‘They’d planned for it. We hadn’t. It was the same in France.’ David remembered marching down a Norwegian road, mountains and forests and snow on a scale he could never have imagined. He saw again German bombers and fighters roaring down on them, the fighters coming so low he could see the pilots’ set faces; gunfire smashing into the column, fallen men lying on snow that turned red. The picture in Natalia’s flat had reminded him of that. ‘The Germans seemed invincible,’ he said quietly. ‘I got frostbite, I was back home recovering when they served up the same medicine in France. I didn’t see how we could fight on after that.’
‘Nor me,’ Geoff agreed. ‘I remember thinking, if we don’t surrender London will just be bombed to annihilation, like Rotterdam or Warsaw was.’ He frowned, a guilty look.
‘They are not invincible,’ Natalia said, her tone certain. ‘Russia has shown us that. In many places there they do not even have a front line, the Germans control one village and the partisans the next, and it all changes from season to season. They are completely bogged down.’
‘But Russia hasn’t beaten the Germans either,’ David replied. ‘It’s a stalemate. I think it’s going to boil down to who runs out of men first,’ he added bitterly.
‘Not just through the fighting,’ Geoff added, ‘if what we hear about the cholera and typhus epidemics on both sides of the line is true.’
Natalia shook her head. ‘There are more Russians than Germans. And they have General Winter on their side, Russians deal with the climate better than the Germans. They know what to wear, how to survive in the forests, what seeds and mushrooms you can eat.’
David thought the remark cold. ‘I expect you have hard winters too where you come from.’
Natalia nodded. ‘Yes, long winters with a lot of snow.’
They passed an ancient country church where the service had just ended, the warmly dressed congregation talking in groups beside the porch. A red-faced vicar in his white surplice was shaking people’s hands. David said, ‘They look a contented bunch.’
‘Yes,’ Geoff agreed. ‘They’ll be with Headlam’s lot.’ The Church of England had split two years ago – a large minority opposed to the government forming their own church as the German Confessing Church had – but this prosperous-looking congregation was more likely to have stayed with the pro-German Archbishop Headlam.
‘Were you brought up an Anglican, Geoff?’ Natalia asked.
‘My uncle was a vicar. I believed for a long time, that’s partly why I joined the Colonial Service, going out to help the poor benighted natives.’ He gave his sharp little bark of laughter and ran a finger quickly over his fair moustache in an oddly cross, peremptory gesture. ‘David and I used to argue about religion at university. He won the argument in the end, so far as I’m concerned.’
‘You would have been brought up a Catholic, David, with your Irish family.’
‘My parents had had enough of religion in Ireland.’ He turned to Natalia. ‘What about you?’
‘I was brought up a Lutheran, though most people in Slovakia are Catholics. But I also became disillusioned with religion. Did you know that our little dictator, Tiso, is a Catholic priest? His Slovak nationalists were glad to help Hitler break up Czechoslovakia, and now we have our own little Catholic Fascist state, just like Croatia and Spain. Our Hlinka guard, the equivalent of your Blackshirts, loaded the Jews onto trains when the Germans wanted them deported in 1942.’
There was an anger in her voice David had never heard before. Geoff said, ‘I thought all Czechoslovakia had been occupied by Germany.’
‘No. We are a satellite state with our own government, like Britain and France.’ She looked away, concentrating on the road as a little sports car passed them, a young couple out on a Sunday drive.
Geoff asked, ‘Are your paintings of your home town?’
‘Mostly of Bratislava, the Slovak capital, where I lived before I came here.’
‘And the battle scenes?’ David asked.
‘Slovakia sent soldiers into Russia with the Germans when Hitler invaded. We were the only Slav country to join the invasion. Only a token force.’ She hesitated, then added, ‘My brother was with them on the Caucasus front. He was badly wounded. Later he died.’
‘I’m sorry,’ David said.
‘It was ironic, because in the thirties he was a Communist. He went to Russia for a while, full of hope, but came back disillusioned. Russia was the graveyard of his hopes and then it took his life, too.’
