Some Old Lover's Ghost (24 page)

Harold gave a croak of laughter. ‘You’d better give them to Lorna and come and see Freddie.’ Lorna wrote the agony column. ‘She loves brats. I can’t bear them till they begin to be civilized.’

They moved out of the Fulham basement in the February of 1938. Max’s salary, almost double what he had earned as a freelance journalist, allowed him to pay off their debts, and to put down a deposit on a house in a better district of London. The new house was narrow and four-storied, with a dark and mysterious strip of garden and a white-painted front that looked out onto a small fenced square of lawn and bushes. A girl came in three mornings a week to help with the heavy housework, and Melissa and Joshua each had their own bedroom. The house had electricity and, because of Max’s job, they had a telephone installed. Tilda spent the first few months emulsioning walls and making curtains and cushions. When the weather eased, she and Melissa planted bulbs and cuttings in the garden, which was a tiny wilderness of narrow paths and dark, sooty shrubs.

In the summer, they all travelled to Holland to stay with Emily and Jan. Emily was pregnant; the baby was due in November. Jan and his younger brother, Felix, owned a boat, and they spent a week sailing on the Waddenzee, Emily sitting cushioned at the prow, the children tied by lengths of rope to the mast. They celebrated Joshua’s first birthday on board the
Marika
, the single candle on his cake guttering in the fidgety wind. The whack of the sails and the frill of white water at the hull delighted Joshua, and he danced with excitement. Jan taught both Tilda and Max the
rudiments of sailing. The rush of cold air, the exhilaration as the sails seized the wind and the
Marika
began to scud across the waves – all were intoxicating to Tilda.

They returned to England. Harold Sykes’s daughter, Charlotte, who hadn’t the least idea what to do after she had finished school, offered to help with the children. For the first time since Melissa’s birth Tilda had time to herself. She made herself new clothes and attended constrained little coffee mornings to raise money for this or that. In the afternoons, she took Melissa to tea parties with her small friends or they all went to the park. Sometimes, in the evening, they went to a cocktail party or to dinner at the home of one of Max’s colleagues. Tilda told herself that she was happy. She and Max and the children lived in a lovely house in a nice part of London and they wanted for nothing. She joined a sewing circle and a music club, and, sitting in a neighbour’s drawing room, listening to a recording of Myra Hess playing Chopin, she found herself thinking, for the first time in years, of Daragh. Wondering what he was doing, how he was. Whether he ever thought of her. She pushed the thought ruthlessly away, but felt unsettled and frightened. She wanted another baby, but she knew that after the Munich Conference and the subsequent dismemberment of Czechoslovakia Max’s resolution against having another child had hardened. When it’s over, he said, and the
it
was a black, amorphous thing, growing larger, coming nearer.

Max was in Berlin when Herschel Grynzspan, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, shot and killed the Third Secretary at the German Embassy in Paris. Max heard the news over a crackly telephone line in a bar at the Hotel Adlon. He had been intending to leave for London the following day, but he stayed on, waiting for the inevitable retribution.
Kristallnacht –
the Night of the Broken Glass – erupted on 9 November. All over Germany, synagogues were burnt to the ground and Jewish shops and homes were invaded, their contents, down to every last teacup, smashed. Thousands of Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Max, standing in the shadows, watching
the prayer books belonging to the frail residents of a Jewish old people’s home smoulder in pyres on the street, found that his fists were clenched so tightly that his nails had drawn blood from his palms.

Kristallnacht
altered him, showing him that there was no limit to the cruelty that human beings were capable of inflicting on their fellow men. When he went home, he wanted to shut himself inside his house with his beautiful wife and his beloved children, and never leave it. Outside, the world he knew was disintegrating, and he could not bear to imagine what that falling apart would bring in its wake. Here there was a gentle sort of order behind the chaos: though the floors might be littered with building bricks and dolls’ clothes, there was always food on the table at supper-time, clean shirts hung in his wardrobe, and the children tucked up in bed at seven o’clock at night. He didn’t know how Tilda did it, but he knew that he needed it.

