A Possible Life (6 page)

They were in marshy land with pine forests all round them; in the distance he could make out mountains, or their foothills. The camp itself had obviously been built for some other purpose before the war. The watchtowers were set into the perimeter fence at intervals of about a hundred yards and did not look particularly tall or robust; there was a second barrier of rolled
barbed
wire, while the main fence, to judge from the regularly spaced junction boxes, was electrified. Geoffrey walked next to Trembath through the gate of the camp and down a metalled road for about twenty minutes before the SS guards ordered them to stop at a building site. They were given shovels and told to start working; their job was to dig a drainage channel along the edge of the field.

Geoffrey could understand nothing of what the other prisoners, who were either Russian or Polish, were saying to one another. He felt as though he had become lost in someone else’s war – some Transylvanian or Slavic nightmare that had nothing to do with Mr Green or the Musketeers. Who were all these East Europeans with their terrible histories, pine forests and slaughters? What had they to do with democracy and the RAF?

‘These men look broken,’ Trembath said from the corner of his mouth, working next to Geoffrey, glancing at his starved fellow prisoners. ‘I think we need to set an example.’

‘Not yet,’ said Geoffrey. ‘We need to know more before we start planning an escape, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘It’s our duty,’ said Trembath.

Geoffrey stood up to stretch his back from an hour of digging and felt a sudden, excruciating pain in his side. An SS man with a whip stood behind him. The Pole to Geoffrey’s right made a downward gesture with his arm: stay bent over, don’t stand up. Along the line, Geoffrey saw an old Slav do what he had done – stand and stretch. An SS man drove a rifle butt into his face; when the man next to him went to help, they shot him through the knee. Another German officer, drawn by the sound, walked over to see what had happened. He took out his pistol and, to the amusement of his fellow guards, shot the man through the other knee as well. The prisoners bent down to the ditch and did not raise their heads.

They worked for twelve hours digging with a half-hour break
in
the middle of the day, when a motor lorry brought water, a piece of bread and more soup. The site itself, perhaps twenty acres in extent, had many completed buildings, paths and roadways; it was surrounded by further wire through which Geoffrey could see what looked like bonfires in clearings among the trees, attended by further prisoners in striped uniform and overseen by SS men with guns and dogs. Columns of smoke with an unfamiliar smell emanated from the pyres.

Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted, Geoffrey remembered from his course at Colchester. He would lie low and observe; and in planning his escape, there was no immediate hurry: the only sense of urgency seemed to come from the chance of malnutrition. It seemed that most of the prisoners in the camp were starving; they were being worked to death. He and Trembath needed to be on a train to the West to rejoin the war effort before they were reduced to the skeletal condition of the others.

There was a further roll call at the end of the day, followed by a watery soup of swede or turnip in the bunkhouse. For the hours of darkness they were left alone by the Germans with only the Polish dormitory prefect, or ‘DP’ as Trembath called him, telling them what to do. The ablutions room had a stone floor, a row of basins and yards of overhead pipework for showers. What it lacked was water. The lavatories were overflowing; a kind of pit had been excavated behind them, though many prisoners were too enfeebled to make the journey.

In the middle of the third night, there was a commotion as a group of six SS men came into the room for what they called a ‘fitness test’. The prisoners were lined up naked and shivering while the Germans walked between the ranks. Those incapable of standing were hauled out by the DP and two other trusted prisoners. From outside, a few moments later, came the sound of gunshots; but it seemed a further cull was needed.

Geoffrey puffed out his chest and stood tall, though he was confident that even after the meagre food of occupied France he was in better condition than most. The concrete floor was cold on his bare feet. A further twenty men were taken out; others were pointed back to the bunks; but a line of fifty naked, shivering men remained. There was a laughing confabulation among the SS men, after which one with a long whip flicked it at the first naked prisoner. It grazed his side, leaving a weal below the ribs. The plaited leather was about six feet long with a metal-weighted tip; it took considerable judgement and wrist action to land the snap exactly – and this was their sport. When they had tired of legs and torso, their gaze turned to the men’s genitals, a difficult target, but one that would cause the most pain. There was no gambling or sense of competition; the inflicting of agony was amusement enough. The guards were allowed three turns each before passing the whip on. Geoffrey turned his eyes to the ceiling where a row of dim electric bulbs was strung, wondering whether it was better to be prepared for the bite of the whip or to be taken by surprise. A man three along from him fell howling and shrieking to the ground while the guards laughed. Geoffrey, when his turn came, escaped with no more than a flick across the upper thigh, shortly after which the guards tired of the game and went to their own beds.

