Read I Can't Begin to Tell You Online
Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
I Can't Begin to Tell You
For Elizabeth, my Copenhagen companion
From 1940 to 1946 the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a British secret service that supported Resistance in all enemy-occupied countries.
Day One
Kay Eberstern was moving as unobtrusively as she could manage through the tongue-shaped wood of ash and birch which ran alongside the lake on her husband’s Danish estate. It was five o’clock on an early November evening in 1942.
It was imperative not to be seen.
At this time of the evening the men working on the estate went home and they would be taken aback if they caught sight of Kay lurking here. They would ask: ‘What is the master’s wife doing?’ If it were peacetime, they might conclude that she was meeting a lover. But it was not peacetime. It was war, Hitler’s war, and British-born Kay had got herself caught up in it. If she was spotted, gossiped over, or betrayed, there could be, almost certainly would be, serious repercussions for the Eberstern family.
Her orders had been to wait for an hour every evening in the wood at Rosenlund, for up to three days. Here she was to rendezvous with ‘Felix’, a British-trained agent who, if all had gone to plan, would have arrived in the area in order to set up resistance operations. She had also been warned that the plans might go awry and the mission aborted. The agent was being parachuted into Jutland and faced a difficult sea journey to Zealand and a subsequent cross-country one into the Køge area.
Kay could have no illusions as to what might happen to Tanne and Nils, her children, or to Bror, her husband. Everyone knew that the Danish police weren’t backward in coming forward in rounding up anyone involved in this sort of activity and handing them over to the German
Gestapomen
.
Was
outraged decency a sufficiently good reason to put Tanne and Nils, and her marriage to Bror, at risk? Was her refusal to tolerate evil, cruelty and a creeping fascism worth it?
Being seriously apprehensive was a new and unwelcome sensation and Kay was struggling to master it. If her task hadn’t been so crucial, and in other circumstances, she might have set about analysing its effects. Damp palms and a queasy stomach were predictable. Less so, were the upsurges of bravado followed by the slump into panic. Like a disease, fear caused weakness and debilitation.
The winter was gearing up and, at this time of the evening, it was growing cold. She pushed her gloved hands into her pockets. Tomorrow,
if
there was a tomorrow, she would take pains to kit up more warmly. It hadn’t occurred to her until she was actually standing and freezing in the wood that she should think practically and prepare. For a start, she needed a torch.
Why
was she here?
What was happening back at the house? Had she been missed yet? Birgit was preparing dinner and Kay had been careful to tell her that she hadn’t been sleeping well – not an untruth – and would be taking a nap.
An owl hooted: a hollow, eerie sound.
Kay shifted uneasily.
Two years ago, on 9 April 1940, Hitler marched into Denmark and declared it a Protectorate with a special blood-brother relationship with the Reich, completely ignoring the non-aggression pact which he had signed with Denmark.
It looked as though the Danes had been caught napping.
Rumours of Hitler’s intentions had been circulating for months. Kay had turned into an obsessive listener to the BBC while it reported what was happening in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland – but in Denmark, even with Germany just next door, events had seemed removed, almost remote. She and Bror took their places at the breakfast table early on that
April morning, he pale and grim, she flushed and on edge. They gazed at each other and Kay imagined she heard in her head the appalled cries of protest at this new arrangement of Europe.
It had taken all day to get a phone connection to her mother in England. Fretful, anxious hours, and lipstick-stained cigarette butts were heaped in the ashtray by the time she got through.
‘Kay …’ Her mother was on the verge of weeping, which was unlike her. ‘Your sisters and I have been desperate to hear from you. We’ve heard the news. Are you all right?’
‘Are
you
all right?’
It was baffling how such important conversations could be reduced to the basics.
Kay searched to make the verbal connection mean something. ‘We’re getting over the shock.’
‘Darling, couldn’t you come home?’
Home
.
She thought of Piccadilly Circus, of the lisle stockings she used to wear, of nips of sherry in meanly sized glasses and overdone beef for Sunday lunch, and of her mother standing in the passageway of her tiny cottage at the end of a waterlogged lane clutching the telephone receiver. She thought, too, of her mother’s deferential, polite widowhood lived out on the edges of a society that didn’t rate widows very highly.
