Orphans of War

by Leah Fleming

  ‘Keep yer head down when you get up there,’ yelled the sergeant, pointing out a hill ahead. At least he was driving the canteen, and mounted up the ramp in a swift manoeuvre at the first attempt, and kept the show on the road, driving past lines of soldiers, military police and sullen natives. There were guns and artillery ahead. The convoy snaked round the high hedges, unsure of what lay waiting to ambush them.

  When his truck died, everyone started hurling abuse at him as if he’d sabotaged it on purpose. ‘Get that bleedin’ thing off the road!’ He bumped it over tussocky grass, terrified that there were mines in the grass sewn as thick as thistles. This was the moment that Greg’s war began in earnest.

  Someone brought out the petrol stove and tea was brewed–business as usual. It was a fractured petrol pipe that had done the damage but no one had a spare. The truck was going nowhere and neither were they, canteen or not, so all they could do was dig a slit trench and get stuck in for the night.

  Enemy aircraft were flying low and Greg decided to try out his firing skill, aiming his gun high, pretending he was out with Mr Batty doing a bit of poaching. When someone was out to get you there was an edge to the firing off like no other, he thought.

  The rest of the night passed without incident and the truck was patched up when he went on a recce to filch a pipe from another abandoned truck. Only it wasn’t as empty as he’d thought when he fell over the leg and the boot lying on the ground. He felt sick at the sight of what remained of the poor driver.

  Once back on the road they trundled through the Bocage of Normandy, a slow tortuous route, when a sudden burst of sniper fire came from nowhere. Greg grabbed the nearest soldier and threw him into the ditch for safety so that they landed in a heap. The bullets rattled where they’d just been having a quiet fag, ripping through the truck side. Another bloody repair job to do!

  The stink in the ditch was awful. They’d landed in a trench that had been used as a latrine and their uniforms were covered in shit!

  ‘I owe you one,’ said the broad-shouldered bloke with a stripe on his arm in a broad Yorkshire voice. ‘But couldn’t you have found a better hole, Byrne?’

  That’s how he and Corporal Charlie Afton became ‘shit’ brothers. It was good to have a guy on your side, who led from the front, fearless under fire and with a tyke’s common sense not to court danger.

  In the long trek over Europe somehow they kept in touch. From Jerusalem Corner, through Caen, Greg was filched for repair jobs and made a corporal. From Belgium into Holland, all those terrible campaigns that Greg would never forget–Gennep, Nijmegen, Grave, clearing the country between Maas and the Rhine–he and Charlie looked out for each other in billets and lofts, hay barns, fishing on lakes and birdwatching by rivers. Charlie was a good mate and no one survived long without a good mate.

  Greg’s canteen days were long gone when they realised what a whiz he was with broken axels, pumps and gearboxes. He had a knack of sniffing out spare parts in the most unlikely places. When he became a sergeant he began training up lads of his own to grovel under lorries and trucks, foraging for spares.

  The only thing that separated the band of brothers was girls. They’d been initiated into the joys of Maisons de tolérance in Normandy. Standing in line down some backstreet, waiting for a turn to relieve their manhoods, was a farce.

  Greg had faltered behind the door for a second on that first visit. This was not how he’d imagined it would be. It was all so rushed and perfunctory. ‘Next,’ shouted someone, shoving him forward. Whoever called this joyless plunge into a lifeless body a relief?

  A sour-smelling woman stood before him looking bored. She was old enough to be his mother, with a sullen painted face, her empty eyes searing into him with contempt, and he felt a flush of shame and anxiety. After two more evenings of this he didn’t bother again but sought out younger girls, grateful for a meal and a share of home rations. With his good looks and charm he found himself popular, and he and Charlie made a good double act, but Greg was cautious with his favours.

  It was a matter of pride to get that first shot at sex over with just in case your number was up. Charlie, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough of it–until he found couldn’t pee, and ended up having treatment that made him more wary. Greg tried not to be smug.

  ‘You’re such a prude, Byrnie,’ Charlie laughed. ‘What a waste. If only I had your looks. I don’t understand you. Even the local girls fall at your feet.’

