Somewhere Over England (24 page)

Ruth came and held her. ‘You ’ave a good cry, my dear. It
helps you know. My old Albert never came back from the last lot. My grandson’s in this one. His dad’s dead.’

Helen told her then that Heine was German and had not been a soldier but a prisoner because it seemed unfair to accept sympathy unless she was honest. Ruth just smiled.

‘They’re all young, poor little buggers. They all bleed just the same and we cry, just the same.’

Helen lay in the dark, feeling the pain of her hands and arms, of her leg, wanting the comfort of the only person who could not give it. Thinking of the bombers who flew over London, dropping their bombs, thinking of the bombers who flew over Germany, and wondered how she could tell Heine’s parents that their son was dead.

The next morning she received a letter from Willi.

Dear Frau Weber,

I ask a friend of mine who is being today released to post this to you when he reach the mainland. I want you to have knowledge of how Heine is killed. He had stood against the Nazis you see, too loudly, too strong and in the end they hurt his friend. Martin now is insane. It is something which makes him want to fight them with more effort.

We walk near the sea on a cold rough day. He had been sent the death sentence but it not stop him from speaking out on that walk too. The guard was in front. I was behind Heine and was pushed to ground from behind. I saw these men come to Heine and push him hard, over edge, on to the rocks, into the sea. They had promised they would, Frau Weber, and I do not tell you this to pain you further but to tell of his courage.

I was with him the night before he died. Perhaps he had knowledge of it in his heart. He said, if he die, I must tell you that he make his gesture as you did in Hanover with the old man on the ground. That these years are just a fragment of time in the great age of the world and that they will pass. Tell her it will all pass, he said to me. And tell her that I love her.

Your husband was brave man, Frau Weber. We
shall miss him, miss his spirit. He was honoured amongst us. He was loved.

Your obedient servant,
Willi Weiss

Helen was late into work. She walked in the icy drizzle of that Monday before Christmas to the Red Cross and spoke to the woman who had brought her tea and kindness. She was able to assure Helen that a message could be conveyed through the Red Cross to Herr Weber informing him of his son’s death in an internment camp on the Isle of Man. It was 23 December and Helen wondered whether there would be carp for the Christmas Eve dinner in Hanover or just bombs and tiredness as there was here. She wondered how long love lived when there was no one to accept that love.

She felt the drizzle turn to rain on her face and was glad she had sent presents for Christoph two weeks ago: a carved catapult for knocking targets off the wall as he had asked and books which she had bought from the stalls which still opened down many side streets. It seemed too much of an effort to think of Christmas now. Before Heine’s death she had hoped to travel down for two days but the vicar had rung the rector in Greater Mannenham to tell him to pass a message on to Laura that the trains were too difficult. But it was not travelling that was too difficult, it was the knowledge of Heine’s death which would be too hard to hide from her son and he should at least have peace this Christmas. It would be time enough in January to tell her son of his father’s death. She stood still and looked at a smouldering ruin, pushing a brick with her foot. Who knew if there would ever be another Christmas free of Hitler’s rule?

On Christmas Eve people still came to the shelter although raids had almost ceased for forty-eight hours. They had found companionship and safety down here beneath the church and had no wish to spend Christmas alone in houses, flats or Anderson shelters. Helen dragged out old bunting and everyone helped to hang it round the crypt. There was no midnight service in the church but beneath it they sang carols and Helen found that her voice was too uncertain to sing ‘Silent Night’. The vicar said prayers for all those under attack; those in the provinces, those in Germany. Afterwards he pumped the
primus and as a light raid continued outside they made tea and soup, using goods that people had brought.

They ignored the crump crump of bombs and Helen pushed the pain of her leg and her hands from her as she listened to the groups talking softly. Sometimes they laughed and sometimes they cried because a father, a son, a husband had died and Helen did not feel alone in her suffering any more and there was some comfort in that but still each day and night seemed to last a lifetime.

