by Tanya Moir
Outside, Will stands in a pleasant square, and feels tired beyond all reason.
A few days later, the SS are taken away, though the burial work goes on. The inmates are free, but they won’t stop dying.
Will photographs them before and after they die, tries to imagine the walking skeletons as the people they were. And he can. He can see them shopping for socks and popping down the pub for a pint, he can see them doing the washing up and nagging their children. And at first he thinks those ordinary people must still be inside the inmates somewhere, feeling ordinary grief and pain and fear. He searches for them, hard, pushing his lens into blank faces.
But he fails. He can find no trace of them. What he sees, instead, is a truth. There is nothing that can’t be taken from us. Not faith. Not love. Not even a name, and certainly not that lame old schoolboy notion, the human spirit.
The soldiers have a word for these people. They don’t mean to be cruel, these British boys with their gallows humour, these men who refer to a flaming Sherman tank as a Tommy-cooker. But they’re calling these inmates zombies, and the term is not unfair. These bodies, with their shrunken hearts and their famine brains and their tissue-thin intestines, are not so much the living as the temporarily undead.
They won’t follow the orders designed to save them. They’re too far gone to help themselves, much less each other. The only thing they can be relied upon to do is die, in ever-increasing numbers. Up to a thousand a day, now.
Will thinks that soon they will all be dead, and maybe it’s better that way. It could be a day to look forward to, when all this ceased to exist, inmates and soldiers and cameramen too, and the whole grey, stinking wreck of Europe.
At night, when the British have closed the gates and left the camp to get on with the business of dying, Will drinks. They all do. They drink like fish. They drink like Irish nurses.
On the night of his twenty-seventh birthday, Will goes out onto the heath. He spreads his coat over birch leaves and long, dry grass, over creeping, cushioning spurge and the sandy soil that swallows bodies with such reluctance. Upon it, he and Nurse Maura McCormick try to remind each other that humans can be tender, and bodies soft, and round, and warm.
Or perhaps they try to forget, in a moment’s single-minded seeking out of each other’s moist, forbidden places, in that overriding old-brain drive, that they are anything at all. For what is sex but another way out, another way of forgetting?
It washes your mind as clear as a bottle of gin. It puts you to sleep just as well as old French brandy. In the morning, you wake up with a much better head. Until you remember that you’re engaged to Eddie Harding’s sister, have given her your word and your ring, have received, in return, much more than rock cakes.
What an odd thought she is, Sarah Harding, in the middle of a morning in Belsen Camp, hungover and halfway through falling in love with Maura McCormick. Will barely knows Eddie’s sister. He’s fumbled his way inside her beneath requisitioned sheets, and without looking at her photograph he can’t remember her face, just silky French knickers and an odd roast-dinner smell, and the thought of spending his life with her is utterly outlandish.
But it doesn’t matter, really, because none of that is real. This is reality, here and now, pinned down in the morning sun beneath his lens. This woman, half-naked in the dust, fighting a child for a raw potato. This bony kernel of reflexes and need. These facile, brain-stem impulses to breathe, and shit, and feed. And the only thing worse than being this, the only thing more human, is the urge, the faculty, to cause it.
Everything else is self-deceit. All of it, art and literature, Sarah and Will, goodness and mercy and love, and yes, Maura McCormick. It’s all an artifice, a high scaffold around a stinking hole in the ground. Press the shutter. We’re all pissing into the wind.
It doesn’t matter that not all sixty-odd thousand inmates of Belsen Camp are like this woman in the dust. It doesn’t matter that Will has spoken with many who still have dignity, and reason. There are people who have just arrived. There are people who have been fed. There are Russians and Poles and Germans and French, there are soldiers and resistance fighters and politicians, there are diamond-brokers and music composers and writers and pretty girls. It doesn’t matter what we begin as — we can all be stripped to the same. It’s nothing but a function of time, of hunger and grief and pain.
If, wandering among the zombies now, there are some who were slower to give way, some who held out for another day or week or year, what difference does that make now? Will knows that he himself would not last long. He’s been in Belsen for six days, and already he feels half-mad.
