Tying Down The Lion (11 page)

Not so much a bobbing island then. More a floating crocodile. Bugger.

“Yes, but at least no war has happened, Nell,” Mum says, pressing a hand to her appendix-grenade. “There is peace, no?”

“Anyone would think you quite welcomed this Wall that’s cut your sisters off from each other, Bridge. This Wall where they shoot people who just want to bob across to see their family or go to the job they used to have before it stopped them in their tracks.”

Blimey. Grandma actually pays attention to the news on the wireless. I knew she loathed Khrushchev, but I thought she only ever listened to
The Clitheroe Kid
.

And I am listening, too, sensing my project about to grow as I make the decision to include Peter Fechter, partly because I wish I could fall in love with him and partly because he made my mum cry.

Peter Fechter was eighteen when the East Berlin police shot him. He might have just started loving a girl. That’s when it begins, at eighteen.

When the news of his death appeared in the paper, I was about nine, rolling a small Victor round the room on the pouffe, but aware of Mum sitting still for ages with the newspaper on her lap. I could see a picture of Peter’s kind, ordinary face.

Eventually, she cut out the article about him, stood up like an old woman and went to cook tea. It was Deutsche mince that evening and for once I didn’t worm out all the slippery strips of tinned pimento because she was still so quiet. I helped Victor shovel up his peas and gave him half my Heinz pudding. I used to be quite nice.

I asked Dad why Mum kept the article and he said Peter was a symbol for freedom.

When I told Gillian about him, she said, “He’s just a person breaking the law of the land. Not a war hero.”

War isn’t all about bombs dropping, I would have said, but when Gillian’s uncle’s house was flattened by a Doodlebug, he shoved her grandfather down the coal cellar in the nick of time, so she knows different.

Peter’s newspaper face haunts me at night, not in the scary train-robber way, but because I wish I could marry him. I did have my eye on Kevin Hatherley in 5B until I realised that after Games he smelt like boiled beef.

I try not to think about Peter’s small sad body on the ground, just his lovely face. I didn’t ask to see the cutting in case it made Mum cry again, but before we came to Berlin, when she was busy snapping at Dad for making her burn the fish fingers when all he did was wrap his arms around her waist, I took it out of her ottoman.

On August 17th, 1962, Peter Fechter, a bricklayer, was helping to rebuild his country. He had an ordinary life in East Berlin, as part of the workforce restoring a palace destroyed in the war. There was an abundance of labour for young men like him.

His older sister lived on the west side. Before the Wall was built, he and his family used to be able to visit her. A few days after the first anniversary of the Wall, he and a friend decided to climb it and cross over, a youthful snap decision, perhaps made in a fit of high spirits.

They hid in an old workshop by the border, peering at the West through a small window not yet boarded up, the prospect of failure generating fear, but the need to escape repelling it.

They removed their shoes, opened the window and leapt out.

Peter’s friend scaled the Wall. “Hurry!” he called. But Peter hesitated. Perhaps he had changed his mind. The East German border guards, however, did not arrest him. They started shooting.

Even though Peter had given up running, the storm of bullets rooted him to the spot. They left him lying in the death strip, alone and crying with pain, watched by horrified people from both sides.

A West Berlin policeman climbed a ladder, threw bandages over the Wall and asked Peter his name. No more could be done. West feared retaliation from East. Afterwards, the East German border guards said they could not have answered his frantic calls for help because the West Berlin police were pointing guns at them.

For the East, Peter’s fate serves as a warning to anyone else considering escape. For the Western world, however, he will become a symbol of the border regime’s cold-blooded brutality.

Peter lay dying for almost an hour before the East German troops sent up a cloud of manmade mist. Behind this shroud they carried him away at last, but it was too late. People will remember Peter Fechter as the young man who was almost free.

“Here it comes,” Dad warns. “Checkpoint Alpha’s up ahead. This one takes us into East Germany. The one after this, Checkpoint Bravo, will take us into West Berlin.”

Armed look-out towers loom from forests stripped to make a free-fire zone in a world of concrete and steel gates, where people are stopped, their papers examined, their faces scrutinised. Forms are stamped, orders are barked. Razor-wire scores the sides of the corridor like a long tunnel-web. In the Auto Corridor, the gaps between watch towers become shorter. Instead of looking out for the next one, we watch them flash by. I swear I can see lights bouncing off field-glasses. Kilometre by kilometre, a world of tyranny is hurtling towards us.

