Spitfire Girls (57 page)

‘Have the others arrived?' asked Tim.

Edith was engrossed in the newspaper.

‘Miss Allam?'

Edith looked up, her face white as snow. ‘Please let me read this,' she said, as more voices closed in.

‘Friedrich.'

Valerie Cobb stood at the door and Kranz was transfixed. She moved towards him, her father in tow, and Friedrich felt the same fascination that had intermingled with the sting of wanting he had known on that first meeting in the little hut. His mind reeled with images: Hunstanton, the caravan, and Shirley's talk of Blood Libel tumbled into visions of Valerie at the edge of his ecstasy in a small bed that could barely contain their pulsating nakedness.

‘We must not make this into a production number,' Sir Henry Cobb crackled, pointing to Grunberg's bags and snapping his fingers at a guard. ‘There will be a few photographs when we leave the building – in front of the lovely grounds.'

Valerie and Friedrich had not unlocked their minds, and as bodies moved about them she could feel his mental imagery penetrating her own brain, their cerebral meshing a cauldron that obliterated her year of joyless solitude in one flash.

‘Hope you don't mind!' shouted Stan, his camera snapping.

‘I thought you said outside,' Hartmut mumbled, pushing him aside and nearly knocking him to the ground.

Valerie glared. ‘Stella Teague was to have joined us,' she said tersely, ‘but she has been ferrying Spits for Malta. She sends you her greatest love, Mr Grunberg. I give you my love, too.'

Sir Henry glowered, his anger at the simple nature of the revelation of Friedrich's whereabouts – a letter from an elderly ballet master to a former student – still churning inside his abdomen. Haydon had decided the exercise should be a publicity stunt to demonstrate British compassion. Cobb and the Ministry had reluctantly agreed it was time Kranz was set free and his expertise in aircraft production put to national use.

As for Valerie, all she wanted was the help of Hartmut, peace for the ballet master, and – in parallel with the nation's requirements – the expertise of her lover. She hoped Shirley would be able to handle the renewed presence of the man for whom Commanding Officer Valerie Cobb would die.

‘This is awful,' said Edith, immobile.

Slowly, the men and women present turned to the girl, her face a mixture of agony and confusion. On the front page of the
Anglian Press
was a blown up close-up of Errol Carnaby, and the banner headline:

 

Hideous Crime: Negro Held

Information was not disseminated in the Spanish prison, and news of the war arrived only with a fresh inmate. Incredibly, this new captive had smuggled a newspaper into the compound, and ten faces crowded around to read over her shoulder. Of various nationalities, some of the victims retreated when they realized the print was in English but a small cluster of women devoured the information with relish. They were unguarded today, having been brought a breakfast of roach-infested figs and water, and since then no captors had reappeared. Figs were dreaded for the terrible cramps they produced in the scorching heat, but the offerings had to be consumed since, as each day passed, one never knew if food would ever arrive again. In recent weeks torture had subsided and the prisoners were often left alone for whole afternoons and evenings at a time. Judging by the testiness of their senior tormentor, some of the recipients of figs suspected a change in the direction of the war.

Generously circulating her precious
Times
, the new woman allowed it to leave her sight when a male inmate passed her on her way back from the only torture session she had endured in her first week. Usually, the first few days when the skilled sadists tried to break foreigners were the ones some did not survive. Even when this latest arrival was introduced to the crude removal of fingernails, the men performing this initiation ceremony seemed distracted and lacking in the glee with which they had inflicted agonies
for years. This sublimely excruciating act, which had left their most recent acquisition wanting to die, caused the new woman to plead with them to chop off her hands because she thought it would lessen her torment. That night she could not think, sleep or read the newspaper and her excrement soiled her bedding. Gouging of one's fingernails had become a dim memory for the women around her, most of whom were mutilated to the point that they would be unrecognizable to an old friend. Their new cellmate could not sleep, and they were annoyed by the anguished noises she was making.

