Somewhere Over England (16 page)

‘Very good,’ she replied. ‘Daddy would be proud of you.’

He just smiled and wound it up again.

The next week the warehouse behind the bank was filled with
papier mâché
coffins and the man who usually worked next to her was absent, arrested for filtering the red pool petrol through his gas mask filter and selling it on the black market for 6/6 a gallon.

On 9 April, the war which the Americans called phoney became real. German troops entered Denmark and moved into Norway, taking Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik. The British newspapers claimed that the collapse of Norway was due largely to betrayal from within and Helen felt the tension knot in her back.

In May one Borough Council dismissed in the interests of
public safety seventeen enemy aliens who had been engaged in Air Raid Protection work for the previous five months. A stone was thrown at Helen’s window but did not break it because of the gummed tape. She began to walk Christoph to school early, before work, because the boys were going later to school and waiting in the alleys again and her son grew drawn and tense and took a safety candle to bed each night, carrying the saucer it stood in, sheltering the flame with his hand as he walked, smiling to his mother, but the smile did not reach his eyes.

On 10 May Germany invaded Holland and Belgium and Chamberlain’s government fell during a debate on the Norwegian campaign. Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. On 12 May, it was declared that in the interests of safety male Germans and Austrians over sixteen and under sixty who lived near the coast were to be interned. The newspapers called for more action against the fifth-columnists who were probably signalling to aircraft, who were making plans behind their blackout curtains to betray the British nation to Hitler.

Each day there were more calls against the aliens and Mrs Simkins looked worried, though she still looked after Christoph because Heine was already interned, wasn’t he, dear, she had said, and could do no mischief. Helen had wanted to snatch her son from her but she needed her job and anyway would not be allowed to resign as it was necessary work.

Other aliens, from non-coastal areas, had to report daily to the police station in person and not use any motor vehicle, except public transport. They had to observe a curfew between eight in the evening and six in the morning. On 15 May, Helen had to appear before a tribunal because she was married to a German but was exonerated and that night she thought her head would burst with the pulsing pain and wondered who had written to the authorities. Who was trying to ruin her life?

Mrs Simkins heard in the greengrocer’s that one of the mothers in the park had reported her for taking too much notice of the barrage balloons and Helen just nodded but did nothing, for what could she do?

Helen washed the curtains that night, and the carpet, the paintwork, wanting it clean and fresh and new, wanting an end to it all but it had not even begun. She knew that, as the rest of Britain knew, because the bombers were waiting, somewhere
they were waiting, and so were those in her area who hated the aliens. Despair was close.

She worked later now because there was so much to do and came home aching with tiredness, but Chris was crying in the night again and she told him that soon they would be able to go and see Daddy but he would not go. He didn’t want to because it was his daddy who made him different, who made people throw stones, and shout and spit at him, he sobbed. Each night he cried and each night Helen held him, angry that her son was frightened and confused. Angry at these people – angry at Heine. And then, when Chris slept, her anger faded because she loved her husband and wanted him, but still the anger was there, and the pain, and the tiredness. And still there were no bombers.

She travelled to the internment camp on 25 May after receiving permission to enter a coastal area. At each change of train police stopped her and everyone else, checking their identity cards, their driving licences, before allowing them to proceed. She bought weak tea on the platform, sipping it, watching people waiting on platforms for trains. They were normal, fighting a war, an enemy they could see clearly, and she was envious because she remembered Heine’s parents and friends and wished she did not know so many good Germans for then it would be so much easier.

Her tea was nearly finished and now she could hear the train. She talked to other passengers as they lurched and rattled away from the station. She did not tell them why she was travelling but talked instead of her son and an old woman asked, ‘Will you evacuate him?’

‘Perhaps.’

