Somewhere Over England (11 page)

She left her then with the anger hanging in the air between them.

In the front room on 31 December, she and Heine saw in the year of 1939 with mulled wine, praying that peace would endure, that somehow Hitler could be stopped without great carnage; that hostility would not blossom in England towards Germans and Italians. That in Germany, God was with Heine’s parents.

As they drank quietly together Heine touched Helen’s hand and said, ‘Your mother is widowed and lonely. We have our lives before us and one another. We should be generous, my darling. Ask her to join us, please.’

She said nothing, just looked at the fire and the flames which lurched round logs and coal. She did not want her mother down, she did not want to see in the New Year with her in case, somehow, she tainted it with her presence.

‘Please,’ Heine said again. ‘There is enough bitterness and pain throughout the world without continuing a feud within our own family.’

So Helen helped her mother down the stairs although she was not fragile enough to need help. She eased her into a chair, handed her a glass of warm wine, feeling the heat from her own as she sat and watched her mother smooth her satin dressing gown and sip with pursed mouth. Yes, all right, Mother, she thought as she sipped her own wine, tasting the warmth in her mouth. All right, I shall do as Heine says and be generous tonight and in the future, but I will never let you spoil any part of my life ever again.

In January the gas mask drills which had been desultory for the past year took on a new urgency in the schools, and in Germany Jews were banned from cinemas, theatres and concerts. They were banned from being vets, pharmacists and dentists and so the refugees continued to pass through Helen’s flat.

In February her mother complained that she earned too much from Ernest’s pensions to claim a free air raid shelter and Helen said that she was not in one of the priority target areas anyway, as she, Heine and Chris were.

Helen was glad when Heine began digging in early March when the soil was frost-free and easier to work. It helped to feel they were doing something as the tension in the press mounted, as people grew edgy and ignored the warm spring. She watched as he sliced the spade deep into the earth at the bottom of the narrow strip of garden behind the flat, heaving cold heavy sods on to the lawn. She was glad that her arms tugged at the shoulders when she and Chris put them into the rust-smeared wheelbarrow and then transferred them to the left side of the garden where the sun struck in the afternoons. She was glad to be working, to be doing something to protect themselves, glad too to be creating from that need a rockery which would thrive. For she wanted flowers to bloom; even if bombs fell from black-crossed aeroplanes she wanted flowers to bloom, then some sanity would remain.

She watched as Heine dug again and again, the sweat soaking his shirt, his hair. There was a smell of fresh earth; there were old pennies, pipes, bottles, tiles and Heine smiled each time they fell from his spade and then threw them up to Chris who would hold them, turn them, then put them to one side to take to school for the ‘precious table’. Worms bored holes in the straight glossed sides of the pit as the weekend passed and Helen took them to the rockery which now held small, wide-spaced plants, and it seemed almost a game as the sky turned blue and the trees budded and blossom bloomed. Almost.

At three feet Heine stopped and helped Helen drag in the fourteen steel sheets which had been dropped off on the pavement by council lorries to each building in the street. Her hands tore through gloves and her shirt was ripped at the shoulder as they dragged them one by one through the narrow passage-way into the garden.

Sandbags had been left also and while Heine fixed the sheets in the late afternoon Helen and Chris doused the bags with creosote to stop them rotting and the smell sank into their skin and their hair and their lungs and although they slept with their windows wide that night they could still taste it in their mouths the next morning.

Helmut arrived that morning and so Heine was too busy to ease the sandbags against the shelter and Helen was taking photographs in the studio, but the next week, with Helmut
helping, they pushed and carried and kicked the sandbags into place and Helen’s back felt as though it would break. Chris threw earth on the roof of the shelter with the spade he had taken to Eastbourne and Helen did too, but with a large shovel. It would be added protection against blast and shrapnel. She called to their neighbours, the Simkins, who then did the same. She lifted Chris who would not be seven until December – but already weighed enough to be twenty, she whispered into his neck.

