The Lifeline

by Deborah Swift

  Not the train, but people cheering. It must be coming! Her relief was tempered with trepidation. The line of people began to move forward. The men nearest her, further up the line, pulled out Norwegian flags and flapped them in a frantic flurry of red, white and blue.

  ‘Alt for Norge!’ they shouted.

  The noise of the train was deafening, the steam, the crank of the wheels. It was only when it was close that she realized. It wasn’t a passenger train after all, but cattle wagons, their long narrow slatted windows open to the elements.

  Herman must have known. That was why he’d asked her to bring things for the men; food and warm gloves. She was shocked they were expected to travel like animals, with the icy wind blowing through, and here was only the mild part of the journey. What would it be like in the frozen north?

  Further down, the man in the wolfskin hat and his friend were jumping up and down waving their arms like crazy men. The front of the train bristled with Wehrmacht in helmets, their rifles at their shoulders. As soon as the engine passed, Astrid ran forward towards the wagons, stumbling along the track beside the train in the wake of the steam. From inside the train, the teachers reached out their hands to take whatever they could. A thin, cold hand reached out to her, and she thrust the whole string bag at him. The bag disappeared inside the narrow slit.

  ‘Thank you!’ came a shout.

  ‘Don’t give up hope!’ she shouted. ‘We’re all with you! Alt for Norge!’

  A barrage of machine gun fire. Astrid dropped to her knees in the snow. But the bullets went over their heads, and anyway they were too late, the train had passed and was clanking its way onwards.

  ‘You all right?’ The teacher in the wolfskin hat ran up.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, brushing snow off her knees. She turned her head away, so he couldn’t see the wet in her eyes.

  ‘It was a warning fire only,’ his friend said, arriving at his side. ‘They weren’t officers so they wouldn’t have the authority to shoot us.’

  ‘My word, that felt good,’ the wolfskin hat teacher said. ‘Just to let the anger out of my lungs. Just to do something. Whoever thought up the idea needs a medal.’

  Collar up against the blustery wind, Astrid walked to the school the next day with mixed feelings. On the one hand, she was elated they had achieved their objective, but on the other, the thought of Ulf and the other teachers, freezing somewhere in that cattle truck, made her so angry that, now she had time to think about it, she could barely breathe. They were good, kind men who had never done anyone any harm, and her headmaster, who should be proud of them, was condoning this ugly Nazi regime.

  At the door, she handed in a sick note to Pedersen’s secretary, claiming she’d been ill with a stomach complaint. It was what they all had planned to do. Pretend an outbreak of a virus. Of course they’d know it was nonsense, but they had to all agree the same story. She’d no doubt that Pedersen would have something to say to them all when he received it. Would she be dismissed?

  In the morning assembly she exchanged anxious looks with Mrs Bakke and Mrs Baum, but Pedersen said nothing during assembly, and she got back in the classroom without a word being said.

  Was he just going to let it pass? She felt the cold weight of the compass in her pocket, thought of Jørgen, and all the other Milorg agents, and their silent patriotism. The squirmy sensation in her stomach lasted all morning, until finally, just as she was collecting in the textbooks at the end of the lesson, the door opened, and Pedersen summoned her with a crooked finger.

  ‘Fetch your coat, Miss Dahl.’

  The words were like a cold sluice over her. She turned to the nearest girl. ‘Helga, collect in the books for me please. And please everyone, don’t forget to put on your outdoor shoes before break.’

  She dragged her coat from the back of her chair, grabbed her handbag and gloves, and followed Pedersen’s flapping figure down the corridor to his office. Before she even got inside, she could see police uniforms through the open door. She slowed as one of them, a thick-set man in plain clothes, turned at the sound of them coming.

  ‘This is Sveitfører Falk,’ Pedersen said.

  ‘Ah, Miss Dahl.’ Falk raised his chin to peer at her; for she was taller than him. ‘We have one or two questions we need to ask you about your whereabouts yesterday. I’m afraid I must escort you to the station.’

  ‘I was sick. This isn’t a matter for the police. I handed a note to the secretary this morning. Mr Pedersen has it. A stomach upset.’

