During the vacation several of his meals had to be taken at the railway station which, because of its close proximity to Worcester, was looked upon by some undergraduates as the college canteen. One night after he had drunk a little too much at the Bricklayers’ Arms, Keith daubed on Worcester’s eighteenth-century wall: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la gare.”
At the end of his first year Keith had little to show for the twelve months he had spent at the university, other than a small group of friends who, like him, were determined to change the system to benefit the majority just as soon as they went down.
His mother, who wrote regularly, suggested that he should take advantage of his vacation by traveling extensively through Europe, as he might never get another chance to do so. He heeded her advice, and started to plan a route—which he would have kept to if he hadn’t bumped into the features editor of the Oxford Mail over a drink at the local pub.
Dear Mother
I have just received your letter with ideas about what I should do during the vac. I had originally thought of following your advice and driving round the French coast, perhaps ending up at Deauville—but that was before the features editor of the Oxford Mail offered me the chance to visit Berlin.
They want me to write four one-thousand-word articles on life in occupied Germany under the Allied forces, and then to go on to Dresden to report on the rebuilding of the city. They are offering me twenty guineas for each article on delivery. Because of my precarious financial state—my fault, not yours—Berlin has taken precedence over Deauville.
If they have such things as postcards in Germany, I will send you one along with copies of the four articles for Dad to consider. Perhaps the Courier might be interested in them?
Sorry I won’t be seeing you this summer.
Love,
Keith
Once term had ended, Keith started off in the same direction as many other students. He drove his MG down to Dover and took the ferry across to Calais. But as the others disembarked to begin their journeys to the historic cities of the Continent, he swung his little open tourer northeast, in the direction of Berlin. The weather was so hot that Keith was able to keep his soft top down for the first time.
As Keith drove along the winding roads of France and Belgium, he was constantly reminded of how little time had passed since Europe had been at war. Mutilated hedges and fields where tanks had taken the place of tractors, bombed-out farmhouses that had lain between advancing and retreating armies, and rivers littered with rusting military equipment. As he passed each bombed-out building and drove through mile after mile of devastated landscape, the thought of Deauville, with its casino and racecourse, became more and more appealing.
When it was too dark to avoid holes in the road, Keith turned off the highway and drove for a few hundred yards down a quiet lane. He parked at the side of the road and quickly fell into a deep sleep. He was woken while it was still dark by the sound of lorries heading ponderously toward the German border, and jotted down a note: “The army seems to rise without regard for the motion of the sun.” It took two or three turns of the key before the engine spluttered into life. He rubbed his eyes, swung the MG round and returned to the main road, trying to remember to keep to the right-hand side.
After a couple of hours he reached the border, and had to wait in a long queue: each person wishing to enter Germany was meticulously checked. Eventually he came to the front, where a customs officer studied his passport. When he discovered that Keith was an Australian, he simply made a caustic comment about Donald Bradman and waved him on his way.
Nothing Keith had heard or read could have prepared him for the experience of a defeated nation. His progress became slower and slower as the cracks in the road turned into potholes, and the potholes turned into craters. It was soon impossible to travel more than a few hundred yards without having to drive as if he was in a dodgem car at a seaside amusement park. And no sooner had he managed to push the speedometer over forty than he would be forced to pull over to allow yet another convoy of trucks—the latest with stars on their doors—to drive past him down the middle of the road.
He decided to take advantage of one of these unscheduled holdups to eat at an inn he spotted just off the road. The food was inedible, the beer weak, and the sullen looks of the innkeeper and his patrons left him in no doubt that he was unwelcome. He didn’t bother to order a second course, but quickly settled his bill and left.
He drove on toward the German capital, slow kilometer after slow kilometer, and reached the outskirts of the city only a few minutes before the gas lights were turned on. He began to search immediately among the back streets for a small hotel. He knew that the nearer he got to the center, the less likely it would be that he could afford the tariff.
Eventually he found a little guesthouse on the corner of a bombed-out street. It stood on its own, as if somehow unaware of what had taken place all around it. This illusion was dispelled as soon as he pushed open the front door. The dingy hall was lit by a single candle, and a porter in baggy trousers and a gray shirt stood sulkily behind a counter. He made little attempt to respond to Keith’s efforts to book a room. Keith knew only a few words of German, so he finally held his hand in the air with his palm open, hoping the porter would understand that he wished to stay for five nights.
The man nodded reluctantly, took a key from a hook behind him and led his guest up an uncarpeted staircase to a corner room on the second floor. Keith put his holdall on the floor and stared at the little bed, the one chair, the chest of drawers with three handles out of eight and the battered table. He walked across the room and looked out of the window onto piles of rubble, and thought about the serene duckpond he could see from his college rooms. He turned to say “Thank you,” but the porter had already left.
After he had unpacked his suitcase, Keith pulled the chair up to the table by the window, and for a couple of hours—feeling guilty by association—wrote down his first impressions of the defeated nation.
* * *
Keith woke the next morning as soon as the sun shone through the curtainless window. It took him some time to wash in a basin that had no plug and could only manage a trickle of cold water. He decided against shaving. He dressed, went downstairs and opened several doors, looking for the kitchen. A woman standing at a stove turned round, and managed a smile. She waved him toward the table.
