The Way Ahead (7 page)

‘None,’ said Boots.

‘We’ll ask Lieutenant-General Montrose to release you, perhaps for a month, in view of the fact that the man regards you as his confidant.’

‘I think that what we’ve heard will be enough to make London jump out of its skin,’ said Boots.

‘It might, yes, if we had any proof. As it is, we’re dealing with hearsay, Colonel. There have been hundreds of rumours and some accusations, but never any proof. Hearsay alone won’t do.’

‘But prolonged interrogation in London might dredge up a few bones with meat on them,’ said Boots.

‘Yes, so it might. But meat on those kind of bones? God Almighty, it’ll be meat that’ll stink to high heaven. We’ll signal London.’

For two days, Boots spent much time with Corporal Thurber, establishing a close and reassuring relationship with him. The German willingly, if in a distressed way, offered extra details of his brother’s outpourings. All amounted to the same thing, however, a picture of the appalling fate suffered by Jewish people in the concentration camp called Auschwitz. On the morning of the third day, with Boots temporarily detached from Lieutenant-General Montrose’s staff, a flying-boat carried prisoner and escort to Gibraltar, where they were met by informed Intelligence men from London.
There
, Corporal Hans Thurber was interrogated for four consecutive days, always in the presence of Boots, who had succeeded in reducing the man’s hysteria and brought him to a calmer recounting of his brother’s confession. Calmer, he was more credible. And there were no variations in his story, only an unbreakable thread of bitterness and a sick disillusion with the glorified SS.

Credibility, however, was still not proof.

He was eventually flown to Southampton Water, with the Intelligence men. Boots went too. On arrival in Southampton itself, Boots was offered a break, either at home or in London. He chose home. He would be contacted there when he was needed again, say in three or four days.

‘And there you are, Polly, here I am,’ he said.

‘I’d be very happy if I weren’t so appalled,’ said Polly. ‘Boots, for God’s sake, do you believe this man?’

‘I’ve spent days with him, observed him, talked to him and listened to him,’ said Boots, ‘and yes, I do believe.’

‘That thousands and thousands of Jewish people are being gassed and cremated monthly?’ said Polly, incredulous.

‘I reserve my judgement on numbers,’ said Boots. ‘I can put thousands and thousands monthly down to the exaggeration that goes with disordered and tortured minds.’

‘But even a count of hundreds doesn’t bear thinking about,’ said Polly. ‘And children, Boots? Infants?’

‘Is it possible, Polly, that Hitler’s Germany is
more
of a hell than any of us could ever imagine?’ said Boots sombrely.

‘If it’s responsible for the murder of little children and their mothers, yes, it’s a hell built by Satan himself,’ said Polly. ‘But could it be, could even the most devilish nation cover up the murder of hundreds of men, women and children, and by gassing them?’

‘That’s what puts a chink in belief,’ said Boots, ‘that’s why Allied governments need positive proof. You’re right, Polly, how could murder on that scale be hidden if it’s been going on for a year and more? I’d like to talk to Corporal Thurber again, and will do when I’m called to London. They’re giving him time to recover from disorientation. They want him stone cold sober, if that’s possible. He’s calmer than at first, but he still has spasms of hysteria.’

‘Darling, do you feel sick about all you had to listen to, and are you tired?’ asked Polly.

‘I feel a sympathy for Corporal Thurber,’ said Boots. ‘As for tiredness, it’s a little early for bed, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t think I mentioned bed, did I?’ said Polly.

‘It’s a thought,’ said Boots.

‘Bed?’ said Polly.

‘With you, Polly,’ said Boots, ‘but not now, later.’

‘At our ages?’ said Polly, finding a smile.

‘Polly old girl, I’m not done for yet,’ said Boots.

‘Oh, good show, mighty man of everlasting iron,’ said Polly.

‘There’s one thing that’s happily constant,’ said Boots.

‘And what’s that, old sport?’ asked Polly.

‘You’re a lovely woman to come home to, Polly.’

Polly’s eyes turned misty.

‘Don’t do it to me again,’ she said muffledly.

‘Don’t do what?’ asked Boots.

‘Put me in need of a hankie again,’ said Polly.

Boots got up, took hold of her hands and brought her to her feet.

‘It’s a frightful world, Polly,’ he said, ‘made so by frightful men, but some of us are blessed with civilized and forgiving women. Women like you. Let me say that it was painful to lose Emily, but you’ve been a joy and delight to me.’

‘Dear man, don’t you know how much I always wanted to be?’ said Polly.

