Postcards From No Man's Land (4 page)

I took Hendrika outside to where Papa was waiting with Geordie. She saw at once that he urgently needed treatment and called out a couple of the boys. They lifted Geordie on to a stretcher and took him inside. It was the last we saw of him. After the war we learned that he had died later that day.

I longed to stay and help but Father said no, we had promised Mother we would return straightaway. How I resented him just then! And I think I would have defied him had Hendrika not said they had plenty of help, except for trained nurses, which I was not of course. I have always
thought she only said that to make it easier for me to leave without feeling bad. So off we went, trundling our empty trolley as fast as we could back down the hill, the noise of fighting already louder than on our way up. I remember the bitter-tasting hot smell of gunfire, which seemed to singe the air.

At home, Mother had cooked potatoes with cold pork and apple-sauce for Ron and Norman, who were keeping watch upstairs. Father and I ate some while we told Mother what we had seen and heard. During the afternoon, soldiers came streaming back from the direction of Arnhem, looking worn out. An officer visited, checking on Ron and Norman. They talked in the front bedroom for a few minutes. When the officer left, Ron looked unhappy but would not say very much, only that things were not going as well as they had hoped. Other soldiers came for drinking water and asked if they could wash. We helped them of course. And afterwards in the cold dusk we stood outside looking south towards Nijmegen, where we could see in the sky the glow of flames and hear the crump of large guns firing again and again. Ron said that was the main army fighting its way to us. He and Norman were so tired by now, not having slept for three nights, that Father suggested that he and I keep watch while they got some sleep. But Ron said they would be ‘for it’ if they were both caught sleeping on duty. So Father suggested I watched with Ron, while Norman slept, then Father and Norman would take over while Ron slept. Norman persuaded him that this would be okay. So for the first half of the night, I sat with Mother watching from the back windows, while Ron kept watch at the front.

On Wednesday the worst time began. Till then it had been the battle of Arnhem. Now it became the battle of Oosterbeek. We did not know it at the time, but only a small group of about one thousand men had reached the bridge at
Arnhem and were holding it against overwhelming odds. The Germans had cut off the rest of the British troops, about eight thousand men, and were surrounding them at Oosterbeek, in a rectangle bounded by the western part of our village and the woodland beyond, with the railway as the boundary to the north and the river to the south.

The Germans started an artillery barrage in the morning, and this time we were not spared in our part of the village. All our windows were blown in, one of our chimneys received a direct hit, shells burst against our walls and fell all around. We sheltered in the cellar whenever this was happening. And were soon joined by soldiers who had been instructed to form a defensive line along our part of the village. In the intervals between bombardments they dug trenches in our back garden, but they asked permission to come in to our cellar as soon as the shelling started because they said they preferred our company to a lonely hole in the ground with no protection from a direct hit or from flying shrapnel.

In the evening German tanks were spotted coming our way and everyone was ordered in to the cellar, taking food and water and whatever else we thought would help in case of a siege. I counted twenty-seven of us crammed together, leaving no space for anyone to lie down flat, while up above it sounded as if the world were falling on our heads. We had no light, except candles, of which there were plenty, because the soldiers had been issued with one each as part of their equipment. But the worst of our hardships was that we had no proper lavatory, only a bucket in the cellar’s coal hole. I hated using it and tried not to drink so that I would not need to go. But fear and anxiety are great makers of urine. Next day Father searched out a large metal container with a lid which he had stowed away in our shed. He cleared a space for it in the coal hole and nailed up a blanket to provide a little privacy. When we had used the bucket, we poured the contents into the container and that
made life a little more bearable.

Men who were seriously injured were carried off to a dressing station, which by now had been set up not far away. The men with only slight injuries stayed with us and Mother and I helped clean and bandage their wounds. So after all I became a nurse. At first I was squeamish, but I discovered then how quickly you learn to cope with terrible things if you have no choice. And luckily I inherit from my mother a practical view of life. While we worked, the soldiers told us about their homes and families, their friends and girlfriends, and showed us photos. Mostly they were very young, nineteen and twenty, and I think wanted more than anything to be mothered.

All the time the noise around us from every direction was endless and nerve-wracking. At first I had been afraid. Not now. I think this was because of the cheerfulness of the soldiers and so many of them being about my own age. For a protected and well-brought-up girl like me, sitting squashed up against these young men from another country, talking about our lives, eating and sleeping beside them, and performing our most private functions together was like a liberation in itself. One after another, my inhibitions were stripped away. Never mind the stench and the noise and the dust flying and plaster falling from the walls, covering us with a pall of pink powder whenever a shell burst, I felt as if my future was with us in our crowded embattled cellar.

