A War of Flowers (2014)

By the same author:

The Winter Garden

Black Roses

The Weighing of the Heart

Patrimony

The Shell House

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © Thynker Ltd 2014

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

The right of Jane Thynne to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

HB ISBN: 978-1-47113-188-2
TPB ISBN: 978-1-47113-189-9
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47113-191-2

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Typeset in Bembo by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For Charlie

‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom
we know nothing.’

Neville Chamberlain, September 1938

‘Our displacement of women from public life occurs solely to restore their essential dignity to them.’

Joseph Goebbels

‘In my state, the Mother is the most important citizen.’

Adolf Hitler

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

August, 1938

Another fine, summer’s day and the MS
Wilhelm Gustloff
cruise liner was making its leisurely way across the Atlantic Ocean. The 25,000 ton ship rose like a sheer
white cliff from the water, eight storeys high, gracefully transporting a cargo of more than a thousand citizens of the German Reich. The sun was already dazzling, bouncing back from a sea of
hammered cobalt as the liner’s prow carved a confident line past the spectacular coastline of Madeira. The island, with its black volcanic sand, its coves fringed with laurel trees and
red-roofed houses clambering up the mountain slopes, glittered in the sapphire morning light. Birds with iridescent necks and little dashes of blood at their throats fluttered through the wooded
mountains, which were swathed at their peaks with a light garland of cloud. A fine spray, thick with the tang of salt, pearled the faces of the people watching from the deck, many of whom had never
set foot outside the Reich and had mostly never seen the sea. The liner was the first tailor-made ship of the National Socialist Strength Through Joy movement, the Kraft durch Freude, organized by
the German Labour Front, and it was the only way an ordinary German was able to leave the country now. The fact that they were getting a glimpse of the world that lay beyond the borders of the
Reich – for now at any rate – and they were seeing it on a two-week cruise costing less than a fortnight’s wages, was yet another reason to be grateful for the Führer’s
reforms.

Ada Freitag had never seen the sea before either, but that didn’t mean she wanted to hang over the deck, waving a swastika flag at it. Smearing a little more Elizabeth Arden suncream on
her freckles and over the skin on her shoulders, already turning a rich caramel, she anchored her bag more firmly beneath one arm, lay back in her deckchair and tried unsuccessfully to relax.

Relaxing was not, Ada had quickly realized, a priority on a Strength Through Joy holiday. Even when at sea, any citizen enjoying a KdF tour had a packed schedule of daily activity, requiring
daunting levels of enthusiasm and stamina. The day began in the main dining room with a ceremony of dedication to the Führer (compulsory), presided over by a portrait of the man himself,
regulation scowl in place, tar-black hair slicing diagonally across his brow. The ship had originally been named the
Adolf Hitler
, until the assassination of Gustloff, Party leader in
Switzerland, by a Jewish upstart provided a Nazi martyr tailor-made for the bow of a ship. But even without his name on the side, Hitler’s image was still everywhere; in the cocktail lounge,
above the swimming pool, even glowering out at passengers when they took a bath. There was no such thing as a holiday from the Führer.

The morning’s dedication ceremony was followed by a strenuous series of PE workouts on deck, gym sessions, fencing, table tennis, dancing lessons, piano recitals, swimming galas and bridge
parties, all of which were not so much obligatory as strongly recommended by the ship’s holiday reps who didn’t leave you alone until you gave in.

Just walking round the ship was a major expedition. There was the Führer suite on B deck, kept for VIPs, the walnut-panelled Folk Costume lounge, and the Winter Garden. The German hall, the
Music salon, the Ballroom and seven different bars. There was an indoor swimming pool, bouncing with echoes from excited Bund Deutscher Mädel girls bathed in dazzling, refracted light. And
then there were meals, meals and more meals that you had to dress up for and were served with napkins folded into swastika shapes, beneath banners sewn with the KdF slogan ‘
Enjoy Your
Lives!
’. The coffee tables had ashtrays with pictures of the ship on their plastic bases, and matchbooks, with
Wilhelm Gustloff
printed in gold lettering alongside them. Someone
had put the Hitler Jugend in charge of the ship radio, which meant that in between the dance music and regular broadcasts from Joseph Goebbels, random exhortations were bellowed over the Tannoy,
mostly concerning military excitements. The most recent one had come when the
Wilhelm Gustloff
passed a couple of German warships idling off the coast of France, and passengers were urged to
‘think of the man who had given the German people their reputation and their position of power in the world: our Führer’. The HJ boys had also instituted a daily quiz –
sample question ‘What is Adolf Hitler’s favourite flower?’ – to which the passengers roared the answers in unison.

In her deckchair on the sun deck, a silk scarf round her head, Ada kept her eyes shut and sighed. Looking at the sea made her feel sick, what with the glare of the sun off its writhing currents
and the smell of fish. The vast expanse of water only reminded her how far from home she was, and the proximity of so many others made her feel nervous. Far better to lie back and pretend to be
asleep, even if there was no chance of relaxing.

Yesterday, to break the tedium, she had taken a trip ashore, but even on dry land the pace did not relent. It was an outing to Funchal to view the flora. The group wended their way past
jacarandas thrusting fiery purple blossom in their faces, giant ferns and dragon trees, yellow frangipani and tremulous orchids. Above them the mountain slopes were tumbling with verdant growth and
in the market old women in shawls attempted to sell them lace, wicker baskets and painted gourds. One woman had a fruit Ada had never seen, pomegranate it was called, a fruit like a cup full of
jewels, but as she stretched out her hand, the tour guide leapt forward and advised her not to touch it on account of disease. The guides were exactly like schoolteachers. While everyone was
marvelling at the banana trees and the birds of paradise and flamingo flowers, the tour guide kept pointing out the poverty of the local inhabitants, their ramshackle homes and gutters flowing with
waste, saying it proved how other cultures were inferior to the Germans. It was lucky the locals didn’t understand. The peasant women kept on smiling their toothless smiles while the group
ignored them and hurried on. Bringing up the rear were a couple of SS surveillance staff, employed to prevent the women striking up holiday romances with foreign men. The guards were a burly pair,
who saw everything and wouldn’t hesitate to rough up any locals who tried as much as a friendly greeting.

Avoiding men had become a full time occupation for Ada. She couldn’t help having good legs, a nice dress and a suntan, but the ship was full of lads who had qualified for their tickets in
groups from the factories where they worked and were delighted to find any unattached women, let alone a pretty twenty-three-year-old with a voluptuous figure, a snub nose, full lips and eyes of
bright Aryan blue. Ada’s creamy blonde plaits framed a face as delicate as a porcelain doll and her red and yellow halter-neck sundress emphasized her generous curves. They hung around her
like wasps, offering to buy her a beer and asking for a dance. Even when she picked up one of her stack of film magazines they didn’t let up, making idiotic comments about movie stars or
suggesting, predictably, she should be on screen herself.

But Ada had not the slightest interest in men just then, or Madeira and its flowers. She was far too nervous for that. Her entire attention was fixed on the ship’s next stop, Lisbon, where
the
Wilhelm Gustloff
would dock and she would complete the business she had come for. Then there would be plenty of time to enjoy herself and she might even take one of the young men up on
his offer. In the meantime, to stop being bothered, she had come up with a pretty good deterrent.