Somewhere Over England

by Margaret Graham

  Helen looked around at the scabied legs and the hand-made shoes that the thin children wore.

  Ed said, ‘In Little Fork they grouse because they had to pay heavy taxes for the war. They don’t understand.’

  Helen took his arm. ‘How can they? It is only those who’ve seen and been amongst it all, like us. We are the only ones who can understand.’ He looked at home now, relaxed as though there was no conflict, no battle. Would he still dream tonight?

  They stayed in an old inn and he did dream.

  They drove the next day along roads which were full of Allied vehicles. They reached the border and this time there were no Nazis holding them up, no red and black flags, and no hidden camera. Helen looked at Chris as they were waved through and his face was tight and cold.

  ‘We brought in a camera for your grandfather. Do you remember? We brought it in so that he could blackmail the Nazis and save some people. He is a man to be proud of.’

  But Chris turned away and did not reply.

  They drove through the west German countryside, along roads carved through heathland, dotted with pines. Some snow remained where clumps shadowed it from the sun. They passed through decimated towns where hardly a building remained and the people pushed prams from ruin to ruin, searching for fuel. Rosebay grew here too, though clearance had begun.

  Helen watched Ed’s face as he looked at the crosses which were still planted in the rubble so long after the war. He stopped the car and walked across and stood near one and she joined him and could smell the dust. It was the same dust as in England.

  They travelled along the great Nazi Autobahn from then on which bypassed all the big cities, and now the three of them were quiet, filled with their own thoughts.

  Helen counted the steel-helmeted military motor-cyclists which wove in and out of the Army lorries, the small military cars, the German farm carts pulled by thin horses. They passed the flat beet fields and there were women bending and walking, bending and walking. Helen asked Ed to stop and she stood by the car, taking photographs because Heine had done this once.

  She told Chris to come and see. He stood next to her and was almost as tall. She told him of his father; how he had taken photographs and exhibited them, how he had thought life would be simpler if he lived as one of these workers, hoeing and weeding and harvesting.

  They stood in silence and then he turned to her.

  ‘I guess maybe he was right.’ There was not the earlier hardness in his face, there was doubt and this is what Helen had wanted to see.

  At last they drove into what remained of Hanover. The Kröpcke was destroyed, its glass dome gone and cleared away along with the smart women and their cigarette holders, along with a world which had once glistened and glittered. In its place there was ruin and devastation, and rosebay too.

  They parked and watched labourers, thin and with sacking tied to their backs for warmth, clearing piles of melted lead and stonework. There were people here too who pushed prams and sorted in the rubbish and Helen wondered where the old Jew dressed in black was now. Had he survived? Had Claus’s family survived? They were also Jews.

  They passed broken bridges and bomb-proof shelters which had saved thousands of people, but not enough, because thousands had also died. Now a policeman told Helen they housed the homeless. She took photographs and Chris stood with her, while Ed walked to the ruins, picking up rubble, turning it over and over in his hand.

  They drove to the Headquarters of the British Occupying Army and Helen presented her press pass to the commanding officer, explaining why she was here, the real reason why she was here and the officer nodded and turned away, saying he had not seen her, because fraternisation was not allowed.

  Helen smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said and left the room which was solid and full of photographs of his wife and children and very English.

  Her footsteps sounded on the steps and on the road and an old woman glared at her.

  ‘Engländerin,’ she hissed but Helen did not mind because she would feel the same if the Germans were marching all over her ruined land.

  They reached the village as dusk was falling and now there were no Nazi flags, no blonde girls with coiled hair, no windowboxes, and only six houses left standing in this main street. The church was still there and Herr Weber’s house, or part of it. Helen walked up to the front door. There was ash on the path, left over from the snow which only lay now beneath the stumps of the limes which was all that remained of the trees that Heine had loved, and for a moment she thought she could smell their summer scent.

