Winter of the World (119 page)

‘I saw you this morning, getting out of a jeep.’

‘Colonel Hicks gave me a lift.’

‘He kissed you on the lips.’

Frieda looked away. ‘I knew I should have got out earlier. I could have walked from the American zone.’

‘Frieda, what about Heinrich?’

‘He’ll never know! I’ll be more careful, I swear.’

‘Do you still love him?’

‘Of course! We’re going to get married.’

‘Then why . . . ?’

‘I’ve had enough of hard times! I want to put on pretty clothes and go to nightclubs and dance.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Carla said confidently. ‘You can’t lie to me, Frieda – we’ve been friends too long. Tell me the truth.’

‘The truth?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I did it for Walli.’

Carla gasped with shock. That had never occurred to her, but it made sense. She could believe Frieda would make such a sacrifice for her and her baby.

But she felt dreadful. This made her responsible for Frieda’s prostituting herself. ‘This is terrible!’ Carla said. ‘You shouldn’t have done it – we would
have managed somehow.’

Frieda sprang up from the piano stool with the baby still in her arms. ‘No, you wouldn’t!’ she blazed.

Walli was frightened, and cried. Carla took him and rocked him, patting his back.

‘You wouldn’t have managed,’ Frieda said more quietly.

‘How do you know?’

‘All last winter, babies were brought into the hospital naked, wrapped in newspapers, dead of hunger and cold. I could hardly bear to look at them.’

‘Oh, God.’ Carla held Walli tight.

‘They turn a peculiar bluish colour when they freeze to death.’

‘Stop it.’

‘I have to tell you, otherwise you won’t understand what I did. Walli would have been one of those blue frozen babies.’

‘I know,’ Carla whispered. ‘I know.’

‘Percy Hicks is a kind man. He has a frumpy wife back in Boston and I’m the sexiest thing he’s ever seen. He’s nice and quick about intercourse and always uses a
condom.’

‘You should stop,’ Carla said.

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Carla confessed. ‘And that’s the worst part. I feel so guilty. I am guilty.’

‘You’re not. It’s my choice. German women have to make hard choices. We’re paying for the easy choices German men made fifteen years ago. Men such as my father, who
thought Hitler would be good for business; and Heinrich’s father, who voted for the Enabling Act. The sins of the fathers are visited on the daughters.’

There was a loud knock at the front door. A moment later they heard scampering steps as Rebecca hurried upstairs to hide, just in case it was the Red Army.

Then Ada’s voice said: ‘Oh! Sir! Good morning!’ She sounded surprised and a bit worried, though not scared. Carla wondered who would induce that particular mixture of reactions
in the maid.

There was a heavy masculine tread on the stairs, then Werner walked in.

He was dirty and ragged and thin as a rail, but there was a broad smile on his handsome face. ‘It’s me!’ he said ebulliently. ‘I’m back!’

Then he saw the baby. His jaw dropped and the happy smile disappeared. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘What . . . who . . . whose baby is that?’

‘Mine, my darling,’ said Carla. ‘Let me explain.’

‘Explain?’ he said angrily. ‘What explanation is necessary? You’ve had someone else’s baby!’ He turned to go.

Frieda said: ‘Werner! In this room are two women who love you. Don’t walk out without listening to us. You don’t understand.’

‘I think I understand everything.’

‘Carla was raped.’

He went pale. ‘Raped? Who by?’

Carla said: ‘I never knew their names.’

‘Names?’ Werner swallowed. ‘There . . . there was more than one?’

‘Five Red Army soldiers.’

His voice fell to a whisper. ‘Five?’

Carla nodded.

‘But . . . couldn’t you . . . I mean . . .’

Frieda said: ‘I was raped, too, Werner. And so was Mother.’

‘Dear God, what has been going on here?’

‘Hell,’ said Frieda.

Werner sat down heavily in a worn leather chair. ‘I thought hell was where I’ve been,’ he said. He buried his face in his hands.

Carla crossed the room, still holding Walli, and stood in front of Werner’s chair. ‘Look at me, Werner,’ she said. ‘Please.’

He looked up, his face twisted with emotion.

‘Hell is over,’ she said.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ she said firmly. ‘Life is hard, but the Nazis have gone, the war is finished, Hitler is dead, and the Red Army rapists have been brought under control, more or less. The
nightmare has ended. And we’re both alive, and together.’

