Hannah & Emil (38 page)

The next day, there was a knock at the door in the middle of the afternoon, just as the girls were returning from the farms. I was trying to get tea onto the table, huge plates of jam sandwiches and tea in the big pot. I asked one of the girls, Milly, a flighty girl with two or three soldiers on the go from the base, to finish up while I answered the door. She was a pretty girl. She gave me a slightly cow-like stare before scurrying off into the kitchen and I wondered if that was her appeal to the soldiers: that sensual, stupid slowness, followed by an eagerness to please.

At the door was a man I had not seen for years, Kenneth Timms. I knew him at Ruskin, and he had visited us before the war, but since then had become a Labour MP for a Midlands electorate and rarely came this far south, into dense Tory territory. He was one of the men to whom I had written trying to find news of Emil. He had aged, as they all had, but Kenneth wore the years heavily. His face held a pinched expression and the wild curls of which he was always a little proud at Ruskin had gone now. He was almost completely bald. For a moment I didn't recognise him. When I did he seemed to be in disguise. I remembered I used to have something of a crush on him at college. ‘Kenneth!' I said eventually. ‘Please come in. How are you?'

He seemed bewildered by the kinetic force and volume of the Land Girls tearing about the place, stealing each other's sandwiches, shrieking at one another, sloshing tea all over the table.

‘Come through,' I said. ‘Where it's quiet.'

I tried not to rush him, sitting him down next to me at the desk in the back office. ‘You are a long way from home, Ken. What brings you down here?'

‘A Labour conference in Southampton.'

I knew that I should ask about it, and how his daughters were, but I could not wait. ‘Do you have news of Emil?'

It seemed he had been waiting for permission to speak, as it tumbled out now in a rush in his Derbyshire accent. ‘Hannah, I do have something, and it is rather worrying. I am not sure if it concerns Emil or not. It is very difficult to obtain accurate information. You see, a ship was sunk in the Irish Sea last Tuesday. The
Arandora Star
.' I stared at him for several seconds, motionless.

‘What seems to have happened is that they sent a shipload for Canada. They were Italians and Germans. I am told that they were all fascists, category A, the ones interned in thirty-nine. Emil would not be in that category, but it is all so confusing. We receive a different memo every day.'

I forced myself to speak. ‘What happened to the men on board?'

He looked at me, stricken. ‘They were lost, my dear. Only a few hundred saved.'

‘Of course,' I said after a few moments, ‘Emil is not a fascist. They know that.'

‘No, no.' He put his hand on mine. It was a little moist. ‘They have always been clear about the categories. But still . . .'

‘What Kenneth? What is it?'

‘My constituent, Mrs Singer—her husband was category C, classed unequivocally as a refugee. He was on it. He was lost.'

In the other room the girls grew rowdier. ‘Don't be such a little tramp!' one shrieked. If those girls started off the war with morals, by God they were gone now. I began to chew a nail. Usually I managed to control this habit, which I regarded as revolting, in company. In private, Emil always told me to stop. I find I am doing it even now, when I pause typing to remember.

I placed my hands in my lap and looked him in the eye. ‘Kenneth, thank you for coming all this way. I have not received a letter. I will not believe he was on board until I see a letter. If you could get an actual list—in any case, I feel that I would know, somehow.'

‘They won't give out a list. They will only say yes or no if next of kin gives them a name. That is what I came to tell you. Here is who you write to.' He handed me a scrap of paper. ‘You should contact them yourself.'

At the door, I could tell he wanted to say that he was sorry, but I would not have it. I hurried him out to his car, shook his hand, thanked him for coming, slipped the ragged triangle of paper in my apron pocket and returned to the house.

When he had gone, I began to peel the carrots for dinner. We had an enviable supply of fresh vegetables with the girls doing the work they did. For once, I did not ask the girls to help in the kitchen. After they had cleared the tea things, I sent them out to walk in the fields. It was so beautifully fresh, after rain the day before.

As I prepared the stew, I told myself, many times: I am peeling carrots. I am peeling potatoes, and occasionally: There is no letter. He is not on the list. The thought hovered. I batted it away. There had been no letter about anything at all. They are not in touch with you, I went on at myself. For one thing, you are not his wife.

When the stew was done, and there were no pressing tasks for the moment, I sat down at the table and examined my poor fingernails. Even then, as my stiff body at last unfolded, I could not allow myself to believe he was lost. I simply refused to do it. I sat very still, and quiet, waiting for the girls to return.

A week later, I scolded one of the girls for attempting to malinger as the others trooped off to their work blearily in the cool early morning. She was another one of those with rather a complicated love life. She said she had a cold, and her eyes and nose were red, but I had heard one of them crying in the night. I was unsympathetic, giving her a little speech about her duty to serve with the troops at their lowest ebb. Eventually the wretched girl sloped off after the others, ready to sob anew. I had simply wanted the place to myself for a few hours and, it seemed, was prepared to act the bully to ensure that I had my way. After the girl had finally gone, I sat down with a cup of tea and a saucer of biscuits in a square of sunlight at the long trestle before an empty sheet of paper, with the address Kenneth gave me in my hand. I might as well know once and for all, I was thinking when I heard the slither of the mail falling to the mat. As always I told myself to expect nothing, either good or bad.

