The Separation (34 page)

Little is known of Joseph Leonard Sawyer before he met Churchill. He competed in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, when it is believed he met the German Chancellor. Later, he was a registered conscientious objector and pacifist who worked as a volunteer ambulance driver throughout the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz. He received injuries several times during air raids, in one case suffering concussion. His conduct is known to have been exemplary: he consistently showed bravery and resourcefulness, saving the lives of many people caught up in the inferno of the Blitz, with little regard for his own safety but never risking the lives of his colleagues. Although his name was unknown to the public, his gallant behaviour under fire had already been noticed by several civil authorities. The crucial meeting between him and Churchill came as the result of an initiative from Dr Carl Burckhardt, president of the Swiss Red Cross. Because the Society was a non-combatant recognized by both sides, the Red Cross was in a unique position to attempt to negotiate an armistice. Such proposals had been put forward at regular intervals after the outbreak of hostilities. As the fighting spread across Europe and Africa during 1940 and the early months of 1941, the war becoming more intense and violent, neither side was in any mood for a cease-fire and the Red Cross proposals were turned down at the same regular intervals.

At the beginning of May 1941, however, Churchill suddenly and unprecedentedly acceded in principle to the latest formal proposal and Sawyer was one of those who were summoned to a top-secret meeting. No public record exists of what was said or agreed during this meeting. Confidential Cabinet minutes about the armistice do not fall under the thirty-year rule and are therefore under indefinite embargo, but in recent years pressure has been increasing for them to be made public. Until then we can only conjecture as to the meeting itself.

If not much is known about Sawyer before he met Churchill, even less is known about him afterwards. That he participated in the armistice is certain, for his signature appears in the treaty document. There are also the photographs taken at the time of the signing, in which Sawyer may be glimpsed standing on the periphery of the group. After that, there is no further trace of him. His unprecedented influence on Churchill, and to a lesser extent on the German Chancellor, is unquestioned, but also unexplained. One naturally wishes to know more, but we can be content that as a result of it the peace deal was forged. The enigma deepens because of his subsequent disappearance, the intrigue heightened by the fact that there were only two recorded sightings of him while on Red Cross business, both of which were made while he was abroad . . .

11

Holograph notebooks of J. L. Sawyer
-
University of Manchester, Department of Vernacular

History (www. man. ac. uk /archive /vern_his /sawyer)

i

I remember exactly the moment when I came to my senses after the accident. Memory reappears like a scene in the middle of a film, an abrupt jump from blankness. I was inside a Red Cross ambulance, shocked into reality when the vehicle jolted over an uneven patch of road. I braced myself defensively against the knocks and bumps I was receiving, but my waist and legs were held gently in place with restraining straps. I was alone in the compartment with an orderly, a young Red Cross worker I knew was called Ken Wilson. It was difficult to talk in the noisy, unventilated compartment. Ken braced his arms against the overhead shelves as the vehicle swung about. He said we were well on our way in the journey, not to worry. But I was worried. Where were we going?

As awareness dawned on me, something must have changed in my manner, because Ken raised his voice over the racket of the ambulance’s engine and tyres. ‘Joe, how are you feeling? Are you OK?’

‘Yes,’ I said, realizing that I was indeed feeling all right, whereas until a few seconds before I had not been feeling anything. The world was suddenly in focus. ‘Yes, it’s starting to make sense again.’

‘You had a nasty shock, old man. Do you remember anything about that?’

‘A bang on the head, was it?’ I reached up and gently felt the top of my skull, but I could feel no sensitive areas where a wound might have been.

‘You took quite a knock,’ Ken said. ‘We’re not sure exactly what happened to you. We think you were a bit too close to a bomb going off. Blast can knock someone out without causing any obvious physical damage. The doctor said we needed to get you to a hospital.’

‘The doctor said . . . ? I’m not ill, am I? When did this happen?’