He did not speak to Tilda about the things he had seen. To tell her about old men beaten in the street, or babies snatched from their mothers’ arms, would sully their home: he would feel that he had brought evil into it. Yet he could not escape the shadows of what was to come. The trenches in Hyde Park, the air-raid shelters built in neighbours’ gardens, the gas masks on their pegs in the hall, all were ominous realities. At night, he dreamt of bombs falling on London, destroying his home, burying his family. When he made love to Tilda now, it was with a sort of desperation, a desire to lose himself in the softness and beauty of her body.

Though a mood of greater realism followed the false euphoria of Munich, Max was still constrained in what he could write. Getting ready to return to the Continent, he was aware of frustration, mixed with dread. When he went to the bedroom to pack, Tilda was folding her blouses into a neat pile.

He said, ‘Are you going to stay with Sarah?’

She shook her head. ‘Aunt Sarah’s coming here. I’m coming with you, Max. It’s all arranged. Aunt Sarah and Charlotte will look after the children, and we can have a few days together, just
the two of us. I’ll stay with Emily while you visit Germany – I’m longing to see her baby.’ Tilda put the blouses in her case, and turned to him and took him in her arms. ‘It’ll be better, won’t it, Max, if I come?’ He drew her to him and kissed her: hot, hungry kisses that made both of them gasp for breath.

They drove to Harwich the following day, taking turns at the wheel. The passage across the North Sea was grey and windswept and they stood on the deck, Max’s arm round Tilda’s shoulders, until the sky darkened. Docking at the Hook of Holland the following morning, they caught the train to Amsterdam. That night, they dined with Emily and Jan, and admired William, the van de Criendts’ son, who was large and blond and placid. In the morning, they caught the train to the border. Max wanted to see the German troop emplacements.

Yet he discovered a different story from the one he had expected to tell. When they alighted at a station near the border, Max saw a dozen women waiting on the platform, trolleys of sandwiches and cakes in front of them. A train whistled, and a thick caterpillar cloud of white smoke formed along the distant railway line, and emerging from it Max could discern an engine, followed by a long snake of carriages. The women on the platform began to pour lemonade into beakers and to remove greaseproof paper wrappings from sandwiches and cakes. The train rushed into the station, brakes screaming. Max could see faces pressed against the windows. As the engine slowed and the smoke cleared, features solidified. All the passengers were children. The boys wore tweed suits, and the girls were dressed in thick winter coats, buttoned to their chins.

Max turned aside to speak to one of the women. She told him that the children on the train were German Jews, from Berlin, on their way to Britain. The children were given food and drink at the station, and a toy. The German authorities had allowed each child to take only one small suitcase and ten marks. Soon they would travel on to the Hook of Holland, and then to Harwich.

Max looked for Tilda, to explain this extraordinary exodus to her, but could not find her. Then he caught sight of her, moving
away from him through the crowds, towards the children. He saw her stoop and smile, her hair golden in the winter sunshine, and take a small boy’s hands in hers, and speak to him until he too smiled. She was surrounded by children, lost in a sea of children. Max, standing back, watched her move away from him, until he could no longer see her.

Kristallnacht
had brought home at last to a self-deceiving British government the urgency of the plight of the German Jews. Entry requirements were eased, permitting the transport of Jewish children into Britain. A few days after she returned from Holland, Tilda started voluntary work with the Refugee Children’s Movement, the organization responsible for the
Kindertransporte
. She had intended to spend two mornings a week with the RCM, while Charlotte Sykes looked after Melissa and Joshua, but the need was vast, particularly for someone who could both type and speak German, and somehow the RCM began to swallow up more and more of her time.

At first there were two children’s transports each week, from Berlin or Vienna, travelling to Britain via Hollond. Though the children for the
Kindertransporte
were selected in Germany, letters flooded into the Bloomsbury offices of the RCM, letters that pleaded desperately for help, that enclosed photographs of smiling, dimpled children. Every child who arrived in Britain had to be found either a bed in a hostel or suitable foster parents. Tilda and Max travelled to Harwich to meet a boatload of child refugees. The port was grey and bleak, and the wind curled breakers from the sea. As they walked through Customs, some of the children, frightened by the uniforms of the officials, began to empty their pockets onto the tables: a pathetic assortment of pencils and string, hair ribbons and sticky boiled sweets.