When we queue for the Allied checkpoint in Helmstedt, the atmosphere shifts from oddly foreign into a mood of non-welcome. Ordinary families like ours are being watched and checked. Normal life has skidded to a stop.

But we are the Bishops. We have a pebble-dashed house with keys in the fruit-bowl and bird-seed on the lino. We peel potatoes and watch Hughie Green. Victor keeps soldiers in a biscuit tin, and I suck the ends of my hair when Mum isn’t looking. Grandma flirts with the fishmonger. Dad looks after men in prison, and Mum makes blancmange that could re-grout the bathroom tiles. But now we are all foreigners.

The military police look over our car, open the boot and kick the wheels. “They need to know we have a spare tyre and enough petrol, and that we could cope with an emergency,” Mum explains.

“Christ, the back-door’s dodgy, Bridge,” Dad whispers, panicky hands running through his hair, then sliding greasily off the steering-wheel.

A guard walks by with a long-handled mirror on wheels for searching under lorries. Dad is staring, transfixed, like the badger in the shed. I pass Victor my last Opal Mint, but he’s too terrified to move, so I make T-K open the wrapper.

While Dad leans forward like a jockey waiting for the off, the guard bangs the flank of the car. We all flinch, Dad almost cracking his forehead on the steering-wheel.

“We can go,” Mum says. “Come on, Roy. Before they bang again.”

The car stalls. The guard bangs. Victor whimpers.

“Roy, please. We have to move.”

“Come on, come on,” Dad growls as if he’s watching the last furlong of the Grand National.

“Come on, come on,” Victor squeaks, clutching my hand.

I want to say shove off, but I might actually need him.

“Lawks what a fuss foreigners make,” Grandma says, sucking at the liquorice-pipe from her Sherbet Fountain. “Just give it some choke, lad. And a bit more rev, I’d say.”

The guard is rapping on Dad’s window. Victor squeals. Grandma almost swallows her pipe.

“Fuck-me-sideways-said-the-queen,” Dad says, revving hard. It may sound like the worst word, but it doesn’t count because he runs it together with the others to make one long new word. The Germans do the same. Think of
Schwarzwälderkirschkuchen
or whatever it is. Mum banned f-m-s-s-t-q from the house, but on a freezing night when Dad’s scuttle comes out empty, I have heard it emerge from the depths of the coal bunker.

The engine starts.

“Thank Christ!” Dad cries, giving the guard a thumbs-up.

We roll forward to the next barrier. More of a jerk than a roll actually, since Dad is using the handbrake for every stop.

“I know we’ve nothing to hide, but I’m dreading them making window-winding gestures at you,” I tell Dad.

“I’ll have a job, Jacqueline. My window-handle’s buggered,” he says, sweating like a man who has a great deal to hide.

“Just be natural,” Grandma says, patting on face-powder and touching up her lipstick.

“Anyway, you can’t be all la-di-da here, Jacqueline,” Dad says, excessively bucked with himself for crossing the first hurdle. “When in Rome, you know.”

“They are sure to be very polite,” Mum says, giving Dad a belated glare for the bad word earlier.

“They can probably remain polite while ripping out a person’s toe-nails,” I tell her, receiving a glare myself.

“You’re going a bit fast, son,” Grandma says as we gather speed.

“I’m allowed to go fifty, Ma, and we haven’t got long to reach Checkpoint Bravo. If it takes more than four hours, they come and search for us.”

“Who’s they?” I ask. “Do the West Germans come tearing along the autobahn to help us? Or do you mean the East Germans march us to a cell for questioning?”

“I mean this lot,” Dad says. “The East. We’re in their country now, Jacqueline. It’s their rules.”

Mum looks suddenly wretched.

“This is worse than Daleks,” Victor whines in absolute misery, peeling his Opal Mint from T-K’s hair. “Why can’t Mum be English like everyone else’s mums? Then we’d be in Clacton.”

“Dear old Clacton,” Grandma murmurs, tipping the tube of sherbet down her throat.

Dad swipes his hand around, but our feet are carefully tucked back. “That’s enough cheek, young man,” he says. But his hair is falling out of its Brylcreem, and he keeps tapping his pockets to check for passports and matches.

