Joe told me what he and Birgit were planning. We spoke in English.
‘Birgit has no money with her, no passport, no documents of any kind,’ he said. ‘Just about everything has been taken away from the Jews in Germany. She is forbidden to travel and if she is discovered with us we will be in the most serious trouble. But we think we can get out of Germany OK. Her parents found out that there’s a Swedish ship sailing for England tomorrow, leaving from Hamburg. If we drive tonight and tomorrow we can catch it.’
‘What if we miss it?’
‘That’s when things might become more difficult. Doktor Sattmann thought that if we miss the ship we should attempt to drive across the border to Denmark and try our luck there, but it might be impossible.’
‘Joe, what in God’s name are we getting involved in here?’
‘We have to take Birgit to England. She’s not safe in Berlin any more.’
‘What about her parents?’
‘They’re in the same position as Birgit, of course. They’ve decided they must escape from Germany too. They’ve been warned by friends in Berlin that if they travelled as a family they would probably be stopped at the border, so Birgit has to leave with us. As soon as they know she’s safe in England, they’re going to try to travel separately to Switzerland, where her father has a little money. With luck they’ll be able to get to France from there, then make it across to England. They might even leave next week. No one’s sure what’s going to happen to the Jews after the weekend, when the Games finish.’
‘Wouldn’t Birgit be safer staying with her parents?’
‘No. They’ve heard stories about other German Jewish families caught trying to escape.’
We were already committed to a desperate plan, with no safeguards except the most elementary ones. Joe and I agreed that Birgit could travel in the front of the van for as long as it was dark and we were not trying to cross any borders. As soon as we got near Hamburg, though, she would have to return to her hiding place and stay in it until we were on the ship and clear of German territorial waters.
Time was passing. We knew that we should cover as much distance as possible in the darkness of the short summer’s night. I offered to take the first turn in the cramped rear compartment of the van, settling myself on the mattress to make myself as comfortable as I could, with the board Joe had used as a cover stacked out of my way on the other side. It was hardly cosy, but after while I was able to doze a little.
After midnight Joe found another place in a side road to make a brief halt, and he and I changed places. I was stiff from being confined in the noisy, shaking rear of the van and was glad of the break. Birgit, sitting to my left, hunched down in the passenger seat with her knees drawn up against her chest. I said nothing as I turned the vehicle around and headed back towards the autobahn. The engine felt rougher, noisier than before. Every shift of the gears made the van jerk and shudder.
Once on the wide, modern road I was able to drive at a steady cruising speed, with few of those disruptive changes of gear. I hoped that Joe, silent in the compartment behind my seat, was finding it possible to sleep. I wanted to talk to Birgit, to make the most of our temporary companionship, but I already knew that for all the noise and vibration in the vehicle it was possible for someone in the back to hear what the two in the front were saying.
Whenever another vehicle went past in the other direction, I used the momentary glare of its headlights to steal a glance across at Birgit.
She remained awake, staring forward into the night. She gave no hint of what she was thinking. Eventually she did shift position, twisting her body and switching her legs so that they were on the other side. This put her head and shoulders closer to mine. When the next vehicle roared past on the other side of the autobahn, I glanced towards her and found that she was looking at me. Still neither of us said anything. Quite apart from Joe’s silent presence, asleep or awake, a few inches away, Birgit had the power to strike me dumb, to make me feel clumsy, to inspire me to think and say the most foolish and impetuous things. I sensed that it was a crucial night in my life, one that I should not ruin with hasty words, so I kept my silence. My senses reached out towards her. I was aware of every tiny movement she made, every small sound. I imagined I could feel the warmth of her face radiating across the short space between us so that my own cheek felt the glow of her. I craved to hear a first word from her that I could respond to, even a grunt or some other kind of semi-voluntary noise, a reaction to something which I could in turn react to. She remained silent. I drove on, completely obsessed with her, driven mad by her silent presence, but beginning to enjoy what we were doing. In the monotony of the almost deserted highway I could pretend to myself that Birgit and I were alone in the van, that Joe was no longer with us, that she and I were eloping together, driving through the warm European night to some romantic destiny.
I began yearning for every next vehicle to appear from the distance ahead of us and pass with a flood of its headlights. Whenever it happened I turned to Birgit and found her looking towards me. Her eyes were serious and calm, seeking mine with some unstated private message.
The few hours of darkness passed slowly before light began to glimmer against the clouds low on the eastern horizon. Birgit became aware of the coming dawn at the same moment as me, as if realizing that the intimacy of the night would pass with daylight. She leaned even closer to me and placed her hand on mine, where I was holding the steering wheel.
She said, in English, ‘JL, I am most happy to be here with you and Joe.’
I grinned back at her, unwilling to speak in case it brought a response from Joe, hidden behind me. I could see her now, without needing the lights of a passing vehicle to show her to me. She was smiling; a conspiratorial flicker of her eyes towards Joe’s position seemed to confirm my own feelings about not wanting Joe to be a part of it.
She did not remove her hand from mine. I drove on and on, as smoothly as I could, north-west towards Hamburg, savouring every second of the long moment of intimacy with the girl I thought of as the prettiest in the world. Gradually, morning came.
