Avalanche of Daisies (54 page)

Since they'd rejoined the division at Fallingbostel, Steve and Dusty had been kept so fully occupied that they'd barely had time to talk, let alone sit in the sun and dream. The Germans had fought most bitterly and at every turn, through peat bogs, along the edge of their endless forests, over the long wild moor of Luneburg Heath, but the British advance had been steady. They'd taken Soltau in flames and Hollenstedt in ruins, and by the 29th of April they'd crossed the River Elbe and reached the woods south of Harburg. And there, just when they were within sight of Hamburg and gearing themselves up for a major assault, everything had come to a halt.

There was a rumour that a citizens' deputation had
come out to meet the advancing troops waving a white flag and offering to surrender – and another that Monty himself was in the area. Nobody knew for certain, so for the moment they were just lying under the trees waiting to see what would happen next and hoping that the rumours were true. They'd lost seventy-eight men since the Rhine crossing and if they could occupy Hamburg without taking any more casualties, that would suit them fine.

‘I reckon this is the end,' Dusty said, happily. ‘If old Monty's here.'

Steve smiled at him.

‘The minute it's over, I shall put in for a spot a' leave,' Dusty observed, squinting up at the branches over his head. ‘We got enough owing! Back home, mate. Imagine it. Nice little bint. Home-cooking. I can't wait.'

Steve smiled at him again but he didn't answer. He'd spent the last half-hour rereading his mail and now he was lying with the letters on his chest, brooding. Barbara had sent him a letter every day since he'd written to her again, and while war dominated his thoughts and he was obeying orders and living an hour at a time, he'd simply been pleased to see her familiar writing and to know that she was safe and well. Now, when he had plenty of time to answer her, he was too confused to do it. The trouble was Belsen had made a nonsense of one of the great certainties of his life, and left him with no way to organise his thoughts and no base from which to work. He wasn't at all sure how he felt about these letters of hers, nor, painful though it was to admit it, how he felt about her.

It troubled him that she hadn't said a word about that Victor feller. And she hadn't mentioned the war much either. True, she'd told him how glad she was that he was alive and well – ‘
We been so worried about you, no letters all that time. We knew it must be something dreadful. I never thought it would be one of those
concentration camps. That must have been awful'
– but apart from that she spent most of her letters telling him about Sis and the management committee of Bellington South. ‘'
Course we know she can't win. That's a safe Tory seat. But she says the experience will come in handy and she might get a good seat next time. We think the election will be called pretty soon once the war's over
.'

He had a vague, disturbing feeling that there was something underneath the letters that wasn't being said, or that he couldn't understand, especially as his mother had only written one letter to him in all that time and hadn't said anything about
that
letter at all, but he no longer had the capacity to think his thoughts through and every time he tried they slid away from him as if he had holes in his brain, or tailed off and were lost in terrible images. Even when he was reading Barbara's letters, he could see those poor, stinking, broken bodies being shovelled into the pit and the smell of death rose into his memory until he was overwhelmed by it and couldn't see the words on the page. After a while he gave up trying. He couldn't read her letters and he couldn't answer them either. It was easier to write in his notebook, for his own eyes and no one else's. Sighing, he put her letters away, and picked up his pencil.

I always thought human beings were the same. I know we are different to look at but I thought we were basically the same. I knew we all did stupid things. I knew we could be unkind, jealous, spiteful, greedy, just plain silly, all those things, but I believed we were basically good underneath it all, that when it came down to it, we'd be moral, our basic humanity would win through. I was wrong.

Oh how painful it was even to write the words.

We are not basically good and we are not all the same. Some people are evil. Those guards enjoyed hurting people, they felt justified in what they were doing. Irma Grese became a torturer and was rewarded for it, Hannah was tortured and was punished by death.

The death-pit gaped under the words, pulling him down towards it but he had to go on. If he wrote this down he might make sense of it. And oh, how much he needed to make sense of it.

