A Possible Life (8 page)

There were too many bodies. The lorries were backed up outside and he could sometimes smell their exhaust over the stench of the ovens. The delays drove the SS men to fury. Two guards took hold of a slow prisoner, held his hands behind his back and thrust his head into the oven. After a few seconds, they pulled him out again, demented and screaming, his head on fire. Geoffrey wondered if they did these things in order to keep their nerve up. It was as though the guards dare not risk lapsing back into the kind of life they must once have known. They needed to set an example to one another. ‘
Schnell!
’ they still shouted. ‘
Schnell!
’ No fire burned hot enough for them.

Geoffrey had a water bottle tied to his waist with string, though feared to drink from it. The intensity of labour was so great that when they stopped for half an hour at midday their places were immediately taken by others on rotation. There were no ablutions, and the men, many of whom had typhus, used the tin dinner plate for two purposes, chucking the waste into the flames as best they could. Those who collapsed or rebelled at what they did were thrown straight into the furnace.

At night, Geoffrey slept in the Special Unit block, outside the main camp, where his apparent composure meant that he was put on suicide prevention duty. The room was smaller than D block, and here the men were tortured not only by thirst and by the guards, but by the memory of what they had seen and done. Few were able to lie down in their wooden bunks to sleep. They had surprised a hunger in themselves for living, had found a will to survive so deep that it had taken them to madness.
Some
sat against the wall holding their heads in their hands, scratching themselves raw. Some rocked back and forth, wearing away the skin on their backs against the cold wall. Some jabbered and screamed, or ran up and down the freezing barrack room; the most agitated were tied up to the ends of the bunks by their friends.

Geoffrey did what he could to calm them, though he lacked the languages needed, and most were in any case beyond words. He stuffed pieces of straw and paper into his ears to cut out the noises of Bedlam and turned to his memories of living. That night, nothing of England would come to him: no river, almshouse or cricket ground. It was these places that had now taken on the vague outlines of something he had dreamed.

Trembath had been right, Geoffrey thought. Better to die as a fighter, whatever reprisals the Germans took. If a hundred innocent men were shot to punish his revolt, it would only hasten what was inevitably coming to them. He wondered if ‘Tiny’ had made any progress with his plans, if he had connected with his doubtful French and schoolboy German to some other prisoners or whether he would make his stand alone. The thought of Trembath grabbing an SS gun and creating havoc even for a few moments was life-sustaining.

In the crematorium, Geoffrey met a Russian called Sergei who could speak a little English. He was a prisoner of war, not Jewish, and assured Geoffrey that all the Russians were determined to escape in order to get back to Moscow and help the Motherland repel the Fascist invader. As a result of two failed escapes, the SS had appointed Search Units from among the prisoners; these enthusiastic men were allowed to range over both camps to look for signs of planned escape. As well as personally searching their comrades and the barracks, they overturned stockpiled building materials, crawled into attic spaces, pipes and ducts – ostensibly to search, in fact to
reconnoitre
. A group of Russians had volunteered for search duty because it gave them so much freedom of movement; they had identified a weakness in the perimeter fencing where the Special Unit went in and out to tend the pyres in the forests.

The signs were discouraging. At intervals along the wire lay what Geoffrey had at first thought were bundles of rags that no one had picked up, but which were in fact the bodies of would-be escapers, shot from the watchtowers and left as a warning. Sergei believed that an escape was nevertheless being planned by a group of Search Unit Russians on the anniversary of the Great October revolution which, for reasons Geoffrey did not probe, fell on 7 November. He had less than a week in which to have himself transferred from the crematorium, though the chances of his being accepted into a Search Unit were remote.

Later that day the lorries from the gas chambers brought a consignment of dead women and children. After a week, Geoffrey had taught himself not to look at any aspect of the people who came in, especially their faces. He was not in any case on duty at the chute when the women came, but was carrying the cut logs in rapid relays to the furnace mouth. It seemed from shouts he heard from fellow-workers that some of the corpses were still living. When the number of people being killed was more than the gas chambers could process, the gassing time was cut to a barely sufficient ten minutes; then some last protective gesture had caused the women to hold the faces of their children tight against them and this perhaps had spared them the full effects of the gas.