I made myself wait for as much as five seconds and then walked quickly to the door. I saw it immediately, a blue envelope, a handwritten address, a letter that looked different, personal, precious, poking out from amid the official guff. I knew even before I picked it up, leaving the others where they lay on the mat; it was his handwriting, addressed to me at Mother's, crossed out and sent on to me here. I ripped it open as I returned to my seat, tearing straight through the address printed on the back. The letter would mean nothing until I saw its date. The delays with the censors meant it might have been sent at any time. It was dated the fourth of July.
After
the sinking of the
Arandora Star
. I held the pieces together with jittery fingers. I was suddenly ravenously hungry and crammed a biscuit in my mouth, feeling I had not eaten properly for weeks.

Douglas Camp
Isle of Man
4th July, 1940

My dearest Hannah,

I hope you have received the previous letters which I sent
to you. I have received nothing from you, but I believe that
you do not know where I am. They have offered to send us to —— and said that wives can follow. I have told you this before.

If you have received my previous letters, I am sorry to repeat
the information.

Everyone knows that you are my darling wife. You should
use my name now. Write to the Home Office. Ask your friends
to help you. There might not be time to wait for arrangements. Organise yourself, in case.

There followed a long passage almost entirely blacked out by the censor. I believed that it expressed his love and loneliness. Some words had been left alone:
fondness
,
missing
,
empty
. It was as though the censor on the one hand believed Emil's words of love to contain some kind of forbidden, dangerous message, but on the other wanted me to know the tone of them, just in case they were what they seemed to be. The British for you.

I could not believe I held something so precious in my hands, my dusty hands that had scrubbed and peeled and washed all morning. I shall do
whatever
he requires of me, I told myself. More. I will not falter. I had a week left of the young women. I would write to the Youth Hostel Association and ask them to find another warden for the next billet. I began to calculate what my few possessions were worth. I had a friend from college whom I had already bothered endlessly but whom I must now ask to help me get permission to travel to the country beneath the censor's ink, whatever it might be. He would probably be glad to do this, to be rid of me at last. I knew that this was how persistence worked, how you received eventual consent for what you asked. You went on until that moment when they just wanted it to be done with, for them to be shot of you. I've seen that look on some official's face many times. The one that says: Oh dear Lord, not you again. And then you know you have them.

I held the letter up to the light, trying in vain to see some mark beneath the blackout that might give me a clue to the name of the country. I believed it must be Canada, after the news of the
Arandora
Star
. Fine then. I spoke French if it was to be required. I would happily go to Canada, if we could only be together there. Would the men be released? So far from Europe and the war? Or perhaps I would be expected to be interned in a camp with him. I knew nothing about the future, not the smallest detail, and yet somehow I had to prepare for it.

I fell asleep that night in our bed with the letter in my hand, tucked in its taped-together envelope. My dreams were filled with the sea, great ships, emerging submarines, bright flashes over grey waters. I did not even know if it were possible for a civilian to go to sea in such times. Then, too, I was quite afraid of the ocean, spent many sleepless nights before every short trip to Europe, and this journey was likely to be much longer. But he had asked me to go. And I would apply all of my intellect to every last administrative detail; I would find the right person to beg, make my case, pluck the requisite money out of the ether, and we would be refugees together.

Emil

THE ISLE OF MAN, 1940

The men had been at sea for only a few hours, below decks in dank dormitories, when Emil heard the motors grinding, felt the hull shift sideways against the sea, their speed drop away. They were ordered up on deck and saw a long beach lined with a high wire fence, boarding houses, the dark shapes of people wandering along the promenade. Have we even left England? he wondered. There were no signs on the dock. ‘Isle of Man,' an officer told them as he hurried them across the gangway. ‘Douglas Camp. Fresh air. Decent food. You're lucky.' The air
was
wonderful. The tangy sea, the cold wind. They had been in a new housing estate on the fringes of Liverpool for weeks. Their overcrowded rooms and tents had quickly become close and rank and food was so scarce that some had taken to rummaging through dustbins. His spirits lifted a little.

Low grey skies sat over the town, casting the red brick of the boarding houses in a dull light. Seagulls cried as they wheeled about the docks in a gang, looking for holidaymakers to bully for food. Slim pickings these days. They marched with their cases along the dock to a high metal gate in the wire fence. Passed through, rifles on them, along the seafront to yet another man with a list on a board. The British army must have a whole regiment of these, with an aircraft hangar full of boards and pencils.

He was assigned to a room in a house a few hundred metres along the promenade. He and two others let themselves in. The red patterned carpet, the smell in it of ancient meals of meat and potatoes and green beans, the long wooden banister—he had stayed in houses like this when they came ashore with Siemens. At any moment a landlady might appear from some back office with a smile and a glass of sherry, a widow not yet dyeing her hair. He found his room upstairs while the others found theirs. Only two beds: one made neatly, a suitcase beneath it, the other bare, with blankets and sheets folded at its foot. The window was open and the smell of the sea came in on the breeze, curtains billowing. A crate, turned on its side so its divider made a shelf, sat between the beds. There were books, miraculously, some in German. He sat on the low bed to read the spines. Thomas Mann, Kafka, Shakespeare plays, poetry: Yeats, Auden. He wished he had paper. He wanted to write to Hannah at once. She would be thrilled at this piece of good fortune. And yet another marvel: next to the books, wedged in as a bookend, an exquisite little globe of hand-painted wood, Germany small enough to fit easily beneath the tip of his forefinger, Britain not the length of a staple and yet all its intricate coastline beautifully drawn. The Isle of Man was barely a dot, though; even this expert hand could do no more for this tiny, forgotten place.