Avalanche of Daisies (50 page)

The obscene pile of corpses was cleared and buried but there were still other burials every day for, as the MO had predicted, most of the prisoners had gone too
far to be saved. The place still stunk but the survivors were fed, the sick made marginal improvements, the huts were gradually cleaned, new latrines dug, new medicines delivered, and they could all see that order was gradually being restored.

Routines were a necessary comfort. Steve got into the habit of visiting Hannah twice a day. Her good sense and kindness sustained him and it encouraged him to watch her gradually getting better.

Sometimes she was too tired to say much and then he simply sat beside her and told her the latest news of the war. But sometimes she spoke at length about her family and friends and the school she'd taught in and what a reward it was to see children learn. He told her he'd gone straight from school to the army.

‘So young,' she sighed. ‘Your life you have before you.'

But he couldn't think about the future. The present was too pressing. ‘I still can't understand how this could have happened,' he said. ‘I see so many things, every day, awful, sad things, and they don't make sense to me.'

‘You should write them down,' she advised. ‘Writing makes clear.'

So he scrounged a notebook from one of the orderlies and began to jot things down – the number of people buried, the grief of the rabbi reciting the Kaddish at the graveside, the German proverb ‘one louse, one death', the discovery that there was no grass growing in the camp because the prisoners had eaten it. But the thing he returned to over and over again was Hannah's refusal to seek revenge.

‘
I cannot understand her,'
he wrote. ‘
If it had been me I would have been screaming for revenge. That vile commandant should be shot and so should Irma Grese. Evil should be punished. I used to think we were born good but the longer I stay in this camp the more I doubt it. Tomorrow I shall ask Hannah what she thinks.'

But the next morning, when he strolled across to her hut, he found another patient lying in her bunk. He was quite annoyed to find she'd been moved and went off at once to look for a medical orderly.

There was one down at the far end of the hut, washing a very old lady and when he saw who was standing before him, he looked embarrassed and ducked his head.

‘Ah yes,' he said. ‘Hannah. Look I'm ever so sorry about this. She died in the night.'

Died? She couldn't have. She was getting better.

‘She had TB,' the orderly explained. ‘It was a haemorrhage. There was nothing we could do.'

Grief rose in Steve's throat like a tidal wave. He had to get out. Now. Anywhere. Or he'd be crying in front of this man, weeping in front of all these people. He ran from the hut, blindly, his boots kicking the supports, hurled himself into the sunshine, ran and ran, away – he didn't care where – until he reached the wire and had to stop because there was nowhere else to go. By then he was crying aloud, weeping for all the deaths he'd seen and endured and never mourned – for Taffy gunned down on that first day and for all the other mates he'd lost, good men, cut to pieces and gone for ever – for the tankies burnt to cinders – for Betty and all the others in that rocket – for Hannah who forgave her enemies and was dead because of them – hot, terrible tears that made him groan with the anguish of too much grief held in check for far, far too long. He was out of control but too wild with weeping to care. When Dusty came wandering over to see what was going on, he was beyond speech. But his old mate was a sensible soul, despite his rough ways, and had seen enough grief in the long campaign to know when to make himself scarce. He simply patted his oppo on the shoulder and left him to get on with it.

The afternoon wore away, the shadows lengthened, and at last the weeping was done. He dried his face on
his sleeve, lit himself a cigarette and, after the first few comforting drags, stood up. He felt totally exhausted.

Dusty was walking across the compound towards him and there was a redcap with him.

‘We got a message,' Dusty said, but checked before he passed it on. ‘You all right?'

‘Yes,' Steve said wearily, and asked, without much interest, ‘What is it?'

‘You're in luck,' the redcap said. ‘You're getting out of here. Your lot are at Fallingsbostel. We've just got through to them. There's transport coming over for you at 09.00 hours tomorrow.'

‘Back to the real world,' Dusty said, when the MP had marched away again. ‘An' about time too. My ol' lady'll be wondering where I've got to. I ain't sent her a letter for three weeks.'

