So Much Life Left Over

  I was doing it with the landlady. She was called Baldhart, and she was in her thirties and still firing on all six cylinders. She had lovely brown hair with golden bits, sort of streaky, and her nose turned up, and she had these hazel eyes that changed colour depending on the angle, and long thin fingers that were always a bit on the cold side, and that was something I liked, and she had lips that were small but sort of plump at the same time, and I’d say that everything about her was just about exactly the right size, and you know what? It wasn’t long before she was saying ‘Oily, ich liebe dich’ and at first I was thinking ‘I know you like a bit of dick’ but soon enough she got through to me, and it was really the first time in my life, because I never did feel that way about my wife before she went off with that Gordon Highlander. I’d married her because she got pregnant, and now I’m not even sure it was my tackle that did the damage.

  Baldhart used to sing that song from The Blue Angel, you know, that flick where Marlene Dietrich gets her legs out. She must have seen it lots of times, because she knew all the words, and when she’d had a few schnapps she’d light an imaginary cigarette and sing it to me. ‘Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt, den dass ist meine Welt, und sonst gar nichts. Das ist – was soll ich machen? – Mein Natur…’

  Well, she was a lovely woman, the best I ever had, so I was contented in Hunland at first, but Captain Pitt wasn’t. He was glum most of the time, and only perked up when he was going home to see his kids, which he did quite a lot. I was left alone in Krautland for a month at a time, hardly speaking a word of Kraut. Of course I learned all the names for the parts of motorcycles at the workshop, and the girls taught me everything filthy I needed to know. After a while I twigged, from little things that he said, that Captain Pitt’d been in love, and she’d packed him in, and that was why he’d done this madcap thing and come out to Germany, just to get away. He was a man in pain, and he talked like someone who knows that everything’s got pickled up, because he said things like ‘If I’d stayed in Ceylon, I’d probably be an estate manager by now’, and he’d look into the distance and sigh, and say, ‘You’ve no idea how glorious it was in Ceylon.’

  He liked going to Berlin. It was really just a great big poxed-out whorehouse, but as far as I know he just wanted to see Josephine Baker and La Jana, and Margo Lion, and he was quite keen on all the plays, and once there was that little boy called Yehudi Menuhin who played the fiddle like a bleedin’ angel, or so he said, and nowadays he’s very famous. I remember how chuffed he was with The Threepenny Opera, and he knew all the songs from it. He must have seen it five times. Both of us learned most of our Kraut from songs. There was a stone lion in Berlin and everybody said it roared when a virgin went past it. It never roared, wouldn’t you know.

  We didn’t do much business. I mean, Germany was down shit creek without a paddle and no leg to stand on, everyone’d lost all their savings twice, and once you’d added on the transport costs, there wasn’t anybody who could buy a British motorcycle, no matter how good they were. And it was pretty much the same the other way round. The Huns made perfectly good motorcycles themselves, same as we did, but it cost a lot to get them back to Blighty, so we didn’t sell many. We turned over a few DKWs and BMWs. I always liked those horizontal engines. The bike leaned over differently, depending on whether it was a right- or a left-hand bend. That was the torque effect, that was.

  Captain Pitt’s two friends, Willy and Fritzl, were a right pair of characters. He’d captured them in the war, and they’d become friends, and to begin with they just talked about what they’d done in the war, and about all the technical details of the planes they knew about, and they’d crack open a bottle of white after work, and toast all the dead aces together, and stagger home a bit late with their arms around each other’s shoulders. I reckon that for them it was like being back in 1917.

  Willy and Fritzl were proud of Captain Pitt, because the Captain was still pretty famous, and it wasn’t too bad, having been captured by an ace and then become friends afterwards. It was all chivalry and knights of the air. I do remember one night in the pub when they got a bit wild and they started re-enacting an air battle using their chairs as aircraft, and ratatat-tatting like kids, and then the landlord called the Schupo and we all got slung out and we rode back into town blind drunk, and Willy and Fritzl stopped by crashing into the wall of the workshop and bent up their forks. Willy went over the bars and cracked his head on the wall, and he was out cold.