The phone rang. Boots answered it. The conversation he had with the caller lasted more than a few minutes, and when he came back he looked stunned.

‘My God,’ he said.

‘Boots?’

‘Corporal Thurber hanged himself an hour ago, Polly. He was housed comfortably, with two Military Police sergeants to keep an eye on him. But he managed to hang himself in the bathroom by standing on the lavatory seat, tying his braces around the high window sash, then around his neck and simply letting himself fall. He was a man in torment, Polly, a man who considered himself monstrously betrayed by his brother and his Fuehrer. In common parlance, a decent man. I wonder, are there other Germans like him, others who can tell us what he told us, and would tell if they were free to do so?’

‘If all he said is true, Boots, then there must be, there must,’ said Polly. ‘Did he say who runs these concentration camps?’

‘Himmler’s SS,’ said Boots. ‘That’s believable, if so much else isn’t. I’m still struggling with some doubt.’

‘So am I,’ said Polly.

‘Now Intelligence not only has no proof, but no Corporal Thurber, either,’ said Boots. He grimaced. ‘There’s a suggestion he might not have hanged himself if I’d been there, for he asked once or twice if I had deserted him, if I considered him a man who belonged to an insufferable people.’

‘Boots, you’re not going to blame yourself, are you?’ said Polly.

‘No, Polly, I’m going to have a whisky, a stiff one,’ said Boots.

‘And then?’ said Polly, aware that he was a shaken man.

‘There’s always you, Polly, thank God,’ said Boots.

‘That’s one thing you can always believe,’ said Polly.

LITTLE PHOEBE ADAMS, ADOPTED
daughter of Susie and Sammy Adams, ran around the bedroom she shared with their natural daughter, Paula. She was shrieking with laughter, Sammy in chase of her. She scrambled over the bed, Sammy popped up on the other side, cut her off and collared her.

‘Got you, little sausage,’ he said.

‘Daddy, you cheated,’ she said, flushed and indignant. But she was happy to be up in his arms and to look into his smiling blue eyes. She was seven, a girl of giggles and responsive affection, and as much of a delight to Sammy as Paula, almost nine. Two of his other three children, Bess and Jimmy, were still in Devon as evacuees. The third, elder son Daniel, seventeen, had returned home three months ago, and was working at the factory in Belsize Park.

Phoebe, with her dark curling hair, dark eyes and elfin prettiness, had her own special place in the affections of Sammy and Susie. They cherished her as if she had been their own, and in the same way that Boots and Emily had cherished Rosie as a young girl.

‘Did I cheat?’ asked Sammy.

‘Yes, you went so’s you could get in front of me,’ said Phoebe, who had a strange belief that Sammy and Susie were her natural parents. That was something Sammy and Susie were going to have to deal with eventually. ‘Daddy, again.’

‘I’m supposed to be getting you ready for bed,’ said Sammy, as mentally and physically up to the mark at nearly forty-two as he had been when running a market stall at eighteen.

‘Just once more, please,’ said Phoebe, so he set her down and a new chase began, Phoebe shrieking as she scampered around. Up the stairs and into the bedroom came Paula.

‘Well, I just don’t know, I’m sure,’ she said, taking off Chinese Lady, her never-failing grandma. Her fair hair, loose, was shining from a brushing, and she wore a dressing-gown over her nightie. ‘I simply don’t know what I’m going to make of you two, and Mummy says that if you bring the house down, Daddy, you’ll be for it. And Daniel said he can hardly hear what the wireless is saying. And Grandma says she didn’t bring you up to make a racket.’

Sammy and Susie, still living with his mother and stepfather in the Red Post Hill house, had decided to stay until the war was over, when they would rebuild on the site of their bombed home. Chinese Lady and her husband, Edwin Finch, had no objections whatever to an indefinite stay by Susie, Sammy, the two young girls, and their brother Daniel. The large house had six bedrooms.

‘Mummy and Grandma said that, did they, Plum Pudding?’ said Sammy.

‘Yes, Daddy, they did,’ said Paula.

‘Oh, my eye,’ said Sammy.

‘Oh, crikey,’ said Phoebe, and darted a glance at Sammy. He tried to look like a guilty man, but failed. A little grin came and went, and Phoebe smothered a giggle.

‘And another thing,’ said Paula, a young lady with a tongue, ‘Mummy says to remind you that Emma and Jonathan will be here in five minutes.’

‘Ah,’ said Sammy. ‘Emma and Jonathan, right,’ he said. ‘Teeth, Phoebe. Jump about.’

‘Daddy, I already done my teeth,’ said Phoebe.

‘Have you?’ said Sammy.