From time to time the barrage stopped for a while—‘Jerry’s having some schnapps to keep his courage up!’ the men would say, and Norman would mimic Hitler, which he was very good and funny at doing. Then we would stumble out into the garden to stretch our creaking limbs and breathe some fresh air, though to call what we smelt ‘fresh’ is perhaps not the right word. Some of the houses along our street were burning and others were so damaged they looked like ruins in the process of being torn down. The
roof and walls of our house were full of holes, the chimneys had gone, and the top corner at the front had been shot away, leaving a ragged gap staring into my parents’ bedroom at their wrecked bed with its torn bedclothes flapping in the wind. I felt embarrassed, as if my parents had suddenly appeared in public wearing only tattered underwear.

‘Now we know what war means,’ said Mother.

I tried not to, but could not help shedding a few tears at the sight of our battered home. Ron, who was with us, said nothing, only put his arm round my shoulders and gave me a comforting hug.

POSTCARD

I can shake off everything if I write;

my sorrows disappear,

my courage is reborn.

Anne Frank

HE WAS BEGINNING
to hate this place.

His arrival yesterday had been embarrassing. His visit to the Anne Frank house, the event he’d been looking forward to the most, had been upsetting. His confusion of boy for girl had unnerved him. The mugging had left him duff. The muggin’s run had left him bushed. It and the rain, still piddling down, had left him humectant. And now this: a phoney book of matches, a condom, and a message.

The book was not a book and didn’t have matches, for all he knew the condom was defective, and the message was in a language he couldn’t read. Well, mostly. The figures were probably a phone number—but was it Ton’s or another con?
Niets
probably meant no. Was
in
in Dutch the same as ‘in’ in English? Amsterdam he knew, and what he knew of it so far he could do without. Was
is
the same as ‘is’ in English? Too much to hope for, surely?
Wat het lijkt?
Oh, to hell with it! Who cares!

Why did he always react to things when it was too late? Why was it that he never knew whether he liked something till it was over, never quite knew what he thought till it didn’t matter any more? Take yesterday. As soon as he found out there were problems he should have said thanks but no thanks and flitted back home straightaway. But it wasn’t until he was in bed that he felt—really
felt
—just how
embarrassed he was. And, for heaven’s sake, how could he
not
have realised that Ton was a boy? Thinking about it now, he knew he’d known all the time. Had sensed it. But he’d wanted Ton to be a girl, had wanted it very much, and wouldn’t let himself
see
that he wasn’t. The truth was he’d deceived himself. And then when he was made to see that Ton was not what he wanted him to be, he’d not known how to react, not known what to say or do, but had just stood there like a dummy.

Maybe his father was right and he really was a congenital wimp.

For the next few minutes he indulged in a bout of self-loathing, his mood encouraged by the rain. Hamlet was dead right. How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable were all the uses of this world. How sullied he was himself. And how maybe he should shuffle off this mortal coil. Not with a bare bodkin of course but in a more appropriately modern fashion. By ODing on E perhaps or smoking the pipe of a car exhaust—his father’s, naturally.

After a while of such musing he told himself what a disgusting contortion of unadulterated crap he was (adding many other luscious deprecations selected from his extensive thesaurus). But such thoughts only served to prove that he was indeed a wimp, a jerk, a nerd, and therefore that he had very good reason to be suicidally mopey about himself. And so the circle was closed and his melancholia, feeding on itself, became self-sustaining.

At home, when such a mood possessed him, two people usually helped him break out of the vicious circle. One was Anne Frank. Reading her
Diary
always revived him, but he didn’t have his copy to help him now, which was just as well, as it would have been stolen too, and he was sure he couldn’t have borne that loss. The other was his grandmother. Sarah had persuaded him that these attacks of what she called his mouse moods were not his fault, not a failure in himself for which he should feel guilty, as he always did
when the bouts were over, but that they were simply growing pains, an adolescent affliction, like being shortsighted or allergic to house dust, something people suffered as an accident of birth or of everyday life that you learn to control or deal with.

He sat staring out from his refuge feeling like the mouse looking out from its bolt hole in the episode he wished he did not remember, the one that gave Sarah the name for his fits. That memory went along with a recurrent dream which he had had again last night, so he should have expected an attack of mouse mood today. Apart from its role as a herald of gloom the dream also upset him because he sensed that it was telling him something vital he needed to understand about himself but could never quite grasp. Even when he was in good spirits, cheerful, light-hearted, the memory of the dream would for no apparent reason invade his mind and occupy his thoughts with its riddle.