  Pedersen said nothing.

  Falk smiled. ‘Yes, we’ve seen the note. And those of your colleagues. Nevertheless, those are our orders. I suggest you come without fuss. We will be interviewing your friends in due course, so there is no point in resisting.’

  ‘Eight years I’ve been teaching, and now you want to arrest me because I was off sick? Mr Kristiansen would never have treated people this way.’

  ‘Mr Kristiansen was old and incompetent,’ Pedersen said. ‘He was due for retirement anyway.’

  ‘You mean, you pushed him out,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘Miss Dahl, our car is waiting outside.’ Falk’s hand was on her arm.

  ‘Don’t you touch me.’ She whipped away. ‘I’m going.’ She marched out of the door. ‘And I resign. If I can’t teach the way I think I should, then you know what you can do with your school.’

  By the time she shrugged on her coat and reached the front steps of the school, the two uniformed policemen were at her side. A car waited at the kerb, and they opened the back door for her to climb in. The car was upholstered in leather, and heated. It stank of aftershave, and just travelling in it made her even more resentful. No real Norwegian travelled in this comfort any more.

  At the police station she was made to fill out her name and address and next of kin. She always hated this; the writing of ‘None’ in the box for next of kin. It made her feel small and incredibly alone. She wondered where Jørgen was, whether he’d made it out of Norway to England, and where he was now.

  They led her into a small interview room that was just a box with a high window and a bare lightbulb dangling above her head.

  Falk told her to sit, and sat down at the table opposite, whilst two policemen guarded the door.

  ‘I’d like to see a lawyer,’ she said. It was what people said on the movies. It was all she could think of to do.

  He ignored it. ‘Tell me where you were yesterday.’

  ‘I told you. Sick.’

  ‘So you had nothing to do with a group of people interfering with the progress of a train?’

  ‘No.’ She crossed her arms over her chest.

  ‘Are you aware that four other people from your school were all absent with the same excuse?’

  Again she was silent.

  He sighed. He stared up at the high window a moment, even though there was no view. ‘Why do you do it?’ he asked. ‘Why do you want to make life harder for yourself? You had a perfectly good job, and I saw you throw it away just now. Like it was trash.’ He rubbed his forehead as if trying to understand. ‘You’re pretty, you have a university education. You hung around with Nystrøm and the others in the popular set. Before I took this job, I taught hundreds like you.’

  Jørgen’s name jolted her onto high alert, and she suddenly realised where she’d seen him before. ‘You were at the university?’

  ‘Taught there twenty years, until they made me redundant. But the Nazis, they recognise intelligence when they see it. People like you think you’re so entitled. You rant about your fine beliefs, about what should and shouldn’t happen. You can afford them, that’s why. But what about the rest of us?’

  She shifted back in chair. He was angry now, she could feel the bristle in the atmosphere.

  He stood up and prodded a finger down on the desk in front of her. ‘You’re like all the rest of the college kids. You’ve obviously never known what it’s like to have to wonder where the next meal is coming from.’ He strode away, but then tu
rned and leaned towards her over the desk. ‘Think you’re better than us, don’t you? Because you get to choose not to obey the Germans.’

  She still didn’t speak.

  He leaned in again until his face was close to hers. ‘You were on that protest against the transportation, and you think your stupid sick note is a little joke, that it’s funny.’ He leaned in, so his spittle flew in her face. ‘Think you’re so bloody clever. Well, a night in the cells should get rid of that idea. And I’ll show you how clever you’ll be feeling when you’re on the list for transportation to Germany, or to a labour camp like your friend Ulf Johanssen.’

  A shiver ran through her, but she stayed still.

  ‘He will be in the north of Norway now, learning how to work hard for a living, and be grateful just to be alive.’

  She wouldn’t let him see her fear. The fact Ulf had been on the train made the knot of anger inside her condense into cold iron. What had happened to Ulf could happen to her.

