The Reunion

by Geoff Pridmore

  What would Oma make of her English granddaughter? Hanne had been named after her German grandmother. For that matter what would Oma make of her English daughter-in-law? The situation reminded Rene of an article she’d read in a women’s magazine about the arranged marriages of Europe’s royalty in days gone by; how princesses would be shipped off to a foreign land where they couldn’t speak the language, trapped in a loveless marriage, never to see their dear homeland again.

  Rene’s marriage was by no means loveless: she adored Hugo; and at least married life was on British soil, but six weeks in Bavaria was going to be quite a trial with only Hugo and Hanne for conversation.

  In his many recollections of his homeland and family, Hugo had never claimed a fond relationship with his widowed mother. She had come across as something of a tartar who took perverse pleasure in taking back whatever she had given to her children. These stories always left Rene with the impression that her mother-in-law would be a difficult woman to bond with.

  And what if “the war” came into conversation? Rene wasn’t the type to hold her tongue if someone wanted to have a go. It might not come from Oma; it might come from somebody else. How would she deal with it? It shouldn’t arise. There were times when she got quite defensive with Hugo if he mentioned Dresden. So she’d come back with London, Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester and all those non-strategic cities that were bombed and “rocketed” (her word).

  ‘Rene? Get the map ready. We are closing to Lown-ceston, nah?’

  ‘Nearing Launceston, Hugo. Nearing Launceston.’

  Devon and onward…

  Hugo drove as he worked – hard. There were plenty of places to see along the way, but Rene and Hanne could only marvel as such places flashed by.

  Rene had experience of two places – her native East End of London and the far west of Cornwall where she’d worked as a Land Army girl. Of the 300 miles in between she knew little other than what she’d read or seen on the television. She knew Devon bordered Cornwall, but all the other counties were something of a mystery: Somerset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Surrey. She would make a mental note on this journey, just as Hanne was making her own personal note of the mileage. She would try and make a note of Germany, too. What came where? Was Bavaria in the south and, if so, what surrounded it?

  Hanne kept up a barrage of questions about whatever she saw and caught her fancy, but Rene had no answers that could be drawn from experience.

  Hugo, too, had not travelled since arriving at St-Erme station on a train in 1944 – a confused POW detained by Churchill until such time as it was considered he would no longer be a threat to national security. He had often recalled it in this way to Hanne, as if Churchill himself no less had ordered the particularly dangerous Hugo Mauer be kept under guard until such time as “Mum” Rene insisted he be released into her care. As a Londoner, her credentials in this respect satisfied Churchill and the War Office. Had mum been a simple Cornish maid then dad would probably still be incarcerated just like the equally dangerous Rudolf Hess – whose story fascinated him.

  The little van, working hard climbing hill after hill, was rarely in one gear for too long. Hanne sympathised with it because she knew what it was like on a bike with only three gears. She hated hills, unless they were downhills.

  Holland would be different, with its flat roads. Hugo would be able to rest the gearbox in Holland; rest his cramped left foot and left leg. Hopefully, they could speed through Holland and make good time, especially if they didn’t stop.

  Hanne felt that, if Saturday morning cinema was anything to go by, there would be so much to see in Holland. There would be windmills and charming folk in national dress wearing clogs. Dad would have to drive carefully as so many of the Dutch people rode bicycles (like her) and they wouldn’t be expecting a Morris Minor van from Cornwall with a German at the wheel to come racing along and blow them off the road and into a dyke.

  She had seen a film once where the narrator had said that the fishermen of Yorkshire could understand the Dutch fishermen without translating, and vice versa. Many words and phrases were the same or very similar, so she should be able to talk to some of the people and not need a translator. If she said, ‘I want a cup of coffee’, she would be understood perfectly because the phrase was very similar in Dutch. It would be enough to get by; she wouldn’t need mum or dad to translate for her.

  Rene thought Hugo would be bound to stop in Holland to look at the flowers and compare notes with the growers. Surely he wouldn’t miss such an opportunity to compare notes?

  A day later: The end of

  the beginning – at last

  Dover was not what Hanne had expected – not at all. She’d expected a quayside like the one at Penzance, where they would drive down the quayside and be lifted onto the ferry by means of a crane and ropes. Hopefully, they would remain in the van while it was being lifted. Dover didn’t disappoint: it was just very different to what she had thought it would be; and, horror upon horror, the sea was brown! She’d never seen the sea so brown as this and suspected that rusty sewer pipes running into the sea were the cause.

  The ferry was much, much bigger than she’d expected. There was room on board for a thousand Morris Minor vans parked bumper to bumper.

  The speed limit for boarding the ferry – in the approach – was ten miles an hour. This caused the speedometer needle to jump like mad; it couldn’t cope with such a snail’s pace, especially having worked so hard from Cornwall. It wouldn’t matter if it broke completely in Holland because the continentals have a different system of measuring speed, so the van’s speedometer would be useless anyway. Hanne could take her eye off it then, though hopefully it wouldn’t affect the milometer, which she needed for checking the total mileage to Oma’s.