‘A week or so ago. You were down in Bermondsey. In fact, a lot of us were there that night. A big raid, one of the worst so far. At the end, when we reported back to the Wandsworth yard, we did a head count and you hadn’t returned. You were posted as missing, but the police didn’t find you until three days ago. You don’t seem to have suffered any physical damage, but the doctor who examined you said they had already come across several similar cases. Blast can cause internal damage without visible wounds. You need a proper check-up, but the hospitals in London are stretched to the limit. We thought it would be safe to take you home, so you can see your own doctor, go to your local hospital. Things aren’t too bad yet in Manchester’

After the shock of renewed self-awareness faded, I began to orientate myself. It seemed to me that my memory, as I prodded experimentally at it, was not too badly affected: I could remember the weeks in London, the endless anxious hours driving the ambulance, the scores of injured people we picked up. I vividly remembered the hundreds of fires in the narrow London streets, the ruined, gaping-windowed buildings on each side, the piles of wreckage, the flooded craters and snaking fire-hoses. I remembered Ken Wilson, too. Ken and I had always rubbed along well together. As the ambulance continued on its way, he told me more about what the people at the Red Cross thought might have happened to me, where I could have been until I managed to find my way to the men’s hostel. Although my memory was already starting to piece itself together, behind the calm appearance I was trying to project to Ken I was terrified. Concussion creates a sense of unfilled blankness behind you, one you know in reality must have been made up of experiences which at the time were perfectly normal, but which have since become unreachable by memory. Discovering what is there in your memory, and what might not be, is a painful process.

I want to emphasize the reawakening in the ambulance (why did it occur there?, why at that exact moment?) because it is a point of certainty. My conscious life began again, there and then. What was to follow is the crucial period of my life and I want to record it in my notebook, but much of what I can say is less certain than I would like. I can only describe what happened to me in the way it seemed to happen. I am sure about that moment of awakening. It is certain and it is a sort of beginning. Some time after midnight we took a short break from the journey in Birmingham, where there was another main Red Cross depot. I tried taking some steps without using the sticks Ken gave me. It came quite naturally, but I felt nervous without their support and was quickly short of breath. We carried on to the canteen and sat at a table with the young woman who had been driving our ambulance, Phyllida Simpson. We huddled together in the cold canteen, getting to know one another. When we returned to the ambulance, Ken took over the driving, while Phyllida loosely secured my legs and waist with the straps in case I wanted to sleep. Soon we had passed through the heavily bombed centre and inner suburbs of the city, and were striking northwards into the countryside. Phyllida lay back on the stretcher shelf on her side and began to doze.

I too was exhausted, but the exhilaration of having an identity was coursing through me. I settled down to pass the rest of the night on the uncomfortable ledge, wrapped in a couple of blankets, bracing myself with my elbows and staring up at the van’s ceiling. It was cream-painted, made of metal, held in place by a line of tiny painted-over rivets. There were few comforts in the vehicle. How many damaged lives had expired on a hard shelf like this, with a similar dreary view? I knew of some of those people myself. I could not forget the feeling of despair and regret that arose whenever we arrived at a hospital casualty bay, only to find that the injured person must have died as we were driving frantically through the blacked-out streets.

ii

We arrived in Manchester as dawn was breaking. Someone unlocked the door of our building and we went inside. Ken and Phyllida went to the kitchen and one of them put on a kettle to make tea while I walked around the deserted floors, familiarizing myself with the place once again. I knew it had been some time since I worked in the building, but my faulty memory was imprecise about details. I was anxious to go home to see Birgit again. The first train out to Macclesfield did not leave until after 8 a.m. but as we drove into the centre of Manchester Phyllida told me she thought there might be someone who could give me a lift home before then.

In the end, after hanging around in the centre of Manchester, I caught the train. I left Macclesfield Station, walked through the tunnel, crossed the Silk Road and began the climb up the hill towards Rainow. It was a long walk, with many reminders of the times I had laboured home the same way, pedalling my old bicycle.

