Somewhere Over England (9 page)

‘But won’t we be stopped at the border? Photography is allowed only with a permit, isn’t it?’

Heine did not answer and there was only the sound of the clock. They had fifteen minutes and then Helen realised what Herr Weber had meant and she sat down, her hands cold. The camera was for secret work. His sight was better and his hearing. Of course she knew what he meant.

‘You see what I mean when I say I cannot promise to keep you safe – but I need you with me. You are English, they have to be more careful with foreigners. We are not yet at war.’

Helen picked the white cotton thread off her apron, curled it round and round her finger, watching her fingertip turn to purple. It was four o’clock.

‘But most of all I need you because you will give me courage.’

She walked alone to the school and stood at the railings waiting for Christoph. The children called him Chris and thought his father was Dutch. He ran towards her, past the white-chalked hopscotch squares, his cap on the back of his head, his blond hair too long. His smile was wide and his eyes were her father’s: dark brown.

‘Did you bake the conkers today?’ she shouted as he reached her but did not kiss her cheek because none of the other children did and, after all, he was nearly six. She laughed and nodded and they walked back through the park. Other children trailed in front and behind with their mothers. Helen held his sandwich tin which smelt of Marmite when she opened it. They stopped by the swings with their rusted chains. He ran to one and pushed off with both his feet.

‘So you ate everything today then,’ she called as he swung himself high, his socks down at his ankles, his knee black. One
dark woman pushed her son on the swing next to Helen and turned and smiled.

‘Said I would if you baked ’em for me.’ He was slowing now. ‘Hey, I bashed a tenner today, so now mine’s the king. It’s got sixteen so far. Is Dad home? Did he get any good shots today? Did you?’ But he wasn’t listening, he was scraping his shoe along the ground as he slowed the swing, ready to jump from it before rushing to the roundabout.

‘Chris, for goodness sake, don’t do that and come on now. It’s time to get home.’

‘Man and boy, they’re all alike,’ the other woman said and laughed. Helen smiled, the tin was cold against her skin. She put out her hand to steady the swing after Chris ran off. The chain links stained her hand.

‘Yes, man and boy,’ she echoed and added silently, German and English too; we’re all alike. She waved to the woman. ‘See you again,’ she called and hoped that she would.

They walked down the path which ran alongside beds which held no flowers now that summer was gone, just heaped dark earth. Chris kicked a stone, scratching his toe-cap but Helen said nothing, just breathed in the smoke from the bonfire that the greensman was fanning by the tennis courts. There were hardly any leaves left on the trees and the sun seemed to have been sucked from the face of the earth.

‘How would you like Grandma to come and stay with you for a bit? Daddy and I have to go away, just for a while.’

There had been no decision to make really, she had known from the start she would go because a father’s love was too important to let slip through your fingers, too important to waste. And besides, Heine had said he needed her.

Chris would not stay behind. He did not like his grandmother, he told Helen as she read to him that night. She was always too close, always wanting to take everyone away from him so that it was just the two of them. Helen listened but she already knew. That night in bed she told Heine that the three of them would go and that it would be all right. She dreamed of a sun-filled stream and she woke in the morning crying.

Four days before Christmas Helen sat next to Heine as he drove slowly up to the border posts, his eyes on the slush-covered road, his hand wiping the inside of the windscreen
where his breath had condensed and begun to freeze. Helen took out the leather from the glove pocket, leaned across and helped and then did her own. This time there were no birds singing, only snow which dragged down the branches of the trees. Neither of them spoke of the camera, of the search that must come when they stopped.

There was no ‘
Grüss Gott
’ from the young blond border guard dressed in his green jacket and black trousers with his high black boots. This time he stood erect and snapped ‘
Heil Hitler
’ while Helen smiled, her shoulders tense, willing Heine to reply in kind which he did, but only when he had climbed from the car, because she knew he did not want her to hear him say those words.

