Devastation Road (35 page)

When it ended, the rest of the people in the auditorium slowly got up and left, the woman taking her snivelling out into the foyer. But Owen didn’t. He sat there in the darkness staring
until eventually, with the last whirr of the projector and a click, the screen went blank.

The tram from Victoria Embankment took him over the Thames, moving with slow persistence past the lines of traffic. London felt surreal. The streets were recognizable but the
war had cast a shadow over them; the blackened buildings seemed to loom despite the mid-May sun. His greatest fears lay scattered around him. Even buildings here had been taken out, bombs and fires
ravaging the city in much the same way as he had seen in Hamburg. It seemed to Owen to be a city damned beyond repair.

After he had come out of the Ministry, he had walked along the river and cut across Victoria Embankment Gardens, where in a bandstand a group of returned soldiers were singing hymns and women
from the Red Cross rattled collection boxes. All the men were parcelled up in bandages, one or two even missing an arm or leg. He wondered if any of them had been at St Mary’s and dealt with
by his father; whether his father, in fact, was still working there. He stood for a few minutes on the neatly trimmed grass and listened to the tune he’d carried all this way in his head
– ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’ – being sung out, proud and strong.

At Wimbledon station he changed on to the trolleybus. Gazing through the window now as it took him down Kingston Road, the tune still lingered. He held the button tight in his palm and watched
the windscreens of passing motorcars blinking in the heat.

The streets became more familiar still, remembered images turned real again, like: the buildings of Hawker Aircraft, and the window propped open by someone’s shoe, and inside a figure that
might once have been him, leaning over a drawing board and drafting out a future in nothing more than pencil lines.

Then they were curving right at a junction and heading towards Caversham Rise, where outside a gate almost two years before she had patted his breast pocket and, taking his hand, had kissed his
knuckles and palm, closing his fingers around it.
Come back
, she had said. She had then put his other hand to her belly.
We need to tell Max
.

On the trolleybus that had taken him away from her that last time, his RAF bag on the seat and her silhouette on the pavement at the top of the hill watching him go, he had looked out the window
– just as he did now – and outside the street and people had blurred, washing down the glass as they turned to liquid in his tears.

Now here he was again. The trolley whirred to a stop and he stepped off and waited as the wire sparked and the bus surged forward once more. Nothing much had changed: on either side just a line
of terrace houses on an ordinary street. He set off up the hill feeling rather anxious as a boy on a pushbike came freewheeling past him. He had no idea, he realized, what to expect from her, what
she looked like now, what she might say. She probably didn’t even know that he was still alive. The official report had stated ‘presumed dead’.

He slipped his hand in his pocket, expecting to find not a button or a map or a scrap of paper but, perhaps, a forgotten key; and with it he would go through the gate and up the steps, past the
pots of geraniums, and he would unlock the door and step inside and she would be there to meet him and he would see her face again. What if Max was there? What would he say? He tried to think of
all the things that should have been said. He could feel his heart racing.

As he drew nearer to the house, though, and its single gate and wooden steps leading up to the door – the door and steps he had so often imagined, the round-bellied bowls of the ceramic
pots and geraniums scattering their petals – it wasn’t there. He couldn’t see it. He picked up his pace. It wasn’t there. No, he thought. No! But there was just a gap. He
reached the spot and stopped sharply, his heart beating so damned hard now that he thought he might pass out. He stared, horrified, across the empty space: nothing but the piled remains and juts of
wood; nothing but bricks and rubble.

Oh God, no. He looked at where the house had always been, then scrambled over the debris.

‘Connie!’ he shouted. ‘No, Connie! No!’

He clambered over the piles helplessly looking for her.

This was their retribution. This, he thought, was for Hamburg. With a single bomb and pinpoint accuracy, they had blown out his heart.

‘Connie!’ he yelled.

After all these miles, all these days . . .

She had been nothing when he had woken in that field, not even as much as a thought, but he had searched and searched until he had found her, and now he was here; miles and days and infinite
lifetimes later, he had come all this way for her, because she had said it –
Come back
– and he had. He was here now. He was here.

