‘In Nuremberg.’
‘Yes. There I see the young men who wear the black collar patches of the SS and they are not the same as us – they are bullies. Then comes Reichskristallnacht. The action of one crazy Pole should not reap such a horrible vengeance but it gives the Stormtroopers the excuse.’
Lukas heard the air raid sirens starting up again across the city. The captain got to his feet, went over to the door and turned off the light, plunging the room into darkness. Lukas heard him crossing in front of him, then the clatter of wooden rings on the curtain pole.
He’d drawn the curtains back and Lukas could see the searchlights arcing across the low cloud base, the silhouette of the captain standing in front of the window, his hands folded behind his back, looking out over the city.
‘Looks like your chaps are going to give us another bloody good show tonight,’ he said.
Out in the park anti-aircraft guns began to fire, huge gouts of flame lighting up the trees for a split second. The noise was deafening, rattling the windows in their frames. The sound abated momentarily and Lukas could hear the drone of the bombers in the distance, the crump of detonations before the guns began to fire again. The captain drew the curtain closed.
‘Oh dear,’ he shouted through the darkness over the din, ‘I think your colleagues are forcing an end to our fascinating discussion.’
Light flooded across the floor behind Lukas where the captain had opened the door into the corridor. He heard the heavy boots of the guard approach and felt a hand on his elbow, leading him towards the door. The captain was waiting for him in the corridor and shook him warmly by the hand.
‘Thank you, Oberleutnant Schiller,’ he shouted, ‘we will not be meeting again. I hope you have a comfortable night.’
Lukas was taken along corridors and up and down staircases. The din from the anti-aircraft guns was so loud, Lukas lost all sense of direction or distance but he knew he wasn’t returning to his wrecked room. Eventually he was taken up a final set of stairs and into a small attic room furnished with a bed and a chair.
Without a word the guard locked the door and Lukas was left for another night, listening to the heavy bombs dropping all around. The building rattled and shuddered as the shock waves swept the city but he felt a strange disconnection from the chaos, from the war, from his past, as if those few days at Enington Farm were the only life he’d ever lived.
Chapter Thirty Seven
Brigsie had a miserable Christmas with her mother in Swindon. She missed Robbie and she missed the countryside but the real reason for her distress was the three buttons wrapped in a twist of brown paper at the bottom of her gas mask box.
Ever since that dreadful morning in the kitchen at Enington, she’d been in a lather of anxiety. One moment she resolved to throw the blasted things away and forget she ever suspected her friend; the next she was overwhelmed with guilt that she was putting her friendship above her duty to her country.
When she read the reports of the Second Great Fire of London in the papers a few days after Christmas, she was so moved by the bravery of the firefighters who battled the inferno, she knew she had no choice. She made her excuses to her mother and took the train back to Shawstoke even though she was meant to be on leave until after the New Year.
When she reached the churchyard, she got off her bike and pushed it up the path, the click of the sprockets sharp in the cold air. She leant her bike against a gravestone and walked into the porch and slumped down on the wooden seat.
She took the notebook and pencil out of her gas mask box, licked the stub and wrote, ‘Mrs Sanger at Enington Farm gave sanctuary to the German pilot who crashed on the Downs in December 1940. Enclosed, uniform buttons found in ash from range.’
She read it through, her eyes moving back to the beginning, lingering on the name.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bring herself to name her friend. In a panic, she tore up the note and put it in her mouth, chewing it, wishing she could produce more saliva. The paper tasted bitter and her mouth was as dry as peanut shells. Finally she managed to mash it up until it was soft enough to swallow.
Must get the next one right.
‘German from Norrington crash bailed out over Sheppington Downs. Hid at Enington Farm. Uniform probably burned. Buttons found in ash outside farmhouse. No further sightings.’
That was better. She hadn’t mentioned Millie by name and although she knew she was only fooling herself, it didn’t feel so cold a betrayal.
With trembling hands, she drew the buttons from her pocket and folded them into the note. Checking that she still had the graveyard to herself, she lifted the tile and tucked the letter into the cavity underneath before reseating it. She pulled out a handful of last year’s leaves from beneath the bench, scattering them over the tiles, then she went outside, picked up her bike and walked slowly back up the path towards the gate.
One more check across the landscape, one more glance behind her, and she drew a cross in chalk on the back of the headstone nearest the gate. Then she swung herself into the saddle and cycled slowly across the Downs and on to Shawstoke.
‘Is that you?’ her landlady called out from the kitchen as Brigsie let herself into her digs in Station Road.
‘Yes, Mrs Preece.’
The tiny woman popped her head round the door.
‘You all right, lovey? You don’t look too clever.’
‘Just a bit tired,’ Brigsie said.
‘Did you want a sandwich or something? Tea won’t be for a fair few hours yet.’
‘That’s all right. I’m going up for a lie-down.’
The room was piercingly cold. Brigsie sat at the little dressing table by the window and stared out across the roofs of the terraced houses, shining grey under a damp sky. She heard the comforting puff of a train approaching the station, watched the steam marking its progress on the other side of the houses before sinking back down across the town.