16
I was woken at 6.30 a.m. in my room in the Officers’ Mess at RAF Northolt. I had slept for less than three hours. I forced myself out of bed, reeling with the need to sleep, fighting back the compulsion to stay lying down for a few minutes more. I showered, shaved and dressed, stumbling, dropping things, yawning. I was stiff with fatigue and my leg was aching. Breakfast was the standard RAF fare for non-operational officers: as much toast as I could eat, spread with the yellow gunge the mess called butter but which tasted of fish and was widely rumoured to be refined from the sumps of trawlers.
The car was already waiting for me outside the mess. It was a large black Riley with the crest of the House of Commons imprinted on the doors. A WAAF driver – not the same one as before – was standing beside the passenger’s door. As I approached she stood to attention, saluted smartly and held the door open for me. It had started to rain: a warm but depressing drizzle, slicking down over the roads and trees from a sky the colour of lead.
The WAAF drove swiftly towards central London, expertly negotiating through what little traffic there was.
It was my first visit to London since the early months of 1940, when I had spent a weekend leave with some of the other officers from 105 Squadron. We were in the West End for two nights, carousing our way through the pubs and nightclubs, taking a break from what we thought at the time to be the unspeakable horrors of war. Like most people we had no conception of what was to follow within a few weeks. After the invasion of France and the Low Countries, the Germans were able to move their bomber squadrons to within a short flying distance of the British coast. Every major city in Britain was suddenly within range. For most people the war changed from an anxious time of distant skirmishes to a battle in which they found themselves in the front line. The nightly Blitz had begun in the first week of September 1940 and continued more or less without a break for eight
months. London suffered the most, but almost every provincial city was attacked at one time or another. By November, casualties among civilians and rescue workers were numbered in the thousands. One of those killed was my brother Joe, who died when the Red Cross ambulance he was driving in London took a direct hit from a bomb. Months later, I had still not become reconciled to the shock of his loss.
Today was my first visit to London since the Blitz began. I stared out of the car as we drove to the centre, appalled by the sheer scale of destruction. Everyone in Britain knew the capital had taken a beating during the winter. Even though what the newspapers printed was controlled by government overseers, so as not to give information or encouragement to the enemy, there was enough for most people to gain a pretty vivid idea of what was going on. The weekly newsreels at the cinemas were filled with images of flames, smoke, gutted and collapsing buildings, snaking hosepipes in the roads and torrents of water jetted against the fires.
But to see some of the damage for myself was horrifying. As we drove along Western Avenue I saw street after street where houses had been blown to pieces, where rubble-mountains of brick and plaster and jagged beams of charred wood had been created by the bulldozers. In Acton I saw a whole street that had been destroyed: it was just a rough, undulating sea of broken bricks and other rubble. Windows everywhere were broken, even where there was no other visible damage. There was a pervasive, squalid smell: something of drains, smoke, chalk, oil, soot, town gas. Along the main road itself there were many places where the surface had been cratered by an explosion or was being dug up to repair water mains, electricity supplies, telephone connections, gas pipes, sewers. These constant obstacles slowed our progress. In a few places, where the damage was worst and bombed buildings hung perilously awaiting demolition, there were police warning signs, tapes, boards hastily erected to prevent pedestrians from wandering into areas where the paths or the road surface had been undermined. The rain still fell lightly, streaking the car windows with muddy rivulets and creating areas of shallow flooding across the roads and pavements.
We were held up by a large truck blocking the road. Accompanied by a team of workmen, it was reversing slowly into one of the bomb sites. I stared out at the dismal scene, the shattered bricks and pipes lying in the muddy puddles, the filth of charred wood, the glimpses of broken and crushed household items, the pathetic remains of wallpaper visible where inner walls still happened to stand. I tried to imagine what the street must have looked like before the war, when it was full of homes, harmlessly lived in by ordinary people, going about their lives, worrying about money or jobs or their children, but never imagining the worst, that one night their house and all the houses around it would be blown apart by German bombs or incinerated by phosphorus incendiaries.
I also tried to imagine what those former inhabitants must have thought about the men who had bombed their houses, the Luftwaffe fliers, coming in by night. The fury they must have felt, the frustration of not being able to hit back.
I recoiled from the thought. The popular press depicted the Luftwaffe crews as fanatical Nazis, Huns, Jerries, shorthand codes for an enemy impossible to understand, but sense told me that most of the German fliers were probably little different from me and the young men I flew with. Our own bombing missions to Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, Kiel, Cologne were no different in kind from the raids that had brought the German bombers here to Acton and Shepherd’s Bush. Today, in Hamburg, there would inevitably be piles of rubble, fractured water mains, homeless children, where A-Able’s high-explosive bombs had fallen.
There was surely a difference, though? What everyone hated about the German raids was that they were indiscriminate, the bombs falling on every part of the cities that were attacked. Women and children were as likely to be killed or injured as soldiers – more likely, indeed, since cities are full of civilians. By contrast, it was repeatedly argued that the British bombing of German cities was a matter of careful targeting, of meticulously chosen aiming points on military installations distant from civilian centres.