Geoffrey latched his eyes on to the wooden logs and redoubled his efforts, beneath the, for once, silent stare of the guards. He had lids of skin that he could bring down over his eyes. He closed them when he could; at other times he fastened his gaze to the backs of his hands – to the veins, the pores – to keep the eyes from straying.

He heard the rumble of the chute and wished he had had lids with which to seal his ears.

He decided he would rather die now than go on. There was an SS man in the crematorium whom he had noticed eyeing him as he worked. He was a slight, feral creature with small black eyes. His name was Muller. An instinct told Geoffrey that the way this man stared at him was personal. At the end of his twelve-hour shift, as he was leaving the crematorium to return to the asylum of the Special Unit barracks, he asked Muller if he might transfer from the crematorium to the detail that worked in the woods outside the fence.

Muller looked him up and down. He seemed almost amused. ‘Are you English?’ he said.

‘Yes. You speak my language?’

‘Yes. I study before the war. Why do you wish to move?’

‘I’m fit. I’m strong, I can do more work outside.’

‘Those prisoners there live a few days only. It is the worst.’

Geoffrey felt Muller’s gaze on him, sliding over his torso.

He said: ‘If it would please you, Lieutenant. I would like to please you.’

The man’s face froze over suddenly. ‘Go, then. You disgust me.’

‘Will you arrange my transfer?’

The fear left Muller’s eyes. Contempt returned. He smiled a little. ‘You want to die? You are a … coward?’

‘You will authorise it?’

‘Go and die.’

Geoffrey was dismissed. He went with a group of twenty prisoners through the wire to a clearing in the woods, where they exchanged their striped uniforms for rubber boots and waterproof overclothes. The job was to clear mass graves where the land had subsided, leaving ponds and pools of such fetor that even the Alsatian dogs would not go near.

They were near the section of the wire that the Russians had chosen for their escape, which was due in thirty-six hours’ time. Knowing that his end was near, Geoffrey hurled himself into the work. He would have to complete only two shifts. He could do it.

‘
Schnell!
’

The dogs for once cowered and whimpered. Geoffrey had an implement like a boat hook that he fished with in the swamp, hauling viscera and limbs out and carrying them to the pyres.

The quantity of ash cleared from the crematoria and dumped among the trees meant that nothing would grow; it looked like the surface of another planet. All the SS wore gas masks. One thrust a bottle at Geoffrey. It was vodka. He drank. The guards lifted their masks for a moment to drink. They passed the vodka round from guard to prisoner, from prisoner to guard.

There was continual screeching from the Germans. More. Faster. Harder. The prisoners were screaming, too, in Polish, Russian, Yiddish. Geoffrey’s throat was raw with retching, raw with screaming. He shouted all the words he knew. Parts of human were dropping on him.

A prisoner turned on his guard, and was shot. Two men threw themselves on the pyre to die. One was hauled off and made to work again. Geoffrey pressed on with his eyes shut. His belly was empty, there was nothing left to retch. He took more vodka, more and more, then set back to work in blindness.

A day, a night in the asylum, a day again, bright sun over the pine forest, meaning thick ground mist tonight, back into the rubber boots, the clothes from the last crew dripping and he is in the woods again. This must be the last he knows of it, so he works in fury. Chloride of lime, meant to quell the stench, runs powerless from spleen and womb. An hour, another hour, a day. Inside the wire there is evening roll call and amid the clamour a column, fifty, sixty men, a Search Unit going out from the camp into the building
site
, their guards shouting. They are searching under planks and peering into pipes, secretly their pockets jammed with rocks and bits of masonry. From the watchtower a complacent guard looks down on them. The Pyre Crew is returning now as the sun sinks behind the woods and the men can barely pull their bodies home.

And the Search Unit is at the gap in the fence. There is a shot, there is always a shot. A body. More commands, a moment of confusion. Search Unit and Pyre Crew are crossing at the fence. The sentry is suddenly nervous in the watchtower and there comes a roar of Russian, fifty men hurling iron and rocks and rushing the wooden tower, which tips over, snapping on its legs, and Geoffrey is turning on his heel, with them now, with the Search Unit, running into the woods, scattering among the pine needles, through the lunar ash, running as though fresh from two weeks’ rest, limbs free; steady, Talbot, pace yourself, leave something for the later stages; at least a minute gone before they hear the siren and the gunfire and the dogs.