  Sometimes, though, he just couldn’t look those starving girls in the eye. Hadn’t they got brothers and mothers who were shamed by their desperate acts? He thought of Mrs Plum and Maddy and Gloria. How would he feel if they had had to do this to survive? He felt ashamed of taking advantage of them, but war was war and who knew when his end might come? He gave them what he could spare from his rations.

  Later, when they were billeted near Hanover with a family, there was Marthe, a pretty blonde daughter of the house who threw herself at both of them in exchange for cigarettes, sweets, anything to sell on.

  Charlie surrendered to Marthe’s slender, starved body and long blonde plaits, but Greg was hesitant when she pressed her friends to accompany him. He made excuses to avoid her after that. He couldn’t help his distaste. He kept thinking of Maddy and Gloria. If things had been different…He found himself distant, ignoring their charms and preferring to go fishing with a borrowed rod in the Steinhuder Meer. He once caught a two-pound perch, much to the family’s delight.

  Now and again there would be a bunch of letters waiting for him, a parcel from Mrs Plum with news of the girls. He’d been a chit of boy when he enlisted and now he felt like an old man. That part of his life he sealed away in a cigarette tin, close to his breast pocket, a world where there were proper roads and trees still standing, no mud, and girls with pigtails smiling from photo booths in school uniform, letters written in round childish handwriting. Good clean girls to come home to, virgins, not prostitutes.

  He’d seen the worst and best in human kind. Sometime he woke with the faces of dead comrades before him, their eyes staring blank and despairing. He’d see stick-thin children with sunken eyes, and peasants lying bloated in ditches, covered in flies. War was a terrible thing and it haunted his dreams.

  When the time came to be demobbed into civvy street where would he go? Perhaps he might stay in the army and retrain, but it was Charlie who was full of plans.

  ‘When they let out us out of this madhouse you’re coming home with me. You’re too good a mechanic to let loose on our competitors.’ Charlie’s family owned a string of garages around Yorkshire. ‘Besides, my mother will love you. I’ve told her you saved my life and don’t drink much or smoke, and don’t go with German girls; a paragon of virtue. She’ll have you preaching in the chapel pulpit in no time! Don’t forget…I owe you.’

  The thought of going home scared him but perhaps Charlie would show him how to enjoy life again. The war seemed to bounce off him like water off slate. They’d paid their dues and now Greg wanted to be successful and make a life for himself as he’d always promised. He’d been spared for a purpose, given a second crack at life, and he wanted to be more than a garage mechanic.

  Being an orphan and evacuee had taught him that you were nobody without money, connections and a half-decent family. He was not going to be put down ever again. He was going to live by his own rules. Move over world, he smiled, Gregory Byrne is going to make his mark, make a fortune and find his princess!

  12

  ‘Who’s that dreamboat in the flannels? You could cut your bread on those creases,’ whispered Gloria to Maddy. It was a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1947, a scorcher of a day after the coldest harshest winter on record, and the Sowerthwaite Youth Club was playing rounders on the Fellings recreation ground.

  ‘Crikey! It’s him, the Jerry, the vicar’s guest, the one there’s been so much fuss about,’ she added, pleased to be back on home ground with her old school friends from St Peter’s. Mrs Plum, true to her w
ord, had found her a job as a mother’s help and it was her afternoon off.

  ‘What fuss?’ Maddy was the last to hear the gossip as usual.

  ‘My dad says it’s not right having one of them staying here,’ said Beryl from the post office.

  ‘But the war’s over ages ago…we can fraternise now.’ Maddy turned round to answer.

  ‘Not for my dad it ain’t. You saw what them Japs did to our Frank,’ argued Beryl, folding her arms in protest.

  ‘But the boy looks too young for a soldier.’ Maddy eyed the young man with caution, taking in his brown hair, his height. He looked quite ordinary. She recalled how Aunt Plum had fought the vicar’s corner when he offered to guest a German refugee, an exchange as an experiment with a view to there being further contact later on. She’d been too busy studying to take much notice but there were some facts at her fingertips.

