Winter’s Children (24 page)

‘I ask and ask to be sent home but Dresden is with Russian soldiers now. I want to find my sisters,’ the other one answered.

They were very careful with their table manners and watched what she was doing, making Shirley feel important. The other one looked like a film star on the screen of the Picturedrome but he had a scar down the side of his ear and she kept staring at the ridges on it. He saw her looking and fingered it with a smile.

‘I jump from the window … I was naughty little boy!’ he smiled and she blushed knowing it was rude to stare.

As the afternoon drew on the noise at the dining table grew more raucous and when the teatime visitors arrived from the neighbouring farms they were still at the table with not a thing cleared away, the afternoon had vanished.

The local farmers had brought with them their own contingent of POWs and in no time everyone cleared away the debris ready for the real party to begin. They crowded into the hall for a singsong and party games: pin the donkey, winking murder, blindman’s bluff.

Shirley liked cadging piggy backs. She felt like a princess in her pink crushed velvet party frock with the smocked bodice and the big one kept bumping his head on the beams and roaring like a lion. Everyone was enjoying themselves but soon it was time for Daddy and the men to do the foddering and farm chores. The prisoner men all lent a hand so the jobs would be done quicker.

Shirley joined the willing helpers making up a supper fit for the King himself: cold meats, Wensleydale cheese, trifle and Christmas bread; Mummy was humming to herself, which was a good sign.

‘Frau Snowden, I want thank you, you are, how we say,
gemutliche Frau,
a warm lady, my heart is full. We not expect such
Willkommen.
English are not what we expect. I salute you,’ said Klaus, clicking his heels and bowing his head, and Nora felt her hands trembling as she lifted the glasses from the tray.

There was a fizzing inside her like bubbling pop. In the bustle of her own cluttered kitchen something so unexpected was happening she could hardly breathe. How could she be feeling such sympathy and warmth to total strangers, men she had met only a few hours ago? It was strange to feel the bitterness evaporating like the brandy fumes on the pudding. She didn’t know either of them or what they had done. They could’ve slaughtered women and children, shot their neighbour’s son, murdered Jews, and yet when Klaus was looking at her with those flint sparkling eyes she sensed only a flicker of pity, not hatred. All she wanted was to stare back and that wasn’t right. What would poor Tom make of her change of heart?

She fingered her winter best clothes, glad she had made the effort. Her rusty wool crepe dress, rich as shiny conkers in colour, shaped her body neatly, outlining her full bust and neat waist. She was built square but everything was in proportion. Her hair was coiled up at the front and hung loose at the back, bouncing with health. Her best stockings were neatly darned and she wished they were real nylons not thick wool.

Someone sat at the piano in the hall and they pushed the hall table aside to clear the floor for a dance. Tom and Shirley jumped around the room and Big Hans danced with the daughter of their next-door neighbour, who lived three fields away.

Klaus took his place at the keyboard and the POWs linked shoulders and started singing carols. Then, in honour of the day, Nora pushed in beside him and played the famous tune ‘Lili Marlene’. She could feel his breath, the scratch of his uniform. The smell of him was sweet to her nostrils and she could feel the closeness of his lips as they all joined in the song.

Suddenly she was afraid. Something strange was happening. Her cheeks were on fire. For a second they glanced at each other and held the gaze enough to register what was happening, a brief moment of recognition, an exchange so swift but so meaningful, so utterly all shaming that Nora could not believe the whole room could not see that there was more on the boil than the kettle!

‘I must see to the kitchen,’ she croaked feebly, and Shirley bounded across the hall. ‘Dance with me. Dance with me, Santa Klaus!’

Everyone laughed at the mistake but Nora stood in the doorway transfixed by the sight of him spinning her child off the floor. He was lean and long-limbed, with an aquiline profile more Grecian than Nazi. For one brief second she was almost jealous of her own child. Then he looked up and smiled and that jealous aching was gone.