As the wheels rattled she looked out of the window but could see little through the mesh. Perhaps, she thought to herself, because evacuation had been in and out of her mind since 9 April, not because of the planes which still had not come, but because of the boys who shouted and attacked. But Chris could not go where he was known, he could not go where the other children had gone, so where? Joan who worked beside her at the bank had an aunt in Norfolk who was kind and tolerant and had said she would have him, but how could she let him go? He was only seven and she loved him, needed him. How could she let him go?

From the station she walked through the town, asking in a shop where the internment camp was, and ignored the stares and the hostility because she was used to it. She walked past the houses, the barbed wire which seemed to be everywhere, coiled in long rolls along the beach. Past the empty ice-cream stands, the rows of boarding houses, some shuttered, forlorn. Past the gardens which still held flowers. She heard the gulls which Heine had written of, smelt the sea breeze, saw the hawthorn in full leaf as she walked down the lane, heard the birds, full-throated, melodic.

There was a high wire fence at the bottom of the lane, and gates guarded by sentries. More barbed wire was rolled on top of the squat huts. It was like nothing that she had seen before and Heine was here, barricaded like a criminal. Helen showed her pass and was escorted to a hut by a soldier with a bayonet that glinted in the sun. It was two-thirty p.m. Behind that door would be her husband but she must not tell him of Chris crying, or of the boys, because he must think that they were safe.

He was there, sitting at a table, but then she saw that it was not one table, but two pushed together. He looked older, thinner and she went to him but was waved back by a guard.

‘Sit there,’ he ordered, pointing to a chair at the other side of the two tables. ‘And you must not touch your husband.’

Helen walked towards the chair, looking at Heine, not at the two tables that had been pushed together so that she could not reach him, could not touch his thin hands, his tanned skin. Could not smell his skin or kiss him. She sat, clasping her hands together and they said nothing yet, just looked, and then he smiled.

‘Hello, my darling.’ His voice was the same.

They talked then and another prisoner brought coffee in a tin mug and she told him of the bank manager who dealt with all the munitions and war factory accounts and how she worked until late because records must be kept, details must be logged, or production would falter. She told him of the balloon in the recreation ground and how it had torn free. She told him of Mrs Simkins’s kindness. All this he already knew from her letters but it did not matter because they were speaking words which reached over the distance between them.

She did not tell him of Chris.

Heine told her of the English he taught Willi. Of the hairdresser who had opened up in one of the huts. He told her of the concerts which were held every Tuesday. He did not tell her of the barbed wire which had pierced their roof, letting in the water when it rained. He did not tell her of the Nazi sailors who were picking flowers to make victory wreaths. He did not tell her that they sang in the evening of Jewish blood dripping from Nazi steel, shouting also that Hitler was very close. He did not tell her that he had been beaten again for taking the scissors from the hairdresser because he would not cut Jewish hair. Neither did he tell her that she was too thin and her eyes were sad.

‘You are so beautiful, Helen. You are so very lovely.’

‘And so are you, my darling. You will be careful. You will think of us, remember that you must come home to us.’ Helen could see the bruise on his neck which he had not spoken of. But she would say no more because they both had their war to fight and when she left she didn’t cry or look back until she was far along the lane and all the time she wondered if she could bear to come again, only to leave him so thin, so hurt.

On 28 May Belgium surrendered and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk began. Small boats, big boats, ships; anything that could float took men from the beach and the sea and filled up the stations, the trains, the camps, the hospitals in Britain. Helen saw them in lorries being driven from Waterloo, dazed and defeated, and wondered what would happen now, and she was frightened, as everyone she met was frightened. Invasion could be only weeks away, the press said, and so did the girls she worked with and the passengers in the tram queue as they craned to see the illuminated number which had been moved from the front top to the side to avoid attracting enemy aircraft and Helen wanted to run home, snatch up Chris and hide. But where?

Then the newspapers began again. Act! Act! they screamed. Lock up all refugees from Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia. Lock up those of British nationality who could be considered in sympathy with the enemy. And so they were locked up, including the British Fascists, and so too were German and Austrian women between sixteen and sixty. Many of those had escaped from the threat of concentration
camps, from the terror of the Nazis, and Helen wondered whether she would be sent for again and could not sleep for the fear which ran through her because of what would happen to her child.