War cannot be fought except with lies. I knew the dispiriting reality of the RAF’s bombing campaign. I had experienced at first hand the impossibility of aiming accurately at targets shrouded in cloud or smoke, I remembered so well the crews’ inability in the dark to find the chosen town, let alone the specific target: the power station, the military camp, the arms factory. I had tried to fly through anti-aircraft fire without losing my nerve, listening on the intercom to the terrified reactions of the other men, knowing that sometimes bombs were released early in panic, that sometimes the bomb load was jettisoned in frustration after a target could not be found, believing it preferable to drop bombs on anything German – even a German field – than to return home with a full load of unused weapons.
We left the suburbs, passing the White City stadium, then turned south towards Holland Park, heading for the part of central London close to the river. The nature of the damage changed noticeably. Where in the suburbs there had apparently been few attempts to clear the wreckage, in the central parts of the city, where several raids had been concentrated, much had been done to keep the streets clear. Where the bombing was worst I saw gaps in the rows of buildings, and the streets, if they were cratered, had been effectively repaired and smoothed. Everywhere I looked I saw piles of sandbags guarding the entrances to buildings or shelters and windows criss-crossed with sticky tape to try to prevent glass splinters flying. Directions to the nearest air-raid shelters were everywhere, painted on walls or printed on paper placards pasted to shop windows.
In some respects London life was continuing as it had before the war: there were many red double-decker buses driving along, as well as more than a few taxi-cabs. Apart from the general absence of other cars, there were whole stretches where for a few moments you could believe that nothing much had been changed by the war. It was an illusion, of course, because as soon as you convinced yourself that you were seeing a part of London the bombers had somehow missed, the car would turn a corner and there would be another burnt-out ruin, another gap, another hastily erected wooden façade concealing some scene of devastation beyond. The sheer magnitude of the damage was a shock to me: it extended for mile after mile, with every part of London apparently affected.
I guiltily remembered a night when we had been despatched to bomb Münster, a town that had been difficult to find. When we finally located the place, it turned out to be covered in cloud. Because A-Able was starting to run low on fuel, we dropped the bombs blind, through ten-tenths cloud cover, down on Münster below, then headed for home. Where did those bombs fall, what did they destroy, what human lives had they permanently disrupted?
We crossed Hyde Park Corner then went along Constitution Hill, past Buckingham Palace, which was almost unrecognizable behind the mountains of sandbags placed against every visible door and window. Green Park, to the left, was a curious sight: much of the open space had been ploughed under and replanted with vegetables, but at frequent intervals I saw emplacements of anti-aircraft guns, or winching stations for the multitude of silvery barrage-balloons that floated five hundred feet above the trees.
We turned into The Mall, where more anti-aircraft guns pointed upwards through the summer-leafed trees on each side. The car was moving alone, unhindered by other traffic. I realized that I had crossed over into a part of London that was closed to normal traffic, that my new status as one of Churchill’s ADCs was already letting me move in places, and around people, that I would not have dreamed about even two days earlier.
Admiralty House is part of the great archway that separates The Mall from Trafalgar Square and the warren of offices it contains had provided Mr Churchill with a London headquarters that was more practical for the conduct of a war than the cramped quarters of 10 Downing Street, a short distance away. The WAAF driver took the car to the rear entrance of the building, in the wide area called Horse Guards Parade, in peacetime a place of pageantry and commemoration of great national events, n
ow in wartime a huge open-air depot for military vehicles, supplies and temporary buildings. The inevitable brace of anti-aircraft guns stood among the trees adjacent to St James’s Park.
I walked from the car towards the only entrance I could see, wondering what I was supposed to do and to whom I was supposed to be reporting. My orders said only to attend the building by the stated time. However, as soon as I limped to within sight of the door, a Regimental Sergeant-Major marched out to greet me, snapped to attention, saluted me and, after briefly checking my identity, conducted me to a room close to the main entrance. Here, already waiting, was a small group of men, presumably civil servants, dressed in suits and carrying bowler hats, two senior policemen, and two other serving officers: a submarine captain from the Royal Navy and a colonel from the Brigade of Guards. Everyone was extremely cordial and welcoming and I was offered a cup of tea while we waited.
At about eight-thirty we heard a great deal of noise in the corridor outside and a number of men and women hurried past. A few moments later, entirely without ceremony, the stocky figure of Winston Churchill appeared at the door of the room.
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said, glancing around as if checking that we were all present. ‘Let us be done with this task as quickly as possible, as I have to be elsewhere this afternoon and out of London tonight.’
He turned smoothly and walked out of the door. We followed, making way for each other. It was only a few hours since my interview with Mr Churchill at Chequers. Before he appeared I had been thinking that he might acknowledge me personally, perhaps make small-talk about the late night that he must know we had both had. In fact he barely glanced at me. I noticed that for someone of his age, who in the early hours of this morning was still awake and working and who, like me, could have snatched only two or three hours’ sleep to be in central London by this early hour, he looked remarkably fresh. I had seen him only in the glow of his desk lamps – in the bright light of morning his face, the familiar rounded outlines, so reminiscent of a baby’s features, looked vigorous and untroubled.