Chris eased himself up against the back of her seat, leaning his elbow along the top. There was a box of Christmas presents on the seat beside him and another box with the remains of their picnic beside that. They both watched Heine walk to the customs post and then climbed out at his gesture. Another guard came and searched the car, picking up and shaking the presents and opening some. Would he find the camera? But even if they did, they wouldn’t hurt a child, would they? Helen felt her headache throb more deeply. It had clenched down one side of her neck and head since they had left Britain.

She took Chris’s arm and pointed down the road. ‘That’s Germany, where Grandfather and Grandmother Weber live.’ She must look natural, at ease. She must not appear afraid.

She looked at the Nazi flag which hung limp at the top of the pole, at the trees which had been cut back so that it would be clearly visible from a great distance. She looked at the scarlet background, the white circle and the hooked cross marked out in the deadness of black and her hatred of it gave her courage.

She smiled at her son and he took her hand. She could see his breath in the crisp cold air. Behind him the guard was looking at the picnic box, his face full of distaste at the apple cores, the banana peel, and he turned from it and nodded to the officer who waited with Heine. She smiled again at Chris and told him to stamp his feet to keep warm and knew that for now they were safe.

They drove without stopping through verges no longer full of poppies or brown-eyed Susans but heaped with snow stained by slush and dirt. They saw no blonde-haired maidens, just
iced ponds. No window-boxes, just inches of snow on ledges and long daggers of ice hanging from pointed eaves. They stayed on the first night at a country inn and the second in a town, but in both they said little because the people might have been Nazis.

On the third day they drove through the flat beet fields and Helen told Chris of the boys his age who picked beet through the snow and ice. There were no commercial advertisements as they approached the outskirts of Hanover because the Nazis did not approve. They skirted around the city and as darkness fell they drove into Heine’s village.

‘Why wouldn’t Grandmother come? She will have Christmas on her own now.’ Chris’s voice was sleep-filled, his lids heavy.

Helen shrugged. ‘Older people get set in their ways,’ she answered and was glad that her mother was not here because the older woman’s eyes had been hard since Heine had come back to them.

She climbed out of the car and opened Chris’s door, holding out her arms to him, breathing in his warm scent as he clung to her. The picnic basket was on the seat and Heine reached in past her and picked it up.

‘Clever girl,’ he said. ‘I thought he was going to look in there for one moment.’

Helen laughed quietly, her headache gone now that they had arrived. ‘Men don’t like dirty nappies or mess, surely you haven’t forgotten.’

He pulled a face and Helen remembered the woman in the park.

‘Man and boy, you’re all alike,’ she murmured and as he kissed her the front door opened, flooding the garden with light, and she was glad they were spending Christmas in Germany.

They sat at the dining-room table eating by candlelight. Frau Weber had brought down from the attic two honey wax candles to celebrate their arrival, and their sweet Christmas aroma was everywhere, mingling with the pine of the Advent candles. Chris sat next to Helen, smiling because his Oma, his grandmother, had said that he could light the last Advent candle on Christmas Eve. They ate asparagus soup, as they
had on their last visit, oh so long ago, Frau Weber said. Venison, chestnuts, sprouts and potato puffs followed decorated with sliced orange. The Bordeaux was thick and strong on Helen’s tongue and she smiled when Heine’s mother said she must call her Mutti.

Heine and his father spoke quietly when they spoke at all, but both seemed content to share the sight of the child and the women talking of St Nicholas and Christmas stockings. Chris leaned his head on his mother’s arm when he had half eaten his venison. His lids were heavy and the talk spun around him. There were strange smells and sights and voices but the German was familiar and it made him remember the men who had come to his home, the men with thin faces and shaking hands who had been kind; who had sat him on their knees and seemed to drink in his laughter as though it was something they had never heard.

He turned to his mother. ‘My uncles liked me to laugh, didn’t they?’

She didn’t hear and so he pulled at her sleeve. It was silk, so soft and smooth and he wanted to sleep. His mother turned and smiled. ‘My uncles liked me to laugh, didn’t they?’

Her face was close to his. ‘Oh yes, my love. It was a sound that was very sweet to them.’