As it did again while he waited for the rain to stop.

One evening soon after he came to live with his beloved grandmother, Jacob spotted a mouse scuttling along the floor right up against the wainscot. Sarah screamed and jack-knifed her feet on to her chair. Though not the slightest prissy, she had an unbearable phobia about mice, associating them from childhood with dirt and disease, dreading their quick unpredictable movements, and, being fastidious, unable to abide the thought of touching them or, worse, of them touching her. Nor could Jacob, being in this respect as in others very like his grandmother. His knee-jerk reaction was to jump up and chase after the wee sleeket timorous cowerin’ beastie, yelling imprecations and waving at it the book he had been reading. (What ridiculous stereotypical reactions, Sarah had said afterwards, the female closing her legs and trying to climb out of danger, the male shouting violent curses and rushing off in counter-threat to hunt the enemy down.)

As startled by them as they had been by it, the mouse turned tail and skittered in to the first, as it hoped, safe hiding place it could find, which happened to be a very narrow space between the bottom of a bookcase and the wall it didn’t quite abut.

Silence. What’s it doing? Sarah wanted to know. From a safe distance Jacob bent down and tried to peer in. Too dark to see. Fetch a torch, Sarah suggested.

Using the torch and pressing his cheek hard against the floor so that he could squint in to the gap, Jacob saw the small grey-brown mouse snugged in to the back corner, facing out, big ears almost transparent, large black baby eyes, hairless paws as pink and handlike as a miniature monkey’s. Sitting there on its haunches, panting (oh what a panic’s in thy breastie), cleaning its whiskers, and staring out at him.

Only a fieldmouse, he said. I don’t care what sort it is, Sarah said, I don’t want it here, and if it’s a fieldmouse, it’s in the wrong place anyway. We’ll have to get rid of it or I’ll never sleep. Maybe, Jacob said, if I get a stick I could winkle it out and chuck a towel over it and take it outside.

The only suitable prod he could quickly find was a fluffy brush with a thin bamboo handle which was flexible enough to lever into the awkward gap. Even then it would only enter at floor level and move in and out like a piston.

Jacob never liked to think of what happened next. Instead of winkling the mouse out, he poked too hard. His hand could feel the fatal skewering thrust for days afterwards.

The dream occurred for the first time a few nights later. He was not unhappy at the time, nor was it a dream on its own but only the end of a longer one, the rest of which he couldn’t ever remember until a moment when:

He is talking, he doesn’t know who to or what about, though quite cheerfully. He is in an ill-lit confined space, maybe a large cupboard: there are no windows. As he talks
he sees out of the corner of his eye towards his right on a wide empty wooden shelf at chest height a small dark-brown lumpy bundle hardly bigger than a man’s fist. He turns his head to look directly at it, then gives it a poke with a short thin iron rod with a flange on its end shaped like an upper lip that he finds he is holding in his right hand. As soon as he touches it the bundle falls apart, turning into two large mice about the size of rabbits. One flops on to its back, legs splayed wide like a dog wanting its tummy scratched, the pink of its belly sparsely covered in soft light-grey fur. His attention, however, is taken by the other mouse, which has rolled on to its side and is curled in a foetal position, head tucked in to paws. It is lying very still. Is it alive? He pokes it with the lip of his metal probe. Nothing. He taps it lightly on the side of its head. Now at once it is a mouse no longer but a human child, with a large, much too large head, and a face that disturbs him. He taps it again, harder and on the temple this time. The child whimpers but does not open its eyes. He hits it again, and again, each time with deliberate increasingly powerful force that he feels in his hand and along his arm and into his bicep. Between each blow he carefully observes the child’s reaction. After each hit the boy moans in pain and distress and has also grown larger and is closer to Jacob. It is as if the child is coming closer without either of them moving. Like a film, each shot in bigger close-up than the one before. After the fourth or fifth assault a wound appears on the child’s temple and blood oozes out, thick bright red blood, but not in great quantity. It doesn’t flood out or run down his face but congeals into a shiny lozenge on the boy’s temple. Excited by the blood, Jacob strikes him harder still. And harder. But now he is thinking to himself between each blow:
What am I doing? I shouldn’t be doing this! Why am I doing this? I don’t want to do this
! But goes on hitting him again and again till the child is in such big close-up the only part of him Jacob can see is his injured bleeding head. And
the little whimpering cries the child lets out after each blow are more and more upsetting, more terrible than if he were screaming. Yet all the time the child’s eyes are closed, as if he is asleep.