  ‘His name is Dieter Schulte. He’s a theology student so he isn’t a soldier. His parents died in the bombing of Dresden. He—’

  ‘Trust her ladyship to know so much about him,’ snapped Beryl, unimpressed.

  ‘I don’t. It’s just there’s been a lot of discussion about his visit in the local paper,’ Maddy replied.

  ‘I don’t think he’s much to look at, is he, Gloria?’ Beryl ignored her.

  Gloria shrugged. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ Maddy blushed, not wanting to make matters worse for the poor lad, who could sense they were all staring at him. ‘But the war’s over so we’ve got to make friends sometime or another.’

  ‘Pity about the glasses with no rims on them; perhaps he couldn’t afford any,’ said Gloria. ‘I’ve not seen any like that before. He’s tall but his jacket’s too small in the arms. I bet they put him in second-hand clothes. The Master Race doesn’t look so masterful now.’

  ‘There was a right ruckus in the church council about him coming,’ said Beryl. ‘My dad says charity begins at home and there’s many a town kiddy who needs a good holiday in the country, never mind giving Jerries any favours.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s like that. He’s being sponsored by the Church in a gesture of reconciliation,’ Maddy added, but that only made matters worse.

  ‘Where do you think up such big words, Maddy?’ Gloria laughed and then gasped. ‘Hell’s bells, she’s got run out. Your turn, Beryl.’ The line-up shuffled forward.

  Since Gloria’s return there was no living with her. She’d joined the new youth club and was eyeing up all the local boys as potential boyfriends. She even wrote to Gregory and his friends and asked for photos. Gloria was brazen.

  Maddy had been restless in her last term at school. There was a whole new world outside the school gate and she’d wanted to get away from desks and school uniforms.

  Grandma had sniffed and snorted, ‘What a waste a university education would be on a girl of your class. Once you’re out, you’ll be getting married.’

  ‘I don’t want a season!’

  ‘And why not?’

  ‘I want to be useful, find a job, earn my keep and see the world.’

  ‘You’re very sure of yourself all of a sudden. Is this all your doing, Plum?’ Grandma turned to see Plum shrugging her shoulders.

  ‘Nothing to do with me. I’d have liked to see her at Oxford, but Maddy’s mind’s made up.’

  ‘Since when did girls have any say in their futures? I don’t know what this world is coming to. Are there no standards left?’

  ‘There’s more to life than parties and frocks, Granny. I promise I’ll work hard and make you proud, and I won’t go far away. I just don’t want to stay on after my exams…Please…’

  Gran had huffed and puffed but given in to her pleas. From then there would be no more excruciating sports days and end-of-term concerts, just long weeks of summer hols.

  Uncle Gerry was due home for good and everything was returning to normal at long last; soldiers returning in their striped demob suits and silly hats. The field batteries were dismantled, air-raid shelters now turned into pig arks and chicken coops.

  With her eye straighter than ever before, Maddy felt normal, if not still too tall, towering in her pleated shorts and pumps as they watched their team getting thrashed by the lot from Beamerly St George.

  Yet out of the corner of her eye she watched the stranger trying to make sense of play, trying to meld into the background, aware all eyes were on him. How would she feel if it was the other way round? Embarrassed, awkward in the glare of curiosity–she knew what it was like to be different and called names.

  ‘Why don’t we ask him to play on our side?’ she whispered to Gloria. ‘It’s mixed match.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. Who wants a Jerry on their team?’ came the reply.

  ‘He can have my place. I’m hopeless,’ Maddy offered, knowing she’d be out first ball. Hand and eye coordination was never her strong point.

  ‘He’s wearing glasses, for goodness’ sake. What use will he be?’

  ‘I wear glasses only for distance now.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Gloria sniffed. Only a friend spoke the truth like that and no offence was taken. Gloria had taken to speaking as she found since her return. There was a hard edge to her scorn sometimes. ‘I bet he’s useless.’

