‘I’m not.’
‘You are. You absolutely are because I know…’ he paused looking past her, frowning angrily, imagining something before looking back at her and saying, ‘Yes, I’m quite sure I couldn’t find it in my heart to forgive something like that, not if the tables were turned.’
Poor old Hugh, she couldn’t let him blunder on.
‘But don’t you see? That’s exactly why I forgive you.’
At first, his expression didn’t change but then his mouth stretched into a ludicrous smile that didn’t reach his eyes and he shook his head, as if he was trying to get water out of his ears.
‘Whatever can you mean?’ he said, gently laying her hand down. ‘Don’t mock me, Millie. I’ve bared my soul to you tonight. I’ve not held back a single thing.’
‘I know and it makes you the better person, because I can’t claim the same for myself.’
A wily look came into his eye. He wagged a finger at her and said, ‘You see, you’ve completely lost me now. You’re playing one of those awful riddle games that girls play and us chaps, we’re not very good at them.’
‘I’m not playing games, Hugh. It’s my turn to confess. It’s a secret I’ve kept for years.’ She shrugged, a thought flitting past, ‘Now I come to think of it, you kept your secret for years. If June hadn’t conceived, would you have told me?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Perhaps not but I feel I must tell you. Lukas Schiller and I were lovers.’
‘Who?’
‘The German pilot.’
‘You and he were what?’
She knew from his tone she didn’t need to repeat herself.
‘A German?’ he said, his chin pushing forward, his lip lifting at one side. She nodded. ‘A bloody German? Christ almighty, Millie. Have you lost your mind?’
‘No more than you – a coupe de foudre. Isn’t that what happened to both of us? A bolt of lightning.’ As she said it, she thought, how apt. He fell from the sky and I was struck. He stunned me, filled me with a mad energy. ‘Isn’t that what happened to you? A moment’s insanity?’
‘No.’
‘You planned it?’
‘No. You’re doing it again. You’re playing silly, stupid games.’
He was on his feet, breathing heavily. He walked off, down the corridor to the door before coming back, leaning on the table, his face close to hers.
‘It’s not the same,’ he said.
‘It’s exactly the same,’ but as the words left her lips she thought, no. It isn’t the same. The act, the betrayal – perhaps those are the same. But the love?
1951
Chapter Eighty Four
He pushed on through the panting countryside, his boots white from the chalk of the track. The air was hot and scented with the smell of hay, sweltering under a summer sun. He’d stripped off his jacket a mile back and carried it slung over his shoulder. As he reached the top of the Downs, he felt a light breeze flutter the cotton of his shirt. In the pocket he had her letter.
If the war has taught us anything, then surely it’s forgiveness.
If only he’d known, he wouldn’t have suffered such despair.
I never stopped loving you. I want to be with you.
He would have waited with a glad heart if only he’d known.
When he lifted the letter from the floor, he expected nothing. The envelope was ragged, filthy, covered in graffiti of different hands, different addresses, different postmarks.
That evening, like every other, he felt so weary, so low, he had little interest in where the letter came from. He carried it with him through to the tiny kitchen that looked out across the meadow and down to Dunmanus Bay. He poured himself a tumbler of whiskey and lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs.
Then, picking up the bottle by the neck, he went outside, lowered himself into the battered cane chair and gazed at the blue mountains on the other side of the strip of water. He didn’t think about the letter until the sun sank behind Sheep’s Head and the cry of the gulls stilled for the evening.
When he went back inside, the kitchen was dark and he was unsteady on his feet but the letter glowed where it lay. He clamped his cigarette between his lips, narrowing his eyes against the smoke as it drifted past his face. He peeled the envelope open, tilted the page towards the dimming window and read the first line.
Dear Lukas, I hope this finds you.
The whiskey fumed in his head. He turned the sheet. He put a hand onto the edge of the sink to steady himself.
I’ve never stopped loving you.