  She knocked, knowing that Claus had telegraphed ahead for her but she was nervous. Perhaps Oma would hiss at her too. She knocked again, feeling the hardness of the wood on her knuckle. She did not recognise the woman who opened the door until she spoke, and then she knew it was Oma, and she held the small thin body in her arms, hugging her, crying because this was Heine’s beautiful mother, and she had no teeth and her once thick hair was thin and white and limp.

  She held her saying, ‘I’m so glad to see you. So sorry that Heine died,’ and together they wept for the man they had both loved and then Chris was there, standing and looking, until Helen turned, her arm around Oma.

  ‘This is your grandmother, Chris. This is Oma. You have come home.’

  He didn’t move or speak, just stood with his face closed and then Herr Weber came, walking slowly on two sticks out from the darkness of the hallway. His hands were gnarled and his fingers crooked. Oma told them the Nazis had beaten him when he had been betrayed; all over his body, including his hands and fingers. Still Chris just stood with Ed behind but Oma and her husband smiled.

  ‘Come, my child,’ they said to Helen, drawing her into the house, drawing them all in. ‘Come. It is hard for him. It is hard for us to forgive ourselves.’

  That night Helen lay in the room that had been Heine’s. The lead soldiers were still on the shelf but the blue tiles of the stove were cracked from the blast of the bomb which had taken off the corner of the house. The brass knobs of the stove no longer gleamed and the body beside her was not Heine but Ed, and she loved them both.

  They slept in their clothes because it was so cold and there was no fuel for the stove and only one blanket. She lay looking at the ceiling lit by the moon; a bomber’s moon and she wondered if there would ever be a time when they stopped using the language of war.

  She tucked her arm beneath her head turning to look at the clouds scudding across the sky.

  ‘Will you lay your ghosts too?’ Ed said.

  She turned to him, not knowing until he spoke that he was awake.

  ‘My ghosts? she queried.

  ‘Sure, Helen. You have Heine to set down quietly in your life. He died alone. That’s why you are trying so hard with me.’

  His voice was gentle and he reached out and wound her curling hair round his finger.

  Helen grasped his hand, loving it, loving him. He was right, she needed to lay her ghost, but she was fighting because she loved him, not just because Heine had been alone. She told him this, pulling his head down, kissing his lips, his eyes, his cheeks.

  ‘I love you, I love you and I always will.’

  He put his arm around her and pulled her to him and she felt the buttons of his overcoat against her throat.

  ‘Even if I don’t stop this goddamn war inside me?’ His breath lifted her hair and it was warm on her skin.

  ‘We’ll stop it. It might take a while but one day it will all end.’ But it did not end that night because the dreams were there as usual.

  Chris lay in his room with his Oma’s old duvet over him, dragged down from the attic which he had remembered as smelling of apples, but which was now open to the sky, the roof sliced open by a bomb; a British or American bomb. He was warm, though the stove was unlit, and he remembered now how his father had carried him from the dining-room when they had arrived that last time. There had been the scent of honey candles and heat from the stove. There had been the taste of venison
in his mouth and the feel of his father’s arms about him as they came upstairs into this bedroom where the stove was unlit. There was frost on the window and he could remember the mark his mother’s nail had made where she had run it down, scraping at the ice.

  He lay in bed and smiled and thought he heard his mother’s voice. ‘In my family, children sleep in warm rooms even if it means the adults go into the cold one.’

  His father had laughed and said, ‘My darling girl, do not prepare to do battle.’ Chris looked round because the voice had been so clear but there was no one there. His mother had always been prepared to do battle for him. She was doing it now and he knew that she was winning because he had seen the ruins, the despair, his Oma and his grandfather. The Germans were just people like him and their houses had been ruined and their children killed and he knew now that all Germans were not monsters, only some had gone mad. He knew that he was not from a family which had done that.

  The next morning they ate ham from the cans and a few potatoes but not many and Helen was hungry as she had not been for over a year.