Nor have I, Steve thought. I haven't written to anyone. But he was too numb with grief to be troubled by conscience about it. I'll write and explain when we're back with the division, he thought. She'll understand.

‘I shall be glad to get shot of this place,' Dusty said.

Steve looked round at the awful compound, at the mound where so many pitiful corpses were buried, at the hut where Hannah had died. ‘I don't think I shall ever get shot of it,' he said. ‘It'll be with me till the day I die.'

The last three weeks had been the longest and most anxious that Barbara had ever known. As the days passed and the letter she worried for didn't arrive, she withdrew deeper and deeper into herself. She went to work, as usual, and did her best to be cheerful to her passengers; she took her share of the housework; and true to her vow, she was polite to her in-laws and answered her mother's letters religiously. But her heart was a lead weight and there was little joy in her world.

After the first shock of the official notification had passed, Bob endured the long wait in his usual patient way but that was because he was afraid that a second letter would tell them the news they didn't want to hear and he preferred to go on in ignorance for as long as he could. At least that left him with a little hope to cling to.

Heather had found a kind of hope too, but hers was superstitious and private. It would be his twenty-first birthday soon. If he was alive – and he had to be alive, she simply wouldn't accept the possibility that he could be dead – then
that
would be the day he'd write to her. The letter would come that morning. ‘
Dear Mum, Just to say I'm thinking of you
…' the way he'd written last year when he was on Salisbury plain. The belief kept her going. Even if he'd received that last awful letter of hers – and oh she
did
wish she hadn't sent it – he would write to her on his birthday. He was bound to. But the hope was too flimsy to prevent her from being miserably jealous of any letter that was sent to Barbara.

‘Two more again this morning,' she said to Bob, when the third pair arrived. ‘Nothing from the War
Ministry and she gets letters from everywhere else, every damned day.'

‘Every other day,' Bob corrected mildly, as he put on his cap.

‘Nothing from the War Ministry,' Heather went on. ‘Every day that damned postwoman comes up that damned path an' every day I think maybe this is it, maybe they've found him.' Her eyes were glistening with tears in her fierce, taut face.

He put an arm round her shoulders. ‘I know.'

She was thinking of her Dear John letter again, and that made her too irritable to respond. ‘No you don't. Nobody knows. Day after day. It's not right. Why should she have letters and we don't?'

‘They're from her mother and her aunt,' he said. ‘You don't begrudge her
that
surely. A bit of comfort.'

But in fact, although Becky Bosworth wrote briefly and more or less to the point, Maudie Nelson's letters were no comfort to Barbara at all. After the kindness of the first one, they'd degenerated into gossip – Jimmy had been ‘
ever so bad with the croup'
, Mrs Cromer's bunions were worse, Vic Castlemain was ‘
working for a jewler and doin ever so well
'. Now they were simply a regular reminder of how far apart they'd grown. We got nothing in common no more, Barbara thought sadly. I hardly know what to say to her. She don't even follow what's going on in the war.

If it hadn't been for Aunt Sis and the General Election, it would have been an impossible time. But Aunt Sis was a life-saver. There was plenty to do and she made sure that Barbara was involved in all of it, calling for her after work and leaving notes for her at the garage. Barely a day went by without a job being found. There were letters to write, leaflets to draw up, agendas to compose, and on the first Saturday in April there was a public meeting in Bellington South at which she had to make her first speech as parliamentary candidate.

Mr Craxton looked out a booklet on how to compose such a speech and walked to her flat to deliver it in person. It was his first outing since his heart attack and he still looked frail, so she thanked him for it very kindly and said she was sure it would be invaluable. But when she came to read the thing, it was worse than useless.

‘I can't write a speech this way,' she said to Barbara later that evening, and quoted, ‘
Opening proposition. Development. Further development. Concluding paragraph.
It'ud end up dull as ditch water. No one'ud listen to a word of it.'

