The Separation (24 page)

There’s someone out there!’

So I had a name for the child. I held the knowledge to me like a coveted prize. Angela, her name was Angela. My daughter -I felt a thrill of intoxicating excitement - my daughter was called Angela!

A moment later the door opened fully again. A man stepped through with a rough movement of his shoulders. I had never seen him before in my life: he looked to me as if he was about forty or fifty, with a weather-beaten, unshaven face. In the house behind him I could still hear the child crying. The man stood there on the threshold of his house, staring steadily at me, his silence and the resentful set of his head radiating a stubborn aggression.

I backed away, returned to the car and drove away down the hill.

The following week my ship sailed from Southampton and I set off on my fresh start in Australia. During the six-week voyage, itself an adventure like nothing I had known before, I made a conscious decision that if I was going to make a go of my life in Australia I must leave the old emotional baggage behind. Of course, such a decision is easier to plan than to carry-through, but I sensed that many of the people who were on the boat with me, emigrating for similar reasons to mine, were undergoing something of the same feeling themselves. We talked about our hopes and plans, about the challenge of starting again in a new and young country. We were silent about our past lives.

As we sailed across the calm swell of the Indian Ocean, I felt all that starting to slip away. I arrived in Australia. In that beautiful and exhilarating country I lived my new life, working hard and long. First I was a part-time pilot for a crop-dusting concern. There was a great deal of work available because Australia had vast fields. Soon I graduated from part-time hired pilot to full-time salaried pilot; later I became a manager in the company; within fifteen years I owned the whole firm. After that I moved into other aviation businesses, usually involving the chance for me to keep flying, something that burned up energy if not always my own.

I returned to Britain in 1982, when I reached sixty-five. By then I had earned and saved plenty of money and I bought the flat where I have lived until recently. I settled down to retirement, not really thinking what it would mean until I had time to sit still long enough. Sitting still long enough turned out to be what I was least good at.

I went through a period of physical restlessness, endlessly travelling, constantly trying to meet people and make new friends, opening up possible non-vocational interests and projects. I made tentative contact with some of my colleagues from the RAF and prison camp days, even visiting one or two of them. I realize that this can be predictable behaviour in some recently retired people, those whose lives have been full of activity. In my case it achieved little and anyway it was brought to a sudden end by a minor heart attack. Whether one thing led to the other is not for me to say but the result was that since then I have been taking things much easier.

In the time of reflection that necessarily came while I recuperated, I started thinking back over my life. Reflection was something that seemed timely, now that I was in my seventies, living with a heart that had given me an unwelcome reminder of my own mortality. It was time to think matters through. Writing this down, looking back on my life, it seems plain to me that I am one of that generation whose lives were permanently marked, perhaps blighted, by involvement in the Second World War. To be young and to live through a war is an experience like no other. It was enough experience for a lifetime, but if you survived, as I survived, there was more life to come but it was not the same thing at all. For me the war, and therefore my early life, ended in January 1945, as I stood there in that freezing prison compound, somewhere in Germany, waiting alone.

It was the last time in the war that I saw a bomber stream flying overhead, as Bomber Command went about its deadly business. I did not know which city the planes were visiting that particular night, but I do know that it was not to be the last of their visits. Great and terrible bombing raids still lay ahead, of which I was to know nothing until long after the war ended: the devastating raids on Dresden, Pforzheim, Dessau, many other towns and cities, now almost without defences as German resistance collapsed, lay in the weeks ahead.

I sensed some of this as I shivered in that bitter night - I wanted to see the planes for the last time. The other prisoners had returned to their huts, the guards had moved away. There was no reason why the aircraft would fly back by the same route they used on the way in. Usually, in fact, to avoid the risk of night fighters the planes would scatter and take different routes. But at this stage of the war, every crew probably chose the shortest, most direct route. The long silence continued. Then, as I was about to give up, I heard at last what I was waiting for: the sound of distant engines. I scanned the sky and before long I was able to pick out the first of the bombers returning. More followed, then more. Soon the same hundreds were flying overhead. They were no longer in a stream but were flying at different heights, most straggling alone, sometimes in pairs or small groups. It took more than an hour for them to go by. They were heading towards the west, back to their bases, home to England. Somewhere behind them, a German city whose name I did not know was lying overwhelmed in the night, glowing and smoking.