That night, lying close between Trembath and the Pole, Geoffrey thought how he might take his mind off where he was – off the pain in his thigh, the hunger in his belly – and open the gateway to sleep. He pushed his mind as far as he could from his surroundings. There was a particular cricket ground that had meant a great deal to him when he was growing up. It had a cedar tree in one corner, near the pavilion, a hedge that ran along the road and could be cleared with a mighty heave over midwicket, a bowling green at one end and cow pastures at the other. It was, for a club ground, remarkably flat and true; it was a place to score hundreds, though
it
never played quite as easily as might be expected, and you had to work for your runs. Now he imagined himself going out to bat on a bright Saturday morning in July, with perhaps a hundred people watching from deckchairs and benches at the side of the ground. There would be picnics on rugs laid out on the grass; boys practising their own games with smaller bats and balls; women in floral cotton print dresses; but above all there would be the concentration of the players in the middle – the intensity of struggle that was never sensed from the boundary.

He liked games with a morning start so he could make his mark at the crease with a stud from his boot in the brightest possible light. He talked to himself all the time he was facing, his lips moving, as he urged himself to watch the ball. That was all his self-instruction: watch it, fasten it to your eye like a fish on a hook. Once, against a slow left-armer, he had gone down the wicket, and as he swung through the ball, dispatching it high over long on for six, he swore he had seen at the moment of impact the slight mark made by the risen seam as its tough stitching met the soft face of the willow.

And to go into lunch undefeated on 48 or 55, to the congratulations of his teammates and the shy smiles of sisters and mothers and girlfriends; to sit at the long trestle and attack his plate of ham and tongue salad, biscuits and cheese, but not eating too much and drinking only a half-pint of beer from the barrel knowing that in the afternoon heat much more endeavour would be required of him because he so passionately wanted his side to win. Outside the pavilion he sucked on a cigarette and gazed up at the sky to re-accustom his eyes to the light as the umpires walked out again to the middle. He would turn to his partner. ‘All right? Shall we?’

After they had been there a week, the Pole who shared their bunk died from typhus, and this gave them more space. They slept head to toe, and Geoffrey began, in a way he found
ridiculous
, to see the few square inches of space about his head as his own territory, and to resent any intrusion from Trembath’s large feet. Once he concealed a rare piece of sausage that had come with breakfast in a small crack in the wood to give himself something to look forward to when the day was through. All afternoon he thought about it. Saving the ‘unexpired portion’ of the day’s ration was the military term by which he dignified his action; in fact, his hoarding reminded him of his mother’s dachshunds, who would take any prized bit of leftover from the human lunch that had been thrown in their dog bowl and carry it off to their baskets.

Before adopting their sleeping positions, he and Trembath would whisper plans to one another. There were tens of thousands of prisoners and only a few hundred guards. Among the prisoners there were many women, living in separate blocks, who might not contribute to a fight, though some looked desperate enough; many of the men were too enfeebled by sickness and starvation to be of use. However, there were still able-bodied men – many of the Russian prisoners of war, for instance – and there were skilled tradesmen: electricians who could help neutralise the fence, carpenters, blacksmiths and others who might help to arm them. It would be possible to overwhelm their tormentors by weight of numbers. They would at first take casualties from machine-gun and rifle fire, but were easily numerous enough to push on, capture the SS firearms, turn them on their owners, tear down the watchtowers, cut the wire and go free.

