Spitfire Girls (38 page)

Nonetheless, that same assimilation had brought the same result for his relatives as the Warsaw Ghetto had brought for those in Poland. He wondered if Kranz knew
the full extent of the horrors now taking place; the businessman seemed never to receive any post, his cursory perusal of the infrequent newspapers leaving him indifferent.

‘Why haven't you told me about your caravan lady before?' he asked, smiling back at Kranz, whose colour had returned to his sunken cheeks.

‘Something about the Blood Libel,' he mused, his long fingers rubbing the side of his face, as if to extinguish a searing pain. ‘Since you mention it – her friend, Shirley, found the subject fascinating. Listen, Friedrich,' he continued, relentless in his quest, and now curious about the other man's liaison. ‘If you can get permission to contact this girl Shirley, we could say it is with reference to a useful historical research project. Then we could enlist her help in explaining to the authorities that we are harmless Jews, not Nazi spies, and at the same time we could find your lady.'

‘What makes you think I am trying to find her?' Kranz demanded, his voice strained as he felt an odd onslaught of tears approaching.

‘Don't think I haven't noticed you receive no post, but that you pine for a woman who isn't your wife.'

‘For a man with no wife, you receive a hell of a stack of communications – perhaps you are a spy of some sort.'

‘Those letters are from my students. They claim to love me, but none has lifted a finger to protest at this curious incarceration.' Grunberg leaned back against the wall and curled up into his cool, damp corner. No heat ever reached these barracks, and the sanitary facilities were a shock to the elegant, meticulous folk the British had seen fit to
intern regardless of their religion. It was the height of absurdity, Grunberg reflected, that a bunch of assimilated Jews, each an expert in his field, should be cooped up in this makeshift concentration camp just because His Majesty's government thought all German-speaking people were followers of Hitler.

Grunberg laughed to himself.

‘What is so funny, old man?' Kranz leaned over, poking his head into André's corner.

‘We are brought here, forced to neglect our work, and left to languish while the British, in their great Christian wisdom, think they are guarding society against Nazis.'

‘I suspect you were a lapsed Jew before this happened.'

Grunberg smiled:

‘Friedrich, I never even thought about being one of the tribe until the British authorities chose to remind me. I'm sure it was the same for you.'

Kranz rested his head against the side of the bunk and listened as other men chatted, mostly in their native German, while some played chess and others listened to music on the old phonograph provided by a sympathetic guard. Closing his eyes, he thought of Valerie, and the smell of her skin was as fresh in his nostrils as if she had been sitting beside him on this atrocious concrete. Grunberg knew nothing of his torment, nor of the horrible consequences his actions must surely by now have had on Valerie's life. Reflecting back on the past months, he wished everything could be reversed: there was not one occurrence of which he was not now ashamed.

Only his passionate joining with Valerie was worth preserving, and even that would most definitely never
happen again. Could he continue to live this way? Why did he not think of his wife, or of his mother and children? He closed his eyes and recalled the string of events that had culminated in his present imprisonment.

When Friedrich Kranz had left Truman's estate and found himself at Cambridge, it had been a stroke of luck to meet André Grunberg, whose organ virtuosity captivated him and forced him to linger in the chapel far longer than he had intended. He drifted off to sleep, and when his eyes opened again the music was still playing but night had fallen and Truman's wallet still pressed against his clean, scrubbed chest.

The two men had made friends instantly, Grunberg a legend in the ballet world but now unemployed and on the run from the authorities. They remained in Cambridge, André playing daily in the chapel and Friedrich spending his days discovering that war was in full swing and that anyone wishing to purchase a private aircraft would be regarded as either a madman or a visitor from another planet. All civil air activities had been halted months before, and when a suspicious manufacturing executive from Australia had listened nonplussed to Kranz's calm request, he alerted the authorities.

Why would Kranz want an aircraft?

How had he found access to so much cash?

After leaving the inquisitive, unhelpful Australian millionaire, Kranz comandeered a small car and with a full petrol tank the pair moved on. The boarding-house landlord eyed them quizzically as they departed, half wondering if Grunberg's story about an organ virtuoso festival had been rot.