  Chapter 2

  Hugo’s Story

  Prisoner Release form 8975

  POW Hugo Heinrich Mauer

  Release date: 28th September 1947

  Rank: Private

  Delete as appropriate:

  Wehrmacht / Kriegsmarine / Luftwaffe / Other

  Nazi Party member: YES/NO

  POW No. 375734 Mauer

  General overall discipline, works hard, does as ordered. Not known to have been a party member. No reason to hold further. Suggest repat or agri job here. Some English but not fluent.

  Signed: Major P.H. Redmond, Commandant

  Hugo had tied a steadfast knot that wasn’t likely to give at any point on the journey ahead, but every time they stopped he’d pay it some attention. All the luggage was waterproofed in clear plastic sheeting covered by a tarpaulin, so a downpour shouldn’t dampen proceedings.

  What would his platoon commander have said? “Check, check and check again. Only move out when you’re happy with your check.”

  ‘You have the list I made?’

  Wally was not a happy man this morning, which was most unlike him. Hugo was not insensitive to people’s moods; he just made a point of never showing concern. A mood was destructive for all concerned as it was selfish and should not be indulged with some pathetic enquiry.

  Maybe Wally was “under the weather”, as the British say, but it was totally out of character. He’d been fine last night, joking and talking too much as he always did. Meg, his wife, was fine and would be into work soon after making sure their boys were in school, so nothing wrong there. Perhaps it was something he ate? Whatever, no time to muck about; best to go now or never.

  The list is in order – straightforward.

  ‘Anything you do not understand? Nah? Good! Better go or the ferry will leave without us.’

  It bothered him all day the fact that Wally seemed so down – didn’t even say goodbye. There must have been a reason. Maybe he was jealous that he wasn’t coming along, too. How could they have ta
ken everybody? But that’s all Hugo could think of by way of explanation. Wally had been paid in advance to look after the operation. He wasn’t alone, there were plenty of staff on hand and, although things were never quiet, this was the best time for what he had in mind.

  Wally had always had time for Hugo. He’d never been discriminatory in any respect. He could have shouted: ‘Hey, you Jerry! Move your arse!’ as others had done. Wally was never like that. He’d made a point of catching the eye of the sullen, beaten POW with a smile and a thumbs up: ‘You’ll be all right, mate. You’re with us now. We’ll look after you.’ And he had – good as his word.

  Thinking about it, yes! He should have come with us. How thoughtless not to invite him! He’s always had an interest in the language, learning whatever words and phrases he could pick up. He was always asking about Bavaria.

  ‘We should have brought Wally!’ said Hugo, quite out of the blue, as they crossed the Devon county boundary.

  ‘Too late now. I don’t think we’d have had room.’

  ‘Not in the van! He could take his car – the Hillman. We should have offered. He loves Germany… He loves Germany, you know,’ he repeated, fearing that Rene couldn’t hear him properly. ‘Remember, he helped me learn English and I would teach him German words, nah?’

  ‘He taught you how to play chess.’

  ‘No, I knew to play chess. He took me to the St Ives Chess Club. We would make chess pieces on the lathe. Without chess I would not be here. We would not be on this journey.’

  ‘He’ll get over it,’ Rene reassured him. ‘You needed him to run the farm while we’re away. Maybe next time when the children are older he and Meg could come with us.’

  ‘The children must come with us – always. This is for them.’ His forefinger tapping the rim of the steering wheel, Hugo was adamant, and that surprised Rene.

  The van was too noisy for conversation, though it did help Hanne in learning to project her voice over the noise. She wasn’t about to wait for quieter opportunities and chatted away regardless about all manner of sights that she was seeing from the back.

  ‘Ford Zodiac.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Ford Zodiac. I think he wants to get by. We’re too slow. He looks very impatient.’

  ‘He would do with you staring at him.’

  Rene responded dutifully to the vast majority of these observations, but not Hugo. This lack of response, on the surface, might have seemed un-fatherly, but the truth was that Hugo was really quite deaf in his left ear, with diminished hearing in his right. He kept this to himself and mostly no one noticed, though some folk did think he was either ignorant or just typically German, or both.

  “Typically German” is a rather silly phrase though, despite the fact that English or British people used it quite often, as if they, somehow, could not be categorised as being “typical”.

  Looking in the rear-view mirror, Hugo glimpsed Hanne studying him. Embarrassed, she glanced away to the road ahead. This had been a good way of looking at dad up until then because he didn’t use the mirror nearly enough; he tended to use the wing mirrors, and generally he was not a backward looking person.

  Hanne had learnt from various sources that Germans were typically blue-eyed and blond-haired. This contradicted what she could see with her own eyes: Dad was not blue-eyed. Hugo had black hair combed back and thinning, and his eyes were brown – definitely brown. She pressed him on the subject. At first, he didn’t hear, then Rene nudged him. ‘Dad! Hanne is asking you something.’

  ‘Yes! What?’

  ‘Are you really German, Dad?’

  ‘Of course. Why would I be not?’

  ‘Because you have brown eyes.’

  ‘Yes. I have brown eyes. That is Bavarian, nah.’

  ‘And you have black hair.’

  ‘That is Bavarian.’

  ‘Mum has blue eyes.’