‘And then you came to England?’
‘A few years later, yes. And here I am,’ she added, a note of finality in her voice.
Beside the motorway they passed one of the agricultural settlements for the unemployed. The government’s propaganda preached that the countryside represented the British soul, that the people needed to be brought back in touch with it. David saw shabby prefabricated huts set in mud, plots all around marked off with chicken wire and sagging little fences, like a city allotment on a larger scale.
‘Recreating our glorious medieval past,’ Geoff said with angry sarcasm.
People were working there, bent double, planting spindly trees. A tired-looking woman in coat and headscarf carried a muddy toddler between the shacks.
‘It is the same all over Europe,’ Natalia said. ‘Countryside worship. The heart of the nationalist dream. Look at it.’
Geoff suggested they put the radio on, and for a little while they listened to Two-Way Family Favourites, records requested by soldiers’ families for their loved ones serving in India and Aden, Malaya and Africa. After a request from a mother for her boy in Kenya, Geoff asked Natalia to turn it off, the programme was depressing him.
The place where they stopped for lunch was an old coaching-house, but the interior had been modernized, all black-painted oak beams and whitewashed walls gleaming with horse-brasses, a shield and crossed swords nailed above the fireplace. There was a television set at one end of the bar, showing a display of morris dancing. During the week it would have been full of travelling salesmen but today there were only a few elderly people at the tables, a couple of retired military types propping up the bar. David went to get drinks and order lunch.
‘The problem with the British working man,’ one of the old men at the bar was saying, ‘is that frankly he just doesn’t like work, he’s too bloody lazy.’ He jabbed a finger at his friend. ‘The answer’s to put them under military discipline, give the slackers a damn good flogging in front of the others. And shoot some more of these demonstrating trade unionists, like they did in Bradford in the summer.’
‘I don’t know if they’ll go in for public floggings, Ralph. Beaverbrook’s still a bit soft for that.’
‘Mosley’s calling the shots now. He’ll get the shirkers working properly, then our industry can maybe match the Germans and the bloody Yanks.’ He laughed. ‘Same again?’
As he walked back to the table David remembered that talk of shooting trade unionists had once been a joke among some of his father’s lawyer friends; but now it was actually being done and people like those old barflies were happy about it. They had taken a table by the window with a view out over brown frosty fields. Geoff had lit his pipe. He said with a self-deprecating bark of laughter, ‘I’ve been talking about life out in Kenya again. Boring poor Natalia.’
She smiled at Geoff; David felt an odd pang of jealousy. ‘It is not boring,’ she said. ‘It sounds like another world, Africa. Like the Garden of Eden.’
‘It’s hot and full of disease.’
‘The White Man’s grave.’
‘That’s West Africa. But it’s hard work. Out where I was in the tribal areas there were just a few of us running an area half the size of Wales. Well, the chiefs ran it really, but they had to defer to us. We pushed a road through while I was there. I thought it was a good thing, would help them develop some commerce, but it was just used to ferry black labour to the white settler areas.’ His mouth set hard.
Natalia said, ‘It mus
t have been very lonely if you were the only white man.’
‘Yes, their way of life’s so different. They don’t really trust us. Can’t blame them, I suppose, we just arrived and took things over.’ He gave his bitter laugh. ‘Sometimes among them I felt like a man stumbling about in the dark with a dim lantern.’
David said, ‘We used to have black visitors at the Dominions Office sometimes. I remember not long after I started, I had to meet a South African student who was stranded here without any money, and didn’t want to go home. I thought I had liberal ideas about race but when he came in all I could do was sit and stare at him because he looked so different. He must’ve thought I was mad. Spoke to me in perfect Oxford English.’ He shook his head. ‘Of course, Africans and Indians aren’t allowed to come to England to study any more.’