Trembath was becoming impatient. ‘Listen, Talbot,’ he said, ‘it’s important that we don’t let ourselves descend to the level of some of these people. They’ve lost their dignity.’

‘They’re refugees,’ said Geoffrey. ‘They’ve lost their family, their homes, their money – their children in some cases, I think. But for us … It was certainly a bit rough in occupied France, but nothing like—’

‘That’s exactly it. They’re civilians. We’re soldiers.’

‘Irregulars. That’s why we’re here and not in a proper PoW camp. Back in London once I heard that the girl who landed with me on my first drop by Lysander – she got captured and taken to some women’s camp called Ravensbrück. They heard nothing more. The Red Cross doesn’t function there.’

‘Are you saying they killed her?’

‘I think so.’

That night at roll call, the SS officer asked if anyone spoke French, and, without thinking, Geoffrey raised his arm. No sooner had he stepped forward and been pushed at rifle point towards the administrative buildings near the camp entrance than he saw that he had made a mistake. What had he been thinking? A better job, some interpreter’s office work, an end to ditch-digging and beating … The collaborator’s comfort? There was no such thing as ‘better’ in this place; there were only faster or slower roads to the same end. The smile on the face of the SS guard who accompanied him to the office was that of a man who knows but will not tell.

Geoffrey was given a new ‘Special Unit’ uniform with thicker stripes and told to wait. It was past midnight when they heard the distant sound of a train approaching through the pine forest. All trains sound the same in the night, thought Geoffrey: forlorn – and for a moment, a line from a Charles Trenet song sounded in his head. The rails rattled as the clanking wagons came closer; there was the outline of smoke and steam against the moonlit clouds, then the shape of the locomotive nosing through the night, slowing as it neared the terminal point, until the train of twenty wagons came juddering to a halt beside the platform and the engine let out a final gasp of steam. For a moment in the night all was silent.

Then the sides of the cattle trucks were unlocked and wrenched to one side, squealing on their metal runners, by willing striped
prisoners
of the Special Unit of which Geoffrey was now part. Inside there were no cattle or horses, but hundreds of people – children, women, men, old, young, jumping or falling down on to the platform, eager to leave behind the excrement and the dead bodies in the trucks. With an Alsatian dog snarling at his heels, Geoffrey urged and encouraged the people to dismount. They were French. ‘
Descendez. Vite. Messieursdames! Vite, s’il vous plaît
.’ How pathetic it was, he thought, that he could only dignify his part in what was happening by saying ‘please’. The French so loved their please and thank you and monsieur, madame; his mother and her Limoges family would be proud of him.

The members of the Special Unit pushed the people into lines while the SS officers screamed at them to hurry. ‘
Les hommes à droite. Les femmes et les enfants à gauche
,’ Geoffrey called out, translating the German order. The prisoners’ suitcases, bags and in some cases mere bundles of belongings were ripped from their hands and taken to large piles at the end of the platform, where other prisoners, many of them women, emerged from the darkness and took them swiftly back inside a building, like mice taking cheese through a hole in the wainscot. The new arrivals were haggard and startled, yet many still looked hopeful; there were men in good coats with yellow stars stitched to the lapels, women with neat dresses and hair they had managed to keep tidy through the journey from the west. Some of them held the hands of children purposefully to them; others were already like beggars, vagrants, living on the last scraps of energy; they looked to Geoffrey as though they would welcome any development that would let them rest. The majority, though, were stoical; they seemed hopeful, despite the dogs, the whips and the screaming, that some natural justice would prevail; Geoffrey saw them looking towards their future home, its strong brick buildings, its orderly air, with something like optimism.

The mothers and children came forward first. They were
pushed
and piled on to the backs of lorries and driven off to one side of the main gate. The other women were divided, so far as Geoffrey could make out, by age and physical attributes. Those who seemed fittest for work were herded along the same route as he and Trembath had been, presumably to shaving and disinfecting; the older and frailer were loaded on to more motor transports. Some of the Special Unit were now pulling corpses from the train, while others began to hose out the reeking wagons. Geoffrey ground his teeth and tried not to breathe too hard.