He’s healthy and well nourished. At the end of the day, he leaves the camp for a clean bed — he doesn’t sleep in the shit of the dying, or wake up nose to nose with the dead. And yet now, in the morning when he rises and washes and shaves, he feels no connection with his own face.
He doesn’t say most of these things to Maura McCormick. Just the part about going mad. And Nurse Maura the exhausted, Maura of the blessed pink and living skin, holds his head to her breasts and says, ‘Do something. Help.’
So in the afternoons he puts his camera away. He does a stint on the stretchers or the delousing guns, wading through the ankle-deep shit of the huts to carry the inmates out, spraying them with DDT before they’re trucked off to be scrubbed in what the Tommies are calling the ‘Human Laundry’.
At night, he and Maura work their way down a bottle of brandy, and find and lose what they need to, fucking gently under the Belsen stars, and it’s a wake and a celebration.
In the mornings, when the light is good, Will walks the camp, and addresses the problem of focus. He sends Bob back to Bergen for a tripod. He stops up his aperture, lowers his shutter-speed. He experiments with multiple exposures. He sharpens the stillness — the dead, and the dust, and the wire.
Those who stop, to look or to rest, are clearest. Sick inmates move slowly, slightly soft, their edges shedding. The healthy are hardly there at all, just passing blurs. Least substantial of all are the soldiers and Red Cross workers, flashes of hurrying effort that barely register on the frame.
Will thinks he’s getting somewhere.
He should stay, my grandfather, and see it through. He should see what happens. He should stay to see the day when all the dead are buried, and the huts burned down. He should stay to hear Menuhin play.
He should stay, and marry Maura McCormick. Maura of the happy endings, Maura to whom the survivors will write. Maura who can admire an artifice while it stands. Maura who can and does and will find ways to matter. She could heal him, couldn’t she? (Wouldn’t she have made a lovely granny? I can feel her arms reaching out to me now, a feather-light caress, the blithe touch of my own non-existence.)
Will Biggs should stay. But he doesn’t. He leaves, because he has given his word to Sarah Harding. He leaves, because Cecil takes one look at his latest contact sheets and orders him back to regimental HQ. He leaves, because there’s still a war on, and it hasn’t finished with him yet.
There are German rivers to be crossed. There are portraits and cities to be taken. The Elbe, and Lübeck. Eddie and Bodge.
But first Will must return to Celle and the public relations office. Luckily, Cecil has already left to shoot the man of the hour at Monty’s new Lüneburg HQ. Written orders have been left for Will, which he receives from a pretty dark-eyed secretary, along with a brown paper bag and a very odd stare.
‘I kept these,’ she says. ‘I thought perhaps you should have them.’
Will opens the packet on the road north to the Baltic Sea. Inside are the contacts from his last twenty Belsen rolls. Cecil has drawn a large red chinagraph cross over every sheet.
Will and Bob cross the River Elbe two days behind the tanks. They chase the bridgehead north, through a flotsam of brewed-up armour and ruined towns. The roads are busy. The Germans are running away from the Russians. The Russians are walking home.
In darkness south-west of L
übeck, Will and Bob are stopped by a military policeman.
‘Roadblock up ahead,’ he warns them. ‘Load of granddads with Panzerfausts. You might want to wait till morning.’
A squadron of Sherman tanks is leaguered on the roadside. It’s a cold night, with a sharp wind blowing down off the Baltic, and the tankies are huddled around their stoves, smoking and drinking tea. Their CO turns out to be Frank Brennan, a man Will’s known since Alamein — they’d be good friends, if friends were still worth making. Frank points out a wood up ahead, to the left of the road.
‘There’s supposed to be an 88 in there. Some infantry boys got pinned down this morning, trying to go round the roadblock. We’re going up to clear the way for them as soon as it gets light.’ He doesn’t sound enthusiastic. ‘They’re some of your old lot, come to think of it, Will — the Surreys. Poor buggers.’
Will lights a cigarette and stares at the trees and wonders if Eddie Harding is alive or dead, and whether he wants to know.
‘Drink?’ Frank opens a bottle of whisky. ‘Courtesy of the sappers. We managed to take a bridge without blowing it up today.’