She felt sick with shame and fear. She knew she’d done the right thing. Why, then, did she feel so utterly wretched? Why couldn’t she feel angry, furious with Millie for betraying her country?
Then a completely new thought struck her, one that astonishingly hadn’t occurred to her before.
Had Millie been compliant? Or had she, horror upon horror, been forced against her will to give him shelter?
Bloody hell! Supposing he’d raped her; those butcher birds of Europe always raped women. They were animals; ruthless killers.
She had to go back, had to get to the dead letter drop before the runner. She’d made a terrible assumption. The burnt buttons weren’t enough evidence to consign Millie to a fate worse than widowhood, worse than rape. She may even be responsible for her hanging. It was too awful.
‘I’m going out again,’ she called as she hurried past the kitchen.
She heard Mrs Preece call back as the front door slammed but she was on her bike, pushing down on the pedals with all her might, heading back across town.
The journey usually took less than hour. Surely the runner wouldn’t collect the note before dark.
She sped through the villages at breakneck speed, standing up on the pedals, the bike rocking back and forth with each pump. The roads were mostly flat and she reached Merewick in less than half an hour. She swung the bike into Sheppington Way and as she hit the incline, her legs felt impossibly sluggish. She dropped down over the handlebars, tucking her elbows into her side to reduce the wind resistance.
As the incline steepened, the front wheel began to wobble and she fought to keep her balance until she was forced to climb off and push. Her legs felt like jelly. She leant on the handlebars for support, her chest heaving from the climb. She stole past the track to Enington Farm, frantically looking this way and that, terrified that someone she knew would spot her.
She reached the top of the plateau where the road levelled off and climbed into the saddle. She would make good progress now. The hiss of the tyres bounced back from the high hedges
either side of the road and after a few minutes, she saw the top of the squat flint tower rise above a dip in the land.
She was nearly there. She felt the burden of her guilt lifting even as she realised she was exchanging one disgrace for another. She had to admit that betrayal of her country was easier to bear than the betrayal of another woman.
She slammed on her brakes, the back wheel skidding round on some loose gravel. Between the stunted thorn trees along the low wall of the churchyard, she could see a figure, bent and working at a task. It was Mr Street, the sexton.
She stepped off her bike and hurried it under the shelter of the hedge.
What was she going to do? It was impossible to slip into the churchyard unseen and what earthly reason would she have for visiting the church in the middle of the week? Think woman.
Visiting a grave? Hardly. Mr Street knew who was buried where; he’d buried most of them himself and knew that none of her family was laid to rest here.
Could she pretend she was checking the times of the services? Why would she?
There was nothing else for it – she was going to have to find somewhere to hide out and wait until he left. She peered round the hedge, trying to work out what he was doing. He was digging a grave. It was going to be a long wait.
She pulled her bike deeper into the hedgerow, broke off some branches to screen it from the road and settled down to wait. She was sheltered from the wind but she was clammy from the exertion of the ride and shivery with anxiety.
She watched the heavy clouds passing overhead, heard the plaintiff cry of the lapwings and was washed by waves of utter loneliness. It dawned on her that this was how it was going to be, not a few days of battling with her conscience but months, if not years, of worry that she’d done the wrong thing. She would never have the salve of talking it through, of hearing a friend say, ‘What else could you have done in the circumstances?’ It would follow her like a shadow for the rest of her life, the knowledge that when duty to her country called, she closed her ears and slunk away.
She heard the rasp of a metal hinge and peering through the thicket, saw Mr Street loading his tools onto his bike cart and slowly pedalling towards the road. She watched him pass yards away from where she hid, then she scrambled out of the hedge, her limbs stiff and cold, and made her way wearily up the track to the churchyard.
When she passed through the gate, she knew something was out of kilter. The chalk mark had gone.
The mess of flint and clay around the fresh grave made her shudder, the red earth livid and scattered across the grass as if a creature had been torn limb from limb. She pressed on to the porch and lifted the tile.
The cavity was empty. She was too late.
1941
Chapter Thirty Eight
An unpleasant surprise awaited Constable Hanratty when he returned to duty in the New Year.
‘Shawstoke? I don’t want to be transferred to Shawstoke. I’m better than that. It’s a bloody rural nick.’
‘It’s out of my hands, Bert,’ Sergeant Bennett said.
‘What am I meant to do for the rest of the war? Round up sheep?’
The sergeant leant his elbows on the desk and said quietly,
‘You’ve been warned enough times, Bert. You’re a bright bloke, but that temper of yours… We’ve been happy to cut you some slack, give you the benefit and all that. But top brass aren’t so understanding.’
Bert Hanratty stared back at his desk sergeant and slowly the truth dawned on him.
‘Christ on a bicycle! Is this something to do with that ruddy Kraut?’
‘Of course it’s to do with the ruddy Kraut. An officer from the RAF comes to collect an important prisoner and what does he find? You beating seven bells of hell out of him in a locked cell.’
‘You weren’t at Dunkirk,’ Bert hissed through his teeth. ‘If you’d seen what I saw at Dunkirk, you’d have been in there with me.’
‘We can’t let ourselves come down to their level, Bert.’
Bert knew that however low he stooped, he could never come down to their level.