  They sat in Wilhelm Weber’s study because it was smaller to heat, Oma said, her voice tired. There were still old shirts laid against the gap in the bottom of the door but it was not against the prying ears of Hans but against the draught which whistled through the damaged house. There was the same lamp on a cupboard which had lit the room when she and Heine had come before and the same chairs, but they were ripped and torn and the horsehair protruded.

  All morning they talked and Chris listened. Herr Weber told them how Hans had betrayed him but that they had never found the camera. They had taken him, the local Blockwart, to the cells and beaten him.

  He told Chris and Ed how the Americans had come before the Nazis could kill him. The Americans had destroyed every house not flying a white flag and any resistance near a village meant retribution by United States artillery fire and the people knew this.

  ‘Soon,’ he said, ‘there was a forest of white flags. Some still died though because the Nazi guerrilla fighters shot the first to put up the white flag. In our village it was the pastor who died. The madness, you see, lingered even until the last moments of the war. Perhaps it still exists.’

  Helen watched Chris who sat, his head on his hands.

  Wilhelm Weber looked at Ed. ‘You were a bomber pilot. Well let me thank you. During the last months the Allied bombing smashed the transport systems faster than they could be repaired. Aircraft parts could not be moved from the factories.’

  Now he tapped Ed’s knee. ‘So you see, my dear young man, in this war you served a purpose.’

  Herr Weber nodded then to Helen because she had told him of her husband and the nightmare he lived through each day.

  Ed shrugged. ‘I guess maybe that’s good of you to say but there’s still an awful lot of death beneath the bombs I dropped. His voice was unsteady and he clasped his hands together Helen heard the creak of his chair as he hunched his shoulders.

  The old man nodded. ‘Yes, that is true. There was so much death everywhere and mistakes were made. Of course they were made. We played a game which was so big, so ugly that no one knew what the results would be.’ He sighed. ‘Did you ask for the war?’

  It was a question he wanted answered and Ed shook his head.

  ‘No, I guess I never really gave it a thought.’

  ‘Of course, my boy, no one really knew that any of this would happen, even we Germans. In the early days the Third Reich was going to bring us, oh, how do you say … I know, employment, stability, grandeur. Your wife will have told you that Heine saw other things. I did not. I supported Hitler.’

  He coughed and Oma went to him, patting her own mouth and sucking in her lips. Helen went to the kitchen and brought back aspirin for him, glad that she had packed three bottles.

  ‘The Nazis gave us work though it became work in support of war. They improved housing, promised equal pay for women, gave marriage loans, increased family allowances, built roads. Things we had thought we would not see again after the First World War, the poverty of the twenties, the street fighting of those years. He gave all this to us, he gave us order and we looked away from the sickness we should have seen.’

  Helen watched Chris. He was still resting his chin in his hands and Ed put his hand on his shoulder and together they learned about another side of the war. Oma left to brew real coffee brought from America and the smell invaded the house, bringing a smile to the old man’s face.

  ‘Ah, that is good. We have used acorns for so many years I had forgotten that there is such a thing as a coffee bean.’ He laughed but there was still a deep sadness in his eyes.

  She looked around the room. Two prints remained on the walls. The glass was cracked. The telephone had gone.

  ‘Willingly we turned aside, you understand? At that stage, no black boots kicked at us. That, my fine young pilot, is our guilt. We allowed this to happen, all this.’ He swept his stick towards the village, then sucked at his lips, rubbing his age-spotted hand over his mouth.

  ‘It was only later I realised the truth and then I did something, but it was so little.’

  Helen began to speak but Chris interrupted. ‘You did not do little. You risked your life day after day like Ed did. That is more than I’ve ever been asked to do. Perhaps more than I ever will be asked to do.’

  His voice was adult, his words too, and now he looked at Helen and smiled and she knew that he had seen, and was on the way to accepting, his heritage.

  Herr Weber tapped Chris’s leg lightly with his stick. ‘You are very like your father, and your mother too. My son would be proud of you.’