They drink in silence. Will says nothing of Belsen Camp, and Frank doesn’t mention the death of his wireless man, who stepped on a mine this morning.
‘Well,’ says Frank, ‘I’d better kip down, you know. Since I’ve got work in the morning.’
Will nods. ‘I might go on up ahead. See what the old regiment’s got itself into. Make sure I bag a good seat for the morning show.’
‘Watch out for S-mines,’ says Frank, and rolls himself under his tank.
‘Shall do,’ says Will. ‘Goodnight.’
They don’t wish each other luck.
TWO
Two days after the funeral, Maggie and I have pretty much finished clearing out Grandpa William’s unit. We’re in the garage loading up the car with bags of clothes for the charity shop when Neville, the nice old man from next door, pokes his head in to ask if we’d like a cup of tea.
‘Do you need a hand,’ he enquires, looking up, ‘to get that stuff down?’
We follow his gaze to a load of dusty shapes stacked in the roof-space, and sigh and say no thank you to aid and refreshments — we’d better not stop. Neville takes the hint and potters back inside.
My first instinct is to leave the boxes where they are and pretend we didn’t see them. But no, of course, my mother can’t do that — not now that Neville has pointed them out. He’ll know we did it on purpose. And besides, says Maggie — who’s on really good drugs these days — there might be something important inside.
I doubt that anyone puts important things in a banana carton and stuffs it in the ceiling cavity, but I bite my tongue and fetch the ladder. Naturally, it’s me who has to go up it. Skin crawling at the prospect of spiders and mice, I climb up and down, passing the last of my grandfather’s things to Maggie.
Three boxes of National Geographics under grey fur. Two boxes of records, ditto. One suitcase that looks like it’s come from the age of steam. An unused airbed, still in its box, with a big happy picture of visiting kids on the side, circa 1980. A rusty folding chair. A set of lawn bowls.
Back on the ground, I brush dust off my sweatshirt and jeans, and glare at the black marks on my Reeboks. The records, I see, are old 78s. Cole Porter. Vera Lynn. Behind me, Maggie lifts the lid on Grandpa William’s suitcase.
The dead spill out. Skin and bones all over the garage floor. My grandfather’s proofs, the inanimate frames of Will Biggs’ story.
Among them, a yellowed Today magazine, 18 April 1945. Letters from Nurse Maura. A few enlargements — Survivor Girl, the others wired to Today. Shirtless Sarah, cruelly out of context. A dead soldier, hardly more than a boy, with bruises around his neck and his uniform in a tangle. Another dead in the mud, the top of his head blown away. And we wouldn’t know, if it weren’t for the names Will scrawled on the back, that one was Lester Bodgewick. Bodge. And the other was Uncle Eddie.
Maggie and I, oblivious, suddenly, to dirt, kneel on the garage floor, and for a very long time — a minute, an hour? — say nothing worth recording.
‘I don’t understand.’ Maggie shuffles through the proof sheets again.
I don’t blame her. There’s a lot to take in. And much of it doesn’t make sense, not yet — some of it won’t for years. Frames must be matched to dope sheet notes, contexts traced, dates and places Googled. But already I sense the shape of it, a form I recognise is there in the dark, even though I can’t see it.
The bulldozers. The pit. Survivor Girl, staring down the barrel of fifty years, unable to give me her name. They’re the crackle of speech down a bad phone line, the voice I know I’ve heard but can’t quite place. The dark side of my grandfather. All the things he knew, and never said.
And I’m in awe of him. The sheer tensile strength of the man. Sergeant William Biggs. My hero.
‘He never said a word,’ says Maggie. ‘All those years.’
Her voice is shaky. Furious. And I realise she’s not getting it at all.
‘He had this hidden away the whole time. How could he do that? Say nothing to me?’
Maybe she’s right. Maybe Will has given her nothing. I look at her now, on his garage floor, and I can’t see him. Sitting there with Belsen in her hands, whining of injustice, my mother is a biological miracle — all Harding, and no Biggs. She can only see her own story.