Barbara's mind was still sharp, anxious though she was. ‘What do you really want to talk about?' she asked.

There was no doubt about the answer to that. ‘The welfare state. That's what this election's going to be about. The welfare state an' the five giants we got to conquer.'

‘Well thass it, then,' Barbara told her. ‘You've written the opening proposition already.'

It took them until two in the morning to write the speech and even then Sis wasn't completely happy with it. But it had taken their minds off their worries and it turned out to be a huge success, unfinished or no. After the meeting she and Barbara and the Bellington South management committee went cheerfully off to the nearest pub trailing half the audience with them. The debate continued until closing time, and Barbara was in the thick of it and glad to be there.

It was only on the rare occasions when she was at home and on her own that her misery was too much for her. Sometimes she took out her precious shoebox and reread some of Steve's letters, so that she could hear his voice again. But the comfort they brought was complicated by an underlying anguish, because so many of them led her straight to the situation she was in now.

… People don't die in a war. They are killed and most of them are young and have their lives before them … I think the worst thing is there's no time to mourn them. We just have to get up and go on … there isn't any other option. So don't let this stop you. Keep on going. Live your life to the full. It's the best way to honour our dead …

And wasn't that what she was doing? Keeping on. Working hard. Planning for the future. But how would she manage in the future if he didn't come back to share it, if he'd been killed like the others, and she was never going to see him again? It would be his birthday in a week's time. Oh Steve, she mourned, my own dear, darling, darling Steve, that'll be your twenty-first birthday and I don't know whether you're alive or dead.

Meantime the papers were full of the great advances that were being made on all fronts. The tanks were ‘swanning' across Germany. Hanover was captured. Vienna was liberated. The Russians were storming towards Berlin. There was even news of success against the Japanese, with American marines landing in a place called Okinawa. The rations were down again but they'd come to expect that. Cheese had been cut from three ounces a week to what Sis called a measly two. But the war was nearly over. They'd started work on the new electoral register. Better times were coming, even if success
was
tinged with sadness. As it so often was.

A piece of sad and rather unexpected news broke on April 12th. President Roosevelt, the stalwart of the American war effort, was dead.

‘Poor ol' feller,' Barbara's passengers said. ‘To come all this way an' work so hard, an' then die just when it's almost over. Don't seem fair. 'Specially in all this lovely weather.'

And it
was
lovely weather, the hottest April on record. 76°F in the shade, so the papers said. A real heatwave. But there was still no letter from Steve and
he'd come ‘all this way' too. What if he's dead like the President? What if they write to tell me that? Oh please God don't let them write and tell me that.

‘His birthday tomorrow,' Heather said to her reflection that evening. ‘Then we shall see.'

But although it was another beautiful day, no letters were delivered at all. That evening, when she finally had to face that there was no possible chance of any more mail that day, she sat down and cried for over an hour.

Barbara was out, at a committee meeting with Aunt Sis, but Bob was on late turn and caught the full impact of her grief.

‘Try not to cry so,' he implored, patting her heaving shoulders. ‘You'll make yourself ill.'

‘I don't care!' she said wildly. ‘He's dead. I know he is. Didn't I tell you right at the start? And I never got to say goodbye to him. Not so much as a word. It's the same as our Betty. They said missing then. But they knew she was dead all along. They had to come an' tell us in the end, didn't they. He's not missing any more than she was. I
would
be a fool to be caught out by the same line twice. He's no more missing than I am. It's always the same. They start by saying they're only missing. Missing isn't dead, they say. And we fall for it. It makes no odds
what
they say. They all end up dead in the end.'

He tried to reason with her. ‘We don't know he's dead.'

But she groaned. ‘We do! We do!'

He offered tea but she groaned at that too. ‘And here we are stuck with that awful girl. Why doesn't she go home and leave us in peace?' It wasn't fair and she knew it but grief was making her too bitter to be fair and she needed someone to sting.