He felt that bomb drop again through him, breaking every bone within him as it fell and blasted, and he crumbled until he was on his knees in the bricks and timber, in all the dust and shards of
glass. He strained out a voiceless cry, retched, and then shouted. He couldn’t help it. He tugged at his stomach and wept so hard – for there among the shattered pieces of blasted
terracotta were pale and washed-out petals. They looked like shreds of skin.

The car provided by the Ministry bore him along the lane as he stared blindly through the window at the stark yellow oilseed rape, the field burning so bright.

When they finally arrived, his mother was standing in the doorway, already crying just seeing the car pull into the drive. She bustled him through. She was kissing his cheeks again and again;
she couldn’t stop touching his arm. Everything was strangely familiar: the wooden boards that Cedar used to skitter across; the kitchen floor his mother fell on; the stairs his father had
come down that day; and the light shining through the stained glass window, the way it fell across the floor, leaving pools of different coloured light that he and Max had lain beside, passing
their hands through it to see the colours chase across their skin.

She led him through the dining room and out the double doors to the garden.

‘Your father is doing the usual. He hasn’t changed. Oh, darling, I can’t believe that you’re back. I prayed for you every night.’

And there he was standing at a flowerbed with a large floppy hat. He nimbly snipped the dead head from a rose, pocketing it in his summer jacket, while Cedar scrambled up from his sleep and came
padding across the lawn.

‘Oh, jolly good, there you are,’ his father said matter-of-factly, as if Owen had been gone for no more than an hour.

‘And what of Max?’ Owen later asked.

His mother tried to smile but couldn’t manage it. ‘It’s short, you know, but lovely handwriting. They must have taken some care.’

He had died on the second of May. Pneumonia, as reported by a German doctor in a town called Sagan – somewhere in the east of Germany, his mother had explained. He had
been transferred to a camp for aircraft pilots that, it had been written in the letter, had been evacuated, but he was found to be too ill to make the walk.

That was indeed why Owen had been going back, he realized – the sense that he had left Max there, the pull coming from a memory that he had felt all along but still couldn’t unearth;
going back for the love of a brother or as a final act of atonement for the guilt of an affair. Either way he had sat on a train, watching a girl in red sandals and white socks being settled into a
seat opposite by a kindly aunt before she’d kissed the child goodbye and handed her a teddy bear.

Sometimes now – in his memory or his imagination or a dream – he saw his brother stumbling out of a truck, newly arrived from somewhere or other, or in a hospital bed in a camp about
to be emptied, as the snow battered the windows and men gathered outside in the dark, stamping the cold from their feet.

At that bed he had slipped a promise into Max’s ear, and sometimes, in his dreams, an apology too. He would feel Max press a watch into his hand, and then closing Owen’s fingers
around it as if, like her kiss, that might somehow keep it safe.

Now this watch that had once been stolen – unfastened from him in a field in the dark, six hundred miles away – had been returned to Owen and was on his wrist once
more, fixed and no different from how it had always been but for a small engraving on the back-two tiny ‘v’s that were only visible when you turned it and they sparkled in the
light.

So much was lost and yet every day something would come back to him – a snatch of dialogue or a name or a face, blowing through his head like leaves, that he would see for a moment but
couldn’t quite catch. Other things returned and lingered, as if he had opened curtains to a view that now could not be closed. He thought about Max and their final minutes together, and the
long trudge away from him through the forests, the biting cold and driving snow. Sheltering that first night in a brick factory in Muskau with thousands of other men, he had cried. In the
flickering light of a gas lamp, seated among the shivering bodies, and with his jacket in his lap, he had chewed through the threads and unpicked the heart that she had sewn there, trying to unpick
everything that had happened, everything that he had done. Then, without thinking, he’d slipped the threads into his pocket, where they were now and had always been, and only when the square
of material was left in place had he realized what he had done.

‘I’ll take you down the garden,’ his mother said.

She led him across the lawn to where his father was still among the flowers, secateurs in hand. It was as if nothing had changed. Owen felt the warm sun against him, the first scents of summer
already pervading the air.

‘Ah, here he is,’ said his father. He called into the nearby potato plants. ‘Leo. Come on, out you come.’ A small face appeared between the stalks. ‘Come and say
hello.’