In the next corridor along, the male population had decreased in the past three months, no new arrivals having been available for the sport their captors called ‘forced rape'. With the women left, for once, to keep their legs unspread and to feel their wounds healing, a certain quiet had settled upon the prison and for the first time in three years a sense of hope began to permeate their reeking habitat.

‘Pacific – paradise under siege – what an incongruous scenario.' One of the men had seized the coveted newspaper, the front page of which showed a terrifying wire photo of naval vessels engulfed in blackness and flame.

‘This means Roosevelt's in it at long last,' said another inmate, scratching at the hideous rash that had spread from his knees upwards into his anus, as if following the path of a giant tentacled insect within his limbs. ‘It's been so long since I caught up on the history of the Far East,' he continued, scratching furiously all the time.

‘That itch will eat you up in the end, my friend,' said his companion.

‘Do you remember when we were at school and I got rushed to that hospital where Dame Dazzle looked after me? Her face keeps coming back to me at the oddest moments. It's been twenty years since that day.' He gesticulated wildly with his hands as if to make the other man understand him more fully.

‘Perhaps your life is passing before you in small spurts. As bits of you are taken away in the torture chamber, you die proportionately each time.'

‘It was Hertfordshire – 1922.' He had not been heard.

‘Did you say 1922? We weren't born yet.'

Both men tired when they talked, their frames making minimal shadows on the slippery floor. Other men slept, and their bodies stank, but the newspaper had kindled hope in this pair and they fought off slumber to read that the United States had entered the war at last, although there was little detail.

What had been the provocation?

Both men were intrigued. Had they been able to chat to the new girl who had slipped them the paper, they would have learned that the American base at Pearl Harbour had been attacked on 7 December by the Japanese, causing catastrophic damage to the fleet and countless casualties.

Their minds had begun to work in unison after having been confined together for so many years, and now the pair looked at each other knowingly. This new woman had delivered a ragged, yellowing newspaper and they calculated that, if America had taken up arms in December 1941, months of transformation would already have taken place, and by now the conflict might be turning in their favour. They read of the siege of Malta and of the island
winning the George Cross. It appeared Roosevelt had released the US aircraft carrier ‘Wasp' at the personal request of Winston Churchill. Fantasizing the absurd possibility of liberation in 1942 and an end to their horrendous ordeal, the men shook skeletal hands and spent the rest of the night combing the glorious pages and learning about Shirley Bryce. In a human-interest story they were told that Miss Bryce, Britain's most valued ground engineer, had gone on leave from the Air Transport Auxiliary for the first time in a year to visit her mother near Cannon Street, London, but unfortunately an enemy bomb had made a direct hit on her mother's house and both women were killed instantly …

When the men were awakened unusually early the next morning the newspaper had absorbed excrement and urine from the floor and the inmate riddled with rashes tried to salvage the adored black-on-yellow pages. A hovering guard pulled the man away, leaving the other half of the team tearing out pictures and advertisements and making a small pile of foul-smelling cuttings. An hour passed and the other men in his cell had been taken away. Something was definitely afoot, he told himself, and wished his rags had pockets for the collection of choice news items. He was the last to be taken away, dragged up off the floor, his booty scattering everywhere. He cried out but the newspaper was gone for ever. Led into the sort of bright and cheerful room he had not seen for a year, he was given a small plate of fresh-smelling food.

‘I've heard of the last feast before the execution, but this is a bit much,' he said, grinning at his minders.

‘They call you the idiot here, Florian,' said one of the Spanish fascist thugs.

‘For a death banquet this is better than most.' Paul ate, the food making him dizzy as he wondered where his brother had been taken. Unbelievably, he was handed a carafe of good wine. ‘Surely you are too kind,' he said, fighting off the nausea of a dead body being revived.

‘We have had some interesting revelations today, and the boss is feeling in a generous mood. All the prisoners are being fed and bathed.'

‘Are we being visited by the great man himself, the Generalissimo Francisco Franco?' Paul asked.

‘Oh, much better than that,' replied the guard, leaving the cell.

