The Separation (4 page)

Joe did not think entirely alike, I should say. Whenever we discussed what we thought was happening in Germany we vehemently disagreed, but because we were both committed to the sport and had to work as a team we generally steered clear of the subject.

I loved rowing. I loved the strength I had in my body, the speed I could find, the agility with which I could move. I rowed every day that the weather allowed, sometimes alone for endurance development, but usually with Joe, training for speed, for coordination, for the simple familiarity of rowing together. We could never train too much, or enough. I knew I could always improve, always hone my muscles a little more. We competed in a sport in which winning margins were often measured in fractions of a second; there was no possible improvement that was so small we could safely neglect it. Joe was just as committed. Everything I felt inside myself I could observe taking shape in him. Joe rowed stroke. As we rowed, his body was only inches away from mine. His back filled my view, shoulders, arms, flowing to and fro, straining back with the main pull, recovering, sweeping forward, slicing the blades down into the water, putting on the pressure for the next stroke. When we rowed Joe’s back became my inspiration, the powerful, functional muscles matching every movement I made as if we were somehow synchronized by an invisible power from above. I watched his back in the sunlight, in the rain, on grey days, when our coordination was perfect and when we could get nothing right. I watched it at rest as well as during the bursts of energy. I watched it, yet I rarely saw it properly. It was something on which to rest my gaze, a familiar and undisturbing sight while I concentrated on the mindless task of going faster than ever before. Joe and I became more than a team at such times -it was as if we were one person sharing two bodies.

People said we were the best coxless pairs team in the country. They invested great hopes in us, because rowing was a sport in which Britain excelled. The Olympic coxless pairs gold medallists in Los Angeles in 1932 had been Edwards and Clive, the British team, now retired from the sport. Edwards and Clive were our heroes, but we were still expected to equal or better them. So this was the consuming foreground of our lives. Youth is blind to the world around it, but obsessive youth is blinder still. Ignoring everything, we trained intensively for the Games through the spring and early summer of 1936. Germany was rearming, building an illegal air force, and Hitler marched in his troops to occupy the Rhineland, but we were training on weights, sprinting and running, bringing our times down, getting the rhythm and the smoothness of the strokes right, learning when and how to burst with speed, when to consolidate our strength, how to take the shortest, straightest line in water that constantly flowed and eddied unpredictably beneath us. Then July came and it was time for us to travel to Germany. In 1936 there was no combined embarkation of a national team wearing colours, as we see in the modern age. We were expected to make our own way to Berlin, so we carried our equipment in our own van, taking it in turns to drive.

3

I prowled about on the boat deck during the short sea-crossing to France. Joe was inside the lounge cabin and I did not see him again until the ship docked. I was wide awake, exhilarated by everything, but also concerned about the well-being of our two shells, lashed side by side to the roof of the van. We transported them everywhere like that, but never before had we taken them on board a ship. Watching the van being lowered by crane into the hold, the chains swinging, had been an uncomfortable moment of alarm. It reminded me how vulnerable they were and how damage to either of them could put us out of the competition.

I stared restlessly out to sea. I watched the two coasts between which we were slowly crossing. Somewhere in the middle of the Channel, with the lights of both England and France in clear view, it felt as if the sea had narrowed. Both coasts seemed to be almost within reach. I had never before realized how close our country actually was to the mainland of Europe. From this perspective the sea did not seem much wider than a big river. I stood at the rail amidships, thinking such thoughts, little appreciating how could I have done? - what an important symbol of national security that short stretch of water was soon to assume for everyone in Britain.

Three hours later, with the early dawn breaking ahead of us, we were travelling eastwards away from Calais, along the French coast, heading for the border with Belgium.

Joe was driving. I curled up as comfortably as I could in the passenger seat beside him, closed my eyes and tried to snatch some sleep, but I was too excited. The strange French farmland was drifting magically past our windows, flat fields cultivated in exact, rectangular shapes, tall trees planted alongside the road. Ahead was the prospect of hundreds of miles more of sweet foreignness, Belgium and Holland and Germany.

4

The next day I was driving the van when we reached the border crossing between Holland and Germany.