He was confounded. He didn’t believe it.
I want to be with you.
He was instantly sober, as if a torrent of iced water had been poured over him. With a shaking hand he lit the Tilly lamp, carried it over to the armchair beside the empty grate and set it down on the table. The letter trembled in his hand as he read:
I’ve spent so many years feeling guilty: guilty that I couldn’t stop my husband from killing himself; guilty that I’d helped an enemy soldier; guilty that I couldn’t stop loving you. But guilt is a pointless emotion. It changes nothing, except the person who carries it. If I can set guilt aside, so can you. There was a war. Terrible things were done. You didn’t do them. Neither did I. We did a wonderful thing: we loved each other.
She’d searched for so long. No one would help her, an English woman looking for a German. She wrote to the British Legion and the Red Cross. She tried Relatives Associations in Canada, discovered he must have been sent back to England before repatriation but the trail went cold.
Then, quite by chance she came across an old friend in the Family Association, someone who’d worked as a Land Girl on her farm at the beginning of the war and this Brigsie Paterson had tracked down a voluntary body in West Germany. They told her Fräulein Marta Goersdorf of Heidelberg had died at the end of the war but they had an old contact address for her nephew. The letter was dated a year ago.
He didn’t write back. He just went. He found new reserves in himself, sobered up, cleaned up and went. He got off the train at Merewick on a hot afternoon in August. He could hear children’s laughter coming from the schoolyard across the road. He wanted to walk, wanted to cover the mile and a half up to Enington Farm so that he could calm himself, prepare himself.
He thought of the months that had passed since she’d written the letter and his senses reared back. Anything could have happened. The letter, burning against his skin in the pocket of his shirt, may have been her last attempt, her last hope. As the months passed, she may have given up, changed her mind.
Then he thought of all the years she’d searched for him and his senses relaxed.
As he walked, other thoughts rose up. She’d chosen Herr Adamson; he was so sure she’d married Herr Adamson. He’d spent so many years imagining them together, building a life, starting a family that he almost resented her calling him to her.
Too much blood under the bridge, she’d written.
He couldn’t sustain the grudge. He didn’t care anymore.
The landscape had changed. Fields he remembered filled with flax now waved with grasses and wild flowers. Trees he remembered were larger, hedges he remembered had gone. When he reached the top of Wigstan Combe, he couldn’t see the roof of the barn – that had gone too – but ahead he saw the clump of trees that rose around Enington Farm.
For years he’d imagined it abandoned, thought she’d be living over at Steadham with Herr Adamson but as he neared, he saw a herd of cows out in the pasture, flicking away the flies with their tails and knew they were hers.
He slowed his pace. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, his mouth and throat dry. When he rounded the corner and stood at the entrance to the yard, he was struck by an emotion so strong, so strange, it felt as if he was in his Messerschmitt again, returning from a sortie, the clouds around him creating valleys and mountains to fly between.
Sometimes the cloudscape was so beautiful in the mo
onlight that he would look for a landing strip, high above the earth and pretend he was coming in to land. Just before his plane sank into the water vapour, he dreamed he could open the cockpit, climb down and walk amongst those mountains in the air, into a separate but parallel world. It was like stepping into the pages of a familiar and much-loved book and here it was again, that same feeling. He couldn’t imagine how the story ended. He was afraid to finish it, to sink down as he sank through the clouds, back into real life, real fear.
He nearly lost his nerve, nearly turned back.
The yard was empty, smaller than he remembered, everything more rounded, better ordered. The chickens were scratching in the dust, a couple of them lay in the sun with their wings spread across the warm earth, and when he walked by, they roused themselves with an irritated clucking and hurried away, shaking their feathers.
The door to the house stood open and as he moved into the cool shadow of the porch, he stopped.
He should have written; he should have let her know he was coming. He was stunned by his recklessness – but no, her words were here, next to his heart.
