is speaking.’

  Using the telephone box outside the railway station rather than the handset in his hallway, where Mrs MacCaig might overhear him, the shopkeeper went on. ‘I represent Siol na h’Alba. In fact I am the ceannard, the president.’