Part Three: 1999

1

Five months after he met Angela Chipperton at his signing in Buxton, Stuart Gratton finished work on his latest non-fiction book,
Empty Cities of the East.
It was another oral history, this one dealing with the experiences of the men and women who had been sent to Ukraine between 1942 and 1948 to build and populate the new German cities, as part of the Nazi
Lebensraum
policy. He sent the manuscript and a floppy disk to his literary agent, caught up with the usual backlog of messages and mail, then took a short holiday. He went first to visit his son Edmund (twenty-seven, working for a telecom provider in Worcester, married, pregnant wife called Hayley, child expected in October) then after a few nights drove across to Yorkshire to see his other son Calvin (twenty-two, completing his doctorate at Hull University, single, living with a young woman called Eileen). Ten days later he was back home. The agent acknowledged his new book but said she hadn’t yet had a chance to read it all. The editor at his publishers was meanwhile said to be reading the book: on an impulse Gratton had e-mailed it to him before he went away.

So far he was following his normal post-book pattern. What he usually did next was to start work immediately on a new project, a kind of psychological bulwark against the possibility of some kind of problem with the one just delivered.

As he drove back across the Pennines from Hull, he was trying to decide which book to start. He had two projects in mind, but both were problematical, if for different reasons. One would involve a major investment of time and research: he planned to write a social history of the USA since 1960/61, when Richard M. Nixon was elected to the US presidency after Adlai Stevenson’s term of office. The Nixon administration, voted in on a bring-our-boys-home ticket, in fact more than doubled the size of the American military commitment to Siberia during its term of office. Nixon’s over-ambitious, ill-judged and corruptly financed foreign policy measures were widely regarded as a principal cause of the economic stagnation which still afflicted the USA to the present day. Gratton’s idea was to travel to the US and carry out detailed interviews with the surviving main players, illustrating their testimony with an up-to-date profile of the present state of the country. He knew that the book could be sold without any problems: he had already received serious offers from three publishers, and the Gulbenkian Foundation had committed itself to providing a lucrative financing package for the many months of research it would entail. All Gratton had to do was instruct his agent to set up the deal from the best offer on the table and he could start whenever he liked.

However, the sheer size of the book daunted him. Although much of it was mapped out in his mind and he had received outline agreement from most of his proposed interviewees, it was a vast project that would probably require two or three years of his undivided attention. Above all, it would mean him having to spend several months living in and travelling around the USA. His new book,
Empty Cities,
had involved a total of three visits to the US, tracking down and interviewing survivors from both sides of the Ukrainian uprising of 1953. There were tens of thousands of East European expats who moved to the USA throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. Now he found it discouraging to contemplate going back again. There was much to like, admire and enjoy in the USA, but from the point of view of a traveller or researcher from Europe, time spent there involved endless hassles and wearying reminders of the Third War mentality that still held American political life in its thrall. He simply did not look forward to several months of having to cope with suspicious bureaucracy, crooked currency deals, technology that didn’t work and the need to register with the police or FBI whenever he arrived in a new town or county. He remembered the first time he had visited the US, in 1980. Struggling with the pervasive isolationist mentality, the xenophobia, the blatantly censored media, the cities managed by criminals, the fuel shortages and the inflated prices had felt like perverse fun at the time, almost like a trip back to the Depression of the ‘30s. Two decades on since his first visit, with nothing better and everything the same or worse, the novelty had gone out of it.