Everything except flour, she explained in pidgin English, was in short supply. She set in front of him two large slices of bread covered with a thin suggestion of dripping. He thanked her, and was rewarded with a smile. After a second glass of what she assured him was milk, he returned to his room and sat on the end of the bed, checking the address at which the meeting would take place and then trying to fix it on an out-of-date road map of the city which he had picked up at Blackwell’s in Oxford. When he left the hotel it was only a few minutes after eight, but this was not an appointment he wanted to be late for.
Keith had already decided to organize his time so that he could spend at least a day in each sector of the divided city; he planned to visit the Russian sector last, so he could compare it with the three controlled by the Allies. After what he had seen so far, he assumed it could only be an improvement, which he knew would please his fellow-members of the Oxford Labor Club, who believed that “Uncle Joe” was doing a far better job than Attlee, Auriol and Truman put together—despite the fact that the farthest east most of them had ever traveled was Cambridge.
Keith pulled up several times on his way into the city to ask directions to Siemensstrasse. He finally found the headquarters of the British Public Relations and Information Services Control a few minutes before nine. He parked his car, and joined a stream of servicemen and women in different-colored uniforms as they made their way up the wide stone steps and through the swing doors. A sign warned him that the lift was out of order, so he climbed the five floors to the PRISC office. Although he was early for his appointment, he still reporte
d to the front desk.
“How can I help you, sir?” asked a young corporal standing behind the desk. Keith had never been called “sir” by a woman before, and he didn’t like it.
He took a letter out of an inside pocket and handed it across to her. “I have an appointment with the director at nine o’clock.”
“I don’t think he’s in yet, sir, but I’ll just check.”
She picked up a telephone and spoke to a colleague. “Someone will come and see you in a few minutes,” she said once she had put the phone down. “Please have a seat.”
A few minutes turned out to be nearly an hour, by which time Keith had read both the papers on the coffee table from cover to cover, but hadn’t been offered any coffee. Der Berliner wasn’t a lot better than Cherwell, the student paper he so scorned at Oxford, and Der Telegraf was even worse. But as the director of PRISC seemed to be mentioned on nearly every page of Der Telegraf, Keith hoped he wouldn’t be asked for his opinion.
Eventually another woman appeared and asked for Mr. Townsend. Keith jumped up and walked over to the desk.
“My name is Sally Carr,” said the woman in a breezy cockney accent. “I’m the director’s secretary. How can I help you?”
“I wrote to you from Oxford,” Keith replied, hoping that he sounded older than his years. “I’m a journalist with the Oxford Mail, and I’ve been commissioned to write a series of articles on conditions in Berlin. I have an appointment to see…” he turned her letter round, “… Captain Armstrong.”
“Oh, yes, I remember,” Miss Carr said. “But I’m afraid Captain Armstrong is visiting the Russian sector this morning, and I’m not expecting him in the office today. If you can come back tomorrow morning, I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you.” Keith tried not to let his disappointment show, and assured her that he would return at nine the following morning. He might have abandoned his plan to see Armstrong altogether had he not been told that this particular captain knew more about what was really going on in Berlin than all the other staff officers put together.
He spent the rest of the day exploring the British sector, stopping frequently to make notes on anything he considered newsworthy. The way the British behaved toward the defeated Germans; empty shops trying to serve too many customers; queues for food on every street corner; bowed heads whenever you tried to look a German in the eye. As a clock in the distance chimed twelve, he stepped into a noisy bar full of soldiers in uniform and took a seat at the end of the counter. When a waiter finally asked him what he wanted, he ordered a large tankard of beer and a cheese sandwich—at least he thought he ordered cheese, but his German wasn’t fluent enough to be certain. Sitting at the bar, he began to scribble down some more notes. As he watched the waiters going about their work, he became aware that if you were in civilian clothes you were served after anyone in uniform. Anyone.
The different accents around the room reminded him that the class system was perpetuated even when the British were occupying someone else’s city. Some of the soldiers were complaining—in tones that wouldn’t have pleased Miss Steadman—about how long it was taking for their papers to be processed before they could return home. Others seemed resigned to a life in uniform, and only talked of the next war and where it might be. Keith scowled when he heard one of them say, “Scratch them, and underneath they’re all bloody Nazis.” But after lunch, as he continued his exploration of the British sector, he thought that on the surface at least the soldiers were well disciplined, and that most of the occupiers seemed to be treating the occupied with restraint and courtesy.
As the shopkeepers began to put up their blinds and shut their doors, Keith returned to his little MG. He found it surrounded by admirers whose looks of envy quickly turned to anger when they saw he was wearing civilian clothes. He drove slowly back to his hotel. After a plate of potatoes and cabbage eaten in the kitchen, he returned to his room and spent the next two hours writing down all he could remember of the day. Later he climbed into bed, and read Animal Farm until the candle finally flickered out.