Few of the refugees spoke any English. Tilda greeted them, trying to put them at their ease. The photographer who had driven up from London with Max and Tilda took a picture of a pretty dark-haired girl, clutching the doll she had been given in Holland. The children were taken by bus to Dovercourt,
a few miles along the coast. Dovercourt was in the summer a holiday camp, with pebbledashed chalets and a communal dining hall. Now the wind lashed the fragile little buildings and in the distance the sea had retreated, showing shiny dun mudflats. Tilda helped the other volunteers to serve tea. A group of girls huddled together in a corner of the room, and the boys, determined to put on a brave face, bit their lips to keep the tears from their eyes. Returning to London that night, the photographer fell asleep in the back of the car. Max, driving, was very quiet. Tilda knew that Max, too, was imagining what the parents of those children must have suffered, to send them alone to a foreign country.

The RCM took over Tilda’s life. If she wasn’t at the office or meeting new arrivals in Harwich, then she was fund-raising or coaxing warm clothes and food from anyone she could think of. When she was elected to the post of secretary of her local committee, it became her responsibility to organize the selection of foster homes and their twice-yearly inspection. The foster parents collected their children from a large, gloomy room near Liverpool Street Station.

As the train slid into Liverpool Street, the refugee children jammed their faces against the carriage windows. Attached to every child was a brown luggage label with a number written on it. Lines of foster parents stood along the platform. Some children shrieked with recognition and pleasure as they alighted from the train; others hung back, exhausted by their long journey, confused by unfamiliar faces and a strange language. Tilda spoke to them reassuringly in German, and shepherded them to the nearby reception centre, where other volunteers sat behind desks, filling in forms. Every child had to be matched to its foster parents. Some parents failed to turn up on the correct day, others arrived to find their adoptive children missing, taken from the train at random by the Gestapo at the border with Holland, and returned to Germany. Some of the smaller children cried, cold and alone and bewildered. The older boys, who would eventually be taken to a hostel, kicked their heels and talked loudly. The crowds
thinned out until only the older boys and a girl were left. The girl stared resolutely down at her boots.

Tilda glanced at her watch. It was almost half past three. She beckoned to the solitary girl.
‘Wie heisst du, liebchen
?’

‘Rosi,’ whispered the girl. ‘Rosi Liebermann.’ She was rather stout, and her mousy hair was swept back into an unbecoming pigtail.

Tilda heard the clack of high heels. A woman was crossing the room towards them. She wore a smart wool coat, a little felt hat with a feather, and was impeccably made up.

‘Are you Rosi’s befriender? Mrs …’ Tilda glanced at her list. ‘Mrs Stannard?’

‘I am Mrs Stannard.’ A leather-gloved hand was briefly extended to Tilda. Mrs Stannard glanced at Rosi, and then she moved a yard or two away and whispered to Tilda.

‘I thought she’d be prettier! She isn’t like her photograph at all.’

Every now and then, a foster child did not live up to its adoptive parent’s dreams. Tilda said patiently, ‘Rosi is twelve, Mrs Stannard. Children change very quickly at that age. The photograph was probably taken a few months ago.’

Mrs Stannard stared once more at Rosi. ‘It won’t do,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’m sorry, but it just won’t do. And I really must go, or I shall miss my train.’ She marched back across the hall, heels clattering.

Tilda had the impression that although Rosi knew no English, she had understood every word of that conversation. Rosi’s nose was suspiciously red, and her lips pressed very tightly together. Tilda ran the possibilities through in her head. There was the hostel, but that was intended for older children. Or she could try to contact one of the foster parents whose child had been detained in Germany, to see whether they would consider taking in this young girl instead. The same thing might happen: Rosi might be rejected again. Years ago, she had failed little Liesl Toller: she must not fail another child.

She took the girl’s hand. ‘Rosi. Would you like to come home with me?’

By the time all the forms had been filled in and Rosi’s few belongings had been assembled, it was already four o’clock. Then the Tube trains were packed, and because of Rosi’s suitcase they couldn’t squeeze into the first two trains that stopped at the station. Rosi’s feet, clad in stout boots, struggled to keep up with Tilda as she almost ran home from the Underground station.