Second Violin (36 page)

‘Blankets for the sick, and a visit from the MO?’

‘The MO will be here in the morning. I can probably drum up enough blankets for the sick . . . my men will surrender theirs . . . depends how many are claiming sick.’

‘Seven. And a dozen I’d just call elderly.’

‘OK. Leave it with me.’

Eynsford-Hill pushed his way between Jacks and Spinetti. They were, Rod thought, grinning like idiots, revelling in the minor skirmishes of the class war, delighted, smugly pleased to see toff
versus toff work in their favour. What bothered him was that they neither of them seemed to grasp how serious it was. What bothered him was that their perception of him as their champion could be
at best temporary.

Half an hour later half a dozen soldiers brought up trays of bread and cheese. Rod felt a slap on the back from Jacks that he could well have done without. The bread was stale, the cheese
faintly green with the onset of mould.

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ said Jacks. ‘This is disgustin’. Get those buggers back up here and give ’em a piece of your mind, ’Ampstead!’

Rod chewed on his iron rations, thinking this must be how the escaped convict had felt in
Great Expectations.
Awful it was, and way better than nothing at all.

‘Tell you what, Mr Jacks, try flashing
your
old school tie for a change. I think you’ll find they don’t do room service. Or did you think I could work
miracles?’

‘Alright, alright . . . keep yer wig on. I only asked.’

Jacks bit into the bread and cheese, pulled a face at Rod, chewed almost stoically and looked around him. Bad as it was the meal was being wolfed by almost everyone else.

Herr Rosen said softly to Billy, ‘You see, Herr Jacks, we have many of us been here before. Eat first, complain later, if at all, for you may end up with nothing. Believe me, I have eaten
worse. And you, Herr Troy – miracle, shmiracle . . . don’t be so modest.’

Rod lay on the floor, used his bag for a pillow. This must, he thought, be what a coffin feels like. Or, as his metaphor enlarged, what it feels like to be a lead soldier in a toybox . . . lying
as he was ramrod straight between a ramrod straight Rosen and a ramrod straight Hummel. Somewhere over to his right Jacks was squirming, ‘I can’t get comfy.’

‘Sssh, Billy,’ Rod heard Hummel say, then Jacks was up and yelling, ’Ere, wot the bleedin’? . . . It’s a rat . . . a fuckin’ rat just ran over me!’

A shaft of moonlight from the roof showed Jacks leaping from one foot to the other, armed with a shoe.

‘It’s a rat, a fuckin’ rat!’

In seconds he had the room in turmoil, old men wrapped in blankets shuffling around and shouting at one another in German.

‘
Ja
!
Ja
!
Hier
!’

Jacks pounced with his shoe, walloped and missed. Spinetti came at it from the other side, walloped and scored. He picked up the rat by its tail, but before he could say a word, the cry went up
from the other side of the room, ‘
Noch eine, noch eine.
’

Soon half the men in the room had taken off one shoe and were pounding away at the floorboards, at rats real or imagined in a mad cacophony of drumming.

Another Lancashire corporal appeared suddenly at the top of the stairs, a man either side of him with rifles levelled.

‘What the bleedin’ ’ell is going on ’ere?’

Silence. Then a lone voice said, ‘
Ratten.
’

Then dozens of voices took it up, ‘
Ratten
!
Ratten
!’

‘What!?’

‘Rats.’

Hands went up among the prisoners, three dead rats held by their tails.

The corporal muttered, ‘Jesus H. Christ’, motioned to his men to lower their rifles, and as he did so there was a cry that seemed to come from a thousand miles away. Faint and clear
at the same time. Rod looked behind him. A window had been forced open. He looked out and down, the corporal rushed to his side. Five floors down they could see the outline of a man, splayed across
the cobblestones.

Rod had no idea who it was. The sight, the idea of another suicide took his breath away. Billy Jacks came up beside him.

‘Not another?’ he said gently.

‘Yeah,’ said the corporal. ‘Another bloody jumper. My third this fuckin’ week! Now I’ve got to fill out fuckin’ forms an’ fuckin’ chits and make a
report to the fuckin’ captain. And then the fuckin’ captain’s got to make a report to the fuckin’ colonel. Why do they always pick my fuckin’ shift? Why can’t
you fuckers do it on the day watch? Why can’t you do it before you fuckin’ get here?’