Terrible things were done. You didn’t do them. Neither did I. We did a wonderful thing: we loved each other.
He heard a noise from inside the house, a clicking across the stone flags. He held his breath and stared down the corridor, his eyes still dazzled by the harsh afternoon light.
Out of the shadows an old dog emerged, grey around his jowls, the lower lids of his eyes loose with age, his nose scarred from years of pushing through hedgerows and brambles. The dog paused, sniffed the air, his cloudy eyes gazing up at him and then, behind his sunken hips, his tail began to wag. He came forward as fast as his legs allowed. Lukas flung his jacket down, dropped onto his knees and took the dog’s head in his hands.
‘Gyp, my old friend,’ he said.
He buried his face in the fur, rocked by an overwhelming grief. He’d wasted so many years. He could never get them back. His eyes felt prickly and hot. He wanted to weep but was afraid that if he submitted to even a single tear, he might unravel completely. The dog gazed back at him with milky eyes, his tail beating a slow and soothing rhythm.
‘Where is she?’ Lukas said. ‘Show me where she is.’
Gyp sauntered out into the sunshine and disappeared around the side of the house, stopping by a gate in a picket fence, his tail wagging slowly from side to side. The garden on the other side was crowded with plants, wigwams of runner beans pushing up between the cabbages and lettuce. A trug lay on the path, filled with vegetables. He saw a flash of red between the towers of sweet peas, a paisley scarf covering the back of her neck, her shoulders brown from the sun.
She looked exactly the same age as when he’d last seen her, as if this world on top of the Downs had held its breath waiting for his return. He lifted the latch of the gate and she turned. The bunch of sweet peas in her hand fluttered to the ground like confetti.
Author’s Note
As an adolescent growing up in rural Herefordshire, I was fascinated by the story of a Luftwaffe pilot, Franz von Werra, the only German POW to escape from British captivity during the early stages of the war. He made several audacious but unsuccessful escapes in England and was on the run for almost a week in the remote countryside of the Lake District. I started to write a story about a young woman finding him in a barn on her farm and helping him but the seventies got in the way and I abandoned it.
The real von Werra was eventually recaptured and deported to Canada where he successfully escaped, making it to neutral America by walking across the ice of the St Lawrence River. By all accounts he was a highly intelligent, charismatic and charming young man, albeit somewhat conceited. He returned to active duty but crashed into the sea during a practice flight. His body was never discovered. He was twenty-seven years old.
I now live in a small Downland village in Oxfordshire. When a friend in the local history society told me that a German fast bomber, a Junker Ju 88, had crashed on the Berkshire Downs above the village in November 1940, that nascent story from my teenage years flooded my imagination again.
This Junker bomber had been sighted over Coventry and eventually shot down by Spitfires, crash-landing at Woodway Farm in what was then Berkshire. Morney Higgs, a local farmer, was spotted in his car driving past the village pub with a shotgun. When other drinkers hailed him and asked where he was going, he told them to hop in; he was off to arrest the crew of the German plane that had come down. The surviving crew of the four-man bomber were found still with the plane (one had died during the fighter attack).
Even today the countryside at the top of the Downs is like another world, remote and inaccessible. When bad weather closes in, the small number of houses up there are completely cut off.
There is no dairy farm up on the Downs above our village but I grew up on the opposite side of the River Wye from a dairy farm in Herefordshire. Early in the morning the cows ambled through the morning mist to the milking sheds. In the daytime they grazed among the buttercups and drank from the river before wandering back to the sheds for the afternoon milking. In high summer, the river levels dropped. Once a cow made it over to our bank and the herdsmen had a devil of a job getting her back home. Two Land Girls worked at Bartonsham Farm during the war, milking by hand and driving a horse and float around the town, making the deliveries.