Geoff pulled at his pipe. ‘If I was honest I was always happy to see other white officers, veterinarians and forestry people. And I’d go down to Nairobi often.’ A shadow crossed his face and he fell silent. David thought, he still hasn’t got over that woman he knew out there, though it was years ago. It was a strange sort of fidelity, admirable but somehow frightening. He wondered if Natalia knew Geoff’s story. She probably did, she probably knew everything about them.
She met his eye briefly, then glanced out of the window. ‘Winter has come early this year. It reminds me of my country.’ She smiled sadly, in her self-contained way.
The men at the bar were becoming drunk and loud-voiced. ‘During the Great War, if a man wouldn’t go over the top and fight you gave him a quick court-martial, then took him out and shot him. I’ve seen it done. Why should it be any different with people who won’t bloody work?’ David remembered something Sarah had said once, that the Great War had made mass slaughter ordinary, that was why Stalin and Hitler could commit murder on a scale inconceivable before 1914. It was why these old men could talk like Soviet Commissars or SS men.
The barman had turned the television up. Everyone looked round. The background of a turning globe, the BBC initials underneath, was showing; they heard the announcer say, ‘. . . special broadcast from the Minister for India, the Right Honourable Enoch Powell MP.’ Powell’s ascetic face with the black moustache and fierce, passionate eyes appeared. Everyone was looking. He began to speak, in his ringing voice with its Birmingham accent; unsmiling – Powell never smiled. ‘I wish to broadcast to you today about our most important Imperial possession, India. You will all be aware of the seditious rebellion and terrorism there. It has even infected native regiments within the Indian army. But I want to tell you today that we shall not, will never, give in. We know that the majority of the Indian people support us; the ordinary people to whom we have brought railways and irrigation and a measure of prosperity, the rulers of the princely states, our loyal allies. The Muslim League, who fear Hindu domination. For two hundred years we have governed India, firmly and fairly. Ruling it is our destiny.’
He leaned forward, those blazing eyes on the screen seeming to fix on each of them individually. ‘That is why, with the agreement of our German allies, we are recruiting a hundred thousand soldiers to strengthen our presence there. Firm and quiet rule will soon descend on India once more. We shall not withdraw, or compromise, ever. A nation that showed such weakness would be heaping up its own funeral pyre. So be reassured, British rule and British authority in India will be established ever more firmly.’
The old men at the bar cheered and clapped.
‘We knew something like that was coming,’ Geoff muttered.
Natalia said, ‘India. Churchill was determined to hold on to it too, wasn’t he, before the war?’
‘He knows he’s lost that one,’ Geoff said.
A waitress came with shepherd’s pie, stodgy but filling. Afterwards Natalia said she would like to stretch her legs, just for ten minutes, as there was still a long way to go. Geoff said it was too cold for him and he would wait in the car. There was nowhere to walk except round the edge of the almost-empty car park behind the roadhouse so David and Natalia began to circle it, going slowly, smoking. She kept one hand in her pocket. David thought, perhaps her gun is in there. Jackson had called her a crack shot. Who had she shot? he wondered. Across the fields he saw a village. Like others they had passed recently it was built of red brick; they were well into the Midlands now.
Natalia said to him, ‘Soon you will see your friend Frank. He sounds like a man with many difficulties.’ Her expression was sympathetic.
‘I wonder how Frank made it through, sometimes.’
She said, ‘My brother had difficulties as well. All his life. Though that did not stop our government sending him to fight in Russia.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’
She gave a sad smile and looked away, to where a farmer was working a field, two big carthorses pulling an ancient plough. She turned back to him. ‘There seem to be certain people who have some quirk in them, something they cannot surmount.’
‘I think a lot of things went wrong in Frank’s early life.’
She stopped, watched the carthorses. ‘With my brother something inside him was different from the start. But he had a right to live.’ She looked at David with sudden fierceness. ‘A right to live, like everybody.’
David hesitated, then said, ‘You told me your government helped load the Jews onto trains.’
‘Yes, they did.’