He reached out and took her hand. ‘You’re right.’

‘We’ve got Walli, and in a minute you’ll meet a fifteen-year-old girl called Rebecca who has somehow become my child. We have to make a new family out of what the war has left
us, just as we have to build new houses with the rubble in the streets.’

He nodded acceptance.

‘I need your love,’ she said. ‘So do Rebecca and Walli.’

He stood up slowly. She looked at him expectantly. He said nothing but, after a long moment, he put his arms around her and the baby, gently embracing them both.

(iv)

Under wartime regulations still in force, the British government had a right to open a coal mine anywhere, regardless of the wishes of the owner of the land. Compensation
was paid only for loss of earnings on farmland or commercial property.

Billy Williams, as Minister for Coal, authorized an open-cast mine in the grounds of T
ŷ
Gwyn, the palatial residence of Earl Fitzherbert on the outskirts of Aberowen.

No compensation was payable as the land was not commercial.

There was uproar on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons. ‘Your slag heap will be right under the bedroom windows of the countess!’ said one indignant Tory.

Billy Williams smiled. ‘The earl’s slag heap has been under my mother’s window for fifty years,’ he said.

Lloyd Williams and Ethel both travelled to Aberowen with Billy the day before the engineers began to dig the hole. Lloyd was reluctant to leave Daisy, who was due to give birth in two weeks, but
it was a historic moment, and he wanted to be there.

Both his grandparents were now in their late seventies. Granda was almost blind despite his pebble-lensed glasses, and Grandmam was bent-backed. ‘This is nice,’ Grandmam said when
they all sat around the old kitchen table. ‘Both my children here.’ She served stewed beef with mashed turnips and thick slices of home-made bread spread with the butcher’s fat
called dripping. She poured large mugs of sweetened milky tea to go with it.

Lloyd had eaten like this frequently as a child, but now he found it coarse. He knew that even in hard times French and Spanish women managed to serve up tasty dishes delicately flavoured with
garlic and garnished with herbs. He was ashamed of his fastidiousness, and pretended to eat and drink with relish.

‘Pity about the gardens at T
ŷ
Gwyn,’ Grandmam said tactlessly.

Billy was stung. ‘What do you mean? Britain needs the coal.’

‘But people love those gardens. Beautiful, they are. I’ve been there at least once every year since I was a girl. Shame it is to see them go.’

‘There’s a perfectly good recreation ground right in the middle of Aberowen!’

‘It’s not the same,’ said Grandmam imperturbably.

Granda said: ‘Women will never understand politics.’

‘No,’ said Grandmam. ‘I don’t suppose we will.’

Lloyd caught his mother’s eye. She smiled and said nothing.

Billy and Lloyd shared the second bedroom, and Ethel made up a bed on the kitchen floor. ‘I slept in this room every night of my life until I went in the army,’ Billy said as they
lay down. ‘And I looked out the window every morning at that fucking slag heap.’

‘Keep your voice down, Uncle Billy,’ Lloyd said. ‘You don’t want your mother to hear you swear.’

‘Aye, you’re right,’ said Billy.

Next morning after breakfast they all walked up the hill to the big house. It was a mild morning, and for a change there was no rain. The ridge of mountains at the skyline was softened with
summer grass. As T
ŷ
Gwyn came into view, Lloyd could not help seeing it more as a beautiful building than as a symbol of oppression. It was both, of course: nothing was simple in politics.

The great iron gates stood open. The Williams family passed into the grounds. A crowd had gathered already: the contractor’s men with their machinery, a hundred or so miners and their
families, Earl Fitzherbert with his son Andrew, a handful of reporters with notebooks, and a film crew.

The gardens were breathtaking. The avenue of ancient chestnut trees was in full leaf, there were swans on the lake, and the flower beds blazed with colour. Lloyd guessed the earl had made sure
the place looked its best. He wanted to brand the Labour government as wreckers in the eyes of the world.

Lloyd found himself sympathizing with Fitz.

The Mayor of Aberowen was giving an interview. ‘The people of this town are against the open-cast mine,’ he said. Lloyd was surprised: the town council was Labour, and it must have
gone against the grain for them to oppose the government. ‘For more than a hundred years, the beauty of these gardens has refreshed the souls of people who live in a grim industrial
landscape,’ the Mayor went on. Switching from prepared speech to personal reminiscence, he added: ‘I proposed to my wife under that cedar tree.’