I took a shortcut across the fields on the slopes below our house. It was a lovely autumnal morning, with mist shrouding the hills, but the thin sunlight was already on my face and the view across the plain was coming into focus as the day moved on. I could see our house ahead of me, outlined against the pale blue sky. I thought of Birgit in there somewhere, not suspecting that I was almost home. Because we had no telephone in the house I had not been able to send a message ahead. I briefly imagined her sitting alone at our kitchen table, perhaps drinking milk or tea, reading the morning newspaper. I had been away so long - I no longer knew how many weeks it had been since I left. Birgit was living by herself for all that time, alone in a house and in a country where she never really-felt she belonged. I had hardly been able to contact her: no telephone conversations except short ones by arrangement in public call-boxes, our letters delayed by the disruption the bombing caused. She was so young, so beautiful. I had left her alone, neglecting her for the sake of trying to do something about the war. I broke my stride. For the first time ever, I was stricken by doubts about my wife. Could she have turned to someone else for comfort in my absence? While I was in London I had met so many other people whose lives had been disrupted by the war, whose minds were full of anxious thoughts about sexual betrayals and jealousies. Separation, loneliness, mistrust, infidelities, these were the real consequences of war for most people. The marriages of at least two of the men in the small group I worked with in London had already collapsed under the strain of war.

I realized I was panicking, a reaction usually alien to me, and I decided at that last moment to send out a warning. In those few seconds I had convinced myself that if I marched unannounced into my house I might interrupt something that I would rather not see. I was less than fifty yards away from the house. I cupped a hand around my mouth.

‘Birgit!’ I shouted. ‘Can you hear me? I’m home!’

My voice sounded to me like an explosion in the quiet morning. It seemed that my words echoed across the slopes, back from the tranquil hills, loud enough to make people miles away turn their faces and crane their necks. I glanced around at the misty, sunlit view. I called again and continued to climb up the uneven grassy slope.

‘I’m home, Birgit!’ I yelled again.

Then there was movement. I saw one of the curtains in the main living-room twitch quickly to one side. Had it been Birgit?

The front door opened, the one that led out to the muddy lane running past the house. I stumbled forward, tripping, pressing my hands briefly on the dew-cold grass for balance, then levering myself up again. I saw someone step out of the house.

It was not Birgit. It was, in a terrible fulfilment of my worst fantasy, a young man. He was in uniform, in RAF uniform: smart blue trousers and tunic, pale-blue shirt and dark tie, a peaked cap. He looked across the muddy ground towards me, the shock in his face reflecting the shock that I myself felt. It was my brother Jack, there at my house.

I half crawled, half climbed up the slippery grass towards him. He was standing stiffly with his hand stretched out towards me. I kept stumbling and sliding, pushing myself desperately towards him, but somehow I was unable to make any more progress. Birgit came through the door behind Jack and stood peering past his shoulder as, like a fool, I blundered and slithered on the muddy slope.
iii

I opened my eyes and the cream-painted metal ceiling of the ambulance was there above me. The noise and vibration of the engine, rattled through me. My back was stiff from straining for balance against the lurching of the van.

Phyllida was standing in the aisle with her legs braced, leaning down over me. She was holding my wrist in one hand; the other pressed coolly on my forehead. I tried to sit up, deeply confused by the suddenness of the transition. She pushed me down again, gently but not allowing me to resist. I realized how physically weak I was feeling.

‘You were shouting,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t catch what you said.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. In my mind’s eye I could still see the steep slope, the bright morning sunshine, the figures of my brother and my wife, high and unreachable above me. ‘I wasn’t asleep! Was I shouting?’

‘Joe, try to relax. We’ll get you to Manchester as soon as we can. Let me give you something to drink.’

She held out to me one of the lidded cups we gave the patients when the ambulance was moving at speed. What had been going on in my house? Jack and Birgit together? I took the cup from Phyllida and sucked at the metal mouthpiece. Cold water ran pleasantly into my mouth. I took two or three gulps and passed the cup back to her.