‘Yes. The British must have still been angry about the Dakota escapade. That’s why they sent their secret agents to kill the worm.’
‘What do you mean? Secret agents?’
‘Two people. A man and a woman. Although they did not get away, more’s the pity for them.’
Ewa’s heart drops like lead. Her voice is hardly there. ‘What happened to them?’
‘A plane crash. The workers rushed from the cornfield when they saw the plane falling into the trees. But it was too late. There was no explosion, no fireball, so they found the bodies – a girl strapped into the cockpit, still warm. And a man, although you would hardly know that was what it was, they said. A bloody mess, he was.’
Ewa’s fingers are so tightly clasped that she feels the ridges on her bones. A bloody mess. Gertruda does not notice a tear slip down Ewa’s cheek.
‘The police, or men who said they were police, came soon after, and shooed the farm workers away. No one found out who the dead couple were or what the plane had been doing in their village. But it was a British plane, there was no doubt about that.’
Ewa does not hear any more. She starts to mumble. Perhaps Gertruda thinks it is a prayer and not the words: my poor darling, my poor darling, repeated again and again. Ewa does not notice when Gertruda slopes off. No one in the church takes any notice of the thin woman weeping on to cold stone. Nowadays, everyone goes to church to cry. As soon as Ewa thinks she has no tears left, she stands and tries to make for the door. But her eyes go towards the entrance to the sacristy and then begin to stream all over again.
Later, as she stares from her bed at the stains on the ceiling, Ewa thinks about the girl-pilot and decides not to hold a grudge. Perhaps Stefan, in his own way and for reasons he thought to be good, was using the foreign girl for his own ends, just as he had used Ewa. And neither will Ewa blame the girl-pilot for the crash. She seemed like someone you could rely on in an emergency. She probably did her best.
Over the next days, the weather turns biting cold. Ewa wears every piece of clothing that she owns and still shivers. But she does not mind. The arctic air seems to bring clarity to her thoughts. She knows now that her life will be different to anything she ever imagined, but she will have a life, of that she is determined.
The men in the post office exchange shifty looks when she asks for a stamp on a letter to England. She sees them looking too when she comes in every day to check for a reply. But she has had a word with Jabłoński and the foreign post when it arrives, does not go astray.
It is not just a letter she receives, but a parcel. There is a letter inside it and a piece of stiff paper with numbers and words that have the look of money. Her own letter, addressed to: Royal Air Force, London was written in German which she guessed would be more likely than Polish to be understood. But the reply is in English, as are all of the other things in the parcel – a hardback book, a set of cigarette cards showing seaplanes, and a pilot’s logbook with the initials SB embossed in gold.
She sits on her stale bed and presses the open logbook to her face, breathing as hard as her lungs will permit. And yes, she is sure, it gives off the very faintest smell of unfiltered cigarettes and shaving soap.
One of the orderlies at the isolation hospital used to boast, until the woman doctor gave him a very arched look, that he had once visited America. Ewa takes Stefan’s things and the letter to show him. She gives him half a cabbage and makes him promise not to tell anyone about what he will translate.
The orderly’s eyes light up. It is a postal money order, he says. For seven pounds. Ewa has no idea at all how much that is worth. The letter tells her that this is her widow’s pension, backdated. The letter also says, although the orderly’s English is not as good as he has led everyone to believe, that a travel pass would be available should she ever wish to visit Britain. He tells her that the hardback book is called The Correct Word and How to Use It. The seaplane facts on the cigarette cards Ewa can work out for herself.
And so, not long before Advent, Ewa stands beside a hand-painted platform sign at the railway station. She turns up the collar of her new second-hand coat. The air is sharp but deliciously clear; feathery cirrus clouds comb the turquoise sky. She will take trains and a boat and another train, and keep heading west. When the track runs out, she will get off the train and try not to go anywhere else ever again.
She will make a life for herself. Occasionally she might even persuade herself that she is in love. But the new name, Mrs Eve Bergel, which is written on her letter of safe passage, will be the last one she ever has.
Sometimes in the years to come Eve will wonder what might have happened on that sultry afternoon at the isolation hospital if she had not spat in Stefan’s face. Was everything that followed after that her own fault? And if she had not told him where the suitcase was hidden, he might not have come to be inside the Avro Anson as it fell into woodland with an ashen-faced English girl at the controls.
Thoughts like this are pointless, she knows, but they keep her memory of Stefan alive. She will not waste time in imagining what became of the suitcase filled with relics from a war crime that no one wants to remember. For decades to come, the whole world will agree that this particular atrocity, somewhat awkward amongst the countless uncomplicated others, is best forgotten. She always knew that Stefan was deluded about the power of facts to change anyone’s mind. But she will not blame him for trying.
And as she grows older, Eve will also do her best not to be too hard on the poor girl lying on a makeshift hospital bed, trying not to cough up her guts when her husband appears. How could that girl have possibly known, as Stefan ripped off the surgical mask, that she would never see his dear face again?