  There was this stupid song about how my parrot doesn’t eat hard-boiled eggs, and Willy and Fritzl did it as a duet, and they crossed their eyes and waggled their heads like idiots, and it always cracked me up. I can still sing it. ‘Mein Papagai frisst keine harten Eier…’

  Those were the days.

  Then in 1933 Hitler got elected, and it wasn’t long before he’d given himself the two top jobs all at once. He was fond of referendums, that one. He got the people to do all his dirty work, and the mad bastards went along with it and gave him what he wanted.

  You can sort of understand it. I mean, they’d been having an election every five minutes, and there was a dozen parties to vote for, and there was fighting in the streets, and they’d had that second bloody great depression in 1929, and there were queues for the dole a mile long, and there was eight million unemployed, and there was a plague of suicides. I think it was in 1932, they had that Bloody Sunday in Hamburg and it was a big barney between the National Socialists and the Commies, and sixteen people got killed. It was shocking. What they had in common was not being arsed with democracy, and wanting to knock it on the head. It was like they couldn’t cope with not having a Kaiser. That’s what Captain Pitt thought. We used to talk about all this stuff when we were on our tea breaks, and I’d say I got my opinions from him to begin with, until I knew more about it myself.

  Well, Adolf was the Kaiser all right, multiplied by ten. Everything happened so fast. They dumped the League of Nations, Parliament got elbowed out, and they banned criticism, and they fired all the people who weren’t like them, and the Bolshies started disappearing into camps, and a lot of people got banged up for their own protection or to stop them doing anything evil before they’d even thought of doing it, and they started their war on unemployment, and people left for the countryside in droves to do land help and labour service, and what have you. Then some clot set fire to the Reichstag, so they gave the rozzers a lot of extra clout, and Willy and Fritzl got all fired up and wrote to Himmler offering to execute the arsonist. And then there was the secret police on top of the Schupos and the Kripos, and this was the Gestapo, and you couldn’t fart without some idiot denouncing you. It was Adolf giving the whole country the biggest kick up the backside it ever had, and it sort of worked. After three years, you wouldn’t believe the difference. Even the Bolshies were impressed.

  All around you people were like drunks, talking bollocks about how the Germans was the bee’s knees, and everyone else was dross, as if they weren’t just a bunch of loonies who went around starting wars. And they kept going on about how they hadn’t really lost the last war, and it was all because of a stab in the back by the Jewboy Bolshies. We had these parades of SA Brownshirts, with their torches and their speeches from balconies. And I heard those shirts were only brown because brown was the cheapest cloth. Baldhart was going to join the NSF, which was the National Socialist Womanhood, because she was fired up like everyone else, but in the end she didn’t, and I’ll tell you why.

  It was because the prossie woman in our house didn’t give one of her clients what he was hoping for, and did give him something else he wasn’t hoping for, and he went to the Gestapo. He said she was a streetwalker, which wasn’t legal by then, even though she wasn’t, and he said the house was a brothel, which it hardly was, and he said the girls were sleeping with foreigners and Jews and it was causing racial defilement and contamination, because what would happen if one of them got pregnant and
the kid was half un-German?

  The only thing he said that was true was that the girl was giving out the clap. Oh, and the girls slept with whoever they liked because if they liked someone, they wouldn’t have given a toss even if he’d been an Eskimo.

  Well, the Gestapo liked a bit of drama, so they always kicked the door down, and if it was open, they closed it, and then they kicked it down. And they always came in the middle of the night. So that’s what happened. We were all woken up by shouting and crashing about, and Baldhart and me got dragged out of bed, and all the girls got dragged out of bed, and the men in the house too, and we got stuffed into a couple of vans and we got taken to their interrogation place that was like a bunch of sheds with a barbed-wire fence. We were there for flipping weeks, and this stupid sour-faced woman turned up in a doctor’s coat, with her tape measures and calipers to measure our heads and the lengths of our noses.