  He turned to the door as Oma brought in the coffee and they curved their hands round the mug because the stove was burning small bits of the dining-room furniture and there was very little heat.

  ‘Before the war Hitler talked to his people. He travelled amongst them. But afterwards it was different. No. Seldom did he go to his soldiers. Never did he go to the bombed cities to talk to his people. But, my dears, the people still trusted him to win the war.’ He threw up his hand, spilling some coffee on to his patched trousers but he didn’t notice. ‘And do you know why? Because they had so much suffering they had to have victory to justify it all.’

  Helen thought of Churchill and the King and Queen, stepping over rubble, their faces compassionate, sharing the danger.

  ‘I guess victory makes it better,’ Ed said, sipping his coffee. Helen could see the steam rising from his mug.

  ‘Defeat makes it all a mockery. But it is a mockery anyway. It was a game of the Nazis that went so wrong and we did not oppose it in time. That is our crime. That is the crime of the people, and your task for the future is to make sure you never let that happen in your lives. That must be your expiation. You must make every day of your life count for something good.’

  There was silence and then Chris said, ‘But what about the camps? That is what is so terrible.’

  Oma wept now and Wilhelm Weber looked at her and then at Helen, Ed and Chris.

  ‘And do you imagine we can forgive ourselves?’ He looked at Ed. ‘You dream at night because of the job you did.’ His face was fierce now and his voice that of a younger man.

  Ed looked at him, listening intently, his eyes fixed on the old man as he continued. ‘We have to live with the knowledge that, as Germans, we allowed this murder of innocents to happen. We read Mein Kampf but we thought it too outrageous.’ He was talking quickly now. ‘But it happened. It was a state secret and knowledge of that secret was punishable by death. The secret was preserved.’ He stopped now and looked at them all; one by one.

  ‘But each night and every minute of every day I ask myself the question. Did I know? Had I guessed and turned from the truth?’

  He sat back now, his coffee forgotten, his old damaged hands limp on his thighs.

  Oma took one and held it, sitting on the arm of his chair. She said, ‘You see, it makes anything that we did seem so litt
le. Can you understand that?’

  Again there was silence which was not broken by anyone until Helen touched Ed’s hand and they left the room, walking out to the car, hearing Chris behind them.

  They drove to the forest, walking amongst the trees, away from the paths, picking up kindling and carrying it back to the car, loading the boot, then the back seat. They drove and emptied it into the corner of the kitchen where newspaper was laid on the floor and chairs were dumped, waiting to be burnt.

  They went back again, but only Ed and Helen now because Chris wanted to stay with his grandparents. They walked amongst the oaks, the beech, past the woodsman’s cottage where there were no tables any more. She showed him where once logs had been stacked. They gathered what they could find but many had been here before them. It was grey and the cold seeped through their clothes and into their bones but there were too many thoughts for them to speak.

  That night there were no dreams but they were there again the night after that, though not so vivid nor so loud and he woke when Helen touched him and wept in her arms and it was the first time he had been able to leave the blood and climb out of the darkness. She stroked his hair and kissed his eyes and they talked, slowly and carefully until the sun began to rise.

  In the fresh dawn Helen took him to the woods, making him walk on the soft pine needles which had eased the ache in Heine’s leg and would help his too. The sun was filtering through this time and now Helen remembered that soon there would be wild anemones and violets beneath the spreading branches. There were buds on the trees which must have been there before but they had not noticed.

  ‘I kind of forgot for a while that the sun comes out and trees bud,’ Ed said, reaching for her hand. ‘I guess I’ve forgotten a lot of things.’ He stopped and pulled her to him. ‘Maybe your bulbs will be out around our house, and we should dig up your roses when we get back.’ He kissed her with lips as soft as she remembered.

  ‘Our bulbs and our roses,’ she said against his mouth.

  They walked again, mud clinging to their shoes as they walked on paths which had become overgrown and unkempt beneath the trees, and looked up through the branches at the sky.