Instead, even as she lies, fading, on her kitchen floor, Eve will try to remember the best of her time with Stefan Bergel. She will think of him on that wide grassy airfield pointing up at the cirrus clouds, and perhaps, in her last moments, she will remember the cool brown water of the lake and sunlight slicing through reeds on to their bare limbs. This is what love can be, she will remind herself. This is what life can be.
1963
Aerogram
Kohlgartenstrasse 53
4411 Dortmund, BRD
19. Mai 1963
Sehr geehrte Frau Bergel,
I am sorry, I know I intrude upon your peace and I could not blame you for thinking that the reasons behind this letter are entirely selfish. I should have written it many years ago but I told myself there was no way of finding you, despite the fact that I never looked. A chance occurrence has, however, compelled me now to write.
My twin boys, you see, are nearing fourteen and they show a great aptitude for languages. Whilst looking for a summer school to help them improve their English, I came upon a brochure for The South Coast School of English. And in it, though I had thought never to have that joy again, I saw you.
The sight of your face stirred in me so many thoughts and memories that expressing them to you has become inevitable. Should you throw this letter away unopened, I would not bear the slightest reproach. However, should you read it and then have questions for which only I am left to provide an answer, please, dear lady, write back. I swear I will give you an honest reply to any question. My memory of those years, when I can bear to delve into it, remains clear.
Indeed, some memories have recently started to come unbidden. I find myself doing everyday tasks, like filling a watering can for my dahlias or watching a garage attendant pump fuel into my car, and I find my vision intruded by images from the war. These appear to be real, earthly things. I have seen the charred body of an old man in my children’s sandpit, a dead baby in my filing cabinet and last week a young woman in a yellow Dirndl apparently drowning in my freshly drawn bath. Good, you may say. And I myself, in a way, feel glad that I have not escaped entirely unscathed from my part in Germany’s war.
Before I write of your h
usband let me first offer my sincere condolences for your loss. I know that he died many years ago and I see from your name that you have not remarried. I regret, sincerely, that my sympathies are so belated. Despite all that happened I still count your husband, above all, as my friend.
Did he ever give you an account of our time together as prisoners in Russia? He may not have burdened you with the story of how we escaped from the hell that this imprisonment became in the end and I will not inflict that story upon you now. Should you wish to know, you have only to ask. Suffice it to say that the massacre we avoided was more terrible than anyone now cares to believe. I wonder whether the full truth of this Polish tragedy will ever be known. Certainly, untold thousands of our best countrymen were slaughtered and no one, save their nearest loved ones, wants to remember them. These heroes have been betrayed by the whole world and this betrayal seems only compounded with the passing years. The real culprits behind this slaughter are no nearer justice and it is worse than pointless for someone like me to broadcast the truth. So I have kept quiet.
Posterity allows me to see the futility of your husband’s quest for justice in respect of our murdered comrades, but in 1943 the situation appeared very differently to us both. When he first came to me, on a bright autumn morning as I was leaving the swimming pool, I had an uncanny intuition about what he was going to request.
This was the first time we had met since our ghastly release from Soviet captivity over three years before. I was shocked but also delighted to see him looking handsome and well dressed on your city’s fine streets. In 1940, he had slipped away suddenly from the train that was carrying us out of the USSR and I often wondered what became of him.
Unlike me, Stefan’s revulsion for what the Soviets had done to our compatriots did not drive him into the service of Germany. I may be deluded, but even now I do not blame myself for the choice I made in 1940. No one knew then the depths to which the German nation would sink, not even those who were about to set that horror in motion. It was only later in the war that I saw what a mistake I had made, but by then it was too late. In October 1943, standing there in the shadow of the new swimming pool, I was trying not to admit to myself that when Stefan told me about his escape from our Russian train and his daring journey through Rumania and France to England and the RAF, I was envious.
So here he was, perilously far behind enemy lines and throwing his trust wholly into the hands of a German officer. Stefan insisted that he was seeking a purely personal alliance with me to safeguard the truth. He knew about the documents that had been exhumed from the Katyn graves and the work of the Posen Forensic Institute to preserve and catalogue them. The Reich authorities always hoped that the proof of this war crime would drive a wedge between the Western Allies and the USSR.
Stefan knew too that I had been placed in charge of the project to preserve the relics. His plan was to transport some of this exhumed evidence into Allied hands without the prior knowledge of the British. He stressed that neither the Reich authorities nor even the AK, each of whom had their own agendas with regard to the massacre, should know anything of his plan. He and I alone would preserve a cache of evidence which, if the war went badly for Germany, would be the only remaining proof that the Soviets had, in 1940, massacred the whole military elite of the Republic of Poland.
I saw at once the sense in what your husband was proposing. By that time, the Red Army was pushing us back from the east and I sometimes seemed alone amongst my colleagues in realising that their direction of travel would be only one way. When they reached Posen, as I knew that they would, the Katyn grave goods would become one of their most valuable spoils of war, spoils which would instantly be thrown upon a bonfire.
So it made sense to me that some of the mass of relics that I had been in charge of preserving should be sent for safe-keeping in England. How the envelopes were to be transported to there, I never asked. And believe me, Frau Bergel, your husband never said. It was well known that the Polish underground had a network of couriers who ran clandestine supply lines through Slovakia and Hungary as well as the Baltic. So I assumed this to be the mode of transit to England. It was not until the morning of the fateful day that I learnt about the planned arrival of an Allied transport plane to our area. By then, the suitcase of evidence was already in your husband’s possession and I was fully implicated in his plot.