Coming to live in Denmark, she had left all those things behind.
‘Kay, I wish you didn’t live so far away. I wish … I wish … I don’t want to die without seeing you again.’
‘You’re not going to die, Mother. Do you hear me?’
Her mother pulled herself together, as Kay knew she would. ‘I’ve taken in two little boys, evacuees. The bombing is so bad in London and they’re sending all the children into the country. They had fleas! Imagine! They don’t speak the King’s English. But I’m getting used to it …’
The timed call limped to its three-minute limit.
England
was cut off.
Kay shook herself, determined not to dip into homesickness. Her life was here now, in Denmark.
How hard it had been to keep the homesickness and misery at bay when she first arrived as a nervous and badly dressed bride. Having met Bror at her friend Emily’s twenty-first dance, she had married him only six months later. It had been a fast and exciting transition. Too rapid, perhaps? Although she was deeply in love and saw her new life as an opportunity to be grasped, she had been ignorant of the battle she would face in turning herself into a woman capable of running Rosenlund. The Ebersterns expected conformity and there were times when she had had to fight to subdue her rebellion. There had also been occasional clashes with Bror, whose politics were more old-fashioned than hers.
Yet in those early days her senses had been stoked and stroked by physical love, by the sights and scents and tastes of a different country, by the challenge of mastering the Danish language and customs. It had been a time of languor, of sensuality and of plenty, when the glittering mysteries of ice and fog during the long dark Danish winters offered some compensation for the occasional moments of sadness.
Inside Kay’s walking shoes, her toes were cramping.
Sweat had gathered at the bottom of her spine and the waistband of her skirt was unpleasantly damp. The truth was that she was frightened. Truly terrified she had made the wrong decision.
To steady herself, Kay started counting up to ten.
One … two …
They were lucky at Rosenlund. The war had not really hit them here yet – or in Køge, the ancient fishing port just three miles to the east. Only a short train ride from the capital, Rosenlund still could, and did, function along traditional rural lines. The seasons dictated its agenda. So it had been easy, and
natural perhaps, to duck away from the worst and for family life to continue, not so much blithely, but removed.
All the same. All the same … was a refrain that ran frequently through Kay’s mind.
Elsewhere, Danes who opposed the Directorate were being rounded up. There were reports of torture and of murder in the streets and in the cells of Vestre prison in København (as Kay had learned to call it). Others were holed up in houses which they trusted to be safe, only to be betrayed by fellow Danes, the so-called
stikker
.
In the early days of their love affair, Bror told her: ‘In Denmark it is a point of honour to care for our communities.’
Then, she believed him.
Anyone could see that in giving Bror possession of the eighteenth-century ochre-painted house, with its farmlands and woods occupying a fertile curve outside Køge, fate had dealt him a royal flush.
She had only to conjure the image of his tall, fair figure standing by the window in the elegantly proportioned drawing room, looking out across the lake to the fields and wooded clumps, to hear him say: ‘As long as one field lies against another supporting it, there I shall be …’ It was the voice of a man at ease with his task, caught up by an urgent, emotional, almost mystical, union with the land.
No one could accuse Bror of not caring for his inheritance.
‘Three,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Four.’
Think of something else
…
The early days …
Bror wooed Kay with stories of the Danes. Obviously. He told her of Vikings, of fishermen, artists, designers, navigators, wireless inventors, democrats. He told her of heroes and their voyages, of the Danes’ ongoing tussle with the sea.
He described how the sea turned iron grey in winter and brilliant blue and amber in summer. He explained the geographical oddity which meant the Baltic froze in winter because
it wasn’t very salty. He singled out the pebble beaches, the pines, the wild myrtle and gorse and the tiny islands which peppered the coastline.
He told of being the small boy, then the teenager, who got up before light and went out with his father to shoot duck on the mist-shrouded marshes. The making of a crack shot.
The salt tang. The silence. The swoop of the birds. The beating of their wings.
Almost word for word, Kay remembered what he said.
Bror painted a land of cool, clean beauty and astringent winds … all of which Kay discovered to be true when it became her home and she found happiness.