That night Keith slept well. After another wash in near-freezing water, he made a half-hearted effort to shave before making his way down to the kitchen. Several slabs of bread already covered in dripping awaited him. After breakfast he gathered up his papers and set off for his rearranged meeting. If he had been concentrating more on his driving and less on the questions he wanted to ask Captain Armstrong, he might not have turned left at the roundabout. The tank heading straight for him was incapable of stopping without far more warning, and although Keith threw on his brakes and only clipped the corner of its heavy mudguard, the MG spun in a complete circle, mounted the pavement and crashed into a concrete lamp post. He sat behind the wheel, trembling.
The traffic around him came to a halt, and a young lieutenant jumped out of the tank and ran across to check that Keith wasn’t injured. Keith climbed gingerly out of the car, a little shaken, but, after he had jumped up and down and swung his arms, he found that he had nothing more than a slight cut on his right hand and a sore ankle.
When they inspected the tank, it had little to show for the encounter other than the removal of a layer of paint from its mudguard. But the MG looked as if it had been involved in a full-scale battle. It was then that Keith remembered he could get only third-party insurance while he was abroad. However, he assured the cavalry officer that he was in no way to blame, and after the lieutenant had told Keith how to find his way to the nearest garage, they parted.
Keith abandoned his MG and began to jog in the direction of the garage. He arrived at the forecourt about twenty minutes later, painfully aware of how unfit he was. He eventually found the one mechanic who spoke English, and was promised that eventually someone would go and retrieve the vehicle.
“What does ‘eventually’ mean?” asked Keith.
“It depends,” said the mechanic, rubbing his thumb across the top of his fingers. “You see, it’s all a matter of … priorities.”
Keith took out his wallet and produced a ten-shilling note.
“You have dollars, yes?” asked the mechanic.
“No,” said Keith firmly.
After describing where the car was, he continued on his journey to Siemensstrasse. He was already ten minutes late for his appointment in a city that boasted few trains and even fewer taxis. By the time he arrived at PRISC headquarters, it was his turn to have kept someone waiting forty minutes.
The corporal behind the counter recognized him immediately, but she was not the bearer of encouraging news. “Captain Armstrong left for an appointment in the American sector a few minutes ago,” she said. “He waited for over an hour.”
“Damn,” said Keith. “I had an accident on my way, and got here as quickly as I could. Can I see him later today?”
“I’m afraid not,” she replied. “He has appointments in the American sector all afternoon.”
Keith shrugged his shoulders. “Can you tell me how to get to the French sector?”
As he walked around the streets of another sector of Berlin, he added little to his experience of the previous day, except to be reminded that there were at least two languages in this city he couldn’t converse in. This caused him to order a meal he didn’t want and a bottle of wine he couldn’t afford.
After lunch he returned to the garage to check on the progress they were making with his car. By the time he arrived, the gas lights were back on and the one person who spoke English had already gone home. Keith saw his MG standing in the corner of the forecourt in the same broken-down state he had left it in that morning. All the attendant could do was point at the figure eight on his watch.
Keith was back at the garage by a quarter to eight the following morning, but the man who spoke English didn’t appear until 8:13. He walked round the MG several times before offering an opinion. “One week before I can get it back on the road,” he said sadly. This time Keith passed over a pound.
“But perhaps I could manage it in a couple of days … I
t’s all a matter of priorities,” he repeated. Keith decided he couldn’t afford to be a top priority.
As he stood on a crowded tram he began to consider his funds, or lack of them. If he was to survive for another ten days, pay his hotel bills and for the repairs to his car, he would have to spend the rest of the trip forgoing the luxury of his hotel and sleep in the MG.
Keith jumped off the tram at the now familiar stop, ran up the steps and was standing in front of the counter a few minutes before nine. This time he was kept waiting for twenty minutes, with the same newspapers to read, before the director’s secretary reappeared, an embarrassed look on her face.
“I am so sorry, Mr. Townsend,” she said, “but Captain Armstrong has had to fly to England unexpectedly. His second in command, Lieutenant Wakeham, would be only too happy to see you.”
Keith spent nearly an hour with Lieutenant Wakeham, who kept calling him “old chap,” explained why he couldn’t get into Spandau and made more jokes about Don Bradman. By the time he left, Keith felt he had learned more about the state of English cricket than about what was going on in Berlin. He passed the rest of the day in the American sector, and regularly stopped to talk to GIs on street corners. They told him with pride that they never left their sector until it was time to return to the States.
When he called back at the garage later that afternoon, the English-speaking mechanic promised him the car would be ready to pick up the following evening.
The next day, Keith made his way by tram to the Russian sector. He soon discovered how wrong he had been to assume that there would be nothing new to learn from the experience. The Oxford University Labor Club would not be pleased to be told that the East Berliners’ shoulders were more hunched, their heads more bowed and their pace slower than those of their fellow-citizens in the Allied sectors, and that they didn’t appear to speak even to each other, let alone to Keith. In the main square a statue of Hitler had been replaced by an even bigger one of Lenin, and a massive effigy of Stalin dominated every street corner. After several hours of walking up and down drab streets with shops devoid of people and goods, and being unable to find a single bar or restaurant, Keith returned to the British sector.