I miss the ordinary summer, even the reek of Dad’s sweet-William in the back yard, even the lavender polish and stewed-pear smell of the Clacton guest-house. But at least there is one advantage over Clacton. While Dad is busy being as nervous as a racehorse on the starting-blocks, or wherever they start from, the Bad-Moon girls can sleep off their hangovers.

The car lurches towards the police barrier at Marienborn, almost stalling on the approach, but Dad reins it in with an expert kick on the clutch.

“Shall I choke you?” Mum asks.

“No, Bridge. It’s under control. Don’t worry,” Dad says, yanking on the handbrake and talking at supersonic speed.

A soldier orders us out, demanding to see our papers. We stand in a line as close to the car as we can, toasting against the sun-baked metal. If we end up in a windowless hole, I will never forgive Mum.

One guard watches us while another shuffles through our passports and takes them away.

“God, they’re slower than a millpond in June,” Dad mutters.

“Sh,” Mum says.

“I can’t stand long,” Grandma says. “I’m a slave to my veins, don’t they realise?” She raises her voice. “I’ve got blood-pressure, you know.”

“Haven’t we all, Grandma? Thankfully,” I whisper.

“Get a move on,” she tells the nearest guard. “Best hurry before the car falls apart.”

“Sh,” Mum hisses.

“It’ll not stand much prodding,” Grandma continues. “A wing, a prayer and a rubber-band are all that holds it in one piece.”

To illustrate, she does a flapping bird impression, then presses her hands together and finally clutches Mum’s wrist and twangs the rubber-band round it.

“Ow,” Mum shrieks, scowling.

I swear the guard’s lips are twitching.

“Not a bad lad really, is he?” Grandma says. “Just not a terribly talkable fella.”

We are surrounded by other armed guards, so alert they’re almost quivering. I glance at Victor. Although this is T-K’s world of guns, uniforms and fear in living, breathing Technicolor, Victor has smuggled him away in the glove compartment and looks lost without him. A rush of sisterly love surges, the first since he was about nine months old and learnt to clap, which made him seem so much more human.

I am shaking. The vital thing is that no one must see. Fear is one of the Emotions we have learnt about in biology. “So-called Finer Feelings,” Miss Lobb said, curling her upper lip as if Feelings carried a bad smell. No chalk was wasted on them. Before hurrying back to the safer topic of ovaries, she ticked the most delicate Emotions off on her fingers. “Love, Fear, Sympathy, Excitement. Now, if you feel any one of those, keep it to yourself. Show too much and you weaken.” That was it. Feelings covered in five seconds.

I am an older sister, a sensible daughter, an almost-adult. In 1971, I shall rechristen myself Tuesday and wear glorious Sunflower stocking-tights. I already have a powder-compact. I’m just not allowed the powder yet. I must pull myself together and be mature for Victor’s sake. I am not the smallest bit afraid. I am a dignified woman. Oh Christ alive, is that a Kalashnikov?

My Emotion is hard to hide now. Grandma tries to hold my hand and I want her to very much, but as I’m not six I shake it off.

The nearest guard is staring at us.

“Shall we tell him a joke?” Grandma asks.

“No, for George Harrison’s sake, Grandma,” Victor whispers.

“What do you call a cross German, eh?”

Sod it, she’s already tittering.

“Grandma, stop it.”

“Sour kraut!”

“Grandma!”

“He doesn’t understand, Victor love. Look, his face is blank.”

“But one false move and it’ll be ready-aim-fire.”

Victor’s right. If I look at the ground, the guard will assume I have something to hide. If I look him square in the eye, I’ll seem brazen. I can glare well enough to wither a geography teacher, but they’re quite a scrawny species.

“All out!” he barks, pointing at our car. “Become everyzing in zee auto out. Now, please.”

He takes a step towards us.

“He means get everything out of the car,” Mum says.

I’ve already worked this out. Their word for ‘get’ is
bekommen
, which used to confuse Mum too.

“Please all out now!” he shouts.

“Yes, yes, we do understand you awfully well, my good man,” Mum says in her primmest English.

Blimey. In a minute she’ll be holding out her handbag and saying, “Oh my dear fellow, please would you care to consider the contents of my reticule? Thanks awfully.”

If I spoke up like that, it would be called backchat.

The guard, at the end of his tether, keeps jabbing his finger in the direction of the car. The handcuffs tied to his belt jangle and his gun glints in the sunshine. Sweat is collecting in the creases at the back of my knees.