  ‘So you’ve nothing to say.’ He glared at her a moment longer while she looked past him to the wall behind. ‘Then you will be charged and a trial date arranged. I suggest you plead guilty and ask for leniency. If you join the Teachers’ Union then you might avoid transportation. Take her down,’ he said to his men by the door.

  As she stood up, Falk loomed over her again. ‘You think you’re so much better than me, don’t you? You and Nystrøm. Well, if you don’t heed my warning, you’ll just be dirt, hear me? Dirt.’

  CHAPTER 17

  In the back of the farmer’s cart, Jørgen stretched out his bruised leg and rubbed his twisted knee. It was swollen and he guessed he’d torn ligaments when his skis were taken in the avalanche. Every jolt of the cart hurt, and even today, he still felt shaky, but he wasn’t going to let Karl see how rattled he was. And he was grateful for the lift. The farmer was a cheerful soul, and the journey by horse and trap to the edge of the fjord made up in speed what it lacked in comfort.

  Jørgen and Karl got off at a small village close to Ålesund, a cluster of houses around a stone jetty. Their farmer was delivering bales of hay to a farm close to the shore, and there, under shelter of an outside barn, Jørgen was at last able to transmit at the proper time to his contacts in the SOE.

  It was a relief to hear the familiar tapping of his contact in England. The precision soothed him. Astonishingly, he could recognize the pace of her transmissions and it was like hearing an old friend. His coded transmission told them back at base in England there would be two people needing to travel.

  ‘Two?’ came her coded reply. ‘Supply details.’

  ‘Friend,’ he tapped.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Karl Brevik.’

  The next time he checked in, there was an address and code word, and they soon found Jan Balstrud, the fisherman that was their contact, in the herring-smoking hut by the edge of the water. He was a toothless old man of about eighty, but still seemed to be working the boats.

  ‘You’ll be all right up here,’ he said, pointing to a rickety ladder.

  He put them up in a cramped attic under the turf roof of his house. The rafters stank of the linseed oil used to keep out the wet, and the place had to be accessed by the lethal-looking ladder, but it was dry, and warmed by the smoky heat from the peat fire downstairs.

  His next radio contact informed him the boat would be with them in three days.

  ‘Three days?’ Karl seemed unimpressed they couldn’t be quicker.

  ‘It’s rough water, and the weather could be bad.’

  During the three days they had to wait for the boat to Shetland, Karl was restless, and kept disappearing for long walks, taking his rucksack with him. He never left it unattended. The third time he did it, Jørgen found himself getting irritated. Didn’t Karl trust him? Why had he taken the pack? He didn’t need it for just a stroll around the harbour, surely.

  When Karl returned, still wearing the rucksack, Jørgen asked him, ‘Where’d you go?’

  ‘Just along the shoreline. Not far.’

  ‘With all that stuff?’

  Karl’s eyes blanked for a moment. Then he smiled. ‘Thought I’d better keep fit. No use getting out of condition. Never know when you might need to run, or carry weight.’

  Jørgen looked at him a moment longer. Something about it didn’t ring true. He realised he still didn’t really like the man. He’d tried to, but something about him just rubbed him up the wrong way. I suppose you can’t like everyone, he thought. But it was something to do with the fact that Karl never let down his guard. Their conversations were always on the surface, like he never got to penetrate beyond acquaintance.

  The day before the boat was due, Jørgen sat down to write to Astrid. He might not get another chance; once they were in England the mail to Norway would be censored.

  Karl was sitting on the horsehair mattress in his corner of the attic, examining a map of Shetland he’d found in the old man’s kitchen.

  ‘Hey, Karl?’ Jørgen said. ‘Have you a paper and pen? I thought I’d write to Astrid before we leave.’

  Karl sat up and pulled the notebook from his rucksack, and carefully tore out two pieces of paper, before pushing the notebook back in to the pocket.

  Again, Jorgen was annoyed at this small act of meanness; that he hadn’t handed over the whole book, but he said nothing. He kept reminding himself he wouldn’t even be alive if it wasn’t for Karl.

  He uncapped the pen and focussed on what he wanted to say.