‘Higher, Mummy, I can’t reach,’ he called.

She growled and he laughed but she lifted him higher still and then he threw the seeds – forget-me-nots, love-in-the-mist, marigolds – across the shelter roof, and for a moment Helen wondered whether they would be at war when the flowers bloomed.

They painted the inside walls white while Chris broke cork tiles into pieces with his fingers, leaning over, watching the pile of bits grow on the upturned dustbin lid. An ant ran over his shoe and then on into a crack. Some bark was caught under his fingernail and he dug it out, rolling it between his fingers. It was bouncy and warm.

‘Smaller, Chris,’ Heine called and so he worked for another hour and then he climbed down into the shelter and threw the cork at the wet paint, again and again until the cork stuck to the sides. And he nodded as his father said that the pieces would absorb the moisture and prevent condensation.

‘It’s going to be a good play-house, Dad,’ he said.

They had to hang a blanket not a door, the inspector said when he called. ‘Don’t want to be shredded by splinters now, do we?’ Helen looked from him to the rockery. Would the alpines take root and bloom, she wondered, not wanting to hear the words.

In the middle of March Hitler took over Prague and spring-cleaned the country, Heine said between thin lips. Czechoslovakian Jews now began to come and the flat was full again. Claus had written from America that he still had not established an agency for the partnership but was working for another firm to make some contacts. It would take at least two years, he said, and Helen had been glad because England was her country. Heine had been worried.

Helen smiled and kissed him. ‘There is no war yet, there
might be no war. Look, the Russians still have signed no pact with anyone. Hitler needs that signature to neutralise Russia before he can bite into Poland. And in the street there has been no unkindness towards us, no anti-German feeling.’

‘Do they know we are German?’ Heine asked and Helen did not answer because she could only have said no.

In April conscription plans were endorsed after Britain and France pledged to defend Poland and that weekend Heine and Helen took Chris to the Avenue and dug her mother’s shelter. They bolted, doused, heaved, while Helen’s mother told her neighbour that Heine was too old to be called up and had an injured leg and later told Helen that perhaps they would think he was Dutch.

On Sunday evening before they returned to London, Heine and Helen took Chris to the stream and floated sticks, swearing that the winner was the one which Chris had thrown even though it was not. Helen watched as Heine lifted his son over the parapet, saw the strong hands, the fine blond hairs. Saw the green lichen which stained Chris’s coat. Saw her father, quite clearly now, his face, his shoulders, his hands, and remembered the horror of that war and its legacy for the women who waited and the men who never returned. She prayed that another war would not come.

May was hot and the British Government declared again that it would side with Poland in the event of a German attack to the East but negotiations were still being conducted between Russia and Britain with a view to a pact and so hopes for peace remained. Helen watered her rockery and sewed Chris’s initials on his shoe-bag and swung him in the park, talking to other mothers whose faces were strained as they listened to their children talk of the evacuation practice or the gas mask drill. She stood and watched as Chris played cowboys and Indians with the other boys, seeing him load his pistol with a roll of red caps, hearing the snap as he fought his battle, smelling the blackened roll when he gave it to her to carry home.

She was asked to photograph the trenches being dug in the parks, the builders reinforcing the basements, the brick surface shelters which were going up in many London streets. She did but she would not think of them afterwards.

In July a local boy won a big boxing match and Mr Simkins, their neighbour, drank until he passed out in the street. Heine carried him up to his flat above his tobacconist’s shop which also ran beneath theirs. It was then that Mrs Simkins asked if they would be evacuating Chris. She clicked her tongue and said that she supposed the Government was right to want to remove anyone who would get in the way but it seemed very hard and would the bombs really come? Heine said he did not know.