And what of you in all this, dear Frau Bergel? I knew all along who you were. I remembered your name and your beautiful face from the letters and photographs that Stefan had showed me on his ragged bunk in our Russian prison citadel. So, three years later, when I arrived by happy accident in Posen and then came to the Guest House Hartman, I was already smitten.
Let me assure you, dear lady, that whilst we lived in the same house, I had no idea that you were involved with the AK. Once I knew that Stefan had returned, I suspected, of course, that you must be involved with him in some way. But I did not understand the extent of your participation in the insurgency until I saw you with him and the others through the darkness at the partisans’ landing ground. Later, in that horrible office block in the aftermath of the raid, my only concern was to spare you the police’s more extreme forms of persuasion. This is why, in an attempt to produce a confession, I told you, to my shame, that your husband was a traitor.
In the years since then I have thought of you many times, wondering if you had survived the indignities of the women’s camp and after the war, avoided the retributions that were meted out in our Polish homeland. Then, to my joy, I discovered The South Coast School of English. When I saw your face in the brochure, I have no shame in admitting that the sight of you made me break down and weep. Your elegance, your wisdom and your resilience shone from the page. You are, dearest Eva, even more lovely now than when I knew you in our youth.
I told you once, do you remember, that you would always be able to rely on me as a person? In this, as in many things in my life, I failed, but I do not seek your forgiveness. Even asking for it seems like an impertinence. All I hope is that you can remember what happened and that you can try to understand.
Mit besten Grüssen
Heinrich Beck
Acknowledgements
When We Fall is my second novel to be published but it is the one I started first. I had the idea for it in 2008 after reading an obituary for the wartime pilot Diana Barnato Walker. At that point, I had not written any fiction since I was a child but I had a sudden feeling that if I was ever going to write a novel, the story of the women pilots of world war two would be a good place to start. I thought it might take me about six weeks to write a presentable version of a novel, a few months at the most. Twelve years later, here it finally is.
So, after such a long time in the making, there are many people to thank for the fact that this story has finally become a published book and I, in the process, have become a writer.
The journey started with the women of Air Transport Auxiliary, none of whom are still alive, but their incredible feats live on in the memoirs that many of them wrote. I think I have read almost all of these vivid, funny and often heart-breaking accounts of wartime life in the air and without them I would not have had the confidence to write about the world of the ‘Spitfire women.’ I am also grateful to Richard Poad and Maidenhead Heritage Centre who helped get my ATA research journey underway.
As my reading about the second world war deepened, I knew that the dramatic heart of the story would have to be in Poland, and in particular, in the Katyn massacres that were hidden for five decades by powers on both sides of the cold war. For readers who want to know more about what happened, the best introduction to the horror and impact of the atrocity is to watch the astonishing film Katyń (2007) by Andrzej Wadja whose own father was a victim.
From the mass of incredible books about the war that I read over the course of a decade, it seems unfair to single out particular titles. But I hope that as a follow-up to the fictional story
of When We Fall, readers might like to find out more about the book’s historical background. The best starting point for the ATA women pilots is Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whittell, for the intriguing story of wartime Poznań, read Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland by Catherine Epstein and for an astonishing insight into the Polish resistance movement written by one of its true heroes, please seek out Story of a Secret State by Jan Karski.
Many writers and editors have given generously of their time and expertise to help with this novel and to shape me into a novelist. Jacqui Lofthouse was there at the beginning and only she really understands quite how far I have come. Thanks to Richard Skinner and the brilliant Faber Academy/ Truckles writers, and also to Sarah Savitt, Sam Copeland, Alison Hennessey, Sara Starbuck, Neema Shah, Fiona Erskine and Marcelle Perks. Special thanks to Gaynor Arnold whose razor sharp editorial notes helped move the book’s final draft on to a completely new level.
Friends and family who read any of the many earlier versions of this story all contributed in some way to the book that has now been published. Thanks to Eileen Milner, Sally Kirby, Polly Milner, Emily Milner, Lynne Eadie, Caroline Fox, Lorna Gentry, Phil Laymon, Lynne Thoms, Jane Shillaker, Will Orr and Niki Orr. Vicky Jordan and the staff and volunteers of Woodcote library were a big help in the early days of research. Thanks too to Marcelle Perks and Ingo Ebeling for advice about German usage and to Asia Milner for help with Polish. The heart of this story would not really beat without the knowledge of Poland given me by my sister-in-law, Asia. I am hugely grateful to her and my brother Terence, and to the Lipowicz family for their hospitality. Thanks also to Tomasz Laskowski for an inspirational tour of second world war sites in the wonderful city of Poznań.
When We Fall would still be languishing in one of those unsuccessful earlier versions were it not for the faith shown in me by my agent Andrew Lownie and by my fabulous publisher No Exit Press. Love and thanks for everything to Ion, CQ, Claire, Lisa, and to Katherine Sunderland.
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