Traversing a series of villages, and blissfully unaware of petrol rationing Kranz reflected on his confrontation with the Vickers magnate. Something about the man had struck him. He wanted to see him again, but would officials in suits be at the factory gates in Southampton next time he visited the premises? Thoughts of Southampton brought back sensations he wanted to bury – Valerie might be at Hamble, the new ATA pool he had just read about in the national press. If he went back, this time by car instead of by train – a train filled with rows of hostile eyes – he could find her and relieve her uncertainty about his fate.

Surely she must think him dead.

‘What am I looking at?' cried Grunberg, pointing straight ahead. Kranz had flicked from his reverie to the sight ahead, bringing the car to a swerving halt.

A carload of men in uniform, all sporting wings on their shoulders, had stopped and were blocking the road.

Friedrich felt a wild urge to turn back, but one of the men was already approaching their vehicle.

‘You look young enough to serve,' Noel Slater declared, his face so close to Kranz's he could feel the hot alcoholic breath sweeping past his left cheek. Soon Slater had been joined by a curious Jim Mollison and Sean Vine, tailed by a timid character hovering in the background. Sam Hardwick seemed to be studying the automobile.

The three men had been rude and sarcastic, while quiet Sam circled the car several times and smiled at the two Austrians.

‘What are your wings – ?' Kranz had asked, his voice weak and croaky.

‘ATA,' Vine replied, folding his arms across his chest. ‘Saving Britain, without glory.'

Kranz had been genuinely terrified, but Grunberg could only smile back at the circling Sam, seemingly unperturbed by Noel and his taunting band.

‘So healthy and not in uniform,' Noel continued, his face now brushing against Friedrich's. ‘In the next town along it will all catch up with you.'

‘What will catch up with us?' Grunberg challenged him, speaking for the first time.

‘The fact that dogs will growl at your scent,' Slater said, winking.

Indeed, when they were allowed to pass and the Austrians could no longer see the bevy of pilots as they sped along the road, the next town offered up its local MP, who had been called to a public presentation in the main square. As he laid a small wreath on the war memorial, his Labradors growled at the two onlookers, and soon the crowd's attention had been drawn to the men eating a meagre lunch in their muddied automobile. The dogs had become agitated. Their owner finally left the podium and shouted to the animals, and when he did this Friedrich dropped his stale roll, and when Tim Haydon came closer to pull his dogs away from the scent of foreigners Kranz knew his chances of seeing Valerie had been obliterated.

‘It occurs to me that your lot shouldn't be eating pig,' Haydon said, calmly observing the bedraggled travellers, their food now being devoured by the dogs.

‘Pig?' Kranz asked.

‘Is it not some form of primitive blasphemy?' the MP asked, peering at Grunberg. ‘My friend Captain Slater
makes a habit of setting up roadblocks to capture wanted criminals, when he is not ferrying for ATA. Who is your cohort?'

‘André Grunberg, ballet master,' he offered, outstretching his hand.

Haydon looked at them both, a small crowd gathering around the car.

‘Valerie has married me,' Tim said quietly.

Kranz felt his chest tightening, the roll burning in his gullet as his heart thudded unsteadily. He wanted it to stop, but its fibrillation made his head reel.

Grunberg was talking:

‘Congratulations,' he said, grinning at Tim.

‘I shan't invite you to tea, Mr Kranz, but I will be taking you into custody.'

The dogs were whining at Kranz's feet, their slobbering making him dizzier as he thought of this horrible man violating Valerie – his pallid, clammy skin against hers, its unkempt odour permeating her cells and making them both dirty and faded like old torn vests. He did not care, now, what Haydon did with him, but he lamented Grunberg's victimization. In a distant haze he could feel strong hands and unloving arms lifting him from his seat as his head knocked loudly against the roof of the car.

Grunberg had been taken and the pair were pushed into another vehicle while Haydon resumed his war memorial presentation.

Voices talked of Kranz's theft of the Fulmar, and of his visit to Lord Truman, as the car in which they were prisoners moved away from the town square.