If anyone is going to pick up these fragments of William Biggs, put him back together again, it will have to be me. It isn’t going to be easy. I don’t have the complete pattern. In the absence of full information, I might make mistakes, build him up too big or too small, and never learn my error. I can only do my best with what I’ve been left — his eyes, his lens, his blood — to make my guess at the way my grandfather used to be.
Is it Eddie they can’t get over, Sarah and Will? Whatever it is, they can’t help each other. They sit side by side in Evelyn Harding’s front room, with their hands on their knees, and misunderstand each other’s silence.
Will doesn’t think much about how he feels — which is impatient, mostly. With the crowds on the Tube, with the queues at the shops, with the kids playing war in the street.
He can’t go to the Odeon, where women crunch sweets and bitch about husbands and bosses over news of the Belsen Trials. He can’t stand the tabloids. He can’t stand the talk in the Fox and Hounds. He can’t stand the Hardings’ grief. Its luxuriance. Its selfishness. Its ignorance of context. It’s too much for just one man.
He can’t wait to get out of Eddie’s house. He walks the streets of South Wimbledon, which are skewed somehow, oddly different, uneasily the same. The street he grew up in is only three away from Eddie’s. What a coincidence, they said, five years ago, in the echoing cold of the Guildford barracks. To be there in next-door bunks.
Eddie a year younger than Will. Lying there on a hard, narrow bed with his ankles crossed and his arms behind his head, unafraid of the strangers around him. Easy to like. At home in his own skin.
Three years later they walked down The Broadway together, lean and laughing, with desert tans. On Haldwyn Street they saw a hole where Will’s mother’s house used to be. A crater two days old. Eddie took him home to Kings Close, which was whole and warm and bright, with the Christmas decorations still up. Just three streets over.
Will’s entire life contained in his army pack. Eddie lending him pyjamas.
The Hardings all went to his mother’s funeral. Kate did, too. That was the first time Will saw her in the flesh. Handsome Eddie’s prize. She wasn’t disappointing.
All the boys wanted Eddie’s Kate. She was B Company’s private pin-up girl. Eddie always shared her pictures, and sometimes her letters too. Will himself had stared at her legs for three days in a trench outside Alamein.
They were sad for him, Eddie and Kate. But they only had a week’s leave. They took him with them, dancing. And they were sorry that all Kate’s friends were dating GIs, and the bes
t they could do for Will was Eddie’s sister.
Will walks down Haldwyn Street most days now. He tries to think of his mother, but she’s too far away, and he can’t find focus. There are so many dead between then and now, it’s hard to make out a single face.
It doesn’t matter to him that this is the road that led him to Sarah Harding. He doesn’t remember her warm beneath his hands on the Berkeley’s dance-floor, what she said or what she wore. He doesn’t remember photographing her that night, with dark and lovely soft-mouthed Kate, with handsome Eddie. How they looked like film stars, all three of them, there in a booth under glittery lights.
(Who’d have thought that Nanny Biggs ever looked like that? A doe-eyed strawberry-blonde in a chiffon dress, diamantes sparkling. It’s a shame no one remembered.)
There were months when Will photographed Sarah a lot, morning, noon and night on leave, with the second-hand Contax II he’d bought at the Khan el-Khalili, with his difficult new army-issue Super Ikonta. With Eddie and Kate, at picnics and dances. On the Serpentine. Outside a club in Leicester Square. Under the pear tree at 7 Kings Close. And once (May 1944), alone, in a requisitioned flat in Knightsbridge, wearing a crisp new AFPU cap and a black lace bra.
There was a time, before she was nothing, when Sarah must have made Will Biggs smile. In London, in spring, D-Day minus 10, she was the only one to whom he mattered.
Now he walks away from her down gap-toothed Haldwyn Street, crosses leaf-choked gutters in gritty, failing autumn light. He rides the Northern Line all the way under the great ants-nest of London, to Camden Town and his army bedroll on Clive’s floor.
Some nights, Will borrows Clive’s motorbike and his pass, and rides out to Pinewood, where he’s printing up a portfolio for Today. The empty offices are large with darkness, rattling with cleaners and the ghosts of old campaigns — discarded models and props, maps of Tunisia, of Sicily and the Amalfi Coast. A fez. A Gestapo helmet.