He barged his way out, took his men with him. Rod looked down at the body, looked at Jacks, looked down at the body, at the posse of uniforms gathering around it.

Hummel was standing behind them. Poked his head between them and he too looked down.

‘Always they yump,’ he said and turned away.

Rod turned back to the room, a sea of frightened faces, and found his voice.

‘Who?’ he said. ‘Does anyone know who?’

And no one did.

Later, cold and miserable, craving a blanket, ramrod straight again between Hummel and Herr Rosen, Rod heard Billy say over him, ‘Ummer?’

‘
Ja
, Billy.’

‘You said “always they yump”.’

‘That’s because they do.’

‘Sure. All I meant to say was it’s “jump” with a J.’

‘Thank you, Billy.’

Later, Rod heard Billy start to snore and knew then what the music of the night would be, the bass rumble of his snoring underscoring the arpeggios of urine landing in firebuckets as the elderly
got up to pee, one after another, all night – but then why should he sleep? When had he ever known two deaths in a day before, let alone two suicides? It was a recipe for eternal insomnia.
The stuff of which dreams are not made.

Roused at six. No breakfast. No Medical Officer. Shuffled back onto a train, unwashed, unshaven, bleary. Eynsford-Hill sticking his head in through the carriage window to say,
‘What you’ve got to understand is –’, only to be cut short by Rod’s curt ‘Fuck off’ and the train juddering into motion.

At Liverpool Pier Head Rod finally realised his brother had been right. They were headed for the Isle of Man. They lined up for the noon crossing to Douglas aboard the RMS
Ben My
Chree.

For a while, for the few hours it took to cross the Irish Sea on a calm, beautiful summer’s day, it was almost possible to ignore war, captivity and the rumbling of his stomach. It was
bliss to watch land fall away, it was bliss to watch nothing but sea, it was bliss to watch new land come into sight. Even half a dozen Spitfires circling briefly on a training exercise did not
dent the illusion.

Late afternoon brought them to disembarkation in Douglas harbour, another stupid sergeant bellowing at them. A miserable, downtrodden private to march them off again. A haphazard path across the
town, up the hill to another ring of barbed wire.

It seemed to Rod that ‘camp’ was hardly a good description. The Army had cordoned off whole streets of seaside boarding houses. Simply rolled out barbed wire and declared what was
within a camp. The landladies of these establishments had been told to pack and go, the houses stuffed to the eaves with refugees of all (enemy) nations and, in the absence of proper screens, the
windows painted black. It looked bizarre. The bright, garish colours of the seaside punctuated by the lightless panes of black.

They stood at the gates and waited. Voices from behind the wire called out names to men in line . . . Manny, Asa, Yonny? . . . it’s me . . . Hans, Josef, Willi!

The miserable private on guard duty came out to talk to the miserable private who’d marched them up from the quay.

‘Wot? More? We can’t take this lot. We’re stuffed. Where do they all come from?’

‘They just marched up the hill.’

‘Well march ’em back down again, they can’t come in here.’

‘Maybe Port Erin will take ’em?’

‘Maybe. So long as they don’t come here.’

Rod could hardly miss this.

‘I say . . . do I understand that you’re moving us on somewhere else?’

‘S’right mate. They reckon this place is full.’

‘So . . . more walking?’

‘Bound to be some walking.’

‘No,’ Rod said firmly. ‘I’ll walk, and so will the younger men. But the sick and the elderly get off now. They’ve been travelling for two days. You push some of
these chaps an inch further and they’ll collapse.’

The two soldiers exchanged glances.

‘But . . . that’s most of ’em. Most of ’em look sick or old.’

‘Then they’d better stay here, hadn’t they?’

The guard looked behind him as though seeking support, as though an officer might helpfully appear on the scene at any moment, but none did. Only a bobbing sea of heads still waving and calling
out to those they recognised.

‘Alright, nobody wants any bother. But just the sick uns and the old uns. OK?’

‘OK,’ Rod said.

The gates opened. Rod called out in German that anyone who felt unwell or was over sixty should go inside. Men shuffled past him. Men who looked sick, men who looked old, men who looked neither
and the two who spoke no known language. This whittled their numbers down to a handful. Nobody stood still long enough to be counted.

They marched back down the hill to the railway station, to a quaint narrow gauge railway, where pot-domed little tank engines pulled brightly coloured carriages along a three-foot track.