Grunberg was astonished by the bizarre nature of their
afternoon: did Haydon carry thugs with him at all times, seconded from nearby boxing clubs to capture renegade German Jews from the roadsides of rural England? Why had Kranz told him so little in the time they had been lodging together? Was he in fact a common criminal?

‘Beaverbrook is making a big killing out of your friendship with Mrs Haydon,' one of the boxers muttered, his hulking body causing Kranz pain as he struggled to breathe in the cramped conditions. ‘Everyone has heard about your visit to His Lordship, and your Hebrew feature revealed to the butler in the bathtub.'

‘The butler in the bathtub,' Kranz murmured, his mind still glued to the image of Valerie's sinewy thighs being forced apart by Haydon in the clumsy messiness of his attempts to penetrate her: spewing nowhere and leading him on to painful gropings that left her cold. He could imagine her hair greying and her face becoming lined with discomfort, as Haydon lost interest in the boyish figure and firm breasts, drifting into perversions with real boys whose mouths kissed his own nipples. Kranz could envisage the whole scenario and imagined Truman's butler being present, urging the boy on and partaking of the anal splendour offered both men in turn as they demanded blood and degradation within their worlds of psychotic penis-fixation.

Here in a place that would soon become an official internment camp Kranz had stopped imagining Haydon's couplings with Valerie, and now he worried that the marriage had put an end to her mastery of aeroplanes and her authority in ATA.

How could she have given it all up so quickly?

A voice inside his head suggested Haydon was blackmailing Valerie in some way – the MP would protect her forever if she would come into his clammy, acrid bed, not ever revealing her immoral associations with Jews and with other women. Though she would hotly deny the latter, Haydon would taunt and in the end triumph.

And now war was upon the world.

From what he could grasp from the often stale barracks newspapers, places as far-flung as Africa and the Philippine Islands could soon come into the appalling maelstrom. Kranz worried periodically about his family, and Grunberg wondered if his favourite student, Stella Teague, might stage a spectacular parachute jump into the camp from an ATA aircraft, and rescue the two men from this ridiculous humiliation.

In the next bunk along was a small man called Zuki who kept pictures of Hitler on the wall and who shunned their overtures. He had a friend in the women's camp who was ‘illustrious', as he described her, and who in his eyes had been wronged by the British to such an extent as to cause a secondary war front. Her camera had snapped his shots of the Führer, and for a while she had been based in Poland near the Warsaw Ghetto, making topical films for the Reich. Kranz wanted to meet this woman – he ached at the thought of her: his earthly senses, which had become more acute in his incarceration, told him she had been in the presence of his flesh and blood, but he knew not how. His life might be lived to its conclusion in this place, should the war go on for a generation, and by that time they would
be of one species, like convicted murderers condemned to death and united in the simple pursuits associated with the slow demise of those who become anonymous.

Kranz could foresee a communal existence, inmates tolerant of each other's needs because boredom would eradi cate any form of fervour. Was this not what happened in factories, and in offices? He looked forward to meeting the illustrious woman, who might assuage his boredom with tales from the Ghetto.

Mrs Bennell had been determined to find a Ouija Board for the girls. They were now flying aircraft that terrified the landlady in her dreams and laid waste any preconceived images she might have retained about post-Edwardian womanhood. Word had been circulated that in Battle of Britain missions there had been a number of close calls in which ATA pilots had come under direct enemy fire. Debates were raging about the arming of ferry personnel, and she could see no reason why an Anson-load of young women should not be defended. She had been told by Cal March that the arming of civilians was against the rules and that if ATA were to fully arm they would be in violation of international convention.

The boy, now sporting a handsome moustache and the uniform of a senior air cadet, kept her abreast of things he should not have revealed, but she swore secrecy and prayed nightly for his safety. His closest friend, Alec Harborne, had been ferrying incessantly and now that Cal had developed an acquaintance with Jo Howes, her American slang had provided an endearing counterpoint to his throwaway cockney phrases. She had come out of her awkward, sullen girlhood and emerged a confident, talkative character in keeping with the exceptional qualities of ATA ladies, qualities which aeroplanes seemed to bring out in all manner of humanity.