‘Oh, dear, oh, dear,’ said Paula, ‘I think you’re a bit wobbly from making a racket, Daddy. Never mind, you’ll be better later.’

Only a little later, in fact, when the girls were in bed, Sammy was well enough to answer the door to Emma and Jonathan himself. It was the last full day of the young couple’s week at home, and Sammy had asked them to drop in.

‘Here we are, Uncle Sammy,’ said Emma, fresh as a bird at morning’s first light, despite spending the whole afternoon in and around the Denmark Hill area. She and Jonathan had been trying to decide on the kind of house in which they would like to begin their post-war life. It was a prolonged outing embracing ideas, visions, hopes and optimism.

‘Glad to see you,’ said Sammy, and gave his likeable niece a hug and a smacker before shaking Jonathan’s hand. ‘Jonathan, forgot to ask you about your tin knee when me and Susie saw you at the beginning of your leave. How’s it doing?’

‘Rattling a bit,’ said Emma.

‘I call it operative,’ said Jonathan who, like all the younger relatives, thought Sammy an eternal live wire. ‘So, I’m grateful to it, fond of it, and hanging on to it.’

‘I’m fond of it too,’ said Emma. ‘We’re a proud trio, Mum and Rosie and me, we all fly the flag for our husbands’ brave legs.’ She spoke light-heartedly, then made a little face. ‘Considering everything else, Uncle Sammy, we’re lucky.’

‘We’re all lucky, Emma, all of us who are still alive,’ said Sammy, remembering the months of the sustained blitz on London, and the night when he, Susie and Paula, in their air raid shelter, had heard the shattering roar of the exploding bomb that had razed their house. ‘And I’ll say this much, Jonathan looks as if he could climb trees all day, and you look as if you’d never be far behind.’

‘Yes, him Tarzan, me Jane,’ said Emma. ‘Oh, hello, Aunt Susie, love your dress.’

Susie, coming through the hall, was wearing a jersey wool dress of royal blue, a blue that always did so much for her fair looks. She was thirty-nine and the thought of being forty in August didn’t exactly exhilarate her. Every year seemed to fly, even in wartime. She could hardly believe the country had been involved in an utterly vicious conflict with Hitler’s Germany for well over four years, and against Japan for more than two. Susie could sense the country being drained of its best men and its strength. Soldiers, sailors, airmen and yes, merchant seamen too. Time after time the news referred to the loss of merchant shipping and the
drowning
of the crews. The German U-boats were the wolves of the Atlantic and the North Sea, hunting in packs, although the Royal Navy and the American Navy, with the help of long-ranging Sunderland flying-boats, were gradually getting the upper hand. And no U-boats could touch those fast-running troopships and armament carriers, the
Queen Mary
and
Queen Elizabeth
, in their voyages to and from New York.

Susie still put her faith in Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a bulldog turned lion. She was still sure he could outmatch Hitler, especially as his American allies were proving awesomely powerful. And their GIs were proving irresistibly fraternal. Shy girls shrieked and ran home to their mothers when they saw them coming. Most girls did no such thing. They liked the breezy, extrovert gum-chewing Americans.

Susie greeted Emma and Jonathan affectionately, exchanging kisses with them.

‘Lovely to see you again,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk in the parlour, shall we? Sammy has something to say to you. We won’t keep you long as it’s your last evening.’

On the table in the parlour were glasses, a bottle of beer and a bottle of port. They sat down around the table, and Sammy poured port for Emma and Susie, and beer for Jonathan and himself. The beer frothed to a fine white head on which bubbles sparkled and popped.

‘Now,’ said Sammy, ‘here’s to you two young people, well and truly married, which my dear
old
Ma is all in favour of and said so on the happy occasion when your Aunt Susie had the good sense to marry me. Or was it the other way round?’

‘Well, I think the world of you, Uncle Sammy,’ said Emma, ‘but I also think it was the other way round.’

‘Granted,’ said Sammy. ‘My lucky day that was, and I won’t deny it.’

‘Granted,’ said Susie.

‘I weren’t there myself,’ said Jonathan, ‘but durned if I don’t believe you, Aunt Susie. No offence, Uncle Sammy.’

‘None taken,’ said Sammy genially. ‘You two have been looking for your kind of dream castle today, right?’

‘Oh, a kind of wander into the realms of wishful thinking,’ said Emma, ‘to give ourselves lovely ideas of what we’d like for our post-war home, even if we know we’d have to start with something modest. Jonathan’s saving as much as he can out of his sergeant’s pay, and I’m saving as much as I can out of my farm pay.’