He was interrupted by a loud clanking sound like the footsteps of an iron giant. Turning to look back along the drive, Lloyd saw a huge machine approaching. It looked like the biggest crane in
the world. It had an enormous boom ninety feet long and a bucket into which a lorry could easily fit. Most astonishing of all, it moved along on rotating steel shoes that made the earth shake every
time they hit the ground.

Billy said proudly to Lloyd: ‘That’s a walking monighan dragline excavator. Picks up six tons of earth at a time.’

The film camera rolled as the monstrous machine stomped up the drive.

Lloyd had only one misgiving about the Labour Party. There was a streak of puritan authoritarianism in many socialists. His grandfather had it, and so did Billy. They were not comfortable with
sensual pleasures. Sacrifice and self-denial suited them better. They dismissed the ravishing beauty of these gardens as irrelevant. They were wrong.

Ethel was not that way, nor was Lloyd. Perhaps the killjoy strain had been bred out of their line. He hoped so.

Fitz gave an interview on the pink gravel path while the digger driver manoeuvred his machine into position. ‘The Minister for Coal has told you that when the mine is exhausted the garden
will be subject to what he calls an effective restoration programme,’ he said. ‘I say to you that that promise is worthless. It has taken more than a century for my grandfather and my
father and I to bring the garden to its present pitch of beauty and harmony. It would take another hundred years to restore it.’

The boom of the excavator was lowered until it stood at a forty-five-degree angle over the shrubbery and flower beds of the west garden. The bucket was positioned over the croquet lawn. There
was a long moment of waiting. The crowd fell silent. Billy said loudly: ‘Get on with it, for God’s sake.’

An engineer in a bowler hat blew a whistle.

The bucket was dropped to the earth with a massive thud. Its steel teeth dug into the flat green lawn. The drag rope tautened, there was a loud creak of straining machinery, then the bucket
began to move back. As it was dragged across the ground it dug up a bed of huge yellow sunflowers, the rose garden, a shrubbery of summersweet and bottlebrush buckeye, and a small magnolia tree. At
the end of its travel the bucket was full of earth, flowers and plants.

The bucket was then lifted to a height of twenty feet, dribbling loose earth and blossoms.

The boom swung sideways. It was taller than the house, Lloyd saw. He almost thought the bucket would smash the upstairs windows, but the operator was skilled, and stopped it just in time. The
drag rope slackened, the bucket tilted, and six tons of garden fell to the ground a few feet from the entrance.

The bucket was returned to its original position, and the process was repeated.

Lloyd looked at Fitz and saw that he was crying.

1947

At the beginning of 1947 it seemed possible that all Europe might go Communist.

Volodya Peshkov was not sure whether to hope for that or its opposite.

The Red Army dominated Eastern Europe, and Communists were winning elections in the West. Communists had gained respect for their role in resisting the Nazis. Five million people had voted
Communist in the first French postwar election, making the Communists the most popular party. In Italy a Communist-Socialist alliance won 40 per cent of the vote. In Czechoslovakia the Communists
on their own won 38 per cent and led the democratically elected government.

It was different in Austria and Germany, where voters had been robbed and raped by the Red Army. In the Berlin city elections, the Social Democrats won 63 of 130 seats, the Communists only 26.
However, Germany was ruined and starving, and the Kremlin still hoped that the people might turn to Communism in desperation, just as they had turned to Nazism in the Depression.

Britain was the great disappointment. Only one Communist had been sent to Parliament in the postwar election there. And the Labour government was delivering everything Communism promised:
welfare, free health care, education for all, even a five-day week for coal miners.

But in the rest of Europe, capitalism was failing to lift people out of the postwar slump.

And the weather was on Stalin’s side, Volodya thought as the layers of snow grew thick on the onion domes. The winter of 1946–7 was the coldest in Europe for more than a century.
Snow fell in St Tropez. British roads and railways became impassable, and industry ground to a halt – something that had never happened in the war. In France, food rations fell below wartime
levels. The United Nations Organization calculated that 100 million Europeans were living on 1,500 calories a day – the level at which health begins to suffer from the effects of
malnutrition. As the engines of production ran slower and slower, people began to feel they had nothing to lose, and revolution came to seem the only way out.