That night he and Helen talked as they did every night about Chris, their love for him, their need to keep him with them, but they spoke also of his right to safety, to a billet in the country. But then they thought of him with a stranger, of his face as he woke, soft and full, his arms which hugged them. They thought of his fear of the dark. Would foster-parents understand? They drank him in as he came home each day, listening to his voice, his ideas, hearing his laughter, watching him grow, holding him when he fell, kissing him when he was asleep, and knew they could not bear to be parted, not even for a week, let alone for the years of his childhood, for who knew how long a war would last?

And then in the darkness of night they talked again of the bombs that had fallen in Spain, of the buildings which had crumbled and killed, of the shrapnel which had sliced, the blast which had destroyed, and knew that they could not bear any of this to touch their son.

They talked then of them all moving to the country but Heine said, ‘How can we? We need to stay, to work for the nation as everyone else will do.’

‘But he is our child,’ she whispered, watching high clouds nudging in front of the moon.

‘How can we run away?’ he replied as he held her, his breath moving her hair. ‘I’ve done too much of that. And we must earn a living, darling. As photographers we need to live in London, we have our contacts now. I can work as an air raid warden, earn my place in your society.’

On and on they talked, night after night, but neither spoke of the question to which there was no answer. What would happen to a German in this country if war was declared?

After a hot dry summer the children of the neighbourhood were tanned and Helen’s arms were brown from weeding the
rockery. In August negotiations between Russia and Britain collapsed and on 23 August, as Helen and Heine listened to the wireless on a hot still evening, it was announced that Germany and Russia had signed the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Helen cried while Heine held her but she did not feel safe, even with the feel of him so close because it meant war. She knew it meant war but what would that mean to them?

On 31 August Helen packed Chris’s bag. They had bought an enamel cup, a knife, fork and spoon and the list of allowable clothes had been ticked and folded into the case because Christoph’s school was to be evacuated tomorrow and Helen and Heine had decided that he must go. He must be safe, but they were numb with grief.

The next day they took him to school, walking past police cars which crawled the kerbs telling parents through tannoys to take their children to the schoolyard where they must assemble in front of their form teachers. Helen kissed her son at the gate, smoothing his hair with her hand, and somehow, she let him go. They joined the other parents outside the playground and watched through railings which held none of the summer heat. They saw the register being taken and the children being formed into columns two abreast. They saw him labelled by a teacher, saw him not look at them as they pressed with other parents against the school railings. Helen gripped the flaking metal, feeling the cold hardness, thinking of that, not of her heart which seemed to fill her chest and which was destroying her.

Helen did not hold Heine’s hand, could not move hers from the railings until they marched from the playground and then she thrust them into her pockets where they were bunched into fists, trying to keep the pain clasped inside them.

The children marched with their gas masks banging against their sides, their cases in their hands, following the Headmaster who held a banner with the letter ‘S’ and the number ‘60’ inked on. Along the streets they marched, with Heine and Helen and the other weeping or silent parents.

They crossed the road in waves as they had learned to do in the summer practices, the parents waiting as their children queued up along the pavement in lines two hundred yards long before turning to face the road and crossing quickly at a
teacher’s command. The traffic was held up by police for three seconds only.

So efficient, Helen thought. They are taking my child from me so efficiently. Old men and women stood outside their doorways watching the children followed by their despairing parents, and their eyes were full of the knowledge of what war really meant.

At the station the children marched past the barriers to the waiting area, where there were other schools milling or sitting on cases talking. The Stepney children stopped close to the entrance and Helen watched as Chris stood quite still, looking across at the group beneath the clock. His face had been still and quiet all morning and now she saw it close, saw his shoulders drop, his head turn but not before she heard, ‘It’s that bloody German.’ It was a high voice and she turned and looked and there were the Alton Mews children from Highlands School, standing behind their banner, carrying the same gas masks as Chris, the same cases. But they were not the same; they were English and at the flash of fear on her son’s face, she moved.

She felt Heine hold her arm but she heard the call being taken up as it had been in 1938 when faces grew ugly and words even uglier.