  Dear Astrid,

  By the time you get this, I’ll be out of Norway. Sometime, I’ll come back home and when I do, I’ll look you up. You are a special part of my life. In the meantime, don’t forget to enjoy yourself, and I will understand if you meet someone else. I don’t want you to feel you have to have any ties to me. The Occupation in Norway makes it hard for me to have any certainties about the future. There is much more I’d like to say, but I’ll only say this, I’m not running away, only going where I can be most useful. And the fight goes on, not just for me, or for you, but for all Norwegians.

  ‘What are you telling her?’ Karl asked.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing that’ll bother the SOE, anyway. Just keeping in touch.’ Again, Jørgen did not sign it. He asked their elderly fisherman friend, Jan Balstrud, if he had an envelope, and whether he could get it passed through Sivorg, the civilian Resistance. Jan agreed to pass it on.

  The rest of the day was a strange limbo time, whilst they waited for enough dark to be rowed out to the rendezvous point on a smaller island out in the mouth of the fjord.

  As he and Karl put their bags aboard the big fishing vessel that would take them across the North Sea, Jørgen took a last look back at Norway. His feelings about it were complex. The land he loved and knew had been tainted by bombs and shootings and blood. He didn’t like to abandon it, this way, it made him feel like a traitor.

  But the Nazis had given him no choice. He’d have to fight for Norway from Shetland instead.

  Laughter made him turn. It was Karl, already aboard and having a joke with two of the crew. In less than five minutes he’d made himself popular, become the centre of attention, with an exaggerated tale of how they’d crossed Norway to get to the boat. Jørgen sucked in a huge breath of salty, sea air. The fact that other people could now take on the burden of Karl Brevik made his heart rise, and when he heard the chug of the engine and the slap of the waves, he stumbled to the prow and turned his face into the wind. He was unsurprised to see Karl was a natural sailor, though on more than one occasion, Jørgen’s heart was in his mouth, as the boat plunged into the trough of the waves and Karl gripped the rail, feet floating in mid-air.

  Jørgen was more cautious. Spying had taught him to always calculate risk, and it was a hard habit to break. When the wind ceased to howl through the rigging, he managed to sleep. At dawn he went to the prow to try to catch the first sight of land.

  Summer would soon be coming and over there, somewhere, lay Shetland; a place of p
eace, pure air and wide open spaces — an island still free.

  CHAPTER 18

  The boat arrived by the eastern shore of the Shetland Islands at night, and the shouts from the crew on deck brought Jørgen to the rail to peer out into the black, where a faint hump of darker black bled into the horizon. Frustratingly, because of sea defences designed to trap the enemy, they had to wait till the pale light of morning before they could motor round to the harbour.

  The new centre of operations for the Shetland Bus was in Scalloway, the ancient capital of the islands. To Jørgen’s surprise, the village was on the Atlantic side of the island, facing away from Norway. Unlike the few houses he’d expected, Scalloway was a working village, clustered under the ruins of a tumbledown seventeenth century castle.

  A British army captain, Harcourt, greeted them. He was a short, stout man, looking like he’d been shoe-horned into his uniform, but he spoke good Norwegian, which was a relief. With him was the female secretary to the Norwegian Consul, Morag Airdrie, who spoke Norwegian like a native. Jørgen found her warm smile immediately endearing.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you to hand over your bags,’ Morag said. ‘And I’ll need all your documents too.’ They led them into across the main harbour road to a garage-like shed with a long trestle table.

  Jørgen knew from instinct that Karl would hate protocol or any kind of paperwork. He was a man who preferred action to talking; he could never be still for long, and was always pacing or on the move. Now, he was hurriedly taking things out of his pack and stuffing his pockets.

  ‘No,’ Morag said, sharply. ‘Leave everything inside. And empty your pockets.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Karl asked her, in English, giving her a dazzling smile. It was the first time Jørgen had heard him speak English, and he sounded confident.

  ‘Morag,’ she said, but continued in Norwegian. ‘Sorry this is necessary, but all incomers have to be searched and vetted.’

  ‘It’s a pretty name,’ Karl said, again in English. ‘Mine’s Karl. Karl Brevik.’