Paul's nausea was increasing and he sank down in the chair, his head slumped. When the appalling sensation had subsided he moved to the neatly made camp bed, and when his guard returned he knew he had been nourished in order to be alert in his performance of a series of sexual acts upon a creature who had been brought in and was now banging, banging, banging its body against the bed frame, grunting in a voice so ugly as to chill but which Paul could not hear. Cries that he could not hear were cascading down the corridor and permeating his new palace, their agony making the creature curl into a little ball whose head rested against the spotless mattress.

As Paul drank the wine, he reflected that when he and Zack next talked in their cell they could fill the empty days by learning sign language. Belching loudly, he caused the female torture victim to look up for the first time, and when he saw a face he had known a lifetime his eerie
scream reverberated all the way to the interrogation room, where Zack Florian's mutilated testicles had been pinned to the wall next to the rapists' favourite picture of Rita Hayworth.

Errol had been asked to clean a rifle for a newly arrived Air Force man, the weapon having been meant not for war but for games. Lord Truman had invited the handful of American officers to his shoot and it was left to Errol Carnaby, of the coloured brigade, to ready shotguns for the pheasant weekend.

In this part of rural Norfolk, Hitler's war seemed remote and the trickle of Americans had not yet reached invasion levels. Errol, his book of Blake's poetry tucked into a small haversack, resigned himself to being excluded from the outing. Albion was now his home but he mused that entry into Jerusalem was more complicated than he had envisaged. On that day in Philadelphia when he had begged the Recruiting Officer for shipment to Britain, his vision of Blake's kingdom had excluded the criteria necessary for membership of the local shoot. Errol had laughed when a fellow Negro soldier suggested he was possessed of more natural elegance than any of the other men assembled with Wing Commander Charlie Buxton for the exclusive gathering.

Errol's trial was several months old and 1943 saw a build-up of the American presence in Britain. Much attention was being paid to the Carnaby cause célèbre because the base of the 466th Bomb Group, Eighth Air Force, Second Air Division, was gaining strength in Truman's parish of Weston Longville. Errol had loved Attlebridge when, in the twilight of 1942 he first arrived from Fort
Oglethorpe, Georgia. His group was photographed in the centre of the Norfolk village, and for some reason Errol's likeness was earmarked for a centre spread on the front page of the
Anglian Press
. At the time his comrades joked about the British photographing the arrival of tribal warriors from one of their African colonies. Errol hoped the bizarre publicity would attract Edith Allam's attention; in fact, Charlie Buxton summoned her to the new base to meet the entire American contingent, who included Molly and Kelvin and a hulking Military Policeman, Frank Malone. On the day Edith visited, Errol had been called to cleaning duties and told the white platoon was off limits for the time being.

Inexplicably, the picture story was never printed by the
Anglian Press
. It was only on the eve of the trial that Errol's face was plastered across Norfolk, Suffolk and neighbouring counties. Seeing his black self displayed like a WANTED poster across a county, his memory was jogged back to the days in Fort Oglethorpe: there, the coloured lady soldiers were called Waccoons and the sole Jewess in the white WACS was ostracized for not taking part in a marathon drinking weekend that left the whole of the base unconscious. Life in the fort was desolate and he thought of Edith ceaselessly throughout the misery of basic training. Here in Norfolk, however, Errol had got to know places like Shipdham and Wendling and he also got to know Lady Truman very well indeed.

They had become friends when her ladyship asked Charlie Buxton if he could recommend a good editor to evaluate and correct some prose Tim Haydon had written for an American publication. When the handsome black man first appeared at the front door of the Truman residence
she had been horrified and extremely frightened, slamming the door and gasping for breath. Running out of the rear door of the large mansion, she stumbled through half a mile of undergrowth until the new air base was in sight, and begged Buxton for assistance: his Lordship, she babbled, was up in town, meaning Norwich, and she was defenceless without staff! The Wing Commander had calmly reassured her that her sinister intruder was the American editor she had requested.