It was a moment we had been looking forward to with mixed feelings. We were undoubtedly nervous of the Nazis, but at the same time, because our mother had been born in Germany, we had been brought up believing that Germany was a good and beautiful place, with a great civilization and culture. Frankly, we had no idea what to expect.

We had driven through the Dutch town of Eindhoven an hour or two before reaching the German border. The road was straight but perilously narrow, built up on embankments that ran between wide and uninteresting fields. Beyond Venlo we entered an area of woodland. After crossing the River Maas on a long bridge built of girders, we drove into the border zone, hidden where the road ran through a dense thicket of trees.

The officers on the Dutch side dealt with us quickly. After a perfunctory examination of our passports one of the officials raised the barrier and I drove across into the narrow strip of no man’s land. We could see the German border post about a hundred yards ahead, where another long pole straddled the road. This one was painted with a triple spiral of red, black and white.

We drew up behind two other vehicles that were already waiting to cross, inching the van forward as each passed through the border ahead. When it was our turn, the officer, a rotund man wearing a uniform of green jacket, black trousers and highly polished black boots, saluted us with his arm raised at a smart angle.

‘Heil Hitler!’

‘Heil Hitler!’
Joe responded.

Before leaving home we had received a letter sent by the Foreign Office to Games competitors, warning us of the behaviour and courtesies that would be expected of us in Germany. The Hitler salute was the first item on the list. To neglect or refuse to make it could lead swiftly to trouble, including imprisonment and deportation. Like most people in Britain we had seen newsreel film of the Nazis. To us, there was something unmistakably ridiculous and histrionic about it. Back in our rooms in college, Joe and I had Heil-Hitlered each other and our friends, goose-stepping about, laughing and laughing. The guard lowered his arm stiffly. He leaned down by the passenger window and stared in at us. He was a youngish man, with pale blue eyes and a fair moustache, neatly cropped. He glanced suspiciously into the compartment of our van, where our luggage was stowed, leaned back with his hands on his hips while he regarded our shells strapped to the roof, then held out his plump fingers. Joe gave him our passports. He looked through both documents slowly, turning the pages with precise motions of his fingers. The sun was beating down on me through the window. I began to feel anxious.

‘[These passports are for the same man,]’ he said, not looking up. ‘[J. L. Sawyer twice.]’

‘[We have the same initials,]’ I replied, beginning what was for us the familiar explanation. Joe was always Joe. I was sometimes called Jack, but usually JL. ‘[But our names - ]’

‘[No, I think not.]’

‘[We are brothers.]’

‘[You are both initialled J. L., I see! Some coincidence. Joseph, Jacob! That is how they name twins in England?]’

Neither Joe nor I said anything. The officer closed the second of our passports, but he did not hand them back.

‘[You are going to the Olympic Games in Berlin,]’ he said to me, looking across. I was in the driver’s seat, but from his point of view the right-hand drive must have put me on the wrong side of the vehicle.

‘[Yes, sir,]’ I replied.

‘[In which event do you propose to compete?]’

‘[We are in the coxwainless pairs.]’

‘[You have two boats. Only one is necessary]’

‘[One is for practice, sir. And as a reserve, in case of accident.]’

He opened our passports again, closely scrutinizing the photographs.

‘[You are twins, you say. Brothers.]’

‘[Yes, sir.]’

He turned away from us and walked to his office, a solid-looking wooden hut built beside the barrier. Several large red flags with the swastika emblazoned on a white circle hung from poles standing out at an angle from the wall. There was no wind in this sheltered spot surrounded by trees and the flags barely moved.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘It’s going to be all right, Jack. Relax ... we haven’t broken any rules.’

We could see the guard through the wide window at the front. He was before a high desk, turning the pages of a large, ledgerlike book. Two other guards were also in there with him, standing back and watching. Behind us and beside us other vehicles were arriving at the border post, but they were being waved through by more guards after only short delays.

Presently our guard returned. He glanced briefly at the trucks grinding slowly past us.

‘[English,]’ he said. ‘[You speak German remarkably well. Have you visited the Reich before?]’ He handed back our passports, directing his question deliberately at Joe. After the first salute, Joe had not spoken during the exchange. He continued to stare ahead, past the barrier pole, along the road that led into Germany. ‘[Do you speak German as well as your identical brother?]’ the guard said loudly, banging his fingers on the window ledge.