  It turned out that this place was for prossies, pimps, gypsies, tramps, abortionists, beggars, professional criminals, unemployable pissheads and people with the clap. They hadn’t really got started on poofters, lesbos and pornographers by then.

  I got off for shagging Baldhart because I was the right racial type and ‘capable of Germanisation’, and Captain Pitt somehow managed to find us and give those Gestapo a proper bollocking, waving his passport with that stuff in it about how His Majesty Requests and Requires, and talking about the War of Jenkins’ Ear, and then Willy and Fritzl turned up and said that as they were good Nazis and had the papers to prove it, they wanted me back because the business was suffering.

  Eventually it became clear that we had all been denounced just out of malice, and they went and got that man and put him in a re-education camp for three months. Served him right. I hope he got re-educated. From what I know now, he might never have come out of there at all, though.

  And now I’ll tell you why Baldhart never did join the National Socialist Womanhood. It was because the three girls we were so fond of didn’t come back for a few more days. They got given this long lecture about sexual anarchy, and racial suicide and biological duty, and blood and honour, and Treason against the Race, and hereditary criminality, and then when they got back, it turned out they’d all been tied down and sterilised, because they’d had too many boyfriends and some of them were probably Jewish Bolsheviks, and it was to prevent racial contamination.

  It knocked the stuffing out of them. I mean, a girl dreams of having tiddlers one day, doesn’t she? Even a prossie.

  37

  Sandwiches

  Gaskell and Christabel spent the whole of 4 October 1936 in Hexham making sandwiches, wrapping up apples and baking fairy cakes.

  The women, now both in their early forties, had weathered well the storms and vicissitudes of their unconventional relationship. Christabel’s long and occasional relationship with Daniel had survived the years of his being with Mary and then in Germany, because neither of them expected anything more than the pleasure and affection they could afford to give, and their weeks apart had always served merely to awaken an eagerness to see each other again. For Christabel, Daniel filled in the gaps left by Gaskell, who was as much of a husband to her as a woman could be.

  As for Gaskell, she entirely failed to be jealous of Daniel. She adored him. He treated her exactly as she had always wanted to be treated. They went out shooting together, and Daniel was not ashamed to admit that she was the better shot. They painted stumps on a blank wall of the great house and bowled balls at each other, but most of all, they went flying. Daniel’s aircraft were now at least eighteen years old, and had to be handled very tenderly, so for the most part they were lovingly kept idle in a barn on the estate. Daniel thought they were probably unsaleable because of their obsolescence, and they had even gone so far as to plan a Viking funeral for them, but on the evening of the ceremony, they had not had the heart to douse them with petrol. They went down to Shoreham and came back with a Southern Martlet, a lovely little biplane for stunting in, and a little while later they bought a Miles Falcon, because it was very fast and there was even room for the children. Gaskell had a plan to fly it to China, which, fortunately, she never had time to attempt because of all her artistic commissions, and then the outbreak of war.

  The affection between these three was cemented by the children. Felix was now eight years old, and had been despatched to Dunhurst in Hampshire. This was a Montessori school attached to Bedales, itself a ‘progressive’ school which specialised in the education of atheists, liberals, bohemians, artistic types, the children of the louche, and stray Russian and European intellectuals. It did not suit Felix very well, as he was a quiet and conservative little boy. In later life he would look back on his education at these establishments as a somewhat perplexing sojourn in a menagerie, relieved only by being taken on frequent exeats by his particularly glamorous, kind and affectionate godfather, who treated him to bangers and mash with onion gravy in roadside cafes, and knew everything about aeroplanes. Felix lived for the holidays, when he would be back on the estate in Hexham, roving the increasingly wild grounds with a catapult in his pocket and a parcel of sandwiches, having been told not to worry about coming back until it was dark. Inside the house, Gaskell and Christabel got on with their nude portraits and strangely angled photographs.