If some people are evil, maybe there is evil inherent in all of us, maybe the early Christians were right, maybe we are born evil. If that is so, I am evil, and so are Dusty and Aunt Sis and my mother and father and Barbara.

But at that point he had to stop. What if Mum was right and she really
was
playing around with someone else? Was that evil? Or just foolish? How can I be certain? The question made him sigh with distress. How could he be certain of anything now?

Sergeant Morris was walking towards them through the trees. ‘Come on then, boys, let's be 'aving you.'

They sat up slowly, pretending to groan. ‘Where to, sarge?'

‘Hamburg in a day or two, my lovely lads. And we won't have to fire a shot.'

‘Is it true then, sarge? Have they surrendered?'

‘They're surrendering,' the sergeant said. ‘Just come through, which you'd've heard if you'd had the wireless on instead a' rolling about on your backs out here. I never saw such a lot a' dozy tarts!'

‘No peace for the wicked,' they joked as they scrambled to their feet.

‘Shouldn't be wicked,' the sergeant told them, giving the well-worn reply. ‘What you been up to?'

They parried that in the usual way too. ‘Chance'ud be a fine thing!'

The careless words echoed in Steve's mind all evening, congealing his thoughts. He was still brooding over them when news came through on the camp radio that had the entire regiment cheering.

Adolf Hitler had committed suicide. No rumour this time. There was no doubt about it. The German radio had made the announcement itself – after playing Wagner's ‘Death of Siegfried' to forewarn their listeners. They hadn't admitted that he'd killed himself, naturally, but had claimed that he'd ‘
died fighting to the last against the Bolshevik Hordes
'. It was the Forces network that had revealed that it was suicide. But what did it matter how he'd gone? He was dead. That was the great thing. And now the Germans would surrender. It didn't clear Steve's mind, but it lifted his spirits.

At four o'clock the next afternoon the division set off to occupy Hamburg. It was raining heavily when they started but by the time they reached the river Elbe the sun had come out. It was a new experience to cross a bridge they hadn't built themselves and an even better one to be entering a German city without having to fight for it. It was only a matter of minutes before the tanks were rolling through the empty streets towards the main square.

The population had been put under curfew so there was no one about except the local police, who stood lining the pavements as they drove past, sullen and subdued and obviously defeated. ‘Serve the buggers right,' Dusty said.

They passed the docks where several U-boats stood in their pens, half-built and burnt black. The damage here was spectacular. The enormous cranes and gantries above the docks had been knotted into grotesque shapes by the blast and the heat of the fire-storm had even melted the steel girders, huge though they were, leaving them red and black and drooping.

‘They won't be building any more of those damned things in a hurry,' Steve said, looking at the burnt-out U-boats with satisfaction. It was a justified revenge. The submarine builders had had it coming to them for a very long time.

Then they were heading for the city centre where the roads were full of potholes and the destruction was total. In street after street the buildings had been reduced to piles of rubble and, even when they found a terrace of houses, it turned out to be a facade with nothing behind it. Steve was surprised by how quickly the Germans had tidied the place up. The streets had been cleaned and cleared, the tramlines mended although there were no trams running. They'd even restored the telephone wires although there couldn't be a phone left under all that rubble. He couldn't understand their passion for neatness and order when they'd produced a place as foul and disorganised as Belsen. Does evil run by opposites? he wondered. Neat bureaucracy and cruel behaviour.

In Adolf Hitler Platz the garrison commander was waiting to meet them outside the Town Hall, which was about the only building still intact. He was fat and wore glasses and an incongruously tidy uniform. Steve disliked him on sight, hating his superfluous flesh and remembering Joseph Kramer and his immaculate attire. He was delighted when their colonel arrived dressed in an American combat jacket, a pair of corduroy trousers and an 11th Hussars' cap, looking every inch the conqueror and totally himself. And when he ignored the fat German and pulled a packet of army biscuits from his jacket to feed the pigeons, Steve cheered as raucously as all the others.