He was on a hospital ship when it was hit. Despite his shattered leg, he fought his way up through the stinking fuel and made it to the surface. There was a nurse beside him in the water, her white apron floating around her, translucent as a jellyfish.
As the ship floundered, the red cross on the white funnel shone like a beacon through the smoke and fumes but still they came. Those Nazi planes machine gunned them in the water as they swam for a nearby boat. The trail of bullets missed him, hit her, turned that lovely face into bloody porridge that spread like vomit across the surface of the ocean as she sank.
One of the small boats hauled him out, a fishing trawler from Ramsgate.
The leg never properly healed. There was an infection deep in the bone; every now and then a sinus opened up and it drained. Foul thing but nothing compared to the deep hatred festering inside him. He’d like to round up every single one of them and see them rot in hell.
* * *
‘Those bastards,’ Hugh said, slamming a newspaper onto the kitchen table.
‘Bloody hell, Hugh!’ Millie said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘Didn’t mean to make you jump – but it makes me seethe reading that.’
The front page was filled with an image of St Paul’s Cathedral rising above clouds of smoke and bombed-out buildings, lit by the fires raging around it. She didn’t want to know what the Germans were doing because it only added to her intolerable sense of guilt. Left in peace she could think about Lukas as if he were any other man, but Hugh kept jerking her back, on and on about the war.
‘More of London’s burned over the last few days than during the Great Fire,’ Hugh said. ‘They leave off over Christmas, then begin again on a Sunday night. Apparently most of the City was shut up for the holidays, whole offices locked, no caretakers to raise the alarm. They dropped ten thousand incendiary bombs in three hours…’ He stabbed his finger onto the paper, snatched it up again and stared at the photograph.
‘It says here…’ – he twisted the paper towards her and pointed at the paragraphs – ‘that the Thames was at its lowest, the fire services were completely overwhelmed and then, when the City was lit up like day, over come the bombers to dump tens of thousands of tons of high explosives on the city.’
He flung the paper down in disgust and paced around with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his trousers.
‘What kind of people are they?’
He looked at Millie, his expression challenging, as if he thought she knew the answer.
She felt overwhelmed with fatigue. There was no safe response.
‘I don’t know, Hugh. I don’t know what makes men fight.’
‘This isn’t men fighting each other. This is a nation prepared to bomb and terrorise and slaughter thousands of innocent people to bring this country to its knees. Well, they’ve got us all wrong. We may not be able to understand how their minds work but they sure as hell don’t understand how ours do – this…’ – he pointed at the paper – ‘will stiffen our resolve. Hitler’s crazier than we thought if he imagines this’ll bring the British to their knees.’
It seemed so silly, all this huffing and puffing when he was nowhere near the fighting, not like Lukas. Lukas had seen horrors, terrible things happening to his friends – but then an unpleasant thought wormed its way into her head. When Lukas guarded the waves of bombers over London, did he look down on the city and imagine people like the Farrows running down burning streets, children howling with terror, brick walls folding into the road behind them?
‘Didn’t we bomb Berlin first?’ As she said it, she knew she’d made a mistake.
Hugh stopped pacing and turned to face her.
‘What?’
‘I thought we bombed Berlin back in the summer.’
‘And that justifies this?’ He threw his hands up into the air in exasperation. ‘You’re wrong anyway – Hitler bombed London
first and that’s why Churchill sent bombers over to Berlin.’
God, Millie thought, what does it matter?
‘How else was he to show that attacks on civilians won’t be tolerated?’ Hugh said. ‘But we did it right – they had plenty of warning. They didn’t suffer casualties on the same scale as us. Hitler has promised to raze our cities to the ground. That’s not war, that’s murder.’
‘I suppose it is,’ she said, but she didn’t believe it. War itself was the demon.
‘It’s not soldiers fighting soldiers any more,’ he went on, ‘it’s a different war, a cowardly war. We don’t want German jackboots marching into London the way they marched into Paris. This country would be a pretty dreadful place to live in if the Nazis were in charge.’
She wished he’d stop.
‘Oh, Hugh, please – you know I don’t understand these things.’
‘I’ll leave this for you to read then.’
An uncomfortable silence descended on the room. Eventually Hugh cleared his throat and said, ‘Anyway, I didn’t come over to have a row with you.’ She looked up at him and he gave her a cautious smile. ‘Come on Mills, we’ve always enjoyed a bit of argy-bargy, haven’t we? You used to give me and Jack ruddy hell if you didn’t agree with us.’
‘Perhaps.’ She looked back down at the ground.
‘Oh, come on – please. Since Christmas I thought you were feeling better, I thought I could push you around a bit,’ he stooped slightly to look in under her bent head.
‘Maybe I’m not as resilient as I used to be.’
‘Course you are. We’ve always enjoyed a good argument,’ he said, giving her a playful dig in the ribs.
‘Stop it, Hugh.’ She smiled wearily at him. ‘So, if you didn’t come over to squabble, what did you come over for?’
‘I came over to see if you needed any help getting things ready. I’m driving down to Shawstoke round about four to wait for the train.’
A Dangerous Act of Kindness Page 17