  ‘Too many questions, I think.’

  ‘Hitler said that all Germans had blue eyes and blond hair.’

  ‘No, I think the English said all Germans have blue eyes and blond hair.’

  ‘And you’ve got a big nose. Hitler didn’t like big noses. That’s why he killed the Jewish people.’

  Rene couldn’t believe her ears. ‘What do you know about that, young lady? What have they been teaching you at school?’

  ‘Nothing. I saw it on television about how he killed Jewish people because they had big noses. I’ve got a big nose, everyone says I have.’

  ‘I don’t think you should be watching programmes like that, do you?’

  ‘It was a schools’ broadcast programme I was watching when I had flu and I was off school last year. It was for schoolchildren – like me.’

  Hugo glanced across at Rene, as if it were her fault for inventing TV, or at least leaving it in a place where Hanne could switch it on unaided. ‘We can’t be there all the time,’ she snapped.

  ‘It’s the price we pay for running our own business.’

  ‘Would they have killed you, Dad? Because of your nose? And me too?’

  Hugo didn’t answer. He was good at keeping his thoughts to himself and diverting thoughts that disturbed him. Since his arrival in Cornwall in 1945, in order to help his English he’d read books and any articles he could find on the war. He’d read how Germany had originally prepared to invade in the southeast and along the south coast in Operation Sea Lion in 1940 – the summer he was apprenticed to a sales clerk. Barely audible, he started to talk to no one in particular: ‘Looking at the countryside today, an invading army would have found it hard with the hedges and large oaks, beeches, elms, ditches, valleys… If the British had dug in, this would have been hard country to take. Panzers need flat, open ground because the infantry follow. If the British had not given up, and they would not have done, each kilometre would have been hard fought, just as Normandy had been hard fought in 1944.’

  ‘Go on, Dad! Tell us some more.’

  ‘Like Arnhem – the big mistake of Montgomery – paratroops would have dropped into fields to open fronts in the west and the north. The infantry would have been beaten. Troops would have landed along England’s south coast from Kent to Land’s End, up the Bristol Channel and Welsh coasts. I learned more about the war since, than Hitler’s government ever told me.’

  End of big nose question.

  Saved!

  Hugo had known nothing about the war at all – only what he’d experienced. His news had come direct from Joseph Goebbels and his propaganda ministry. Goebbels had reassured everyone. The Allies were falling back on all fronts, and they’d soon be suing for peace. ‘Today, everyone has the news – ITN, BBC – all they ever broadcast is news, news and more news. Where does it get anyone?’

  ‘Nowhere, I suppose?’ said Rene.

  In respect of his dark hair and large nose, he kept this thought to himself: There had been others – at school and on the parade ground. ‘I’m a Bavarian and proud of it!’ seemed to come from nowhere.

  ‘I know, dear. Don’t worry.’

  Yes, there were those who questioned his appearance. His facial structure would not have stood up to rigorous measurements from the professors of Aryan ideology. Not so much in respect of his brother or sisters: they were quintessentially Northern European; but Hugo was different. The difference was enough to concern him that there might have come a day when someone would have called to the house in Oberwinkel to demand proof of the bloodline, because something was clearly amiss.

  ‘Did you adopt him, Frau Mauer?’ they might have asked.

  ‘What did you know of his father?’

  ‘Does he have a different father to his siblings?’

  It was ridiculous of course! Hugo was quintessentially German. Look at Rudolf Hess; look at Goebbels; look at Speer; look at Himmler – who looked Japanese, for goodness sake! And look at raven-haired Ado
lf Hitler – no small nose on him either!

  There were plenty of examples, but protesting that from behind the wire of a Nazi internment camp would have carried little weight.

  If the war had gone the other way, and Germany had successfully landed in Britain, Hugo would by now be someone quite senior in the Luftwaffe. Not as a commissioned officer, but an NCO at least. He might very well have been posted to Cornwall where his work might have been in airfield construction. He liked construction; he was no flyer and had not even considered that he might have been pilot material, but on the ground he might have excelled in building runways. It did not occur to him at the time that the British would have fought tooth and nail for every centimetre of their sacred ground. He might have had a handle on the English language, but he had no idea who the British were.

  By nightfall they’d reached Ringwood, which was good progress considering traffic and the little van. ‘The Germans would have built autobahns here,’ Hugo exclaimed, pushing forward his national pride. ‘No silly little roads and bends, but proper straight roads to take you from A to B. Our journey would be quicker today.’

  ‘Would we be at Oma’s by now if we had proper roads?’ asked Hanne.

  ‘Maybe not, but nearly. Also, I would have a better car – a Mercedes Benz. We would break the speed of sound.’

  Hugo dreamt of owning a Mercedes Benz. The little Moggy Minor was a beginning, but the dream would finalise with a Mercedes. He was prepared to be patient.

  As the overly warm little engine cooled, emitting little burbles like a hungry tummy, Hugo and Rene set about putting up a tent on the open parkland that was to be their resting place for the night. ‘I think this is the New Forest.’ Hugo wasn’t absolutely sure, but there were no fences to be seen and the grass and shrub were as neat as any heathland he’d ever seen.