  ‘Bet he’s not. Germans are supposed to be good at games,’ Maddy snapped back. ‘What’ve we got to lose, anyway?

  ‘Bet ya?’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘That lipstick you had on last night.’ Aunt Plum had given Maddy ‘Cherry Glow’ to wear, but she thought she just looked silly.

  ‘Done!’ They slapped hands like farmers over a market deal.

  Gloria turned back to the match. ‘You’ll have to ask him. I’m not going near him.’

  Maddy edged out of the line, sidled over to the boundary where Dieter was standing with the vicar’s wife, Mrs Murray.

  ‘Ah, Madeleine, come and meet Dieter, our student.’

  ‘Hello,’ she replied, looking him straight in the face. ‘We wondered if you’d like to play. You can have my bat,’ she smiled, staring into the bluest eyes she’d ever seen.

  His cheeks were pink and his neck red as he bowed, and for a second she thought he was going to click heels like the Nazis did in the films.

  ‘Danke… thank you, I am delighted,’ he smiled. He was really good-looking behind those stern glasses. Taking off his tweed jacket, he rolled up his sleeves. His arms were tanned to a nut brown and the fair hairs stood up against the dark skin. He looked very muscled for a theology student. He walked with her to the back of the queue while she explained what he must do to stay in the game when his turn came round.

  He towered over the other members of the team but not over her. Everyone turned to look him over with interest.

  ‘That was a kind gesture, dear,’ said Vera Murray when she returned. ‘Poor Dieter must be getting a little tired of our ancient company. He’s been working on farms. His English is good. It puts our feeble German to shame and he is so polite.’

  Maddy prayed he’d not be shown up when the Beamerley team sussed out his background. They would show him no mercy. She felt mean now betting Plum’s present away.

  Gloria did her usual harum-scarum dash and got run out. Beryl was caught. Derek Brigg from the garage got a rounder but they were three behind and in for a thrashing. Then it was Dieter’s turn. He carefully took off his spectacles and put them in his pocket, stood four square and, after the first miss, he whacked everything they threw at him.

  Gloria whistled in amazement.

  ‘Run, you daft bugger!’ the lads screamed from the sidelines. He tore round at breakneck speed and scored another rounder. Then he missed and was nearly out. The next ball he whacked into the trees.

  ‘Bloody hell! Where did he learn to hit like that?’ Another rounder, and another. The last one he pitched too high and was caught out–but they had drawn the match.

  ‘Not bad for a Kraut!’ was the verdict, and Maddy nudged Gloria wit
h relief. Her new lipstick was safe.

  ‘Here, you,’ yelled Gloria. ‘How come you can play rounders so well?’

  ‘I play baseball with Americans. It’s the same, ja?’ Gloria was looking up at him, flashing her green eyes. He was the enemy no more.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Madeleine. It is good to stretch legs. I enjoy very much,’ he turned to give her a warm smile and her heart took a funny leap, a fluttery jump when she looked up. A boy who towered over her was a novelty, especially a boy with periwinkle-blue eyes and streaked brown hair. He handed her the bat and bowed again; this boy had nice manners too. There weren’t many of them in Sowerthwaite.

  When they went into the church hall for tea and biscuits, she sensed his eyes burning into her back. He was watching her and she felt hot iron tongues snaking up her cardigan. For the first time in her young life she knew she was being stared at not for being an oddity but with admiration, interest and gratitude.

  Suddenly the room went fuzzy round the edges and she wished she could walk right up to him and find out more about his life. An inner voice told her not to be so public, not in front of Gloria and the girls. They wouldn’t understand. They would tease her and take it the wrong way, make fun of them both and she couldn’t bear that to happen.

  Somehow she had rescued him, made him a hero and saved the match. That was enough for now, but her gesture had not gone unnoticed and Vera Murray was quick to seize the moment, bringing the boy round to the Brooklyn to meet the Belfields.

  That was when Maddy found out he was going to be a student at Thubingen University on a special scholarship. His father was a Lutheran minister, a friend of the martyred pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had been hanged in Flossenbürg Concentration Camp for preaching against Hitler’s regime.