  Felicity was six years old, and sometimes went to stay with her Aunt Sophie in Blackheath, where she sat alongside the other little ones in the dame school, and learned to do sums on a slate. She listened wide-eyed as Sophie gleefully related all the most horrible episodes from the Bible, such as the decapitation of St John the Baptist, or Jael’s murder of Sisera by driving a tent peg through his head whilst he slept. Sometimes she won Sophie’s weekly prize for the most outrageous word of the week. Quite often Fairhead would come in and sit with the children, a cigarette smoking in the centre of his lips, to listen to his wife, and Crusty the dog would slumber under Sophie’s desk, occasionally being startled awake by its own farts.

  Felicity was a vivacious child, with blue eyes and black hair, who would, at the end of each day, count up the number of new bruises on her limbs and then invite people to inspect them. She was always up trees, or up ladders, or getting her head stuck between the railings, or losing one wellington boot in a dungheap. Daniel loved her clear, rippling laughter, and the way that she would run to him and leap up into his arms, putting hers around his neck, and plastering his face with kisses. She would be joining Felix at Dunhurst in a year’s time, and it would suit her very much better.

  If there was ever a bone of contention between Gaskell and Christabel, it was because neither of them was particularly adept at avoiding entanglements with other women, and they had adopted the noble but inadvisable policy of being completely honest about it. Their artistic milieu consisted almost entirely of sexually polymorphic characters with interesting inclinations, and it was all but impossible not to get drawn in, because it was such fun, and, at least when one was tipsy, seemed so harmless at first. Their squabbles would end with Gaskell storming out of the house to drive her Bentley into the distance at suicidal speed, whilst Christabel sat up all night, sipping sherry and listening for the sound of the engine, hoping to see at last the sweep of the lights across the curtains as the car turned at the curve of the drive. As far as men were concerned, Christabel remained faithful to Daniel, as she always knew she would.

  Christabel and Gaskell thought of themselves as socialists, but were in reality libertarian conservatives. They believed that one should do pretty much whatever one wants, but there should be a gentleman in Number Ten Downing Street, who speaks in properly constructed sentences, and that this gentleman should be paternally concerned with the welfare of the people. Accordingly, on this day, they were driving down to Consett, with its belching steelworks and permanent Martian cloud of red dust, and then on to Chester-le-Street, in order to be there for when Ellen Wilkinson led the Jarrow Crusaders in.

 
They were going to park up the Bentley at the Church Institute, and use it as a sort of kiosk, to serve cakes and apples, and partridge or pheasant sandwiches to the hungry and weary marchers. There would be a choice of hot tea, chilled champagne or home-made ginger beer from their battery of Thermos vacuum flasks.

  38

  Daniel, Felix and Felicity

  Daniel came home early for Christmas in 1937. The entire world seemed to be in a state of hysteria, and Daniel was profoundly worried by what he was reading in the newspapers and hearing on the radio sets in roadside cafes. It had been a terrible year in almost every way imaginable. In the USSR Stalin was continuing the show trials and mass killings that were to make him one of the greatest murderers in history and the executioner of the Communist Ideal; Spain was in a state of civil war, in which one side was killing priests and the other was killing intellectuals; China had been invaded by Japan and subjected to a campaign of sustained atrocity; Shanghai had been burned to the ground by incendiary bombs; in May the Hindenburg had exploded into flame in New Jersey; in September, Mussolini and Hitler, equally fired up in their competitive quest for empire, had filled a stadium with one million people at the Field of May in Berlin; at home, Sir Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts were meeting violent resistance during their parading through London, and in Liverpool Mosley himself had accidentally boosted his public support by being knocked unconscious by a rock; Ramsay MacDonald had died, loved and respected by everybody except his own Labour Party.