But his thoughts fell into the same holes no matter what he saw or how pleased he was to see it.

The next day news came through that Admiral Doenitz had sent an envoy to Montgomery's HQ on Luneburg Heath. And that night the announcement
they'd all been waiting for was finally broadcast. The Germans had surrendered unconditionally. More than a million Germans in Holland, Denmark and north-west Germany were to lay down their arms at 08.00 hours the following morning. The war in Europe was over.

Dusty Miller put in for leave the very next day. But Steve was still locked in misery and indecision and he stayed where he was.

‘You're barmy,' Dusty told him. ‘Don'tcher want ter go home?'

‘Not yet,' Steve had to admit. ‘I got things to sort out. And besides,' managing to grin at his oppo, ‘someone's got to keep the army running.'

At three o'clock on the following afternoon Whitehall was so full of people it was impossible to walk in any direction except the one the crowd was following. Many had been there since early morning, jostling and dancing and cheering, with paper flags in their hands and London dust on their shoes, and more were arriving by the minute to join the celebration. Barbara had come up on the tram as soon as she finished work, with Sis and Mabel and the girls. Now they were wedged in the mass, waiting for the Prime Minister to declare the war officially over. There were loudspeakers on all the lamp standards and Union flags draped from every window and the sense of happiness and relief that rose on every side was as palpable as incense.

‘What a day!' Sis shouted above the racket. ‘What a day!'

‘Our Betty should've been here to see it,' Mabel said, sadly. ‘Poor kid. I keep thinking about her. An' all the other poor little devils. There's been a lot a' good people killed. I don't think I ought to have come.'

Poor Betty, Barbara thought, remembering her with a sudden surge of anguish. And poor Norman. She could see his brawny arms and that rolling walk of his and the way he'd gone whistling off to sea. We got peace at last but
they
paid the price for it.

‘It'll never happen again,' Sis said, patting her sister's arm. ‘We'll make sure of it this time.'

There was a whirring noise from Big Ben as the great clock began to sound the hour, booming out across the crowded streets in the steady familiar way that had been such a comfort over the last six years. As it struck, the
crowds gradually shooshed themselves quiet and at the last stroke, the loudspeakers spluttered and a voice spoke tinnily over their heads announcing the Prime Minister.

There was a cheer and shouts of ‘Good old Winnie!', then a pause, and then there was that fruity, unmistakeable voice with the news they'd all been waiting to hear for such a long, long time. Although Japan remained to be subdued, he said, the war in Europe would end at midnight. It was a short speech and ended with a flourish, ‘Advance Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King.' And at that there were tears as well as cheers.

Barbara was thinking about Steve. Now he'll get leave and come home. Now I shall see him again. In a few days. A week maybe. It made her yearn to imagine it. Steve, Steve, after all this time.

The crowd was on the move again, inching down Whitehall, and looking up she saw that there were people coming out onto one of the balconies and that one of them was a short, stout man wearing a dark siren suit and a Homburg hat and waving a cigar. Churchill himself. At the sight of him such a roar went up that it made her ears ring, and when it died down, a band began to play ‘For He's a Jolly Good Fellow' at which they all cheered again and began to sing, waving their paper flags in time to the music. And Churchill held up his cigar at them and nodded and smiled. After the song, the cheering went on for a very long time and it didn't stop until the band played the first chords of ‘Land of Hope and Glory'. Then they all settled and stood very still to sing the words while Churchill conducted them, using his cigar as a baton.

‘I feel almost sorry for him, poor old beggar,' Sis said, when the patriotic hymn was over and the balcony was empty again and the crowds were wandering off in their various directions. ‘He'll take it hard when we vote him out a' power.'

‘D'you reckon we will?' Mabel wondered.

Sis had no doubt. ‘It'll be a close run thing,' she said, ‘but we'll do it.'

Now that they'd heard the official announcement, Mabel said she thought she ought to be getting back. ‘I haven't got the heart for it. Not really.'