Bror Eberstern, her husband. To outsiders he was a courteous landowner, with a laconic, sometimes brusque, manner of which they could be afraid or daunted. Only a few intimates knew of his gentleness and tenderness and the reserve which masked his feelings.
No man was an island and it followed that no woman was either. Habit, children, their shared bed, their shared days, their deep feelings for each other – these created the ties which had grown thicker and tougher over the years. Yet Bror had gone and made a decision, a political one, which had the power to change her life.
Kay was angry about it. Bitterly so.
She shifted position, kicking up the undergrowth which smelled of leaf mould mixed with recent rain. So much of life had its scents and stinks: newborn babies, roasting pork, bad drains, fresh bread, the glamorous and addictive aroma of Turkish cigarettes, the tanning lorry, pink and white sweet peas. So did waking early in the morning to a world cleansed by the dark, to recently polished leather shoes, Bror’s aura of tweed and tobacco … To be conscious was to engage with sensations in which she took endless pleasure. To be alive was a gloriously tactile experience, gloriously absorbing. Any eloquence she
might summon to describe what she was experiencing faltered in the face of the shimmery intensity of her feelings.
Five forty-five. Fifteen more minutes before time was up.
In wartime, the senses were assaulted in new ways. People were less clean, less well fed. Poverty and scarcity smelled different.
If poverty smelled, did fear smell too? These days fear and suspicion were everywhere. Danish police were checking every traveller on trains and on boats and ferries.
Gestapomen
patrolled the ports. Then there were the
stikker
. Nosy. Officious. Highly dangerous. And you never knew where they were.
That
stikker
were a big problem wasn’t surprising. Their equivalents would be everywhere, including Britain. No society was incorruptible and no one’s motives were unadulterated. When Kay’s father lay dying, he let slip to his daughter a little of what he had learned amid the mud and the blood of the Great War: ‘When you are cold and hungry and frightened … or wounded, you don’t care about political philosophies or the passions which drive them. They fall away. You want to survive and you will sacrifice most things to do so …’ Watching his features drain of life, she cried helplessly. At the time, her grief was too overwhelming for her to examine what her father had meant but the halting words must have rooted in her unconscious mind for she remembered them now.
A grey, insubstantial mist which had previously settled over the lake was shifting. The darkness folded down. There were noises which she half recognized, half not, for, in her state of heightened awareness, they appeared to be extra loud and ominous.
Time?
Five minutes to go. The knot in her chest slackened for she doubted Felix would turn up now – whoever he was. A hero? An opportunist? A non-conformist? A communist? It was common gossip that it was only the communists who demonstrated any open resistance in Denmark.
In
the two years since Denmark had been occupied Kay had lived in a bubble. It had taken the lunch with Anton, Bror’s cousin, for her to understand that some men and women were responding to the need to be decent and, believing their government to be supine, were taking matters into their own hands.
If that was so, what did Bror’s actions make him?
Asking and answering the question made Kay feel dangerously out of kilter.
Crack.
What was that? Heartbeat accelerating, Kay whipped round. Nothing. Breathing out slowly, she refocused on the lake. The mist had now cleared and the light from the stars nipped and bobbed on the water.
Would Felix be tall, short, old, young? Was he Danish? Probably. Otherwise the language barrier would be too difficult. Even after twenty-five years in Denmark, Kay still spoke with a foreign inflection.
Time was up.
She was off the hook for today and, for all that she had resolved to be strong and resolute, she was thankful.
Glancing over her shoulder, she moved off in the direction of the house.
… ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag …’ the ghost of her father sang in her ear in a cracked baritone. ‘Can’t you be quiet, dear?’ said her mother …
Immersed in her marriage as Kay had been since she arrived here twenty-five years ago, occupied by motherhood and life at Rosenlund, she’d found that the power of England to evoke an intense response in her had diminished. Yet, since that April morning in 1940 when Hitler marched into Denmark, she had been winded at odd moments by homesickness – its jolt speeding through her body in an almost physical manner. ‘Plucky little Britain is punching above its weight,’ said Anton and she wanted to cry out: ‘My country!’ Then she remembered. No, England wasn’t her country any longer. Denmark was.