He saw her look across to his father but his chair was empty and he felt panic. Had he gone again? He had always been away, but not for months now. He turned again to his mother and she was there. She was always there and he leaned his head against her again. But then he felt strong arms around him and his father’s rough chin against his cheek. His Oma rose and kissed him and then they left the warm honey-scented room and climbed the stairs, and his face was against his father’s chest as he drifted in and out of sleep.

Helen went ahead, into the room which was to be Christoph’s for the next two weeks. It was cold, so cold. There was ice frosted on the inside of the double windows and she scraped a finger from top to bottom, collecting frost beneath her nail.

She marched from his room into theirs. It was warm from the stove. She walked quickly to the top of the stairs, hissing at Heine to stop, pointing towards Chris’s bedroom. ‘There is no heating in there. It’s freezing.’

Heine stopped. ‘In Germany the children sleep in cold rooms.’

She turned. ‘In my family, children sleep in warm rooms even if it means the adults go into the cold one.’ Her hands were on her hips, anger in her voice.

Heine shifted his son’s weight slightly and then laughed. ‘My darling girl, do not prepare to do battle. I am too tired and too intelligent to risk my life fighting over something which is easily remedied.’ He passed Chris to her, walking quietly into their room, riddling the stove as she stood behind him and watched, feeling the heat from the ash and red-hot coals as he drew out the pan. He moved ahead of her into the smaller bedroom and heaped them on to the kindling and coal already laid in the stove, leaning down to open the draught doors at the base, and she saw his long thin hands on the brass knob, his wrists against his good shirt cuffs, his eyelashes casting shadows on his cheeks in the dim overhead light. The Nazis seemed far away in this room. War seemed an impossibility.

When the room was dark and warm and Helen and Heine had kissed Chris goodnight, he watched as they left the room, then waited because he knew she would be back. She always was. The door opened again and his mother was there. ‘Sleep tight, my darling boy,’ she whispered and only then did he close his eyes.

Herr Weber’s study was lit by a small table lamp which cast a circle of light that barely reached Heine and Helen as they sat in their armchairs. They watched in silence as the older man laid old shirts against the gap at the bottom of the door, pushing hard until it was plugged. They watched as he pulled the telephone plug from the wall but still did not speak because he had held his fingers to his lips. Only when he was completely satisfied did he sit near to the low fire, opposite them but close so that his whispers could be heard by them.

‘You see, Hans has been with us for twenty years and Ilse too but we dare not trust them. The telephones can be tapped too. I am not suspected. Not yet. But now as I said in my letter I can see and hear all that Heine saw and heard. But it is too late really. I know it is too late.’

Heine laid his hand on his father’s knee. ‘Be careful, Father.’

‘Oh I am most careful.’ Herr Weber laughed softly. ‘I carry
out my duty to my utmost ability. I am in and out of the courts. In and out of interrogation rooms and so I need your little present very badly.’ He raised his eyebrows to Heine, who nodded at Helen.

She lifted her handbag and took the camera out. ‘Please, do be careful. We see the refugees. We hear such stories.’ The camera was cold in her hand as she passed it to him. His hand was thin, with veins which knotted and bulged. He had been a strong, fit man. He was that no longer.

They did not watch as he took it and moved behind them. He did not want them to know more than they had to and it would be elsewhere by tomorrow. He started to speak only when he had returned and again in a whisper.

‘I have taken the post of
Blockwart
. I am now the leader of a local group of Party comrades. I am, my dear son, honoured to serve at the lowest level of the Nazi political system but I know what is going on. I can, with this camera you have brought me at such risk to yourselves, take photographs with a view to recording crimes and, as importantly, blackmail.’

Helen looked at this old man who had held legality above all else.

He laughed but there was no amusement in the sound. ‘Yes, my dear. Legality loses its appeal when it is used to remove from society “vermin” such as gypsies, Jews and parsons. I use the Nazis’ vernacular, of course.’ He was still whispering. Helen looked at Heine, who took her hand, holding it tightly, and she saw in his face love and fear for this man.

Herr Weber leaned forward, his face sharply etched in the dull dim light, and started to speak, but Helen interrupted.

‘Parsons. I didn’t know. Why parsons?’