The other possible book for him to work on would be the one he was idly planning about Sawyer, but because of the time spent on
Empty Cities
he had done virtually nothing about it. By chance, his route back from Hull led him through Bakewell, the small town where Angela Chipperton lived, and he was reminded of her and the notebooks she had lent him. Compared with the American history, the book about Sawyer held all the appeal of smallness of scale, a puzzle to elucidate then ideally solve, a minimum of travel and perhaps a few weeks of soothing archive or internet research. The main problem with the Sawyer project, apart from the general lack of response to his advertisements, was that Angela Chipperton had failed to reply to his efforts to contact her since their brief meeting. He had already sent the photocopied pages to the transcription agency, anticipating her response. The agency returned the clean copy to him a short time later, but she had not yet sent him the original notebooks, nor had she given him formal permission to use the copyright material. He had still not found the time to look at the long text. All he knew about Mrs Chipperton was her postal address. No phone number was listed and she appeared not to use e-mail.

Meanwhile, no reply had ever come from Sam Levy in Masada: Levy had always been a long shot, because for one thing there was no guarantee that the old man was even still alive. Levy’s link with Sawyer could anyway be a red herring. However, over the years Gratton had learned that there was rarely such a thing as coincidence. Everything was ultimately connected. He had a hunch that Levy’s offhand remark about the Sawyer he knew in the RAF meant that they were quite likely one and the same, but with or without a response from Levy there was still no guarantee he would be able to ‘find’

the real Sawyer.

He realized that the Sawyer book could rapidly become a waste of time, involving a lot of fruitless research for a book that he might never be able to write, let alone publish. The puzzle could turn out to be not a puzzle at all, but a misunderstanding by Churchill, even a mistake or a misprint. It wouldn’t be the first time that an idea for a book led nowhere. Nor would it be the first time historians had been misled by Churchill, that arch manipulator of twentieth-century history.

2

Then the decision was made for him. A few minutes after he arrived home and was still unloading his car, his neighbour brought round the various large postal packages she had taken in for him while he was away. Among them was a small, firmly packed parcel with Masada stamps and postmark. Gratton attended to his necessary chores. As soon as he could, he settled down in his office and opened Sam Levy’s package. He then went back and read, at last, the Sawyer notebooks. The next morning, after a night of shallow sleep, he was out of bed early. He telephoned his agent, leaving a message on her voice-mail to put the American social history project on hold. He went to his car and set off across the Pennines, speedily retracing his route of the day before, back through Buxton towards the town of Bakewell.

3

Bakewell was a place with which he was unfamiliar, somewhere he passed through in his car from time to time, with no reason to stop. While Wendy was still alive they occasionally used Bakewell as a base for walks, parking their car in the town then exploring the countryside around, but since her death Gratton had given up that sort of thing, endlessly promising himself he would return to taking regular exercise as soon as his current workload eased.

He was looking for Williamson Avenue, an address that sounded straightforward enough. Bakewell was a small town, so when he arrived he began cruising the streets, looking for the road. He stopped at a newsagent’s to buy a street plan, but they had sold out. He asked the man behind the counter if he knew where Williamson Avenue was. He was directed out of the town, towards Monyash. He turned back when he reached the countryside without seeing the road.

He located it in the end, surprisingly close to the centre of the town: it was a residential road off another residential road, with fairly modern houses down one side and a parade of recently built shop units on the other. The address Angela Chipperton had given him was number 17, which was a laundromat. The maisonette above was empty. According to the man who ran the pharmacy next door, it was used for storage by a firm of magazine distributors. Clearly no one lived there. Gratton drove to the information centre at the town hall and carried out a systematic search. First he discovered that houses in Williamson Avenue had been demolished about ten years earlier to make way for the shops, but they had stood, derelict and uninhabited, for several years before that. There were no Chippertons in Bakewell, no Sawyers and no Grattons. Nor were there any Chipperfields, Sayers or Grattans, or at least not any with names or initials even close to those of the woman he was trying to locate. He cast his net wider, scouring through the directories for towns or villages in the area with names similar to Bakewell: he found a Blackwell, a Baslow, a Barlow and of course a Buxton. He drew a blank in all of them: there was no one with a name even remotely similar, certainly not in any Williamson Road or Street or Lane or Avenue.