On 29 December when there was due to be a tidal low-point in the Thames the Luftwaffe came again. The water mains were damaged at the start of the raid by high explosive parachute mines and then at least 10,000 fire bombs plummeted from the planes. In the crypt they could not feel the heat of the fires which raged unchecked until water was available again from more distant mains but in the morning they smelt and saw the devastation and that night there were more people who had been bombed out arriving to stay in the crypt. The next day, which was Monday, Helen was late in to work because she took them to the Town Hall to get coupons until their ration books could be replaced.

Mr Leonard could say nothing because so many were late, unable to force their way through the havoc which had once been London. Some never came because they had been killed.

That night the vicar explained as they all sat talking that a fire-watching rota was to be drawn up at the request of the authorities and those in the shelter were eager to put their names down. Helen decided that there should be soup available at one penny a cup and Marian volunteered to organise it. The old lady, Ruth, stood up and said that she thought there should be a knitting group to make socks and hats for the soldiers.

‘All you need to do is pull out old jumpers,’ she said, holding up a dark green one. ‘Just pull it out and knit it up again.’ And so a knitting group was formed, but Helen could not yet bear the thought of wool being drawn across her cut hands and so, instead, she formed a small choir at the back of the crypt and found solace in the music.

The days passed and December became January. Britain and Australia’s attack on the Italians in the Western Desert
proceeded. Nits became a problem in the shelter and Helen bent her head over newspaper and combed out several lice. One of the women was a hairdresser and soon most of the women had bobbed hair and Helen looked at herself in the mirror and wondered how Heine would have liked it. She did not cry this time but put her arms round the young mother whose husband was missing in action and, instead, held her while she wept.

By 17 January Helen’s hands and control were improved enough for her to leave London to see her son.

The train journey took six hours and was cold, so cold. Again and again the train was shunted into a siding to allow troops or goods wagons to pass but there was no raid as they travelled and little to see through the mesh of the windows. There were other mothers on the train, travelling to see their children. They were pale, tired. Their eyes sunken. No one talked very much but some slept, jerked awake with each stop only to fall asleep again within minutes. But Helen couldn’t sleep.

She caught the bus from Thetford and dusk fell after twenty miles. The journey took one hour more, the slitted headlights picking up the white line painted at the side of the road but nothing of the flat countryside beyond. Helen eased her leg, flexed her hands, glad that her gloves covered the red scars. The bus stopped three times but each time another village was called out and Helen watched as the women she had travelled with on the train stepped down into the darkness. Would there ever be a time when they would see the welcome of lighted windows, she wondered.

At last the bus pulled up again and the driver called, ‘Greater Mannenham.’

Helen rose, lifting her bag from the seat beside her. She had brought Christoph a knitted hat from Ruth and some more books and one change of clothes for herself because she could not stay more than a night. She thanked the driver and stepped carefully from the bus to the road; her leg was still stiff, still sore. For a moment she couldn’t see Chris but then he was there, his arms around her, holding her, and she knew she must not cry but she did when she heard him say, ‘Oh, Mum, I’ve missed you.’

She heard the bus move off, smelt the exhaust, and saw
Laura standing behind Chris, but all she felt was his arms around her, his head pressed into her body. She dropped her bag and held him, stroking his hair, bending to kiss him, wondering how she could have forgotten the sound of his voice but somehow it had indeed become lost.

They walked back through the centre of the village. It was cloudy so there was not even the light from the moon or stars to light their way. Laura held a torch covered with tissue paper and gripped Helen’s arm, guiding her along the lane while Chris held her hand tightly, causing pain to stab right up into her arm but it didn’t matter now that she was with her son.

There was a fire in the inglenook and Helen sat on the settee, keeping her gloves on, saying that she was cold. One of her cuts had begun to bleed and Chris must not see. But Laura saw and beckoned her out to the kitchen while Chris sat on the rug in front of the fire and looked through the books. She bathed and dressed the cut and all the time there was the smell of stew in the air and Helen realised she was hungry. She realised too that she had not felt hunger since his death. She looked at Laura and knew she should tell her about Heine but the words hurt too much in her throat.