They walk out across the Hampshire fields, heading away from The Ridings and the
clip
of his father’s secateurs. The day is warm and sunny, with the scent of
pollen in the air, bumblebees and dragonflies, and vapour trails pulling like fraying threads across the sky.

Sometimes the child wants to walk, so progress is slow and meandering as he grasps Owen’s finger in his hot hand and totters slowly forward, but mostly the child is content to sit and ride
in Owen’s arms. They watch Cedar lolloping ahead, disappearing in and out of the long grass so that every time he is found again, the child points and laughs.

Eventually, in a field overlooking the Downs with a slope just like he has been looking for, they stop to sit and rest. Cedar nuzzles scents out of the soil and the boy stumbles around, still
finding his feet. He finds wonder in the smallest things, like ladybirds opening up their mechanical shells and folding out their wings.

Owen lies back in the grass and the child eventually clambers on him and, before long, is asleep. He holds him close, enjoying his weight, his smell, his warmth and, above all else, the sense
that he is his. Sometimes, in his head, he can hear Irena telling him that he is good with him – not Little Man but this Little Miracle, this little infant found alive in the rubble when all
else around him was lost. He listens to the child’s breathing now as he had done on that first afternoon, sitting on the bench at the bottom of his parents’ garden and holding the child
tight to him as he cried at all the confusion of his desolation and his thanks.

All the clues he needs to remember Connie by she has left for him in this face – her eyes, her nose, the shape of her chin, the soft pinkness of her cheeks. And there she is vivid once
more, more vivid than she has ever been, so that when he shuts his eyes – as he does now – she is with him. She is kissing him at a party down a darkened corridor, or potting geraniums
on a step, or sitting beside him on the remains of a train engine writing him letters, every word of which he now knows. Or she is at the top of a street waiting for him, or turning to glance at
him from the back of an open-topped Austin that is disappearing down a lane. Either way, she is not lost any more. She is in his head and heart and everywhere that he looks. He just has to close
his eyes.

Devastation Road
is a work of fiction. The only historical figure to feature in the story is Sir Sydney Camm, Chief Designer at Hawker Aircraft. All the other
characters have been imagined, as have the events of Owen’s journey. That said, much of the background detail is true.

Although not named, the camp that acts as the main location in the final third of the novel is Belsen, south-west of the town of Bergen, near Celle in northern Germany. As the
war entered its final phases and the Reich found itself being squeezed from every side, the death camps were evacuated and the inmates moved. Many of these ended up at Belsen – among them its
most famous inmate, Anne Frank. In February 1945 the population of the camp had grown to 22,000, but by 1 April this had exploded to 43,000. To make matters worse, in February a typhus epidemic had
broken out as well, then the food supply failed and the water was cut off. The camp was reduced to chaos and the situation was so dire that there were even reports of cannibalism.

When the British 11th Armoured Division finally liberated the camp on 15 April 1945 the sights that met them must have truly horrified them. By this point the camp’s population had reached
a staggering 60,000, disease and starvation were rife, and the bare dusty grounds were littered with a further 13,000 bodies lying unburied where they had fallen. One of the first to enter the camp
over the following days was a young BBC reporter, Richard Dimbleby. His report and film footage shocked the world.

Slow responses and some ill-advised decisions meant that despite their best efforts a further 14,000 inmates died
after
they had been liberated, including an estimated 2,000 dying from
being given the wrong food. The main concentration camp was called Camp 1 – or the ‘Horror Camp’ – while the barracks of the nearby Panzer training school became the
location of Camp 2. This was where the hospital was established. As Haynes says to Owen, they took 500 patients out of Camp 1 into the hospital every day, the equivalent of three blocks. Even with
the help of various relief and aid agencies, including the International Red Cross, they were woefully under-resourced. Those deemed healthy enough were then housed in the smaller facility at Camp
3 awaiting deportation home, the first group to leave Belsen being a group of French and Dutch on 24 April. The ‘Horror Camp’ was fully evacuated and the last of its barracks burnt down
on 21 May. It had taken over a month just to clear out all those who were sick.