This is Wintergill, not Hollywood, she sighed. The war was over and this man was far from home, starved of female attention. He was not Errol Flynn and she wasn’t Carole Lombard. This may be wild Brontë country but that sort of romancing was thin on the ground. Klaus was just enjoying his freedom for a day. There was nothing more to it than that. And yet …

Tea was served upstairs in the old drawing room, scene of many of Joss and Jacob Snowden’s famous Christmas celebrations. Jacob would be looking down from his photograph by the door, glad that Christmas had come to ‘Dingley Dell’ once more. Sandwiches were passed round, bowls of trifle and a tin of Sharps toffee. Nothing was on ration for Christmas Day. Coupons and rations were forgotten when Wintergill House had a ‘blowout’. Belts were loosened, ties undone, corsets unhooked as the heat of the fire, food and drink took its toll. Neighbours, soldiers, children all sitting on the floor, squashed together in the silence of satisfaction, in a silent reverie of nostalgia for the better times before the war had made them enemies. Klaus had saved Nora a place on the floor as someone began a ghost story about the barghest, the mysterious white dog that roamed the Dales, omen of death and destruction. As they sat on the floor by the fire she felt her hand aching to touch his, to caress his fingers, but pushed them under her skirt to avoid such temptation. She must be drunk.

How can I even think such thoughts in front of my husband and my bairn? she mused. The man was a stranger. She was bound tight by duty and loyalty. Passion and adultery were what happened in books to Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, not to good old Lenora Snowden, farmer’s wife, newly appointed Minutes Secretary of the Women’s Institute.

‘Can we open the presents around the tree now?’ whined Shirley who’d been eyeing them all up impatiently. She was tired, overfed and ready for bed.

‘In a moment, love,’ Mum whispered. Her cheeks were all pink. Shirley didn’t like her sitting down with Mr Klaus. He wasn’t Santa after all just a soldier who kept looking at her mum. She sensed him distracting Mum so she tugged her sleeve.

‘Come on, Mum … I want to open the presents.’

Daddy nodded from across the room and Shirley ran downstairs to the big tree in the stairwell to fetch the brown parcel tied with string. ‘Can I open this?’ she asked, tearing off the paper to find a beautiful little carved house, like a cuckoo house chalet, painted in bright colours.

‘It’s a gingerbread house! Can I eat it?’ she cried, and Klaus shook his head laughing.

‘It’s a little Christmas house for your dolls, Fräulein Shirley. See, the front opens.
Ja?
It is house of
meine Heimat
… fatherland.’ The soldier smiled, proud of his handiwork.

‘It’s beautiful, like Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house,’ Mum said. ‘Thank you so much, but it wasn’t necessary.’

‘Ja,
but it is so,’ Klaus argued. ‘At home before Christmas, we have many markets, to sell wooden toys,
Glühwein
– hot wine and … herbs – but it is all gone now, I think,’ he replied as if he was talking only to Mum, ignoring Shirley.

‘Say thank you, Shirley. It’s a grand little house, is that. Go and fetch the stuff for our visitors,’ Daddy ordered, and she went down again for their parcels, giving one each for the big one and the other.

‘For us …
Hans, danke … danke.
They opened their presents as if they were made of gold. There were just two pairs of rough woollen mittens and a scarf. ‘You knit for us?’ They looked so pleased. How could anyone be pleased with such boring gifts?

‘No she didn’t, they came from the WI,’ Shirley snapped.

‘Now I’ve met you, I will knit something for both of you,’ Mum said, pointing at Daddy’s jumper. ‘One for you and you,
ja?
’

‘You can’t knit,’ Shirley whispered.

‘I can if I want to,’ Mum snapped back, and Shirley wanted to cry.

Everyone laughed but the Germans looked at their gifts with tears in their eyes. ‘
Danke, danke,
merry Christmas,’ stuttered Big Hans, the gentle giant, with a grin on his face.

‘You are very
gut
to us, you shake our hand and give us
gut
things. We never forget,’ said the other one.

‘None of that, let’s have another singsong round the piano,’ Daddy called out. They sang until they were hoarse, more carols, German and English, patted each other on the back and Shirley felt sick watching Mum being silly. She was glad when the clock spun round until it was time for the lorry to pick up the men again. Tomorrow she could have her parents all to herself.

The sky was bright and clear. Shirley’s Christ candle sitting in the draughty window was burning low. The day was over and Nora slumped with exhaustion.

‘I think we should ask for those two lads to be sent to work here,’ said Tom, sucking his pipe. ‘They’ve fitted in right grand, don’t you think?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Nora, suddenly wary.

‘You could teach them proper English.’

‘They can’t stay in the house.’

‘There’s the room over the Side Barn where the Irish stay at haytime. We can make it sound, give them a bit of privacy. I never like to miss a bargain and Big Hans will do the work of two men,’ he laughed. ‘What do you think, lass?’