The fate of the Jews was a subject David avoided. But Natalia knew, something at least, of what had happened to them in Europe. He asked, ‘Do you know where they went?’
‘Nobody knows for sure. But I think somewhere bad.’
‘We don’t really know anything about it over here. We’ve been told about comfortable labour camps.’
She began walking again. ‘We had many Jews in Bratislava before the war. I had several Jewish friends.’ David nodded and smiled, encouraging her to continue. ‘It happened in steps; restricting where the Jews could work, then taking away their businesses, turning the screw, bit by bit.’
‘As is happening here.’
‘In 1941 they were all expelled from Bratislava.’ Her voice was flat and unemotional again, and David began to realize what it cost her to keep it so. ‘There was a family in our street, the man was a baker. One morning I was woken by the sound of breaking glass. I looked out of the window and saw men from the Hlinka Guard – our Fascist paramilitaries – pulling them out of the house, kicking and hitting them. They threw them in a van and drove them away. Some of the Hlinka men stayed behind, and I heard them in the house, breaking things and coming out with armfuls of clothes and ornaments. Later we learned the same thing was happening all over town. One of the Hlinka people and his family moved into the bakery and started it going again, as though it had always been theirs. That is what most of these Fascists are, thieves waiting for loot.’
David shivered. ‘Did nobody protest?’
She gave him a sudden fierce look. ‘What should I have done that day, gone and told the Hlinka Guard to stop? What you think they would have done to me?’
‘No, of course you couldn’t have done anything.’
‘And it was all done so quickly. Some people did protest after it started, even some priests, which embarrassed Tiso. They stopped the deportations for a while. Though I heard they resumed later.’ She sighed. ‘I wish I could have done something.’
‘You couldn’t. I’m sorry; I know you couldn’t.’
She smiled, looking suddenly vulnerable. ‘No. People should know though. It is good you are interested.’
‘And they were put on trains?’
‘That was a year later. We’d been told the Jews were in work camps somewhere in the remote countryside, we didn’t know where. People were starting to forget them. Then one day, it was a beautiful summer day, my fiancé and I went for a long drive. He had a car, not many do in Slovakia. We drove a long way. A long way.’ She looked into the middle distance. ‘We had a picnic on a hillside, I remember some deer came ou
t of the woods nearby and drank at a stream. We sat watching them. Afterwards we went for a hike. We went over fields and meadows, saw the mountains in the distance.’ So she had a fiancé, David thought. What had happened to him?
‘We crossed a big hill. On the other side was the railway line that goes over the mountains into Poland. We hadn’t realized we had come so far.’ Her voice had slowed. ‘And there was a train standing there, in the middle of nowhere, there must have been an obstruction on the line somewhere. A huge goods train, wagon after wagon, just standing there in the sunshine. We wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but we heard noises.’ She shook her head slightly, closing her eyes. ‘All the wagons had small ventilation windows and barbed wire across them. We heard voices, calling to us in Yiddish. We didn’t understand what we were seeing, Gustav and I, so we walked down a little, towards the train, and then we caught this terrible smell – I don’t know how long those people had been travelling but it must have been a long time in the heat.’
‘How many were on the train?’
‘I don’t know. Hundreds. One woman was calling to us over and over, begging for water. Then two men in the black Hlinka uniform, with rifles, came round the end of the train – they must have been patrolling the other side – and waved and shouted at us to go away. So we walked back. I was frightened we might get a bullet in the back for what we had seen. But I think they would not have hurt us, because of Gustav’s uniform.’
‘Was he a soldier?’
She answered, quiet defiance in her voice, ‘Yes. He was German.’
David glanced at her in surprise. She said, suddenly defensive, ‘He was with German Army Intelligence, the Abwehr. He hadn’t known what was going on, he was very junior, it shook him. We both knew that if people were transported in that state, by the time they reached their destination many would be dead.’ She turned and stared at him. ‘The British, like the French, say they are proud of protecting their own Jews, only deporting foreign ones. But that is what happened to those they did deport.’