‘[Yes, sir,]’Joe said, smiling with sudden charm. ‘[No, we have not visited Germany before.]’

‘[They teach German in your English schools?]’ ‘[Yes. But we also have a mother who was born in Germany]’ ‘[Ah! That explains everything! Your mother is a Saxoner, I think! I knew I was right about your accent! Well, you will know that we are proud of our sportsmen in the Reich. You will find it difficult trying to beat them.]’ ‘[We are pleased to be here, sir.]’ ‘[Good. You may enter the Reich.]
Heil
Hitler!’
He stepped back. As we passed over a white line painted across the surface of the road, Joe made a perfunctory return raising of his arm, then wound up the window on his side. He said, with quiet bitterness, ‘Heil bloody Hitler.’

‘He was just doing his job.’

‘He enjoys his work too much,’ Joe said.

But soon after that we relapsed into silence, each of us absorbed by the unfamiliar scenery of northern Germany.

The sights we saw have since blended into a few memorable images. A lot of the landscape we passed through was forested, a conspicuous change from the vistas of flat farmland we had seen in Belgium and Holland. Although we went through several industrial towns - Duisburg, Essen, Dortmund, all of them shrouded in a thin, bitter-smelling haze that made our eyes sting - there was not enough variety to provide detailed memories. I was keeping a journal as we went along but of that journey I recorded only a couple of short paragraphs. Most of what I remember was a general sense of
being in Germany,
the place that was always being talked about in those days, and with it the vague sense of dread that the name gave rise to. The feeling was reinforced by the hundreds and thousands of swastika flags that were flying from almost every building or wall, a glare of red and white and black. Many long banners were strung across the autobahns and from building to building across the streets of the towns and villages. They bore inspiring messages, perhaps spontaneously created, but because of the insistent tone more likely to be the product of the party. There were slogans about the Saar, about the Rhineland, about the Versailles Treaty, about
Ausland
Germans - one banner which we saw many times in different places declared:

‘[WE ARE PLEDGED TO BLIND OBEDIENCE!].’ There were few commercial advertisements on display anywhere and certainly there were no messages about the Olympic Games. We drove and drove, trying to conserve our physical energy for the training and events which lay ahead, but inevitably, by the time we were approaching the environs of Berlin, we were done in. Joe wanted to find the British team headquarters straight away, to let them know we had arrived, but I was tired of driving, tired of being in the van. I simply wanted to find the house of the family friends with whom we had arranged to stay. We argued listlessly about it for a while. Joe pointed out that we had arrived in the city before noon, that there were many hours of daylight left. I agreed that we should resume training as soon as possible, get our muscles back into competitive trim, but I stubbornly insisted that what I wanted to do was rest. In the end, we came to a sort of compromise. We located the British team headquarters, then went from there to the stretch of water near the Olympic Village at Grunewald, where sculling and rowing teams were to train. We unloaded our two shells and our oars into the boathouse that had been allocated to us. Next we drove to our friends’ apartment, in Charlottenburg, a western suburb of Berlin. We did no training that first day we arrived.

5

Five years later, in the early summer of 1941, I was in hospital in rural Warwickshire. My plane, Wellington A-Able, had crashed into the North Sea about thirty miles from the English coast, somewhere off Bridlington. Only one other crew member was still on the aircraft with me when it went down: Sam Levy, the navigator, who had been hit in the head and leg by shrapnel. Sam and I managed somehow to scramble into an inflatable dinghy and we were picked up by a rescue boat many hours later. I was in a fog of amnesia. I remembered almost nothing of even the bare outline I have described. Moments only of it remained, glimpsed in flashes, like fragments of a terrible dream. I came slowly back to full consciousness, confused by what was going on in my mind, a conflict of violent images and what I could see around me in the physical world. I was in a bed, suffering intense pain, there were strangers coming and going, inexplicable actions were being performed on my body, bottles and trays were clattering, I experienced a sensation of helpless motion as I was wheeled somewhere on a trolley.