By June there was still no invasion though Italy declared war on Britain, German troops entered Paris, and on 23 June Britain stood alone.

‘Got rid of those bloody frogs. Now we can get on with it,’ Mrs Simkins said.

No one had called to take Helen away and she spoke to Bill Rowbottom because she could not bear it any more and he told her that she was safe. She was British, she had been cleared once and that was enough. She went home and weeded the garden, digging down into the earth for the dandelion roots but snapping one off in error, knowing that next year a dozen would come in its place. Would there be a next year? She threw them into Chris’s small wheelbarrow, watching as he took them to the compost, putting her hand on her aching back and lifting her face to the breeze because at least she was free.

In the summer small-scale air raids occurred but not near them. Signposts came down. Road blocks were put up, ringing of church bells was banned and Heine’s camp was to be moved but when? For weeks she heard nothing from him though the newspapers told of prisoners being evacuated and interned in Canada and she wondered if he would be exiled. But he wrote to say that he would not.

On 2 July the
Andorra Star
was sunk by a German torpedo. It had been carrying internees bound for Canada. Nearly six hundred were drowned and now, at long last, the newspapers said, ‘What have we done to these friends of ours?’ Overseas internment ceased and people began to think rationally, not with fear. Neighbours were chastened and left lettuce on the doorstep, not stones, and Helen showed the paper to Christoph who was glad it was not his daddy who had drowned and said to Helen that he loved his father and she held him close because he had not said these words for far too long.

Marian, from Alton Mews, came round and said she was sorry for everything she had not done. She came each week after that and sat with Helen in the evening and read stories to Christoph because Emily had now been evacuated to her
grandmother in case Germany started bombing, and without her child she could not sleep or eat.

In July the police drew up outside and Helen watched as they knocked, gripping the window ledge, wondering if they had come for her but they had not. They had come to tell her that her mother had been knocked down in the blackout and killed. She stood quite calmly while they told her, watching the clouds scudding through the sky as white as the gypsophila which she had picked from the edge of the garden that morning.

When they left she sat in the chair and thought of her mother; the tight curls, the smooth skin, the eyes which were hard so much of the time but which had softened when she saw her grandson; the hairbrushes on the dressing table; the young refugees whom she could not condone, and Helen wondered if she would have been able to at her age.

She thought of the evening they had had together when Heine had gone to Liverpool, the loneliness which had been assuaged for those few hours. Then there was the day of the Jubilee, the laughter, the talk and now regret crept in and guilt.

But then she thought of her father; the damp curtain, the bleak room. She thought of the telegram to Hanover, of the sight of her mother’s smile when she arrived home from Germany, the same smile when Heine had not returned from Hemsham that day. That smile which had played across her mother’s face each time she was released from the cupboard. That night she didn’t sleep but sat up stirring weak tea, not knowing what to think or feel but knowing that there was a loss inside her. She heard the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece, the twelve chimes of midnight from the church tower. Then one, two, three, four, five, six o’clock and still she did not know what she felt.

She arranged the funeral but did not take Christoph, and on a hot sunny day she buried her mother next to her father, standing with Mrs Jones and Mrs Sinclair while the vicar spoke, his voice calm and quiet as the bees nuzzled the flowers from the Avenue and her wreath. As she threw a handful of earth warmed by the beating sun on to the coffin, she cried, but not in grief for now she knew what she felt. She cried for what might have been; for the companionship they might have found together, echoes of which had reached them both but which had been destroyed.

She cried for the woman her mother must have once been; for the loneliness she must have experienced especially when Helen turned away from her finally but in the end she could feel no guilt because her mother had betrayed Heine. She turned from the grave as the vicar finished and now there was a sadness which bit deep and would be with her always.