What could she say? He was the boss in the farm matters. They could do with more help but there was danger in the POWs coming. She ought to suggest another gang but she found herself smiling and nodding.

Meeting Klaus had stirred up such strange feelings, as if her guts were churning over in a silly schoolgirl fashion. There was nothing wrong in a bit of romantic temptation. It was the yielding to it that was wrong. She was a wife and mother and good Christian woman. Surely there was nothing to fear from such an arrangement, was there?

In the weeks that followed Shirley watched her mother knitting those jumpers with lightning fingers, a simple style in unravelled old wool, hand spun and dyed. Big Hans, as she called him now, was so huge he took a whole fleece. Every second she had free she was clacking those needles, lost in her thoughts with no time to play ludo or snakes and ladders. ‘I must get on,’ she kept saying.

Then the snowstorms came, and Shirley couldn’t go to school, and the snow was so high they had to keep digging themselves out of the track. The postman walked on the stonewalls and gangs of diggers were out trying to keep the tops clear for the milk lorries. They were fast in with the two soldiers living in the barn until they sent for Big Hans to go home. He was that desperate to leave, he took snow shoes and poles and skied his way back to the road, taking their post on his back and some butter for the shops.

Then the blizzard took hold and it was all they could do to keep watering the barn stock and trying to rescue the stricken ewes sheltering under the drifts. Dad and Mr Klaus returned frozen each morning with the farm boy. All she could see were their eyes peering out of icy lashes like snowmen wrapped in scarves, and Mum fussing over them.

‘Come in, get yerselves warm,’ she cried as Shirley jumped up into her dad’s arms. Mum was busy trying to warm them with hot broth.

‘We’ll need a warm-through,’ Tom ordered. ‘Get the kettle on the boil and let the lad soak in the tub in front of the fire. He can’t go back to his billet until he’s thawed out proper.’

Shirley thought it was all a game, filling the bath. Mum started shooing her out of the door when Klaus peeled off his layers. ‘This is no place for the womenfolk,’ she whispered, but Shirley noticed Mum kept nipping back into the kitchen for stuff she’d forgotten, pink-faced and all hot and bothered; not like her mum at all.

Nora drank in a glimpse of his nakedness in one draught. He was a fine figure of a man. His bare shoulders were still tanned from the summer sun, his muscles lean and defined, his hips narrow where Tom’s were thick and fleshy. She grabbed the towels and fled into the hall, away from any further revelation. He was beautiful and she mustn’t look any more.

‘Stop it, you’re hurting me,’ Shirley snapped, and she realised she was gripping her arm tight.

‘Sorry, love,’ she croaked, feeling light-headed and silly.

As the days turned into weeks, Tom insisted she gave Klaus proper English lessons, and in the evening he sat stiffly at the kitchen table while she tried to engage him in conversation and some written work while Shirley kept butting in with suggestions. It was no surprise that he didn’t make much progress and the blizzards howled round their heads, blowing drifts that cut off even the Side Barn from the house, and Tom suggested she make up a bed for Klaus in the shelter of Wintergill House.

Nothing was said, not one intimate exchange between them had ever taken place, but as Nora climbed the stairs that night she knew that somehow she would make sure they were alone. Lying in bed she waited for the house to go silent and for Tom to be snoring, slipped into her dressing gown and made for the stairs. She coughed outside Klaus’s bedroom door and made enough noise to waken the dead but no one stirred. She waited and waited on the off chance with a sickening heart, and slowly made her way up the stairs back to bed with a terrible feeling of being utterly stupid.

Then she noticed a flicker of light under the door of the upstairs parlour and opened it softly. Klaus was there waiting, his hands hugging his knees. He looked up and smiled. ‘Frau Snowden – Lenora – I have to speak with you. I am thinking of you all times, night and day. I must go!’

‘And I of you,’ she whispered. She sat by him shivering in the darkness.

‘Never will I forget your kindness and your husband … This is bad thing, I know.’ He bent his head onto his knees and she sensed he was weeping. Her arms were round him in seconds and she cradled him tightly as they rocked together and she wept for the hopelessness of their loving each other. In the darkness and the flickering candle, in the icy chill of the parlour, they clung to each other and found their lips crushing together, their bodies straining to express all they felt. What happened between them was as natural as talking and breathing. Why waste precious moments in words when bodies can express so much more?