Their guard handed them over to another with a tired, ‘All yours, mate’ and ‘Watch out for the big bugger with the posh voice, he’s a trouble-maker.’

Their latest escort didn’t seem a bad sort. Grinning rather than smiling, but that was at least an expression and far better than the way the soldiers had behaved last night or this
evening. He ignored the warning, turned his grin on Rod and said, ‘You’re one of the lucky ones, mate.’

‘Lucky. We don’t even know where we’re going. We just get bounced from pillar to post.’

‘Trust me, mate, in less than an hour you’ll be in heaven.’

The grin had become a smile, Rod could not but trust to the honesty of the man. ‘In heaven’, clearly, was no euphemism for meeting one’s maker – they weren’t about
to be put up against the wall and shot. After all, the British didn’t do that sort of thing, did they? And as soon as the thought had achieved language in his mind he realised how difficult
it would be explaining that to the Jews, the Germans and the Austrians on this train, who had fled persecution, who had fled camps, and probably did think they had leapt from frying pan to firing
squad. They had seen two countries that they may well have thought above that sort of thing descend into casual murder and political thuggery. Who, prior to 1914, would
not have considered Germany amongst the most civilised of countries? Why should it not happen here?

It was like the descent into a dream. The descent from a dream. He would never be sure which. Steam from the locomotive wreathed around his ankles, the smell of a childhood
summer drifting to his nostrils, smoke and soot mingling with the steam, the racing clouds across the sky, the heavy hint of rain in a summer evening, rounding off a day of glorious summer
sunshine, the awed, gentle hush of Mitteleurope hissing behind him, soft as smoke and steam. And as the last puff from the engine dies away, the platform clears, and in front of his eyes the
station name board,
Heaven’s Gate.
And a poem of Edward Thomas’s surfacing in his mind,
Adelstrop
, remembering the slow train stopping in obscurest Oxfordshire or
Gloucestershire, the singing of a blackbird and of all the birds for miles around – and then a blackbird did sing, and it seemed to him he was wrapped inside the dream, wrapped in birdsong,
wrapped in steam, wrapped in a soft, shlooshy murmur of enquiring Yiddish. How improbable was Heaven’s Gate? How much the stuff of dreams?

‘Told yer.’

It was the soldier who’d chatted to him on the platform in Douglas.

‘Not quite,’ said Rod. ‘You dropped a hint.’

‘Nah, if I’d told you there was a place called Heaven’s Gate, it’d ruin the surprise and you’d never have believed me.’

‘I’m not sure I believe you even now.’

‘Suit yerself, but don’t hang about. If you ask me it’s going to piss it down.’

Out of the dream. Rain and night. Out of the dream. Piss it down.

It was a matter of less than a quarter of a mile to their destination. Rod did a head count to please the soldier and realised for the first time that they were down now to
less than twenty. Mostly middle-aged. Indeed the youngest seemed to be made up entirely of those with whom he had shared a compartment on the journey from London. They’d lost the two
Incomprehensibles at Douglas, and they’d lost Klemper. The five remained – Rod, Jacks, Hummel, Spinetti and the still rather enigmatic Herr Rosen. He shrugged off the word survivors
– unbidden in his mind and not yet appropriate, and said to the soldier, ‘I make it nineteen.’

‘Me too.’

‘How many of us should there be?’

‘Search me. I’ll just tell ’em nineteen delivered and leave it at that.’

Rod and he walked side by side, down a dusty lane, thick with dog roses and honeysuckle, away from the station, the raggle-taggle band of old Jews trailing along behind, all a-mutter. They
dribbled to a halt at two large stone gateposts. The gateposts had lost their gates, no doubt being melted down to make spitfires or dreadnoughts, the iron hinges stuck out like severed limbs, but
two inscriptions remained. The newer read ‘St Margaret’s School for Girls. Est. 1921’, and the one above, its lettering black with age, the contrast between stone and carving
almost dead flat, read ‘Heaven’s Gate, Convent of the Sacred Heart. 1866.’

As at Engels’ mill, makeshift gates had been knocked up from three-by-two and barbed wire. One half lay propped open, and in the space another infantry man stood puffing on a cigarette in
lazy expectation.

‘Another lot?’ he said simply.

‘Nineteen, Ted,’ said the first soldier, adding a truthless, ‘All accounted for.’