Although I am fascinated by the past, I’m not a historian. I use research as a trigger for ideas and include a list of the books and people who were invaluable in making this story as plausible as possible. There may be inaccuracies but this is a work of fiction and it came from my imagination. However, some of the incidents and anecdotes in the book are real. My father was a keen amateur pilot as well as a surgeon. When he was ten years old, he adapted his bicycle so that he could steer it with a joystick. As a young man, he adored flying and Lukas’s experience of landing on an airstrip of cloud was my father’s.
Medicine runs in our family and my brother, also a surgeon, was working in casualty many years ago when he experienced a real-life version of Bill Russell’s imaginative approach to keeping the crowd at bay by squirting them with warm blood.
At the beginning of the war, unlimited funds were poured into establishing ‘listening houses’ to enable British Military Intelligence to eavesdrop on the conversations of captured enemy soldiers. Many of the listeners were German exiles, but co-operative prisoners were also used to act as stool pigeons, encouraging fellow prisoners to talk. The equipment used was state of the art; so sensitive that even whispered conversations could be recorded. MI19 planned to combine the information with signals intercepts and air reconnaissance photograph to build up an overall intelligence picture but as the war continued, appalling atrocities started to come to light. When the war ended, the British decided to keep the success of their eavesdropping methods secret in order to continue using them in the Cold War. Instead of presenting the evidence at the war trials, the transcripts remained secret until 1999 when they were finally declassified.
National Power are in the process of dismantling a large coal and gas-fired power station about five miles away from my village. It was built in the sixties but during the war, the site was occupied by Durnell’s Farm, a German working camp. Just like Lukas, the men interned there would have worked on farms around the area. In fact, by October 1946, a quarter of the workforce on the land were POWs. Over the next few years, the 400,000 POWs held in Britain were repatriated. Twenty-five thousand of them chose to stay. For many of these young Germans, their homes were now in the Russian sector; others had no homes or family to return to.
Karl Artur Schaefer, a driver and mechanic in the Panzer Division, married a local girl after the war and settled in our village. After D-Day, he’d managed to get a boat to Guernsey, still under German occupation, but when the war ended, he was captured. The Germans were made to stay on Guernsey to defuse the mines even though there was virtual starvation on the island. Finally he was brought to England as a POW
to work on the farms. He wrote to his family in East Germany to tell them he was alive and well. His mother told him not to come back for the time being because life was pretty bleak under Soviet rule. When the fraternisation ban was lifted, Artur was in our local pub and met his future wife, Maureen who was in the Land Army. Sadly Artur died a few years ago but his wife still lives in the village.
There were many acts of kindness shown on both sides after the war ended: a German POW walking the streets of Uxbridge in 1945, leaving a hand-made toy on each doorstep and silently moving on; English families queueing outside the sentry gates of the camps in the winter of 1946, waiting to collect Germans to share their Christmas dinners with; Helmut Reinhardt mending clocks for the villagers of Atwood; civilians ignoring the fraternisation ban and giving prisoners sweets and cigarettes, as well as food that was still on ration.
No peace treaty was ever signed at the end of the Second World War but our two countries found it anyway. These kindnesses helped to change opinions on both sides, allowing a lasting peace to be forged after many years of darkness.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the people who helped to bring this book to a wider public. Early readers include my daughter, Katie-Jane Whitlock who monitored the first draft and guided me towards greater heights of loss and romance; beta readers Jane Gibson, Lizzy Granger and Leila Nightingale who ploughed through an earlier and more ponderous version; my Oxford Brookes alumni, in particular fellow writers Mandy Robotham and Izzy Brown as well as Amanda Edwards-Day and Rose Marsh Stevens and, of course, my fantastic tutor, James Hawes. A special thanks to Ben Fergusson who checked my German references and visually annotated the final draft with the most entertaining proofing marks I’ve ever seen. And to my orthopaedic surgeon brother Peter Thomas, who gave me invaluable advice about relocating a dislocated shoulder as well as the story of the squirting artery.
A Dangerous Act of Kindness Page 38