Laura smiled at her, pointing to a chair, calling to Chris to come in and wash his hands. He ran through and Helen thought again how much he had grown, how strong and straight and tall he was. He ran the tap and it splashed up and over the sink but Laura just laughed and threw him a towel and Helen felt excluded.

This was her child but she did not even know where the towels were which dried his hands. She didn’t wash them, or any of his clothes. She didn’t serve up his meal, as Laura was now doing, heaping rabbit, carrots and potato on to his plate and then on to theirs and now jealousy surged into her throat and chest and she was appalled.

She looked down at her plate, not wanting to see familiarity between her son and this kind, plump woman.

‘Chris talks of you every day. There is no one in his life but you,’ Laura said.

Helen looked up and, saw Laura looking at her and then at Chris and knew that after all she was lucky to have placed her son with this woman.

‘He knows that it hurts you much more to let him stay here
than to take him back with you to London,’ Laura continued, and Chris looked up at her and smiled.

‘I think you’re very brave, Mum. You have to stay there. I know you do because we need the money. Laura has explained it to me and Daddy told me too, in one of his letters.’

Helen picked up her knife and fork now, tasting the rabbit, the thick gravy, the potatoes, but there was no appetite again. Later she must tell him about Heine. Later.

She listened while she ate sparingly as Chris told her how he had pulled the carrots and stored them in sawdust. How he fed the chickens and the pig and how they had called one of the piglets Heine and one of them Helen. She listened as he told her of the fat girl called Mary who was his friend and who lived in a cottage where no one cared. She listened but he did not talk of his friends at school. He did not talk of the games they played and he lowered his head and told her about the butterfly net Laura had found in the attic and she thought she saw a darkening in his eyes when she asked about his school friends and he did not answer.

Later she asked Laura if the boys knew of Chris’s German heritage but she said that they did not. How could they? Only she and the rector’s wife knew. Helen looked closely at her son as they sat in front of the fire and could see no shadows now in those dark eyes so perhaps there had been none earlier?

They sat and talked in the quiet of the cottage and Helen was restless. There was no normality in the hissing of the fire, the voice on the radio reading out the nine o’clock news, the hoot of the owl. There was no normality to this quiet evening which came from the peacetime past.

She read to him in his room that night. A room warmed by logs burning in the grate, their light shielded from the sky by more slates, like the inglenook downstairs, Chris told her. She sat by his bed, holding his hand with her wounded one and she told him it was nothing and then asked him if everything was all right in the village. If the boys were his friends too, as well as Mary? He kissed her hand and held it to his cheek and told her she must be careful of the bombs because he loved her so much. He loved Laura too but more as a grandmother, not as he loved her.

Again Helen asked him if there was any trouble but this time he said, ‘No, Mum. Everything’s all right. Honestly it is.’ And most of the time it was. Most of the time.

In the morning Helen fed the hens and the pig, watching the squealing piglets born too early.

Laura said, ‘Too impatient, couldn’t wait for the spring. It’s because old Reynolds let his damned pig into the orchard.’ Helen laughed then walked with Chris along the lane, watching him as he stamped on puddles. Laughing as he slid on frozen skid paths. Listening as he told her about the blacksmith at the forge.

He showed her the goat, their school and pointed to the copse in the distance to the left of a line of elms.

‘That’s where I’ll go with the net. Mary said she’d come. I wrote to Dad about it.’ He kicked at the frost-stiffened verge. ‘Mr Reynolds says the Germans are buggers. They drop bombs on you, hurt our animals, kill our people. They’ve hurt your hands. They’re buggers. That’s what Mr Reynolds says anyway.’

Helen stood next to him, staring over at the copse, seeing the rooks’ nests high in the bare branches, hearing his words drop into the still air. Her face was pinched and cold. She wet her lips, clenching her hands, wanting to feel the pain.

‘It’s war that’s the bugger, Chris. Most of the people in it are like us. Doing things we don’t want to do just because we have to. No, I don’t hate the Germans but I do hate the Nazis and that’s the difference that you and I must remember. The Nazis hurt other Germans too. They’ve somehow dragged everyone into the war.’