In 1946, the autumn term at Crampton Abbey began on 17 September. The day before, Mrs Little knocked on her husband’s study door before entering.

Mr Little’s closest companion, a clumber spaniel called Heep, was asleep in front of the unlit fire, his aroma mingling with that of his master’s Sir Philip Sidney pipe tobacco.

‘We’re at least three boys short,’ said Long John, looking up from where he was making some calculations on a piece of graph paper.

‘Doddington’s not coming back. His mother can’t afford it now his father’s dead. And the price of coal, food, electricity … I shall have to cut the salaries. I wondered if I could sack Garrard as well.’

‘But who’ll look after the games pitches?’

‘We’ve got this new chap starting. Franklin. I could ask him to do some mowing and maintenance as well as taking junior games.’

‘How much do we pay Garrard?’

‘The equivalent of one boy’s fees for a year.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Little, sitting down and absently stroking Heep’s head. ‘Are we in a pickle, dear?’

‘I think so. There seems to be no end of rationing in sight. The ministry says it’ll last for at least five years. And now the parents are worried about what the boys are eating.’

‘Matron wrote off to the ministry and they suggested Radio Malt to build them up a bit.’

‘Could we get rid of some of the maids?’ said Long John.

‘We’re down to five. And we only pay them pin money.’

Mr Little drew in a mouthful of Sir Philip Sidney. ‘I must remember to invite the new superintendent of the asylum over one evening.’ He puffed thoughtfully. ‘I suppose what we really need is some sort of recruitment drive.’

‘You don’t mean advertising?’

‘Good heavens, no. But we need to put the word about. That Crampton Abbey is a first-rate school. Has Baxter come back yet?’

‘Yes, I saw him this afternoon.’

‘I had to cut his salary.’

‘Again, dear?’

‘As a warning. After the maids found all those gin bottles in his room.’

‘He’ll hardly have enough for beer and cigarettes.’

‘Good thing too. Anyway, I’m going out for my evening walk now. Come on, Heep. Come on.’

The spaniel rose stiffly from the hearth rug and followed his master out into the corridor, through the green baize door
and
down the broad oak staircase, past the stone fireplace with the ceremonial sword above, out into the still-warm air of the Nottinghamshire evening. Habit had taught the dog that this unwanted exertion, which might involve a walk downhill to the village, would bring a scrap or treat of some kind in due course.

Long John Little ignored the rose garden with its ornamental arch and the wooded park that lay behind it, turning instead towards the kitchen gardens with their sun-beaten brick walls on which espaliered trees were heavy with fruit. He glanced into the greenhouses, whose open doors gave a gust of tomatoes, while the gravel paths between the cold frames crunched beneath his feet. He calculated that he need serve only five more years before passing on the headmastership to his son, at that time a junior housemaster at a Midlands public school. His pension was not adequate to provide for himself and Mrs Little in retirement, but he hoped the governors might make special provision from one of their contingency funds. Otherwise he would be condemned to an old age in one of the unused wings of the house, whose heating bills he could conceivably repay with a few Latin verse lessons to the scholarship form.

The back gate from the kitchen gardens led into the village churchyard, where Long John walked slowly among the gravestones and the heedless yews. On an impulse, he pushed open the side door of the church and went into the damp-smelling interior. The brass eagle on the lectern loomed wide-eyed and predatory over the pews with their dusty kneelers. The organ needed overhauling, but there was little chance of the village being able to raise the funds over the next few years; the steps up to the pulpit were also a hazard, though anything that might cut short the sermons of the local vicar, Mr Woolridge, was a blessing.

It had always struck Long John Little as curious that empty churches seemed emptier than empty houses. A kitchen or a
sitting
room was still the same with no one in it; but the silent organ, the bright stained-glass windows above the altar with its rather showy little cross, the board by the pulpit announcing the numbers of the unsung hymns, seemed heavy with absence. His footsteps loud on the cracked tiles of the nave, he went and sat down at the end of one of the pews – roughly where an eleven-year-old would sit on Sunday morning, the boys being ranged from back to front in school order, determined by their performance in Latin.